Nairn's London


Ian Nairn - 1967
    Nairn’s London, however, has deservedly stayed: ever since its original publication in 1966, Ian Nairn’s 450–entry “personal list of the best things in London” has had the reputation as the finest, most stimulating London vade mecum of them all. Brilliantly and bitingly written, impassioned in its vision of the city and its history, this is a splendidly unique volume to be treasured by every connoisseur of the ever–changing city.

Gustav Klimt: Complete Paintings (XXL)


Tobias G. Natter - 2012
    He stood for Modernism but he also embodied tradition. His pictures polarized and divided the art-loving world. The press and general public alike were split over the question: For or against Klimt? This monograph explores Klimt’s oeuvre with particular emphasis upon such contemporary voices. With a complete catalogue of his paintings, including new photographs of the Stoclet Frieze commissioned exclusively for this book, it examines the reactions to Klimt’s work throughout his career. Subjects range from Klimt’s portrayal of women to his adoption of landscape painting. The theory that Klimt was a man of few words who rarely put pen to paper is also dispelled with the inclusion of 179 letters, cards, writings, and other documents from the artist.Contributing authors: Evelyn Benesch, Marian Bisanz-Prakken, Rainald Franz, Anette Freytag, Christoph Grunenberg, Hansjörg Krug, Susanna Partsch, Angelina Pötschner, and Michaela ReichelThe Editor and Author:Tobias G. Natter is an internationally acknowledged expert on art in “Vienna around 1900.” For many years he worked at the Austrian Belvedere Gallery in Vienna, latterly as head curator. He also worked as guest curator at the Tate Liverpool, the Neue Galerie New York, the Hamburger Kunsthalle, the Schirn in Frankfurt am Main, and the Jewish Museum in Vienna. From 2006 to 2011, he directed the Vorarlberg Museum in Bregenz, and from 2011 to 2013 was director of the Leopold Museum in Vienna. In 2014 he founded Natter Fine Arts, which specializes in assessing works of art and developing exhibition concepts. He is the author of TASCHEN’s Gustav Klimt: The Complete Paintings; Art for All: The Colour Woodcut in Vienna around 1900; and Egon Schiele: The Complete Paintings, 1909–1918.Details:Gustav Klimt: The Complete PaintingsTobias G. NatterHardcover with fold-outs, 29 x 39.5 cm, 676 pagesISBN 978-3-8365-2795-8Edition: EnglishSUZY MENKES:“Surely TASCHEN’s Klimt: The Complete Paintings. Each unfolding page — with its strokeable surface of intense paintwork and its meld of Byzantine imagery and Venetian mosaics — brings to life the exotic eroticism of an exceptional artist.”

Norman Rockwell: Behind the Camera


Ron Schick - 2009
     Working alongside skilled photographers, Rockwell acted as director, carefully orchestrating models, selecting props, and choosing locations for the photographs -- works of art in their own right -- that served as the basis of his iconic images. Readers will be surprised to find that many of his most memorable characters -- the girl at the mirror, the young couple on prom night, the family on vacation -- were friends and neighbors who served as his amateur models. In this groundbreaking book, author and historian Ron Schick delves into the archive of nearly 20,000 photographs housed at the Norman Rockwell Museum. Featuring reproductions of Rockwell's black-and-white photographs and related full-color artworks, along with an incisive narrative and quotes from Rockwell models and family members, this book will intrigue anyone interested in photography, art, and Americana.

Skyway: The True Story of Tampa Bay's Signature Bridge and the Man Who Brought It Down


Bill DeYoung - 2013
    Directly in the ship’s path was the Sunshine Skyway Bridge--two ribbons of concrete, steel, and asphalt that crossed fifteen miles of open bay.  Suddenly, a violent weather cell reduced visibility to zero at the precise moment when Lerro attempted to direct the 20,000-ton vessel underneath the bridge. Unable to stop or see where he was going, Lerro drove the ship into a support pier; the main span splintered and collapsed 150 feet into the bay. Seven cars and a Greyhound bus fell over the broken edge and into the churning water below. Thirty-five people died.Skyway tells the entire story of this horrific event, from the circumstances that led up to it through the years-long legal proceedings that followed. Through personal interviews and extensive research, Bill DeYoung pieces together the harrowing moments of the collision, including the first-person accounts of witnesses and survivors. Among those whose lives were changed forever was Wesley MacIntire, the motorist whose truck ricocheted off the hull of the Summit Venture and sank. Although he was the lone survivor, MacIntire, like Lerro, was emotionally scarred and remained haunted by the tragedy for the rest of his life. Similarly, DeYoung details the downward spiral of Lerro’s life, his vilification in the days and weeks that followed the accident, and his obsession with the tragedy well into his painful last years. DeYoung also offers a history of the ill-fated bridge, from its construction in 1954, through the addition of a second parallel span in 1971, to its eventual replacement. He discusses the sinking of a Coast Guard cutter a mere three months before Skyway collapsed and the Department of Transportation’s dire warnings about the bridge’s condition. The result is a vividly detailed portrait of the rise and fall of a Florida landmark.

