Product Description

Beginning in the very first year of the twentieth century, Gustav Stickley made furniture that is prized almost a hundred years later for its honesty, simplicity, and usefulness. As a designer and manufacturer who emphasized careful workmanship, respect for natural materials, and simple lines, Stickley had a profound impact on the look of American homes. Today, Arts and Crafts design -- synonymous with Stickley to many people -- has become an American passion.

Elegantly designed and lushly photographed, Stickley Style is the first major publication to explore in full photographic color the central role Stickley played in the development of Arts and Crafts design. Author David Cathers invites us into the world of this influential furniture maker and provides us with an insider's tour of some of the country's most important Stickley collections and interiors. Here, imbued with pure and simple lines, are the comfortable Morris chairs, the upright settles, the solid oak chests, the hammered metalwork, and the delicate textiles that have come to epitomize Stickley's style.

But Stickley was more than a furniture maker -- he was a one-man phenomenon: book and magazine publisher, proponent of a simple and natural lifestyle, and de facto leader of the Arts and Crafts movement in America. Calling the composite of his ideas and activities "the craftsmanship of life," he used the word Craftsman to refer to his houses, his furniture, and his magazine.

Stickley Style captures the excitement and revolutionary zeal of these ideas and this era, a time when Victorian fussiness was being abandoned in the search for a modern way to live. The book opens with a vivid description of the Craftsman idea and describes Stickley's vision of ways to make a house conducive to a life of beauty and contentment. Cathers then goes on to show us the collections in a series of stunning Arts and Crafts homes, including Stickley's own family home in New Jersey. Finally, for those who want to furnish their own homes with appropriate reproductions, an extensive catalogue presents everything from Stickley tables and sideboards to tall case clocks and metal door latches. Throughout, specially commissioned photographs by Alexander Vertikoff show the overall harmony that will make the Stickley style as much a favorite for the new century as it was for the last.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #454399 in Books
• Published on: 1999-10-05
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 224 pages

Amazon.com
The Arts & Crafts movement first gained popularity in England in the late 1800s as people became distressed by spreading industrialization and factory goods produced inexpensively with flimsy construction and inferior wood. Seeing that the new system treated workers as machines, the movement sought to revive a craftsmanship of earlier times. In the United States, Gustav Stickley gathered together many of the movement's shared beliefs as he tried to, among other things, clear the clutter typically found in Victorian interiors and replace it with something simpler. The book begins tracing Stickley's life in 1876 when, at 18, he found his life's vocation while working in his uncle's furniture factory in Brandt, Pennsylvania. Through wonderful photos (many of them full-page) and careful wording, David Cathers and Alexander Vertikoff demonstrate a clear appreciation for Stickley's style--unvarnished wood, exposed joinery, strength, no-nonsense forms, and the beauty of integrity. Stickley, in short, devoted his life to celebrating and making visible the elements of construction. The work of others who helped to shape the Arts & Crafts movement--including architect Harvey Ellis, Charles and Henry Greene, Elbert Hubbard's Roycroft community, and Charles Rohlf--is also examined. Among the highlights of the book is Craftsman Farms, an artisan colony, model farm, and school Stickley built on 650 acres, described in its time as "a log cabin idealized." The book also examines Stickley's Colonial Revival House in Syracuse, New York, which he turned into the first Craftsman residential interior after a fire damaged the house on Christmas Eve, 1901. It was also to be the house where Stickley, widowed and nearly penniless, lived out most of his final years (he died in 1942) with his daughter and her five children. Many of the details about Stickley's personal life come from his grandchildren's memories. "He was," one grandchild has written, "almost an evangelist in bringing new thoughts and new appreciation of things artistic and new social thinking. That is something that doesn't go bankrupt and he, as an inspiring person, never did go bankrupt." --John Russell

About the Author
David Cathers is a writer and frequent lecturer on the Arts and Crafts movement. He is also a trustee of Craftsman Farms. Stickley's log home in New Jersey, which is now a National Historic Landmark Cathers is the author of Furniture of the American Arts and Grafts Movement, the first in-depth study of the Furniture made by Gustav Stickley, L. & J. G. Stickley, and the Roycrofters. His Genius in the Shadows, a study of Harvey Ellis, traces the work of the architect who designed some of Stickley's most important Furniture. A former advertising executive, Cathers lives with his wife in Westchester County, New York, in a farmhouse furnished with classic Stickley pieces.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Gustav Stickley and the Craftsmanship of Live

