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labricoleuseIt is unusually hard to find good reading material in Southern Utah. Working at the Shakespearean Festival this season, all the local bookstores were heavily Mormon-centric [1], and the nearest chain bookstore was an hour away. A friend and fellow artist who supplements her papercrafting with bookstore clerkage sent me a wonderful gift: Cowboy Boots: The Art and Sole, by bootmaker and historian Jennifer June. The book also contains a thoughtfully-written foreword by country music star, Dwight Yoakam.
I'd first seen this book at my local Tandy Leather, sitting on the countertop as a "While U Wait" diversion. At the time, i was only able to briefly page through it--long enough to know that i badly wanted to own it! So, imagine my joy when my friend sent it to me out in Utah this summer.
June's thorough text covers cowboy boots from every angle--history, construction, their form, function, and fashions. She traces the rise of the style as a reaction to the notoriously poor US Cavalry boots of the early 19th century, and as an innovative development spawned by the invention of the four-piece Wellington boot, footwear which was at the time widely hailed as a stroke of cordwainer's genius.
June discusses each structural element of a cowboy boot--heel, shank, toebox, shaft, pulls--in both functional and stylistic terms. A bootmaker herself, she meticulously describes the steps of cowboy boot engineering and construction, and covers the full range of embellishment techniques, from inlay/overlay to leather tooling, painting and dyeing, stud and stonework, conchos and toecaps, "mule ears" (elongated boot pulls that hang down to the sole), and ornamental stitching. She also discusses a full range of popular customized cowboy boot imagery--the symbology of recurring design elements such as roses, eagles, longhorns, stars, skulls, butterflies, and many others.
As an artisan in a related field with a particular interest in artisanship history and construction methods, the text itself was of primary concern for me, but the lay reader would probably be even more drawn to the plethora of beautifully detailed full-color photographs by Marty Snortum, proprietor of the innovative custom shop Rocketbuster Boots. The boots depicted range from antique and vintage specimens to new custom boots created for celebrities (from politician John Kerry to rock frontman Lemmy of Motorhead), rodeo stars, and just regular folk. Some of the images show deconstructed or preconstructed boots, illustrating some of the techniques discussed (such as pegging soles and heels). Nevermind its instructive value; the book could serve as a coffeetable art-book on the strength of the photography alone.
I admittedly have a soft spot for cowboy boots, not only as a fan of the American West, but also as a crafts artisan--cowboy boots are my work boot of choice. Anyone who reads this blog regularly knows i'm a big proponent of attention to workplace safety, and proper footwear in the workshop is a major concern of mine [2]. Since in in a single day's work i may find myself dyeing 20 yards of fabric in a 60-gal steam vat, carving shoe rubber with a hook-blade, drilling holes in a metal plate, spray-painting, leather-punching, hat-steaming, and delicately hand-stitching, all interspersed with attending staff meetings and teaching graduate classes...well, i really need some all-purpose footwear, something beyond even the sturdy-but-klunky work-boot. Cowboy boots provide me with the reinforced toe-protection of a heavy-duty boot, steel-shank arch support, and a tall boot shaft to protect my shins and ankles from dropped tools or spilled dyebaths, yet the shaped toe, vamp stitching (the "toebug"), and the Cuban heel make me feel a bit more presentably-dressed for both the work room and the conference room.
Now that i've read all about the making of a pair of custom cowboy boots, i'm definitely going to save up for a pair from one of the companies whose work caught my eye. I'm drawn to the rockabilly Sailor-Jerry-style work of Snortum's Rocketbuster, but some other creative bootmakers who caught my eye are Back at the Ranch, Duck Menzies of Temple, TX (no website), Liberty Boot Company, Lucchese Boot Company, Riff Raff Leatherworks, & Tres Outlaws.
The book also features an extensive glossary of bootmaking terms, suggestions for finding antique and vintage boots (particularly search suggestions for eBay), and museums that feature cowboy boot collections. Of the ones listed, i can personally vouch for the excellence of the Autry Museum of the American West in Los Angeles, CA, and the Bata Shoe Museum in Toronto, Ontario. One i haven't been to that's now on my list of "some day": the National Cowgirl Museum and Hall of Fame!
Even if you don't like cowboy boots, rodeos, westerns, or any of that, the construction information alone is of interest to any shoe and boot enthusiast, and particularly anyone concerned with the construction, alteration, and repair of footwear. I highly recommend this book!
[1] Bookshops that cater to Mormon consumers make perfect sense in an area where the population skews so heavily toward that religious demographic. As a jobbed-in "gentile" with no personal interest in the faith, though, it was a reading-material wasteland for me.
[2] I still shudder to recall one otherwise-reputable shop i once freelanced for, where several crafts artisans frequently came to work in peep-toe mules. I wondered: who was legally at fault, should one of these workers drop a blade or anvil and lose a toe? The lead artisan or shop manager, who allowed workers to come in with this kind of footwear, or the worker who chose to wear such unsafe attire? Thankfully, the question remained hypothetical for the duration of my employment, but i determined that no workers in any shop i ran would run that risk.
