UPDATE ARCHIVE for 2021
NOVEMBER 27th, 2021:
A retired professor from Florida contacted me about foreign language editions of a couple of Time-Life books written by a friend and colleague of his, and in my hunt to help him find what he was looking for, discovered two things - the original bibliographer for the Time-Life Books sets, Michael Legg, did have his site archived on the Wayback Machine(but all the links he'd set up to take you to listings of the books are now broken, so all the bib details are missing except title/author), and secondly, both Mr. Legg and myself were listed as original sources for Wikipedia's Time-Life Books page along with the Time-Life company page, which has no mention of the books they used to publish anywhere on it. Time-Life only does music and videos now. So for up-to-date information on books they published, I'm essentially it. I've been panicking for about a month now, trying to fix what I thought was beneath anyone else's notice.
Mr. Legg's page was last archived in 2003, and a lot of the sets from 1999 onward had missing titles in his bib, so I'm guessing his health was failing at that point and he wasn't updating as much as he had earlier on. My own bib page was missing all the small sets, most of the cookbooks, and all the literary sets. I've fixed that, cribbing what I could from Mr. Legg's bibliography, and checking each set for completeness. I'm missing a lot of bib details still(ISBNs, copyright years, some authors, pages) on many of the sets, but I at least have the sets listed with the titles in each set, have added a cover scan to each entry so you can see what the set looked like, and will continue to slog my way through hunting down the details. Since I'm going in alphabetical order, if you need those details for a set I haven't gotten to yet, you'll need to contact me and ask me to skip down for you. I dropped everything at the beginning of November to update this page, and have worked frantically to get it to this point so I wouldn't have to be so embarrassed. I still haven't been able to do the necessary hunting to see what languages each set was translated to, but I will get to that eventually. So there's still not a comprehensive catalog of Time-Life Books world-wide, but I think I've finally covered most of the bases in English for now if you are only looking to see if your set is complete. Please forgive me for not taking this page seriously enough and getting it updated much much sooner.
TIME LIFE CATALOG AND BIBLIOGRAPHY
If you need to contact me, use "akamoraih[at]gmail[dot]com" and you know to replace the "[at]" and "[dot]" with the appropriate symbols, right? Spammers look for those symbols when trolling for addresses to try - hence the dumb encryption. There's a mailing address on the contact page now, if you need to mail me stuff, and if you're having trouble figuring out the incryption, I'm fairly active now on
www.Craftree.com under the name Moraih. I enthusiastically encourage people to check it out!
OCTOBER 20th, 2021:
...and the story on what I'm calling the "Deep Fakes" continues. I have now identified 25 of these books for beginners that have been pushed out via book sellers who do not concern themselves with the quality of their products. 22 of these are aimed at crafters wishing to learn tatting, 1 for needle lacers, and 2 for quillers. There may well be many more for other disciplines. They have these things in common:
1) They are independently published - no reputable publisher is involved, and no country of origin is given with any of them.
2) They have odd price points, as though it were translated into American dollars from a foreign currency.
3) They all have a 979 ISBN prefix(instead of the usual 978), which is legitimate, just not common yet because it is so new.
4) Page length varies but cover dimensions are almost uniformly the same. 20.3cm x 12.7cm (8inx5in). They are square bound. They took a great deal more care with the cover than they did with the contents.
5) Every single one of them is aimed at "novices" or "beginners", and has one of those two words in the title.
6) All are translated into English but largely unreadable.
7) They are all clearly written by people who had no idea what the craft was until they googled it and cobbled together their essay, and still didn't know how to do that craft when they finished their run at it.
8) They appear to be legal in every way that I can check except that they can't actually teach anyone the craft.
The cover artwork may be plagiarized, but I haven't been able to match any of it to original sources. I don't spend a whole lot of time on the internet, so I'm not the best person to sleuth out their artwork sources. A couple of the tatting books don't actually have tatting on the cover, but crochet. The two quilling books come the closest to being realy books - they do have basic tutorials for making coils, but they offer no patterns, including the lovely pieces used for the covers.
I think these are attacks on crafters, targeting people who do not know the real players, and it disturbs me greatly. I bought a handful of them when they first started showing up, expecting out of copyright materials with an introduction slapped onto it so that the "author" could add her name to the work. It's a more sophisticated scam than that, and less useful to anyone than republishing copyright-free works. I'm betting other crafts have been targeted as well, and I think it would be useful to get word out to as many people as possible. I have no idea how to get word out to people who aren't connected to the on-line tribe but are trying new crafts on their own. Someone else may have some idea how to stop these people.
