Historic Seattle To Host Two Arts & Crafts Events
Bay Area Copper 1900-1950
Thursday, October 27th
This program is co-sponsored with the Museum of History & Industry (MOHAI) and will be held in MOHAI’s Lakeside Pavilion.
Gus Bostrom has been in the Arts & Crafts antiques business for more than 25 years. His Berkeley showroom, California Historical Design (which recently moved to Alameda), has been open since 2004. Many Pacific Northwest residents who visited Historic Seattle’s Bungalow Fair owe their precious Stickley, Limbert, and van Erp pieces to Bostrom’s quality finds.
Bostrom has been interested in Dirk van Erp and the American Arts & Crafts Movement since he was a teenager. When he was 15, he wanted to do a school term paper on Dirk van Erp, but could find only a small amount written about him in the 1974 book California Design 1910. He approached a local antiques dealer in San Francisco for help. His response was “Absolutely not kid. Why should I help you when I can buy $7,000 lamps for $1,000? Good luck.”
But Bostrom never lost interest. The result of that tenacity was a catalog and exhibit held at Bostrom’s gallery. Through the book and exhibition he met the van Erp family. This opened up doors, gave him access to information that had been locked away for many years, and inspired a follow-up exhibition in late 2014.
Bostrom’s talk is the impetus for bringing out of MOHAI storage the copper hops panels created by the van Erp Studio in 1948 for the Rainier Brewery’s Mountain Room in Seattle. There will also be a show and tell of Arts & Crafts metalwork in local collections.
Bibliophiles & Books about Buildings
Sunday, November 6th
This program is co-sponsored with the Book Club of Washington (BCW), Pacific Northwest Chapter of the Antiquarian Booksellers Association of America (ABAA), and Seattle Public Library.
Steven Schuyler, a Boston-area rare book dealer specializing in the building arts, shares his personal passion, favorite finds, and insights into what books can tell us about the building trades, changing architecture, and interior design and decoration trends.
Schuyler grew up in the Pacific Northwest, attending Bainbridge Island schools and Whitman College before earning a Ph.D. from Harvard. He was his high school’s first exchange student, to Cologne, Germany, where he lived with a family “awash in books and book sleuthing.” He recalls, “I got the bug there, and it never left me.” Schuyler says, “For me, collecting has always been about the mindset more than the activity. I got to know Europe as a teenager through the windows of the wonderful book stores I experienced, from London to Brussels to Amsterdam to Berlin.” He will share some of his ‘collector anecdotes’ with us. He will also showcase some of the stunning visual materials that comprise a publication prepared by Richard Cheek, Selling the Dwelling: The Books that Build America’s Houses, 1775-2000. It is the catalog for an exhibit held at New York’s prestigious Grolier Club in 2013-2014 that documents the development and influence of the house design book, from early American builders’ manuals through the rise of popular pattern books and catalogs for kit homes.
This presentation will be followed by a panel discussion with librarians and book dealers addressing the delights and the challenges of book collecting in this field and a problem faced by many local collectors — where will my books go after I go? The talk and panel will be accompanied by an exhibit of books and ephemera from local collections and from the Seattle Room of the Seattle Public Library.
For more information about these and many other Historic Seattle events, please visit www.historicseattle.org.