Description

Immediate dispatch from Somerset. Nice older book in good condition. Pages in good condition. No notes or highlighting. Some creasing and marking to the cover. See images. Fantastic book.

About the book >.>.> The glass craftsman as he open door of his furnace is displaying skills which have been inextricably linked with the flame -his energy source- for millennia. What takes shape between the heat of the latter and the manipulative skills of the former is the substance-glass. There is a curious balance between the fire the craftsman and his product. Fire melts glass making it duclite as water and the craftsman teases this into a from working as it cools. It is that imperceptable creative instant that emerges from the blending of these three elements the moment when glass takes on its definitive shape that remains the age-long secret of the glass worker’s skill. It is towards the suc- cess of that creative moment that generations of glass workers have worked passing on their skills unrecorded as oral literature.(1) Only a few catalysts act as variables to this traditionalised craft ritual little else has changed in its performance through the ages. Indeed the basic in- gredients of glass are neither transparent nor brilliant as glass but must wonder at their own transformation in the melting flame of the glass maker’s furnace and the skilled hands of the craftsman as cooling they become that brilliant clear or tinted phenomenon we call glass. There are a number of crafts whose techniques are of considerable interest to us now which have survived unchanged for millennia. Many of these have throughout their considerable pasts undergone vast technical development. Glass making is one such craft in which extremely interesting technical ad- vancement has taken place consistently over the millenia. (LL)