View your shopping cart.

Banner Message

Please note: We are working on getting our inventory accurately represented on our site while we are in our temporary location. There might be items that appear online that are not currently accesible to us to ship to you. If you order these items, you will be refunded and the rest of your order will ship. Feel free to contact us with any questions.

Art & Architecture

HUMAN AND DIVINE: 2000 Years of Indian Sculpture

HUMAN AND DIVINE: 2000 Years of Indian Sculpture

By: Khanna, Balraj
$24.95
More Info
This beautifully illustrated book provides a unique consideration of the magnificent tradition of Indian sculpture and offers valuable insight into the inspiration behind it. Much of Indian sculpture is sacred in purpose, embodying religious beliefs and philosophical ideals. It is at the same time deeply sensual, celebrating the human body in all its astonishing variety, and has been used to portray the gods and goddesses of Hinduism, as well as the saviors and saints of Buddhism and Jainism. The fusion of earthly and transcendent realms is conveyed by transformations, poses, and gestures whose symbolism is understood by every adherent of these great religions.
Produced to accompany the traveling exhibition of the same name, "Human and Divine "highlights the achievements of a dynamic artistic tradition and explains what Indian sculpture means and why it looks as it does. The sculptures--made from stone, bronze, terracotta, marble, ivory, and wood--are drawn from British public and private collections and date from ancient times to the early twentieth century.
Balraj Khanna outlines the early history of Indian sculpture and places it in its cultural and religious context. George Michell describes the various forms and styles that have developed in the different regions of India and explains the significance of specific works.
HUMAN ANIMAL IN WESTERN ART AND SCIENCE

HUMAN ANIMAL IN WESTERN ART AND SCIENCE

By: Kemp, Martin
$40.00
More Info

From the lazy, fiddling grasshopper to the sneaky Big Bad Wolf, children's stories and fables enchant us with their portrayals of animals who act like people. But the comparisons run both ways, as metaphors, stories, and images--as well as scientific theories--throughout history remind us that humans often act like animals, and that the line separating them is not as clear as we'd like to pretend.

Here Martin Kemp explores a stunning range of images and ideas to demonstrate just how deeply these underappreciated links between humans and other fauna are embedded in our culture. Tracing those interconnections among art, science, and literature, Kemp leads us on a dazzling tour of Western thought, from Aristotelian physiognomy and its influence on phrenology to the Great Chain of Being and Darwinian evolution. We learn about the racist anthropology underlying a familiar Degas sculpture, see paintings of a remarkably simian Judas, and watch Mowgli, the man-child from Kipling's The Jungle Book, exhibit the behaviors of the beasts who raised him. Like a kaleidoscope, Kemp uses these stories to refract, reconfigure, and echo the essential truth that the way we think about animals inevitably inflects how we think about people, and vice versa.

Loaded with vivid illustrations and drawing on sources from Hesiod to La Fontaine, Leonardo to P. T. Barnum, The Human Animal in Western Art and Science is a fascinating, eye-opening reminder of our deep affinities with our fellow members of the animal kingdom.

HUMANITY

HUMANITY

By: Weiwei, Ai
$12.95
More Info

Writings on human life and the refugee crisis by the most important political artist of our time

Ai Weiwei (b. 1957) is widely known as an artist across media: sculpture, installation, photography, performance, and architecture. He is also one of the world's most important artist-activists and a powerful documentary filmmaker. His work and art call attention to attacks on democracy and free speech, abuses of human rights, and human displacement--often on an epic, international scale.

This collection of quotations demonstrates the range of Ai Weiwei's thinking on humanity and mass migration, issues that have occupied him for decades. Selected from articles, interviews, and conversations, Ai Weiwei's words speak to the profound urgency of the global refugee crisis, the resilience and vulnerability of the human condition, and the role of art in providing a voice for the voiceless.

Select quotations from the book:

"This problem has such a long history, a human history. We are all refugees somehow, somewhere, and at some moment."

"Allowing borders to determine your thinking is incompatible with the modern era."

"Art is about aesthetics, about morals, about our beliefs in humanity. Without that there is simply no art."

"I don't care what all people think. My work belongs to the people who have no voice."

