This book is absurdly ambitious. It attempts to cover, very briefly, the history of furniture from the Middle Ages to the outbreak of the First World War; and not the work of one country alone, but that of many different lands.

The attempt is made in the hope that it may clear a little of the mystique that surrounds the subject, without pretending—as the women's magazines sometimes do—that the most wonderful bargains are to be picked up in junk shops by exercising nothing more than that indefinable quality usually called 'good taste'.