One of Jane Austen's most charming youthful 'novels' in miniature, presented in a deluxe illustrated edition with Leon Steinmetz's gorgeous black and dark red illustrations. Most people think Jane Austen wrote only six novels, though very short ones, while still a young girl. She was only 12 or 13 when she wrote The Beautifull Cassandra, an irreverent and humorous little masterpiece. Weighing in at 465 occasionally misspelled words, it is a complete and perfect novel-in-miniature, made up of a dedication to her older sister Cassandra and 12 chapters, each consisting of a sentence or two. Narrating the slightly criminal adventures of the 16 year old title character, the novel gives us Austen's most irrepressible heroine, who, after stealing a hat, leaves her mother's shop to flounce around London, eating ice cream (without paying), taking coach rides (without paying), and encountering handsome young ladies and gentlemen (without speaking) - all to return home hours later with whispered joy: 'This is a day well spent.' Austen fans will love the strong-willed Cassandra who can eat six ice creams and then refuse to pay for them! Special import from Princeton University Press, 72 page landscape softback, illus.
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Great Britain and Ireland are particularly well endowed with cathedrals and abbeys and it is estimated that there were almost 1,000 built during the Middle Ages. When Cromwell closed the majority of them during the dissolution of the monasteries, many were left in ruins, plundered or survived because their local communities adopted them as parish churches. The outstanding example is St Albans which begins this beautifully illustrated collection. We go to Bath Abbey, Belfast, Birmingham, Bristol, Canterbury, Chelmsford, Chester, Chichester, Coventry, St Davids, Durham, Ely, Exeter, Edinburgh, Glasgow, Glastonbury, Gloucester, Hereford, Leicester, Lincoln, Liverpool, Manchester, Newcastle, Norwich, Oxford, St Patrick's Dublin, St Paul's, Peterborough, Rochester, Salisbury, Southwark, Southwell Minster, Tewkesbury Abbey, Truro, Wells, Westminster Abbey, Winchester, Worcester to York Minster with a bolt of lightning and walls of glass and it rebellious Yorkshireman. Discover tales of an English pope, a martyred archbishop, secrets and troublesome spies, stained glass wonders and castle-cathedrals, famous memorials and spectacular architectural feats in a rich heritage and fascinating collection. 144 well illustrated pages.

Ambitious engineering, brilliant colour from new forms of stained glass, murals and sculpture, the architects whose work is included here range from Basil Spence and Edward Maufe, designers of major cathedrals, to the radical Gillespie, Kidd and Coia whose brutalist seminary lies abandoned near Dumbarton. This superbly well produced Batsford publication has one or more colour photographs on every page together with architect, location, year completed, denomination and whether grade 1, 2 or A listed. Each church or chapel has been built in the UK since 1914, in a period in which concrete and steel gave a new freedom to construction while new ideas about congregations changed assumptions about traditional layouts, bringing celebrants and people closer together. The book provides biographies of major designers, articles on glass, fittings, and on the synagogues, mosques and temples that play an intrinsic part in worship in Britain today. Leading architectural historians give a fine brief description for each such as the 'massive brick piers supporting the ring beam, light spilling down a flared concrete funnel from a lantern into a regular space...as a result of divine laws of geometry, mechanics and proportion, timeless laws' about Abbey Church of Our Lady Help of Christians in Worth, Sussex. Clifton Cathedral in Bristol is a hexagonal space, superbly lit by roof lights and rising to the three-part thrusting spire, presumably symbolic of the Trinity. It was built in 1973 to a remarkably low budget of £600,000. Organised by date 1914-29, 1930-45, 1946-59, 1960-69 and 1970 and after and with special chapters on stained glass, art and artefacts. With useful glossary, 208pp, 19.6 x 25.5cm, packed with colour photos.
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SIGNED BY THE AUTHOR it is an enthralling journey around the Britain we have created since 1980. Wimpey homes, Millennium monuments, riverside flats, wind farms, spectacular skyscrapers, city centre apartments, out-of-town malls. Here are the horrors and delights, triumphs and failures from space age tower blocks to suburban business parks, and from postmodernist exuberance to Passivhaus eco-efficiency. Iconicon is at once a revelatory architectural grand tour, and an endlessly witty and engaging piece of social history. Encyclopaedic, funny and often cutting, Grindrod has written a love letter to contemporary buildings in his punchy polemic about our accidental urban landscape. Thrown together entirely for financial or political gain without any thought for aesthetic or social value, here are the visions of a few top architects, and a larger generation of young architects who wish to improve life for whole communities, not just the rich and powerful. It really makes us look at those big shiny funny shaped public buildings with a new eye and Grindrod's chirpy prose style is full of pop references as he chronicles the accelerating decline of the UK since 1980, the sprawl and the disaster of the Grenfell fire. The book is perfectly aimed at those in power. 486 big chunky pages, some illus. Signed by the Author and stickered.

