IF I COULD BUT SEE IT: A Graphic Biography of William Morris, by socialist and artist Nick Thorkelson

IF I COULD BUT SEE IT: A Graphic Biography of William Morris
NICK THORKELSON
Pluto Press (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$24.95 ebook, available now

Rating: 4.8* of five

The Publisher Says: A vivid, full-colour graphic biography of the celebrated 19th-century designer and socialist William Morris (1834–1896), the celebrated designer, driven polymath and radical socialist.

Acclaimed cartoonist Nick Thorkelson moves through the events of Morris’s life weaving a rich tapestry of the major artistic, social and political questions which animated him.

He explores Morris’s politics and art, and how his hatred of class tyranny and love of humanity shaped his poetry, design and relationships.

The book brings to life the tension of Morris’s efforts to democratise art while creating pieces for the wealthy, his critique of Britain’s Empire, and his central place in socialist culture and propaganda.

Thorkelson’s striking and idiosyncratic drawings chime with the Arts and Crafts movement’s emphasis on the humanising power of the handmade.

The book also features fourteen pages of immersive and dazzling illustrations by Sharon Rudahl, pioneer of women’s comics, honouring the literary work for which William Morris was best known during his lifetime.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: If there has ever been an illustrated biography of socialist artist, poet, and capitalism-fleecer William Morris, I did not hear about it. Now that I have it's hard for me to see why this is the first one (if it is). Morris's role in reviving and revamping Gothic architecture in the newly rich Victorian era, using the English hunger to memorialize their ill-got gains to redistribute huge sums of money from the kleptocrats to honest craftworkers.

Like Josiah Wedgwood a century earlier, Morris used the design and manufacture of gorgeous luxury goods to redress the income imbalance he saw plaguing and ruining his society as it turned from the United Kingdom into the British Empire.

a graphic synopsis

chapter opening art in the Master's style

In a clear and concise telling of the events and the beliefs that animated the events of his life, Author Thorkelson does something I both enjoy and admire: he uses the technique of Morris's métier to give we-the-reader extra, surprising insight into the forces Morris was so contemptuous of and adept at harnessing to the economic betterment of the craftworkers he employed, and the aesthetic improvement of the people who paid for it all.

Morris thinking and scheming and designing

It's only 128pp so you know how very much heavy lifting the illustrations are doing. Much time is saved, in a sense, by leaving us to look in the corners and backgrounds for the rest of the story. In a time where sequential-art storytelling is so very prevalent, finding it deployed well on a major culture-shaping visual artist and designer of built living environments is deeply refreshing.

Morris out in his world

And lo, behold! Morris made over a world that was not heading anywhere beautiful into a world that included public and private spaces with gravitas and grandeur...handcrafted by well-paid workers in an increasingly mass-produced, uninspired, enslaved by machines ethos. He made it possible for aesthetics to last into our own age.

It might not be to your personal taste but it for sure and certain could not have been created by a LLM.

THE GIRL IN THE MIDDLE: A Recovered History of the American West, the cost of Empire in focus

THE GIRL IN THE MIDDLE: A Recovered History of the American West
MARTHA A. SANDWEISS
Princeton University Press (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$32.00 all editions, available now

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: A haunting image of an unnamed Native child and a recovered story of the American West

In 1868, celebrated Civil War photographer Alexander Gardner traveled to Fort Laramie to document the federal government’s treaty negotiations with the Lakota and other tribes of the northern plains. Gardner, known for his iconic portrait of Abraham Lincoln and his visceral pictures of the Confederate dead at Antietam, posed six federal peace commissioners with a young Native girl wrapped in a blanket. The hand-labeled prints carefully name each of the men, but the girl is never identified. As The Girl in the Middle goes in search of her, it draws readers into the entangled lives of the photographer and his subjects.

Martha A. Sandweiss paints a riveting portrait of the turbulent age of Reconstruction and westward expansion. She follows Gardner from his birthplace in Scotland to the American frontier, as his dreams of a utopian future across the Atlantic fall to pieces. She recounts the lives of William S. Harney, a slave-owning Union general who earned the Lakota name “Woman Killer,” and Samuel F. Tappan, an abolitionist who led the investigation into the Sand Creek massacre. And she identifies Sophie Mousseau, the girl in Gardner’s photograph, whose life swerved in unexpected directions as American settlers pushed into Indian Country and the federal government confined Native peoples to reservations.

Spinning a spellbinding historical tale from a single enigmatic image, The Girl in the Middle reveals how the American nation grappled with what kind of country it would be as it expanded westward in the aftermath of the Civil War.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: One image, not typical of Alexander Gardner the Civil War photographer's work, sent Martha Sandweiss on an intense journey of genealogical and historical research. Author Sandweiss is an archive-divin' fool in this book. As you'd expect from this book coming out via Princeton University Press, the evidence is in the sixtyish pages of endnotes. Impressive recordkeeping, impressive intensity of trolling the census data, genealogy databases, newspaper morgues, Federal records of official actions...I'm very slightly overawed by the depth of Author Sandweiss' commitment to her search for one child's identity when, at the time, it's clear she was unimportant.

Yet she was there...why?

I could easily see the intrigue; I could not match the dogged pursuit of facts. In any lifetime. The revelation that there had ever been a Federal Peace Commission (made up of those white guys in the photo), tasked with meeting Native people from all groups, was news to me. That its mission was to determine the course that would bring about lasting and just peace shocked me...talk about honored in the breach not the observance! So the book expanded my knowledge about the injustice, the lies, and the chicanery that acquiring our empire necessitated.

Sophie Mousseau, the titular girl in the titular middle, serves as a lens for Author Sandweiss to bring the role of women, Native and settler, in the wars and peaces of that time and place into focus. It was all new information to me, so I enjoyed the whole experience...despite the expected violence against women, it was reported not detailed for titillation.

I'd rate the read a full five were it not for some...unusual...thoughts the author had about the nature of photography....