Let's Tat: fun finds

I've been spending a great deal of time looking over the first and second editions of Angeline Crichlow's Let's Tat, and have been finding a lot of things that make each book unique. I suppose it's inevitable in a self-published, hand bound book that has been written on a typewriter. That's part of what makes Let's Tat such a treasure.

What I've also noticed is just how much work Angeline put into creating each one of her books. When you factor in the amount of pages, the hand binding, the corrections that have been applied directly to the page, and the level of detail that she went through to explain each concept in tatting, it truly is a labor of love.

Let's take a look at some of the interesting things I found in each book.


Differences Between the Two Editions:

The first edition was published in 1979. 100 copies were made, each numbered and signed by Angeline Crichlow. The second edition was published in 1981 and approximately 400 copies were made. Unlike the first edition, the second edition is not numbered and the inside page has a photocopy of Angeline's signature:

Book Signatures: first edition on left, second edition on right

The leather bound cover of the second edition came in different colors. Mine is brown, and I have seen photos of green, yellow, and burgundy covers as well. As far as I know, the first edition only has a burgundy cover. (If you have a first edition that is NOT burgundy, I'd love to hear about it!)

Book Covers: first edition on left, second edition on right

The ribbon bookmarks also came in different colors. I have seen burgundy, red, hot pink, and green. Gold lettering on the cover has different spacing, placement, and clarity on each book.

If you turn the book to the side, you will notice "Let's Tat" hand written on the spine in gold pen. For some reason, this is missing from my first edition copy. I looked for signs of it having been rubbed off, but it looks like it was never there. This may be unique to my copy (I think Fox's first edition has the title on the spine, as seen in a post by Ann when the book was traveling the world).

Book Spines: first edition on left, second edition on right

The endpapers in the first edition are plain while the endpapers in the second edition are decorated with pictures of tatting:

Endpapers: first edition on left, second edition on right

The second edition has more pages (353 as opposed to 332). This is because a few extra patterns have been added and some unnumbered pages have been incorporated. The second edition also has an address change and other information that has been glued to the pages of the book. For the sake of privacy I'm not including any photos of addresses, but here is a page from the end of the book where additional titles have been added:

Additional book titles glued to the second edition

My favorite page in the book shows photos of the generations of tatters in Angeline's family. This is also different in the two editions. The first edition only has four generations of tatters:

Four Generations of Tatting, first edition

The second edition has five generations of tatters. Angeline's daughter Jeani has been added:

Five Generations of Tatters, second edition

Look closely and you will see that Angeline's year of death has been written in blue ink in the second edition. I believe this was done by her daughter, as the same blue ink is used to correct her daughter's address a few pages back. This book must have been one of the last copies sold.

The above photo is also a good example of the print quality in the second edition. It appears to be photocopied throughout, rather than the offset printing seen in the first edition.


Correction of Typos (first edition):

Perhaps the most interesting thing about this book is the way in which typos are corrected. White out, black pen, red marker, and glued bits of typing can be seen throughout the pages (this is exclusive to the first edition). Although some corrections were done to the master copy before it was sent off to the printer, there are loads of edits done to each book by hand. Multiply that by 100 first edition copies and you will begin to see just how tedious of a job it is.

There are seven instances where typing has been cut out and glued on top of typos. Here are a few examples:

There is also a photo glued to the bottom of page 12. This was super difficult to spot (I had to run my fingers over the page to feel the extra layer).

Photo of Rose glued to bottom portion of page

In total there are 8 glued corrections in my copy of the book. If Angeline did this with all 100 copies, that is 800 little pieces of paper that were cut and glued!

There are other types of corrections as well. White out and black pen were used to fix certain misspellings:

Later page additions, marked by the letters "xx" contain red marker to signify colored thread. I suppose this was her only option as the entire book is in black and white. Notice the white out correction on the same page:

Red marker used to signify colored thread

In total, I was able to find 40 corrections applied by hand (the group of red markings above was counted as 1 correction). If Angeline made these corrections to every one of her original 100 copies, then that means she made 4,000 corrections in all. Can you imagine? I hope she had someone helping her!


Uncorrected Typos (first edition):

While carefully examining the pages of the first edition, I stumbled upon a number of uncorrected typos. Here is a sampling:

A couple of these were remedied in the second edition of the book, but for the most part, they remain uncorrected in both editions.


Other Finds

The majority of my time was spent looking through the first edition of Let's Tat. However, as I was comparing errors between the two editions, I noticed that my second edition seemed to be missing pages!

I swear I had seen page 231 somewhere, and after careful searching I found it:

Something must have happened in the bookbinding process and a few of the pages got mixed up. Luckily they are all there, just misplaced.


Stories from Angeline

Sprinkled throughout the pages of the book are stories from Angeline's childhood and adult years. I especially like the story of creating a volleyball net when she was a school teacher in Arizona:

You can really see Angeline's resourcefulness in this excerpt. This same ingenuity is what enabled her to create Let's Tat with very limited technology. I greatly admire her for it, and it's a major reason why I am such a fan of this book.


Well, that's it for this post. I hope that my analysis gives a window into just how much time and effort Angeline put into creating this book, and that her dedication will inspire some of you. It sure has inspired me!

Pure Luck

The other day, I was browsing the Internet and randomly decided to search for Angeline Crichlow's Let's Tat. For those of you who are unfamiliar with the book, it is exceedingly rare. Only about 500 copies were made, and each was hand bound by Angeline Crichlow herself. This book is so rare that the last time I saw it for sale was nearly two years ago. That copy was a first edition (#33 of 100) and auctioned for $242.50 on eBay.

