The Eccentric Teapot: Four Hundred Years of Invention

New York: Abbeville Press, 1989. Hardcover. VG/VG-, some minor tears/fading at dust jacket edges, interior clean. Black cloth with color-illustrated, glossy dustjacket. 120 pp., 137 bw and color plates. Magazine article on teapots laid in. "Short and stout is the very least of it. Since the advent of tea drinking in China four thousand years ago, the form of the teapot has inspired endlessly imaginative variations--humble, elegant, quirky, and abstract. The investigation of the teapot as an art form in its own right has reached an inventive peak in the last two decades, but a fascination with the ceremony of tea drinking and the objects designed for that ceremony has flourished in both the East and West. This beautiful and delightful book introduces us to some of the most sublime, outrageous, and exotic teapots ever to grace a Mad Hatter's table. The designers of these idiosyncratic vessels have fully explored the ceremonial significance, spiritual associations, and formal complexities of teapots and tea drinking, and have given the results a distinctly eccentric spin. Both comfortably familar and utterly peculiar, this provocative gallery includes portrait teapots of Oscar Wilde, Ronald Reagan, and Queen Elizabeth; teapots impersonating animals, vegetables, and the Three Mile Island cooling towers; and teapots so far removed from the concerns of function that they resemble nothing as much as drawings of teapots. This book's charming and intelligent text also covers the history of tea and tea drinking, as well as that of the teapot itself. Noted writer, critic, and author of American Ceramics, Garth Clark analyzes the fascinating connection between ritual, cusine, and design that finds its nexus in these wonderfully singular teapots." - from the dj flap. An ideal gift!!