Craft stained glass at home

The gentlest starting point: a handful of small projects that each introduce one skill, in an order that means you never need a technique you have not met. Start here if you have never cut glass.

The Isenbergs ran a studio and a supply business, and it shows — this is the book that anticipates the problems of someone working alone at a kitchen table, from what to buy first to why your solder is beading instead of flowing.

Reyntiens was a working glazier as well as a scholar, and this is the technical book he wrote for people who wanted to do it properly. Older and more demanding than the beginner titles, and the one to graduate to.

A compact British handbook from the era when this was still a trade taught by apprenticeship. Divine writes about lead came and glass painting with an assumption of seriousness that most modern hobby books avoid.

Raguin's survey is the best single account of the medium from medieval cathedrals to the twentieth century. Read it for the sense of what light through coloured glass has been made to do — the ambition on display reframes what you attempt yourself.

Tiffany's studio invented the copper-foil method most beginners now learn first, and pushed opalescent glass further than anyone before or since. Worth studying closely because his work is the direct ancestor of the technique in your hands.