Probably designed for children aged nine and up, all ages will appreciate the striking graphic stamps from printmaker Tom Frost in his beautiful and illuminating journey through the world of endangered animals. Jenkins is a conservation biologist who has worked for WWF and the UN and here he celebrates the mighty Asian elephant to the tiny rosalia longicorn beetle, the red-crowned crane, the polar bear, Grévy's zebra, the variable harlequin frog, indri, numbat, black rhinoceros, Tapanuli orangutan, the Amsterdam albatross, the blue whale, Iberian lynx, Galapagos giant tortoise, golden lion tamarin, largetooth sawfish, African wild dog, Sunda pangolin, Korean club tail dragonfly and okapi among them. For each, for example the okapi, the outlined and coloured graphic art of the animal looking at the viewer is framed by First Class Post, the country of origin such as Congo or Republic of Korea, and in the top corners local currency for example 800 franc as if it were an actual postage stamp with serrated edges. Opposite each huge full page colour artwork is a whole piece on the endangered animal together with a locator map, its class, family, IUCN status, numbers if known and where it is found. 30 endangered animals calling for help like never before, each is exquisitely illustrated as a stamp of the country where it lives. Take an armchair trip around the world and find out all about these beautiful creatures and how we can save them from extinction. 64pp, 25.8cm x 33.6cm.

Transport and stamp collecting have been brought together in this special book looking at the way postage stamps have increased our knowledge of transport worldwide. The collecting of stamps or philately is a fascinating hobby looking at the development of postal services in all its forms, designs of stamps that have evolved since the Victorian Penny-Black to today's creations, often artistic but dependent more and more on photography. The book covers the British Isles, Europe, the Eastern Mediterranean, Africa, Asia, Australia, New Zealand and the Pacific region, the Americas with beautiful gliders, seaplanes, single engine planes to airbuses in Brazil and Argentina on stamps of five pesos, a BAE Sea Harrier from the Falkland Islands on a £5 stamp, US Thunderbirds and Canadian Snowbirds, stamps from Indochina, the unmistakable images of Concorde and the Chengdu J10, a Xian JH-7 The Flying Leopard, and the Comac C919, a narrow-body twin jet airliner among these gleaming flying machines. Page after page of beautiful colour reproductions of stamps on 128 glossy white pages.

Sub-titled 'An Intimate Collection of Behind-The-Scenes Photos Featuring the Legendary Art Collector', the renowned photographer took these images between 1967 and 1974, and many have never been seen before. Born into a wealthy New York family in 1928, Marguerite 'Peggy' Guggenheim was one of the greatest art collectors of the 20th century. Using her inheritance to open her first art gallery, her love of art led her to eventually settling in Venice where she relaunched her life after becoming the star of the 1948 Venice Art Biennale. Striking, enigmatic and dramatic, Moses photographed Peggy in her favourite places around Venice, as well as in her private palazzo at Canal Grande. She glides on her gondola with her Lhasa apso dogs, and wears her iconic butterfly glasses, a fur-trimmed coat and bright red stockings. She had been photographed by Man Ray in 1924, wearing flapper eveningwear, by Gisèle Freund in 1939 with Herbert Read, and by Berenice Abbott in 1926, a dog in her arms, and of course by Moses who shows her from provocative poise to complete relaxation in this collection. She is pictured surrounded by pigeons on St Mark's Square and around the first buildings of the Renaissance, surrounded by artworks in her own home, being shown paintings as she reclines on a sofa, reading a book in front of a bottle of Gordon's Dry Gin, enjoying the company of visitors approving of the paintings by Magritte and Max Ernst to be seen on the walls of her barchessa. There are blue glass Venetian figures, sculptures, she is pictured with paintings by Miró, Chagall, or sitting on her Byzantine style throne looking at a photo album in the grounds of her home. Inside her turquoise bedroom the 'headboard' is by Alexander Calder and the lamps were made by Carlos Scarpa for Venini. In her salon there is a huge painting by Grace Hartigan (Ireland, 1958) and she is pictured with her grandson and his wife in front of a Giacometti sculpture (Walking Woman, 1936). There is also a wonderful series of black and white images and family snapshots and portraits and pet dogs from the archive included on black pages in one special section. 144 exceptional pages, 23 x 29.5cm, colour.

The bayonet is essentially a knife fixed to the end of a gun, used for charging the enemy when firepower fails. There is something chilling about the order to "fix bayonets", heralding as it does uncompromisingly brutal hand to hand fighting, but there was bayonet warfare in the Falklands conflict and in Afghanistan in the 21st century. Norris draws on personal accounts of soldiers using bayonets in combat from the Napoleonic and Crimean Wars, various Colonial campaigns, through the World Wars. The bayonet originated in the French city of Bayonne and was introduced into military service in 1647. The earliest bayonets were of the plug type, with tapering handles capable of being fitted into the mouth of a musket when needed. When King Charles II was restored to the throne of England he placed an order for 500 bayonets, until then almost unknown this side of the Channel. The muskets in service, however, were not in good repair and the insertion of a bayonet tended to split the metal, so adjustments were made to allow the bayonet to be inserted through rings on a flintlock rather than into the muzzle. The bayonet also proved an effective intimidatory measure while soldiers were reloading, given that it added an extra 12 inches to a musket barrel already five foot long. In the 18th century the blade was now triangular in section and the bayonet itself was fitted with a Z-shaped slot that prevented it from falling off. The British faced French forces in the American War of Independence, but had to yield before their superior musket and bayonet technique. At Waterloo in 1815 the bayonet was effective in breaking up the enemy lines at the end of the battle. During World War I each of the three main belligerents had their own bayonet design, and today's contemporary bayonets are produced to exacting metalworking standards. 209pp, white photos.

