PUBLISHER’S ADVANCE PRESENTATION COPY OF HANDICRAFTS OF THE SOUTHERN HIGHLANDS, WITH 58 ILLUSTRATIONS FROM PHOTOGRAPHS TAKEN FOR THE WORK BY DORIS ULMANN

(ULMANN, Doris) EATON, Allen H. Handicrafts of the Southern Highlands with an Account of the Rural Handicraft Movement in the United States and Suggestions for the Wider Use of Handicrafts in Adult Education and in Recreation. New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1937. Thick octavo, original blue cloth, pictorial endpapers, original dust jacket. $750.

First edition, publisher’s advance presentation copy, with 58 illustrations from photographs taken for the work by Doris Ulmann, in scarce original dust jacket. With publisher’s presentation review slip laid in.

“Late in her life, Doris Ulmann concentrated on photographing the rural handicrafts movement. That work was collected in Handicrafts of the Southern Highlands (1937)” (McDarrah & McDarrah, 500). Appalachian crafts written about in this work and documented by Ulmann’s photographs include log cabin-building, spinning, weaving, dying, quilting, pottery, wood-carving, furniture-making, doll-making, and musical instrument-making. “Living on Park Avenue, the cultured and always elegantly attired Ulmann still remained drawn to ordinary people, and by the mid 1920s she had become committed to documenting the lives of Americans who were still following the customs and traditions of a vanishing rural culture… [She] made her last working trip in the summer of 1934, to the Appalachian regions of the western Carolinas… She is now widely recognized as a major pictorial chronicler of American life during the early 20th century” (ANB). See Roth, 78-9. Contemporary owner signature. Bookplate. Laid-in illustrated map of the Southern Highlands with craft illustrations on verso.

A beautiful advance presentation copy in about-fine condition.