Glenn Adamson

“Duane waxed lyrical about “the self-respect which every mechanic should feel, as forming part of that great basis upon which society is erected,” and condemned “idle and imbecile” speculators. As to the machinery wielded by the new capitalist class, he reminded his readers that it, too, was “a production of labor and of mechanical rules of art; and that even in its most perfect state, labor is necessary to its operation, as well to contrive and make, as to keep in order and put it in motion.” And he expressed a clear preference for small-scale manufactures, such as could be performed by just “one, two, or three artists, working with simple tools,” and preferably sold by the maker rather than entrusted to a “third person for sale.” America would be an artisan republic, an advanced economy without hierarchy: “a new thing on earth.”
― Glenn Adamson, Craft: An American History

“The philosophy of tea, he wrote, is not mere aestheticism in the ordinary acceptance of the term, for it expresses conjointly with ethics and religion our whole point of view about man and nature. It is hygiene, for it enforces cleanliness; it is economics, for it shows comfort in simplicity rather than in the complex and costly; it is moral geometry, inasmuch as it defines our sense of proportion to the universe.2”
― Glenn Adamson, Fewer, Better Things: The Hidden Wisdom of Objects