"This ... book introduces us to some of the most sublime, outrageous and exotic teapots ever to grace a Mad Hatter's tea party. The designers of these idiosyncratic vessels have fully explored the ceremonial significance, spiritual associations, and formal complexities of teapots and tea-drinking, but they have given the results a distinctly eccentric spin. Both comfortingly familiar and utterly peculiar, this ... gallery of teapots includes portrait teapots of Oscar Wilde, Brooke Shields, and Queen Elizabeth; teapots representing animals, vegetables and the Three Mile island cooling towers; and teapots so far removed from the concerns of function that they resemble nothing so much as drawings of teapots. The form of this simple object has fueled the creative genius of art, craft, and industry toward ends as diverse as pure aesthetics, perfect utility, lighthearted whimsy and political satire."--Book jacket.