The History of the Söderfors Anchor-Works by Johan Lundström (review)

TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE Book Reviews 625 month of September. See that you take said little apples at midday and that it be not rainy weather and neither should it have been given frost.” Besides its obvious value to historians, the book is an interesting docu­ ment whose openness may seem surprising since so many master dyers of the past jealously guarded their secrets. Rosetti himself comments: “You must know that this is a work of Charity that I bequeath for the public benefit, and which has been imprisoned for a great number of years in the tyrannical hands of those who kept it hidden.” Perhaps it was because the author was not a professional dyer but a public-spirited employee of the Venetian arsenal that he was willing to spend the time and effort to collect these recipes. He gives his reasons in the book’s preface: “These works of mine have been pub­ lished for the benefit of the people of . . . Venice ... so that my illustrious Senators shall reap benefits by revenues, let coffee houses and workshops expand with the growth of the number of masters . . . so that there be comfortable and decent rooms suited to carry out such workmanship.” In revealing the origin of his information, the author merely suggests the difficulty of this task: With all my forces I have worked, days and nights, months and years, bearing this studious discipline, with risks and discomforts ... it has taken sixteen years . . . [The art of dyeing silks] . . . was brought from more remote places than . . . the Kingdom of Naples and Rome and other lands of Italy . . . the dye­ ing of silk to make velvets, damasks, and satins, and other silk fabrics came from Florence and Genoa and were brought out by me, paid for in cash; the cost I reserve as my secret. The true art of dressing and tanning leather . . . have been extracted from the secrets of Skopia, of Syria, of Angora and of many unknown provinces, and put together and experimented with in this vicinity. The task of translating such a work would have been formidable in any case. Edelstein and Borghetty, in doing this work thoroughly and well, have made a positive contribution to the dye literature. Rita J. Adrosko* The History of the Soderfors Anchor-Works. By Johan Lundstrom (Uppsala, 1791). Translated by Lars-Erik Hedin, with introductory essays by Fritz Redlich and Lars-Erik Hedin. Publication no. 21 of the Kress Library of Business and Economics. Boston: Harvard Graduate School of Business Administration, 1970. Pp. ix-j-83; 2 maps. $5.00. The reason why the Swedish dissertation by Johan Lundstrom (1768-1848) has attracted particular attention at Harvard Business * Miss Adrosko, associate curator in the Division of Textiles of the Smithsonian Institution, has done research on the history and application of natural dyes. She is the author of Natural Dyes in the United States. 626 Book Reviews TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE School evidently is that the treatise constitutes an early company his­ tory in which the author describes from many points of view a mercantilist, as opposed to a modern capitalist, enterprise whose origin and operations the reader can study as a “protofactory” and an “early modern iron works.” Fritz Redlich in his essay gives a review of the history of published company histories and states that Sweden appears to be the cradle of those publications. However, Lundstrom’s treatise of 1791 on the Soderfors Anchor-Works, dated April 26, 1676, has several forebears in Sweden. The earliest one, to my knowledge, published in 1702 and 1703, was written by Olof Naucler and dealt with Stora Kopparberg (Falu copper mines). The history of this important enterprise, today still one of Sweden’s biggest industrial concerns, can be traced back at least to the year 1288. Nauclcr’s work was translated from Latin into Swedish, carefully edited and published in 1941. The Latin and Swedish versions of Lundstrom’s dissertation, on the other hand, have remained rare booklets, hitherto sparsely referred to by history writers. The translation and adaptation of the 18th-century Swedish version into modern English have now been excellently done by Lars-Erik Hedin. In the introductory essays by Hedin and Redlich, the

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