Little Chintz Book

There are still a few copies out there to buy of this little gem of a booklet. I must admit to expecting something larger when it arrived but nonetheless I am delighted. It made me realise how lucky we are these days when it is almost unheard of to have black and white photographs and how comparatively cheap (with one or two exceptions) books are now. This tiny little book was 3 shillings in 1955 when it was published. After doing a little research online with inflation this equates to about £11.60 or $18.65 in todays economic terms.

 

The sunglasses are there to give you an idea of scale.

I opened this page randomly. It looks to me in the plate on the right that someone who had seen palm trees gave a verbal description and this is what the artist came up with.

Most of the plates in the book are of English Chintz but not all were in the collection of the V and A, they say they tried to get representative chintz of each decade.