The word “frame” possesses an interesting history. Originally from the Old English framian, the word meant “to benefit, make progress”; in Middle English its meaning as framen was extended to include “construct.” From there it assumed the noun form that art historians know but do not necessarily consider with the same care as the painting that rests inside its borders. Eli Wilner reverses this trend. In The Gilded Edge: The Art of the Frame, he has gathered together scholars, curators, and framers to outline a new field of collecting and study. As Wilner writes in his introduction to these ten essays, the “connoisseurship of American picture frames has been negligible” (11). And he depicts himself as a pioneer of sorts. Recognizing in the 1980s the potential value of his own collection, Wilner established the Eli Wilner & Company frame dealership in 1983. The Gilded Edge, he writes, has been a “dream…for more than twenty years” (11). Like the American collectors of the Gilded Age who methodically went about the business of collecting and cataloguing, buying and (sometimes) selling, Wilner’s interest in frames is both scholarly and financial. It has always been thus in the world of fine and decorative arts....