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Art & Architecture

VAN GOGH TV'S PIAZZA VIRTUALE

VAN GOGH TV'S PIAZZA VIRTUALE

$35.00
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"Piazza virtuale" by the artist group Van Gogh TV was not only the biggest art project on television ever-from a contemporary point of view the project was also a forerunner of today's social media. The ground-breaking television event that took place during the 100 days of documenta IX in 1992 was an early experiment with entirely user-created content. This is the first book-length study of a largely forgotten experiment: It not only documents its radicality of the approach, novel programme ideas and technical innovations. It also allows direct access to videos from the show, which were inaccessible until now, via QR codes.


VISIONS OF BUDDHIST LIFE

VISIONS OF BUDDHIST LIFE

By: Farber, Don
$19.95
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Don Farber's highly acclaimed photographs open a spectacular view of the beauty and diversity of Buddhist life around the world. His superb eye for composition, his attention to color and detail, and his intimate knowledge of Buddhism come together to produce outstanding, often breathtaking images. A selection of Farber's best work to date, Visions of Buddhist Life brings an important message of compassion, healing, and understanding to today's troubled world.

The photographs, together with Farber's extensive captions, take us to the temples, monasteries, and colorful streets of Los Angeles, Kyoto, and Bangkok, and travel onward to China, India, Nepal, South Korea, and Taiwan. They depict Buddhists alone and in crowds, in cities rich and poor, in meditation and in conversation. They also picture some of the great teachers of our day--the Dalai Lama, Thich Nhat Hanh, and Kalu Rinpoche. These images capture some of the last Tibetan masters to have received their training before the Chinese invasion and are a vital documentation of a tradition in danger of vanishing forever.

A study in the human face, in the art of spiritual devotion, in the evocative power of landscape, this collection of images provides an essential context for understanding Buddhism. Visions of Buddhist Life is also a visual and spiritual journey into a realm where the doctrine of nonviolence is paramount and where peace begins with the thoughts and actions of the individual.

VISUAL THINKING

VISUAL THINKING

By: Arnheim, Rudolf
$29.95
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For thirty-five years Visual Thinking has been the gold standard for art educators, psychologists, and general readers alike. In this seminal work, Arnheim, author of The Dynamics of Architectural Form, Film as Art, Toward a Psychology of Art, and Art and Visual Perception, asserts that all thinking (not just thinking related to art) is basically perceptual in nature, and that the ancient dichotomy between seeing and thinking, between perceiving and reasoning, is false and misleading. An indispensable tool for students and for those interested in the arts.
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VIVIAN MAIER: A PHOTOGRAPHER'S LIFE AND AFTERLIFE

By: Bannos, Pamela
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Who was Vivian Maier? Many people know her as the reclusive Chicago nanny who wandered the city for decades, constantly snapping photographs, which were unseen until they were discovered in a seemingly abandoned storage locker. They revealed her to be an inadvertent master of twentieth-century American street photography. Not long after, the news broke that Maier had recently died and had no surviving relatives. Soon the whole world knew about her preternatural work, shooting her to stardom almost overnight.

But, as Pamela Bannos reveals in this meticulous and passionate biography, this story of the nanny savant has blinded us to Maier's true achievements, as well as her intentions. Most important, Bannos argues, Maier was not a nanny who moonlighted as a photographer; she was a photographer who supported herself as a nanny. In Vivian Maier: A Photographer's Life and Afterlife, Bannos contrasts Maier's life with the mythology that strangers--mostly the men who have profited from her work--have created around her absence. Bannos shows that Maier was extremely conscientious about how her work was developed, printed, and cropped, even though she also made a clear choice never to display it. She places Maier's fierce passion for privacy alongside the recent spread of her work around the world, and she explains Maier's careful adjustments of photographic technique, while explaining how the photographs have been misconstrued or misidentified. As well, Bannos uncovers new information about Maier's immediate family, including her difficult brother, Karl--relatives that once had been thought not to exist.

This authoritative and engrossing biography shows that the real story of Vivian Maier, a true visionary artist, is even more compelling than the myth.

