The Potter's Book of Glaze Recipes by Emmanuel Cooper

This book is a good reference once you have some more knowledge and understanding of why you would pick the materials and how you would use them. Therefore, I think this book is not really appropriate for somebody who doesn't know about the glaze chemistry or the materials too well. It's much safer to use Ferro Frit to source barium. Barium Carbonate is highly toxic in its powder form and if it's not encapsulated properly in the recipe with other encapsulating materials, there could be an imbalance in BaO that could leach into food for foodware. For example, a midnight blue glaze recipe calls for 28% Barium Carbonate. The thing that I really wish the recipes would discuss is the toxicity of the materials. The only downside is that the recipes don't have a lot of comments other than maybe the appearance and general observations.

This books has a lot of recipes and very useful information for potter. If you want a really great book by Emmanuel Cooper can I recommend his biography of Lucie Rie? What I've always hoped is that Thames and Hudson would put all the glaze photos online - you'd have to buy the book for the recipes but at least you'd have a better reference. Secondly, some of the glaze colours as photographed are not the same as described in the text, leaving me uncertain if this is a potter, photographer or printer error. Firstly many of the glazes have no image at all a great pity when he tested each glaze multiple times and must have had hundreds of tiles. However the biggest problem is the photography.

There are some 'running heads' on some pages instead of the chapter title.

Most are reduction/oxidation mixups, and you can spot them if you have basic knowledge such as what colour a glaze should be in red/ox. There are some fun glazes such as crater and shocking pink for when you're having one of those days. I can usually find a specific glaze, whether ingredient based - eg dolomite white - or surface based - eg stony cream. The glazes are reliable - so far all have turned out as described. This has been my most used glaze book to date.

The Potter's Book of Glaze Recipes by Emmanuel Cooper