Review of Shaker Cut-and-Fold Booklets: Unfolding the Gift Drawings of Emily Babcock

Among the material culture of the Shakers, gift drawings represent some of the most recognizable visual images.Crafted during the revivalistic period known as the Era of Mother's Work, gift drawings record with meticulous detail visions of the heavenly sphere and offer spiritual messages to guide those in the physical world.Beautiful renderings of the unseen world, gift drawings have received attention from several scholars, including Faith and Edward Deming Andrews, Daniel Patterson, and Sally Promey.Based on exhaustive and meticulous research, independent scholar Sandra A. Soule adds new insights to our understanding of an unusual and rare form of gift drawings: cutand-fold booklets.Soule offers two key insights: first, that cut-and-fold booklets worked together in intricate pairings, and, second, that the one extant pair of these tiny volumes was crafted by Mount Lebanon Second Family Shaker Emily Babcock.Cut-and-fold booklets are a wonder of design and artistry.Individual sheets of paper hold text and images on both front and back.Two sheets, each notched with geometric cuts, when folded together and then several times over, create small booklets.Very few of these sheets survive-it was Soule's curiosity about the purpose of the few extant sheets, catalogued as individual manuscripts, that led her, with scale reproductions, to figure out that the sheets were paired and then to assemble two related sheets into one book.Soule determined that three