The Silver Gringo: William Spratling and Taxco
Mark, a research associate at Harvard's Peabody Museum and author of four anthropological titles, here focuses on a singular cultural phenomenon. William Spratling, an American writer, illustrator, and draftsman who lived in Taxco, Mexico, from 1929 until his death in 1967, almost single-handedly transformed an impoverished mining town into a prosperous silver manufacturing center. The simple elegance that made his work so popular (and now collectible) owed much to the influence of the ancient Mexican artifacts he amassed. Based on exhaustive research, interviews, and photographic study, Mark's book details Spratling's successful production and marketing of fine-quality, hand-crafted silver jewelry and related items. Mark's work succeeds more as a business history than as a biography, perhaps because of the intensely private nature of the man, but her approach is both scholarly and accessible. Most public and academic libraries will welcome this complement to the few available works on Mexican silverwork.-Rex Klett, Mitchell Community Coll., Statesville, NCCopyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.