front cover of Alabama Creates
Alabama Creates
200 Years of Art and Artists
Edited by Elliot A. Knight
University of Alabama Press, 2019
A visually rich survey of two hundred years of Alabama fine arts and artists
 
Alabama artists have been an integral part of the story of the state, reflecting a wide-ranging and multihued sense of place through images of the land and its people. Quilts, pottery, visionary paintings, sculpture, photography, folk art, and abstract art have all contributed to diverse visions of Alabama’s culture and environment. The works of art included in this volume have all emerged from a distinctive milieu that has nourished the creation of powerful visual expressions, statements that are both universal and indigenous.
 
Published to coincide with the state’s bicentennial, Alabama Creates:  200 Years of Art and Artists features ninety-four of Alabama’s most accomplished, noteworthy, and influential practitioners of the fine arts from 1819 to the present. The book highlights a broad spectrum of artists who worked in the state, from its early days to its current and contemporary scene, exhibiting the full scope and breadth of Alabama art.
 
This retrospective volume features biographical sketches and representative examples of each artist’s most masterful works.  Alabamians like Gay Burke, William Christenberry, Roger Brown, Thornton Dial, Frank Fleming, the Gee’s Bend Quilters, Lonnie Holley, Dale Kennington, Charlie Lucas, Kerry James Marshall, David Parrish, and Bill Traylor are compared and considered with other nationally significant artists.
 
Alabama Creates is divided into four historical periods, each spanning roughly fifty years and introduced by editor Elliot A. Knight. Knight contextualizes each era with information about the development of Alabama art museums and institutions and the evolution of college and university art departments. The book also contains an overview of the state’s artistic heritage by Gail C. Andrews, director emerita of the Birmingham Museum of Art. Alabama Creates conveys in a sweeping and captivating way the depth of talent, the range of creativity, and the lasting contributions these artists have made to Alabama’s extraordinarily rich visual and artistic heritage.
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Analyzing Intelligence
National Security Practitioners' Perspectives, Second Edition
Roger Z. George and James B. Bruce, Editors
Georgetown University Press, 2014

Analyzing Intelligence, now in a revised and extensively updated second edition, assesses the state of the profession of intelligence analysis from the practitioner's point of view. The contributors—most of whom have held senior positions in the US intelligence community—review the evolution of the field, the rise of new challenges, pitfalls in analysis, and the lessons from new training and techniques designed to deal with 21st century national security problems. This second edition updates this indispensable book with new chapters that highlight advances in applying more analytic rigor to analysis, along with expertise-building, training, and professional development. New chapters by practitioners broaden the original volume’s discussion of the analyst-policymaker relationship by addressing analytic support to the military customer as well as by demonstrating how structured analysis can benefit military commanders on the battlefield.

Analyzing Intelligence is written for national security practitioners such as producers and users of intelligence, as well as for scholars and students seeking to understand the nature and role of intelligence analysis, its strengths and weaknesses, and steps that can improve it and lead it to a more recognizable profession.

The most comprehensive and up-to-date volume on professional intelligence analysis as practiced in the US Government, Analyzing Intelligence is essential reading for practitioners and users of intelligence analysis, as well as for students and scholars in security studies and related fields.

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Arkansas Made, Volume 1
A Survey of the Decorative, Mechanical, and Fine Arts Produced in Arkansas through 1950
Swannee Bennett
University of Arkansas Press, 2020

Arkansas Made is the culmination of Historic Arkansas Museum’s exhaustive investigations into the history of the state’s material culture. Decades of meticulous research have resulted in this exciting two-volume survey of cabinetmakers, silversmiths, potters, fine artists, quilters, and other artisans working in communities all over the state.

The work of the artisans documented here has been the driving force of Historic Arkansas Museum’s mission to collect and preserve Arkansas’s creative legacy and rich artistic traditions. Artisans from across Arkansas’s rich cultural landscape come to life among the colorful quilts, playful temperance jugs, and inventive effigies included in Volume I. Readers will delight not only in the striking full-color images but also in the stories that weave them together across time and region to create a lively picture of art and artisanship in a state too little celebrated for its creative output.

Volume 1
Quilts and Textiles • Ceramics • Silver •Weaponry • Furniture • Vernacular Architecture • Native American Art

 
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Arkansas Made, Volume 2
A Survey of the Decorative, Mechanical, and Fine Arts Produced in Arkansas through 1950
Swannee Bennett
University of Arkansas Press, 2020

Arkansas Made is the culmination of Historic Arkansas Museum’s exhaustive investigations into the history of the state’s material culture. Decades of meticulous research have resulted in this exciting two-volume survey of cabinetmakers, silversmiths, potters, fine artists, quilters, and other artisans working in communities all over the state.

The work of the artisans documented here has been the driving force of Historic Arkansas Museum’s mission to collect and preserve Arkansas’s creative legacy and rich artistic traditions. The photographs and fine artworks that enliven the pages of Volume II represent not only a delightfully broad scope of talent in genres ranging from landscapes to cubist portraits to political cartoons, but also a longstanding tradition of advocacy and support for the arts in Arkansas.

