Ancient Glass of Canterbury Cathedral, The

London: Lund Humphries and Company, 1949. Bernard Rackham's "The Ancient Glass of Canterbury Cathedral"

RACKHAM, Bernard. The Ancient Glass of Canterbury Cathedral. With a Foreword by the Late Archbishop Lord Lang of Lambeth. London: Published for the Friends of Canterbury Cathedral by Lund Humphries and Company, 1949.

First edition. Large quarto (12 5/8 x 9 1/4 inches; 330 x 238 mm.). xvi, 194 pp. Twenty-one color plates, including frontispiece, on heavy gray stock, each with a leaf of descriptive text, and an additional eighty monochrome plates throughout the text.

Original blue buckram decoratively stamped in gilt on front cover and lettered in gilt on spine. Top edge gilt. Upper corners lightly bumped. Some cellotape residue on front free endpapers from where a jacket once was attached. Otherwise a very good copy. With sticker at foot of title-page: Boston Book and Art Shop Inc., Boston, Massachusetts.

Many of the windows of Canterbury Cathedral contain stained glass, in fact there is around 1200 square meters of stained glass in the Cathedral as a whole. The oldest glass in the building dates from the twelfth century and is over 840 years old. These particular windows show the genealogies (family trees) of biblical figures. Over the years, many of the original windows have been destroyed. Some were lost during the reformation and many more during the English Civil war. In 1942, during World War II, Canterbury suffered heavy bombing. Much of the remaining medieval glass in The Cathedral only survived because it had been removed and stored in crates for safe keeping at the beginning of the war.
The windows of Canterbury Cathedral continue to bring color and light to the building, helping to create a sense of awe and wonder. Even today, new windows continue to be created for the Cathedral and a team of conservators work hard to look after the beautiful glass and ensure it will still be here for people to enjoy in the future.