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(no dust jacket, possibly as issued) [binding solid, gilt/black embossed lettering and decoration on front cover still bright and attractive; moderate wear to the extremities, some shelfwear to bottom edges of covers, light bumping to upper corners; soft diagonal creasing at lower corners of pp.13-28, with small tears at the edges of a few pages]. (B&W photographs, diagrams, charts, etc.) This was the third and final volume issued by this publisher under the aegis of its "House Beautiful" magazine, which had began publishing in 1896 (The Atlantic Monthly Company took it over in 1913 and was its publisher until it was bought by the Hearst Corporation in 1934). The first two -- "The House Beautiful Building Annual" and "The House Beautiful Furnishing Annual" -- have dated rather badly, and are today largely of historical/reference interest; and they are, consequently, rather common in the marketplace. Not so the "Gardening Manual." Like the others, this one was essentially a product of the magazine's editorial staff (produced by committee, one might say), but is distinguished by bearing the imprimatur of Fletcher Steele, who penned the introductory chapter on garden design, entitled "Design of the Small Place." Steele (1885-1971), who studied under Frederick Law Olmsted Jr. and others at Harvard (which in 1900 had instituted the world's first landscape architecture program) and later apprenticed with Warren Manning, opened his own firm in Boston in 1913, and over the course of his career designed and created over 700 gardens. His biographer, Robin Karson, states that Steele "was unique in his dedication to the notion that gardens can be life-altering works of art, and he was very unusual in his working methods and level of involvement with his clients. [He] was interested in looking underneath the social façades of the people he worked with. He wrote about wanting to discover what the client's secret dreams were about when he was making a garden." Although he left behind a substantial archive of his work (housed at the SUNY College of Environmental Science and Forestry in Syracuse, New York), his list of published works is surprisingly thin: just a couple of years prior to the appearance of this volume, he had published his first book, "Design in the Little Garden" (The Atlantic Monthly Press, 1924) and late in life he produced what amounted to his grand philosophical summing-up, "Gardens and People" (Houghton Mifflin, 1964); book-wise, that's about it. The "Gardening Manual" appeared at a pivotal moment in Steele's career, when he had just started to come under the sway of the new Art Deco movement, which he had first encountered in Paris in 1925 at the Exposition Internationale des Arts Décoratifs et Industriels Modernes (the so-called "Art Deco Exposition"), where he saw examples of cubist gardens that employed such materials as concrete, mirrors, and colored gravel -- in marked contrast to the English Arts and Crafts vein in which he had been working. He represents a transitional figure between the old school and the Modern style, and through his writings, designs and teaching (at Harvard, naturally) he influenced a number of younger design students, one of whom, Dan Kiley, called him "the only good designer working during the twenties and thirties, also the only one who was really interested in new things." Though his work had gone somewhat out of style during the Modernist period, his reputation has grown in recent years. The present volume is exceedingly scarce, with none on offer in the marketplace at the present time (March 2021). [And remember what I said up above about its two companion volumes being common and unremarkable? Well, this will prove it: I've got copies of both of them -- see the last picture posted with this listing -- and if you buy this volume, you can have them for free!]. Seller Inventory # 26645
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