There I was, minding my own business on a weekend, trying to figure out how little I could accomplish before Monday, when my wife ambushed me with a bold plan to repaint the living and dining rooms. This was all well and good in theory, but you have to understand that those are where all the books are. Painting? Fine. Unpleasant but fine. Moving a couple thousand books, the shelves and furniture, disassembling the surround-sound system just to start painting? Not cool, not cool at all.
Still, it's always nice to have an excuse to look through every one of your books again. For one thing, it reminds you which ones you have, keeping you from buying a duplicate next time you're at the store. For another, frequently you find those duplicate copies and, hey: already one item down on tackling that Christmas shopping list. The early frontrunner for book I was most surprised to find (I thought I'd given it away) is Janet Gleeson's
Arcanum, a story of the European creation of porcelain.
Arcanum is just the singular form of a Latin plural noun we often use, "Arcana," both of which relate to arcane, an adjective describing something as mysterious or unknown. Arcana are multiple unknowns; an arcanum is just a singular secret. The secret Gleeson's book initially focuses on is the Philosopher's Stone: the alchemical tool that supposedly turns base metals into gold.
The story opens at the dawn of the 18th century, with Augustus the Strong, Elector of Saxony, spendthrift sybarite and womanizer, desperately strapped for cash. Augustus decides alchemy is his ticket to an unencumbered good life and in seeking to fill his coffers with instant gold, turns to a man unfortunately gifted at magic. Johann Bottger is talented enough at sleight of hand to convince audiences that he's turned silver into gold, but the immediate downside to this ability comes in the form of Augustus, who kidnaps Bottger and —short of luring him with amontillado and walling him up in a catacomb — says, "You'll get out when you start cranking out the ingots."
The charming twist to Gleeson's story is that Bottger already believes he can do this. At a time when hundreds of charlatans winked about Europe, asking for a little "seed" gold to "start up their experiments" before disappearing, and despite having no scientific basis for it, he sincerely feels that isolating the arcanum is really just a few weeks or months of serious labor away.
Sadly, those weeks and months stretch into years, until Bottger is in real danger of being hanged as a charlatan. Then, in a strategy that bafflingly somehow works, he convinces Augustus that he can find a totally different arcanum: the secret to making porcelain. Luckily for Bottger, this time he's right. At a time when the royal houses of Europe were spending fortunes on China porcelain, Augustus is able to virtually control the market and found a porcelain dynasty (Meissen) that's still considered among the finest in the world.
Interestingly, this story only takes you a little under a third of the way through the book. The second part details the creation of painted European porcelain and the minerals and the firing process required to bring out vivid colors. The last part of the book is a kind of bestiary of massive porcelain sculptures, elephants and satyrs and unbelievable fired statuary.
This structure can present something of a challenge for the reader. After all, this is a mystery story about a mystery solved. Because porcelain is so readily available in our lives and comes from places other than China, we have to assume that the Europeans eventually figured this stuff out. So in a sense, it's like watching an episode of Columbo: it opens up with the people who we know did it. Now we need to figure out how, and that process of discovery is entertaining, mostly because of the people we follow.
Gleeson's book shines most when focusing on the individuals who made these discoveries and took these risks. The 18th century was still a time during which a great deal of interesting behaviors could be construed as normal, and even that which qualified as eccentric was more permissible. These are fun people to be around, and their quirks and about-faces enliven the sumptuous — and sometimes overfilling — prose she devotes to porcelain itself. Perhaps that prose owes something to her work in auction houses like Bonham's and Sotheby's; regardless of its origin, her knowledge of and fondness for her topic are evident throughout.
The one downside I personally experienced when reading the book came after Bottger's successful creation of Meissen porcelain. To continue the above Columbo analogy: I knew who did it, wanted to figure out how, and I did... only I did about halfway through the episode. Because I don't share Gleeson's enthusiasm for porcelain (perhaps I took too much of a stereotypical male "solutions-oriented" approach to the text), the sumptuousness of the later sections became a little too much for me. I still wanted to think about minerals and the firing process: what all these Nereids looked like was sort of secondary to my experience. I suspect that Gleeson might have anticipated this response, because later chapters feature interesting stories of porcelain espionage and isolated industrial warfare, but it seems pretty clear that after spending early chapters reaching the creation she wants to indulge in the marvel of it.
Gleeson's research seems credible (I don't remember any clunking obvious errors, which is often the hallmark of popular histories) and is presented lucidly and with a good ear for personal details. The book can be enjoyed both as a story of discovery and as a kind of Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous and Dead. There are enough details that anyone should find something to engage. (For instance, a review of equal length could be written just on the economic mania for a good of relatively low utility.) The current relative commonness of porcelain might make the book's topic seem trivial, but just as is the case with the pepper or cloves or saffron in your cupboard, it's humbling to read a book and then touch an everyday object and suddenly realize how it once held a mortal fascination for so many.
