Sub-titled 'The Body, The Divine, and The Question of Civilisation', the popular TV historian Mary Beard takes a look beyond the familiar canon of Western imagery. She offers an expansive survey of world history to show how religion has long inspired art, from the Hindu temple at Angkor Wat to the exquisite calligraphy of Islamic mosques, whether describing the church of San Vitale at Ravenna and how early Christian artists depicted Jesus, or examining the role of vanity in Renaissance art through Tintoretto's Crucifixion. All religions have wrestled with idolatry and iconoclasm, destroying art as well as creating it, and within her book, Mary Beard redefines the Western-centric legacies of Ernst Gombrich and Kenneth Clark, revealing a new legacy for future generations. Mary Beard begins her history with a meditation on the human body and its varied representations across epochs starting from the gigantic 3,000 year old stone heads carved by the Olmec of Mesoamerica, Greek bodies, the Emperor of China and the power of images, supersizing a Pharoah, the artfulness of Islam, Bible stories, Hindu images, the scars of battle and more. 240pp with beautiful colour plates.

'Curious Busts from Nature as Large as Life,' was just one advertisement for Madame Tussaud's wax work exhibition. Madame Marie Tussaud launched her chain of wax museums more than 200 years ago but what few people know is that her original wax models were often based on famous and infamous people that she was acquainted with during and after the French revolution. Madame Tussaud created many figures in wax, from the philosopher Voltaire (of whom she said, 'the dross wants separating from the gold'), French lawyer and statesman Maximilien Robespierre (who Marie said she witnessed surrounded by his victims' relations on the way to his execution at the guillotine), and leader of the French revolution, Napoleon Bonaparte, whose relics were displayed in her exhibition hall in London in 1843. Marie Tussaud took to wax making under the tutelage of Dr Philippe Mathé Curtius, who made a name making anatomical models for medical students, and was employed by him in 1777. She travelled to England in 1802, mainly because she felt France was volatile and its economy declining under the rule of Napoleon, but also because she said she was escaping an 'unsupportive and worthless' husband. Marie then launched a display under her own name in London in 1808. The exhibition hosted a Chamber of Horrors, the Napoleon Rooms, the Great Room in which there were gilt ornaments in the style of Louis XVI and a Hall of Kings section featuring Henry VIII, Mary Queen of Scots and the Hanoverians. Through this book. discover the sad place wax had in Marie's personal life as, when her daughter Marie Marguerite Pauline died six months after she was born on 1 September 1797, all Marie had to remember her by was a wax sculpture she had made before her child's death. Learn that she knew murder was a popular attraction for the public in the early 19th century and so, when an Irish soldier in the English army conspired but failed to assassinate King George III, she began devising a plan to obtain a copy of his severed head even before his execution. The book also includes fantastic images, from a shot of Marie's death mask and a model of Madame du Barry called The Sleeping Beauty, to a wax figure of Queen Victoria as seen today at the exhibition. Black and white images, 234pp.

