Shoes: The Complete Sourcebook [Hardcover]

John Peacock (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: June 17, 2005

The most comprehensive and detailed history of shoes ever published, with more than 2000 specially drawn illustrations.

John Peacock charts the development of every kind and style of footwear from earliest times to the present day, for both men and women. His drawings reproduce in meticulous detail a host of representative examples from every era: the simple sandals of Ancient Egypt, made from natural fibers; exquisite Greek footwear of the "Golden Age," including boots made from rawhide with leather linings and leg bindings; richly embroidered and bejeweled shoes of the Byzantine empire; the fantastic pike-toed boots newly fashionable in the fourteenth century; the hugely exaggerated platform heels of the sixteenth century; eighteenth-century women's slippers of the finest silk; and a huge range of contemporary shoes, from sneakers and stilettos to the latest footwear in radical materials and experimental styles.

The pictures are arranged in six chronological sections and accompanied by full descriptions, including details of materials, heel and toe styles, decorations, and fastenings. An invaluable reference section includes a time chart summarizing the development of shoes throughout the centuries, a concise bibliography, and biographies and histories of the world's leading shoe designers and manufacturers, including Manolo Blahnik, Salvatore Ferragamo, Charles Jourdan, Roger Vivier, and Vivienne Westwood.

This encyclopedic survey, with its colorful and detailed illustrations, will become the unrivaled reference work in its field, indispensable to any shoe enthusiast, designer, or collector. Over 2,000 illustrations, 800 in color

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Shoe lovers will salivate over this comprehensive pictorial guide to fabulous footwear through the ages. Peacock, a former costume designer for BBC Television in London, illustrates every possible shoe imaginable, starting with an array of skimpy sandals from Ancient Egypt and moving chronologically up to a French high-top sneaker from 2003. The book is almost entirely visual, including over 2,000 colorful drawings of men's and women's boots, slippers and heels. With only brief descriptions of each shoe's materials and design, readers will probably be left wanting a more in-depth history about the development of footwear through the centuries. Who designed that red, white and blue French mule in 1789, for example? And what led to the creation of the first Assyrian boot from 3,000 years ago, which is so strikingly similar to present day Uggs? For those interested in costumes and fashion, the illustrations will make this an invaluable reference source. There's plenty of variation among the models depicted, from elaborately beaded Byzantine Emperor's shoes to simple English heels with bows from the early 1900s, but one notices how trends recur throughout shoe history. Recent designs borrow from millenniums of style, like the huge Venetian 16th-century platforms and pointy medieval ankle boots. Peacock also includes a helpful index profiling important designers from the 1800s to the present.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

About the Author

John Peacock was Senior Costume Designer for BBC Television for many years. His many books include The Complete Fashion Sourcebook; Costume: 1066 to the Present; The Chronicle of Western Costume; Twentieth-Century Fashion; Fashion Since 1900; Fashion Accessories; Shoes; Men's Fashion; Twentieth-Century Jewelry; and many others.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 168 pages
• Publisher: Thames & Hudson (June 17, 2005)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0500512124
• ISBN-13: 978-0500512128
• Product Dimensions: 10.8 x 10 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2.9 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.9 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (8 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #281,692 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

43 of 46 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Complete hype, May 20, 2005

By 

Amy Hilliard (VA, United States) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)   

This review is from: Shoes: The Complete Sourcebook (Hardcover)

I happened upon this book in the bookstore, and also recently saw it mentioned in Harper's Bazar. All they say is that it is a "comprehensive history of footware." What they fail to mention is that all the pictures are illustrations. There is not one single color photograph of an original shoe. If you check the product description above that Amazon provides, it does tell you that it has illustrations, but many people don't know to look there.

While the drawings are nicely done, they didn't give me the same thrill that seeing an actual photo of an original shoe would have. The pictures on the cover are exactly the same type of drawing and the same type of composition that you will see of other shoes in the book. I can understand having drawings of shoes from hundreds of years ago, but not having any photos of modern shoes seems a cop out.

The book is informative, but I think it is in no way "complete." It gives an overview of shoes from different eras, but does not scratch much beyond the surface. So, you get a little of everything and some representative pictures of the average footware, but not a good sense of what might be unique about a particular time period beyond what you can see for yourself in the illustrations.

I've read other books on fashion history that do a better job than this book in covering a wide range of time periods (such as Decades of Beauty). However, these books did not contain only shoes. I have yet to find a book about shoes that has both good photographs and informative text.

So, due to lack of competition, some people may want to check this book out because there isn't anything else out there. But, I would not reccomend buying it sight unseen. I think that this book would be too elementary for a fashion historan or someone into the history of shoes, but too boring for the average person to want to buy. I definitely would not recommend it for someone with a shoe fetish. It was worth the time I spent looking through it at the bookstore because of some of the text, but mostly because of the lack of photos I did not buy it.

11 of 13 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Excellent within its parameters, August 9, 2006

By 

Elizabeth A. Root (Laurel, MD USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Shoes: The Complete Sourcebook (Hardcover)

I waffled between 4 and 5 stars for this. I think Peacock could do with some slightly more accurate titles. This is a history of western European shoes, with ancient Mesopotamia, Greece and Egypt thrown in for length. Beyond those, there is nothing on even eastern Europe, let alone Asia, Africa, etc. I also suspect from his books that Peacock does not really approve of our casual age. I saw only a single tennis shoe; none of the clogs and earth shoes that were so typical of the late 1960s and early 1970s; and none of the elaborate athletic shoes. Peacock does say that he is focusing chiefly on fashionable shoes, but I think that the high-end athletic shoes qualify as designer models, even if the other don't.

Given that, it's wonderful for what it does cover. Men's shoes are included. My favorite part is the ancient shoes; I have never seen such a variety illustrated.

The pages have small but clear drawings of usually 7 or 8 shoes per page, with minimal labelling. More detailed labelling follows. The time length covered by each section varies; as one might expect, shorter period are covered for more recent shoes. This is not as lush as the photographic collections of shoes, but I think it's more helpful as a history, especially for older styles which may have been reconstructed from fragments.

The introduction gives a brief history of the development of the shoes. There is a timeline where the shoes are reproduced as outline drawings to get a idea of the flow of change. This is followed by a concise history of designers and companies, and a bibliography.

So, it doesn't have a scholarly historical text, I don't recommend it for people as a book for gaping over startling shoes, but it is a very good visual history.

5 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Give Thanks for this is as Good as it Gets, December 26, 2006

By 

Sator (Sydney, Australia) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Shoes: The Complete Sourcebook (Hardcover)

You really must give thanks to the author for having given us this book. As usual it is peerless in the degree of historical accuracy and detail that his illustrations unfailingly provide. Morever, it is one of the rare books that give us as much insight into men's footwear as it does into the history of women's footwear.

Of course it would have been nice to have detailed photographs of original ancient footwear or even those from a century or two ago. Sadly, many specimens have not survived at all or at often at best are in poor condition and are kept hidden from regular open exhibition at textile museums that do own them due to their fragility. In most cases the original appearances of the footwear have to be reconstructed using paintings and published period sources along with a dash of imagination. The results are illustrations that bring to life what the historic examples would have looked like to a far greater degree than pictures of old footwear delapidated beyond recognition.

Granted these inevitable limitations, the splendid size and quality of the illustrations makes this a tour de force vastly superior to anything else likely to go into print for many years, if not decades, to come