Perspective as Symbolic Form


Erwin Panofsky - 1927
    Finally available in English, this unrivaled example of Panofsky's early method places him within broader developments in theories of knowledge and cultural change.Here, drawing on a massive body of learning that ranges over ancient philosophy, theology, science, and optics as well as the history of art, Panofsky produces a type of "archaeology" of Western representation that far surpasses the usual scope of art historical studies.Perspective in Panofsky's hands becomes a central component of a Western "will to form," the expression of a schema linking the social, cognitive, psychological, and especially technical practices of a given culture into harmonious and integrated wholes. He demonstrates how the perceptual schema of each historical culture or epoch is unique and how each gives rise to a different but equally full vision of the world.Panofsky articulates these distinct spatial systems, explicating their particular coherence and compatibility with the modes of knowledge, belief, and exchange that characterized the cultures in which they arose. Our own modernity, Panofsky shows, is inseparable from its peculiarly mathematical expression of the concept of the infinite, within a space that is both continuous and homogenous.

Mademoiselle Chanel


C.W. Gortner - 2015
    The sisters nurture Gabrielle’s exceptional sewing skills, a talent that will propel the willful young woman into a life far removed from the drudgery of her childhood.Transforming herself into Coco—a seamstress and sometime torch singer—the petite brunette burns with ambition, an incandescence that draws a wealthy gentleman who will become the love of her life. She immerses herself in his world of money and luxury, discovering a freedom that sparks her creativity. But it is only when her lover takes her to Paris that Coco discovers her destiny.Rejecting the frilly, corseted silhouette of the past, her sleek, minimalist styles reflect the youthful ease and confidence of the 1920s modern woman. As Coco’s reputation spreads, her couturier business explodes, taking her into rarefied society circles and bohemian salons. But her fame and fortune cannot save her from heartbreak as the years pass. And when Paris falls to the Nazis, Coco is forced to make choices that will haunt her.An enthralling novel of an extraordinary woman who created the life she desired, Mademoiselle Chanel explores the inner world of a woman of staggering ambition whose strength, passion and artistic vision would become her trademark.

Paris: The Biography of a City


Colin Jones - 2004
    In this definitive and illuminating history, Colin Jones walks us through the city that was a plague-infested charnel house during the Middle Ages, the bloody epicenter of the French Revolution, the muse of nineteenth-century Impressionist painters, and much more. Jones’s masterful narrative is enhanced by numerous photographs and feature boxes—on the Bastille or Josephine Baker, for instance—that complete a colorful and comprehensive portrait of a place that has endured Vikings, Black Death, and the Nazis to emerge as the heart of a resurgent Europe. This is a thrilling companion for history buffs and backpack, or armchair, travelers alike.

Well-Read Women: Portraits of Fiction's Most Beloved Heroines


Samantha Hahn - 2013
    Anna Karenina, Clarissa Dalloway, Daisy Buchanan...each seems to live on the page through celebrated artist Samantha Hahn's evocative portraits and hand-lettered quotations, with the pairing of art and text capturing all the spirit of the character as she was originally written. The book itself evokes vintage grace re-imagined for contemporary taste, with a cloth spine silk-screened in a graphic pattern, debossed cover, and pages that turn with the tactile satisfaction of watercolour paper. In the hand and in the reading, here is a new classic for the book lover's library.