WABI-SABI: FURTHER THOUGHTS

WABI-SABI: FURTHER THOUGHTS

By: Koren, Leonard
$16.00
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Twenty-plus years after the initial publication of Wabi-Sabi: for Artists, Designers, Poets & Philosophers, Leonard Koren is back with further insights into this seminal aesthetic paradigm. An important book for art and design theorists, and other thoughtful creators.


WATER, WIND, BREATH

WATER, WIND, BREATH

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The Barnes Foundation's historic Pueblo and Navajo collections are explored alongside works by contemporary Native American artists

This richly illustrated book makes the Barnes Foundation's exceptional collection of Native American art from the Southwest available to the public for the first time. Collector and educator Albert C. Barnes traveled to the U.S. Southwest in 1930 and 1931 and, deeply impressed by the generative art practices he saw there, formed a collection of Pueblo and Navajo pottery, textiles, and jewelry. Water, Wind, Breath illuminates the materials, forms, and designs of the objects as they relate to Pueblo and Navajo histories and ideas. The book blends postcolonial and Indigenous perspectives, introducing readers to living artistic traditions filled with purpose, intention, and a deeply embedded spirituality that connects places, practices, and Native identities. Works by contemporary Native American artists are juxtaposed with historic pieces, illuminating the connections between heritage traditions and modern practices.

WAY OF THE BRUSH: Painting Techniques of China and Japan

WAY OF THE BRUSH: Painting Techniques of China and Japan

By: Van Briessen, Fritz
$34.95
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The first paperback edition of this backlist classic, "The Way of the Brush" examines the technique, style, traditions, and methods of ink-painting. Illustrated with over 250 paintings and packed with instructions, "The Way of the Brush" covers every aspect of the art, from brushstrokes, composition, and the painting surface to meaning, perspective, and artistic philosophy. Part One explains the elements, techniques, and principles of Chinese and Japanese painting, while Part Two is devoted to challenges associated with the art. Also included are three appendices and a full bibliography.
WHAT IS CULTURE FOR?

WHAT IS CULTURE FOR?

By: The School of Life
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How to find compassion, hope, and perspective in the arts.

Our societies frequently proclaim their enormous esteem for culture. Music, film, literature and the visual arts enjoy high prestige and are viewed by many as getting close to the meaning of life. But what is culture really for?

This book proposes that works of culture were all made, in one way or another, with the idea of improving the way we live. The book connects a range of cultural masterpieces with our own pains and dilemmas around love, work and society, and invites us to see culture as a resource with which to address the complex agonies of being human. It provides us with enduring keys to unlocking culture as a way of transforming our lives.

WHAT IS LANDSCAPE?

WHAT IS LANDSCAPE?

By: Stilgoe, John R
$15.95
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A lexicon and guide for discovering the essence of landscape.

"Mr. Stilgoe does not ask that we take his book outdoors with us; he believes that reading and experiencing landscapes are activities that should be kept separate. But, as I learned in his book, the hollow storage area in a car driver's door was once a holster, the 'secure nesting place of a pistol.' I recommend you stow your copy there."
--The Wall Street Journal

Landscape, John Stilgoe tells us, is a noun. From the old Frisian language (once spoken in coastal parts of the Netherlands and Germany), it meant shoveled land: landschop. Sixteenth-century Englishmen misheard or mispronounced this as landskep, which became landskip, then landscape, designating the surface of the earth shaped for human habitation. In What Is Landscape? Stilgoe maps the discovery of landscape by putting words to things, zeroing in on landscape's essence but also leading sideways expeditions through such sources as children's picture books, folklore, deeds, antique terminology, out-of-print dictionaries, and conversations with locals. ("What is that?" "Well, it's not really a slough, not really, it's a bayou...") He offers a highly original, cogent, compact, gracefully written narrative lexicon of landscape as word, concept, and path to discoveries.

What Is Landscape? is an invitation to walk, to notice, to ask: to see a sandcastle with a pinwheel at the beach and think of Dutch windmills--icons of triumph, markers of territory won from the sea; to walk in the woods and be amused by the Elizabethans' misuse of the Latin silvaticus (people of the woods) to coin the word savages; to see in a suburban front lawn a representation of the meadow of a medieval freehold.

