Cardinal Richelieu curated a cattery at the Louvre Palace. Rural buildings with crumbling walls and peeling paint with a beautiful black cat perched on an old barrel. 'I believe cats to be spirits come to earth' said Jules Verne with a lovely furry grey tabby striding atop a fence. Remarkable French landscapes, both urban and rural, are populated with cats brimming with personality, whether languidly strolling in a quaint village or regally perched on the doorstep of an elegant château. Now, a carefully curated selection of these unforgettable images is available in a small, charming book that will be an all-around delight for Francophiles and cat lovers alike. 60 pages. Colour. 15.88 x 18.42 cm.

Breakfast - drink coffee in cafes in Paris as the city wakens, Parisian dogs play in manicured parks, the gargoyles of Notre Dame and their medieval riddles, Rodin's The Thinker, here is a book of illustrations celebrating French culture and must-see sites in the capital of France. Take an enchanting tour of Paris's most charming places, objects, and pastimes. Organized by season, it takes the reader through a year's worth of quintessentially Parisian experiences, from secret gardens bursting with roses to exotic plumage at the city's bird market, fantastical murals on the ceiling of the Paris Opera House, street vendors serving freshly roasted chestnuts in newspaper cones, candied violets at Paris's oldest sweet shop, dazzling colours in the stained glass at Sainte-Chapelle, cups of hot chocolate on a cold winter day and more. The friendly text and whimsical illustrations make this a poetic letter to the City of Light. A uniquely intimate perspective in this triomphe of je ne sais quoi and joi de vivre! 16.51 x 24.13cm. 112 pages.

Press out the illustrations from the page and transform your book into a cityscape to treasure and display. The book describes over 50 classic structures in Paris, the modern city with a historical heart, in an authoritative and compelling style. Includes of course the Eiffel Tower, Champs Elysees and Arc de Triomphe, the Palais de Tokyo, Castel Béranger, La Place de la Concorde, Maxim's de Paris, the Café de la Paix, Opéra Garnier, Galeries Lafayette, Moulin Rouge, Musée du Louvre, the Tour Saint-Jacques, the Fontaine Igor Stravinsky with its bright, primary-coloured whimsy of fibreglass and polyester shapes, and more. For each there is the address, architect, date opened and dimensions and a brief history. Press around each building holding the page steady, discard the excess card, smooth the edges with your fingers and it magically forms a display from the top of the book. Colour, 110pp.

From a few thousand tours he has conducted in 70 countries, Bryan Bland recounts history, dramatic scenery, green exercise as a therapeutic intervention, and location filming and much else from world politics to the crucial life-enhancing role of music in his light-hearted examination of the profit of birding. Red-Lord Parrot, Keel-billed Toucan, Red-Crowned Ant-tanager, Collared Aracari, Pale-billed Woodpecker, Indigo Bunting, Ocellated Turkey, Red-capped Manakin - the only man-made structures visible were pre-Columbian and the roof combs of Mayan temples constructed 1,300 years ago. As far as the eye could see stretch nothing but the largest tract of the rainforest, north of the Amazon 'like sitting on top of a giant broccoli.' Author Bryan Bland has spent a lifetime discovering that there is more to birding than the obvious interest derived from just watching the birds. The pastime is also instrumental in opening doors for life's other pleasures and with his humorous and anecdotal text, birders and non-birders will be swept along with his tales of running 50 miles across the land-slide strewn Himalayas in order to keep an appointment with a tour group, to meeting Britain's first-ever breeding pair of Parrot Crossbills using material from Bryan's beard to build their nest. Based in the birding hotspot of Cley in Norfolk, Bryan alternates his highly regarded residential bird watching courses with his overseas tours, and he is also a highly regarded bird illustrator. 352pp, beautiful line art throughout.

