Soft Covers for Hard Times: Quiltmaking and the Great Depression [Hardcover]

A warm, engaging book by a serious quilt historian. The photos are great. What's intriguing is the author's theme of how the quilts of the American depression were often anything but somber -- there was great beauty, joy, and exuberance in the designs.

Be advised: the over-all rating given this book by Amazon is deceptive. The single review of the print copy has a five-star rank, which the book deserves. The review of the Kindle version expresses the reader's experience with a far-different book - one with black-and-white photographs. In books like this, as in all art books, color is integral to understanding, a Siamese twin to the author's text.

That is particularly true with "Soft Covers for Hard Times." In this book Ms. Waldvogel chronicles a remarkable phenomenon - a radical shift in the deeply conservative tradition of quiltmaking in the era of the Great Depression, one that involved a burst of new patterns and also a burst of new, softer, pastel colors.

The book addresses two questions - Why were Depression-era quilts generally "pretty" and why were they so similar all across America?

On her way to answering these questions, the author discovers some things that have interest to economists, psychologists, historians, and the general public. For in an era of great economic gloom and stagnation there arose a thriving new industry - one that involved all aspects of the quiltmaking process from the production of fabric, threads, and quilt batting to the publication of new patterns marketed through magazines, booklets, and newspapers. Even the manufacturers of agricultural feed and the sundry makers of sugar, rice, and other commodities sought to gain from the renewed interest in quiltmaking, packing their products in cotton sacks printed in colors and designs similar to those produced by textile mills and popular with quiltmakers. And helping to fuel this new industry were a number of women pattern makers, whose names became household words.

Of course, this burst of creativity and production of quilts was fueled in part by the Colonial Revival of the 1920's, a movement that honored the handmade as opposed to the assembly-line produced object. And the Treaty of Versailles, which ended WW I, required the powerful and secretive German dye-makers to share their formulas with other nations. Among those were the formulas for the commercial production of pastel colors that resulted in an entirely new palette of textile colors.

All these developments appealed to a long tradition of handmade bedcoverings and to quiltmaking as a domestic art that expressed both the frugality and the homemaking skills of American women whose means were straitened. This tradition, a folkart tradition, had provided women a creative outlet since before the Amercian Revolution, and some historians declare it the only distinctively American design traditions. In hard economic times, women took pride in using their own hands and imaginations to provide both beauty and comfort for homes that no doubt lacked amenities. They felt and expressed their oneness with their colonial and nineteenth-century forebears.

This book not only contains fine examples of quilt patterns popular at the time. It also includes photographs and interviews with the quiltmakers in their homes, it depicts the designers and their designs, and it shows the tools and materials found in sewing baskets across the nation.

"Soft Covers for Hard Times" is a book that should be on the bookshelf of everyone interested in quiltmaking and American history. The homogenization of design that marked the Depression-era quilts is seen also in traditional forms of music and handicrafts. This book is well-researched, well-conceived and -executed, and it addresses with fullness a phenomenon not otherwise addressed in the pages of a single book.

Merikay Waldvogel is a meticulous scholar with an engaging writing style, and this book is already a standard resource.

It is unfortunate that Amazon.com has chosen to combine the ratings of the Kindle version and the text version, for the rating misrepresents the quality of the product.

This is an enjoyable book for those interested in history as it relates to the family issues of the Depression years. There are many interesting stories of the quilt makers themselves with beautiful color plates and clear enough detailed illustrations that a quiltmaker could use them for inspiration or make a reasonable facsimile of any of them. It covers the years 1925 to 1945 and gives a interesting insite into the lean Depression years and the shortages of the War years.

› Go to Amazon.com to see all 5 reviews  4.2 out of 5 stars