Books about antiques: Edinburgh cabinetmakers' price books.(The Edinburgh Cabinet and Chair Makers' Books of Prices, 1805-1825)(Book Review)

Edinburgh cabinetmakers' price books

Before Amazon.com and desktop publishing there were the printing shop down the street and a lot of cast-lead letters. Producing a book was a craft and selling it was a slow and uncertain challenge. Books, particularly picture books, often depended on subscribers who signed up for copies before they were printed. The Edinburgh Cabinet and Chair Makers' Books of Prices, 1805-1825 is a throwback to that earlier age. Acknowledgment is made on a full page to thirteen trusts, companies, and people who were particularly generous funders of the publication. On the following two pages some two hundred names are listed in columns, many of them libraries and museums, others dealers, and still others names of individuals who subscribed to one or more copies. Finally, in the Foreword, other benefactors are thanked--two Edinburgh collectors "generously sponsored the dust cover of this book," and Curtis Fine Papers of Guardbridge, Fife, donated the paper on which the book was printed. Evidently, Curtis was magnanimous, for once the intended edition of five hundred copies was run off and appeared to be doing well, the decision was made to print as many more as there was paper to do so, perhaps another three hundred copies.

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Our review copy of the book was accompanied by a handwritten letter from David Jones, a furniture historian and lecturer at the University of Saint Andrews in Fife, who wrote the splendid introduction to the book and who was clearly the moving spirit behind the fund-raising. Mr. Jones wrote that if we chose not to review the book, he hoped we would pass it on to a library that he named, but I will not, because here is the review. Some weeks later Mr. Jones, on a lecture tour in the United States, presented himself at our office to see if we had received his letter and the book. In the course of conversation he revealed the continued pressrun on the remaining supply of Curtis paper. Miraculously, the book now exists, defying all odds.

The five Edinburgh price books reproduced here in facsimile present detailed labor costs for each of the many procedures needed to make each of the furniture forms covered. These prices were mutually agreed on between masters and journeymen, whereas the London price books were confrontational, being drawn up by the journeymen alone and "presented to their employers as a form of wage claim."

The sort of uniformity represented by the Edinburgh price books was mirrored by the so-called New Town being built in Edinburgh between the later eighteenth century and the middle of the nineteenth. A large number of the houses and apartments in New Town were rented furnished to out-of-towners coming for the social season, business, or the education of their ...