Tens of thousands of shoemakers worked in eighteenth-century Paris and London, but if any wrote about their trade before M. de Garsault in his 1767 Art du cordonnier, nothing survives. Surprisingly little scholarship has been published since, until this richly contextualized translation. Informing this edition are D. A. Saguto’s extensive notes and incisive examinations of eighteenth-century German and Italian sources as well as later French editions of Garsault’s work. The result is an elegant illumination of artisanship and practices that otherwise might have been lost.
Art of the Shoemaker returns us to a world where shoes, like most other goods, were made by hand with time-honored techniques—from preparing threads and shoemakers’ wax to the stitch-by-stitch use of the awl and the proper making of an inseam. Complementing Garsault’s original copperplate images are contemporaneous illustrations and hitherto unpublished photographs of eighteenth-century tools and artifacts. Also included are a facsimile of the original French text, translations of other eighteenth-century writings on shoemaking, a glossary of eighteenth-century terms, and suggested further reading.
As master boot- and shoemaker Ernest W. Peterkin comments in his foreword, Art of the Shoemaker offers solid foundation and new appreciation for students of costume, artists, collectors, archaeologists, and future artisans.
