Stoddard Design Library and Inventors of Tradition

The Stoddard Design Library, part of the Glasgow School of Art Library's Special Collections, features prominently in the new book 'Inventors of Tradition' by Beca Lipscombe and Lucy McKenzie, published by Walther Konig. At the intersection between art, design and social history, The Inventors of Tradition is a subjective study of the history of the Scottish textiles industry since the 1930s. It brings together samples of world-class design through the archive material of individuals and companies.
For the publication and accompanying exhibition, Beca and Lucy selected items from the Stoddard Design Library, the in-house library of carpet manufacturers James Templeton and A. F. Stoddard. It was used to inspire the company’s designers, or to enable them to source motifs that could then be incorporated into their own textile designs. The library was often the starting point in the design process, providing initial ideas for subsequently developed designs.
The library is a rich source of material in the areas of carpet design, textiles, ornament, flat pattern, and textile interiors. It was amassed from the mid-19th century right up to the early 21st century.
Templeton’s and Stoddard’s were alive to contemporary continental developments in art and design, and a good proportion of their library material, especially from the 1880s to the 1930s, was acquired from abroad. The Stoddard Design Library includes volumes from the USA, France, Spain, Italy, Austria, Germany, Czech Republic, Poland, Sweden, Finland, China, Japan and India. Many of the volumes are now extremely rare, and often unique. Particular highlights include 11 volumes in pochoir by Eugene Alain Seguy, of which the only comparable collection internationally resides at Princeton.

Bookbindings by Talwin Morris and Charles Rennie Mackintosh

GSA Library has recently purchased a number of Art Nouveau bookbindings for its Glasgow Style Collection, designed by Talwin Morris and Charles Rennie Mackintosh.
Morris became Arts Manager for Glasgow publisher Blackie & Son in 1898, a position he held until his death in 1911. He became friends with Mackintosh, his wife Margaret, and their circle, and revolutionised bookbinding by using stylised motifs such as birds, roses and briars. He also abandoned the fussy serif fonts that hitherto had been standard.
Newly accessioned titles include:

In 1902 Morris introduced Mackintosh to Walter Blackie, an acquaintance that was to lead to the commission for Hill House, Blackie's home in Helensburgh. Mackintosh also provided Blackie & Son with a small number of binding designs, which were soon repeated across several titles, often in different colours.
Newly accessioned titles include:

GSA Special Collections digitised

A representative selection of beautifully-illustrated books from GSA's Special Collections have now been digitised and are being made freely available via the Internet Archive. Spanning the art, design and architecture disciplines and ranging from the fifteenth to the twentieth centuries, the 35 books can be 'virtually' paged through and enjoyed, or downloaded in a variety of formats, including to handheld devices.

Histories of Carpet Manufacturers

GSA Library has recently purchased a number of rare books to complement the Stoddard Design Library, the working library of the A. F. Stoddard and James Templeton & Co. carpet factories that came to the Library in 2009. These books, either published in-house by the companies or written by people connected to them, are important documents in reconstructing the histories of these important manufacturers.

Short Essays Delivered and Now Dedicated to the Workers of James Templeton & Co.'s and J. & J. S. Templeton's Carpet Factories was written by J. Murray Templeton and published in Glasgow by James Maclehose in 1887. It reproduces speeches and lectures given by Templeton and addressed to his staff, normally designed to instill good morals and responsibilities. The subjects covered are diverse, from temperance to the labour programme of America. There's even a lecture on stars and atoms!

A Century of Carpet Making by Fred H. Young provides a short history of James Templeton & Co. by a senior partner in the business. It was published posthumously around 1943 in a limited edition and modest form due to wartime rationing.
In 1953 James Templeton & Co. designed the carpet for the Coronation of Queen Elizabeth II in Westminster Abbey. Coronation Carpet Review was a trade publication designed to drum up trade and was published in June that year by the British Continental Trade Press. It includes an advertisement to the front for a specially designed Coronation Axminster carpet by A. F. Stoddard and Co.

During World War II many of the carpet factories in the area were requisitioned for the war effort and adapted for wartime use. The Stoddard factory at Elderslie becomes a naval laundry, servicing the hammocks, bedding and life jackets of ships on the Clyde. Blackwood Morton & Sons of Kilmarnock moved production from carpets into machine parts and electric hub motors. From Loom to Lathe - And Back Again was published in-house in 1946 to recount the story.

Sydney Smirke, Architect

When recataloguing our rare books, we often come across annotations, inscriptions or bookplates that reveal the books' previous owners. Our copy of Examples of ornamental sculpture in architecture: drawn from the originals of bronze, marble and terra cotta in Greece, Asia Minor and Italy by Lewis Vulliamy (1791-1871) is no exception.
Published around 1821, the volume includes several engraved plates of sculptural decoration, designed to illustrated their potential application to architecture. The GSA Library's copy includes the bookplate of architect Sydney Smirke, who is best known for the Round Reading Room in the British Museum. This 1857 neo-classical domed building now forms part of the Great Court, but was originally designed as the reading room of the British Library and was used as such until 1997. It's probably very appropriate that an architect so famed for a library should find his own book, some 150 years later, in a small art and design library in Glasgow!

