Is that the one the boot standard you shared with me was from? I laid out these boots for my wife on it and it seemed to work really easily
1 Like
Sorry I’m so bad at picking the right threads I just search for terms and start talking
But while I’m at it I picked up one more and will see if there’s any worthwhile material
No I just got this in the mail this week. Maybe it was Lunati?
1 Like
Could be. Thought you had said it was Plucknett, but I could be mixing up discussions.
2 Likes
Oh sorry you’re right. That was part of some historical research I was doing into the “Brookes method” as referenced in Patrick that’s ended up so famous.
Basically the Northamptonshire county boot and shoe pattern cutting schools date back to mid late 1800s, the last few superintendents were Swaysland, then Brookes, then Wootten (who wrote the forward for Patrick. Brookes, Wootten, Patrick, and Plucknett were FBSI - Fellows of the National Boot and Shoe Institution (or national institution for the boot and shoe industry in other sources) which as far as I can tell was a partnership between industry and govt education in the Northampton area. Brookes was in the inaugural class of that, and I don’t think it lasted too long, so I think the FBSI folks were all close knit, with educators and industry pros and relevant gentry intermixing in authorship and in doing things like serving as national examiners.
Robert Henry Brookes ~1866-1937 was a clicker and pattern cutter for 27 years before moving on the education of aspiring shoemakers. (A neat post script is that his son John Henry Brookes became a major figure in the education of art students - there is a lot more information out there about him than his father - and today’s Oxford Brookes University is named in his honor)
Brookes didn’t write a book himself but was credited as being the originator of an SLL-proportional patterning system meant to help students scale their patterns to the lasts easier.
I found an OCR of an old trade journal article that included this quote:
“Standard Construction. The shoe we propose to make being an oxford, from the forme we must now obtain an oxford shoe standard. The procedure which follows for doing this is based on proportions of the S.L.L. rather than specific measurements, a very convenient method for students to adopt. The method is attributed to the late Mr R H Brookes. F.B.S.I., and is usually referred to as the Brookes’ method.” -Long, J. V. A. (n.d.). An Introduction to Shoemaking. London: The Shoe and Leather News
That system also included building taller shafts around a pivot point at the ankle rather than say tracing forward from a back line or vertical patterning line - see this illustration by Brookes’ predecessor Swaysland which uses “pitch lines”:
The P “pitch point” is what Patrick specifically referenced in his book, where he says that he took the standard cutting method from another source
Anyway that led to Plucknett, a contemporary of Brookes, who asked for and was given the Northamptonshire school standards by Mr. Brookes for reproduction in his comprehensive book. So I believe these couple pages represent the original “Brookes method”.
I agree with mllcb that plucknett does a much nicer job of explaining how to lay the standard out than patrick, but grateful to patrick that he continues on to linings and blockers etc. In general I’ve been enjoying skimming Plucknett II as he seems to enjoy going into minutiae, alternative methods, and historical context, just my speed of nerd.
2 Likes