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Pottery-related Mystery Novel

Semi-OT:

Potters who are also mystery lovers may enjoy "Uncommon Clay" by Margaret Maron, a mystery involving Judge Deborah Knott and a family of North Carolina potters that seems to be marked for death.

The pottery aspects are presented fairly well, and the plot is pretty good. However, the author spends a *lot* of time on character development, so this may not be for those who like cut-to-the-chase action. My wife and I listened to it as a recorded book (from the local library) on a trip this past weekend, and it seemed slow getting started to me, whereas she had no problems with it. (She selects the recordings, because she is a weaver and has already listened to most of the library collection while working at her loom... if I picked, she would be sure to have heard it already!) But it was fine to while away the miles, and might be equally fine in a pottery studio.

Best regards,

Bob Masta DAQARTA v4.00 Data AcQuisition And Real-Time Analysis

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Bob Masta
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Reply to
DKat

A favourite book here is "The Snow Firing" by Joyce Gard, printed

1967/8. The following are a couple of summaries I found -

"When a friendly potter comes to work at the long-abandoned pottery that used to belong to Philip's grandfather, the twelve-year-old boy's energy, interest, and evident talent, which appear as he helps his new neighbour, bring unhappiness to his mother."

""This story is about a boy who stems from a family of country potters of the old kind, with its good and its bad inextricable tangled, and who helps in the rebirth of the old pottery into our modern world. Naturally this is a painful as well as an exciting process"

I had a look and there's one copy on ebay at the moment, if anybody out there's interested. No, it's not my copy - there's no way I'd part with mine!

Susie

Reply to
Susie Thompson

Just checked AbeBooks

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and they have lots of copies, priced around US$8 or $9 including shipping in the USA.

Best regards,

Bob Masta DAQARTA v4.00 Data AcQuisition And Real-Time Analysis

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Scope, Spectrum, Spectrogram, Sound Level Meter FREE Signal Generator Science with your sound card!

Reply to
Bob Masta

Just finished reading "Uncommon Clay" (easily found at the library). Good read, though the bit about a professional potter not knowing about or understanding glazes nags at me. Toxicity of heavy metals in glazes was made more real and personal. In the U.S. only lead and cadmium are made a clear issue of and potters in general really don't have clear guidelines on the materials we use. Silica is actually one of the more dangerous materials and it is in almost everything you would find in a studio. Few people know that. Making our pots 'safe' for once they leave the studio is an entirely different issue and one which seems to be the most confused. Pinnel's Weathered bronzed green has been taken off our shelf - either because

1 - it has Lithium in it and that could be dangerous especially to someone taking Lithium 2 - it could possibly leach copper - it is fine to whip you eggs in a copper bowl but you don't know that some end user is not going to put orange juice in what you made and end up with more copper than they should have and yucky tasting orange juice... 3 - it settles like a rock unless some one is on top of it all the time

or all 3.

Most of the more beautiful and interesting glazes (for me and many others - for example I love the alkali and barium blues) do not stand up to the rules set by MC6 (Ron Roy and John Hesselberth's book) or they do not work in a studio situation (runny glazes can be yummy but not worth the $$$ for shelves).

People in our studio keep coming to me with glazes they want made that are very high in metal oxides (6% Cu for example) with the minimum amount of silica. I can almost guarantee them that the glaze will leach metal and not be stable but that is meaningless to them because there really is no standard I can point to. There is no "Food Save" criterion. I do wish we would come to some conclusions on this issue rather than say all insides of pots should not have any metal oxide in the glaze.

Donna

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D Kat

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