HATFIELD — In the past five years, adult coloring books have gone from a curiosity to a cultural force.
You can buy Amazon.com best-sellers with titles like “Release Your Anger: Midnight Edition.” You can attend adult coloring clubs and meetings in 49 states, including in western Massachusetts. You can get adult coloring books about Donald Trump, “Game of Thrones” and, now, the history of Hatfield.
Though the artifacts in the Hatfield Historical Museum’s newest exhibit date from the 1700s to the 1920s, they tie in with this 21st-century trend. When “Celebrating Nature: When Beauty was Infused in Everyday Objects” opens Sunday, during Memorial Day weekend, visitors will be able to buy adult coloring books inspired by objects in the collection.
Kathie Gow, the museum’s curator, said two events inspired the exhibit and book: receiving an adult coloring book for Christmas and cataloging small objects for the museum’s inventory project.
“So many of the things have these beautiful designs, and they’re just ordinary, everyday objects and not something that’s necessarily going to be featured in an exhibit,” she said.
The museum selected objects for the exhibit based solely on their aesthetic appeal, Gow said, rather than focusing on a specific historic context. And while a few objects might show up in future, context-oriented exhibits, she said most of them — like a grave marker and a gas sconce — probably would only be featured here.
These objects are appealing, Gow said, because they reflect a period of time when simple function and attention to detail were not mutually exclusive. Now, she rarely sees such care put into the making of a comb or a lipstick case.
“There’s less manufacturing that happens in the country now,” she said. “And price is such a factor that to produce these things today would cost a lot more.”
To put together the exhibit and the coloring book, Gow said she went through an archive of images of the museum’s collection and sent photographs to local illustrator Monica Vachula and her husband, George, who created pages based on the photographs.
The exhibit focuses on objects with designs influenced by nature – vines, grapes, floral patterns – which Gow said she’s particularly drawn to.
The book Gow got for Christmas also had designs based on nature, and though she’s only had time to color one page, she said she can see why the books have become so popular — they ease day-to-day stress.
“It gets you alone … to slow down a little bit,” she said. “The one time I colored in a page, it was calming. It felt very therapeutic.”
The museum printed 100 books, which will sell for $10 each as a fundraiser for the Hatfield Historical Society, and which double as guides to the exhibit. Gow said she expects the books to sell out, and the museum may consider a second printing.
It also might consider making a second book. Gow said she’s come across several other designs that would lend themselves well to the project — particularly old business logos and letterheads — but didn’t have room to include them in this exhibit.
“It takes so much time to put up an exhibit,” she said. “Would we have a second exhibit associated with a book? Probably not. But we might do another book of the items we had to put to the side while we were planning this.”
Functioning elements of the museum itself will play into the exhibit, too. It will include pictures of one of the building’s heating grates, which Gow said she believes is original to the 122-year-old building, and of the drawer pulls on the display cases, which date to the early 1900s.
Squatting to examine the intricate grate, she traced her finger along its metal-wrought daisies.
“They just don’t make things like it anymore,” she said.