Gustav Stickley loved music, especially opera. He was stirred by the beauty of gardens and came to relish working in the soil. He cherished his wife and children, even though the demands of his career often kept them apart. In later life, opening his blue tin of Edgeworth tobacco and filling his corncob pipe, he delighted in telling vivid tales to enraptured grandchildren. But his greatest passion was wood. As his grandson Gustav Stickley III recalled, "He would caress a piece of wood. As burly and as big as he was...when he touched a piece of wood it was like a caress...Even as a boy I could see this". A maker of furniture and decorative household objects and later also a publisher, Stickley (1858-1942) became a central figure of the American Arts and Crafts movement that flourished at the beginning of the twentieth century Members of the movement, which arose in England, were distressed by the era's spreading industrialization and criticized factory goods cheaply produced and superficially decorated with garish machine-made ornament that often masked flimsy construction and inferior wood. To them, the new manufacturing system treated workers as little more than machines themselves. The movement bravely sought to remedy these ills by reviving the handicrafts of earlier times, stressing the value of good workmanship, simple design, and the life-enhancing pleasures of honest hand labor.

In the United States Stickley gathered together many of the movement's shared beliefs and called them the "Craftsman idea." He advocated his version of the Arts and Crafts philosophy in his influential Craftsman magazine beginning in 1901, and in his Craftsman Workshops he produced moderately priced furnishings consistent with its principles and sold them widely. Through his publications and his products, Stickley brought Arts and Crafts ideals into people's daily lives, giving the movement meaning for a large national audience. This has proved to be his unique and lasting achievement.

Compilation copyright © 1999 Archetype Press

Text copyright © 1999 David Cathers

From the Introduction: Gustav Stickley and the Craftmanship of Life

THE CRAFTSMAN IDEA

This was an era of great ferment in the decorative arts, and Stickley felt its irresistible pull. In 1898 he established his own firm, the Gustave Stickley Company (he later dropped the e from his first name), which for the first two years continued to produce revivalist furniture. Stickley had a factory payroll to meet and a family to support, and these responsibilities apparently took priority, he was not yet able to act on the ideas forming in his mind. At the same time he began to experiment with Arts and Crafts design in his shop.

In the summer of 1900 Stickley introduced his first Arts and Crafts furniture to the trade at the Grand Rapids Furniture Exposition. Some of these early designs seem to have been inspired by Charles Rohlfs, the innovative Arts and Crafts furniture designer and maker whose workshop turned our intricately derailed and often exotic pieces expressing his unique and highly personal aesthetic. Other Stickley designs exhibited at this show suggested his awareness of contemporary European trends written about regularly in the international art journals. Stickley's offerings "met with instant favor," reported the trade magazine Furniture Journal, but his firm apparently made only one significant sale at this show. George Clingman, manager of the Tobey Company, a large Chicago retailer, ordered more than eight hundred pieces of Stickley's new furniture and arranged to market it exclusively under the Tobey name. Within a year the dealings between the two men ended in mutual disaffection, but Stickley's career as an Arts and Crafts furniture maker had begun.

By 1901 Stickley's designs had grown more confident and had taken on the robust, structural quality that would characterize Craftsman furniture from then on. That same year, with a staff of writers and editors, he began publication of The Craftsman, a monthly magazine intended to publicize his furniture and spread Arts and Crafts ideals. The first issue, in October 1901, was devoted to William Morris, the second to John Ruskin, and the third to medieval guilds (for a time Stickley publicly referred to his firm as a guild).

Stickley's Craftsman idea, as he defined it in his 1901 catalogue, arose from established Arts and Crafts principles: "...the ideals of honesty of materials, solidity of construction, utility, adaptability to place, and aesthetic effect..." These handicraft-based precepts emphasized plain, functional form, good workmanship, decorative structure, and a respect for natural materials. Stickley applied his newly awakened beliefs to the furniture made in his workshops and, within a few years, to interior design, metalwork, textiles, and the design and construction of houses.

"Honesty of materials." Stickley valued honesty, by which he meant two things. First, the purpose of a piece of furniture should be immediately apparent in its design. He believed, for instance, that a chair should be "first, last and all the time a chair, and not an imitation of a throne, nor an exhibit of snakes and dragons in a wild riot of mis-applied wood carving." Second, the designer and the artisan should appreciate the nature of their materials and create objects that honestly express that nature. For Stickley, like Frank Lloyd Wright, wood was not meant to be molded or bent into elaborate shapes or encased within thick layers of highly polished varnish that obscured its inborn beauty. It should be cut in straight lines to emphasize the dramatic patterns of its grain, its plain surfaces finished to enhance their natural colors and texture.

