Markham’s sixty or so drawings are the earliest-known set of textile machine maker’s workshop drawings in the U.S.A., prepared primarily for cotton carding, spinning, and weaving machinery but also for wool carding and spinning equipment. Nothing similar has survived from the antebellum decades. Prepared between 1814 and 1825, a collection of such significance requires an examination of its provenance, a biography of the draftsman, and an analysis of the historical contexts shaping both draftsman and drawings. David Jeremy and Polly Darnell fulfill all of these goals in this marvelous book.
            As comparisons with contemporary European machine drawings reveal, Markham’s drawings are evidence of the transition from preindustrial to industrial forms of technical knowledge, and of a much wider knowledge revolution in the United States.
 
David J. Jeremy is Emeritus Professor of Business History at Manchester Metropolitan University Business School, where he has taught since 1987. He has researched in the areas of business history and the history of technology, and has written a number of articles and books, including Transatlantic Industrial Revolution: The Diffusion of Textile Technologies Between Britain and America, 1790–1830s (Cambridge, MA: M.I.T. Press and the Merrimack Valley Textile Museum, 1981 and Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1981) and Artisans, Entrepreneurs, and Machines: Essays on the Early Anglo-American Textile Industries, 1770–1840s (Alershot: Ashgate, 1998).
 
Polly C. Darnell currently is the Archivist and Librarian at the Shelburne Museum in Shelburne, Vermont. Between 1980 and 1995, she ran the Research Center of the Sheldon Museum in Middlebury, Vermont. She has taught and written about archives and community history and been active in regional and national archival organizations. She has a B.A. in American History from Goddard College and an M.L.S. from the University at Albany, State University of New York.