Books Received

Books-Livres 441 catalogue display of the tools and stamps listed by a New York supplier. A long and detailed list of sources of supply (for the U.S. and Britain) is given at the end, and there is a photograph of a sidewalk jeweler’s supply shop, its owner crouched beside his tool-crowded shelves,taken in the Indian city of Tiruchirapalli. Many of the photographs are the fruit of travel by the author himself, particularly in India. The book is short of encyclopedic; one big volume cannot encompass the fullest detail, but it provides a genuine start toward a dazzlingvariety of techniques. The book openswith an introduction to metals and their properties, with small size wire-drawing and sheet-making in sterling silvzr described fully as an example. All the schemesof hand cold-working and finishing, such as chasing, etching and stamping, are next, followed bythe inlayingmethods, then by soldering, niello, mokume and granulation. The forming of metals by raising, spinning, forging, welding and casting are here, methods as old as lost wax and as new as centrifugal investment casting and electroforming . The last chapter is a guide to hand tools, and there is a long appendix of tables for wire sizes, sheet weights, densities, areas and the other hard facts useful for the handcraftsman in metal. Any young craftsman working with metal would find this book a practical guide and a constant inspiration. It would be a prized possession for any school or group shop working in metals by hand. It never recognizes the machine tool, except for a metal-spinning lathe. Nonetheless, it invests the objects one sees with a sense of their origin. (Reprinted with permission. Copyright 0 1968 by Scientific American, Inc. All rights reserved.) Creative GlassBlowing. James E. Hammesfahr and Clair L. Strong. W. H. Freeman, San Francisco, California, 1968. $8.00. If metalworking is worldwide and ancient, the joining and shaping of manufactured glass tubing by hand in a gas flame, called ‘lampwork‘ in the trade, is a small and specialized craft that is indispensable to science. It is only a century since Hammesfahr’s grandfather first brought some of the techniques to this country from Germany and Bohemia. With a few specialized store-bought gas burners at a couple of dollars each, the compressor from a junked refrigerator, a household gas supply, a stock of 4-foot lengths of tubing and rod, a few ordinary tools and ‘a good fire and a pair of dexterous hands’ you can become a glassblower. Students in chemistry, biology and physics once had to learn this craft; now they come to depend onthewiderrange ofmachine-made itemsand onthe professionals. Here is how that expert works. Colorful, drollfigurinesandjewelrycan alsobe made by lampwork as an absorbing hobby for young and old. It is fun to watch, and it is more fun to doalthough it can be frustrating to learn. It is all remarkably vivid in the clear, detailed, scientifically insightful text and marvelously penetrating line drawings of this book, a model of how-to-do-it books that has few peers for quality of teaching. School shops, attention! The reader has a rare advantage here: the book makes everything seem so real he will understand what he has only read about almost as though he had actually done it. Let us hope there will still be plenty of doers. (Reprinted with permission. Copyright 01968 by Scientific American, Tnc. All rights reserved.) BOOKS RECEIVED A te Mamma, Marie Albina Acavuzzo, Fratelli Fabbri Editori, Italy, 1969, 15 pp., illus. Aesthetics and Art Theory, Harold Osborne, Longmans, Green, London, 1968, 217 pp., illus., 42s. Antares, dessins anciens et modernes estampes du XV au XX siecle, catalogue No. 4, 1969 ‘Crispin de passe’, Guy Proute & JacquelineEzratty, Saint-Cloud, France, 1969,43 pp., illus. Architecttura Giapponese Contemporanea-Contemporary Japanese Architecture, Ed. Paolo Riani, CentroDi/Edizioni,Florence, 1969,282pp., illus. Art and Understanding,Derek Clifford,New York Graphic Society,Conn. Greenmich, 1968, 166pp., illus. $11.50. Creationpicturale et ordre cerebral, MarcelleWahl, Editions Ditis, Paris, 1964. CulturalPolicy: A Preliminary Study, Unesco,Paris, 1969,49pp. Design by Accident,James F. O’Brien, Dover,New York, 1968,215pp., illus. The Perception of Brightness and Darkness, Leo M...