ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

      A book with a long gestation accrues many debts of gratitude, many stories along its journey, and this one is no exception. At the top of my list are Darielle Mason and Leslie Essoglu of the South Asian Art Department at the Philadelphia Museum of Art for providing the first wonderful opportunity to examine the kantha in the Stella Kramrisch and Jill and Sheldon Bonowitz collections for the 2009 exhibition Kantha: The Embroidered Quilts of Bengal. It was an extraordinarily stimulating experience to work closely with spectacular textiles, and I quickly fell in love with the material. I thank the Costumes and Textile Department for generous access to textiles, files, and ideas. Dilys Blum looked at several textiles with me and offered an invaluable sounding board for ideas. Barbara Darlin facilitated opening up the same textiles and checking object files many times in the past few years. I thank Sara Reiter and Bernice Morris for their conservators’ eye and tools in looking at Kamala’s kantha with me. Tim Tiebout offered his expertise as I struggled with my own photographs of the textiles.

      Susan Bean not only gave me access to the many objects and images at the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, Massachusetts, that helped me understand the range of material I was mulling, but read drafts, offered astute comments at conference panels, and popped images to me via email from her own fieldtrips. Rosemary Crill, Nick Barnard, and Suhasini Sinha at the Victoria and Albert Museum generously accommodated many requests, as did Richard Blurton at the British Museum. Sona Datta and Yuthika Sharma, during their tenure at the British Museum, helped unfold many textiles and scrolls. Shailendra Bhandare at the Ashmolean Museum of Art and Archaeology at Oxford University kindly helped me make sense of an embroidered image. At the Yale Center for British Art, during my month-long stint, I received extraordinary research support from Gillian Forester and Elizabeth Fairman, who introduced me to things I had assiduously avoided, urging me to consider sketchbooks and drawings for English samplers, along with narrowing my list of manuscripts with a degree of precision I could not have anticipated. Francis Lapka and Katherine Chabla, along with many others, helped me learn to appreciate the worlds of copies and floating images, their lines and methods of making. Bindu Gude and Stephen Markel gave me generous access to material at