The Bombing of GHQ Boulogne by Edward Ardizzone, Dunkirk: Embarkation of Wounded by Edward Bawden, An Old Battleground by Richard Seddon, Dangerous Work At Low Tide by Eric Ravilious and September 3rd 1939 by Henry Moore with barely human half drowned figures staring wildly are among the colour plates chosen for this collection of nine stories of courage, tenacity, inventiveness and persistence. During WWII, British artists produced over 6,000 works of war art, the result of a government scheme partly designed to prevent the artist being killed. The book tells the story of these nine war artists who ventured closer to the frontline than any others in their profession. In addition to the above mentioned were Barnett Freedman, Anthony Gross, Thomas Hennell, Albert Richards, and John Worsley who all travelled abroad into the dangers of war to chronicle events by painting them. They formed a close bond, yet two were torpedoed, two were taken prisoner, and three died, two in 1945 when peace time was at hand. Men who had previously made a comfortable living painting in studios were transformed by military uniforms and experiences that were to shape the rest of their lives, and their works significantly influenced the way in which we view war today. Some of the artists paintings and sketches have been included such as Henry Moore's Swimming Off the Southcoast on the Day War Broke Out - the stark coming together of a blue late summer's day and the looming blood-filled threat of war as a sky in the near distance, the first sight of the war the reader gets in this pictorial record of those six tragic years. The sequence of dates and locations provides a different kind of diary or journal. Full of biographical detail and so many aspects caught through the fine artists' eyes and into paint - the phoney war, evacuees harvesting, portraits of the great and the good, and the ordinary like gun manufacture, aerodrome runways, tanks rumbling through France, small boats at Dunkirk, anti-aircraft defences and bomb damage. 'John Worsley stood disconsolately near the wire, hands in pockets, eyes fixed on a point beyond the perimeter fence. That was dauntingly high, well over a man's height, with concrete posts at regular intervals... To his right was a wooden watchtower, under whose shadowy roof were more guards, crouched over machine-guns, watching him as he stared at the point where freedom began.' 240pp, well illustrated paperback, colour plates.

Aboriginal art from the 1950s, the collection showcases much of an impressive holding of around 230 works collected by the Art Gallery of New South Wales, Australia. On the small island of Yurriwi, more commonly known as Milingimbi off the coast of Arnhem Land, gathered in groups in the deep shade of the tamarind trees along the beach, artists of varying ages and experiences worked alongside one another to create exquisite bark with jewel-like surfaces that capture the complexities of land, seas, sky and cultural inheritance in one seemingly abstracted image. Beautifully painted in brilliant local pigments, the generally diminutive scale of these works belies the complexities they capture. There are also paper bark figures bound in handmade string and boldly painted for example of a sea canoe, a decorative string made with human hair, feathers and inner-bark fibre, woven baskets made of pandanus leaf, sculptures, pipes, spearheads, spear-throwers, and paintings depicting an emu nest and eggs, long-necked tortoises, snakes, crayfish, dogs and other animals, waterlilies and spirits, fish and stingrays. Finely carved wooden objects are adorned with intricate designs and delicate feather forms, the origin of which lay in ceremony, the creative endeavours of these men have many functions and represented their cultural identity. There are particular moments in the history of art when exceptional things happen, and thankfully developed in close collaboration with the community, this rare exhibition catalogue reproduces archive photographs in black and white from the 40s to the 1960s of the community at work plus full page colour images of a great number of the museum's collection. 146 page large softback.
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The finest paper engineering on quality white card, the line art literally pops into 3D with fluorescent orange on the reverse of the card making a reflective image on the outline scenery behind. Six of the world's most remarkable bridges are seen in a new perspective. They are Tower Bridge in London, the Rialto Bridge Venice, Millau Viaduct France, Sydney Harbour Bridge Australia, Brooklyn Bridge New York and Wind and Rain Bridge in Chengyang China with its beautiful pagoda shapes and wooden rails, large in the foreground and seemingly disappearing into the woodland hillside. One each of six designs, each of these large quality cards comes with a white envelope with fluorescent inside. On the reverse of each card is the location, architect, date, height, length and type of bridge from the cable stay suspension bridge built on floating cassions which gradually sank into the bedrock in New York to Sir Horace Jones's combined bascule and suspension construction of our favourite, Tower Bridge. All are exquisitely constructed from paper. A quality item, boxed for safekeeping.