I ALWAYS KNEW

I ALWAYS KNEW

By: Chase-Riboud, Barbara
$39.95
More Info

The extraordinary life story of the celebrated artist and writer, as told through four decades of intimate letters to her beloved mother

Barbara Chase-Riboud has led a remarkable life. After graduating from Yale's School of Design and Architecture, she moved to Europe and spent decades traveling the world and living at the center of artistic, literary, and political circles. She became a renowned artist whose work is now in museum collections around the world. Later, she also became an award-winning poet and bestselling novelist. And along the way, she met many luminaries--from Henri Cartier-Bresson, Salvador Dalí, Alexander Calder, James Baldwin, and Mao Zedong to Toni Morrison, Pierre Cardin, Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, and Josephine Baker.

I Always Knew is an intimate and vivid portrait of Chase-Riboud's life as told through the letters she wrote to her mother, Vivian Mae, between 1957 and 1991. In candid detail, Chase-Riboud tells her mother about her life in Europe, her work as an artist, her romances, and her journeys around the world, from Western and Eastern Europe to the Middle East, Africa, the Soviet Union, China, and Mongolia.

By turns brilliant and naïve, passionate and tender, poignant and funny, these letters show Chase-Riboud in the process of becoming who she is and who she might become. But what emerges most of all is the powerful story of a unique and remarkable relationship between a talented, ambitious, and courageous daughter and her adored mother.

IDEALS OF THE EAST

IDEALS OF THE EAST

By: Okakura, Kakuzo
$10.95
More Info

The 1904 book that famously declared "Asia is one" was among the first studies in English to reference Zen as it explored the roots of Japanese beauty. Like the author's "The Book of Tea, " this volume emphasized the spiritual ideals of Asian, and especially Japanese, art.

Kakuzo Okakura (1863-1913) was an administrator and scholar whose writings helped shape the West's early views of Japan and Asia.

IMAGINARY ANIMALS

IMAGINARY ANIMALS

By: Sax, Boria
$30.00
More Info
An extraordinary menagerie of fantastical and unreal beasts featuring hundreds of illustrations, from griffins to dog-men, mermaids, dragons, unicorns, and yetis.

Fire-breathing dragons, beautiful mermaids, majestic unicorns, terrifying three-headed dogs--these fantastic creatures have long excited our imagination. Medieval authors placed them in the borders of manuscripts as markers of the boundaries of our understanding. Tales from around the world place these beasts in deserts, deep woods, remote islands, ocean depths, and alternate universes--just out of our reach. And in the sections on the apocalypse in the Bible, they proliferate as the end of time approaches, with horses with heads like lions, dragons, and serpents signaling the destruction of the world. Legends tell us that imaginary animals belong to a primordial time, before everything in the world had names, categories, and conceptual frameworks. In this book, Boria Sax digs into the stories of these fabulous beasts. He shows how, despite their liminal role, imaginary animals like griffins, dog-men, yetis, and more are socially constructed creatures, created through the same complex play of sensuality and imagination as real ones. Tracing the history of imaginary animals from Paleolithic art to their roles in stories such as Harry Potter and even the advent of robotic pets, he reveals that these extraordinary figures help us psychologically--as monsters, they give form to our amorphous fears, while as creatures of wonder, they embody our hopes. Their greatest service, Sax concludes, is to continually challenge our imaginations, directing us beyond the limitations of conventional beliefs and expectations. Featuring over 230 illustrations of a veritable menagerie of fantastical and unreal beasts, Imaginary Animals is a feast for the eyes and the imagination.

IN THE REALM OF THE GODS: Land, Myths and Legends of China

IN THE REALM OF THE GODS: Land, Myths and Legends of China

By: Cass, Victoria
$24.95
More Info

"[Victoria] Cass brings China's mythic landscape to life. These stories draw the reader into a dimension that hovers over a magical landscape where ordinary mortals confront extraordinary powers. This is a journey into the psyche of eternal China."--Christine Mathieu, co-author of "Leaving Mother Lake: A Girlhood at the Edge of the World"

China is a land that has fascinated the world for centuries. Take a journey in this book back to a China that is both stunning and mysterious, back to the places where tales of magic were born. Victoria Cass retells both popular and little-known stories of emperors and empresses, ghosts, spirits, warriors, maidens, and magical realms amid landscapes potent with history.

The stories are arranged by geography, providing an unprecedented look into how folklore and culture were shaped by China's natural surroundings. Cass shows us where mortals, demons, and gods have for centuries belonged, taking the reader on a "grand tour" of China. This is a book that will capture the imagination of a new generation of readers.

