Plastering Plain and Decorative
Fourth Edition
Charged with making a review of this great work on plastering for “preservation professionals” is a unique task. For as a group these professionals show keen interest in by-gone craft and trade skills in order that these can be correctly applied to the restoration, conservation and safeguarding of our patrimony. Unfortunately, what many of these professionals lack are the hand and visual skills to know just what can be done with reluctant dollars spread thin over an entire project.
Frequently we fall back on the concept of “training” more craftsmen while at the same time relegating craftspeople to second class standing in the restoration process. Note we claim the title “professional” yet deny it to the very ones who do the work. Craftsmen are often only approached after the bidding documents have been finalized, when in reality they should be the very ones who help in the creation of the restoration specifications. This book will help overcome this ignorance.
Thus the real task is not to train more craftsmen, the more pressing task is to train more “customers” who can articulate and desire the services these craftsmen can provide. This fourth edition of Plastering Plain & Decorative just might help do this. It will not make you a plasterer, any more than reading Ulysses will make you James Joyce… but it will expand your understanding of plaster work beyond the so frequent response to heritage interiors of tearing out the plaster in a building, loading it in the “Green” dumpster, and replacing it all with plasterboard, when plaster repairs are often simple and less expensive following the directions this book allows.
Reading the Table of Contents of this book is like entering a fine restaurant with the most wonderful menu imaginable. Nineteen chapters capture the pallet of what a plasterer can create in his “kitchen.” There are the mandatory receipts and understandings of the materials a plasterer uses, along with his “pots and pans” i.e., his tools. Tired of just a drywall pan and wide taping knife, why not upgrade with a selection of 16 molding tools (mitring [sic], scratch, and small working). Or work out at the plasterer’s gym with a hod for carrying wet plaster to the ceiling scaffold, or wrist shovel exercises screening and mixing lime and sand together. In fact 12 pages of tool descriptions with drawings and photographs of each in chapter VI will keep you broke for some time as you build a working kit. You might never go back to the boredom of your desk and CAD screen. The book offers visual life to all those who wish to participate, not just in the past glory of others, but in their own creations of today and tomorrow…after all preservation is not just about our past, but also about our future.
When you get tired from reading text or mixing mud, there is a 5 page index of the drawings and photographs of exceptional plaster work of every kind. How about “Cast enrichment guilloches and frets” on page 194 as a main course with “Butter Pat” ceiling ornaments on page 80, followed by a refined desert of “Assyrian bas-reliefs.” or “Fruit modeled (loose) in clay, cast in plaster of Paris, and bedded up in situ.” Take out is available in a “Gesso-decorated box,” plate CXVII.
We are charged with safeguarding our patrimony, often with the scarcest of cultural dollars. We need to reduce the time we spend making drawings and writing specifications and getting on with the real task of making a building shed water, guarding its delight and allowing others to “see” what our forefathers hath wrought in those wonderful visual dictionaries, our built heritage, we safeguard for the future. William Millar watches over us and we must bow to him and George Bankart for the wonderful reminder they took the time to write and a special thank you to Donhead Publishing for making this almost lost art form vibrant again. Ab imo pectore, thank you.
Richard O. Byrne
