Book review: The Technology of Setting, P A Grether

[ps_bond]

A while ago, this was mentioned on the forum as a text on stone setting. I went hunting for it, found some truly ridiculous prices for it 2nd hand (£150?), found one on EBay for about £20 which Royal Mail managed to lose before finally finding it on the Cousins website for £37.70.

At just shy of 90 pages, there's not a lot to it; it's a bit bigger than a Ladybird book, but the content is *far* from Ladybird. The book covers traditional setting methods, tool preparation and working practices (with some alternatives listed too). There is no eye candy, the illustrations are all line drawings - but they communicate the techniques extremely well. It's a textbook, but a very good one - it both builds on & reinforces the tuition I had from Tom Wellburn last year, with a couple of settings we didn't have time to practice in class.

The settings covered start with bead/grain setting, then move on to pave, with variations on pave layout, cutdown settings and azures described in detail; there's cabochon setting for both thick & thin bezels, claw settings - well, pretty much everything other than invisible setting!

All in all, I'm very impressed with this one. It isn't a coffee table book, it isn't a glossy collection of ideas, it really is an instruction manual - and I haven't seen one that equals it.

[Tabby66]

Thanks Peter, one question...........how much stone setting expertise do you think you need for it to be useful??

[ps_bond]

Honestly? I think it works from first principles. Providing you're happy to play with gravers to get used to them if you haven't handled them before, it pretty much covers everything. The use of gravers/scorpers in this is limited to using them as small chisels, really - it's not the same level of skill needed to do e.g. lettering (although it can lead on to it).