Barbara Brackman, Joyce Gross and Cuesta Benberry about 1989. Cuesta, and Joyce were two quilt scholars who helped considerably with the research for Clues in the Calico.

Twenty years ago, I published a book on how to date old quilts. I was a schoolteacher and a quilt collector, and I figured I could combine those two vocations to teach others how to tell the age of their antique quilts. It was a bit intimidating to publish a book on textile history because I had no background in textile science and little in art history, but I got a lot of support from my publisher Evelyn Metzger, who kept telling me, “You’re the expert.” So in 1989 we published Clues in the Calico: A Guide to Dating and Identifying Antique Quilts.

The book was really published before its time. A full-color book was not an option—even twenty years ago color printing technology was very expensive and each page of color added to a book’s cost. Glues for paperbacks of that size were rather primitive—many copies just fell apart and people had to spiral bind them or use a notebook to keep the pages together. And there wasn’t yet a huge audience of quilt collectors. When Evelyn retired her EPM Publishing house a few years later, we’d sold a few thousand and we were both pretty happy with its record.

But then the book took on a life of its own. The audience grew larger; the field of quilt scholarship grew wider and so did the demand for a book that summarized needlework history, dye and color technology, quilt style and patterns. People told me they’d seen used copies of the book for sale for $200!

I had two copies, both rather battered. I decided if I came across any for less than $50 I’d buy them. But I never have. There were just too few of them out there and too many people who wanted a copy.

Over the years I’ve tried to figure out ways to reprint Clues but nothing very practical came up until C&T Publishing suggested we make it an eBook. We scanned one of my copies, and they worked their digital magic on it. It’s now available for $19.99. You can download it as a pdf, which is probably the ideal format as you can then search in the text by words. For example, you could look for all mentions of “synthetic dye” or “tied comforter”. You can print it out and spiral bind it or keep it in a notebook so the pages lay flat while you are studying them. Either way you’ll have a basic reference for analyzing antique quilts.

Looking at the photo, I realize twenty years is a long time! We couldn’t have imagined the digital revolution or where our collecting would take us.