This is the first major study of the subject in over seventy years. In a triumph of scholarship, Stefano Carboni has drawn on a huge range of sources to produce a beautiful and comprehensive history. The book is based on the superb al-Sabah Collection in Kuwait and includes detailed descriptions of some 500 objects, accompanied by hundreds of newly taken photographs and specially commissioned drawings. Beginning with the legacy of Roman and Sasanian traditions in the early years of Islam, the coverage extends well over a thousand years to the last phase of glass production in Mughal India and Safavid and Qajar Iran in the 18th and 19th centuries. Dr Carboni's authoritative text, the beauty of the objects themselves and the fine quality of the reproductions combine to reveal to scholar and layman alike an aspect of Islamic art that has for too long been neglected.

The subject of this book is the so-called London Qazvini, an early 14th-century illustrated Arabic copy of al-Qazvini's The Wonders of Creation and the Oddities of Existing Things, which was acquired by the British Library in 1983 (Or. 14140). As is commonly the case for copies of this text, the London Qazvini is lavishly illustrated, with 368 extant paintings out of the estimated original ca. 520. Its large format, ambitious illustrative cycle and the fine quality of many of the illustrations suggest that the atelier where it was produced must have been well-established and able to attract craftsmen from different parts of the Ilkhanid area. It also suggests that its patron was wealthy and curious about scientific, encyclopedic and caja'ib literature, and keen to experiment with the illustration of new texts like this work, which had been composed by the author only two or three decades earlier. The only centre that was capable of gathering such artistic influences ranging from Anatolia to Mesopotamia appears to have been Mosul. The London Qazvini is an important newly surfaced document for the study of early illustrated Arabic copies of this text, representing the second earliest known surviving manuscript, as well as for the study of Ilkhanid painting. In a single and unique manuscript are gathered earlier Mesopotamian painting traditions, North Jaziran-Seljuq elements, Anatolian inspirations, the latest changes brought about after the advent of the Mongols, and a number of illustrations of extraordinary subjects which escape a proper classification.