Book Review: Looking at Textiles by Elena Phipps 01/09/2012 by Camille Myers Breeze I am naturally skeptical about small art books, especially when they’re part of a series. However, on a recent trip to the Metropolitan Museum of Art bookstore I picked up Looking at Textiles: A Guide to Technical Terms by former MMA textile conservator, Elena Phipps. I made the $18.95 investment largely because of my familiarity with the author and her previous work including The Colonial Andes: Tapestries and Silverwork, 1530-1830.
The compact nature of the book led me to read it before any of the large and shiny volumes I also purchased for our Museum Textile Services library that day. An approachable 95 pages long, Looking at Textiles has a 15-page introduction followed by 72 pages of fabric glossary illustrated with beautiful textiles, historic images, diagrams, and depictions of textiles in other forms of art.