Gustav Stickley's Metal Shop: Reform, Design and the Business of Craft

This article documents the history of Gustav Stickley's metal shop by examining the gulf it straddled between the ideals of the Arts and Crafts movement and the pressures of the factory system. A careful analysis of the shop's productions, in concert with the extant business records at the Winterthur Library, provides a rare glimpse into Stickley's operations, revealing a different structure to the workforce than previously presumed. By framing the metal shop as an example of batch production, the false binary of craft production / mass production tension dissolves, allowing for a more nuanced examination of the rhetoric and practice of labour. What emerges is not so much a view of the Arts and Crafts as a stylistic choice, and certainly not as reactionary and anti-modern, but as a strategy attempting to preserve the notion of 'authenticity' in a culture whose rapid change threatened to destabilize the traditional meanings of labour and craft.