Elizabeth Cumming obtained her doctorate from the University of Edinburgh in 1987. As keeper of the City of Edinburgh Art Centre (1975-84) she organized many national and international exhibitions and catalogued the city's fine art collections. Since 1984 she has lectured and curated exhibitions, mainly on Scottish turn-of-the-century art and design.

Wendy Kaplan was educated at the University of Pennsylvania and the Winterthur Museum Program. As Research Associate at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston she organized the major exhibition on the Arts and Cragts in America, The Art tht is Lift (1987), and was principal author of its awardwinning catalogue. She has written widely on nineteenth and twentieth-century design and is a museum consultant.

This volume surveys the highly influential Arts and Crafts design movement--which embraced architecture, furniture, glass, ceramics, metalwork, textiles and books--in Britain, America and Europe. Although the styles adopted by the movement were diverse, its leading architects, artists and craft-designers, including William Morris, Frank Lloyd Wright, Josef Hoffman and Eliel Saarinen, were united in promoting the moral superiority of "honest" design and natural materials in an industrial age. 167 illus., 31 in color.