To my surprise, the University of Chicago Press has some sort of distribution arrangement with the Hong Kong University Press -- seeing an unexpected Yixing book led to another impulsive purchase, although I think this will have to be the last one -- I really don't have an interest in Yixing collecting, so it seems silly to develop an interest in Yixing book collecting.
This book is
I-Hsing Teapot: Painting by 10 Shanghai Masters:
https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/bo ... 38996.html
I think that they were a bit confused about what they had, as it lists the author as the Hong Kong academic Jao Tsung-I, but the author is actually Thomas Wai Hung Tang. It was published by HKU under their Jao Tsung-I Petit Ecole series, however, which I think was the source of the confusion. It is a 2004 album of engraved (not painted) pots that belonged to the collector Shen Zhi-yi.
The exact time when the pots were engraved isn't quite clear from the English translation, but it is strongly implied that it started shortly after Yixing pots were being signed by individual artists in the late 70s. One of the artists whose pot engravings are featured, Zhang Da-zhuang, died in 1980, for instance. An end date is also not so clear, although it mentions that the person responsible for the rubbings in the book died in 1990.
Each artist gets a brief biography, and as mentioned above the pot photos include rubbings, as the engraving itself is not always easy to see. A bit annoyingly, very little is said about Shen Zhi-yi, even though these were his teapots, other than that he was born in 1921, was somehow connected to the Shanghai Art Gallery, and that the original idea of holding an exhibition of engraved Yixing teapots (the reason for the first group to be created) came from his friend Tang Yun, a painter and Yixing teapot collector himself.
The actual production process is not so clearly outlined. For instance, it includes a brief biography of Shen Jue-chu, but no teapots, saying "The teapots in this album are all carved by Mr. Shen." This suggests that the process was that Shen Zhi-yi went to the artists to get original drawings, which were then sent to Shen Jue-chu the engraver along with the pots, and then returned to Shen Zhi-yi, who went down to Yixing to get the pots fired.
Still, it is in English, and addresses an aspect of Yixing that does not seem to be focused on very much in other English-language books.