A lavish Thames & Hudson publication with 338 colour illustrations, many double page, of some of the finest examples of taxidermy, many staged and in curious settings and others curiosities such a cojoined twin lambs under glass domes - four ears, one mouth and eight legs. Art installations include a taxidermy barn owl with bluebottles and thistle seeds by Claire Morgan 2011. This real cabinet of curiosities is beautiful, strange and intriguing and sometimes repellent, just like the history of taxidermy itself. 20 years' experience has been brought to the creation of this beautiful book that catalogues and illustrates this resurgent artform. Now stuffed animals appear everywhere from chic apartments to luxury boutiques and museums have been dusting down their collections to put them back on display while contemporary artists have rejuvenated the practice. From its beginnings as a tool of natural history research, through crazes and anthropomorphic, zoomorphic and fake taxidermy to its rediscovery by the art, fashion and design worlds of the 21st century, this heavyweight glossy softback will not fail to astonish and amuse. There are of course the Boxing Squirrels by Edward Hart and the Cat's Whiskers with period dress and parasol, mice in a small French tableau with butler in attendance, four squirrels depicting stages of a boxing match from handshake to knockout, birds in domes, giraffes and stags in realistic attitudes, moose heads, a scarlet ibis, antlers and horns, elephant tusk lined staircase, taxidermy snakes which were confiscated on their way for sale in the USA and trophy mounts, thankfully now out of fashion. See diorama interior design as used in pubs and restaurants, luxury jewellery photoshoots, a Ted Baker store in London featuring taxidermy white rabbits in quirky attitudes and positions, and a fake preserved dragon pickled in 2003 - these images amaze the beholder. 256 large page softback, colour.
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Sub-titled 'The Interaction of Technology and Play' here is a romp through the changing landscape of 19th and 20th century American toys, games, hobbies and amusements and the ways in which technology affects play, and play shapes people. Inventors have used new materials and technologies to reshape sports and games, crafting new and extreme forms of recreation, always responding to popular demand. From LEGO, skateboards to beading kits and video games, the text is basically a social history. Some particular technologies for example the bicycle fit into more than one chapter as a toy, a hobby, a sport. There is a chapter on the American Playground Reform Movement and how they were engineered to provide wholesome and efficient activities to children of working class families. A third chapter covers commercial pleasure parks from Coney Island to Disneyland, sites where great collections and machines often imitate the technology of transportation and production through rides, shows and fanciful environments. Crafts seem to prescribe gender rules with heavy tools such as saws and hammers being reserved for men and lighter tools like sewing or knitting needles and paintbrushes reserved for women. In the 20th century new technologies presented new hobbies - operating ham radios, building model aeroplanes, assembling HiFi equipment, modifying cars, and by the end of the century cooking gourmet meals using a wide range of expensive kitchen utensils. The book looks at baseball and basketball, golf and tennis alongside the USA's elaborate road rail work, the rise of mass circulation newspapers and magazines which made national sports possible, pioneer sporting goods manufacturers, the standardisation of playing fields and equipment and through technology, high performance swimsuits and 'anchored' putters challenging the concept of the level playing field. Electronic games it seems have reproduced many of the joys and the alarm of the older toys and is discussed right from the first chapter. 200 page paperback, photos.

When you walk into what was a 17ft square double garage you enter another world. There is an 8ft high oil painted backdrop with watercolour landscapes of the Pennine hills, a cotton mill with 166 windows. With the old Morris Minors, motorbikes with side cars, red telephone boxes, British Railways Chadbury Station in miniature comes alive with its wood and boarded station made entirely from mountboard with card strips overlayed for the roof tiles. The use of mini-posters and timetable boards adds to the veracity, and the tiny figurines like the child carrying suitcases and the station porter in the foreground, the steam train engine in the station, passengers waiting, and the Yorkshire background of rolling hills, the sidings, the pub, the horse, the back-to-backs alongside the canal from the ironworks, the window cleaner, the housewife, the painter, the coalman, all populate this miniature town. A continuous circular track is bridged by a girder bridge, to the left the shed area, to the right the station. It is DCC operated, and the loco stock is ex-LMS and LNER in a begrimed BR livery. To inspire the would-be modeller or please the eye of all transport enthusiasts, craftspeople, or those interested in the miniature world and collecting, the book includes over 100 close up colour photographs and a detailed track plan. 156 glossy landscape pages, colour.