Many histories of inns, taverns and the English public house have been written over the past 150 years, but the name the Seven Stars stands out as a special case. Compared to many other images used for pub signs, the depiction of seven stars has a wide range of cultural and literary associations. They appear in religious and astronomical context, in the Bible, have been adopted by the Freemasons. This special book traces the meaning and origins of the sign back 1,500 years to the legal codes of the Anglo-Saxons and beyond that to the mythological astronomy of the ancient Mediterranean region. It is believed that the sign of the Seven Stars originated in the star cluster of the seven Pleiades which was considered to be a bunch of grapes in the sky in a Dionysian and Bacchic world view, and therefore used as a suitable tavern sign. The first half of the book briefly tells the history of public drinking and the oldest and most interesting Seven Stars pubs going back to the 14th century. The first image is of Ye Olde Seven Stars, Withy Grove Manchester in 1908, a half timbered house displaying the sign 'The oldest licensed house in Great Britain licensed over 540 years.' The second part of the book is a discussion of the various meanings that have been proposed, many based on ideas from ancient astronomy. The distribution of the older pubs with the name is closely related to the areas of the Saxon and Mercian law codes that were in operation after the Danish invasions of the 9th and 10th centuries. The conclusion is that the symbolism involved retains surviving ideas from the mythological astronomy but were lost in the areas dominated by Scandinavian values where the social and political role of drinking establishments was distinctly different. Featuring rare archive photographs of interiors decorated with clocks and badges and banners, the book delves into religious symbolism and the Immaculate Conception, the Book of Enoch, the Masons, the solar system, the Seven Stars of Taurus, stars and monasteries and how the hexagram or six pointed star was a symbol for beer in parts of Germany in the Middle Ages and still found to the present day. Beautifully illustrated in colour throughout this large format 240 page softback.

Another exquisite Thames & Hudson publication and a companion to In Search of a Masterpiece. What was Gauguin hinting at when he painted Milton's Paradise Lost into a portrait of a friend? Is it a girl or a boy who is denied control of the books in Renoir's Portraits d'enfants? How did a chance encounter with Sir John Lavery bring fame to the owner of a small red book? Was it true that no one ever saw Picasso with a book in his hands? Why were the Cumberland girls reading The Fashionable Lover in George Romney's commissioned portrait? Beginning with the question 'What is a book?', this companionable survey for art and book lovers alike explores the symbiotic relationship between the development of books and the emergence of our modern sense of the importance of the individual artist. It parades and interprets the work of many of the greatest artists in the last 500 years and explains how and why books became the single most ubiquitous feature of our cultural lives, an enlarged measure of our everyday existence. The book looks at courtly cultures and their undercurrents, reading matter, the painting of modern life, the word of God, 'book love' and the home, why artists love books, who invented the 'artist' and the pleasure of reading in multiple locations. In a wonderful gallery towards the end of the book there is a depiction in colour of a young man fashionably adopting the French look, reading love poems as the red carnation suggests. 'Books bound in old brown calf, which are lying on tables or on bookshelves', and there?s an exciting almost photographic looking 1879 painting The Bibliophile of old men stooping over a bookstall in old Seville, a pair of Victorian ladies in a train carriage, one reading one asleep, and Degas's 1885 pastel of Mary Cassatt at the Louvre, the seated figure with an indispensable guide book. Alma-Tadema paints a cornfield at Godstone, Surrey to show how a book allows complete privacy and pleasure in an English Arcadia. There is art from Karolina Max, Winslow Homer, Corot, and Munch with his Christmas In the 'Brothel' where Madame reads and her dressed-up girls talk beside the Christmas tree. Edward Hopper, J. M. W. Turner, Van Gogh, here are the Bloomsbury set and hundreds of gifted artists from collections around the world in these 165 colour illustrations with an erudite and witty text connecting gender differences, religious systems, symbols of all kinds, education, changing patterns of transport, social status, romance, the imagination of children, literary lives, sex, friendship, bathing, scientific discovery and books as aids to reflection. Books tell us all about ourselves. 256 large pages.

