"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.

The thirteen contributions to this collection all explore or exemplify the ongoing British interest in the socialist world before 1990. In autobiography, fiction, film, history, and lexicography, these chapters show how contemporary Britain is engaging with the past project to build socialism in Europe, and what this means for the present and the future of our continent. Contributions come from a wide range of disciplinary and geographical backgrounds, and the volume is further enriched by a short story especially written for this book and by an in-depth interview with the author of a recent popular history of the GDR. Together, these chapters offer a unique perspective into contemporary British writing on the ‘second world’ and the enduring fascination with the failures of futures past.

This reference work covers general works, ornament, folk art, arms and armour, ceramics, clocks and automata, costumes, enamels, furniture, glass, leather, metalwork, musical instruments, textiles, dolls and more. Essentially a new work rather than a revision, this annotated bibliography on the history of applied and decorative arts includes over 3000 descriptive entries on books written in western European languages. More than 1000 of these entries are new to the second edition, and approximately half are titles published since 1977. The remainder represent a significant expansion in breadth and depth of the bibliography, with the addition of nearly 500 titles of exhibition and museum catalogues and price guides.

The Arnhold porcelain collection is the most important of the great pre-war Meissen collections to have survived intact, remaining with the descendants of the original collectors Heinrich and Lisa Arnhold. Most of the pieces date from the first decades of the royal factory established by August II, elector of Saxony and king of Poland, in 1710, featuring a broad range of early works, much of it experimental. Brought to America in the 1940's ahead of the family's move from Dresden, Henry Arnhold has continued to expand its depth and range, resulting in a rich and personal collection. This volume contains essays by Sebastian Kuhn and Heike Biedermann, and is introduced by Henry's Arnhold's personal recollection of his family as collectors and art patrons in Dresden and of how the porcelain collection was created.

The Zsolnay Manufactory represents a triumph of Hungarian applied arts, for during its heyday it produced elegant and innovative ceramics for an international clientele as well as architectural ceramics that embellished some of the finest public and private buildings in the Austro-Hungarian empire. This manual recounts the story of the 150-year-old company and presents numerous examples of its work, showing how its changing fortunes reflect the cultural, economic and political developments in Central and Eastern Europe.

Pieces from the Northwest Collection, Northwest Corporation, Minneapolis.