Discovering landscape is good exercise for body and for mind. This book is an essential guide and companion to that exercise--to understanding, literally and figuratively, what landscape is.

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WHAT IS LANDSCAPE?

By: Stilgoe, John R
$20.95
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A lexicon and guide for discovering the essence of landscape.

"Mr. Stilgoe does not ask that we take his book outdoors with us; he believes that reading and experiencing landscapes are activities that should be kept separate. But, as I learned in his book, the hollow storage area in a car driver's door was once a holster, the 'secure nesting place of a pistol.' I recommend you stow your copy there."

--The Wall Street Journal

Landscape, John Stilgoe tells us, is a noun. From the old Frisian language (once spoken in coastal parts of the Netherlands and Germany), it meant shoveled land: landschop. Sixteenth-century Englishmen misheard or mispronounced this as landskep, which became landskip, then landscape, designating the surface of the earth shaped for human habitation. In What Is Landscape? Stilgoe maps the discovery of landscape by putting words to things, zeroing in on landscape's essence but also leading sideways expeditions through such sources as children's picture books, folklore, deeds, antique terminology, out-of-print dictionaries, and conversations with locals. ("What is that?" "Well, it's not really a slough, not really, it's a bayou...") He offers a highly original, cogent, compact, gracefully written narrative lexicon of landscape as word, concept, and path to discoveries.

What Is Landscape? is an invitation to walk, to notice, to ask: to see a sandcastle with a pinwheel at the beach and think of Dutch windmills--icons of triumph, markers of territory won from the sea; to walk in the woods and be amused by the Elizabethans' misuse of the Latin silvaticus (people of the woods) to coin the word savages; to see in a suburban front lawn a representation of the meadow of a medieval freehold.

Discovering landscape is good exercise for body and for mind. This book is an essential guide and companion to that exercise--to understanding, literally and figuratively, what landscape is.

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WHEN I WAS A PHOTOGRAPHER

By: Nadar, Félix
$24.95
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The first complete English translation of Nadar's intelligent and witty memoir, a series of vignettes that capture his experiences in the early days of photography.

Celebrated nineteenth-century photographer--and writer, actor, caricaturist, inventor, and balloonist--Félix Nadar published this memoir of his photographic life in 1900 at the age of eighty. Composed as a series of vignettes (we might view them as a series of "written photographs"), this intelligent and witty book offers stories of Nadar's experiences in the early years of photography, memorable character sketches, and meditations on history. It is a classic work, cited by writers from Walter Benjamin to Rosalind Krauss. This is its first and only complete English translation.

In When I Was a Photographer (Quand j'étais photographe), Nadar tells us about his descent into the sewers and catacombs of Paris, where he experimented with the use of artificial lighting, and his ascent into the skies over Paris in a hot air balloon, from which he took the first aerial photographs. He recounts his "postal photography" during the 1870-1871 Siege of Paris--an amazing scheme involving micrographic images and carrier pigeons. He describes technical innovations and important figures in photography, and offers a thoughtful consideration of society and culture; but he also writes entertainingly about such matters as Balzac's terror of being photographed, the impact of a photograph on a celebrated murder case, and the difference between male and female clients. Nadar's memoir captures, as surely as his photographs, traces of a vanished era.

WHITE

WHITE

By: Pastoureau, Michel
$39.95
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From the acclaimed author of Blue, a beautifully illustrated history of the color white in visual culture, from antiquity to today

As a pigment, white is often thought to represent an absence of color, but it is without doubt an important color in its own right, just like red, blue, green, or yellow--and, like them, white has its own intriguing history. In this richly illustrated book, Michel Pastoureau, a celebrated authority on the history of colors, presents a fascinating visual, social, and cultural history of the color white in European societies, from antiquity to today.