In the words of The Times. 'Rome's history is written in blood, and Addis, who has a vivid, pacey writing style, spares not the squeamish as he describes three millennia of violence from the first kings to Il Duce.' Snappy paragraphs are underpinned by serious reading in this history comprising of a series of vignettes from Rome's ancient foundation to the Second World War, via Gauls, ghettos and gladiators, and its 22 chapters bring to life in 22 scenes from its 2,500 year history. Each is a self-contained narrative whether it is the murder of Caesar, the near-destruction of the city by the Gauls in 387BC, the construction of the Colosseum and the fate of the gladiators, Bernini's creation of the Baroque masterpiece that is St Peter's Basilica, the brutal crushing of Republican dreams in 1849, the sinister degeneration of Mussolini's first state, or the magical, corrupt Rome of filmmaker Fellini's La Dolce Vita. From Chapter 17 Judgement, the Sack of Rome 1527: 'The Peasants' War became a massacre. The peasant leader Thomas Müntzer, a preacher and old admirer of Luther's, was tortured and killed...Bourbon too was preoccupied: his dreams of conquering France had failed. His promised bride, the emperor's sister, was now being married off to King Francois as part of the post-Pavia peace deal. Mustering his wounded dignity, he set off for Spain, hoping at least to be rewarded with the Duchy of Milan.' Personal, easy to read, 632 magnificent pages with colour and black and white photos.

Each huge page is a delight and an artwork of great beauty. Joan Blaeu (1596 Alkmaar-1673 Amsterdam) was a leading Dutch cartographer and member of the Amsterdam council. Son of Willem Blaeu, also a famed cartographer, Joan and his brother Cornelius took over his father?s workshop in 1638. He became the official cartographer of the Dutch East India Company and would gain further fame with a collection of Dutch city maps entitled Tooneel der Steeden, the first atlas of Scotland, and the masterwork Atlas Maior. Superlatives tend to fail in the face of Joan Blaeu's Atlas Maior, one of the most extravagant feats in the history of mapmaking with its exquisitely decorated borders in colourful crests and queens and houses and peoples. The original Latin edition, completed in 1665, was the largest and most expensive book to be published during the 17th century. Its 594 maps across 11 volumes in Latin spanned Arctica, Africa, Asia, Europe, and America. Taschen's meticulous reprint brings this luxurious Baroque wonder into the hands of modern readers. In an age of digitised cartography, it celebrates the steadfast beauty of quality print and restores the wonder of an exploratory age, in which Blaeu's native Amsterdam was a centre of international trade and discovery. The edition derives from the Austrian National Library's complete coloured and gold-heightened copy of Atlas Maior, assuring the finest detail and quality. University of Amsterdam's Peter van der Krogt introduces the historical and cultural significance of the atlas while providing detailed descriptions for individual maps, revealing the full scale and ambition of Blaeu's masterwork. 25 x 38cm, 4.13 kg, 512 pages. Text in English, French, German. Another gorgeous and collectable Taschen publication.

Sinclair McKay's portrait of Berlin from 1919 forward explores the city's broad human history, from the end of the Great War to the Blockade, rise of the Wall, and beyond. It begins by taking readers back to 1919 when the city emerged from the shadows of the Great War to become an extraordinary by-word for modernity - in art, cinema, architecture, industry, science, and politics. McKay traces the city's history through the rise of Hitler and the Battle for Berlin which ended in the final conquest of the city in 1945. It was a key moment in modern world history, but beyond the global repercussions lay thousands of individual stories of agony. From the countless women who endured nightmare ordeals at the hands of the Soviet soldiers to the teenage boys fitted with steel helmets too big for their heads and guns too big for their hands, McKay thrusts readers into the human cataclysm that tore down the modernity of the streets and reduced what was once the most sophisticated city on earth to ruins. Amid the destruction, a collective instinct was also at work - a determination to restore not just the rhythms of urban life, but also its fierce creativity. In Berlin today, there is a growing and urgent recognition that the testimonies of the housewives, office clerks, factory workers, and exuberant teenagers who witnessed these years of terrifying - and for some, initially exhilarating - transformation should be heard. "The author devoted inordinate amount of details to the fall of the Third Reich and the action Red Army towards Berliners and raced through the years of the Weimar Republic between the construction of the wall till it was torn down. Nevertheless he did mention the American airlift, the Soviet blockade and the atomic research at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute." "Dissolution" and "Necropolis," the largest parts of McKay's book, focus on Berlin in 1945, especially April and May, the fall of Berlin and arrival of the dreaded Red Army. The third part "Possession" deals with the GDR and ends with the tear down of the Berlin Wall. McKay believes that "You cannot understand the twentieth century without understanding Berlin." Many rare photos, 16.64 x 24.2 cm, 464 pages.

