NEW YORK CITY -- Along with people and things, certain books achieve legendary status in the antiques field. Ralph Carpenter's The Arts and Crafts of Newport, a slim volume published in 1953, comes to mind. So does Betty Ring's Let Virtue Be A Guide To Thee. Her study of Rhode Island samplers routinely trades for as much as $825.

High on the list of sought after titles is American Painted Furniture 1660-1880. If you can find a dog eared copy of the 1972 volume it will cost you about $150. Written by Dean A. Fales, Jr, with the design assistance of Robert Bishop and editorial supervision of Cyril I. Nelson Ī three big names in the folk-art field -- American Painted Furniture quickly became the essential reference on decorated surfaces. It was a stimulus to the market and an arbiter of style.

It took two scholars with a longtime love of the brush and a keen knowledge of the marketplace to recognize that as good as American Painted Furniture was, it could be better. And a lot easier to find. So Cynthia V.A. Schaffner and Susan Klein, both authors, editors, and former trustees of the Museum of American Folk Art, set to work culling documents, refining their focus, and sifting through an ever growing pile of photographs.

The result is American Painted Furniture 1790-1880. Released late last year, it both expands upon and narrows the earlier work, lopping off 130 years of Hadley chests and japanned Boston highboys but pushing further into the Nineteenth Century with examples of both formal and country furniture. "We wanted to have more representative examples from the 1860s through 1880s, and more regional Southern and Western material," Schaffner explained.

The two, whose first project together was Folk Hearts: A Celebration Of The Heart Motif In American Folk Art (Knopf, 1984), worked hand in glove to produce a seamless effort reflecting individual strength but little personal bias. Schaffner believed strongly in studying technical manuals and trade documents as a way of understanding Nineteenth Century production and distribution schemes.

"There's a need to push American folk art, to explore it through primary source material. It was during our research for this book that I really discovered Nineteenth Century furniture finishers' manuals," says Schaffner, who was simultaneously completing her master's degree at Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum, in Manhattan.

Schaffner plunged far deeper than she had intended, in the course of her study learning to look at high-style furniture, particularly, in a new way. She says, "It's difficult to locate those books and, to some extent, it is tough reading. But we wanted to bring forward something new on surface treatments."

"For example," she elaborates, "when you read in one manual that the surface is meant to `withstand water and shine like glass,' then you begin to understand. Another Nineteenth Century manual talks about the imitation of the colors, grains, and figures of fancy hardwood." Citing John W. Masury's 1872 booklet, The American Grainer's Handbook, she concludes, "When you read something in a period manual you begin to get inside the mind of the ornamenters."

She calls a trip to the Boston workshop of conservator Robert D. Mussey, Jr, "extraordinarily revealing" and identifies as a "great find" a vivid red, fold-up pattern book of 1800 from the collection of the Redwood Library and Athenaeum in Newport, R.I. Though English, it illustrates in charming fashion the multiplicity of decorative schemes that might be applied to a series of chairs made essentially from the same template.

It was while comparing notes with Peter M. Kenny, the Metropolitan Museum of Art curator whose landmark show on the French emigre cabinetmaker Charles-Honore Lannuier opened March 17, that the authors learned of an engraved trade card for William Buttre's Fancy Chair Manufactory. The circa 1813 document, now in the collection of Winterthur Museum, reveals that labor, at least in urban settings, was far more specialized than once thought.

"One man does varnishing, another the basecoat, and another, in fancier clothes, does the ornamental painting," explains Schaffner, who also questions old assertions that decorative painters were itinerants. "Paint had to be hand ground and made every day. Readymade didn't come on the market until after the Civil War. Even then it wasn't considered stable. A lot more was painted in shops than we might otherwise have thought," she concludes.

For her part, Klein says she most enjoyed uncovering details of little known schools and artists. "It's a sleeper," she says of furniture by Jacob and Elias Knagy, a father and son working in Somerset County, Penn., around 1860. "They made fabulous looking faux-grained painted furniture with gilt decoration. They used the buttermilk paint and dovetail construction popular earlier in the century. This was a real find because we have always believed that painted furniture production declined in the later Nineteenth Century."

American Painted Furniture departs dramatically from its prototype, cleaving starkly between high-style furniture and its country counterpart. The first four chapters are devoted to Boston, Salem, Philadelphia, Baltimore and New York City. The last four cover New England, the Middle Atlantic, the South, and the West. Concluding appendices survey painting and gilding technique in more detail; offer a bibliography; and provide a directory of sources, supplies, and restoration services for painting and gilding.

"We started out by thinking that we would only do objects that were not in Fales, but our editors felt that a lot of readers might not have seen the earlier work," says Schaffner. The result is a new volume that mixes familiar pieces that were "just too good not to include" with startling new discoveries.

Thanks to printing innovations, the color illustration has a depth and clarity not possible when Bishop and Fales were at work. With principle photography by Schecter M. Lee, American Painted Furniture opens with a magnification of the vinegar-grained surface of a Schoharie County corner cupboard. Its rich tortoise-colored decoration is evidence of the miracle worked with inexpensive materials by talented, imaginative painters.

The Schoharie cupboard comes courtesy of New York dealers Robert Kinnaman and Brian Ramaekers and Kelter-Malce Inc. Other dealers are credited throughout the book. This nod to the trade is a welcome one, providing validation and another look at some of the major finds of the last decade. Remember the Philadelphia secretary bookcase with dazzling eglomise panels that Ed Weissman found in Argentina and Leigh Keno brought to the Winter Antiques Show a few years ago? It's here too, courtesy of Mr and Mrs Jonathan W. Warner.

The book's breathtaking furniture selection is enhanced by reproductions of paintings, watercolors, printed documents, manuscripts, decorators' boxes, and ornamental tools. "Depictions of interiors help us understand how furniture was used in the home. It's not to say that we were entirely original, but I think we came up with some new connections," notes Schaffner.

"Once we started our research it was like opening up Pandora's box," says Klein, who acknowledges that the ambitious project has prompted as many questions as it has answered. "I think we have a fairly good understanding of painted furniture, but there is still more work to do in specific regions, particularly Baltimore and the South." Adds Schaffner, "The literature of Nineteenth Century furniture finishers is largely unknown to furniture historians. I'm dedicating the next six or eight months to making a systematic study that will help us better understand original intent."

Widely admired, painted surfaces have also been imitated and refreshed for much of the past century. "We gathered lots of Nineteenth Century advertisements offering to repaint furniture. Then there was Esther Stevens Brazer, whose 1940 book Early American Decoration encouraged people to repaint furniture the way they thought it was intended to look," says Schaffner. "Many pieces have been striped and repainted our with Twentieth Century paint. Buyers need to be careful about that," notes Klein.

Rather than replacing the Fales classic, American Painted Furniture 1790-1880 ends up being an essential companion to the first volume and a compelling statement of our growing appreciation and understanding of painted and gilded surfaces. Write Schaffner and Klein, "Paint can turn the most ordinary furniture into decorative sculpture. It is the hand-painted embellishments, the remnants of the flourish of a natural bristle brush, the depth of handmade colors produced by hand-ground pigmented paints, and the pattern of wear resulting from years of use that are celebrated in the furniture shown here."

American Painted Furniture 1790-1880 by Cynthia V.A. Schaffner and Susan Klein was published by Clarkson Potter, New York. It sells for $65 hardcover.