This book has been long anticipated by design historians as well as folklorists, ethnographers, historians and indeed a more general readership. In its handsomely produced pages, we find a rewritten and much-expanded version of Kinmonth's excellent Irish Country Furniture 1700-1950 (Yale, 1993), one of the first design history books to focus on Ireland.As Kinmonth explains in her new preface, her fieldwork in the late 1980s mainly involved knocking on the doors of likely looking farmhouses and asking if the occupants had any old furniture. She originally embarked on that research 'with a sense of urgency' as so much vernacular furniture had already been bought up and exported by dealers, some of whom had 'arrived complete with upholstered suites of modern furniture with which to barter' (p. xviiii). Nevertheless, she found that a lot still remained, and conversations with the owners as well as her documentation of furniture in situ provided the sort of contextual information that is often absent from museum collections and displays. It also generated valuable oral history testimony, which she continues to draw on in this new volume, and that is synthesized adroitly with historiographic, literary and visual sources to produce a completely unique record. Kinmonth is a trained furniture maker as well as design historian, and a special pleasure of this book is her deep knowledge and analysis of the tools, materials and practices used to make, mend and adapt these artefacts as well as her understanding of their meaning and use.
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