$100.00
‘Labels of Empire’ is a deluxe hardcover edition with 544 pages and 1,285 color images. It is the first book to showcase and categorize the trademark labels produced by British and Indian textile companies from the mid-19th century until India’s independence and to examine the significant role they played in the histories of both….
Binding: Hardbound with jacket ISBN: 978-1-954081-25-3 Pages: 544pp Publication Date: Spring 2023 Size: 9″ x 11.75″ Portrait Illustration Count: 1,285 full-color World Rights: Available
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Behind-the-Scenes Production of Labels of Empire
Labels of Empire Website
“Labels of Empire is both a richly visual art book and a cultural-historical study. Like Meller’s Textile Designs, Russian Textiles, and Silk and Cotton, it will be acquired by universities, schools, libraries and museums, historians, and historical societies.”
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Winner of 2024 Next Generation Indie Book Awards
Available
It was said that at one time Great Britain clothed the world. In the 1880s, when the British textile industry was at its most prosperous to date, much of the world’s population wore clothing made from fabric produced in the mills of Lancashire. From 1910 to 1913 alone, seven billion yards of cloth were folded, stamped, labeled, and baled. Most of this output was for export—with 40 percent of it shipped to India.
In order to differentiate their goods, British textile manufacturers and their agents had illustrated paper labels known as “shipper’s tickets” pasted to the faceplate of each piece of folded cloth sold into the competitive Indian market. Designed to appeal to the local people, and printed and registered in Manchester, these brightly colored images further helped to establish a company’s brand. Hindu gods, native animals, scenes from the great Indian epics—the “Mahabharata” and “Ramayana”—and views of everyday life were common subjects. In a sense a form of premium, they provided the consumer with an additional incentive to buy the goods of a particular firm.
Organized by subject, from “Gods and Goddesses” to Swaraj and Swadeshi, Labels of Empire begins with the late 19th-century heyday of British textile manufacturing and closes with Indian independence in 1947. By combining visual narrative, magical realism, popular culture, and history in a way never done before, this book gives an unprecedented view of the British textile industry during the time of the Raj—and its remarkably successful use of paper labels as trademarks.
Susan Meller has been collecting and studying textiles for more than forty years. In the 1960s, she worked in the New York textile industry as a designer and strike-off artist for Riegel Textile Corporation, Dan River Mills, and other fabric converters, traveling to their mills in South Carolina and Georgia to supervise the printing of each season’s line of fabrics. This early experience gave her invaluable insight into the working operations that were still, in many respects, the same as those of 19th-century cotton factories. She later founded and created the Design Library, formerly in New York City and now located in Wappingers Falls, New York. With over 5 million designs, Design Library is the largest and most extensive commercial archive of period textiles and original textile designs in the world.
Susan Meller is co-author of “Textile Designs: Two Hundred Years of European”and “American Patterns for Printed Textiles” (Abrams, 1991); author of “Russian Textiles: Printed Cloth for the Bazaars of Central Asia” (Abrams, 2007); and “Silk and Cotton: Textiles from the Central Asia” that was (Abrams, 2013; La Martinière, 2013); and contributing author to “Colors of the Oasis: Central Asian Ikats” (The Textile Museum, 2010).
REVIEWS
MidWest Book Review
Asian Review of Books
Asian Textiles – Journal of the Oxford Asian Textile Group
Selvedge Magazine Review
ARTICLES
HALI Magazine: Paper Trail
Tasveer Ghar: Mounts of the Gods
The Ephemerist: Labels of Empire
The Ephemerist: Swaraj and Swadeshi
VIDEOS
Labels of Empire Showcase Book Trailer Video
Binding: Case-bound, reinforced spine binding, with lay flat (oxford hollow) spine, separate ends, fully cased in with head & tail bands, tip-on applied to front of case and individually shrink wrapped. Paper grain to run parallel to the spine. ISBN: 978-1-954081-25-3 Extent: 544pp text + ends + case + tip-on + Jacket Text: 4c x 4c on 157 Sun matte art paper + spot matte varnish throughout Case: Cotton cloth over 3.5mm boards with 1c foil stamping on front and spine with de-bossing on front of case with printed tip on adhered Jacket: 4c + matte lam + 1c foil stamping + spot UV x 0c on 200gsm Sun glossy art paper , jacket flaps 4.5″ Size: 9″ x 11.75″ Portrait Illustration Count: 1,285 full-color World Rights: Available
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