Stone and Marble Carving

Alec Miller’s Stone and Marble Carving: A Manual for the Student Sculptor is a rare blend of workshop craft and lived wisdom, distilling a lifetime at the bench into clear, practical guidance. Grounded in the Greek sense of technics championed by Ananda Coomaraswamy, the book moves beyond aesthetics to the elemental disciplines of tool, material, and method. Miller demonstrates how stone itself shapes imagination and rigor, arguing for the sculptor’s hand to remain present from first strike to final surface. His instruction on tools, processes, and finish is exacting yet approachable, offering students a durable foundation in direct carving and an antidote to derivative, studio-bound replication.

Shaped by the Arts and Crafts lineage of Ruskin, Morris, and the Guild of Handicraft, Miller’s manual restores the unity of conception and execution that modern practice too often divides. He situates technique within a moral discipline of foresight and integrity, reminding readers that stone carving’s risks and irreversibility are the very sources of its ethical and artistic force. From architectural commissions to workshop axioms, the book models a standard of competence that is historical in its roots and forward-looking in its implications. For emerging sculptors and educators alike, this is an indispensable text on the craft that makes enduring form possible.

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1948.