Materials & Techniques in the Decorative Arts: An Illustrated Dictionary [Hardcover]

Some of the topics have a reassuring familiarity. Kilns, yes we know what they are, even used one in the school pottery classes. But that was just an electric box and here we have the rest of the story, ranging from Mesopotamia to China, via Stoke on Trent, and covering salt glazing, reduction firing, dragon kilns, beehive kilns, not to mention cross draught, down draught, up draught and bottle kilns. The smallest of which, it turns out, were used at Meissen in the early 18th century to achieve the high temperatures at which hard paste porcelain is fired.

Other topics - Rose Engine Turning, Depletion Gilding and Shell Gold - would be hard for even the diehard knowall to claim prior knowledge of. But if this book becomes as universally popular as it should, we will soon all know that the latter substance is merely gold leaf that has been ground in honey, kept in mussel shells and used as paint, or dried into drops and sold as 'shell gold'.

In part the pleasure of the book is that it seems to have been written by people with a real working familiarity with the subjects, materials and techniques they describe. Not that it becomes a how to do it workshop manual in any sense at all. More that it has the quality of a guided tour round the workshops of a skilled craftsman. Mysteries exposed and astonishing skills and ingenuity revealed at every turn.

This may explain the clarity of the entries. How often has one looked up some slightly complicated process in an encyclopedia or reference book, only to retreat dazed, confused and none the wiser. The descriptions - or rather explanations -throughout this book are crystal clear and leave you completely satisfied and enlightened.

It is well known, of course, that Dictionaries are the dullest books available. Apart from Technical dictionaries, that is, which are so boring that only nerds and anoraks read them. Or maybe they never read them but just collect them. This dictionary, despite being fairly technical, highly authoritative and relatively specialist, is not going to languish unread in anyone's collection. It is quite difficult to put down. It may not have a plot but there is never a dull moment (or a dreary paragraph).

One of the reassuring qualities of the traditional technologies and crafts which form the subject of this book is their relative accessibility, compared to the sheer incomprehensibility of modern technology, or rather of the gene and the microchip, which is what it mostly is. It is nice to see how a lathe works just as it is irritating not to be able to see or ever hope to really understand how our computers work.

The sheer variety of the topics which fall into the book's well contained subject area is entertaining in itself. Without a skip or a jump we pass coolly from Norman Slab - a kind of window glass- via Nubuck, which I think I had some shoes of , to Nylon, which I didn't realize only appeared on ladies thighs as late as 1939, to Oak, which has been imported from the Baltic since the 13th century - were our English hearts of oak actually Lithuanian then? To Obsidian which of course I knew made the inlaid eyes of Egyptian mummies didn't you. Oh really. All right then.

Perhaps the time has come to consider the recreational potential of the serious, but brilliantly executed reference book, as a neglected literary form. How can 572 closely printed pages of solid technical detail possibly compete for anyone's attention with a zap across the tv channels or a surf on the web. Well for surfability this book takes a lot of beating. You can zap it for hours, and if you don't have hours you can just pick it up and let it fall open at, well anything for a rewarding few seconds. Like the Guinness book of Records, perhaps, but rather less predictable. And maybe more useful.

Of course nothing is perfect and there are two problems with the book . Firstly, the size of the print may be ok for a quick dip and check but is not ideal for sustained reading. Then there is the 'And the did you know' factor.

You pick up 'Materials and Techniques in the Decorative Arts - an Illustrated Dictionary ' for five minutes and put it down two hours later (with red eyes) saying : "Did you know, and did you know and did you know." So it could lose you quite a few friends.