"A survey of the main porcelain factories of Europe and Asia with 64 pages of plates, many line drawings, a bibliography, and tables of makers' marks."--Cover

"This is the book on porcelain we have been waiting for. . . . A remarkable achievement."—Edmund de Waal, author of The Hare with Amber Eyes A sweeping cultural and economic history of porcelain, from the eighteenth century to the present Porcelain was invented in medieval China—but its secret recipe was first reproduced in Europe by an alchemist in the employ of the Saxon king Augustus the Strong. Saxony’s revered Meissen factory could not keep porcelain’s ingredients secret for long, however, and scores of Holy Roman princes quickly founded their own mercantile manufactories, soon to be rivaled by private entrepreneurs, eager to make not art but profits. As porcelain’s uses multiplied and its price plummeted, it lost much of its identity as aristocratic ornament, instead taking on a vast number of banal, yet even more culturally significant, roles. By the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, it became essential to bourgeois dining, and also acquired new functions in insulator tubes, shell casings, and teeth. Weaving together the experiences of entrepreneurs and artisans, state bureaucrats and female consumers, chemists and peddlers, Porcelain traces the remarkable story of “white gold” from its origins as a princely luxury item to its fate in Germany’s cataclysmic twentieth century. For three hundred years, porcelain firms have come and gone, but the industry itself, at least until very recently, has endured. After Augustus, porcelain became a quintessentially German commodity, integral to provincial pride, artisanal industrial production, and a familial sense of home. Telling the story of porcelain’s transformation from coveted luxury to household necessity and flea market staple, Porcelain offers a fascinating alternative history of art, business, taste, and consumption in Central Europe.

Over 7000 years of Chinese pottery and porcelain in text and pictures, from Neolithic times through the fall of the Qing dynasty in 1911. Illustrations follow the evolution from the earliest pottery tomb figures to the fine porcelains created by edicts of nineteenth century Chinese Emperors. The book features over 400 color photographs, a Time Line of selected historical events, and values in today's marketplace for each pictured item.

Published for the first time in English, Porcelain is a book-length cycle of forty-nine poems written over the course of more than a decade that together serve as a lament for Durs Grünbein's hometown, Dresden, which was destroyed in the Allied firebombing of February 1945. Porcelain is a book-length cycle of forty-nine poems written over the course of more than a decade that together serve as a lament for Durs Grünbein's hometown, Dresden, which was destroyed in the Allied firebombing of February 1945. The book is at once a history and "declaration of love" to the famed "Venice on the Elbe," so catastrophically razed by British bombs; a musical fusion of eyewitness accounts, family memories, and stories, of monuments and relics; the story of the city's destiny as seen through a prism of biographical enigmas, its intimate relation to the "white gold" porcelain that made its fortune and reflections on the power and limits of poetry. Musical, fractured, ironic, and elegiac, Porcelain is controversial, too, in setting itself against what Grünbein calls the "myth" of the Germans as innocent victims of a war crime. At the same time, it never loses sight of the horror deliberately visited on an unwitting civilian population, nor the devastation that looms so large in the German memory. Published for the first time in English, on the seventy-fifth year anniversary of the firebombing, this edition contains new images, notes, Grünbein's own reflections and an additional canto--an extraordinary act of poetic kintsugi for the fractured remains of Dresden's memory.

A compelling examination of the ultimate global commodity, blue and white porcelain, from kiln to consumers across the globe.

The product of a ten-year collaboration among eminent American, Chinese, and Japanese scholars, Chinese Ceramics offers a new perspective in interpreting the oldest and one of the most admired Chinese art forms, from its technological aspects to its aesthetic value. The volume includes a chapter on Chinese export ceramics that delves into Chinese trade activities and ceramic wares made for export as well as a chapter about the authenticity of Chinese ceramics, discussing issues related to connoisseurship of this Chinese art."--Pub. desc.

Through The Ages for classes 6 to 8 follows the latest syllabus guidelines of Council for the Indian School Certificate Examinations. With an attractive layout and interesting features and activities, the books have been designed to make studying history and civics enjoyable for the students.

This is the fifth revised edition of a standard work of reference which was first published in 1969. It is a remarkable book that effortlessly and enjoyably takes the reader from the earliest pottery extant dating from the first Neolithic period, through the great classical names such as Wedgwood and Spode, Staffordshire and Ironstone to the more readily collectable pottery of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. There are many individual studies of potteries and potters but here Griselda Lewis succeeds in putting this vast array of them into an understandable historical perspective and traces the links in the development of the rich tradition of pottery in England. This book triumphantly succeeds in the most difficult task of all, that of arousing enthusiasm. - this comment by a reviewer on a previous edition of the work neatly sums up one of the main reasons for the book's enduring success. The new edition contains almost three times as much colour as the first edition and benefits from the wealth of research that has gone on in the past twelve years. There is a large section on modern studio potters and commercial wares that will be of particular interest to the contemporary collector. AUTHOR: Griselda Lewis is author of many books on pottery including An Introduction to English Pottery, A Picture History of English Pottery, Prattware (with John Lewis) and A Handbook of Crafts. 175 colour & 173 b/w illustrations

The finest history of pottery available, this book offers an inspirational journey through one of the oldest and most widespread of human activities.