French Republication Calendars

As part of our ongoing programme to recatalogue GSA Library's rare books, we've just discovered Plans et dessins tires de la belle architecture ou representations d'edifices executes ou projettes en cxv plances : avec les explications necessaires by Christian Ludwig Stieglitz (1756-1836), published in 1801 in Paris.
Although the Library has many 19th century French architectural books, this volume is particularly interesting in that its title page features dates from both the Gregorian calendar (1801) and the French Republication calendar (IX).
The French Republican, or Revolutionary, Calendar was in use for about 12 years after the French Revolution, from about 1792 to 1805, and was briefly resurrected for 18 days during the Paris Commune of 1871. The new Republic was keen to sweep away some of the legal, religious and societal orthodoxes of the ancien regime, and created a new system of measures (the metric system) and a new calendar, beginning at Year I (1792). Our volume dates to year IX (1801).
The calendar was created by a commission of astronomers, geographers, mathematicians and poets, and saw not only a new numbering system for years, but also new names for months, days and seasons. The 12 months were each divided into 3 10-day weeks called decades with the last day in each 10 replacing Sunday as the day of rest. Each month was named after an aspect of nature, for example Vendemiaire (grape harvest) and Frimaire (frost).
Days were divided into 10 hours, each with 100 decimal minutes, creating an hour that lasted a conventional 144 minutes. Traditional French saints days were replaced with days celebrating animals, tools, plants or minerals.

Palladio's 'Four books of architecture'

One of GSA Library's greatest treasures is our 1581 edition of architect Andrea Palladio's 'I quattro libri dell'architettura', one of the most influential treatises in the history of architecture. Published in Venice, it is notable for its striking images and the innovative way that drawings of buildings from classical antiquity are juxtaposed with the designs that they inspired. We've just completed a pilot project with the National Library of Scotland and the Internet Archive, which has resulted in a digital copy of this wonderful book being made freely available online via the link above.

Coronation Colours 1953

Currently featured in the Library's display of books on colour from its Rare Books and Special Collections is Coronation Colours from the British Colour Council. The document was designed to give very precise instructions to public bodies, organisations and companies on the correct colours to use for bunting, tartans and union jacks on the occasion of the Queen's Coronation in 1953. It includes textile, card and ribbon samples mounted in 6 swatch booklets, some with typewritten colour names pasted on the back, illustrating acceptable colours for use during the 1953 Coronation. The British Colour Council itself was an industry standards organisation, active from the 1930s to the 1950s, which produced indexes of named colours for use by government, industry, academia, and horticulture.

Munsell's Colour System

Our latest display of items from the Library's Special Collections focuses on colour theory, and features a number of 19th and 20th century texts on the science and use of colour.
One of the books on display is an instructional manual on the Munsell Color System. Munsell's system (revolutionary in approach when first published and still in use in many spheres today) provides specifications of colours based on three properties, or 'dimensions': namely hue, value, and chroma. 'Value' roughly equates to lightness, and 'chroma to purity'. The system was created by Professor Albert H. Munsell in the first decade of the 20th century, and Munsell was the first colour scientist to separate hue, value, and chroma into perceptually uniform and independent dimensions, based on rigorous measurements of human subjects’ visual responses to colour. On the Munsell scale, each colour is assigned three numbers that then become its unique specification: these numbers correspond to its position on the hue, value, and chroma axes. The Library's example of this text includes a blank Munsell grid with its 3 axes, and coloured chits for the student to place onto the grid as part of their learning.
The colour science display can be viewed on the ground floor of the Main Library during our normal opening hours.

Ladies' Dress Shoes of the 19th Century

Today we look at Ladies' Dress Shoes of the Nineteenth Century by T. Watson Greig, who also authored Ladies' Old-Fashioned Shoes. This volume was published at the turn of the century in 1900 by Edinburgh publisher David Douglas. It includes 20 beautiful full-colour plate of decorative court shoes, with each plate featuring 3 designs. The designs are arrange by colour throughout.
The Library's Special Collections include a number of rare or valuable titles, some dating back to the sixteenth century. These titles are mostly held in the Mackintosh Library. Because of the value of these items, special access arrangement are in place, with viewing strictly by appointment only with our Academic Liaison Librarians.

Inventors of Tradition

Items from the GSA Library's Stoddard Design Collection are currently being exhibited as part of The Inventors of Tradition exhibition. The exhibition looks at some of the pioneers of Scottish textile production, alongside the responses of contemporary designers. Open Tues - Sat 11-5, 22 Jan - 26 Feb 2011 at 21 Stockwell Street, Glasgow.

Library Display: Bookbindings by Jessie M. King

To complement the Glasgow Girls exhibition which has just opened in the Glasgow School of Art's Mackintosh Gallery, the GSA Library is currently showing a display of bookbindings by Jessie M. King from its Special Collections. The bindings span the entire length of King's career. One cabinet is situated just inside on the Library entrance, with another on the top floor next to the Librarians' Office.
Readers can also download a complete bibliography of bindings and illustrated books by King held by GSA Library at http://www2.gsa.ac.uk/library/bibliographies.html

Street Markets of London

Today we look at the Street Markets of London by Mary Benedetta with photographs by Laszlo Moholy-Nagy.
This book takes the form of a sociological description of London street markets accompanied by 64 black and white photographs and a foreword by Bauhaus artist Laszlo Moholy-Nagy. A Hungarian, Moholy-Nagy spent five years at the Bauhaus having been appointed a master by Walter Gropius. The book was published in 1936, just one year before the commencement of Mass Observation in 1937, and during a time when there was great interest in learning about the anthropology of working class communities. Among the locations featured are Petticoat Lane, Farringdon Street, Caledonian Market, Brixton, Covent Garden, Berwick Market, Shepherd's Bush, Brick Lane, Billingsgate and Commercial Road.
The Library's Special Collections include a number of rare or valuable titles, some dating back to the sixteenth century. These titles are mostly held in the Mackintosh Library. Because of the value of these items, special access arrangement are in place, with viewing strictly by appointment only with our Academic Liaison Librarians.