Caroline Rowland’s The Shopkeeper’s Home: The World’s Best Independent Retailers and Their Stylish Homes reads at first like a beautifully curated cabinet of curiosities — a procession of storefronts and private interiors that insist, by virtue of their arrangement and photography, on a particular kind of attention. But read more closely, and Rowland’s book does … Continue reading The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – The Shopkeeper’s Home: The World’s Best Independent Retailers and Their Stylish Homes by Caroline Rowland
The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – The World of Edward Gorey by Clifford Ross
Clifford Ross’s The World of Edward Gorey is less a conventional monograph than an act of tasteful conjuration: a careful, lovingly lit cabinet that sets an uncanny miniature theatre at the center of view. Ross treats Gorey not simply as an illustrator who doodled at the margins of Victorian melodrama, but as a singular authorial … Continue reading The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – The World of Edward Gorey by Clifford Ross
The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – Slab Techniques by Jim Robison
Jim Robison’s Slab Techniques is a concise, unpretentious primer that manages the useful trick of being both immediately practical and quietly provocative. Presented as part of the Ceramics Handbooks series, the book lays out slab building not as a single method but as a family of choices — a toolkit of decisions about clay, joinery, … Continue reading The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – Slab Techniques by Jim Robison
The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – Surface Design for Ceramics by Maureen Mills
Maureen Mills’s Surface Design for Ceramics reads like a compact manifesto for the small, concentrated art of ornamentation — not a polemic but a pedagogy: a careful, image-rich argument that the surface of a vessel is not mere decoration appended to a form but an active partner in meaning-making. Presented as one of the practical … Continue reading The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – Surface Design for Ceramics by Maureen Mills
The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – 500 Paper Objects: New Directions in Paper Art by Gene McHugh
Gene McHugh’s 500 Paper Objects performs the deceptively ambitious work of making a single, humble material speak with the variety and insistence of a chorus. Arranged as a dense visual catalogue rather than a sustained monograph, the book stages paper not as a passive substrate but as an active agent: folded, torn, cast, burned, layered, … Continue reading The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – 500 Paper Objects: New Directions in Paper Art by Gene McHugh
The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – Painting and Decorating Furniture by Sheila McGraw
An attentive manual that thinks like a maker and reads like a quiet manifesto Sheila McGraw’s Painting and Decorating Furniture presents itself at first glance as a pragmatic handbook: techniques, materials, step-by-step procedures. Beneath that useful surface, however, the book stages a subtler argument about how objects participate in our lives — about the ways … Continue reading The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – Painting and Decorating Furniture by Sheila McGraw
The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – Good Bones, Great Pieces: The Seven Essential Pieces That Will Carry You Through a Lifetime by Suzanne and Lauren McGrath
At once primer and manifesto, Good Bones, Great Pieces stakes a modest but ambitious claim: a home’s durability—its capacity to endure fashions, life changes and moves—depends less on trend-chasing than on a coherent set of flexible, well-chosen objects. Suzanne and Lauren McGrath, a mother–daughter design team steeped in editorial and television worlds, lay out that … Continue reading The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – Good Bones, Great Pieces: The Seven Essential Pieces That Will Carry You Through a Lifetime by Suzanne and Lauren McGrath
The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – The Maker: Crafting a Unique Space by Tamara Maynes
Tamara Maynes’ The Maker: Crafting a Unique Space is at once a manifesto for tactile domesticity and a practical handbook for anyone who wants their home to read like a lived, handcrafted archive. Maynes—who writes from the vantage of a practitioner—treats making not as a hobby but as a mode of seeing: an attentiveness to … Continue reading The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – The Maker: Crafting a Unique Space by Tamara Maynes
The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – 500 Glass Objects – A Celebration of Functional & Sculptural Glass edited by Maurine Littleton
Maurine Littleton’s 500 Glass Objects reads less like a conventional catalogue and more like a visual anthology: a sustained argument for glass as a medium that consistently unsettles our categories — between use and display, craft and fine art, commodity and heirloom. The book’s straightforward title promises breadth; what the pages deliver is a series … Continue reading The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – 500 Glass Objects – A Celebration of Functional & Sculptural Glass edited by Maurine Littleton
The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – 500 Metal Vessels: Contemporary Explorations of Containment, Edited by Marthe Le Van
Marthe Le Van’s 500 Metal Vessels arrives like a compact anthology of the everyday and the ceremonial — a taxonomy of containment that doubles as a meditation on form, function and the material imagination. If a vessel’s primary job is to hold, this book insists that holding is never neutral: it is a cultural act, … Continue reading The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – 500 Metal Vessels: Contemporary Explorations of Containment, Edited by Marthe Le Van
The New Renaissance Mindset 