Nicholas Goodison's book about English barometers first published in 1968 and is universally accepted as the standard work on the subject. It set a new standard in the field of furniture studies for the treatment of a specialised subject, and provided a fund of information which was not previously available to historians, museum curators, collectors and dealers.

This revised edition includes much interesting newinformation, most of which has come to light as a result of the author's continuing researches on the subject.

The book is chiefly concerned with the mercurial barometer, which hich first became fashionable as a piece of furniture in the late seventeent century. It was then to be seen only in the houses of rich patrons or natural philosophers. It rapidly natura part of the stock-in-trade of instrument makers, and its popularity steadily increased until the nineteenth century.