The history of design is told by man-made objects. The pyramid and the skyscraper, the amphora and the cigarette package, all have their message. And each speaks not only of itself and its time, but of all similar objects and all other times, for in the progression of tradition and change, nothing is isolated from what precedes it or follows it. Thus a student of the history of design can find an entire culture recorded in a few of its artifacts, much as a skilled archeologist can reconstruct a skeleton from a few fossilized bones.

The Victorian, the Art Nouveau, the Modern-three philosophies of design, all compressed into little more than a century-were not only consecutive but connected. Miss Ferebee shows what the connections were, and how each field of design, from architecture to packaging, related to the others, to its era, and to the irresistible progress of industrialization.

Van Nostrand Reinhold, New York, 1970

Softcover

ISBN: 0442231156