Illustrated throughout with a wealth of captivating images ranging from the ancient world to the twenty-first century, White examines the evolving place, perception, and meaning of this deceptively simple but complex hue in art, fashion, literature, religion, science, and everyday life across the millennia. Before the seventeenth century, white's status as a true color was never contested. On the contrary, from antiquity until the height of the Middle Ages, white formed with red and black a chromatic triad that played a central role in life and art. Nor has white always been thought of as the opposite of black. Through the Middle Ages, the true opposite of white was red. White also has an especially rich symbolic history, and the color has often been associated with purity, virginity, innocence, wisdom, peace, beauty, and cleanliness.

With its striking design and compelling text, White is a colorful history of a surprisingly vivid and various color.

WHY ARCHITECTS STILL DRAW

WHY ARCHITECTS STILL DRAW

By: Belardi, Paolo
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An architect's defense of drawing as a way of thinking, even in an age of electronic media.

Why would an architect reach for a pencil when drawing software and AutoCAD are a click away? Use a ruler when 3D-scanners and GPS devices are close at hand? In Why Architects Still Draw, Paolo Belardi offers an elegant and ardent defense of drawing by hand as a way of thinking. Belardi is no Luddite; he doesn't urge architects to give up digital devices for watercolors and a measuring tape. Rather, he makes a case for drawing as the interface between the idea and the work itself.

A drawing, Belardi argues, holds within it the entire final design. It is the paradox of the acorn: a project emerges from a drawing--even from a sketch, rough and inchoate--just as an oak tree emerges from an acorn. Citing examples not just from architecture but also from literature, chemistry, music, archaeology, and art, Belardi shows how drawing is not a passive recording but a moment of invention pregnant with creative possibilities.

Moving from the sketch to the survey, Belardi explores the meaning of measurement in a digital era. A survey of a site should go beyond width, height, and depth; it must include two more dimensions: history and culture. Belardi shows the sterility of techniques that value metric exactitude over cultural appropriateness, arguing for an "informed drawing" that takes into consideration more than meters or feet, stone or steel. Even in the age of electronic media, Belardi writes, drawing can maintain its role as a cornerstone of architecture.

WHY ARCHITECTURE MATTERS

WHY ARCHITECTURE MATTERS

By: Goldberger, Paul
$18.00
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A classic work on the joy of experiencing architecture, with a new afterword reflecting on architecture's place in the contemporary moment

"Architecture begins to matter," writes Paul Goldberger, "when it brings delight and sadness and perplexity and awe along with a roof over our heads." In Why Architecture Matters, he shows us how that works in examples ranging from a small Cape Cod cottage to the vast, flowing Prairie houses of Frank Lloyd Wright, from the Lincoln Memorial to the Guggenheim Bilbao. He eloquently describes the Church of Sant'Ivo in Rome as a work that "embraces the deepest complexities of human imagination."

In his afterword to this new edition, Goldberger addresses the current climate in architectural history and takes a more nuanced look at projects such as Thomas Jefferson's academical village at the University of Virginia and figures including Philip Johnson, whose controversial status has been the topic of much recent discourse. He argues that the emotional impact of great architecture remains vital, even as he welcomes the shift in the field to an increased emphasis on social justice and sustainability.

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WHY PHOTOGRAPHY MATTERS

By: Thompson, Jerry L
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A lucid and wide-ranging meditation on why photography is unique among the picture-making arts.

Photography matters, writes Jerry Thompson, because of how it works--not only as an artistic medium but also as a way of knowing. With this provocative observation, Thompson begins a wide-ranging and lucid meditation on why photography is unique among the picture-making arts. He constructs an argument that moves with natural logic from Thomas Pynchon (and why we read him for his vision and not his command of miscellaneous facts) to Jonathan Swift to Plato to Emily Dickinson (who wrote "Tell all the Truth but tell it slant") to detailed readings of photographs by Eugène Atget, Garry Winogrand, Marcia Due, Walker Evans, and Robert Frank. Forcefully and persuasively, he argues for photography as a medium whose business is not constructing fantasies pleasing to the eye or imagination, but describing the world in the toughest and deepest way.

