ABSTRACT
This chapter examines how knowledge about design was shared by craftspeople, and focuses on the role of furniture pattern books as the means of communication. Furniture pattern books have often been used in the history of decorative arts and architecture, mainly to provide illustrations. However, studies of social, cultural and economic history have strangely overlooked these sources. In terms of the means of improving techniques, furniture pattern books were not just text books to be taught by authors at the top to readers at the bottom, but acted as a means of learning and transmitting craft knowledge constructed in both horizontal and radial directions. Pattern books can not only be used as the sources for contemporary designs, but also reconsidered as an important medium between authors, craftspeople and consumers in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century material culture. Architectural books are also considered to some extent, although they are used mainly to show comparative cases with furniture pattern books written by craftspeople.
