In the parking lot abutting the various venues where the August 1976 Finger Lakes Bicentennial Quilt Symposium was taking place, I chased down Jean Ray Laury, having met her for the first time just hours before. I think I’d sent her a fan letter or two by then, and Jean, unfailingly generous, had replied, beginning a correspondence that continued until her death in 2011. I told her I hoped soon to talk with her face-to-face, and Ithaca would be that opportunity.

I’d been teaching design and how-to classes at the DeCordova Museum in Lincoln, MA, for about a year, and one day the director came to me with a question. They’d been approached by the publisher Prentice-Hall that was planning a series of craft-focused guidebooks. The Prentice-Hall production team thought the DeCordova faculty might include potential authors. Would I be interested in writing a book about quilt making? Writing a book about anything was the furthest thing from my mind at that point, but I agreed to think about it.

Snapshot I made of Jean Ray Laury autographing books at the First Continental Quilting Congress in Arlington, VA, July 1978.

Jean Laury’s 1970 book Quilts and Coverlets: A Contemporary Approach, published by Van Nostrand Reinhold Co., was pretty much it for any kind of work departing from tradition in those early quilt revival years, and I’d read and re-read it multiple times. She would surely have thoughts on the offer I’d been given, whether it was something I should do or stay away from. In that Ithaca parking lot on that cloudy but warm summer day, she listened to the details of the project as I knew them, asked a couple of questions, then gave me the answer I wasn’t sure I was ready for. “Sounds to me,” she said, “that if you don’t do this they’ll just find someone else who will. What do you have to lose?” And then she explained that when opportunities came her way, she rarely declined. Book projects, exhibition proposals, teaching gigs, whatever. “Say yes to opportunities like this,” Jean counseled. “You never know where it’ll take you.”

It was wise, warmhearted and generous advice, and it convinced me. I signed a contract with Prentice-Hall a couple of months later. When she learned that I’d started work on the manuscript, Jean wrote me, expressing her support:

“Good for you for getting to work on the book. Yes, I’d be happy to read parts of the manuscript or to do whatever I can, if you think it would be of any help. Having a book out makes such a big difference to other people. You may be completely knowledgeable about an area, but if you’ve got a book on it, that reassures other people. It’s crazy, but that’s the way it seems to go.” 

In 1978 the first of my two “handbooks” was published.

First published in 1978 and 1981 respectively, The Quiltmaker’s Handbook and The Second Quiltmaker’s Handbook were re-issued in 1993 by Leone Publications after the book had been acquired by Dover Publications, which distributed the titles for a number of years after Prentice-Hall liquidated their unsold “Spectrum Books” stock. It was my first introduction to the vagaries of the publishing world. Pictured above are the Leone Publications editions, with re-designed covers.

Today, the books seem in many ways outdated, but at the time they were well received. They were sincere, at any rate, because I was serious and sincere about sharing what I’d learned since I’d decided to go down that rabbit hole. Those were pre-rotary cutter days, when we still cut fabric with scissors, and there weren’t yet a lot of the shortcuts that makers developed a bit further down the road. And gosh, my texts were wordy! How-to books today are all about images and illustrations, captioned maybe, but text is kept to the minimum. These you really had to read. With YouTube and Vimeo and other online resources today, there’s a far smaller audience for print tomes. Especially wordy ones.

In fact, at the time, Joyce Gross, the editor of a periodical out of California called The Quilt Journal, in her review of The Quiltmaker’s Handbook, charged it with being “pedantic.” First time I’d come across that word, and had to look it up. Guilty as charged.

Years later, a cartoon by the artist Danny Shanahan appeared in The New Yorker, and it hit very close to home. I reproduce it here, with acknowledgements to that periodical. If I’d had to go about finding a publisher for that first book in a more conventional way, this might have been my fate.

When I re-read parts of the handbooks today, it’s not the pedantry that bothers me. Nor the technical step-by-step processes, nor the illustrations and photographs that went along with those. They hold up at a basic level, and remain clear and uncomplicated. My wizened and greatly matured self cringes a bit when I find evidence in my own words of how a degree of arrogance could slip into my conversation with myself (or more aptly, with my readers). I wasn’t yet thirty when the first handbook was published, and just thirty-two when the second appeared. What chutzpah! And I could be so humorless!

“In quilting we encounter the essence of the quilt, both as an art form and as craft. The stitching that travels through and secures the layers of the textile sandwich defines the nature of the quilt. The object can be any size, shape, or color. It can be functional or nonfunctional, whole-cloth, pieced, appliquéd, embroidered, painted, printed, or a combination of any or all of these, and possibly more. If it is quilted, it is a quilt.”

Oh my.

“When I begin to design a quilt, I want to make something beautiful. Beyond that, I make no other demands. I can’t afford to. If I do, the design will fight me all the way. I begin to juxtapose fabric, and then watch and read colors and shapes and textures in different combinations. I keep what strikes me, but not insistently. I must be flexible and must defer to the image when it wants to go its own way. Since I make quilts simply for the sake of doing them and answer to no external restrictions or specifications, I am privileged to be able to follow wherever that dialogue with the surface leads...I’ll be satisfied only if I feel that the work says something new about my involvement with the interaction of design, materials, and technique. It will succeed for me only if it says that I am here, now, and looking ahead.”

Oh dear. Cue the soaring John Williams score.

In my defense, when I wrote that forty-five years ago, I didn’t know what I didn’t know. Since then the discourses around quilts have been greatly enriched and expanded, by the insights of researchers and historians, by sociologists and material culture specialists, by curators and conservators, by makers the world over, and by collectors. The contexts today are far more diverse, far more inclusive, and far better informed. They’re enlivened by the many communities that have grown around the connectivity that digital media and the web have made possible. We couldn’t have imagined in 1980, back in the Whole Earth Catalogue era, how the “built environment” of the quilt world would grow and change and be enriched in the ensuing decades.

In the photo above (possibly taken by quilt artist Nancy Halpern) I’m at the quilt frame working on Bedloe’s Island Pavement Quilt on the grounds of the DeCordova Museum in Lincoln, MA, summer 1975. The museum’s exhibition Bed and Board opened that summer, and featured quilts and furniture by American makers working at that moment. Behind me is my late wife Judith (1948 - 2015), and to our left, the quilt Goose Tracks that we’d collaborated on the previous year. Much of the content of the classes I taught at the DeCordova between 1975 and 1980 found its way into my first two books.