Until it suspended major glass production in 2011, Fenton Art Glass was the oldest extant American glass company, having reached its centennial year in 2005. For more than a century, this family-owned business produced glass in an astonishing array of shapes and colors, including the figurines of various animals, birds, and butterflies featured in this book. Glass figurines have achieved iconic status in American culture, but the Fenton animals are not the delicate spun-glass creations of the famous Tennessee Williams play. They are a different kind of glass menagerie altogether! Heavy enough to use as paperweights, they serve as a canvas for colours and decoration ranging from the sublime to the whimsical. This new book (published May 2017) takes the reader on a tour of that amazing world of glass honoring the beasts, birds, and bugs that are so essential a part of our natural world and our human lives.
