Alan Watt has been a ceramic artist for 45 years and was for 20 years head of the Ceramics Department of the National Institute of Arts at the Australian National University. Since retiring he has over the past six years conducted numerous weekend workshops on how to build your own wood fired oven. This convinced him that there is a broad and growing interest in learning how to make and use a pizza or wood fired oven. So he has written this book to show how it's done and illustrated it with many excellent colour photographs and line drawings. His book explains the historical development of ovens and the physics and basic principles of oven design. There are sections on oven bases and different types of ovens ranging from low tech to high tech and the traditional brick dome oven. Then follow sections on chimneys and dampers, casting a chimney, and doors and doorways. There are appendixes on casting an arch, Forming a brick arch without traditional formwork, and casting a chimney base. Finally there's a section of recipes, with photographs of dishes which display the diversity of wood fired ovens.