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Writing for Interior Design
Patricia Eakins
New York: Fairchild Publications, Inc., 2005. CD-Rom Edition.
ISBN: 1563672790. Paperback, 513 pages,
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Table of Contents,Writing for Interior Design
Online Booksellers
Fairchild Books
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Finally, finally, finally, I have finished my 513-page textbook, not to mention the cd-rom and the instructor's guide. Writing for Interior Design
is available for purchase through most online booksellers and through
Fairchild Books. You can't see the label on the cd-rom in this picture,
but it matches the book
cover. I am absurdly gratified by synchronicities of this general type.
Of course, everyone wants the two shoes or two gloves in a pair to
match, but some of us are thrilled beyond measure when our socks match
the cat, though we know in our hearts that it is foolish and
politically incorrect to revel in tidy matches.
* * * * * * * * * * * * * *
I am not so busy preening myself that I forget where credit is due:
apart from thanking Adam Bohannon, Fairchild Books's art director, and
Liz Marotta, the patient and perseverant production editor, I cannot
sufficiently thank Sylvia Weber, a superb development editor, the
midwife of this book, a friend of more than thirty years' standing, and
a woman whose socks always match, if not the cat, then her earrings.
Sylvia suggested this textbook to a great many acquiring editors in
houses where she worked over the years. Fairchild's late and much
missed Mary McGarry had the vision to see a niche market in the field
of interior-design education. How I wish she had lived to see its
lovely red cover!
* * * * * * * * * * * * * *
Many a book project founders with the loss of its original acquiring
editor, but Olga Kontzias, Fairchild's executive editor, backed Writing for Interior Design
from the initial gleam in Sylvia's eye through the author's formal
proposal through publication. Her patience must have been sorely tried
when her author missed the original manuscript due date--though said
author did turn in a book not only longer but fuller and richer than originally projected. . . .
* * * * * * * * * * * * * *
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Advance Publications
Women's Wear Daily and Fairchild Publications On-line
Columbia Journalism Review,"Who Owns What: Advance Publications" |
Publishing as I mostly have in the
impecunious world of small and university presses, I can't help being
snowed by the glamour that surrounds Fairchild Books, a tiny and, well,
bookish unit of the glossy and galactic Advance Publications empire
that is best known for its production of stylish periodicals like Glamour, Vogue, and Women's Wear Daily.
* * * * * * * * * * * * * *
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Manolo Blahnik
Marshalls in the Bronx
Frank Gehry's Condé Nast Cafeteria
IDEC: Interior Design Educators Council
Santa Fe
The Inn and Spa at Loretto
Geronimo Restaurant
SantaCafé |
Though I have yet to acquire such
emblematic accoutrements of fashion as Manolo Blahnik shoes, and my
favorite fashion emporium is Marshalls in the Bronx, I have
had lunch with Sylvia in the magnificent cafeteria designed by Frank
Gehry for employees of Condé Nast, Fairchild Publications's much more
glamorous sister in the Advance Publications empire. And thanks to Olga
Kontzias, I was the guest of Fairchild Books at the IDEC
(interior-design educators) conference in Santa Fe in March, 2002. The
presentations at this conference were just hugely helpful, providing a
nuanced sense of the issues informing and methods characterizing
interior-design education. We of Fairchild Books stayed in the elegant
and historic Inn and Spa at Loretto and ate delicious and (ahem)
gastronomically significant meals at SantaCafé and Geronimo. I was and
am very grateful to Olga, Mary, and Sylvia for the grace,hospitality,
and high style with which they have published Writing for Interior Design.
* * * * * * * * * * * * * *
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The Hungry Girls
The Marvelous Adventures of Pierre Baptiste |
Fairchild has consistently treated me as if mine were
a valuable sensibility--not what an author expects from a contract to
produce what is after all a useful product to which she does not
even--alas--control the creative copyright. (One doesn't, typically,
with a textbook. When I am dead, the book, if it sells briskly, will
continue to be brought out in successive editions, like The Joy of Cooking,
though after a while, if I am no longer around, my name will yield to
that of whomever the publisher chooses to revise subsequent editions.
It's an odd form of immortality--the authorial transmigration of souls,
if you will. I'm glad that my name will always be associated with my
fiction titles, The Hungry Girls and The Marvelous Adventures of Pierre Baptiste. But of course these works could easily slide into the oubliette of history, and my name with them. So it goes.)
* * * * * * * * * * * * * *
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| Eakins Syllabus: Professional Writing for Designers |
It is ironic that the syllabus that formed the backbone for Writing for Interior Design
was created during years as an adjunct instructor in the English
departments of various universities, and particularly at New York
Institute of Technology. None of these institutions has paid me
particularly well. The adjunct is always sensible of a gap between the
rhetoric emphasizing the importance to any given institution of its
adjunct staff and the degree to which that "importance" is reflected in
the size of the adjuncts' pay packets.
* * * * * * * * * * * * * *
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| "Santa Fe's Beguiling Canyon Road," by Jay W. Sharp (DesertUSA) |
It is gratifying to write and sell a book
that has a favorable royalty structure, as textbooks do; doubly
gratifying to generate that book from a syllabus created during twenty
years of poorly remunerated teaching; and triply gratifying to now and
then celebrate the project in the Frank Gehry cafeteria of Condé Nast
or the shamanistically svelte precincts of Geronimo on Canyon Road in
Santa Fe.
* * * * * * * * * * * * * *
And all this pleasure quite beside the central gratification of
helping design students achieve fluency in a medium--writing--that many
of them intensely distrust. I like
designers, and I like to help them develop the verbal communication
skills that will contribute to their success in their profession. I
need to bear in mind, of course, that they do not necessarily attach to
language the overriding importance that I do. Not incidentally,
perhaps, this insight was forcefully borne in on me during my visit to
Santa Fe as the guest of my oh-so-stylish publisher. To quote from the
preface of Writing for Interior Design: |
| Georgia O'Keefe Museum |
| ...it is important to remain alert to the secondary
importance that [designers], as self-defined "visual people," attach to
language. . . .many . . .will agree with the painter Georgia O'Keefe,
whose museum in Santa Fe, NM, is approached via walking past the
painter's inscribed musings about the imprecision of language: |
| The meaning of a word to me is not as exact as the
meaning of a color. Colors and shapes make a more definite statement to
me than words. I am often amazed at the spoken and written word telling
me what I have painted. |
| Even if colors and shapes do often need to have
arguments made for them, to help onlookers understand the nature of
what has been painted, most artists and designers would insist that
words play a subordinate role--and they are right to so insist. A
language-oriented teacher must approach this difference with humility.
At the same time, in my years of observation, a writing designer is apt
to be not only a more successful designer in worldly terms, but a
better one, in artistic terms. Writing for Interior Design was written with that hope and from that belief. |
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The corollary may also be true--that a language-oriented writing
teacher who is exposed to the sensory richness of splendid interiors
such as the Frank Gehry dining room or indeed to the highly theatrical
charm of Santa Fe's interior and exterior settings may be a more
successful writer and teacher than if she had huddled into the abstract
realm of pure language throughout the gestation of her book. It is born
now, the book--a physical thing in the world of things. Thank you Olga,
Mary, Sylvia, Adam, Liz, and all who helped it to be well born.
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Published 20 Jan, 2005; last revised 8 Mar 2007. All site content copyright 1997-2007 Patricia Eakins.
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