I had previously mentioned that I’d be giving you a little more of a review on my latest book purchase, Victorian Detail, by Priscilla S. Meyer, so here goes.

Lise Bohm tipped me off to this book, as she occasionally does, and this time I hit some research paydirt immediately upon receiving it. I had been trying to identify a particular chair that repeatedly shows up at auctions and was finally able to point to Charles Klein as the maker due to this book.

The full official name of the book is Victorian Detail: A Working Dictionary. The latter part of the title is the important part. For those of us who didn’t major in Decorative Arts in college or haven’t worked at an auction house for 25 years, it’s good to find a Victorian-specific “Dictionary” that educates the reader on the decorative elements of furniture - specifically Victorian furniture. Yes, there are other furniture anatomy books but they are so broad in scope that they aren’t helpful. Although I’m interested in it, I don’t currently desire to learn about the finishing touches of a Chippendale highboy.

I’m going to detail the Table of Contents because I believe that it gives you a complete picture of the value of the book:

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Just a quick note to point out that a familiar George Henkels-attributed sofa form popped up for sale on Ebay. There is a little mystery surrounding this particular sofa design. The book that I recently purchased, Victorian Detail, suggests that this sofa may have actually been manufactured by Ignatius Lutz and only sold by Henkels in his Philadelphia showroom, but the book doesn’t provide any finality to that theory either way.

If the Lutz theory is true, it is probably because George had to fill his showrooms with a lot of furniture to sell to feed his family of 13 children . At least it can be assumed that they all had a place to sit at the Henkels homestead.

The sofa will sell on May 21st and bidding will start at $600 with expected range of $6,250 to $7,500, though I’d be surprised if it goes that high. More details at the listing.

If you’d like to see an exceptional signed sideboard done by Lutz, see here. I think I smell another blog post coming after seeing this sideboard - I wonder how many “Alexander Roux” sideboards have been sold that were actually made by Lutz….

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