Exquisitely bound in a satin cloth decorated with an Archimboldo design of the head with the face made of flowers and plants and this outsize volume has a pink satin pagemarker and double gate centre pages, stunning black glossy background highlighting its treasures and many of these collectables are made of Nautilus shells with gilt-bronze settings decorated with dolphins, a lion's mouth, and some encrusted with rubies and turquoises. There are ornamental goblets, cups, exquisite glassware, shells of all shapes and colours, many in glass fronted cabinets, and the more gruesome skeletons, lizards and snakes and frogs, and more tasteful collections cameos, marble, silverware, and in today's eyes less tasteful rare birds, carved and inlaid ivory, armadillos, alligators, carved ebony servants. Seven countries Germany, Austria, Denmark, Sweden, Italy and England have been chosen with museums natural history, chateau, private collections, the Schloss Friedenstein in Gotha, Uppsala University in Sweden and curiosities of fantastic drawings, portraiture, semiprecious stones, collections of macabre paintings of humans with animal faces dressed in Tudor costumes, a man with a bloodied eye and the other eye socket pierced with a spear, there are decorative ships and dragons and all manner of shapes and colours and ideas for interior design, reflecting the history of collecting with beautiful objects, weapons and natural curiosities. The unique new Taschen publication, dripping with colour. The Wunderkammer, or "cabinet of curiosities," saw collectors gathering objects from many strands of artistic, scientific and intellectual endeavour, in an ambitious attempt to encompass all of humankind's knowledge in a single room. From the Grand Duke Francesco I de' Medici and Holy Roman Emperor Rudolf II to Archduke Ferdinand II of Habsburg, these aristocratic virtuosos acquired, selected and displayed the objects in real-life catalogues that represented the entire world - spanning architecture, interior design, painting, sculpture, gemology, geology, botany, biology and taxonomy, astrology, alchemy, anthropology, ethnography and history. Marvel at the unicorn horns (narwhal tusks), gems, rare coral growths, Murano glasswork, paintings and peculiar mechanical automata. Browse through illustrations of exotic and mythical creatures and discover the famed "Coburg ivories," an astounding collection of crafted artifacts. These collections are nothing short of a journey through time, from the Renaissance and Age of Discovery, the Mannerist and Baroque periods, up to the present day. Massimo Listri travelled to seven European countries over several decades and the result is a set of gorgeous photographs on each of 19 astonishing chambers, highlighting the most remarkable items in each collection. Text in English, French and German. Colour. 29 x 39½cm, 5.04 kg, 356 pages.

The Egyptologist and lecturer for the British Museum and Victoria & Albert Museum Delia Pemberton has created a beautiful book on the treasures, wisdom and spirituality of Buddhism. Through carefully selected words and pictures she presents the fascinating events of his life, a summary of his teachings, the Cosmic Buddhas, paradise, the afterlife, and the future. Long popular among Western art lovers and collectors, these objects include lacquered wood figures from Japan, painted textiles from Tibet, a Buddhist Stupa in India, a limestone drum slab, gold reliquary set with garnets, huge statues, silk paintings and panels, a huge monk statue in the Prayer Hall in Rangoon, illuminated manuscripts, bronze figures from Java and stones inscribed with Buddhist mantras in Dharamsala, India. 'In the Pure Land, all material needs are met and conditions are perfect for receiving the Dharma teachings continually provided by the presiding Buddha. Those beings fortunate enough to be reborn into a Pure Land are thus guaranteed to attain Enlightenment in the future.' 47 colour illustrations, 96pp.

Popular in Britain since the late 17th century, dolls' houses are tiny slices of social history that give us a fascinating glimpse into domestic life over the last 300 years. In this beautifully illustrated book, Nicola Lisle explores the origins and history of dolls' houses and their furnishings, from the earliest known dolls' house in 16th century Bavaria where Duke Albert V (1528-79) recreated a miniature ducal palace, to the present, and looks at how they reflect the architecture, fashions, social attitudes, innovations and craftsmanship of their day. Chapters cover early baby and cabinet houses, Ann Sharp's Baby House, Georgian and Regency England, Victorians and the Age of Enterprise, Edwardian elegance to Modern Britain, dolls houses in literature. Lisle takes a look at some of the leading dolls' house manufacturers, such as Silber & Fleming and Lines Brothers Ltd (later Triang). The book includes numerous examples of interesting dolls' houses, the stories behind them and where to see them. This includes famous models such as Queen Mary's spectacular 1920s dolls' house at Windsor Castle and the 18th century baby house at Kew Palace. There is also a chapter on model towns and villages, which became popular in the 20th century and also give us a window on the past by replicating real places or capturing scenes typical of a bygone era and skilled cabinetry and ornate embellishment. There is advice for dolls' house collectors, as well as a detailed directory of places to visit, a timeline of dolls' house history and recommended further reading. One of the most comprehensive guides available on the subject, this book offers unique insights into the world of dolls' houses and is a must for anyone with an interest in the history and appeal of these miniature treasures. Colour illus. 196 pages.