A magnificent Thames & Hudson heavyweight quality 496 page softback packed with 273 colour illustrations, a personal selection of paintings admired from public collections during the course of Christopher Lloyd's career in art, here are highlights and unexpected treasures. If you find yourself in Hull, Cork or Dundee, what paintings should you go and look at? Many masterpieces are waiting for you, sometimes neglected, in our galleries and museums and here the distinguished broadcaster and critic Lloyd identifies over 265 masterpieces from the National Gallery to The Burrell Collection in Glasgow around England, Scotland, Wales and Ireland. Admire The Dice Players from 1650 at Preston Hall Museum Stockton-on-Tees, children using pebbles to play Knucklebones on the beach in Philip Wilson Steer's canvas found in Ipswich, masterpieces by Sir Alfred Munnings depicting his wife and horse and himself from 1935 in Dedham, Vuillard, Augustus John, Alma-Tadema, Titian all found at the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge, the strikingly graphic The Butcher's Shop of 1583 by Carracci and a Virgin and Child and Three Angels from 1475, a Lady with Book and a Pissarro landscape, Holman Hunt all found at the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford. Mother and Child by the Sea is a particularly atmospheric, dark and brooding image of a calm and peaceful night with the moon half hidden by clouds over the sea, the child pointing expectantly suggesting his father is onboard the sailing ship in the near distance. This is on page 267 and immediately before the colourful Jockeys Before the Race by Degas, both of which together with Gainsborough and the Travelling Companions by Egg, the Music Lesson and The Rest on the Flight to Egypt by Orazio Gentileschi all to be seen at the Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery. Page after page of well and lesser known masterpieces, beautifully curated with an unobtrusively erudite detailed text, a model of art-historical writing and a sustained pleasure to read. 496pp, 273 colour illus. 21 x 16cm, softback.

At the turn of the 20th century, the American photographer Edward Sheriff Curtis (1868-1952) started on his 30 year project to produce a monumental study of North American Indians. Using an approach that was both artistically and scientifically ambitious, he recorded, in words and pictures, the traces of the traditional Indian way of life that was already beginning to die out. With tireless personal commitment Curtis visited 80 American Indian tribes from the Mexican border to the Bering Strait in America and Canada, gaining their confidence through his patience and sensitivity. Tribes include the Apache, Navajo, Mohave, Atsina, Cheyenne, Klickitat, Nez Percés, Haida, Hopi, Yuki, Zuni, Sarsi and Comanche. Totem poles, squaws, cacti, teepees and famous chiefs like Spotted Bull and Little Sioux, Curtis photographed Indian faces, homes, agriculture, dress, warriors, cooking, hunting, clay making, fishing - every aspect of their nature, habitat and lifestyle. His work was printed in 20 volumes between 1907 and 1930 as The North American Indian, but with only 272 copies, originals became extremely rare. This book gathers Curtis' entire American Indian portfolio into one publication, offering renewed access to and appreciation of his extraordinary achievement, which is as much a precious historical document as a triumph of the photographic form. All in quality, atmospheric sepia. New from Taschen. 14 x 4.5 x 20.5 cm, 768 pages, pagemarker.

A bird-monster devouring sinners, naked bodies in tantric contortions, a pair of ears brandishing a sharpened blade: with just 20 paintings and nine drawings to his name, Netherlandish visionary Hieronymus Bosch (c.1450-1516) secured his place as a pillar of art history. To this day, the painter par excellence of hell and its demons continues to puzzle and enthral scholars, artists, designers, and musicians alike. Based on the best-selling XXL edition, which saw Taschen commission new and exclusive photography of details and recently restored works, this large-scale monograph presents Bosch's complete oeuvre. Texts from art historian and Bosch expert Stefan Fischer dissect the many compelling elements that populate each scene, from hybrid creatures of man and beast to Bosch's pictorial use of proverbs and idioms. By tying together the elusive threads of his oeuvre into one exhaustive overview, this book reveals just what it was about Bosch and his painting that proved so immensely influential. Features impeccable full-page reproductions celebrating the artist's staggering compositional scope, enlarged details unveiling the most intricate and bizarre scenes as much as the unsuspected technical minutiae, from subtle brush-strokes to the grain of the canvas and a fold-out spread drawn from the legendary Last Judgement. A special chapter focusses on Bosch's most famous work, the mesmerizing and terrifying triptych The Garden of Earthly Delights. Colour. Hardcover with fold-out, 25 x 34 cm, a weighty 3 kg, 300 pages.

Caravaggio, or more accurately Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio (1571-1610), was always a name to be reckoned with. Notorious bad boy of Italian painting, the artist was at once celebrated and controversial: violent in temper, precise in technique, a creative master, and a man on the run. Caravaggio employed close physical observation with a dramatic use of chiaroscuro that came to be known as tenebrism. He made the technique a dominant stylistic element, transfixing subjects in bright shafts of light and darkening shadows. Caravaggio vividly expressed crucial moments and scenes, often featuring violent struggles, torture, and death. He worked rapidly with live models, preferring to forgo drawings and work directly onto the canvas. His first version of Saint Matthew and the Angel, featuring the saint as a bald peasant with dirty legs attended by a lightly clad over-familiar boy-angel, was rejected and a second version had to be painted as The Inspiration of Saint Matthew. Similarly, The Conversion of Saint Paul was rejected, and while another version of the same subject, the Conversion on the Way to Damascus, was accepted, it featured the saint's horse's haunches far more prominently than the saint himself. This excellent new Taschen edition offers a neat and comprehensive Caravaggio catalogue raisonné. Each of his paintings is reproduced from recent top-quality photography, allowing for a vivid encounter with the artist's ingenious repertoire of looks and gestures, as well as numerous detail shots of his boundary-breaking naturalism. Five accompanying chapters trace the complete arc of Caravaggio's career from his first public commissions in Rome through to his growing celebrity status and trace his tempestuous personal life, in which drama loomed as prominently as in his canvases. Colour. 15.6 x 21.7cm, 512 pages.