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WOMEN ARE HEROES

By: Jr
$40.00
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Guerilla street artist JR traveled to Sierra Leone, Liberia, Sudan, Kenya, Brazil, India, and Cambodia to seek out women struggling in their everyday lives and, in his words, "to take their stories around the world." Pasting mural-size portraits of his subjects into their own communities--on the sides of buildings, on trains, on bridges--he brings a haunting human presence to harsh environments of social conflict. His photographs of the vast outdoor "exhibitions" that he creates are iconic images celebrating the worth of the individual. A beautifully illustrated account of this remarkable project, Women Are Heroes introduces JR's thrilling imagery of the modern landscape filled with human faces, and also includes his original photographic portraits paired with interviews in which the women share their lives and dreams.
WRITERS

WRITERS

By: Wilson, Laura
$45.00
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Intimate photo essays of thirty-eight important writers, including Margaret Atwood, Gabriel García Márquez, Zadie Smith, and Colm Tóibín

"We've all seen writers on the dust jackets of their books. These portraits, it seemed to me, generally failed to convey either character or personality. Writers deserve better. I wanted to make compelling pictures that would stick in the mind's eye."--Laura Wilson

Inspired by the classic photo essays that once appeared in Life magazine, renowned photographer Laura Wilson presents dynamic portraits of thirty-eight internationally acclaimed writers. Through her photos and accompanying texts, she gives us vivid, revealing glimpses into the everyday lives of such luminaries as Rachel Cusk, Edwidge Danticat, David McCullough, Haruki Murakami, and the late Carlos Fuentes and Seamus Heaney, among others. Margaret Atwood works in her garden. Tim O'Brien performs magic tricks for his family. And Louise Erdrich, who contributes an introduction, speaks with customers in her Minneapolis bookstore. At once inviting and poignant, the book reflects on writing and photography's shared concerns with invention, transformation, memory, and preservation. With 220 duotone images, The Writers: Portraits will appeal to fans of literature and photography alike.

Published in association with the Harry Ransom Center at The University of Texas at Austin

WRITING THE WORD OF GOD: CALLIGRAPHY & THE QUR'AN

WRITING THE WORD OF GOD: CALLIGRAPHY & THE QUR'AN

By: Roxburgh, David J
$14.95
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The art of Islamic calligraphy developed from the 7th to the 14th century, beginning in western Arabia, spreading south to Yemen and north to the Near East, and continuing east and west to Iran, Egypt, North Africa, and Spain. This handsome book demonstrates the breadth and beauty of Islamic calligraphy across centuries and continents, as seen in rare early folios of the Qur'an. Noted scholar David J. Roxburgh begins by discussing the Qur'an, which Muslims believe to be the written record of a series of divinely inspired revelations to the Prophet Muhammad. He then analyzes Kufic script, the preeminent vehicle for writing early manuscripts of the Qur'an; reforms of calligraphy in the 10th century; and the great master Islamic calligraphers, in particular Yaqut al-Musta'simi. The beautiful reproductions of folios and bifolios validate Roxburgh's conclusion that "the miracle of the text of the Qur'an found its equal in the technical mastery of the calligrapher's practice, a miracle in its own right."
X-RAY: SEE THE WORLD AROUND YOU

X-RAY: SEE THE WORLD AROUND YOU

By: Veasey, Nick
$39.95
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A beautiful and utterly mesmerizing view of everyday objects.
Using security scanners and x-ray machines, Nick Veasey creates beautiful, unsettling, inside-out images that reveal?like never before?the intricacy of everyday objects, animals, and plants. Whether the spectacle of an x-rayed Boeing 777, the elaborate geometry of an mp3 player's circuit boards, or the ethereal grace of a translucent daffodil, each page of this book is an absorbing work of art.
In a security-obsessed age, Veasey's work is subtly subversive, as it uses sophisticated technology to discover inner beauty rather than concealed dangers.
Veasey captures the x-ray images on film in a lead-lined studio. (He works on the outside of the studio when the machines are operating.) Once the x-ray has been exposed, it is scanned at ultrahigh resolution, using special equipment tailored for the process. These digital images are then composed and embellished on a computer. The whole process can take weeks or even months?but the results speak for themselves.
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YALE DICTIONARY OF ART AND ARTISTS

