Santa Fe, Museum of New Mexico Press (1989) Second Printing. Hardcover in Dust Jacket. Book Condition: Fine. Jacket Condition: Fine. 311pp. Profusely illustrated  in color and black & white. 

From the front flap:

"Trastero. Banco. Escabel. Harinero. These words, foreign to many, have been in the vocabulary of the carpinteros — Spanish woodworkers — of New Mexico for nearly four centuries. New Mexican Furniture, 1600-1940, is a rich unfolding of the origins, survival, and revival of furniture making techniques and designs in the Hispanic Southwest.

Its beginnings are traced to the first permanent Spanish settlements along the Rio Grande after 1598, when carpinteros made doors and windows, shaped beams and corbels, and fashioned furniture. By 1790, the census listed forty carpenters in New Mexico, or one or more for virtually every Spanish village from Santa Fe south.

Hispanic furniture making utilized European tools and traditions and followed a systematic code of design and con-struction, long established and protected in the artisan guilds of Spain. Guild rules addressed proportion, construction, and decoration. They could be simple — such as the 18th-century dictum concerning the dimensions of a chair; or they could be complex - as the rules for laying out the floral design on the front of a carved chest. The first guild established in Mexico, in 1568, was that of the carpinteros.

It governed the practices of carpenters, carvers, joiners, and musical instrument makers. Some of the prototypes of the trade were still being produced in New Mexico two and a half centuries later.

Authors Taylor and Bokides examined over 1,000 pieces of furniture under the auspices of the Museum of International Folk Art's New Mexico Furniture History Project, 1980-1983. They noted with careful scrutiny the hand of the artisan, his tools and materials, the evolving technology of the trade and the changing demands of patrons. As cultural historians, they paid particular attention to what the furniture as social document could tell us about the culture that produced and used it. An ordinary wooden plow, for exam-ple, depending upon the context in which it was regarded, may be utilitarian, outmoded, discarded, quaint, antique, a valued work of folk art, or a teaching device in an agricultural museum.

New Mexican Furniture, 1600-1940 presents nearly 300 photographs, many in full color, of furniture of the carpin-teros. A 19th-century open mortise-and-tenon chair with gouge carving; a Taos chest enhanced by the popular pomegranate motif; an incised floral design on a traditional Hispanic chair; an elaborately carved wardrobe displaying Gothic influences; cupboards, beds, benches, footstools, washstands and writing desks — all presented in the most thorough and elaborate discussion of Hispanic furniture making in New Mexico ever published."