📚 The Decorative Arts

Furniture, ceramic, metal and textile treated as art — the craft objects that fill a home and carry the taste of their age.

Below are the 30 works carrying the subject decorative arts in the Open Library catalogue with the most editions in print. Author and first year are as the record states them; a missing year means the record does not carry one, not that the book is undated. Novels set in the subject are left out, because a list of historical fiction is not a list of history. Where one author dominates the reprint counts, no more than two of their titles appear.

Cover	Title	Author	First published	Editions
	The elements of drawing	John Ruskin	1819	124
	The two paths	John Ruskin	1859	76
	Frank Lloyd Wright	Frank Lloyd Wright	1900	52
	The grammar of ornament	Owen Jones	1856	49
	Bel ameublement	Sotheby & Co. (London, England)	1978	26
	Suggestions in design	John Leighton	1853	22
	William Morris to Whistler	Walter Crane	1911	14
	The later work of Aubrey Beardsley	Aubrey Vincent Beardsley	1900	13
	Art and industry	Herbert Edward Read	1934	13
	The claims of decorative art	Walter Crane	1892	11
	Egyptian decorative art	W. M. Flinders Petrie	1895	11
	The arts and crafts of our Teutonic forefathers	Gerard Baldwin Brown	1910	11
	Antiques	Ann Kilborn Cole	1957	11
	Art and the beauty of the earth	William Morris	1898	10
	A manual of historic ornament	Glazier, Richard	1899	10
	An encyclopedia of antiques	Harold Lewis Bond	1937	10
	Chinese art	Stephen W. Bushell	1904	9
	Brush and pencil	Charles Francis Browne	1897	8
	A history of furniture	Albert Jacquemart	1870	7
	The Book of Craftsmen	Marjory Bruce	1900	7
	The arts & crafts in New England, 1704-1775	George Francis Dow	1927	7
	Medieval catalogue	London Museum.	1940	7
	The arts & crafts movement	Steven Adams	1987	7
	Studies in design	Christopher Dresser	1874	6
	Folk art of rural Pennsylvania	Frances Lichten	1946	6
	The crafts of the modern world	Rose Slivka	1968	6
	Dictionary of ornament	Philippa Lewis	1984	6
	Memphis	Barbara Radice	1984	6
	Mexican interiors	Verna (Cook) Shipway	1962	5
	Antique collector's dictionary	Donald Cowie	1962	5

List built from Open Library (CC0 metadata) · retrieved 03 Nov 2026 UTC · capped at 30 works per subject.

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