Marina Moskowitz

2020 Charlotte, North Carolina

Abstract: This proposal is for a roundtable; while each participant will introduce their own perspective on the topic, we will not give papers. Please see panel description for further details.

2023 Detroit, MI, United States

Abstract: “Having embarked on a large scale in the seeds-man's business (so extensively and broadcast, indeed, that at length my seeds were distributed through all the Eastern and Northern States and even fell into the far soil of Missouri and the Carolinas), the demand for paper at my place became so great, that the expenditure soon amounted to a most important item in the general account.” Herman Melville, “The Tartarus of Maids,” 1855 When Melville’s narrator describes the scale of his commercial communications, he deploys the multiple meanings of “broadcast” that rhetorically underpin the history of seed selling. The word, of course, has its origins in the scattering of seed. Melville’s link between this activity and papermaking was no accident. If seeds were objects of commodification, print was the mechanism for this process. Though of course all nineteenth-century business benefited from advances in print technology, this paper argues that there was a special relationship between the rise of American horticulture and the proliferation of print and visual culture. Trained as printers, several early seed sellers published their own catalogues, gardening manuals, and illustrated envelopes, while the larger seed companies, including Burpee and Vick, operated on-site printing works to produce marketing materials. Drawing on such ephemera, this paper will explore how the distribution of knowledge undergirded the distribution of seeds, and specifically how communication technologies afforded a glimpse of the physical development that seeds would bring to the American landscape. By providing consumers enough horticultural knowledge that they might appreciate the botanical work of improvement promised by the myriad varieties of plants for sale, the printed page offered seed men an instrument for cultivating an assigned exchange value, or price, that transformed their wares into profitable commodities.

2024 Providence, Rhode Island

Abstract: The Folly Cove Designers were a collective of “designer-craftsmen” working in Gloucester, Massachusetts in the mid-twentieth century. They realized their designs through the medium of block print on textiles and produced primarily domestic goods: aprons, placemats, tablecloths, and some yardages intended for drapery. In an artistic sense, the group was led by the popular children’s book author, Virginia Lee Burton, who offered design classes each winter in which members of the collective would hone their ideas for their annual prints. However, in a commercial sense, the group was spearheaded by Dorothy Norton, who was a designer member but also served as the group’s Business Manager, sourcing materials and negotiating sales channels. When they began in the late 1930s, the Folly Cove Designers were intent in perfecting their craft, and valued the quality control inherent in not only designing but printing their own wares. However, by the early 1940s, it was clear that demand for the Folly Cove Designers’ work exceeded supply; carrying out domestic production of hand-printed textiles severely limited the scale of distribution. To address this conundrum of disseminating design while controlling craftsmanship, Norton experimented with a variety of distribution and licensing arrangements. She sought wider markets through wholesale arrangements with, for example, America House, a shop established by the American Craftsman Cooperative Council to act as a conduit between small-scale home industries and influential buyers in the New York marketplace. But Norton also licensed designs to department stores such as Lord and Taylor, furnishing firms such as Schumacher, each of which used different approaches to reproducing the Folly Cove Designers domestic printing. The Folly Cove Designers provide a case study to consider this relationship between design, craft, and the domestic and commercial production of printed textiles.