With the magic of Bookfinder.com (and A LOT of luck), I found a copy of Let's Tat available on Amazon for $10 plus $3.99 shipping. I have no idea how long it was up there, but I snatched it up right away!

This book was listed as a second edition, published in 1981. I was pleasantly surprised when the book arrived in the mail, and I saw this:

It is actually a first edition (#87 of 100) published in 1979. It is signed by Angeline Crichlow.

Several years ago, I received the second edition of Let's Tat as a birthday gift (and yes, it was rather expensive). The second edition was published in 1981 and has extra content as well as fixes for several typographical errors seen in the first book.

I've been having fun comparing these two books and discovering a whole lot of quirks! I think I will save those for the next post so I can take a little more time with the books. Here are the two editions side by side:

I love how each book is unique. Just from first glance you can see the difference in leather color, book size, and placement of gold lettering. If you look really closely, you may notice that the burgundy book has a red ribbon while the brown book has a burgundy ribbon. (The copy of Let's Tat that I checked out from Interlibrary loan was burgundy with a hot pink ribbon!)

The majority of Angeline's books seem to have a burgundy cover, though Amazon.com has a photo of a green version of the book, and Leigh owns a copy with a bright yellow cover. I wonder how many different colors are out there? Okay, I think I'm having a little too much fun with this! I'll be back later this week to post about all of the quirks I have found in my two copies.

More Books by Angeline Crichlow

For the past couple of weeks I have been making posts about Let's Tat, a 353 page hand bound tatting textbook written by Angeline Crichlow. Many of you know about this book and have had the opportunity to see it for yourselves when Fox generously loaned her copy to travel around the world. Some of you probably know that Angeline also produced paperback tatting booklets which were bound by a ribbon. You can view the covers of these booklets by clicking here.

But did you know that Angeline also created hand bound poetry books? I didn't, until I stumbled upon an eBay listing while searching for Let's Tat. I decided to bid on them because part of what I like about Let's Tat is the fact that it is hand bound. The poetry books share the same quality:

I was the only one to bid on the listing, and because they were rather cheap, I did not read the description very carefully. The title said that the books were miniature, but the photos looked normal. I assumed the books were just slightly smaller than an average book, similar to the dimensions of Let's Tat, but with a lot fewer pages.

So, I was a little confused when I received a parcel in the mail that was much too small to hold two books. Hilarity ensued when I opened the package and was met with these:

 

The surprise made getting these books all the more worthwhile. Here they are next to Let's Tat. Look how much smaller they are!

The little burgundy book's title is almost completely worn off the cover, but it reads "Poems." Oddly, inside of the book, the title is listed as "Excerpts." It contains drawings of flowers intermixed with poems:

The light blue book has "Lullabye" written on the cover, but on the inside it is titled "My Baby." This one contains no pictures, just poems:

I think these tiny books are pretty neat. How about you?

Doily of Triplets

Here's another one from Angeline Crichlow's Let's Tat. This one is called Doily of Triplets:

I used Lizbeth size 40 white and green coral sea. The color scheme is inspired by tatting from Elena's blog.

As I read through Let's Tat, I was intrigued by the details that precede this pattern:

How neat to be tatting something from over 100 years ago. I'm glad that Angeline decided to preserve her grandmother's pattern in this book.

If you live in the U.S. and would like to see Let's Tat, you might want to give Interlibrary Loan a try. Last year, I was able to borrow the book through Interlibrary Loan, even though there is only one copy available in the country (at the Paxton Carnegie Library in Illinois). I like to use a website called WorldCat to search for book availability, and bring a print out to the reference desk at my local library.

When I inquired about Let's Tat, the librarian told me that they don't normally do requests if only one copy of a book is available. I explained to her that it wasn't a big deal if I didn't get the book, but that I thought it was worth a try. After all, if I didn't try, then I would have no chance of getting the book. She agreed to put in the request for me and I was pleasantly surprised when I got a call a few weeks later saying that it had arrived!

I even took some pictures before sending it back:

As you can see, mine was the only due date listed on the back of the book. I often wonder if anyone has checked it out since then:

I was so impressed with the amount of care that went into making Let's Tat (and the fact that it was hand bound by Angeline herself!) that I embarked on a daily search to find a copy for sale. A year later, I am pleased to finally own one:

Don't you just love the gold handwritten binding?

I found one!

Earlier this year, I put together a simple floral edging and bookmark pattern, which I shared on my Free Patterns page. Some of you may recall that I had been looking through my vintage tatting books for a similar pattern, just to make sure that I hadn't accidentally copied someone else's design. I was sure I would find something that looked identical to what I had created, but try as I might, I could not find anything!

Well, about a week ago, as I was looking through my pattern books for something to tat, I stumbled upon the edging I had been looking for. I found it in Angeline Crichlow's Let's Tat:

The reason I could not find this pattern before is because I only recently acquired the book for my birthday. I consider myself lucky as I have only seen two copies of Let's Tat available, once per year on eBay.

When I saw the pattern, I just had to try it out. Below is a scan of three samples:

The top is from my floral edging pattern. The middle is a modified version of the edging from Let's Tat, to correct for inconsistencies between the written pattern and the photo. The bottom is the pattern from Let's Tat, tatted verbatim from the written instructions.

After I tatted the three samples, I realized that my edging doesn't look very much like the one from Angeline's book. As you can see, there's an enormous size difference between them. It was rather difficult to tat the rings in her edging because they are so large. Though, I do like the shape of the large rings better...they are more flowery and less boxy than mine. Perhaps I can revisit this later and adjust some of my stitch counts to create a motif that lies somewhere in between.