The French Country Table: Pottery and Faience of Provence

by Camille Moirenc and Bernard Duplessy

Book Overview

This lushly photographed book takes the reader on a sun-soaked journey to Provence to view the process of creation involved in the crafts of pottery and faience. Accompanied by historical anecdotes,... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0810945789
• ISBN13: 9780810945784
• Release Date: May 2003
• Publisher: ABRAMS
• Length: 192 Pages
• Weight: 3.15 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.8" x 9.4" x 11.8"
• Age Range: 13 years and up
• Grade Range: Grade 8 to Postsecondary

Customer Reviews

Gorgeous Photos Clunky Prose

This $39.95 cover price book is being remaindered at incredibly low prices. It's a large format book with gorgeous, evocative photos of French pottery beautifully printed on glossy stock. Delicious to look at. The problem is with the prose which was translated from the French by someone with a high school level knowledge of English. Some of it is translated too literally from the French and some of it is just so clumsy you have to laugh. "For Sylvie and William, craft is a passion. Before faience, it was a haze. Some friends in Biot brought them into the public eye, and once they made their debut, a second thunderbolt took them to Varges." It's hard to imagine how the publisher of such a lush and expensive book allowed it to be translated by an amateur without, apparently, any oversight. Nevertheless, if you love pottery and Provence, this is a lovely book to have for the photos. And you can learn the history of pottery and the region as you wade through the purple prose. Did you know that the custom of rubbing cut garlic around the inside and outside of a pot to prepare it for cooking was to sanitize it?(this long before anyone knew about bacteria.) I imagine that is also why raw garlic was originally rubbed on a wooden salad bowl, not for the flavor as we do now.