This is easily the best art glass marble book I've ever seen to date. Bob Crafton (who I had the pleasure of meeting many years ago at a Wheaton Marble Weekend show) is an English professor, and you can tell it from his writing - it is written from a literary perspecitve, extremely descriptive and creative and just flat out enjoyable to read. Along with the great writing the book is lavishly illustrated with elegant photographs, a huge selection of amazing pictures of Mark Matthews marbles and art glass, some of them from my friend Bruce Galvin's amazing collection, some from Mark's personal collection, and lots of other pics of Matthews' history. It's a truly fantastic coffee table book, 256 extremely enjoyable pages!

"Mark Matthews has been making marbles for 35 years [as of 2021]. Some - the banded lutzes and opaques, the latticino and solid and vane cores, the clambroths, onionskins, and peppermints-acknowledge their nineteenth century roots. Others - the precision air traps, the filligranas, the graals - employ techniques never before used in the making of marbles. Matthews makes marbles - spherical glass objects, to be sure, but glass spheres invested with a meaning, a significance, an aesthetic vision and purpose. In this sense, the marble is a means to an end in itself. Aesthetics-issues of form and color theory-combine with investigations into the physical and chemical properties of glass, which, in turn, engage social history and economic concerns, and all in the unlikely form of the marble, a crystalline sphere which, in Matthews' hands, produces its own kind of music."

Published in 2021 by Hermes Press.