Material Choices: Refashioning Bast and Leaf Fibers in Asia and the Pacific by Hamilton, Roy W. and B. Lynne Milgram - 2008

Los Angeles: Fowler Museum at UCLA, 2007. Softcover. Good+ (clean, bright, tight but for a very few check marks next to names in the index; bump to lower right corner). Color-illus. card wraps with deep French flaps. 187 pp. with color images and bw maps throughout, numbered by chapter. Asia is renowned for the production of fine handwoven cottons and luxurious silks -important items of trade for centuries. In addition to these celebrated fabrics, however, weavers throughout the region produced cloth from ramie, hemp, pina, and banana fibers (including Philippine abaca and Okinawan ito basho), as well as a number of lesser-known plant fibers. Over the course of the twentieth century, many of these Asian plant fiber weaving traditions became marginalized or hovered on the brink of extinction, given the advent of synthetic fabrics, growing industrialization, and increased international textile trade. As the essays in this book testify, however, they have not vanished altogether. Rather, in recent… Read More

New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 2003. Softcover. Fine. 4to. Fine book. Inscribed by one of the author's on the front free endpaper. A fine copy.