English Furniture and Furniture Makers of the 18th Century (Paperback)

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: common to his contemporaries. Every plate is well produced in line by capable engravers, and, as will be seen by a glance at the original editions, they were not " commercially" but artistically printed, being " flushed" where necessary. All this must have cost a very considerable sum of money, more, indeed, than Chippendale could have reasonably hoped to gain by the mere sale of the book. It was a trade catalogue on a gigantic scale, and he looked for his profits from the advertisement of his wares. Had he spent, as some of his critics seem to have wished him to, several hundreds of hard-earned money in showing the public what they did not but in his opinion ought to want, he should have been shut up by his friends in a lunatic asylum, as being incapable of managing his business. I have no means of judging with accuracy what the cost of producing the " Director " may have been. At present, for merely printing the plates in the same style, without paper, a moderate estimate would be twenty-five or thirty shillings. Add to this the cost of engraving plates, the paper, binding, letterpress, etc., the time employed in making the drawings?reckoned at carver's wages? and considering that he could only receive the full three-and-a-half guineas for such copies as he himself sold, we cannot help being impressed with the fact that no tradesman would be justified, from a business point of view, in preaching an absolutely new gospel at such expense. Like any other reasonable shopkeeper, he advertised such waresas experience showed would sell, without pretending to originality. He supplied copies of the " Director " to the furniture trade at i 14.?. 6rf. Mr. Heaton is Chippendale's most severe, and I might almost say unfair, critic. According to him Chippendale's beds, for instance, a...