The Old Furniture Book

The Old Furniture Book is a substantial guide to antique furniture by N. Hudson Moore, the American writer who lived from approximately 1849 to 1922 and who produced substantial popular books on antique furniture, china, silver, and other decorative arts subjects for the substantial early twentieth century American collecting market. The book was first published in 1903 and was substantially revised across multiple editions through the following decades, becoming one of the standard American popular guides to antique furniture for the substantial Edwardian and early Georgian American collecting audience.

Moore’s various antique books appeared at the substantial moment when American interest in collecting antique furniture and decorative arts was substantially expanding. The late Victorian and Edwardian American middle and upper middle class had substantially developed the financial resources and the cultural inclination to assemble substantial collections of antique furniture, china, silver, and various other decorative arts, and the substantial commercial market for popular guides that could help collectors identify, evaluate, and appreciate the various categories of antiques was substantially expanding to meet the demand.

The Old Furniture Book covers the substantial categories of antique furniture that an American collector of the period would have been likely to encounter. The book includes substantial treatment of American colonial and federal period furniture, of the various English furniture traditions including Chippendale, Hepplewhite, Sheraton, and the various Regency and Victorian styles, of various continental European furniture traditions, and of the substantial American Empire and Victorian furniture styles that the nineteenth century American cabinet makers had produced in substantial quantity.

The book is illustrated with substantial photographs of specific pieces and with the substantial period engravings and pattern book illustrations that provided the documentary basis for the developing American antique furniture scholarship. Moore writes in the substantial accessible educational mode that the popular antique guide tradition required, with substantial attention to the practical questions of identification and evaluation alongside the broader historical and cultural material that gave the antiques their substantial collecting interest.

The book is of interest now to historians of early twentieth century American decorative arts collecting, to antique dealers and collectors interested in the substantial historical scholarship on American and European antique furniture, and to specialists in the broader American antique guide literature tradition that Moore was substantially central to.