ILLUSTRATED WITH 79 PHOTOGRAPHS AND WITH 65 DRAWINGS AND MAPS BY C.B. FALLS
This is the story of cloth and of the people who spun, wove, and dyed it; who traded or fought for it; and who passed its secrets from father to son, from city to city, and from old worlds to new worlds.
It is the story of Chinese silk—for 3000 years a secret; of Egyptian linens, woven 6000 years ago more finely than any made today; of India prints and batik cottons from Java which nearly hastened the completion of a canal from the Nile to the Red Sea by 3000 years and caused the Pharaoh's navies to go creeping around Africa on voyages of exploration; of wool shawls from Kashmir, rugs from Syria, and serges from Gaul; of cottons which Indians high in the mountains of Peru were printing with wooden blocks before Columbus set sail for India and discovered a new world.
And it is the story of exploration, colonization, invention, mass-production, rayon and nylon.
In the old Greek legend the hero Theseus used a ball of yarn to find his way back out of the winding labyrinth into which he had gone to kill the Minotaur. The story of the cloth people are wearing today is like one end of such a ball of yarn. Try to follow this story to where it begins, and you must go from the sunshine of today back over an incredibly long trail to the caves where our ancestors lived many thousands of years ago.
When this book was first planned, the author thought that the story might go "a long way back"—say, to the spinning wheels of colonial America. But she found as the yarn unwound that colonial times were only yesterday in the story of cloth. Back the story went, past the time when our ancestors came from Europe to America. Back to the time when their ancestors in Europe belonged to the guilds. Back of that to the lawless days that followed the breaking up of the great Roman Empire. Back of the Roman Empire to Greece, and back of the Greeks to the people who lived beside the Nile in Egypt six thousand years ago. Still the yarn unrolled, because in Egypt the weavers were already making linen finer than any woven today. Back of such weavers were countless ancestors who had spun thread and woven it into cloth. And so the thread of the story reached back to prehistoric days long before people learned to write, to an unknown time when someone first rolled fibers together to make a thread, perhaps for a fishing line to help him catch his dinner.
Man Is a Weaver is thus a sort of motivated human history, clothing the bare bones of historical dates with true stories of the people who lived through those times, their problems, their excitements, and their work. It is a book that can be read as pure adventure; or as world history; or as a story of mechanical invention and improvement; or for its sections on the clothing and daily life of the peoples described.
Elizabeth Chesley Baity is a Texan who took her M.A. in English at the University of North Carolina, married (her husband is a professor at the School of Public Health), and, seven years ago, made the first notes for Man Is a Weaver.
She writes: "The chief thing I can say about my work on the book is that a faculty wife does have an opportunity to find stacks of source books and to have her writing checked by specialists in various fields. Sometimes I think that my book should be listed 'by E. C. B. and the history, archaeology, and education departments of the University of North Carolina, except that this would be unfair to the library staff, who have patiently ferried textile books back and forth for seven years, man and boy."
—from the dust jacket
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