“Canadian Country Furniture”, by Michael Bird

Bird, Michael S. Canadian Country Furniture: 1675-1950. Toronto: Stoddart, 1994. Print.

I got a little bit fooled by this book, since the 1950 in the title refers to the western part of Canada only.  I’ve noticed this myself – that a house in a museum in Saskatchewan built in 1900 might be very like one built in 1850 in the Maritimes.  So, since I was looking for what furniture might have been in my 1913 Ontario farmhouse, it wasn’t as useful as I’d hoped.

It’s still a neat read, though, with tons of photographs and exhaustive information.  Bird would appear to be a completist and a perfectionist, traveling coast to coast to see and photograph antiques.  It’s divided by province so you can concentrate on the area you’re interested in, although it would be neat to see all this great information in a database where you could see dish dressers through time, for instance.