Opening Fabric Treasures

Philip Anthony Sykas. The Secret Life of Textiles: Six Pattern Book Archives in North West England. Bolton, UK: Bolton Museums, Art Gallery and Aquarium, 2005. 160 pp. £16.

Reviewed by Joyce Storey

The Secret Life of Textiles is the result of a two-year funded archival research project to catalog six regional holdings of books of textile samples from the once-great textile area of northwest England. In the 19th century millions of yards of cotton and calico were woven and printed in this part of the country.

The great textile industries of Europe have suffered near-total extinction, and many of the industrial records in the United Kingdom were lost. It was not until the 1970s and 1980s—about 15 years after the British government forced compensated closure of 47 finishing plants—that museums in Bolton, Manchester, and Macclesfield began actively seeking archival material. Fortunately, pattern books—“groups of designs, proofs, or samples held in book format” (p. 11)— often survived because of the attractive nature of the pattern and color samples.

The Secret Life of Textiles serves as a comprehensive catalog to an area of conservation and research that has previously been neglected. It is well produced, illustrated in color, and includes many footnotes, a glossary, and an extensive cross-referenced index that will make it extremely useful for students researching a variety of textile design and history projects. Discussion of dyer’s notebooks, some of which belonged to such well-known colorists as the Lightfoot family, will interest Chemical Heritage readers.

The book is divided into three sections—production, design and coloration, and trade and business—with an explanatory introduction for each. The largest section—with 24 catalog entries—concerns pattern books and design. It begins with an “extraordinary survival,” a letter book of a designer working around 1810 that gives instructions on making designs saleable.

The Secret Life of Textiles records thorough, much-needed, and interesting research by Sykas and his contributors. I hope that more funding will be available from the Heritage Lottery Fund to allow it to continue. At this point, I must confess that I was born and educated in the north of England and am professionally connected to the companies and the people of the textile industry as a freelance textile designer and as a teacher of design and print technology in Manchester. So, for me, this book is a nostalgic journey through a lost industry. But, although the book is well written and attractively produced, this is a specialist study that will probably be appreciated only by a limited number of people. I wish I could believe that more people would be interested in the 19th-century textile industry and the great contributions it made.