Illustrated with additional eighteenth-century images and artifacts

M. de Garsault’s 1767 Art of the Shoemaker (cloth)

An Annotated Translation

François A. de Garsault; translated and annotated by D. A. Saguto

“Art of the Shoemaker is strongly recommended for both academic and community library Fashion History reference collections, and the supplemental reading lists for students of 18th century period costuming.” —Midwest Book Review

Tens of thousands of shoemakers worked in eighteenth-century Paris and London, but if any wrote about their trade before M. de Garsault in his 1767 Art du cordonnier, nothing survives. Surprisingly little scholarship has been published since, until this richly contextualized translation. Informing this edition are D. A. Saguto’s extensive notes and incisive examinations of eighteenth-century German and Italian sources as well as later French editions of Garsault’s work. The result is an elegant illumination of artisanship and practices that otherwise might have been lost.

Art of the Shoemaker returns us to a world where shoes, like most other goods, were made by hand with time-honored techniques—from preparing threads and shoemakers’ wax to the stitch-by-stitch use of the awl and the proper making of an inseam. Complementing Garsault’s original copperplate images are contemporaneous illustrations and hitherto unpublished photographs of eighteenth-century tools and artifacts. Also included are a facsimile of the original French text, translations of other eighteenth-century writings on shoemaking, a glossary of eighteenth-century terms, and suggested further reading.

As master boot- and shoemaker Ernest W. Peterkin comments in his foreword, Art of the Shoemaker offers solid foundation and new appreciation for students of costume, artists, collectors, archaeologists, and future artisans.

D. A. Saguto, a fifth-generation artisan whose eighteenth-century ancestors were shoemakers in Maryland and North Carolina, has been master boot- and shoemaker for the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation since 1990. The nation’s leading researcher on eighteenth-century footwear, he has been a guest curator for many museums, including the Smithsonian Institution and National Park Service; a guest lecturer on shoemaking history at the University of Delaware and Virginia Commonwealth University; and a consultant on archaeological digs, shipwreck recoveries, shoe-related litigation, and Hollywood movies.

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