GUIDE TO EASIER LIVING
Mary and Russel Wright
Mary and Russel Wright: GUIDE TO EASIER LIVING. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1951. First edition. Square octavo. Printed dust jacket. Salmon paper covered boards stamped in silver. Quarter black cloth backstrip titled in silver. 199 pp. Color frontis [x2]. Decorated rear endpapers. Black and white illustrations throughout. Tips worn and rubbed. $2.95-priced jacket unclipped, with a few unobtrusive short closed tears. Presents nicely under mylar. Interior unmarked and very clean. A stellar copy of the uncommon first edition: the finest example we have handled— a nearly fine copy in a nearly fine dust jacket.
7 x 8.75 hardcover book with 199 pages that are profusely illustrated with detailed illustrations, photographs, charts and checklists. Russel and Mary’s legendary guide to stylishly efficient decorating, entertaining and home maintenance. The book includes a chart demonstrating the Wrights’ “family cafeteria setting” for dinner required 36 dishes, rather than the conventional 82 -- and this when home dishwashers were still relatively rare.
One of the most liberating ideas in the Wrights’ book was the “New Hospitality:” you could serve dinner as a buffet, even from the kitchen counter. Guests could fill their own plates and clear them. You could serve a stew in a single pot rather than the traditional meat, starch and vegetable. A buffet, they added, worked best with lightweight and sturdy ceramic plates made to be stacked.
But the Wrights’ entertaining ideas were not just about food. “We look forward to the day when living room, dining room and kitchen will break through the walls that arbitrarily divide them, and become simply friendly areas of one large, gracious and beautiful room,” they wrote. They suggested replacing the matching living room suite with individual pieces of furniture that were easy to care for — tight upholstery, Formica or glass tabletops, casters wherever possible — and that could be easily rearranged. Their ideal living room has a reading nook and a games corner, with lots of chairs that can be cleared away for a big party. They promoted lightweight aluminum frames alongside drawings of the Charles and Ray Eames’ DCM chair, Eero Saarinen's Womb chair and a Knoll armless couch.
The Wrights also liked lots of storage, but not in the single-purpose bookcases, highboys and lowboys of the past. Their book showed a wall with built-in glass-front and open shelves, as well as a flip-down bar in a New York City housing development. They may be the inventors of modern grad student storage: wooden shelves on cinder blocks hidden behind a curtain. Wright’s own house, Dragon Rock in Garrison, N.Y., used shelving and cabinets to divide the double-height living space into kitchen, dining room and den.
From the book: “A new way of living, informal, relaxed, and actually more gracious than any strained imitation of another day could be, is in fact growing up, despite the etiquette despots and the die-hards. There is evidence all around that the hard shell of snobbish convention is cracking.”
“The beauty of an eighteenth-century drawing room was the perfect expression of its time, but it is not a perfect expression of ours,” they wrote. “A home carefully planned around the requirements of your own family will provide much richer satisfactions. Imitation of other people’s ways holds pale pleasure at best beside that of creating one’s own.”
“We look forward to the day when living room, dining room and kitchen will break through the walls that arbitrarily divide them, and become simply friendly areas of one large, gracious and beautiful room.”
“Once you’ve shaken free of traditionalism, don’t, for heaven’s sake, go looking for a new type of Dream House, or for a new Emily Post to put yourself in bondage to.” Amen.
The easier living the Wrights described — both in the book and in their lines of domestic products — sounds very familiar today, with buffet suppers, one-pot meals, portable seating and lots of double-duty storage. But the Wrights’ work was revolutionary at the time: not only did they simplify our plates and mugs, chairs and cabinets, but they simplified the way we were to live and work in our homes. Many other designers and manufacturers created modern design for the home in the 1950s, but few showed how to use it with the detail and multimedia platform the Wrights used so effectively. — Alexandra Lange
No disrespect to Gibbs Smith, but their paperback reissue of Guide to Easier Living simply cannot hold a candle to the exquisite production of the original editions. [xlist_2018]