Bells and Man

Percival Price's Bells and Man is a standard academic history of bell founding, ringing traditions and campanology across a wide range of cultures, published by Oxford University Press. Price was himself a professional carillonneur and bell scholar, giving the book real authority grounded in practical expertise alongside historical research. Its breadth, covering bell traditions from Europe to East Asia in one volume, is both its strength and its limit, a genuinely useful single reference for the history of bells generally, but any single culture's bell tradition receives less depth than a dedicated regional study would provide. Cite it confidently for the general history and technical development of bells and bell casting, and follow up with a regional specialist source for a detailed claim about one specific tradition's ritual use of bells.