I'd first seen this book at my local Tandy Leather, sitting on the countertop as a "While U Wait" diversion. At the time, i was only able to briefly page through it--long enough to know that i badly wanted to own it! So, imagine my joy when my friend sent it to me out in Utah this summer.
June's thorough text covers cowboy boots from every angle--history, construction, their form, function, and fashions. She traces the rise of the style as a reaction to the notoriously poor US Cavalry boots of the early 19th century, and as an innovative development spawned by the invention of the four-piece Wellington boot, footwear which was at the time widely hailed as a stroke of cordwainer's genius.
June discusses each structural element of a cowboy boot--heel, shank, toebox, shaft, pulls--in both functional and stylistic terms. A bootmaker herself, she meticulously describes the steps of cowboy boot engineering and construction, and covers the full range of embellishment techniques, from inlay/overlay to leather tooling, painting and dyeing, stud and stonework, conchos and toecaps, "mule ears" (elongated boot pulls that hang down to the sole), and ornamental stitching. She also discusses a full range of popular customized cowboy boot imagery--the symbology of recurring design elements such as roses, eagles, longhorns, stars, skulls, butterflies, and many others.
As an artisan in a related field with a particular interest in artisanship history and construction methods, the text itself was of primary concern for me, but the lay reader would probably be even more drawn to the plethora of beautifully detailed full-color photographs by Marty Snortum, proprietor of the innovative custom shop Rocketbuster Boots. The boots depicted range from antique and vintage specimens to new custom boots created for celebrities (from politician John Kerry to rock frontman Lemmy of Motorhead), rodeo stars, and just regular folk. Some of the images show deconstructed or preconstructed boots, illustrating some of the techniques discussed (such as pegging soles and heels). Nevermind its instructive value; the book could serve as a coffeetable art-book on the strength of the photography alone.
I admittedly have a soft spot for cowboy boots, not only as a fan of the American West, but also as a crafts artisan--cowboy boots are my work boot of choice. Anyone who reads this blog regularly knows i'm a big proponent of attention to workplace safety, and proper footwear in the workshop is a major concern of mine [2]. Since in in a single day's work i may find myself dyeing 20 yards of fabric in a 60-gal steam vat, carving shoe rubber with a hook-blade, drilling holes in a metal plate, spray-painting, leather-punching, hat-steaming, and delicately hand-stitching, all interspersed with attending staff meetings and teaching graduate classes...well, i really need some all-purpose footwear, something beyond even the sturdy-but-klunky work-boot. Cowboy boots provide me with the reinforced toe-protection of a heavy-duty boot, steel-shank arch support, and a tall boot shaft to protect my shins and ankles from dropped tools or spilled dyebaths, yet the shaped toe, vamp stitching (the "toebug"), and the Cuban heel make me feel a bit more presentably-dressed for both the work room and the conference room.
Now that i've read all about the making of a pair of custom cowboy boots, i'm definitely going to save up for a pair from one of the companies whose work caught my eye. I'm drawn to the rockabilly Sailor-Jerry-style work of Snortum's Rocketbuster, but some other creative bootmakers who caught my eye are Back at the Ranch, Duck Menzies of Temple, TX (no website), Liberty Boot Company, Lucchese Boot Company, Riff Raff Leatherworks, & Tres Outlaws.
The book also features an extensive glossary of bootmaking terms, suggestions for finding antique and vintage boots (particularly search suggestions for eBay), and museums that feature cowboy boot collections. Of the ones listed, i can personally vouch for the excellence of the Autry Museum of the American West in Los Angeles, CA, and the Bata Shoe Museum in Toronto, Ontario. One i haven't been to that's now on my list of "some day": the National Cowgirl Museum and Hall of Fame!
Even if you don't like cowboy boots, rodeos, westerns, or any of that, the construction information alone is of interest to any shoe and boot enthusiast, and particularly anyone concerned with the construction, alteration, and repair of footwear. I highly recommend this book!
[1] Bookshops that cater to Mormon consumers make perfect sense in an area where the population skews so heavily toward that religious demographic. As a jobbed-in "gentile" with no personal interest in the faith, though, it was a reading-material wasteland for me.
[2] I still shudder to recall one otherwise-reputable shop i once freelanced for, where several crafts artisans frequently came to work in peep-toe mules. I wondered: who was legally at fault, should one of these workers drop a blade or anvil and lose a toe? The lead artisan or shop manager, who allowed workers to come in with this kind of footwear, or the worker who chose to wear such unsafe attire? Thankfully, the question remained hypothetical for the duration of my employment, but i determined that no workers in any shop i ran would run that risk.
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no subject
Date: 2007-07-15 03:38 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-07-18 05:00 pm (UTC)Keep me updated on how this works out, i'd love to know what you eventually decide on. Good luck!