Weekend Review: The Atlas of World Embroidery

 

The Atlas of World Embroidery / Gillian Vogelsang-Eastwood
Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, c2026.
400 p.

I was lucky to come across this large and expensive book through my library system. It's quite big, full of 300 colour illustrations, and gives a great overview of embroidery from around the world. That is both its strength and weakness - because it covers so much, there is of necessity just a few pages on each style and region. But it gives a great sense of what's out there, and what you may be interested in then researching further. 

I thought it was an enjoyable one to flip through, and with so many images to examine that it was creatively satisfying. I flipped first to Ukraine to see what she'd included, and of course because there are only a couple of pages she could only touch on the basics. But this was in a chapter on Eastern Europe, with other, similar countries covered as well, so you could see the fine differences between countries. But there are so many regional differences with one country as well! 

This book made me hungry to explore more into areas I wasn't as familiar with, and the illustrations just piqued my interest in wanting to know more. I'll have to look up other histories that cover just one style to get more in-depth. This book, however, introduced me to a ton of styles. 

I liked it, found it absorbing, but not sure I'd spend the $60 price tag on it for my own collection - it's more of a browsing kind of book for me. Thank goodness for the public library!