"In the Realm of the Gods" also goes where no other book on Chinese folk traditions has gone before by featuring stunning photography from some of China's most critically acclaimed landscape photographers. Their studies of abandoned villas, vertiginous cliffs, nighttime pathways, serene canals, and temples at dusk provide a rich visual complement to the stories.

By presenting the stories and photographs together, Cass has assembled a perfect synthesis of words and images while showing how the physical and cultural geography of China is at the root of its most popular legends and its tales of the natural and supernatural. This book represents a stunning achievement in storytelling.

Victoria Cass is the author of "Dangerous Women: Warriors, Grannies, and Geishas of the Ming."

IN THE SCHEME OF THINGS

IN THE SCHEME OF THINGS

By: Fisher, Thomas R Fisher
$18.95
More Info
One of the field's most innovative thinkers reconsiders the purpose and practice of architecture. At the dawn of the twenty-first century, architecture is in a state of crisis. Numbed by an ugly and shoddily constructed built environment and outraged by the cost of high-profile design projects, the public has become disinterested in and contemptuous of architecture as both a profession and an art. At the same time, some of our most creative designers have isolated themselves from the tastes and needs of mainstream society, reflecting a similar malaise found in design and architecture schools around the country. In this troubling climate, Thomas R. Fisher--who challenged architects as editorial director of Progressive Architecture, becoming recognized as one of the field's most original thinkers--contends that the purpose and prospects of architectural practice must be reconsidered and reenergized. In the Scheme of Things looks at architecture's need to respond creatively and meaningfully to the extraordinary changes affecting the profession now, changes that include the global economy, the advent of computer-aided design, and the growing disconnection between design schools, architectural practice, and the public.

In each of the twelve essays that comprise this timely volume, Fisher addresses issues of vital concern to architects and students, offering hard-hitting criticism and proposing innovative and practical ideas for reform at the level of both the individual practitioner and the profession as a whole. Through his thoughtful and nuanced consideration of architecture's ideological foundations and its relationship to ecology, politics, and technology, as well as his subtle understanding of the architect's interior life, Fisher challenges the demoralized design community to recapture its historical role as steward and visionary of the public realm.

Thomas R. Fisher is dean of the College of Architecture and Landscape Architecture at the University of Minnesota and coeditor of Architectural Research Quarterly. His essays have appeared in Design Quarterly, Architectural Record, and other leading journals.

INDIGENUITY

INDIGENUITY

By: Wigginton, Caroline
$32.95
More Info
For hundreds of years, American artisanship and American authorship were entangled practices rather than distinct disciplines. Books, like other objects, were multisensory items all North American communities and cultures, including Native and settler colonial ones, regularly made and used. All cultures and communities narrated and documented their histories and imaginations through a variety of media. All created objects for domestic, sacred, curative, and collective purposes.

In this innovative work at the intersection of Indigenous studies, literary studies, book history, and material culture studies, Caroline Wigginton tells a story of the interweavings of Native craftwork and American literatures from their ancient roots to the present. Focused primarily on North America, especially the colonized lands and waters now claimed by the United States, this book argues for the foundational but often-hidden aesthetic orientation of American literary history toward Native craftwork. Wigginton knits this narrative to another of Indigenous aesthetic repatriation through the making and using of books and works of material expression. Ultimately, she reveals that Native craftwork is by turns the warp and weft of American literature, interwoven throughout its long history.



INTERACTION OF COLOR: 50TH ANNIVERSARY EDITION

INTERACTION OF COLOR: 50TH ANNIVERSARY EDITION

By: Albers, Josef
$18.00
More Info
"One of the most important books on color ever written."--Michael Hession, Gizmodo

"Interaction of Color with its illuminating visual exercises and mind-bending optical illusions, remains an indispensable blueprint to the art of seeing. . . . An essential piece of visual literacy."--Maria Popova, Brain Pickings

Josef Albers's classic Interaction of Color is a masterwork in art education. Conceived as a handbook and teaching aid for artists, instructors, and students, this influential book presents Albers's singular explanation of complex color theory principles.

Originally published by Yale University Press in 1963 as a limited silkscreen edition with 150 color plates, Interaction of Color first appeared in paperback in 1971, featuring ten color studies chosen by Albers, and has remained in print ever since. With over a quarter of a million copies sold in its various editions since 1963, Interaction of Color remains an essential resource on color, as pioneering today as when Albers first created it.

