Antislick to Postslick: DIY Books and Youth Culture Then and Now

. . . elegance is decadent- and we can't have that during wartime - elegance is only acceptable if it's pasted together, with spit and glue, from the detritus of a tooprosperous/too ridiculous world. (Dave Eggers) God bless the hippies; they loved anything ugly. (Garry Knox Bennett) The material and social culture of America in the 1 960s and early 1 970s is a subject of persistent fascination and critical attention. Books, articles, and essays have discussed 1960s art movements, design, music, theater, and even the cookbooks produced by communes (Hartman). But craft, as practiced by laypeople as opposed to professional artisans, has remained largely unexamined. This period saw a steep rise in the popularity of making by hand, from woodworking and weaving to needlework and pottery. Now, after subsiding in popularity through the 1960s except among the deeply committed, craft is again receiving significant public attention in the first decade of the twenty-first century. As recent cover stories in Publishers Weekly suggest, American craft publishing is booming, even in the midst of recession (Martinez 24). There is an increasing body of scholarly work on craft in the new millennium, in the United States and overseas (Bratich; Parkins), but little has yet been written that compares the two time periods. Both the 1960s and the early twenty-first century upsurges in hand making are notable for their involvement of young adults, working outside of any tradition handed them by their forebears. Both gained ground in the face of war and growing energy crises, at times when the status quo in terms of resource use and consumption is often challenged. Both express a fundamental disillusionment with big structures, be they governmental or private, that comes out of war, instability, and economic uncertainty, whether Vietnam or Iraq, the Bay of Pigs, or September 11. Political activism and social criticism bubble just beneath the surface of each. These two waves also differ in meaningful ways, and the books written as instructional guides to crafts provide a useful window on the Zeitgeist of each period. The 196575 craft books discussed here were generally aimed at the young, and more specifically at the counterculture subset of the young; similarly, a majority of the books published since 2000 is aimed not at all knitters or crocheters or embroiderers, but the under-thirty subset that finds itself newly intrigued with recreational handcrafts (Tartakovsky 59). This is an area ripe for investigation. What are these creative impulses a response to? And how does publishing react to and reflect these waves of interest on the part of new and potential makers? The do-it-yourself books of the Flower Child era had many parents. Chief among them was the agrarian, simple-living ethos promulgated by Scott and Helen Nearing in their hugely influential 1954 book Living the Good Life, a chronicle of twenty years of rural homesteading by the couple, vegetarian political activists who took up small-scale farming in Vermont in the midst of the Great Depression. The Nearings' life work- they built their stone house themselves and wrote extensively about maple sugaring- stood for self-sufficiency and against mass production, large centralized economic systems, and "the yoke of a competitive, acquisitive, predatory culture" (Nearing xix). Later works, like Alicia Bay Laurel's immensely popular Living on the Earth, published in 1970 (the same year renewed interest prompted a reprinting of the Nearings' book), would interpret that ethos for hippie back-to-thelanders. Living on the Earth, a self-styled handbook for alternative living, includes instructions on pickling; hatha yoga; salting fish; growing marijuana; identifying cloud formations; wrapping a sari and giving birth at home; as well as on woodcarving; soapmaking; patchwork; making toys; moccasins, and musical instruments; weaving; and sewing simple garments. …