The Making of:
This paper, too, had its origins in my professional need to help fund the transatlantic research trips that I wanted to do, partly because I enjoyed them and partly because the progress of my research required them. My 2007 trip to the Hagley wasn't long enough -- I started reading the David Wood and Samuel Wright papers (about the Millville, NJ and Millsboro, DE furnace enterprises), but then I left for Albany before I had finished the job. But how was I going to persuade the Hagley to pay for another trip for me, on the same project? The answer was that they had a conference planned on the history of industrial design, and this provided an obvious opportunity for me to offer them a paper about design and its role in stove makers' competitive and marketing practices. So I offered a paper, the proposal was accepted, and I wrote it. Unlike the situation with "Conquering Winter" or "Inventing the U.S. Stove Industry," this time the title I gave the paper was a good one, and it has survived into the final, published form.
A nice result of the return trip I made to the Hagley in May 2008 was that I met K.C. Grier, then on the staff at the neighboring Winterthur Museum, and though there was no possibility that the Hagley Conference would produce an essay collection (the papers were too disparate in subject-matter and methodology, and variable in quality), a better publication opportunity soon presented itself: to translate the paper into an article submission to the Winterthur Portfolio. Once again I had excellent editorial guidance from K.C. and her anonymous readers, and terrific assistance with sourcing illustrations from the Winterthur's own holdings (of artefacts as well as nineteenth-century printed matter) as well as from the Hagley and the New York State Library. The result was a long article with which I am very happy -- apart from anything else, it looks wonderful.
Extras: