Were it not for the copious scholarship, Celina Fox's The Arts of Industry in the Age of Enlightenment could be taken for a coffee-table book. Large, splendidly illustrated and as beautiful as an art gallery catalogue, this magnificent volume surveys with an unprecedented degree of thoroughness the relationships between the mechanical and fine arts during the long eighteenth century. Yale University Press is renowned for its publications on art, yet unusually this one is also about machines: although the last picture is a full-colour river-and-castle landscape by J.M.W. Turner, the first is a full-page detail from the cross-section of a boiler. Viewed as a material object, this book embodies Fox's twinned aims of challenging simplistic arts/science distinctions and of retaining flexible cartographic boundaries when mapping out the past. Or as she herself puts it more elegantly, she would like to bring together the aesthetics of technology and the technology of aesthetics.

To make a second comparison, were it not for the copious illustrations – an extremely generous 256, all of high quality and many full-page – this book would belong not on a coffee-table, but on the encyclopedia shelf of an academic library. It is encyclopedic not only in its breadth, but also in its organization. Fox has sorted her research findings into eight discrete sections, each subdivided into several topics, and each containing an extraordinary array of information. This is a scholarly tome that invites browsing and dipping rather than cover-to-cover perusal.

Fox has provided a much-needed study. Despite the increasing interest in interdisciplinary approaches and material culture during the last few decades, the only previous significant review of this area is Francis Klingender's Art and the Industrial Revolution, first published in 1947. Whereas Klingender was a Marxist economist searching for evidence that industrial forces shape both the written and the visual arts, Fox is a museums specialist eager to escape the conventional confines of art history. Adopting a Baconian approach to her project, and determined not to impose modern categorizations and methodologies, Fox went back to original records and built up the patterns of development that she perceived there. The extent of her archival research is extraordinary, ranging not only from Bury St Edmunds to Birmingham, but also from Paris to Philadelphia.

On the basis of her exhaustive investigation, Fox concluded that there were four principal ways in which the mechanical arts were described, rationalized and communicated in the eighteenth century: drawings, models, societies and publications. For each of these channels, she describes in her book how practitioners made the combination of experiment, invention and explanation central to Enlightenment thought. In addition, as part of her laudable bid to break down traditional assumptions that elite values gradually seep outwards and downwards, Fox also explores the cultural impact of artisans from two viewpoints: how they used portraits to promote themselves and their inventions, and how their skills of close observation and meticulous draughtsmanship affected landscape and genre paintings. Separate chapters on each of these six topics form the core of her book, which is sandwiched between more general discussions of the preceding and following periods.

Despite her commitment to an empirical approach, Fox is far from being an innocent anthropologist let loose to roam among the manuscripts. Her scholarly expertise is evident from the bibliography of secondary literature, which is impressively substantial (even though it does include eighteenth-century published books more usually described as primary sources). Fox's brief introduction makes it clear how much analysis underpins her systematic arrangement, although at times the plethora of examples does threaten to obscure her argumentative thread. Surprisingly for a book so packed with information and produced by such a distinguished art press, the picture captions indicate neither the dimensions nor the artistic medium of the originals.

In a delightful personal reference, Fox recounts being inspired by the way in which the snake-like curves of the M6 follow and emphasize the natural contours of the valley – a modern echo of Josiah Wedgwood's intentions for the Trent and Mersey Canal. Her goal is, Fox writes, to enable her readers to share her admiration for the arts of eighteenth-century industry, and in that she has resoundingly succeeded.