Colne Valley cloth from the earliest times to the present day

huddersfield and district woollen export group [curwen press], 1947. hardcover. Very Good/Acceptable. 9x5x0. 1947 Huddersfield and District Woollen Export Group (Huddersfield, England), 6 1/8 x 9 3/4 inches tall color cloth hardcover in publisher's unclipped dust jacket, white lettering to front cover, gilt lettering to spine, pink pictorial endpapers, copiously illustrated with marvelous black-and-white drawings by Harold Blackburn, color plates of and eighteenth century clothier's pattern book and a folding color map in a pocket at the center of the volume, 70 pp. Very slight soiling, rubbing and edgewear to covers, with mild bumping to the lower tips. Creasing to one tip of the folded map and one small edge tear. Otherwise, a very good to near fine copy - clean, bright and unmarked - in a moderately chipped and edgeworn dust jacket which is nicely preserved and displayed in a clear archival Brodart sleeve. ~YY~ [1.5P] A book promoting the Colne Valley, an area in West Yorkshire, England, that was home to weavers for centuries. With ready access to water power and the cities of Liverpool and Manchester, the mills of the Colne Valley were an important part of the industrial revolution. But the Great Depression and World War II had taken its toll on the Valley's producers. The book and map were produced by The Huddersfield and District Woollen Export Group as part of a post-war effort to gain sales in foreign markets. The map portrays the Colne Valley as a bustling manufacturing center with scores of mills lining the waterways, each with hard-at-work puffs of smoke from the chimneys. Around the margin are medallions with images of historical sites and great homes in the area. And illuminating the Valley from the upper right corner is a sunburst, an image often used by the artist, MacDonald ('Max') Gill, one of the best-known commercial and patriotic artists of his time. Gill 'produced a great many advertisements which made use of maps [using] a striking, colourful, pictorial style . . . . Boldness and information, within an instantly recognizable cartographic framework, offered real scope for the purposes of advertising and propaganda (Barber 2010, 166). This was one of the last works produced by Gill, who finished the map in 1946 and died in January 1947.