Obscure conjunctions: Paul N. Hasluck and Chicago Master Designer

 In our recent quest for really solid men's tailoring books, I spent a good amount of time searching for extant copies of Paul Hasluck's book, Tailoring; how to make and mend trousers, vests, and coats, with numerous engravings and diagrams. It's currently available on HathiTrust, and any number of people on Etsy will sell you a PDF of it, but I find those really unsatisfying. Originals are scarce, seem to end in the 30s, and run in the *gulp* hundreds of dollars in any condition. Ouch.

So, I set up a few eBay custom searches, and while I was at it, did a quick search for "Tailor's manual". Found a listing for about $20, and bought it even though it wasn't clear what was in it. (For that price with a date of "1947" it was good enough.)

Turns out I hit the bigtime! The book that arrived is a set of 2-hole punched pages with a dark glazed manilla cover and prong-fastener binding. The cover has an embossed gold foil badge on the front: "Master Designers Book of Instructions". The back inside the binding has a stamp: Accopress Binder, Acco Products, Long Island City, NY. (It turns out Acco is still around! ) So this wasn't professionally bound as a book, but appears to be some form of trade textbook or reference book. (For what it's worth, this seems to have been kept on a shelf - it's got no markings and no obvious wear at all.)



The text block seems to have a cover and back page that are punched differently from the rest. It weighs in at 156 pages of text, plus four unnumbered plates of diagrams showing where and how to alter men's suit blocks, for a total of 160 pages.

But the title page says... "Tailoring; how to make and mend trousers, vests, and coats, with numerous engravings and diagrams. Published by THE MASTER DESIGNER, Chicago, Ill. Copyrighted 1935 by Master Designer. Edition of 1947."





Hasluck died in 1931, and copyright law was very different from the beast we know today. I haven't been able to find any mention of this book with this publisher anywhere else, but what I did find was a number of other garment drafting and tailoring books by Chicago Master Designer, going all the way up to 1994.

So, with the title obviously the same as Hasluck's edition, I did a little comparison with previews available online.  

The 1909 edition: 
My edition:

So, there you have it - Chicago Master Designer for a brief time republished an Australian tailoring manual! What a one-in-a-million find!

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