A vivid and revealing book focused on the fascinating European journeys of British artist Frances Hodgkins. The much overlooked New Zealand-born Frances Hodgkins (1869-1947) arrived in London in 1901 and, by the 1920s, had become a leading British modernist, exhibiting frequently with avant-garde artists such as Ben Nicholson, Barbara Hepworth and Henry Moore. This book explores Hodgkins as a traveller across cultures and landscapes - teaching and discovering the cubists in Paris, absorbing the landscape and light of Ibiza and Morocco, and exhibiting with the progressive Seven & Five Society in London. See dreamy watercolours of fishermen, a summer garden, Belgian refugees, a hilltown landscape, Cornwall, Pembrokeshire countryside and dozens of intriguing still lifes. Complete with a rich visual chronology of the artist's encounters abroad, alongside over 100 of Hodgkins' key paintings and drawings, the book is an illuminating journey that moves us from place to place through the writings of a number of distinguished national and international art historians, curators and critics: Frances Spalding (University of Cambridge, England), Alexa Johnston (Auckland-based writer and curator), Elena Taylor (University of New South Wales, Australia), Antoni Ribas Tur (Ara newspaper, Spain in the 1930s), and Julia Waite on St Ives, Sarah Hillary on material and technique, Catherine Hammond and Mary Kisler (Auckland Art Gallery Toi oTamaki, New Zealand). 23.5 x 28.5cm, 268 pages. Thames & Hudson, 202 stunning full page colour illus, ephemera and photos.

Richly decorated with antique maps, a spacecraft image of the moon, 1548 image of Ptolemy Prince of astronomy from the book Geography, dozens of antique collectible maps through to satellite imagery, the Atlantic Ocean in a physiographic diagram, this is a beautifully illustrated full-colour history of mapmaking across centuries, using the visual representation of the world through time to tell a new story about world history and the men who made it. Chapters cover prehistoric maps, stories of creation, and Sumerian, Babylonian and Egyptian maps; world made for humans by God in which the clerics and cartographers of the Middle Ages depict the holy story of creation and the first atlases of Ortelius and Mercator. We are taken all the way from the mysterious symbols of the Stone Age to Google Earth, exploring how the ability to envision what the world looked like developed hand in hand with worldwide exploration and meet visionary geographers and heroic explorers along with other unknown heroes of the map-making world, both ancient and modern. Dutch nautical charts and the battle for the biggest Atlas, more about Mercator and all he never managed to complete; France, Denmark and Norway learn to survey large areas; Konsvinger gets a prime meridian in 1779, and maps play a role in central government and administration; the second Fram expedition sets out in 1898 in the wake of the many others that had previously tried to map the northern regions; the First World War paves the way for aerial surveys which in turn pave the way for a Norwegian economic map series and the appearance of maps in most areas of society. Lear about the 7/10 of our planet that are covered by water and Marie Thorpe's attempts to understand what the ocean floor looks like and why; and lastly we look at satellites and computers which provide and manage vast amounts of information and give us maps that are able to speak to us. Big glossy, glamorous colour pages, remainder mark. 18.73 x 24.13cm. 367 pages.

Sub-titled 'The Past, Present and Future of Our Quest to Go Deeper Underwater', here is a journey to the bottom of the ocean and the future of our planet. The first divers to venture into the sea held their breath and splashed beneath the surface. Over the centuries they invented wooden diving bells, clumsy diving suits, and unwieldy contraptions in attempts to go deeper and stay longer under water and push the boundaries of human endurance. Each advance was fraught with danger as people had to survive the crushing weight of water and the deadly physiological effects of breathing compressed air. Plunging into the narrow trenches between the tectonic plates of the Earth's crust, they eventually reached the bottom of the ocean in the same decade that men first walked on the moon. It would be 52 years before anyone returned to these depths, but today many countries are developing drones and submersibles capable of reaching the ocean's deepest point. Once a mission for its own sake, now there are more tangible rewards - the ocean economy with ocean-based industries combined with the assets and resources provided by marine ecosystems - is set to double in size in the coming decades and there is much to be gained from what lies beneath. We meet inventors such as Sir Edmund Halley, Auguste Piccard and Jacques Cousteau who popularised recreational Scuba diving. And of course so recently we have seen the tragic loss of the OceanGate Titan submersible. It was Otis Barton who in 1928 designed the first diving tank that would go to depths suspended by a cable who explained why a steel sphere rather than a cylindrical shape would be ideal. He set a record of over 3,000 feet in his sphere in 1934. These superb facts are woven into a fascinating story, so plunge in. 298pp, 16 pages of colour images.