It is back to 1972 and I am at the Boston University summer school program in Tanglewood, the famous arts center in western Massachusetts. The nearest town to the arts campus was Lenox, where we students could go to shop, socialize, and enjoy a bit of luxury. We got around the beautiful countryside by hitch-hiking, believe it or not - people were happy to give rides to students and summer arts residents did not behave with modern savagery, at least in this little place of cultural aristocracy.
There was a library in Lenox which we were welcome to enter if they had something we could use. I went in and looked through it and found, in the art section, to my thrill, an old original edition of "Hottenroth's Book of Costume." This German treasure was a big heavy tome filled with old engravings in color, documenting the way people dressed all the way from pre-history to the middle 19th century, which was the time of its composition. I had no idea how such a find could show up in a small country library, but this was no rural area; some rich art history academic must have donated it.
As an illustration-minded costume fan, I badly wanted this book. I wouldn't steal it of course, but I wanted the illustrations for my resource collection. But how to get them? The library would not lend this treasure out, and copying machines were rare and in Lenox non-existent. My camera would not take usable pictures. So I resolved to copy the costume illustrations I most wanted. I spent many afternoons there with my pencil and sketchbook, until I had the ancient Middle East and Persia and Byzantium well-drawn. This is one of my copies, representing the Biblical Near East. Nowadays, many of these Hottenroth illustrations have
been re-printed in facsimile, but not the whole set.
Pencil on sketchbook page, 10" x 7", summer 1972.
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