Never trust a man who, when left alone with a tea cosy, does not try it on. (Billy Connolly)

I have never used a tea cosy (or tea cozy, as some apparently refer to it). Which makes sense, because of all of the methods I’ve used for making tea – being a solo tea drinker – I’ve never had the occasion to use a teapot. Hence no need for a tea cosy to keep the pot warm.

I’ve always assumed that tea cosies were kind of a fuddy-duddyish thing, something that hit a peak of popularity in previous centuries and are barely lingering on today. But as I write my monthly columns on tea books I’ve come to realize that this is not necessarily the case. As it turns out there a quite a few books on the art of tea cosies – none of which are particularly fuddy-duddyish – with more coming along all the time.

Based on my unscientific observations of tea cosy books, it appears that Loani Prior is one of the top players in this market. As her bio notes, the self-styled Queen of the Tea Cosies “lives in Queensland, Australia, where her woolly obsessions border on becoming a disorder.”

She kicked off her attempt at total tea book cosy world domination with a tome titled Wild Tea Cosies and then followed that up with Really Wild Tea Cosies. How Tea Cosies Changed the World was next, with a title that might promise just a bit more than the book delivers. And that’s not all. At least one more volume – Pretty Funny Tea Cosies – will roll out in 2014.

The Tea Cosy series of books numbers four volumes so far, as nearly as I can tell. The first two volumes in the series are credited to an entity known as the Guild of Master Craftsman, while the latter two give credit to their authors by name. More about the Guild’s vast array of books, here.

But wait. There’s even more. If you can’t get enough of this sort of thing then you can try Tea Cosies, by Jenny Occleshaw, which came out in 2013. Or you can wait for a 2014 release from another newcomer to the tea cosy book field – Lee Ann Garrett, whose Easy Knitted Tea Cosies is on the way.

See more of William I. Lengeman’s articles here.

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