Textile Machines (Shire Library)

This book combines a description of about fifty important textile machines with an analysis of their evolution from the twelfth century to the present day. Each machine is dealt with in the context of its time, showing the impact that even a simple device like the fulling stocks had on textile production in Britain. The greater organisation of the domestic system in the eighteenth century gave impetus to the development of machines like the dandy loom and the spinning jenny. The author examines the revolutionary inventions of the late eighteenth century and how they led to the industrialisation of the textile industry. Detailed discussion is restricted to those machines which may be seen in the principal textile museums and collections of Europe and America, which are listed at the end of the book.

Anna Benson is a weaver and textile historian. She is a chartered textile technologist and has completed an MA specialising in the textiles of historic houses. Anna and her husband run a specialist weaving business reproducing fabrics of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Other titles for Shire by this author are:

Looms and Weaving