Fifty years after Interaction's initial publication, this anniversary edition presents a significantly expanded selection of close to sixty color studies alongside Albers's original text, demonstrating such principles as color relativity, intensity, and temperature; vibrating and vanishing boundaries; and the illusion of transparency and reversed grounds. A celebration of the longevity and unique authority of Albers's contribution, this landmark edition will find new audiences in studios and classrooms around the world.

INUKSUIT

INUKSUIT

By: Hallendy, Norman
$29.95
More Info
INVENTION OF INFINITY

INVENTION OF INFINITY

By: Field, J V
$35.00
More Info
From Giotto to Michelangelo and beyond, the period from about 1300 to 1650 saw an extraordinary flowering in the visual arts in Western Europe. The works produced were sometimes of astonishing quality and their history has been well documented and much discussed. The scientific endeavour of the time has received considerably less attention. The history of science is a newer discipline than history of art, and no topic is newer than the history of mathematics in the period that saw the beginning of the Renaissance in the arts. This book tells us about the everyday worlds of art and mathematics in a time when artists were merely 'craftsmen' and their practical mathematics was separate from the mathematics of scholars. The story brings together the histories of art and mathematics and shows how the craftsmen's discoveries changed learned mathematics, taking it beyond the admired achievements of the Ancient Greeks. Infinity at last acquired a precise mathematical meaning. The journey takes us through consideration of some of the world's most renowned paintings, and lively accounts of the mathematical techniques and discoveries of the time. We are in a world where art and the sciences have not yet pulled apart from one another, and it becomes clear that the mathematical nature of what we now call Science may well owe something to the tradition of what is now called Art.
ISLAND ZOMBIE

ISLAND ZOMBIE

By: Horn, Roni
$29.95
More Info

An evocative chronicle of the power of solitude in the natural world

I'm often asked, but have no idea why I chose Iceland, why I first started going, why I still go. In truth I believe Iceland chose me.--from the introduction

Contemporary artist Roni Horn first visited Iceland in 1975 at the age of nineteen, and since then, the island's treeless expanse has had an enduring hold on Horn's creative work. Through a series of remarkable and poetic reflections, vignettes, episodes, and illustrated essays, Island Zombie distills the artist's lifelong experience of Iceland's natural environment. Together, these pieces offer an unforgettable exploration of the indefinable and inescapable force of remote, elemental places, and provide a sustained look at how an island and its atmosphere can take possession of the innermost self.

Island Zombie is a meditation on being present. It vividly conveys Horn's experiences, from the deeply profound to the joyful and absurd. Through powerful evocations of the changing weather and other natural phenomena--the violence of the wind, the often aggressive birds, the imposing influence of glaciers, and the ubiquitous presence of water in all its variety--we come to understand the author's abiding need for Iceland, a place uniquely essential to Horn's creative and spiritual life. The dramatic surroundings provoke examinations of self-sufficiency and isolation, and these ruminations summon a range of cultural companions, including El Greco, Emily Dickinson, Judy Garland, Wallace Stevens, Edgar Allan Poe, William Morris, and Rachel Carson. While brilliantly portraying nature's sublime energy, Horn also confronts issues of consumption, destruction, and loss, as the industrial and man-made encroach on Icelandic wilderness.

Filled with musings on a secluded region that perpetually encourages a sense of discovery, Island Zombie illuminates a wild and beautiful Iceland that remains essential and new.

IT'S WHAT I DO: A PHOTOGRAPHER'S LIFE OF LOVE AND WAR

IT'S WHAT I DO: A PHOTOGRAPHER'S LIFE OF LOVE AND WAR

By: Addario, Lynsey
$18.00
More Info

"An unflinching memoir . . . [that] offers insight into international events and the challenges faced by the journalists who capture them." --The Washington Post

War photographer Lynsey Addario's memoir is the story of how the relentless pursuit of truth, in virtually every major theater of war in the twenty-first century, has shaped her life. What she does, with clarity, beauty, and candor, is to document, often in their most extreme moments, the complex lives of others. It's her work, but it's much more than that: it's her singular calling.

Lynsey Addario was just finding her way as a young photographer when September 11 changed the world. One of the few photojournalists with experience in Afghanistan, she gets the call to return and cover the American invasion. She decides to set out across the world, face the chaos of crisis, and make a name for herself.

Addario finds a way to travel with a purpose. She photographs the Afghan people before and after the Taliban reign, the civilian casualties and misunderstood insurgents of the Iraq War, as well as the burned villages and countless dead in Darfur. She exposes a culture of violence against women in the Congo and tells the riveting story of her headline-making kidnapping by pro-Qaddafi forces in the Libyan civil war.

