Talking Shop

Describing everything from bread and cappuccinos to mass-market furnishings, a language of the “artisanal” saturates our culture today. Peter Betjemann proposes that this language has a rich and specifiable history. Between 1840 and 1920, the cultural appetite for handmade chairs, tables, cabinets, and other material odds and ends flowed through narrative and texts as much as through dusty workshops or the physical surfaces of clay, wood, or metal.