Customer Reviews

Paper Clay for Ceramic Sculptors: A Studio Companion

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There are few books out there on paper clay, so if you're one who learns by reading there's precious little to choose from. If you're interested in the medium, you probably need to have this book. But be forewarned: though it contains lots of information not currently available from other sources, it's one of the worst-produced books I've seen in a very long time.

The book was evidently never put through a professional editing process, and it shows. It's full of typos, punctuation errors, and confusing sentences. After reading the first few pages, I concluded (erroneously, as it turns out) that English was not the author's first language. Here is a sample garbled sentence, admittedly one of the worst: "Join between bone and soft is usually better that same join at would be leatherhard." Some sections read more like the author's notes rather than a finished manuscript.

Many of the illustrations have been reduced so small that it's difficult to discern what's being shown -- and some of the labels, reduced along with the illustrations, contain type that literally required a magnifying glass to read.

The author decided to use a question-and-answer format for the entire book, which quickly becomes tiresome. As a result, there's no "narrative" to the book and the information is disjointed and episodic.

The book I received, although it says it's the 2007 "third edition," does not look like the one pictured here. Instead, it's printed in a very horizontal format (about 9 inches wide by 5 inches deep), which is awkward to hold and irritating to use.

If you have the patience to deal with all this, much information about paper clay can be gleaned from this book. The author quite obviously knows a lot and seems willing enough to share that with her readers. However, I believe the publisher does her, and us, a disservice by going into a third edition without taking care of these fundamental problems.

i have found this companion boock easy and clear to follow.it have beeing a great help developing new forms in my studio.