Bauer: Classic American Pottery

Bauer: Classic American Pottery by Mitch Tuchman. hardcover edition. ISBN: 9780811809016.

Renowned for its simplicity, ingenuity, beauty, and color, Bauer pottery has become one of the most widely sought and highly prized lines of American ceramics. The J. A. Bauer Pottery Co. (1885-1962) was the first to break with the tradition of white porcelain for the dinner table. In its place Bauer introduced imaginatively ringed and brilliantly colored, mix-and-match salad plates, dinner plates, butter chips, and saucers; coffee cups, custard cups, eggcups, and tumblers; cereal bowls, soup bowls, sugar bowls, and sherbets; and a host of serving pieces and matching kitchenwares. In all, Bauer marketed nine different lines of tableware and at the same time innumerable handmade and slip-cast floral and garden items, which once sold for pennies and now command prices in the hundreds and even thousands of dollars. Bauer: Classic American Pottery, with 86 full-color and 24 black-and-white photographs featuring hundreds of items and 28 archival images, is the only guide available that provides a complete history of the company and its innovative, extraordinarily diverse, and popular redwares, stonewares, and earthenwares, the most colorful ever produced in America.