Mitgliedutopiainsuburbia

Building Utopia in Suburbia: Gardening, DIY and Practical Manuals from the 1940s to the 1970s

The books in this collection are primarily practical guides. They comprise advice or instructions aimed at the general reader and enthusiast, and yet often contain a significant quantity of technical and specialised detail. They are usually illustrated to some degree with photographs (usually black-and-white, but occasionally a few select colour plates), but more frequently with hand-drawn diagrams that recommend garden layouts, explain the workings of tools or machinery, or elucidate some of the guiding principles of the work as a whole. The typography and visual content is frequently distinct and eye-catching; brightly coloured dust-jackets are a particular feature of the collection.

As such, they prompt a range of questions about their contents and the lives of their readers. What did the ideal home or garden look like? What resources were available to the homeowner in order to accomplish their desires? Who were these homeowners? To which kinds of reader did this literature appeal, and what kind of family structures did it imagine? What were the desires of the people who these books? To what extent did 'how to' literature shape or reflect consumer taste, aesthetics and aspirations?

At its broadest level, this collection explores the impact of changing social attitudes upon the domestic sphere during the post-war decades. Alongside their didactic contents, in their pages we find a record of how gender roles, aesthetic tastes, class structures, consumerism, and aspirations were defined in a context that was ostensibly straightforwardly practical. In many instances, these and other concepts were mediated subtly; in others, prefaces and forewords afforded authors space to sermonise on what a garden or home ought to look like, in language bordering on the sententious that contrasts sharply with the more functional directives these books imparted. In so doing, they sought candidly to shape and redefine the reader's aspirations, inviting him or her to join a particular social world - tasteful, respectable, ordered, designed, maintained - through a particular set of consumer practices.

My name is Dr James Freeman. I'm the Medieval Manuscripts Specialist at Cambridge University Library in the UK, where I am responsible for a collection of some 2,000 handwritten books which range in date from the 5th to the 15th centuries.

I've always bought books, but primarily with a view to reading them; although there might form subgroups within the books I own (for instance, my set of back issues of 'Granta' magazine), the motive force for buying them has almost always been their contents. For some time, I have wanted to begin a book collection, but lacked an idea of what area to focus on (obviously, medieval manuscripts are far beyond my modest means!).

Though I don't currently have access to a garden, I have had in the past, and have particularly enjoyed cultivating vegetables, and have nurtured the desire for an allotment for some time. Quite by chance, I picked up a guide to gardening and food production (published in the 1940s) in a charity shop, and shortly thereafter a guide to being a good handyman (published in the 1960s). Together, these gave me the idea for a collection of practical manuals for domestic life, which I describe in more detail below.

A few weeks after these chance purchases, I set off for a one-month visiting fellowship at the Huntington Library in San Marino, California, to conduct research on medieval manuscripts. The trip not only provided many opportunities to acquire new items for my incipient collection, and which gave to it a North American inflection, but also exposed me to a very particular suburban landscape. In people's houses I encountered architectural styles in bizarre combination or juxtaposition with one another, appearances neither the outcome not of organic growth nor informed by economic necessity or the availability of materials but of conscious design. Added to a feeling of space and distance (and climate) completely alien to a British sensibility, I became fascinated with discovering the context in which the readers of the books I was collecting might once have lived. The oddity of the houses themselves gave inspiration for an outgrowth of the book collection, a collection of photographs entitled "Suburbia ad absurdam". Examples will feature alongside photographs from my book collection on my Instagram profile, https://www.instagram.com/utopiainsuburbia/