Please help spread the word, these are not good books for a a beginner to try to learn the craft from. The cover does not reflect the contents(there are no patterns in either of them, just an awkward tutorial for making coils). You can pick them out because they all have a "979" prefix on the ISBN, they have awkward price points like $10.86 - as though it were translated from a different currency. They all have "Beginner" in the title somewhere. They are all self-published with no country of origin anywhere in them. They are all in awkward English that can be very hard to read. I suspect the authors' names are pen names..
"...Please every information in this book is strictly for educational and entertainment use only. All sincere practice has been put in place to produce correct, relevant, updated, and reliable information. The content contained in this book has been gotten from various sources of knowledge and all techniques highlighted have been put to practice. Using this document adheres readers to comply that no liability is held against the author for any direct or indirect incurred as a result of the informational content. But no limitation to possible erros, inaccuracies, and mistakes."
This was the disclaimer notice in the Benoit book(unicorn cover). You can guess from that how well the rest of the books are written.
SEPTEMBER 28th, 2021:
I've encountered another couple of "deep fakes" - this time targeting crafters interested in trying quilling for the first time(I found a total of 7 of these done to target tatters). Their covers are the best thing about them:
Please help spread the word, these are not good books for a a beginner to try to learn the craft with. The cover does not reflect the contents(there are no patterns in either of them, just an awkward tutorial for making coils). You can pick them out because they all have a "979" prefix on the ISBN, they have awkward price points like $10.86 - as though it were translated from a different currency. They all have "Beginner" in the title somewhere. They are all self-published with no country of origin anywhere in them. They are all in awkward English that can be very hard to read. I suspect the authors' names are pen names..
"...Please every information in this book is strictly for educational and entertainment use only. All sincere practice has been put in place to produce correct, relevant, updated, and reliable information. The content contained in this book has been gotten from various sources of knowledge and all techniques highlighted have been put to practice. Using this document adheres readers to comply that no liability is held against the author for any direct or indirect incurred as a result of the informational content. But no limitation to possible erros, inaccuracies, and mistakes."
The above was the disclaimer notice in the Benoit book(unicorn cover). You can guess from that how well the rest of the books are written.
JULY 2nd, 2021:
I came across a handful of a series of books that I've been vaguely aware of for many years because I had Pamela Palmer's "Tatting" of this series. I decided to see what else was in the series, and ended up setting up yet another catalog page for Shire Publications. It's not complete yet - I just got it started. But it's a good start, and I think you'll be amazed how wide-ranging their fields of interest are. The entire series is very UK-centric, but if you are planning on travelling, this series tends to have a "Places to Visit" section in the back of each of them. I think it is worth your while to peruse the list and see what topics jump out at you. Here's the link:
SHIRE ALBUM
MAY 22nd, 2021:
Website: 
https://dresshistorians.org/journal/
The Early Summer 2021 issue has Cary Karp's marvelous article on early tatting "Knotting and Tatting: The Dual Role of the Shuttle as a Fashion Accessory and Instrument of Decoration", pages 8-47. If you are as fascinated with the early history of our discipline as I am, this is a must-read. We don't have a lot of historical documentation to draw from, but what there is, I think Cary found it. The Association of Dress Historians makes their professional journal available for free on-line, and I believe Cary's article isn't the only one that you'll find interesting. Cary also has a blog where he makes his other articles available:
https://loopholes.blog/publications/#knotting-tatting
MAY 11th, 2021:
Craft Industry Alliance has put up a useful article on copyright that I think everyone should read. Questions have come up a lot lately, and I found this article helpful. My general rule of thumb, is if there is doubt, don't do it. I research carefully, and when needed, make sure I have explicit permission to share in the form of a hardcopy letter to file with whatever I've been given permission to share. In my reviews, I will often mention whether the designer has given explicit permission to sell items made from their patterns/designs, because this is important information to many people. I wish more designers would state their preferences so that makers can proceed with more confidence. Reputable makers always give credit to the designer.
