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Guide to Easier Living
 
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Guide to Easier Living [Illustrated] [Paperback]

Russel Wright (Author), Mary Wright (Author)
5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)


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Book Description

March 6, 2003
Time is a valued commodity in our modern world, and everyone struggles to make the most of each minute. Russel and Mary Wright recognized decades ago that finding time to organize their lives and homes would become a priority for modern men and women. In their groundbreaking book, Guide to Easier Living, the Wrights offered simple ways to achieve a comfortable, well-designed, and organized living environment in any home for any family.

Originally published in 1950, Gibbs Smith is proud to rerelease Guide to Easier Living, and to reintroduce the Wrights' time-tested and proven methods for maintaining an inviting and efficient home. From ways to make household chores as fast and painless as possible, to how to organize a room for maximum living space, the Wrights pioneered a new informal way of living for a newly suburban American public. The Wrights' ideas revolutionized American living and the way everyday people dealt with the unending job of keeping a home in order. These methods and ideas are just as relevant-if not more so-today as they were a half-century ago.

Russel and Mary Wright were prominent and successful designers who pioneered the fusion of modern design and informal living. Most importantly, they were known for their tabletop designs. The Wrights' most famous tabletop design, American Modern, was the best-selling dinnerware in American history and has just been rereleased by Oneida Ltd.



Editorial Reviews

Review

A more retro-appropriate volume is Mary and Russel Wright's "Guide to Easier Living" (Gibbs Smith), originally out in 1950. It's depressing to realize that all of America never lived up to the modernist utopia this book projected. But it's equally fun reading about the era's "increasingly mechanized civilization" next to illustrations of typewriters. (Bret Begun Newsweek )

Before there was Martha there were the Wrights whose vision for a modernist Utopia blew away the Victorian dust motes and seems as fresh today as it did 60 years ago.
(Dwell Magzine )

From the Inside Flap

Whether you live in a city or in the country, whether you have modern or traditional furnishings, you probably work much too hard at the job of keeping your home in order. In Guide to Easier Living (1950), Russel and Mary Wright solve this problem by encouraging people to discard rigid, old-fashioned patterns and create a new informal standard. The Wrights' truly revolutionary contribution to American living is still applicable today as it was when the book was first published. With the intention of making good American design available to everyone, the authors offer timeless advice, such as how to plan the arrangement of rooms to serve their purposes most efficiently, how to choose the most practical furniture and lighting for your specific needs, and much more information geared toward "increasing the enjoyment and satisfaction of life in your home." Should not the reader expect, then, that by following this well-charted course and applying the principles to one's own home, one can create a comfortable, well-designed, and organized living space? Try these ideas and see for yourself. (20030519)

Product Details

  • Paperback: 206 pages
  • Publisher: Gibbs Smith; 1 edition (March 6, 2003)
  • Language: English
  • ISBN-10: 1586852108
  • ISBN-13: 978-1586852108
  • Product Dimensions: 8.3 x 6.8 x 0.6 inches
  • Shipping Weight: 1.4 pounds
  • Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
  • Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #678,614 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

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Average Customer Review
5.0 out of 5 stars (3 customer reviews)
 
 
 
 
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

21 of 22 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars One of my all time favorite books, November 15, 2004
This review is from: Guide to Easier Living (Paperback)
I bought this book when it had just come out and I was newly married. Ive used it so much that it is in tatters, but I still treasure it. The information and illustrations of storage closets, kitchens, general home layouts, etc. are still as useful and inspiring today as they were back in the 1950s. Their sections on choices and care of products for the home: floors, etc are still valid. Their discussions of time and motion techniques in cooking, house cleaning, bed making, etc. are outstanding. I still refer to it frequently. This book is like a dear old friend and has influenced my life for 50 some odd years. It is one of the 9 or 10 most influential and treasured books that I own.
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16 of 17 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars Great then, and great now, November 20, 2003
By 
jlo1 "jlo1" (Poughkeepsie, NY USA) - See all my reviews
This review is from: Guide to Easier Living (Paperback)
Written during the height of the best of Mid 20th Century consumer progress, this reprint is full of still-valid ideas, with the remainder for just looking in wonder at times gone by. In this book, Russel and Mary went to great lengths to explain everything that they believed was important to orchestrating successful home engineering and economics. It's fun to read, and the original illustrations are stylized and tongue-in-cheek. It's fantastic that this book has been reprinted, so its wisdom and guidelines can educate and possibly downscale some of the pseudo-modern pretentiousness of our contemporary lifestyles, via the true modernism of the past that is expressed in the Wright's text. For instance, the mainstream 21st Century over-stuffed attitudes of living in contrived luxury, look bloated and phoney compared to the Wrights' explanations of pared-down but comfortably designed home decorating and economics; i.e., think modern, lightweight, artistic, and easy to maintain -- not necessarily "cheap" or severely spare. Their message was to have fun, make your house look beautiful, and do it intelligently with as little extraneous pomp and flounce to clean as possible. Great advice for the 21st Century!
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3 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars Fantastic midcentury reprint, December 7, 2008
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This review is from: Guide to Easier Living (Paperback)
Some of the information is a bit dated (advice to use more disposable dishes?!), but by contrast some is ahead of its time (assuming that the husband will help around the house and the wife might actually work! outside the home!).

Considering that this book was written in 1950, the majority of the suggestions hold up extremely well and it's full of fascinating ideas about how to design, decorate and manage your home for minimal upkeep and maximum enjoyment/entertainment. Great to have on hand if you're doing any redesigning around the house and especially great if you're into the midcentury modern look.
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