Customer Reviews

Bakelite Style

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Bakelite and the Machine Age were meant for each other. This wonderful material (and I think plastic really should included also) allowed manufacturers to easily create all kinds of products for industry but especially for everyday items that could be found in every home.

Tessa Clark has written a lightweight review of Bakelite but I think it is the photos that make the book come alive. Two chapters: Radios and Jewelry take up about half the pages. Radios are divided into countries. Those from America have been well covered in other books but the pages on radios from Britain, France, Germany, Italy, Spain, Czechoslovakia I found fascinating. European designers mixed Streamline with their own countries inherent design traits to create a wonderful collection of offbeat shapes. On page 123 there is an amazing looking sleek German DAF 1011 tuner/amplifier made from 1935 to 1938, it wouldn't look out of place in a home today though the giveaway is the Nazi swastika embossed on the front.

The jewelry pages are a cornucopia of colorful shapes and textures which could be produced in the millions. What's interesting here is that so many of the items couldn't be made from anything else though there are plenty of examples of Bakelite that has been produced to look like more natural materials like wood, pebbles or ivory.

The rest of the book's visual content have examples of household items: kitchenware; tableware; cameras; telephones; office equipment. There are several spreads that cover individual subjects like: Functionism; Modernism; Plastics and color; Collecting; Care and maintenance. The back pages have a (reasonably) bibliography and index. The Bakelite Jewelry Book looks at this in detail with plenty of examples.

Though the book was published in 1997, so the design is a little staid, I think the wealth of photos definitely makes it a worthwhile buy.

***LOOK AT SOME INSIDE PAGES by clicking 'customer images' under the cover.

This coffeetable collectable book about Bakelite and the Style of its time is beautiful and informative. But this memoir of the "miracle material" would have been even better in gloss, as with the brilliant patina of its subject, rather than matte.

The reader is often jarred with syntactical reminders that the book was printed in China: "No longer in demand for consumer goods, Bakelite returned mercurial career ending as it had begun" [sic.] Say what?

And then there is the horror: a Texas Chainsaw Massacre-type approach to test for true Bakelite. The author advises that a good way to tell if a piece is really Bakelite is to take a hacksaw or sandpaper to it! Please ignore this part of the book. Don't ruin the Bakelite! They don't make it any more! There are better Bakelite barometers!

Aside from these admonitions, this is a big, broad, beautiful buffet, an overview and history of bygone eras' sumptuous stuff and practical products.
TundraVision, Amazon Reviewer