APRIL 20th, 2021:
So a peculiar thing happened. I noticed a stream of 6 new beginner's tatting books show up on ebay within two days of each other - all from the same publisher. They had similar titles, formats, pricing, write-ups, etc., but different authors and covers. I thought, "Aha! Someone is taking copyright free tatting instructions, slapping new covers on it, and having someone write an introduction so they can put their name on it." After all, one of the titles has a subtitle "Guide to Learning How to Tat, Other Tatting Patterns(Dover Knitting, Crochet, Lace)" Yeah, the "Dover" should be a giveaway that this publisher is maybe scraping names off other books to use, not actually understanding the titles used. Boy, was I wrong - not about the borrowing titles portion of this program. They are clearly cribbing titles. The books themselves aren't nearly as useful as a pirated reprint. As far as I can tell, foreign nationals were paid the equivalent of ten bucks or so to write an essay about tatting, which they took more or less seriously(two are straight essays with zero pics - one in huge type and double-spaced in order to cover the assigned 30 pages), then run through a translation program so that it looks like English, but no English speaker would ever confuse it with an English language book. The names are just generic enough in a WASPy way that I'm fairly certain they are not real people. Their scam more or less worked, because I bought 4 of them out of curiosity to see what they were doing and whose work they were filing the serial numbers off of. The seller on ebay is "Prepbooks", who reprints a lot of copyright free books we would otherwise have a much harder time finding accessible copies. So far as I can tell, the books are legal(they even have ISBN), just not good. The names on the books are Janie Smith, Thompson Perez, Marry Adams, Penny Martha, Elsie Crawford, and Jane Craig. They've all disappeared from Prepbooks offerings since I got my copies, but Prepbooks never contacted me to recall them. Maybe they assumed I was a collector of bad essays? WARNING: DO NOT BUY THESE BOOKS unless, of course, you find bad translations entertaining. I haven't checked to see if the ISBN numbers are real or bogus yet. I guess that's my next step, but I feel like I've wasted enough time and energy on these, and done what I'm supposed to do as a reviewer by warning you not to buy them. If you have anything else to add to this story, please do get in touch. I'm all ears.
APRIL 10th, 2021:
Norma Benporath
I've written a bio for an important tatted lace designer of the early 20th century, Norma Benporath and with Judith Connors' considerable help, have provided a catalog of all her books and the periodicals she published her work in - over 1,000 designs in a 23 year span. Yeah, that boggles my mind too. If you tat and haven't heard of Norma, then you're missing someone special. You can click on the picture of her to take you to that page!
If you have time on your hands and want to help, I could really use some researchers to help sift through Australia's newspaper archive for Norma's articles. I've made a start, but there are tons left to do. Contact me for details.
MARCH 3rd, 2021:
I've completed what I can of these three magazine catalogs:
Traditional Quiltworks
Quilting Today
Quiltworks Today
I only had a handful of each of the titles, but at least the pages are set up and I can fill in more as I find them.
FEBRUARY 3rd, 2021:
I've got the PDF files finished and uploaded for Doretha Albee's 1999 "Tatting Knots & Notes, Revisited, Book 1"! Thank you to Deana, her daughter, who not only saved the original files of the newsletter and manuscript along with all the samples Doretha tatted for them, but gifted us with permission to convert all the original issues and manuscript into pdfs for everyone to enjoy. I've printed off the pdfs and carefully compared them to the original manuscript to make sure I didn't make any mistakes in compiling the pages, and that they all printed out clearly(pdfs that are such low resolution they can't be printed are a pet peeve of mine). The book contains Doretha's famous "Pineapple Heaven" doily, with corrections to the original newsletter version. She didn't number the pages of the manuscript, so I've never been sure if the copy I got on loan from the IOLI lending library was complete. But these PDFs are from the original manuscript. I divided the manuscript into two parts to make it easier to download. Here's the link for the review page: DORETHA ALBEE. If you don't know who I'm talking about, use the link. I don't have the slideshow up yet of all the samples that Doretha tatted for her newsletter, so keep checking back. And here are the PDFs of her book:
ALBEE1999_Pages1to44of83
ALBEE1999_Pages45to83of83
I am currently working on two big projects at the same time, one of them is Doretha's newsletter PDFs, of course. I've about got all the scanning done, and Adobe came through with helping me get my beloved Photoshop back up and running on the new computers so I am no longer hamstrung.
If you need to contact me, use "akamoraih[at]gmail[dot]com" and you know to replace the "[at]" and "[dot]" with the appropriate symbols, right? Spammers look for those symbols when trolling for addresses to try - hence the dumb encryption. There's a mailing address on the contact page now, if you need to mail me stuff, and if you're having trouble figuring out the incryption, I'm fairly active now on
www.Craftree.com under the name Moraih. I enthusiastically encourage people to check it out!
JANUARY 3rd, 2021:
HAPPY NEW YEAR, EVERYONE! I think we can all agree that 2020 was a blessing in that it is behind us, and we now have a benchmark that will make our new year look spectacular in comparison. I look forward to getting more done this year, and finishing many projects that got set aside momentarily while I sewed like a madwoman to make masks for everyone I knew. I ended up making a little over 2,000. It was a lot of work, but I think it did make a difference. Vaccination can't happen fast enough for me and my husband. We are so ready for this pandemic to be over. I know you all feel that way too. May you all stay healthy and safe while we wait for our government to get its act together.