By: Langmuir, Erika
$12.95
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This reference work deals with all aspects of Western art from 1300 to the present day. It provides information on painters, sculptors, and graphic artists, technical processes, terminology, theory, schools, movements, patrons and collecting, and much more.
YELLOW: THE HISTORY OF A COLOR

YELLOW: THE HISTORY OF A COLOR

By: Pastoureau, Michel
$39.95
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From the acclaimed author of Blue, a beautifully illustrated history of yellow from antiquity to the present

In this richly illustrated book, Michel Pastoureau--a renowned authority on the history of color and the author of celebrated volumes on blue, black, green, and red--now traces the visual, social, and cultural history of yellow. Focusing on European societies, with comparisons from East Asia, India, Africa, and South America, Yellow tells the intriguing story of the color's evolving place in art, religion, fashion, literature, and science.

In Europe today, yellow is a discreet color, little present in everyday life and rarely carrying great symbolism. This has not always been the case. In antiquity, yellow was almost sacred, a symbol of light, warmth, and prosperity. It became highly ambivalent in medieval Europe: greenish yellow came to signify demonic sulfur and bile, the color of forgers, lawless knights, Judas, and Lucifer--while warm yellow recalled honey and gold, serving as a sign of pleasure and abundance. In Asia, yellow has generally had a positive meaning. In ancient China, yellow clothing was reserved for the emperor, while in India the color is associated with happiness. Above all, yellow is the color of Buddhism, whose temple doors are marked with it.

Throughout, Pastoureau illuminates the history of yellow with a wealth of captivating images. With its striking design and compelling text, Yellow is a feast for the eye and mind.

YOGA: THE ART OF TRANSFORMATION

YOGA: THE ART OF TRANSFORMATION

$55.00
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New York Times 2013 holiday gift list pick

An exploration of yoga's meanings and transformations over time; the discipline's goals of spiritual enlightenment, worldly power, and health and well-being; and the beauty and profundity of Indian art.

YOSHITAKA AMANO: ILLUSTRATIONS

YOSHITAKA AMANO: ILLUSTRATIONS

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A collection of gorgeous full-color art pieces, interviews, and sketches by Yoshitaka Amano, renowned for his work on Final Fantasy, Vampire Hunter D and The Sandman.

Since beginning his career at age fifteen with the legendary animation studio Tatsunoko Production, Yoshitaka Amano has become one of the most acclaimed artists and illustrators at work today. Displaying a rare range, his oeuvre encompasses everything from minutely observed still-life sketches to full-color paintings on an epic scale, from children's storybooks to dark adult fantasy, from theatrical productions to video games to sculpture to commercial design.

Yoshitaka Amano: Illustrations offers a concise survey of this remarkable artist's career to date. It includes selected full-color pieces for series such as Final Fantasy, Vampire Hunter D and Gatchaman (Battle of the Planets), as well as for Amano's own creations like Hero and N.Y. Salad. Packed with sketches, commentary, and interviews, this beautiful volume opens a window into the world of Amano.

YOUNG CHET

By: Claxton, William
$16.95
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Chet Baker was just twenty-two when he was discovered by Charlie Parker in 1951. It was the heyday of the California jazz scene, and the handsome, brooding young trumpeter skyrocketed to fame. During a glorious period that stretched from 1952 to 1957 Baker, the "James Dean of jazz, " captured the hearts and soul of a generation that was infatuated with "cool, " yet deeply moved by the musician's underlying tone of seductive melancholy.

Among Baker's admirers was jazz photographer William Claxton, who accompanied Chet to concerts, performances and studio sessions. His photos show a dreamily introverted musician whose charisma and appearance matched the suggestiveness of his art. And they document a vibrant period in our country's musical history, when youth and beauty ruled the day, and which paved the way for America's obsession with glamorous, fast-living entertainers. Reprinted in an attractive smaller format, and accompanied by Claxton's affecting, personal memories of Baker, these photographs document not just an artist at work, but friendship in the making.