As a woman photojournalist determined to be taken as seriously as her male peers, Addario fights her way into a boys' club of a profession. Rather than choose between her personal life and her career, Addario learns to strike a necessary balance. In the man who will become her husband, she finds at last a real love to complement her work, not take away from it, and as a new mother, she gains an all the more intensely personal understanding of the fragility of life.

Watching uprisings unfold and people fight to the death for their freedom, Addario understands she is documenting not only news but also the fate of societies. It's What I Do is more than just a snapshot of life on the front lines; it is witness to the human cost of war.

JAMES LOEB, COLLECTOR AND CONNOISSEUR

JAMES LOEB, COLLECTOR AND CONNOISSEUR

$30.00
More Info

James Loeb (1867-1933), one of the great patrons and philanthropists of his time, left many enduring legacies both to America, where he was born and educated, and to his ancestral Germany, where he spent the second half of his life. Organized in celebration of the sesquicentenary of his birth, the James Loeb Biennial Conferences were convened to commemorate his achievements in four areas: the Loeb Classical Library (2017), collection and connoisseurship (2019), and after pandemic postponement, psychology and medicine (2023), and music (2025).

The subject of the second conference was Loeb's deep and multifaceted engagement with the material culture of the ancient world as a scholar, connoisseur, collector, and curator. The volume's contributors range broadly over the manifold connections and contexts, both personal and institutional, of Loeb's archaeological interests, and consider these in light of the long history of collection and connoisseurship from antiquity to the present. Their essays also reflect on the contemporary significance of Loeb's work, as the collections he shaped continue to be curated and studied in today's rapidly evolving environment for the arts.

JAPANDEMONIUM ILLUSTRATED: THE YOKAI ENCYCLOPEDIAS OF TORIYAMA SEKIEN

JAPANDEMONIUM ILLUSTRATED: THE YOKAI ENCYCLOPEDIAS OF TORIYAMA SEKIEN

By: Sekien, Toriyama
$39.95
More Info

A fascinating, scholarly, beautifully illustrated, miscellanea of strange beasts, quelling demons, and otherworldly apparitions. JapandemoniumIllustrated will instruct you, amaze you, and transport you to a quintessential realm of Japanese lore. -- Guillermo del Toro, filmmaker
Such beautiful nightmares -- why bother to wake up? Long before Pokémon took to the streets, the Japanese saw monsters everywhere and in everything. Scholarly without being monstrously studious, Sekien's classic compendia of outlandish everyday demons compiled in this one fiendishly clever volume is sure to enchant even the most rational readers (poor misguided souls!) I sleep less now that I recognize the tenjo-name behind the spots on the ceiling. -- Alfred Birnbaum, editor/translator of Monkey Brain Sushi
Japanese folklore abounds with bizarre creatures collectively referred to as the yokai ― the ancestors of the monsters populating Japanese film, literature, manga, and anime. Artist Toriyama Sekien (1712-88) was the first to compile illustrated encyclopedias detailing the appearances and habits of these creepy-crawlies from myth and folklore. Ever since their debut over two centuries ago, the encyclopedias have inspired generations of Japanese artists. Japandemonium Illustrated represents the very first time they have ever been available in English.
This historically groundbreaking compilation includes complete translations of all four of Sekien's yokai masterworks: the 1776 Gazu Hyakki Yagyō (The Illustrated Demon Horde's Night Parade), the 1779 Konjaku Gazu Zoku Hyakki (The Illustrated Demon Horde from Past and Present, Continued), the 1781 Konjaku Hyakki Shū (More of the Demon Horde from Past and Present), and the 1784 Hyakki Tsurezure Bukuro (A Horde of Haunted Housewares). The collection is complemented by a detailed introduction and helpful annotations for modern-day readers.

