I have been obsessed with pat­tern art since col­lege and researched the his­tor­i­cal impact of it. There is one heavy hit­ter I have always admired, Owen Jones. In 1856 he pub­lished a book called The Grammar of Ornament. It was influ­en­tial in the design world because it was a col­lec­tion of his­toric pat­tern from around the world. Now, in 1856 travel was a bit dif­fer­ent than we know it today, so hav­ing a col­lec­tion of global imagery was quite the thing. The orig­i­nal print­ing on this is amaz­ing. If a page has 18 col­ors on it — it was printed 18 times.

In col­lege I pur­chased 2 of the plates (aka color prints) from the book and have always imag­ined that one day I would have my own copy. And not from Amazon, it is just not the same. I imag­ined that I would be in some small antique store and there it would be! Just sit­ting on the shelf. Keep in mind there is not a whole lot of these books float­ing around, so it is a bit of a stretch of the imag­i­na­tion. I looked for about 12 years.

Then when I was in London recently, in a neigh­bor­hood on the out­skirts of the city, there it was. Sitting on the shelf. I couldn’t even believe it, my eyes welled up. My hus­band saw me hold­ing it and knew exactly what it was. I have only been telling him how cool Owen Jones is for like 12 years. Of course I bought it, and for a bar­gain. I got a sec­ond edi­tion, printed in 1868, while the author was still alive. It is called the folio edi­tion. I kind of feel a bit guilty hav­ing it, it should be in a museum. Well, I don’t feel that guilty.

Who knows, maybe next I will bump into a Christopher Dresser (another design rock star) book or tea pot or sugar and creamer?