If my family ever makes the mistake of having me plan our trip to England (again), I can imagine the following conversation taking place:

Family: Why are we visiting so many Churches?

Me: I read a book about stained glass.

And yes, I am that easily influenced by books. After this, I really, really want to take a week or two and just go around English Churches and look at their stained glass. It’s too bad that I don’t actually live in England.

As the title says, How to Look at Stained Glass is a guide on how to appreciate the Church windows in England. I borrowed it pretty much on a whim, since we’ll be going to England next year and I like to get my pre-trip reading done early, but found myself enjoying this quite a bit.

The main bulk of the book is an alphabetical explanation of the various elements of Church glass windows. There were quite a few surprises – I didn’t know about science-themed windows, and I never realised that there were modern stained glass windows! I always imagined them as very old pieces of art. The whole point of the book is basically to get us to notice the small details of the windows – as long as you have one thing to look out for, you have something that you can use to compare and appreciate windows with. And from the list in the book, it’s clear that there are a lot of things you could look out for (birds, bugs, beards, the list is endless).

I do have two quibbles with the book, though:

The first is the alphabetical order. I think that for thematic parts of the windows, it works well, but it is a bit weird to be perspective and Pevsner and then suddenly read about taking photographs. Come to think about it, reading about Pevsner was a bit weird too. I would have preferred if the meta-topics about stained glass windows (like guides or photographs) were in a little section of their own.

The second is about the photographs. While there are a few photos with the text, they aren’t particularly common. If you pick up this book, I would encourage you to occasionally turn to the photo sections in the middle of the books to look at the full-coloured photos, and see if you can connect the photos to the topics you’ve read. It would have been a lot easier to understand if they had the photos with the text, but I can imagine that a full-colour book would have been exorbitantly expensive.

I checked out the author’s blog after reading the book and immediately saw two lovely posts on stained glass, complete with photos. If you have the time, check out her posts on bulb planting and medical glass.

This reminds me, I never really recapped last year’s trip (apart from the posts on tea and books – shows you where my priorities are!). I may do a series of posts on the trip before I forget it all, especially since I do want to blog lots about the coming trip next year.