JAPANESE WOODBLOCK BIRD PRINTS

JAPANESE WOODBLOCK BIRD PRINTS

By: Kashu, Numata
$24.95
More Info
In the 1880s, an economic boom in Japan encouraged a renaissance of traditional color woodblock painting. During this prosperous period, a well-born painter named Numata Kashû created A Picture Book of Birds. Kashû's three-volume series blended the contemporary interest in woodblock prints with East Asia's centuries-old fascination with artistic depictions of birds and flowers. His colorful books received a lavish production from a Tokyo printer that went out of business soon afterward, rendering the volumes instant rarities. Kashû's woodblock prints were so popular that dealers carved up available books in order to sell the images individually, making complete versions even harder to find.
A collector's delight, this exquisite edition reprints a rare 1930s facsimile of Kashû's works. Its vivid gallery of high-quality illustrations features 150 images of birds that are realistic as well as charmingly traditional. Most include the species' names in kanji as well as in English translations. Lovers of fine art -- and of Japanese art in particular -- will treasure this handsome volume, as will naturalists and rare book enthusiasts.
product image

JAPANESE ZEN BUDDHISM AND THE IMPOSSIBLE PAINTING

By: Lippit, Yukio
$15.00
More Info
Zen art poses a conundrum. On the one hand, Zen Buddhism emphasizes the concept of emptiness, which among other things asserts that form is empty, that all phenomena in the world are illusory. On the other hand, a prodigious amount of artwork has been created in association with Zen thought and practice. A wide range of media, genres, expressive modes, and strategies of representation have been embraced to convey the idea of emptiness. Form has been used to express the essence of formlessness, and in Japan, this gave rise to a remarkable, highly diverse array of artworks and a tradition of self-negating art.

In this volume, Yukio Lippit explores the painting The Gourd and the Catfish (ca. 1413), widely considered one of the most iconic works of Japanese Zen art today. Its subject matter appears straightforward enough: a man standing on a bank holds a gourd in both hands, attempting to capture or pin down the catfish swimming in the stream below. This is an impossible task, a nonsensical act underscored by the awkwardness with which the figure struggles even to hold his gourd. But this impossibility is precisely the point.
JUDY CHICAGO: IN THE MAKING: A RETROSPECTIVE

JUDY CHICAGO: IN THE MAKING: A RETROSPECTIVE

By: Schmuckli, Claudia
$49.95
More Info

One of the founding forces behind the 1970s feminist art movement, Judy Chicago became widely known for The Dinner Party, a massive installation turning women's traditional household-bound role on its head by setting a feast for thirty-nine remarkable women to shine a spotlight on women's contributions to history. Like much of her work that would follow, The Dinner Party received massive popular acclaim while being harshly dismissed for its subject matter and embrace of "feminine" craft. For decades, Chicago operated on the margins of the art world, her work shunned by most critics and institutions, but she never stopped creating. Employing a vast array of mediums from textiles to painting to pyrotechnics Chicago is always willing to tackle the most urgent human questions. Judy Chicago: In the Making accompanies the first exhibition to offer a thorough overview of Chicago's career. It traces the artist's practice back to its roots, revealing her unique working process and the origins of the formal and conceptual strategies she has applied throughout her oeuvre. Bringing together a selection drawn from every major series of her work, it also reproduces sketchbooks, journals, and preparatory drawings that document her extensive process of research and development.

Just My Type: A Book About Fonts

Just My Type: A Book About Fonts

By: Garfield, Simon
$16.00
More Info
A delightfully inquisitive tour that explores the rich history and the subtle powers of fonts.

Fonts surround us every day, on street signs and buildings, on movie posters and books, and on just about every product that we buy. But where do fonts come from and why do we need so many? Who is behind the businesslike subtlety of Times New Roman, the cool detachment of Arial, or the maddening lightness of Comic Sans (and the movement to ban it)? Simon Garfield embarks on a mission to answer these questions and more, and reveal what may be the very best and worst fonts in the world.

Typefaces are now 560 years old, but we barely knew their names until about twenty years ago, when the pull-down font menus on our first computers made us all the gods of type. Beginning in the early days of Gutenberg and ending with the most adventurous digital fonts, Garfield unravels our age old obsession with the way our words look. Just My Type investigates a range of modern mysteries, including how Helvetica took over the world, what inspires the seemingly ubiquitous use of Trajan on bad movie posters, and what makes a font look presidential, male or female, American, British, German, or Jewish. From the typeface of Beatlemania to the graphic vision of the Obama campaign, fonts can signal a musical revolution or the rise of an American president. This book is a must-read for the design conscious that will forever change the way you look at the printed word.

KEIKOS IKEBANA

KEIKOS IKEBANA

By: Schrempp, Erich
$24.95
More Info
Keiko's Ikebana offers an introduction to this international art form that is both practical and contemporary. Keiko's unique approach combines traditional techniques with modern tastes, incorporating influences ranging from sculpture to today's Western styles. The result is a one-of-a-kind look that is authentic, easy to create and attractive.

