In 1992 Martha Deese published a seminal article entitled “Gerald Summers and Makers of Simple Furniture.”¹ Based on a 1986 interview that Deese, then a graduate student, conducted with Gerald’s widow, Marjorie, and on extant personal and company papers and photographs owned by the family, the article provided the first account of the company that the couple founded in 1931 and included fifteen images of little-known furniture.² For nearly forty years it remained the only reliable and widely referenced secondary source on its subject.

Deese’s long-awaited new book remains deeply rooted in her article in terms of sources, approach, and methodology, although the story is told in much greater depth. Covering a mere nine years of furniture design and production—the entire life of the small-scale Makers of Simple Furniture (MSF) company—plus one post–World War II design, its length is ample for its subject and its number of images generous (thanks to the support of the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts).

The organization of the book is mainly chronological. It starts with an account of the childhoods and early professional lives of its two protagonists. Gerald Summers (1899–1967) was apprenticed as an engineer from age sixteen, then, after serving in World War I, worked (from 1923) in the same profession at Marconi’s Wireless Telegraph Company. Marjorie Butcher (1909–1996) joined the same firm as a secretary in 1929, having been forced to leave school at age fourteen after her engineer father died, to work in the family gramophone shop. By the time they met, Gerald had made furniture for his own flat, and then, together, they built furniture for Marjorie’s bedroom in her family’s house (neither are documented).

In 1931—a landmark year for the couple—Gerald rented a basement in central London as a living, workshop, and showroom space. Marjorie then resigned from Marconi, moved in with Gerald (they married only later in 1935, when she took Gerald’s surname), and they jointly founded their new furniture company. Marjorie was the manager of their small showroom, which was near major furniture shops such as Heal’s and Maple & Co., and Gerald was the designer. The couple worked together during evenings and weekends until mid-1933, when Gerald resigned from his day job at Marconi. Although the business was a fledgling one, by the end of the year the couple had moved the furniture workshop to a nearby, larger location.

The next three chapters (2–4), approximately one-third of the book’s text, focus in detail on the products sold by MSF. Chapter 2 (“Furniture for the Concrete Age 1931–33”) describes the difficult first years of the firm, with the voice of Marjorie Summers from the extensively quoted interview, retrospectively explaining their early commercial challenges, Gerald’s focus on “function” as the driving force in his design, and his “philosophy . . . against any decoration” (31). Deese is undoubtedly correct when she highlights “the rigor with which [Gerald] applied his engineering sensibility to his furniture” (31) as a distinguishing feature of his designs, especially given that he had no other training or professional experience with furniture.

Chapter 3 (“Some Wonders of Plywood 1934”) focuses on the year in which the firm produced Summers’s now best-known designs: the single-piece bent-plywood armchair, an unusual high-back chair, and a technically ambitious curvilinear food trolley. The latter product resulted from a commission from Jack Pritchard (1899–1992), then working both for plywood distributors Venesta and on his personal Isokon project. Deese discusses the relationship between Pritchard and Summers in this and the previous chapter.

Chapter 4 (“Furnishing the Modern Home 1935–37”) considers MSF products through the lens of domestic room types, which offers the author scope to usefully discuss them in the context of changes to various room types before and during the 1930s. This also offers Deese a practical means of organizing and describing about half of the seventy individual pieces dating from the period under discussion, years she calls “the high point of Gerald’s career” (77).

Chapters 5–7 look at Simple Furniture products in terms of, respectively, “Patrons” (consumers might be a more accurate term), “in Print” (coverage in contemporary press articles and books), and “on View.” The latter term includes everyday promotions in furnishing shops and trade displays, such as London’s first annual Piano Exhibition in 1936, as well as ones for a wider public. These exhibitions for broader audiences included the Ideal Home Exhibition (1935), the Royal Institute of British Architects’ Everyday Things (1936), and finally, the government-appointed Council for Art and Industry’s The Working Class Home (1937).

