Hobbies: Leisure and the Culture of Work in America

Hobbies: Leisure and the Culture of Work in America. By Steven M. Gelber. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999. xiv, 374 pp. Cloth, $49.50, ISBN 0-231-11392-7. Paper, $18.00, ISBN 0-231-11393-5.)

The history of hobbies, more than that of other forms of popular culture, has mirrored the worlds of business and work. This is the thesis of Steven M. Gelber's carefully researched and lucid book. Of course, he does not deny that hobbies often served as compensations for routinized and stressful jobs or that this serious play has increased in number, variety, and most of all public acceptance with the growing segmentation of work and leisure after about 1880. He recognizes too that crafts served as a kind of protest against alienating work and, especially in the home workshop, gave...