Friday, July 01, 2011

The Wine Glass Over the Water

The Wine Glass over the Water

Desgoffe detail God bless the King
I mean our faith’s defender.
God bless no harm in blessing the Pretender.
But who Pretender is, and who is King
God bless us all That’s quite another thing.
          John Byrom

Bonnie_young_princiJoanna, here, talking about an interesting sort of drinking glass our hero and heroine might have encountered in their travels through Georgian or Regency England.
The Jacobite Drinking Glass.
These are wine glasses that form a body of distinctive Eighteenth Century artwork.

We have these through a confluence of lucky chances.

First off, by 1700, English glassmaking was particularly advanced. 
A century before, the champion glassmakers were Venetian. The best glass in England was made by imported Italian glass artists, working by Italian methods.

This changed when the English developed flint glass.  'Flint glass' contains a high proportion of lead oxide, an ingredient that makes for tough, workable, clear-as-water product.  Excellent stuff, in short.  And it was an English specialty.


Continues here, at Word Wenches

6 comments:

  1. Anonymous10:33 PM

    Hi
    This is not about crystal glasses.
    Check out Sherry Thomas' book cover for the German Not Quite A Husband. http://www.goodreads.com/author_blog_posts/1360614-new-york-new-york
    Look familiar?

    DLS

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  2. Hi DLS --

    Oh my. I just have to giggle over this one.

    I will say, that is just a lovely depiction of a couple

    . . . if you cut the bottom part of the picture off so you are not confronted with that odd 'knee in the air' pose so beloved of cover artists
    that would have her all leaning off balance if she were really doing it.

    But it's good of Annique, because it looks like she's exploring him with her hand instead of looking at him.

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  3. Anonymous12:44 PM

    Yes, although I don't recall Annique being on those terms with him while she was blind...
    On the other hand, it doesn't look at all like I imagine the couple in Not Quite a Husband! Starting with the uniform.
    Is it your publisher? I mean, can they DO that?
    DLS

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  4. I am real weak on who owns rights to these various cover photos.

    I think the photographer sells rights to the publisher. What the publisher does with those rights is a mystery beyond my ken.

    That's Nathan Kamp as the male model. He's pretty well known. The photographer is Judy York, If I remember correctly.

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  5. Christine7:00 PM

    I don't know if you saw this but on the AAR site "The Spymaster's Lady" won second place in the Best Historical Romance audio book. Congratulations!

    AAR said
    "Since we didn’t have a category for time travel, Outlander took first place for historical romance with 17% of the vote.  Even the modern portion of the book barely misses the RWA historical cut of 1945.

    Second was Joanna Bourne’s The Spymaster’s Lady with11% of the votes.  A vastly popular book when released in print, it’s proven to have quite the following in audio as well.

    ReplyDelete
  6. I hadn't seen that. How lovely.

    I don't think Spymaster's Lady got the kudo so much as that wonderful narrator won. Karen Potter. WHAT a great performance.

    ReplyDelete