A British Museum and Thames & Hudson co-production with 203 illustrations, the book tells the story of the reception of the Parthenon sculptures in the modern era, as well as Rodin's continued engagements with them throughout his life. Famous for The Thinker and The Kiss, Auguste Rodin drew energy and inspiration from the art of Classical antiquities, and he absorbed and assimilated the modes of ancient Greek and Roman art in his own work in innovative ways. The Parthenon sculptures in particular were a lifelong passion and he first encountered them in books, plaster casts at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris, and some originals in the Louvre, and then drew them first-hand on several visits to the British Museum. He amassed a collection of antiquities, including many fragments of marble sculpture, which he regarded as complete objects in themselves and introduced the idea in his own work of the headless, limbless torso as an object of art, much influencing his contemporaries. Here is all the emotion and the motion, and essays and texts by such experts as Celeste Farge and Ian Jenkins on the French Romance for Greek marbles, and Bénédicte Garnier on The Thousand Parthenons of Auguste Rodin. Rodin rejoiced in the Parthenon sculptures as precious survivors of the art of Pheidias, the most famous sculptor of all antiquity, and in him Rodin found a spiritual companion and mentor. Rodin's modernism bridged the abyss of time, and the headless, armless The Walking Man seems to stride into the 20th century announcing a new purpose for sculpture, for art, for mankind. Exquisitely printed and bound with hundreds of full page and double page spreads, illustrations, close ups and working plasters, Rodin at work in photographs and old gelatine silver prints, with large pull quotes, this is a rare exhibition catalogue Bibliophile is lucky to offer at a discount. 240 very large pages.

This special history book describes the importance of music in parks and open spaces, the growth of the brass band movement, the legacy of the pleasure gardens movement, the impact of the great foundries, through to the decline and subsequent revival of the bandstand, and so much more. Packed with hundreds of archive and colour photos, beginning with a general prospect of Vaux Hall Gardens circa 1715 and the crowded opening of the bandstand in Congleton Park, Cheshire 1914, the commentary begins with the Registrar General of Tower Hamlets writing in 1839 'A Park in the East End of London, would probably diminish the annual deaths by several thousands... and add several years to the lives of the entire population.' The early Victorians recognised rapidly industrialising centres across the country and until this book there has been a clear gap in the understanding of the social impact of parks on local communities. Parks were often developed by a combination of local authorities and wealthy benefactors including Nash, Paxton, Gibson, Milner, Kemp and Loudon and great designs were often produced as recreation evolved. With many parks soon seeming to have a bandstand, what defined the role of music in parks and the effect on dissipating social divisions in society, music at seaside resorts, we begin to understand that in their heyday there were over 1500 bandstands in the country attracting the likes of crowds of over 10,000 in the Arboretum in Lincoln, to regular concerts in most of London's parks up until the beginning of WWII. Little is really known about them from their evolution as 'orchestras', the music played, the intricate and ornate ironwork or Art Deco designs and the impact of the great foundries, to the decline during post-Second World War and revival in the late 1990s, the book tells the stories of these pavilions made for music and their history, decline and revival. The brilliant Gazetteer lists town, location, date erected and manufacture or foundry where known and model by existing bandstands from Aberdare Park to the Promenade Youghall, County Cork and then the lost bandstands, covering all 1500 and with dozens of beautiful sepia postcards and images and modern sunny day blue skies colour photos. 236 very large pages in softback published by Historic England.
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Exquisitely designed and produced by the Parisian publisher Flammarion, the cloth binding is embossed with hieroglyphics in this landscape format tome full of beautiful watercolours. As the day breaks spilling warm, honeyed light over Cairo, Florine Asch sets out with her sketchpad, pencils and paintbrushes. In her journey through this ancient and mysterious land she encounters the sandstone hills of Abu Simbel, the Pyramids of Giza, the baroque elegance of Cairo's grand interiors, a spring in the middle of the desert, sailing boats seen from the terrace of the Old Cataract, Wady Kardassy Temple at Nubia, the Isle of Carr Ibrim, makes a rendition of David Roberts' two painters, the Temple at Edfu, a turquoise earthenware sphinx, a shepherd boy, terraces and hotels, shops and people all beautifully drawn by her hand. From the tranquillity of a felucca floating down the Nile to the bustle of the spice stalls in the market, here is life in the city and the beauty of the desert all come to life under her brush. With handwritten captions throughout and short text, quotations and full page watercolours. 11" x 8½", gorgeous illustrations.