The final chapter (“If the Flat Stops a Bomb 1938–40”) covers the years of the firm under the shadow of a looming war that, once it began in 1939, led to the bankruptcy of the company within a year. The chapter ends in the 1950s with the couple setting up a business designing and repairing machine tools. Gerald occasionally designed furniture during the postwar years, with a serious attempt in the mid-1950s to manufacture and market a small, three-legged metal stool with wooden legs, the TV-T table. While the ingenious knockdown table made to hold drinks or small items was not a commercial success, the machine tool business was, especially as it eventually focused solely on ball and roller bearings for industrial use.

A closing section of plates reproduces some fifty original, typewritten or printed, single-page “design specification sheets” at full scale.³ These were created for use as a showroom marketing tool for MSF items, each listing materials, prices, and sizes for the seventy standard products available. These pages, a rich source of data, are emblematic of the book’s central aim to fully document and share information about MSF. However, the fact that the prices in the plates section are not used at all in the book to locate MSF within its contemporary marketplace is one of numerous missed opportunities that mar the book’s in-depth presentation of MSF’s founders and furniture.

Given that Gerald Summers used plywood in virtually all his designs during the years of MSF, the book’s claim to authority would have been bolstered by more detailed explanation of the furniture’s construction and how different plywoods were used in different ways in MSF models, including in combination with solid woods. For example, Deese indeed mentions that Summers built box-like wardrobes without the need for framed support but does not explain how this was achieved. The use of “airplane plywood” and its thinness and flexibility (35) are mentioned, but Deese fails to make clear the distinction between that bendable, premade product and plywood manufactured in the MSF workshop from stacked and glued sheets of veneer over a shaped former.⁴ The unusual use of the word “rims” is clearly defined (“moulded plywood sheets produced in advance to the desired dimensions and curvature” [102]), but it remains unexplained how that differs (if at all) from the long-standing furniture-making tradition, in small workshops as well as factories, of making parts in batches to be used in different models. Another oddity is the lack of clear explanation of the way the term “bentwood”—generally used for steam-bent, solid wood furniture associated with Thonet—is used beyond the implication of the author’s opposing it to “ordinary plywood” (39).

While both Alvar Aalto’s and Isokon’s furniture are mentioned many times in the book, clear distinctions or similarities between their use of plywood, except for the most summary observations, and what Gerald’s particular contribution was, are lacking. Deese has, however, published a drawing by Gerald of a “coffee skid” (a low table) dated March 1933 that causes her to revise her previous view, and challenge that of others, that he was inspired by Aalto’s treatment of plywood by that date. Instead, she follows Marjorie Summers’s emphatic view that Gerald’s furniture was conceived “absolutely completely independently” of Aalto (31), whose furniture of 1931–33 also used identical bases and even continuous legs and bases. This could conceivably be true but only if one accepts Marjorie’s assertion that “we knew nothing about other designers. No, he wasn’t interested. No, he was doing his own thing” (39).

The author devotes far less text to MSF’s use of plywood than she does to her clear but highly formalist descriptions of most of the furniture illustrated that focus on aesthetics, on Gerald’s “geometric vocabulary . . . [and] expressive language” (31), “visual power” (85), or the “beauty of the wardrobe’s smooth planes” (107). She clearly views this as essential “formal analysis,” which she cites as “often neglected” (though does not explain the basis for her view) in captions to 1930s “pictorial reviews” in magazines (200). While Deese’s descriptions can clarify the separate elements of a piece, sometimes the method of joining, and how they might function with other furniture (for example, chairs with tables), there is much more mention of “surfaces,” “lines,” “planes,” “mass,” “broad arcs,” “concentric circles,” and “cubic volumes.” Such vocabulary, combined with references to Gerald’s “oeuvre,” “genius,” and “brilliance,” jar in a design history book written in 2024.

Related to such hyperbolic language and underpinning much of the book is the author’s desire to ensure that her protagonists and their products are “recognized and remembered” (7 and 284) and that what she describes as the 1930s “celebrity” (1) of their single-piece plywood armchair “should be restored beyond the ‘scholarly appreciation’” (1) that MSF began achieving in the 1980s. This neglect is difficult to see in today’s marketplace, media, or museums. Similarly, there is a tendency to aggrandize elements of MSF history that leads to more than one magazine being described as a “press advocate” for MSF (195, 199) and portrays the granting of patents to Gerald as recognition of the quality or success of his designs, rather than their having been granted strictly for the novelty of invention, regardless of appearance.