"Solidity of construction." The careful construction of Craftsman furniture reproached the inferior factory wares of the day. As evidence of his furniture's substantial structure, Stickley created designs that made use of tenon-and-key joints, through-tenons pinned with visible dowels, double dovetails, and other forms of exposed joinery. These emphatic functional joints added visual interest to Stickley's pure, plain forms, while making clear exactly how everything was held together. Here was solid construction made visible, designed to be beautiful.

"Utility." Stickley was an early advocate of what he described as utility. His sturdy, unadorned Craftsman furniture was durable and functional and intended for daily use. It was not designed to be admired solely for its beauty or the status it conferred on its owner.

"Adaptability to place." The word adaptability appears in Stickley's writings again and again, and the idea of harmony was a leading theme of his work. Good taste for the Victorians had meant assembling and mixing a miscellany of exotic objects Stickley sought to replace this kaleidoscopic approach to design with a unified, harmonious whole: the organic, he believed, must replace the eclectic.

"Aesthetic effect." Stickley always wanted his designs to be beautiful. Because he typically worked with plain forms, the aesthetic effects of his furniture relied on honesty, utility, harmony, and frankly revealed structure. The integrity of Craftsman furniture created beauty

Proportion. The heart of Craftsman design, however, is Stickley's mastery of proportion, the relationship of the parts to the whole. The arms of a Craftsman chair, for instance, are placed to ensure the sitter's comfort and brace the frame, but they are also ac the right height and of the right depth, width, thickness, and shape to accord visually with all the other elements of the chair. Stickley adjusted such details with rigorous empirical experimentation on the workshop floor, not according to any prescribed formulas "[E]very model we produce," he wrote, "is studied and tested and modified until. The Craftsman finds it thoroughly satisfactory"

Color. Stickley cared about color as well. Year after year he experimented with finishing methods that would enhance the natural color, grain, and texture of quartersawn American white oak, his favorite cabinet wood. He worked in matte browns, greens, and silver grays, applying wax or a thin coat of shellac to give the wood a soft, lustrous glow. To complement his furniture he created household objects of hand-worked copper or iron. The copper was given a rich warm brown patina, the iron a dull sheen that Stickley called "armor bright," and all the metalwork was hammered by hand to create irregular, light-catching surfaces that brought gleams of color into a room. He also made Craftsman curtains, wall hangings, and table runners with simple, subtly tinted patterns worked on loose-weave fabrics. With wood, metal, and textiles he recreated the colors and textures of nature and brought them into the home.

Stickley's thinking quickly evolved, and he began to move away from the idealization of the handmade object that had become a widely accepted Arts and Crafts belief. He recognized that he could produce wares affordable to a middle-class market only by combining skilled hand craftsmanship with an enlightened harnessing of the power of machines, an idea advocated by The Craftsman as early as 1902. From the first, Stickley's Arts and Crafts furniture, with its straight lines and flat surfaces, had relied to some extent on machine processes, and his public embrace of the machine acknowledged the realities of Craftsman production. A year earlier Frank Lloyd Wright had argued this case in his famous lecture. "The Art and Craft of the Machine," and it seems likely that Wright's thoughts influenced Stickley Yet as he pragmatically accepted shifting Arts and Crafts ideologies and took advantage of improving machine technologies, the Craftsman idea remained a central theme in all that Stickley did.

In time the Craftsman idea grew to include what Stickley defined as the craftsmanship of life -- a moral dimension that he believed should...

Customer Reviews

Great presentation of Arts and Crafts style
Great photos and informative text about Stickley and the Arts and Crafts movement. Our house is mission-ish and this adds to the enjoyment of the design.

Stunning!
Knowing what a nut I am for Stickley and all things relating to the Arts and Crafts movement, my wife bought me this book for Christmas. Believe me when I say that this book is not something you are likely to skim once or twice and then put away. I read the whole thing and found it to be an excellent resource for all who love Stickley's furniture and the Craftsman lifestyle. As a woodworker I can attest that there are loads of great photographs to inspire you to build reproductions of Stickley classics. As a DIY-er I appreciate the home improvement and color scheme ideas that I was able to gather in this book.

As a librarian I have already read and reviewed many books on this subject. I can honestly say that (to-date) this book covers the Arts and Crafts lifestyle as well as any other and is second to none when it comes to understanding the rise and fall of Stickley's style. Highly recommended.

Lovely Book
This book is full of lush photographs of Stickley homes. I bought it because it was well-designed, as well as informative. The photo references are impressive, and overall the book pays the same attention to detail that Stickley did. For example, I was impressed that beneath the dust jacket, the cover of the book itself was a beautiful print of a Ginko Flower textile. Almost every page has full color images, and at the back there are individual photo references for furniture, lighting, and decorative items, much like a catalog. The whole thing is indexed as well. Useful as a reference book for research, or an art book to just enjoy.