The book includes easy-to-follow instructions for creating 20 stunning ikebana arrangements to help readers bring this traditional Japanese art into their own homes. Readers will also be introduced to the history of ikebana, including its evolution from ancient times into the world of modern design, the basic 'rules' of ikebana design and suggestions for finding and choosing materials and supplies.

KIMONO: FASHIONING CULTURE

KIMONO: FASHIONING CULTURE

By: Dalby, Liza
$24.95
More Info

The colorful and stylized kimono--the national garment of Japan--expresses not only Japanese aesthetic sensibilities but the soul of Japan as well. In this beautifully written and lavishly illustrated book, Liza Dalby, author of the highly acclaimed Geisha and Tale of Murasaki, traces the history of kimono--its uses, aesthetics, and social meanings--to explore Japanese culture. Drawing on a variety of period texts including 17th-century kimono pattern books, Dalby vividly recreates kimono and those who wore them through the centuries. She discusses the development of the kimono robe from its Chinese origins two thousand years ago to its assimilation as the national dress of Japan.

An engaging mix of fashion history and social anthropology, this lively and scholarly book demonstrates in a new way how clothing can illuminate our understanding of culture.

"The force behind this excellent book is Dalby's personal passion for the whole cultural realm she discovered while learning to wear kimono with the exacting perfection of a professional, which meant learning to feel natural in it."--Ann Hollander, Yale Review

"Ms. Dalby has a great deal to tell, starting with her contention that clothing and wearer merge in Japan more than in most places. . . . [She] offers a tour of the cultural collisions that have become part of the fabric not just of the kimono but of modern Japan. It is a tour well worth taking." --Wall Street Journal

"A lively, informative study of the kimono, tracing its evolution throughout Japanese history to its current status as the national dress of Japan. [Dalby's] book's coverage includes all types of 'native' dress, past and present; her unique position as a Western 'insider' allows her to demystify the complex social mores connected with wearing the kimono. . . At once scholarly and enjoyable reading."--Journal of Japanese Studies

"Kimono is as elegantly designed as its topic. Lavishly illustrated and visually stunning . . . the text is every bit the equal of this graphic richness. In language simple but strikingly patterned, it weaves its way through technical details and historical arcanities with panache and color. . . . Such is the variety of lenses focussed upon its topic that the book will engage interests ranging from pop culture to literary history."--Mangajin

"An impressive, unusual, and beautiful book. There are many valuable insights here--not only about Japanese clothing but also about patterns of gender, class, and identity in Japanese culture."--Joseph J. Tobin, author of Re-Made in Japan

product image

KIND OF TOUCHING BEAUTY: PHOTOGRAPHS OF AMERICA BY PEDRO MEYER, TEXT BY JEAN-PAUL SARTRE

By: Meyer, Pedro
$40.00
More Info

"Everyone is free here. . . . The cities are open. They are open to the world and to the future. That is what gives them all an air of adventure; and . . . a kind of touching beauty." So wrote the French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre on a 1945 trip to the United States during which he crossed the country and dove deep into the soul of the American city. In this new volume, Sartre's reflections on the distinctly American quality of cities in the United States are accompanied by Pedro Meyer's photographs of American cities, offering similarly sharp insights, but through a different historical lens: that of the late eighties and early nineties. Together, the photographs and essays articulate the enduring essence of American urban existence--its relationship with time, with labor and humanity, and with the open spaces emblematic of America.

product image

KIND OF TOUCHING BEAUTY: Photographs of America by Pedro Meyer, Text by Jean-Paul Sartre

By: Meyer, Pedro
$45.00
More Info

"Everyone is free here. . . . The cities are open. They are open to the world and to the future. That is what gives them all an air of adventure; and . . . a kind of touching beauty." So wrote the French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre on a 1945 trip to the United States during which he crossed the country and dove deep into the soul of the American city. In this new volume, Sartre's reflections on the distinctly American quality of cities in the United States are accompanied by Pedro Meyer's photographs of American cities, offering similarly sharp insights, but through a different historical lens: that of the late eighties and early nineties. Together, the photographs and essays articulate the enduring essence of American urban existence--its relationship with time, with labor and humanity, and with the open spaces emblematic of America.

