The Grammar of Ornament

This beautiful, highly influential book, long a classic in its field, remains today one of the most comprehensive and best-organized presentations of historic ornamental design. The original 100 color plates, meticulously reproduced here from the rare original folio edition, present a dazzling spectrum of copyright-free design motifs from both ancient and modern cultures. The Grammar of Ornament features designs from around the world: the West to the Far East and many cultures in between.
Graphic and fine artists will find nearly three thousand designs rendered in fine detail from a variety of sources:
Greek and Roman borders and mosaics
Celtic designs taken from manuscripts
Motifs from medieval paintings and stained glass
Floral patterns from Chinese porcelain, wood, and fabrics
Illuminated script from the Koran
Ornamentation from Turkish mosques and tombs
Moorish designs from the Alhambra
Connoisseurs of art and design will find the book's rich display of decorative motifs an endless source of contemplative pleasures.
The work of the celebrated English designer and architect Owen Jones, The Grammar of Ornament, initially published in 1856, was the first book to present a global and historical range of ornament in color, the first to display "primitive" art for its design content, and among the first to suggest nature as a basic design source.
Widely used and circulated, this prophetic work ushered in a major change in Western aesthetics and heralded the move towards nonrepresentational art. Its value as a beautifully organized and produced pictorial museum of historic ornamental design remains unsurpassed.

Owen Jones, Amazon Best-Selling author from Barry, Wales, has lived in several countries and travelled in many more. While studying Russian in the USSR in the `70`s, he hobnobbed with spies on a regular basis. After university, in Suriname, he got caught up in the 1982 coup, when he was accused of being a mercenary.
Later, while a company director, he joined the crew of four as the galley slave to sail from Barry to Gibraltar on a home-made concrete yacht during Desert Storm. En voyage, the yacht was almost rammed by a Russian oil tanker, and an American aircraft carrier - The Atlantic Challenger.
Since 2004, he has lived mainly in the UK, Spain and Thailand. He now leads a somewhat quieter life in his wife`s remote, northern farming village writing, editing and increasing the number of translations, and narrations of his novels.
As he says: "Born in the Land of Song, living in the Land of Smiles".