Book List of the Week

Books With Less Transient Values: Books Every Interior Designer Should Read—Stanley Abercrombie

By Steve Kroeter July 26, 2011

Stanley Abercrombie

Interior design editor and author Stanley Abercrombie: Interior Design magazine (Sonoma, CA)

For someone whose long career has been devoted in large part to words, Stanley Abercrombie has some impressive numbers: in his more than 50 years at the forefront of reading and writing on architecture and interiors, he has been editor in chief of three eminent design magazines (Interiors, Abitare in America, and Interior Design—which he ran for 14 years, beginning in 1983); authored 11 books; written over 1,500 articles for 46 different magazines; and has roughly 12,000 books in his personal library. In addition, he currently serves as books editor at Interior Design magazine, reviewing a steady stream of books each year.

So it’s probably obvious that he knows how to separate the many passing fads from “books with less transient values,” as he puts it—those that contribute something to a broad philosophy of interior design.

In one of his editorials for Interior Design magazine (January 1994), Abercrombie wrote: “We need the solace of interiors that are not only intelligently functional but also intelligently artful.”* This philosophical orientation is evident in the list of 14 books Abercrombie sent us, from The Poetics of Space and On Growth and Form to Walden, or Life in the Woods. Commenting on The House of Life by Mario Praz, he translates the broadly conceptual to the specifically expressive: “We are poignantly reminded of how meaningful and communicative are the inanimate objects we choose to live with.”

Abercrombie himself is the author of A Philosophy of Interior Design, first published in 1991 and still in print—a testament to the “less transient.” And as well as citing the enduring work of George Nelson (both written and designed) in two books on his list for Designers & Books, it turns out that there are few people more familiar with Nelson’s work and writings. Abercrombie is the author of the definitive biography of Nelson (George Nelson: the Design of Modern Design), which he wrote at the request of Jacqueline Nelson, George Nelson’s wife—and for which he interviewed more than 70 of Nelson’s friends, colleagues, employees, and clients.

In April of this year, The Sonoma Valley Museum of Art (California) announced a gift of 2,500 volumes from Abercrombie and Paul Vieyra. This constitutes the first stage of a promised joint gift of 20,000 books from the two men, all of which are about art, architecture, and design. When asked how he and Vieyra would deal with the empty space that the departing 2,500 volumes would leave on their bookshelves, Abercrombie replied: “Some of the shelves that were two books deep are now only one book deep, so there are no empty shelves at all.“

*Stanley Abercrombie, editorial, “Interior Design as an Art Form,” Interior Design, January 1, 1994.

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