Quick and Easy Paint Transformations: 50 Step-by-Step Ways to Makeover Your Home for Next to Nothing


Annie Sloan - 2010
    Then, the 50 projects are divided into five sections: Ageing and Distressing; Working with the Base; Working with Colour; Handpainting; and Crackle, Gilding and Decoupage. There are step-by-step images showing how to achieve the finished look, before shots and inspirational photography showing the effects used on walls and doors, furniture and floors. Learn how to bring old second-hand furniture bang up to date, or how to give modern pieces a softly aged appearance, as well as ways to treat and transform floorboards, doors and plastered walls. Whatever the style of your interiors, Quick and Easy Paint Transformations will show you the best way to makeover your home."

Twilight of the Elites: Prosperity, the Periphery, and the Future of France


Christophe Guilluy - 2016
    The divide between the global economy’s winners and losers in today’s France has replaced the old left‑right split, leaving many on “the periphery.”As Guilluy shows, there is no unified French economy, and those cut off from the country’s new economic citadels suffer disproportionately on both economic and social fronts. In Guilluy’s analysis, the lip service paid to the idea of an “open society” in France is a smoke screen meant to hide the emergence of a closed society, walled off for the benefit of the upper classes. The ruling classes in France are reaching a dangerous stage, he argues; without the stability of a growing economy, the hope for those excluded from growth is extinguished, undermining the legitimacy of a multicultural nation.

Falling Cars and Junkyard Dogs


Jay Farrar - 2013
    Recollections of Farrar's father are prominent throughout the stories. Ultimately, it is music and musicians that are given the most space and the final word since music has been the creative impetus and driving force for the past 35 years of his life.In writing these stories, he found a natural inclination to focus on very specific experiences; a method analogous to the songwriting process. The highlights and pivotal experiences from that musical journey are all represented as the binding thread in these stories, illustrated throughout with photography from his life. If life is a movie, then these stories are the still frames.

Etsy Excellence: The Simple Guide to Creating a Thriving Etsy Business


Tycho Press - 2015
    This book provides actionable steps to help shop owners engage the Etsy community in authentic ways that attract buyers and generate sales. The best Etsy shops stand out among the sea of sellers and draw loyal customer bases, but how they’ve done it isn’t—and shouldn't be—a secret. In these pages, top Etsy sellers share the tools that have helped them, the changes they made that yielded positive results, and their best advice for achieving and sustaining a successful Etsy shop. Beyond sellers’ words of wisdom, this book offers a roadmap all sellers can follow in order to: • Choose keywords and tags to drive traffic to your shop • Photograph your products for maximum appeal • Create a unique shop that stands out • Write winning product descriptions • Price your goods appropriately • Market your products effectively on social media platforms • Maintain lasting relationships with your customers • Diversify your product offerings

Pablo Picasso: Life and Work


Elke Linda Buchholz - 2000
    This collection has been culled from the startling twenty-four year stream of prose poetry that resulted. Reading like a hallucinatory journal, it provides a seismeographic slice of an unknown Picasso, a visceral stew of sensory pleasure and madness that matches his visual work.

6 Billion Others: Portraits of Humanity from Around the World


Yann Arthus-Bertrand - 2009
    This understated yet compelling look at ways of life both familiar and strange creates an instructive, affecting biography of modern humanity. Inspired by the idea that "every single person has got something interesting to say, and every single person has the right to say it," Arthus-Bertrand created a questionnaire of 40 prompts on universal topics such as family, happiness, money, and love, and dispatched six filmmakers to interview more than 5,000 subjects in 75 countries around the world. About one-tenth of the resulting 3,500 hours of film is available online, with subtitles.

Tokyo on Foot: Travels in the City's Most Colorful Neighborhoods


Florent Chavouet - 2009
    Each day he would set forth, with a pouch full of colored pencils and a sketchpad, to visit different neighborhoods. This stunning book records the city that he got to know during his adventures, a gritty, vibrant place, full of ordinary people going about their daily lives. Realistically rendered city views or posters of pop stars contrast with cartoon sketches of iconic objects or droll vignettes, like a housewife walking her pet pig and a Godzilla statue in a local park.With wit, a playful sense of humor, and the colored pencils of his kit, Florent Chavouet sets aside the question of urban ugliness or beauty and captures the Japanese essence of a great city.

Unpleasant Ways to Die


Elan Fleisher - 1989
    Black humor is used in a series of cartoons depicting ironic situations in which people meet their end.

