Recommended Reading

Jacquard's Web: Doron Swade's Difference Engine (2001) recounted the computer's conceptual origin with Charles Babbage, who, as readers discover from Essinger, borrowed from the technology of silk weaving a means of programming his calculating machine. It was the punched card, familiar in computer rooms until the 1960s and which continues a vestigial existence in the punch-card ballot. Its inventor in 1804? Joseph-Marie Jacquard of Lyons, France. Essinger bolsters Jacquard's thin but eventful biography by outlining the subsequent applications of his idea. Essinger's perceptive commentary makes for interesting reading, and his work is a fluid contribution to the history of the computer.
- Gilbert Taylor Copyright © American Library Association.

The Travels of a T-Shirt in the Global Economy takes the reader on a fascinating, around-the-world journey to reveal the economic and political lessons from the life story of a simple t-shirt. Over five years, business professor Pietra Rivoli traveled from a Texas cotton field to a Chinese factory to a used clothing market in Africa, to investigate compelling questions about the politics, economics, ethics, and history of modern business and globalization. Using the story of the t-shirt to illustrate the major issues of the globalization debate, this uniquely entertaining business book offers a surprising, enlightening, and balanced look at one of the major topics of our time.

Women's Work: In this age of ready-to-wear clothing and shopping malls, we sometimes forget that for the first 20,000 years of human existence, all textiles-from everyday clothing to ship's sails-were made by women (and sometimes men) who used a hand spindle to spin threads and a loom to weave the threads into cloth. As an archaeologist and a knowledgeable weaver capable of reproducing the cloth remnants she is studying, Barber is ideally qualified to investigate early textile production and its relation to women's changing roles in ancient societies. Here she reconstructs the history of textiles (primarily in Europe and the Near East), based on the hard evidence of archaeology, geology, art, and ancient texts. Her approach is scholarly yet presupposes no practical knowledge of textile production on the part of the reader.
- Janice Zlendich, California State Univ. Lib., Fullerton Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.

The Woven Pixel: Designing for Jacquard and Dobby Looms Using Photoshop® Everything you need to know about designing woven cloth using Photoshop®. This book is intended for weavers, surface designers, graphic artists and others who wish to have their work produced as woven cloth, whether on hand looms or through industrial production. Accompanying CD contains figures and illustrations in color as well as over 1400 downloadable weave structures and more than thirty full color photographs of actual weavings.
362 pages, Black and White, Spiral Binding
$165 plus shipping and handling
- Alice Schlein and Bhakti Ziek Copyright 2006

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