Book reviews: the British hatting industry

While traveling in the UK last month, I had the opportunity to visit the Hat Museum of Stockport, England, which i wrote up in a blog post, here. In their gift shop, i purchased two books of possible interest to the labricoleuse readership: Penny McKnight's Stockport Hatting and Denton and the Archaeology of the Felt Hatting Industry By Michael Newell et al.

McKnight's book is reminiscent of a course pack: spiral-bound with a vinyl cover, possibly published in batches from a copy shop. The Newell text is a trade paperback, though it's only about 20 pages longer than McKnight's. Both feature a number of useful and interesting illustrations--everything from period advertisements for hatters to photos of hat factory facilities; those in the McKnight book are not the best quality (think photocopies) and entirely black and white, while those in the Newell book are better reproductions and some are in full color. The Newell text is unfortunately full of quite a few typographical errors and could have used another pass-through by a good copy editor before going to press to eliminate these.

The books can be addressed on one level as a pair, since they both cover quite a bit of the same ground: the heyday of the British hatting industry in the area around Stockport, a small town on the periphery of Manchester. McKnight's book predates the Newell text by seven years (published in 2000 and 2007 respectively), and in places, the Newell text comes close to plagiarizing McKnight's, with whole sections reproduced nearly verbatim. They are both quite useful for gaining a grasp of the development of the felt hat blocking process as developed in the Stockport/Denton area in the 19th century, and for establishing a knowledge of how the terms differ between the US and UK hatblocking communities (for example, what American hatters call sizing a hat, UK hatters call proofing it).

In terms of a book I'll get mileage out of in my millinery class as a supplementary text, McKnight's Stockport Hatting and its chapter on production methodology is going to be the most useful. I may assign it as reading in future classes when we do our blocking projects, because it's a great overview of the process from a mass production perspective.

The Newell book is interesting in terms of millinery history scholarship (which is a research interest of mine), but not something I'll use in classes. I might recommend it to fellow milliners with a similar interest in the history of the industry, or students with a particular focus in millinery. I particularly appreciated the verbatim quotations of the personal recollections of the industry from aging Denton hatters, which reminded me of Debbie Henderson's book Hat Talk: Conversations with Hat Makers About Their Hats--the Fedora, Homburg, Straw, and Cap (previously reviewed in this post). Another fascinating/horrifying feature was an account of a proofing-house explosion which killed many workers, complete with a photograph of the destruction it caused to the factory in which it occurred.


Other Publication Notes

On the book review tip, if you can get your hands on the most recent issue (Summer 2011) of Theatre Design & Technology, you can read my reviews of two new books by Frances Grimble, released through Lavolta Press, Bustle Fashions 1885-1887 and Directoire Revival Fashions 1888-1889. Or, you could wait until the digital version of the issue shows up on the website, which seems to be running two seasons behind the quarterly publication schedule (Winter is up now, though Spring and Summer have since come out in paper editions).

And, in case you have ever bemoaned the dearth of fiction featuring fabric store clerks as protagonists, I have a short story, "Shake Sugaree," in the current edition of the literary journal Mason's Road that fits that bill. Check it out!

Unrelated, but I realize it's been a while since i've mentioned it: you can also follow labricoleuse on Facebook or on Twitter for notifications on when the blog has been updated. Pass it on!