Abundance


Sena Jeter Naslund - 2006
    From the lush gardens of Versailles to the lights and gaiety of Paris, the verdant countryside of France, and finally the stark and terrifying isolation of a prison cell, the young queen's life is joyful, poignant, and harrowing by turns. As her world of unprecedented royal splendor crumbles, the charming Marie Antoinette matures into a heroine of inspiring stature, one whose nobility arises not from the circumstance of her birth but from her courageous spirit.Marie Antoinette was a child of fourteen when her mother, the Empress of Austria, arranged for her to leave her family and her country to become the wife of the fifteen-year-old Dauphin, the future King of France. Coming of age in the most public of arenas, the young queen embraces her new family and the French people, and she is embraced in return. Eager to be a good wife and strong queen, she shows her new husband nothing but love and encouragement, though he repeatedly fails to consummate their marriage and in doing so, fails to give her the thing she—and the people of France—desires most: a child and an heir to the throne.Deeply disappointed and isolated in her own intimate circle apart from the social life of the court, the queen allows herself to remain ignorant of the country's growing economic and political crises. She entrusts her soul to her women friends, her music teacher, her hairdresser, the ambassador from Austria, and a certain Swedish count so handsome that admirers label him "the Picture." When her innocent and well-chaperoned pilgrimage to watch the sun rise is viciously misrepresented in satiric pamphlets as a drunken orgy, the people begin to turn against her. Poor harvests, bitter winters, war debts, and poverty precipitate rebellion and revenge as the royal family and many nobles are caught up in a murderous time known as "the Terror."With penetrant insight into new historical scholarship and with wondrous narrative skill, Naslund offers an intimate, fresh, and dramatic re-creation of this compelling woman that goes beyond popular myth. Abundance reveals a compassionate and spontaneous Marie Antoinette who rejected the formality and rigid protocol of the court; an enchanting and tenderhearted outsider who was loved by her adopted homeland and people until she became the target of revolutionary cruelty and violence; a dethroned queen whose depth of character sustained her in even the worst of times.Once again, Sena Jeter Naslund has shed new light on an important moment of historical change and made that time as real to us as the one we are living now. Exquisitely detailed, beautifully written, heartbreaking and powerful, Abundance is a novel that is impossible to put down.

Airman's Odyssey


Antoine de Saint-Exupéry - 1942
    Introduction by Richard Bach. Translated by Lewis Galantière and Stuart Gilbert.

The Definitive Bob Dylan Songbook


Bob Dylan - 2000
    The complete songbook from the greatest singer/songwriter of all time! Now with every song together in one giant volume, the ultimate Dylan songbook features over 329 tunes including all of his greatest hits as well as his lesser-known work. With melody line, chord symbols and full lyrics. Songs include: Blowin' in the Wind * Forever Young * Just Like a Woman * Mr. Tambourine Man * She Belongs to Me * Tangled Up in Blue * The Times They Are Changin' * Visions of Johanna * and hundreds more.

Noble Rot: A Bordeaux Wine Revolution


William Echikson - 2004
    But in the past two decades, revolutionaries have stormed its traditional bastions, making their mark—and their fortunes—modernizing the production and marketing of wine. Noble Rot introduces us to the figures who epitomize the changes sweeping Bordeaux—the noble family behind Château d'Yquem; a stonemason turned winemaker whose wine, made in a garage, sells for $100 a bottle; the Maryland-based critic Robert Parker, whose opinion routinely makes or breaks a wine; the New World operations that have used branding to undercut Bordeaux's supremacy—and delves into the mysteries of the legendary classification of 1855.

Tell Them of Battles, Kings and Elephants


Mathias Énard - 2010
    The sultan has offered, alongside an enormous payment, the promise of immortality, since Leonardo da Vinci’s design was rejected: ‘You will surpass him in glory if you accept, for you will succeed where he has failed, and you will give the world a monument without equal.’ Michelangelo, after some hesitation, flees Rome and an irritated Pope Julius II – whose commission he leaves unfinished – and arrives in Constantinople for this truly epic project. Once there, he explores the beauty and wonder of the Ottoman Empire, sketching and describing his impressions along the way, and becomes immersed in cloak-and-dagger palace intrigues as he struggles to create what could be his greatest architectural master-work. Constructed from real historical fragments, Tell Them of Battles, Kings, and Elephants is a thrilling novella about why stories are told, why bridges are built, and how seemingly unmatched pieces, seen from the opposite sides of civilization, can mirror one another.

Madame Sarah


Cornelia Otis Skinner - 1966
    Actress, writer, biographer Cornelia Otis Skinner, known for her wit and worldly perceptions presents the life of Sarah Bernhardt.

Art Nouveau


Klaus-Jürgen Sembach - 1994
    Here the reform movement of the turn of the century is not only dealt with as an artistic event, but those economic and political interests which inspired, supported, and handicapped it are also taken into account. In the chapters "Movement," "Unrest", and "Equilibrium," the historical phenomenon as a whole is characterised and is also presented with its own distinct local features. The centres of Brussels, Nancy, Barcelona, Glasgow, Helsinki and Chicago are dealt with in subchapters as are Munich, Darmstadt and Weimar. Finally, Vienna, that city in which the synthesis achieved its culmination, is described separately. The outstanding artists are examined in detail in connection with the respective cities of their greatest activity. The result is a complex picture of the symbiosis of architecture, furniture design, and craftsmanship with their corresponding approaches to artistic revitalization.