Although pottery and porcelain have been infinitely more diverse and more prolifically produced in the 19th and 20th centuries than ever before, the one general encyclopedia of unquestioned authority on ceramics, Honey’s European Ceramic Art, stops at 1815.

Elisabeth Cameron’s new Encyclopedia of Pottery & Porcelain takes up where Honey left off and covers the ceramics of the world for the period from 1800 to 1960. It has been compiled for collectors, dealers, museums, students of ceramics and others with an interest in the subject who need a concise, comprehensive, authoritative and accessible work of reference of international scope. It contains about 2500 fully cross-referenced entries on factories, potters, decorators and designers, with bibliographical details and the relevant makers where necessary, 500 or so integrated black and white illustrations and 32 in colour. Glossary entries define the various materials, techniques and styles.

The growth of mass production and the later reactions against it on the part of artist and studio potters, the experiments and excesses of the decades after 1850, the perpetually shifting movements and groupings of the period – the Arts and Crafts and Aesthetic movements, Art Nouveau, the Wiener Werkstätte, Art Deco and so on – all these topics and innumerable others are encompassed in this richly researched and uniquely informative volume. The text has been checked by leading experts on the subject.

Elisabeth Cameron was responsible for the ceramics sections of the Collins Encyclopedia of Antiques and The Collector’s Encyclopedia, Victoriana to Art Deco, and was co-author with Philippa Lewis of Potters on Pottery, an account by some British potters of their work in the 1970s.