LANDSCAPE DESIGN: Culural and Architectural Writing

LANDSCAPE DESIGN: Culural and Architectural Writing

By: Rogers, Elizabeth Barlow
$75.00
More Info
People have shaped the landscape around them since prehistoric times, creating places as diverse in form and meaning as Stonehenge, the Forbidden City of Beijing, Versailles, and New York's Central Park. Overflowing with hundreds of plans, drawings, and photographs, many created specially for this book, this engrossing volume spans the history of landscape design and reveals a great deal about the development of societies, and how cities, parks, and gardens embody cultural values.

Examining famous and lesser-known sites, some now vanished, this comprehensive survey leads the reader from ancient Egyptian royal cemeteries to the magnificent gardens of Renaissance and Baroque Europe, and from great 18th-century English estates and American public gardens to the earthworks and other landscape projects of today.

A feast for the historian, landscape designer, and gardener alike, this new book has no equal.

product image

LETTERS OF PAUL CEZANNE

$39.95
More Info

Book of the Year, Apollo Magazine, 2013

Revered and misunderstood by his peers and lauded by later generations as the father of modern art, Paul Cézanne (1839-1906) has long been a subject of fascination for artists and art lovers, writers, poets, and philosophers. His life was a ceaseless artistic quest, and he channeled much of his wide-ranging intellect and ferocious wit into his letters. Punctuated by exasperated theorizing and philosophical reflection, outbursts of creative ecstasy and melancholic confession, the artist's correspondence reveals both the heroic and all-toohuman qualities of a man who is indisputably among the pantheon of all-time greats.

This new translation of Cézanne's letters includes more than twenty that were previously unpublished and reproduces the sketches and caricatures with which Cézanne occasionally illustrated his words. The letters shed light on some of the key artistic relationships of the modern period--about one third of Cézanne's more than 250 letters are to his boyhood companion Émile Zola, and he communicated extensively with Camille Pissarro and the dealer Ambroise Vollard. The translation is richly annotated with explanatory notes, and, for the first time, the letters are cross-referenced to the current catalogue raisonné. Numerous inaccuracies and archaisms in the previous English edition of the letters are corrected, and many intriguing passages that were unaccountably omitted have been restored. The result is a publishing landmark that ably conveys Cézanne's intricacy of expression.

LIFE AND WORKS OF WINSLOW HOMER

LIFE AND WORKS OF WINSLOW HOMER

By: Downes, William Howe
$10.95
More Info
LIGHT FROM THE EAST

LIGHT FROM THE EAST

By: Evdokimov, Michael
$16.95
More Info
LIVES OF THE ARTISTS

LIVES OF THE ARTISTS

By: Vasari, Giorgio
$12.95
More Info
These biographies of the great quattrocento artists have long been considered among the most important of contemporary sources on Italian Renaissance art. Vasari, who invented the term Renaissance, was the first to outline the influential theory of Renaissance art that traces a progression
through Giotto, Brunelleschi, and finally the titanic figures of Michaelangelo, Da Vinci, and Raphael.

This new translation, specially commissioned for the Oxford World's Classics series, contains thirty-six of the most important lives. Fully annotated and with a brand new package, Lives of the Artists is an invaluable classic to add to your collection.

About the Series: For over 100 years Oxford World's Classics has made available the broadest spectrum of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford's commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert
introductions by leading authorities, voluminous notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more.

product image

LOS CAPRICHOS

By: Goya, Francisco
$12.95
More Info
After a serious illness in 1792, Goya spent five years recuperating and preparing himself for the burst of creativity that was to follow. He read deeply in the French revolutionary philosophers. From Rousseau he evolved the idea that imagination divorced from reason produces monsters, but that coupled with reason "it is the mother of the arts and the source of their wonders." In Spain he saw a country that had abandoned reason, and he peopled Los Caprichos with the grotesque monsters that result from such an action. Plate after plate shows witches, asses, devils, and other strange creatures, many of which are caricatures of members of the society against which Goya was fighting.
The plates were first published in 1799. There are still in existence, however, six extremely rare sets of artist's proofs, considered by most who have managed to see them as infinitely superior to the work actually published. Now, for the first time, this edition reproduces one of these sets of 80 prints, together with the "Prado" manuscript, a commentary on the plates. In addition, this collection contains supplementary material to the Los Caprichos series, inlcuding a never-before-published study for Caprichos 10; three unique proofs of plates probably intended for publication with the others; a preliminary drawing for plate I, a self-portrait of Goya (which appears as the frontispiece to this volume); and a unique proof of "Woman in Prison" which may represent an earlier version of Caprichos 32.