How to make pottery

Chapter 4: PREFACE

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About This Book

This practical guide introduces clay types, their mineral components, and necessary tools and tempers, explaining how material properties affect plasticity and firing. It provides step-by-step techniques for hand-building and wheel-throwing, with illustrated sequences for coils and shaping. Decoration and glazing methods are described alongside recipes for glazes and advice on application and firing temperatures. The text includes instructions for making plaster moulds and tiles and for constructing and operating a kiln. It also presents basket-covered techniques, surveys indigenous pottery practices, and outlines contemporary American studio approaches, emphasizing the balance of utility and aesthetic design for beginners.

PREFACE

An art like pottery-making, which is nearly as old as the human race, is naturally approached with some degree of reverence. One thinks of its old masters in various lands and ages—how they were content to spend a lifetime in the study and practice of it.

There is, however, another thought that comes to mind—that this art, like every other, had to have its beginning. Moreover, every potter, from the primitive man who first realised that clay which held water could be moulded into portable vessels for a like purpose, to the artist potter of to-day, has learned the first steps of the craft.

It was this thought that encouraged me to study the beginnings of pottery, and that leads me to offer this book to those who would also start clay-working, with no other qualification than the wish to learn how to make pottery.