Gerald Summers & Marjorie Butcher: Makers of Simple Furniture, 1931–1940
About this book
Gerald Summers & Marjorie Butcher: Makers of Simple Furniture, 1931–1940 is Martha Deese's monograph on the London firm, published by Hatje Cantz in 2024. The 360-page English hardcover reconstructs the ten-year life of the workshop through Butcher's recollections, unpublished photographs, correspondence, drawings, and specification sheets. It traces hundreds of plywood designs conceived as furniture for the concrete age, including the celebrated Bent Plywood Armchair, until wartime constraints closed the company in 1940.
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For furniture students, the book restores a neglected British chapter of early modern plywood design and shows how a small maker-retailer worked. It is useful for studying material economy, bent plywood, and the overlap of engineering and furniture. On a university reading list it belongs with British Design, furniture history, and courses on making and manufacturing at studio scale.
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