Mad Enchantment: Claude Monet and the Painting of the Water Lilies


Ross King - 2016
    Seeing them in museums around the world, viewers are transported by the power of Monet's brush into a peaceful world of harmonious nature. Monet himself intended them to provide “an asylum of peaceful meditation.” Yet, as Ross King reveals in his magisterial chronicle of both artist and masterpiece, these beautiful canvases belie the intense frustration Monet experienced at the difficulties of capturing the fugitive effects of light, water, and color. They also reflect the terrible personal torments Monet suffered in the last dozen years of his life.Mad Enchantment tells the full story behind the creation of the Water Lilies, as the horrors of World War I came ever closer to Paris and Giverny, and a new generation of younger artists, led by Henri Matisse and Pablo Picasso, were challenging the achievements of Impressionism. By early 1914, French newspapers were reporting that Monet, by then 73 and one of the world's wealthiest, most celebrated painters, had retired his brushes. He had lost his beloved wife, Alice, and his eldest son, Jean. His famously acute vision--what Paul Cezanne called "the most prodigious eye in the history of painting"--was threatened by cataracts. And yet, despite ill health, self-doubt, and advancing age, Monet began painting again on a more ambitious scale than ever before. Linking great artistic achievement to the personal and historical dramas unfolding around it, Ross King presents the most intimate and revealing portrait of an iconic figure in world culture--from his lavish lifestyle and tempestuous personality to his close friendship with the fiery war leader Georges Clemenceau, who regarded the Water Lilies as one of the highest expressions of the human spirit.

Work Energy: Finish What You Start and Fearlessly Take On Any Goal


Jim Harmer - 2019
    He had worked hard for his goals, but there was no assurance in sight that he would ever achieve them.During that year, he learned a key truth that changed the way Jim viewed himself. He found the one unique quality inside him- one we all have- that gave him a reason to work. He didn’t know it then, but that secret ingredient was his Work Energy.Now, after creating a digital brand that has attracted over 70 million people and made him financially free, Jim has constructed the framework behind his success. Within this book, you will discover your own Work Energy: the drive behind everything you do and the reason you can take on any goal. Jim Harmer is the founder of Improve Photography and several other successful blogs. His current company, Income School, has helped thousands provide for their families through blogging and YouTubing. Jim lives in Star, Idaho, with his wife, Emily, and their three children.

Campervan Kama Sutra: Outback Australia, with a camper trailer, three kids and a dog.*


John Perrier - 2015
     Our intrepid adventurers work their way through numerous mishaps, including, but not limited to, an ill-advised river crossing, an inappropriately packed roof rack and some truly horrible singing. During their journey they stumble across a motley assortment of characters such as a confused check-in clerk, a grey nomad with an eye for detail regarding torches, and several Crazy Germans. While reading Campervan Kama Sutra, you’ll not only fall in love with Australia’s vast, ever-changing countryside, but you’ll also delight in the tragicomedy that arrives with unerring regularity. You’ll laugh until something hurts. *P.S. There was no dog.

The Rest Is Noise Series: Apparition from the Woods: The Loneliness of Jean Sibelius


Alex Ross - 2013
    Further extracts are available as digital shorts, accompanying the London Southbank festival programme.Jean Sibelius hailed from the ‘small nation’ of Finland. Working in isolation, far from the great artistic capitals of Europe, Ross shows how Sibelius’s reinvention of classical forms went on to set the pace for classical composers around the world.Now a major festival running throughout 2013 at London’s Southbank, The Rest is Noise is an intricate commentary not just on the sounds that defined the century, but on art’s troublesome dance with politics, social and cultural change.Alex Ross is the New Yorker’s music critic, and the winner of the Guardian First Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award for The Rest is Noise, which was also shortlisted for the Samuel Johnson and Pulitzer prizes for non-fiction.

Project: Organization: Quick and Easy Ways to Organize Your Life


Marie Calder Ricks - 2007
    This practical guide breaks down your biggest problem areas into achievable, bite-size projects that take no more than 2050 minutes to complete. Learn how to create a home office without adding another room to your house, tackle problem pantries, store seasonal clothing, organize your family photos, and set up the laundry room to handle laundry more efficiently. Being well organized creates peace of mind and leaves more time for the things you really want to do. Project: Organization makes it easy with projects that will help you take control of your life

Exercises in Style


Raymond Queneau - 1947
    However, this anecdote is told ninety-nine more times, each in a radically different style, as a sonnet, an opera, in slang, and with many more permutations. This virtuoso set of variations is a linguistic rust-remover, and a guide to literary forms.

The Victorians


Jeremy Paxman - 2009
    Using the paintings of the era as his starting point - in his view, the one mode of Victorian art yet to be rescued from indifference - Paxman explores themes of family, urban life, industry, empire, and imagination to uncover truths (and explode some myths) about Victorian Britain.To Paxman, these paintings were the television of their day, immensely popular visual narratives that attracted crowds by the hundreds of thousands: a single picture show featuring Elizabeth Butler's Balaclava (depicting survivors of the Charge of the Light Brigade) drew 50,000 viewers, some of them openly weeping. The Victorians shows how artists like Butler, William Powell Frith, Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema, Luke Fildes, and Ford Madox Brown were chronicling a world changing before their eyes, and his overview ranges across the whole of Victorian life and culture: from high gothic architecture to the birth of the football league, from the novels of Dickens to the technological marvels of Brunel.Published to coincide with a landmark BBC series, The Victorians is an opinionated, informed, surprising, and hugely enthusiastic appraisal of the birth of modern Britain - a glorious reminder of how the Victorians made us who we are today.