The book of crafts [antikvár]

somé time ago I had a conversation with a professor whose first love was physics and whose sole aim in life seemed to be to make the nonscientific (of whom I am one) bet-ter aware of the fascination of Newton's law, the significance of light years, and the wonder of magnetic fields. The conversation was somewhat one sided, although fi-nally I did manage to make the point that my interest was in the graphic arts. "For-give me," he said, "I alsó care about the arts. I believe that our educational system is too geared to technology. We tend to forget that while new industrial processes give man greater freedom by reducing me-chanical toil, educational programs have to prepare people to use their leisure purpose-fully. No, we must never forget the vitai part that the arts still have to play in our lives." A significant remark, I thought, for one whose life has been spent helping to pro-duce a generation of technocrats who can put man on the moon, a spaceship round Mars, replace a man's heart or send colored T.V. pictures across the world. Wherever future developments may be in any of the many fields of humán endeavor, man, be-cause he is what he is, will always need to make, to fashion, to build, to create and the implication of all fhis is that the child of today will have far more leisure time when he reaches adulthood than ever we thought possible a decade ago. Compare the lot of the Detroit autó workers, who hope to work a fifteen-hour week, with that of many of our industrial workers, for whose parents a sixty- or seventy-two-hour week was commonplace! Educating for leisure, however, is no easy thing. The mass communications business—television, radio, piped music, tablóid newspapers—make it easy for us to sit back and do nothing until we become little more than automatons, working for the sci-entists who create the machines. If leisure is to be used purposefully, then from a very early age, children should be encouraged to Henry Pluckrose introduction develop their own skills and have interests of their own. These interests and skills will be quite different, even within the same family—for each of us is unique. There has been, over the past twenty years, a growing awareness on the part of educators concerning the vitai part the arts can play in helping a child to discover him-self—by handling materials; by fashioning things such as cane, clay, and wood; by struggling to master the subtle skill of twisting a spindle so that the yarn grows like gossamer from the fingertips . . . Yet, it is not only the young child who grows through activities of this sort. The adolescent, the young mother, the middle-aged housewife, the retired bank clerk— people of every age can gain an intangible something from struggling to master tech-niques that have evolved since the dawn of civilization. Many craft techniques re-main unaltered since the very beginning, although the materials have become better and easier to handlé. (We no longer need to dig our own clay; it comes prepacked. We no longer even need to fire it, if we buy it suitably prepared.) The purpose of a book such as this is not simply to encourage everyone who dips into crafts to try working in glass or to fill their kitchen with empty detergent packs so that an army of dolls may be made for anxious little children. Rather, it is to serve as a handy reference book for all who feel that crafts should have a vitai and important place in our own lives. Teachers, craftsmen, youth club leaders, and the generál hobbyists will find many useful and interesting techniques in this book. Of course, purists may look at the con-tents and express surprise that this and that process has been omitted or is only referred to in passing It is, however, quite impos-