Shaker Furniture - The Craftsmanship of an American Communal Sect

Plain lines, honest joinery, and chairs built as an act of worship: Shaker Furniture is the study that first showed the world what the Believers made, and why it still looks modern.

The United Society of Believers, are the American religious community better known as the Shakers. Shaker Furniture sets Shaker cabinetmaking inside the life that produced it: a communal sect that built for use rather than display, and whose rules of order shaped every proportion, joint, and finish.

Andrews names the craftsmen and their workshops, and follows the furniture from ladder-back chairs and trestle tables to built-in cupboards, oval boxes, sewing stands, and the clocks of Benjamin and Isaac Youngs. The photographs commissioned for the book gave collectors, curators, and restorers their first reliable visual record of the work, and cabinetmakers have been measuring from them ever since.

This edition features:

• Forty-seven full-page plates by the photographer William F. Winter, each piece described and measured
• Chapters on the cultural background of Shaker craftsmanship and the essential character of the work
• Appendices on the Shaker chair industry and on Benjamin and Isaac Youngs, clockmakers of the sect
• Notes on construction, materials, and finishes, of practical use to restorers and joiners alike
• A Shaker chronology, a working bibliography, and an index for readers following the subject further