Neglected Beauty

The trouble with too many American antiques books is that they are like too many American antiques: frauds. Like the "married" highboy or the six-drawer chest refashioned into a more salable slant-top desk, our bookstores are a-litter with volumes whose pretty covers disguise clumsy, often dishonest handiwork. Maybe there should be a truth-in-publishing statute. Maybe honesty died with Hepplewhite.

Morton's book is pretty (as editor-in-chief of the art book firm of Abrams he should know something about publishing craftsmanship); it's big (measuring a foot square); it's expensive ($34.95); it's expansive (his South takes in the region from Baltimore to Texas); and it's as pleasing and honest as a piece by George Hepplewhite himself.

The popular, Yankee view of Southern life before the Civil War tends to be an image of goutish, goatish planters drinking and wenching amidst rococo decadence. (There is some truth to the myth: see The Secret Diaries of WilliamByrd of Westover.) But the formal furniture of Baltimore and Charleston is as classically pure as the best of Newport and Philadelphia. As proof, Morton has selected a splendid 18th- century mahogany bookcase, made in Charleston, that measures nearly 11 feet tall by 8 feet wide. It is shown in the context of a formal parlor, and, following the design motif of the book, on the opposite page there is a similar version shown in detail. (Design - by Ladislav Svatos - and careful color reproduction are among several attributes that set this book off from imposters.)

Morton moves easily from wealthy Tidewater to backcountry Piedmont to the South of King Cotton. He lavishes attention on wood and paint, silver (a magnificent pocket watch by Texas silversmith Samuel Bell), Moravian pottery, and West Virginia glass. In a section called "Objects of Utility and Commerce" there is a beautiful brass doorknob from Salem, North Carolina, some fine iron kitchen implements, a coverlet woven in a pattern called

"Tennessee Trouble," and a tradecard for "Green River, the Whiskey Without a Headache."

Then, toward the end, comes a section seemingly macabre but altogether fitting: the Artifacts of War. How Southern, how sad.

The book is modestly called a "broad-scale survey," but it is finer-grained, more handsomely crafted than that.

SOUTHERN ANTIQUES &FOLK ARTBy Robert Morton '55Oxmoor, 1976. 251 pp. $34.95