Deese writes that, unlike MSF, the reputations of contemporary firms such as Gordon Russell and Isokon “survived the war” (2). However, no British furniture company, let alone one devoted solely to leading-edge modernist furniture, had remotely the longevity or popular appeal of Gordon Russell—a large firm with a wide product range that even made government-sanctioned Utility furniture from 1942–49—while no Isokon company existed at all between 1939 and 1964, and then only barely until a company using that name was re-established in 1981. Postwar knowledge of Isokon depended almost solely on the high profile of architect Marcel Breuer (1902–1981), whose ascending reputation in the United States after 1937 was based on his former association with the Bauhaus, his success as an influential postwar architect and teacher, and the promotion over more than thirty years of his Isokon Long Chair by New York’s Museum of Modern Art as a part of its canon of modern furniture.

In her introduction, Deese usefully reviews the return to public consciousness in the 1970s and 1980s of MSF’s bent-plywood armchair. She cites publications and exhibitions, focusing on “scholarly appreciation,” but omits the key role played by two other factors responsible for renewed interest in MSF furniture: London dealers, mainly interested in Art Deco, selling original Summers furniture in the 1970s, which resulted in the first museum acquisitions (by the Victoria and Albert Museum), including the single-piece armchair subsequently shown in the Hayward Gallery’s landmark exhibition Thirties: British Art and Design before the War (1979), and also the unlicensed manufacture of a reproduction of the single-piece armchair by the Alivar company in Italy in the 1980s that found distribution in Europe and, later, the United States (Deese illustrates an image from the New York Times in 1994, crediting the US distributor but saying no more on the subject). More of these reproduced chairs were certainly sold, especially internationally, than during the 1930s.

Finally, Deese’s 1992 article referenced 1930s sources almost entirely, in addition to her interview with Marjorie Summers. More than forty years later, Deese employs the same strategy. Given the transformation in scholarship on, to name a few relevant subjects, modernist design and architecture in 1930s Britain, Alvar and Aino Aalto’s furniture and its British reception, and on the long history of attitudes to plywood that very much informed its use and reputation in 1930s Britain, it is surprising that there is no mention of why such later sources are omitted. It implausibly suggests that the reader is being offered a more accurate, even unmediated, view of the context within which MSF existed.

Despite the reservations raised in the previous paragraphs, Deese has written what must still be regarded as an indispensable book on its subject, owing to new information from the Marjorie Summers interview and the family archive, including press clippings and a wealth of images. The book is beautifully designed, profusely illustrated with hitherto unpublished images, and well indexed and includes endnotes conveniently located in each chapter. Had it been more methodologically aware, it could have been much better.

Christopher Wilk

Christopher Wilk is keeper of performance, furniture, textiles, and fashion at the Victoria and Albert Museum, London, and the author of Plywood: A Material Story (Thames & Hudson, 2017).

1. 1 Martha Deese, “Gerald Summers and Makers of Simple Furniture,” Journal of Design History 5, no. 3 (1992), 183–205.
2. 2 Deese mainly refers to Gerald and Marjorie by their first names. Until the couple married in 1935, Marjorie was still Marjorie Butcher. Once she was married, and in later life, she called herself Marjorie Summers, as does Deese.
3. 3 Fourty-four of the fifty sheets, not necessarily identical to those in the book, formed part of the personal and company papers owned by the Summers family and gifted to the Victoria and Albert Museum’s Archive of Art and Design (AAD) by Marjorie and Gerald’s son, William Summers, in 2021. These are available for public access as the Gerald Summers, furniture designer, papers in the V&A’s Archive of Art and Design (see https://www.vam.ac.uk/archives/unit/ARC211553). Not all of the design or presentation drawings published in Deese’s book formed part of the gift.
4. 4 This is a key topic in explaining plywood construction because references to plywood often erroneously suggest that a dried and finished sheet of plywood was bent into shape whereas in the overwhelming majority of furniture with plywood elements, a stack of thin veneers are molded and glued to become plywood. This is discussed throughout this reviewer’s Plywood: A Material Story (Thames & Hudson, 2017).