The Pictorial Encyclopedia of Antiques [antikvár]

I am one of those deplorable people who, consulting a dictionary or an encyclopedia about any subject on earth - the date when Gainsborough married, the exact meaning of existentialism, the chemical composition of Venetian glass - find it next to impossible to put the book down. One thing or another is certain to catch my eye, some unusual point of view, some minor revelation, even some theory with which I violently disagree. If I am not careful I am liable to forget why I opened the volume in the first place and, the world forgetting and the world forgot, spend the next hour browsing happily amid the accumulated learning of many generations and many countries. I suspect a grasshopper mind and a head disguised as a mere rag-bag of unrelated facts - but a bag full of numerous holes, for the odds are that half the facts I have so interestedly absorbed will have slipped out and been forgotten by the time I have remembered what it was I was so anxious to discover. This book then is that sort of book, a massive accumulation of knowledge into which one dips at one's peril; it is to be consulted, to be treated seriously; its range is wide, its standard of scholarship high, its judgments (though not every reader will agree with every one of them) set down with moderation. I welcome it also in an English translation for another reason. It is good for us with ovir own inevitable prejudices, to see how the development of the applied arts appears in Middle-European eyes, for this is a volume written by Czechs whose country's art history is one of extreme interest. How curious, omitting all reference to politics or religion, and thinking only of the history of art and of the great collectors whose dedicated acquisitiveness has preserved so much of what is worthwhile from the past in spite of the destructiveness of the strange animal called Man - how very curious that in the middle of the 17th century, almost but not quite in the same