Chairs: A History

by Florence de Dampierre

Henry David Thoreau wrote, “I had three chairs in my house; one for solitude, two for friendship, three for society.” In A History , furniture historian Florence de Dampierre presents a wonderfully readable and visually stunning exploration of chairs and their place in culture through the ages. Along with hundreds of gorgeous photographs—many taken specifically for this book—de Dampierre fills these pages with fascinating information and anecdotes, tracing the chair’s emergence in ancient Egypt and examining various forms of seating from classical Greece, the Roman Empire, and the Renaissance era, to the classic designs of today.

From thrones to divans, straightbacked to overstuffed, Baroque to Bauhaus, this beautiful volume will delight anyone who’s ever taken a seat and wondered where it came from.

Genres: History, Nonfiction

432 pages, Hardcover

First published October 1, 2006

Reviews

[Punk · Rating 1 out of 5]

Non-fiction. I gave this 144 pages and finally decided life was too short to suffer through a moment more. The prose is clunky and often unclear, there are no references listed anywhere in the book, and the pictures don't match up with the text. The author spends two pages going on and on about three-legged chairs, but I don't get a picture? Instead I get a photo of a French armchair or something. What?

I wanted to learn the history of chairs! But the most useful part of this book was the introduction.

[Nurg · Rating 3 out of 5]

Classification of the chairs are horrible. Time line is ok but is complicated inside.

[Ioana Andrei · Rating 3 out of 5]

Is`s a well documented book, but sadly this is the only good thing. The fact that the organisation of the book, the pictures are extremely random inserted and the fact that you don`t know if she is talking about one style of the chair or she move to the history of another completely different period was driving me crazy. It was a horror to try to understand what she mean or what she was talking about. Even the titles of the `chapters` were just written in bold, they didn`t even have a upper case letter. The organisation of the book was so poor that i can`t event talk too much about it. Witch is very sad because the content of the book is a good one and have a lot of potential.