Most deal with questions of design in a wide range of areas, from architecture and furniture, to clothes and jewellery, pottery, plumbing, and printing; others are polemics on craft education and training, and on design in general. Loos, the great cultural reformer and moralist in the history of European architecture and design was always a 'revolutionary against the revolutionaries'. With his assault on Viennese arts and crafts and his conflict with bourgeois morality, he managed to offend the whole country. His 1908 essay 'Ornament and Crime', mocked by an age in love with its accessories, has come to be recognised as a seminal work in combating the aesthetic imperialism of the turn of the century. Today Loos is recognised as one of the great masters of modern architecture.

    Much of this importance can be traced back to Freud's extraordinary essay of 1919, 'The Uncanny' (Das Unheimliche). As a ghostly feeling and concept, however, the uncanny has a complex history going back to at least the Enlightenment. Royle offers a detailed account of the emergence of the uncanny, together with a series of close readings of different aspects of the topic. Following a major introductory historical and critical overview, there are chapters on literature, teaching, psychoanalysis, deconstruction, film, the death drive, deja vu, silence, solitude and darkness, the fear of being buried alive, the double, ghosts, cannibalism, telepathy, madness and religion.

    First published in 1856, The Grammar of Ornament remains a design classic. Its inspiration came from the pioneering architect and designer Owen Jones. His observations of decorative art on his extensive travels in Europe and the Near East were employed to improve the poor quality of Western design. His goal was to change the Victorian habit of mixing elements from a wide variety of sources and applying this mix indiscriminately to buildings, graphic design, and products. His resulting study is a comprehensive analysis of a remarkable collection of styles of ornamental design -- from Ancient Egypt and Greece to Imperial China and Renaissance Italy. With its sumptuous illustrations, its detailed survey of individual cultures, and its manifesto of "General Principles," it offered guidance to the designers of the future. In this new edition the designs are further illuminated by Iain Zaczek's perceptive commentaries. Hugely influential since its first publication, The Grammar of Ornament inspired great figures such as William Morris and Frank Lloyd Wright. Contemporary designers, entertained by the archaic charm of Jones's descriptions, are struck by the book's enduring relevance and its soundness regarding the essential principles of good design.

    The New Media Monopoly will provide a roadmap to understanding how we got here and where we need to go to make matters better.' -Robert McChesney, author of Rich Media, Poor Democracy

    In HAMMERTOWN, poet Peter Culley re-imagines his home town of Nanaimo, British Columbia, not as it is, but as it might be imagined in the mind of a Parisian who had rarely left his city. This is Culley's fifth book of poetry.