Soon, however, I was sweltering, as I was being ushered through the hot attic of an old barn, past row after row of thick rods of colored glass, and down onto the working floor of Josh Simpson's hot shop.

I was standing there, a couple of paces from four or five furnaces, fiery orange crucibles of molten glass, watching T-shirted apprentices clad in protective eye-shields, colored to keep out heat and ultraviolet radiation, when a friendly man I had never seen before showed up at my left elbow.

"Hi, I'm Josh," he said, and as we chatted about glass art, and how he started out with glass to begin with, he told me some of the stories you can read in this excellent book.

The book gives you photographs showing how his beautiful glass 'megaplanets', intricate and astounding, have been inspired by ice, by scenery, and by crystal-clear, detailed, yet strangely unfamiliar views of the earth from space. The close-up photos of Josh's pieces of glass art are startling. You can really see why glass is the most-collected stuff in the world.

Andrew Chaikin describes exactly how Josh makes a megaplanet, a challenging process illustrated with some of the most evocative photographs of molten glass you can imagine.

That's interesting enough as it is, but the second part of the book, where you can clearly see Josh's artistic imagination at work, and almost hear him talk as he writes in a warm, autobiographical voice, is intriguing.

This book comes as close as you can get to being in Josh Simpson's brain and seeing the images in the world which inspire his glass art, and then actually visiting Josh Simpson's studio to see him create it.

If you're at all interested in glass art, "Josh Simpson: Glass Artist" is definitely worth reading.

P.S. Getting the book will be a lot less uncomfortable than actually being in the hot shop, which I believe is probably not open to the public.