Using examples from all over the world, the author discusses informally his response to baskets and his ideas about them, and shows hundreds of photographs to illustrate his text. A child's Easter basket is valued as highly as the most refined basket from China. A folded leaf is as remarkable as a prized feather basket of the Pomos. The great panorama of basketmaking is presented with all its trappings of beads, feathers, bells, and strips of rags and leather. Straw, bark, tinfoil and plastic take their places alongside bamboo, rattan, oak splints and the rest, as materials to be worked into baskets. The basic techniques of plaiting, twining, coiling and wickerwork are like materials themselves, something to be manipulated, combined, played with. Of The Nature of Basketry the authors says, "It is a personal interpretation, concerned with the aesthetic quality of baskets as it relates to process and material and human impulses. What started as a book of photographs with breif descriptions became the occasion for developing a number of ideas about basketry and expresing my own insights into the basketry process in relation to other art processes.

I suppose the real purpose of the work is to express my own love of baskets." Through a perception of baskets, the world -- and humankind -- can be perceived fresh.