Heirloom Fruits of America announces its topic, the perfection of a variety of fruits, through immediate aesthetic appeal. Like its subject, this small, delicately colored and thoughtfully designed book asks to be held, savored and digested. Its handheld scale enables it to occupy the cusp between a carefully crafted artist’s book and a factual archive of botanical illustration. In his introduction, historian Daniel Kevles relays some of the social and cultural history of the production, documentation and reception of heirloom fruits in the United States that led to the creation of a Division of Pomology in the Department of Agriculture via the recruitment of art. Kevles relays how chromolithography proved critical to the production of colored plates that could compete in a national market. In the recounting, the book and its contents become works of connoisseurship, practicality, identity and imagination.
In essence, this book is a boundary object. As described...