Volume 2
Photography • Fine Art

 
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The Art of Advertising, The
Julie Anne Lambert
Bodleian Library Publishing, 2020
Advertisers in the nineteenth and early twentieth century pushed the boundaries of printing, manipulated language, inspired a new form of art and exploited many formats, including calendars, bookmarks and games. This collection of essays examines the extent to which these standalone advertisements – which have survived by chance and are now divorced from their original purpose – provide information not just on the sometimes bizarre products being sold, but also on class, gender, Britishness, war, fashion and shopping. Starting with the genesis of an advertisement through the creation of text, image, print and format, the authors go on to examine the changing profile of the consumer, notably the rise of the middle classes, and the way in which manufacturers and retailers identified and targeted their markets. Finally, they look at advertisements as documents that both reveal and conceal details about society, politics and local history. Copiously illustrated from the world-renowned John Johnson Collection of Printed Ephemera and featuring work by influential illustrators John Hassall and Dudley Hardy, this attractive book invites us to consider both the intended and unintended messages of the advertisements of the past.
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Book Conservation and Digitization
The Challenges of Dialogue and Collaboration
Alberto Campagnolo
Arc Humanities Press, 2024
The successful transmediation of books and documents through digitization requires the synergetic partnership of many professional figures, that have what may sometimes appear as contrasting goals at heart. On one side, there are those who look after the physical objects and strive to preserve them for future generations, and on the other those involved in the digitization of the objects, the information that they contain, and the management of the digital data. These complementary activities are generally considered as separate and when the current literature addresses both fields, it does so strictly within technical reports and guidelines, concentrating on procedures and optimal workflow, standards, and technical metadata. In particular, more often than not, conservation is presented as ancillary to digitization, with the role of the conservator restricted to the preparation of items for scanning, with no input into the digital product, leading to misunderstanding and clashes of interests. Surveying a variety of projects and approaches to the challenging conservation-digitization balance and fostering a dialogue amongst practitioners, this book aims at demonstrating that a dialogue between apparently contrasting fields not only is possible, but it is in fact desirable and fruitful. Only through the synergetic collaboration of all people involved in the digitization process, conservators included, can cultural digital objects that represent more fully the original objects and their materiality be generated, encouraging and enabling new research and widening the horizons of scholarship.
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The Book of Looms
A History of the Handloom from Ancient Times to the Present
Eric Broudy
Brandeis University Press, 2021
A heavily illustrated classic on the evolution of the handloom.
 
The handloom—often no more than a bundle of sticks and a few lengths of cordage—has been known to almost all cultures for thousands of years. Eric Broudy places the wide variety of handlooms in their historical context. What influenced their development? How did they travel from one geographic area to another? Were they invented independently by different cultures? How have modern cultures improved on ancient weaving skills and methods? Broudy shows how virtually every culture has woven on handlooms. He highlights the incredible technical achievement of early cultures that created magnificent textiles with the crudest of tools and demonstrates that modern technology has done nothing to surpass their skill or inventiveness.
 
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Books Like Sapphires
From the Library of Congress Judaica Collection
Ann Brener
Brandeis University Press, 2024
Illustrated highlights from the Judaica Collection of the Library of Congress.
 
Books Like Sapphires showcases a wide range of Hebraic treasures from the storied collection at the Library of Congress, many of them for the first time. Tracing the history of Judaica collecting in the twentieth-century United States, the book illuminates varied works, telling their stories alongside vibrant color images. These include a unique manuscript about a betrothal scandal in Renaissance Crete, an illustrated Esther Scroll, a poem from 1477 celebrating the new technology of printing, amusing rhymed couplets in sixteenth-century Padua, and the Washington Haggadah. This book also tells the story of the patrons and collectors, first among them Jacob Schiff, as well as archivists and curators, who made the storied Judaica archive at the Library of Congress the precious resource that it is today.
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A Catalogue of the Pre-1500 Western Manuscript Books at the Newberry Library
Paul Saenger
University of Chicago Press, 1989
The Newberry Library in Chicago possesses one of the most distinguished collections of medieval and Renaissance manuscript books in North America. Based on two major private collections of the late nineteenth century—those of Henry Probasco and Edward E. Ayer—and scrupulously added to in this century, the holdings include late medieval bibles and breviaries, books of hours and books of homilies, and seminal texts on astronomy.

Some of the books, such as those from the libraries of Philip the Good and Anne of Brittany, are beautifully illuminated. But the collection also includes an unusual array of "typical" medieval books, chosen not for their beauty but for their paleographical, codicological, and textual interest. Such codices include an eleventh-century Carthusian monk, and numerous books of hours adapted for feminine use. Paul Saenger has painstakingly identified the text, illumination, physical structure, and provenance for each of the more than 200 books in the collection to provide an exemplary guide to literate culture in the late Middle Ages.

This catalogue, carefully researched and handsomely illustrated, will be an invaluable resource for historians, art historians, paleographers, bibliographers, and collectors.
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Catalogue of Watermarks in Italian Printed Maps, ca. 1540-1600
David Woodward
University of Chicago Press, 1996
This catalogue presents over three-hundred photographic images of watermarks found in Italian printed maps of the sixteenth century. Such watermarks are essential tools in identifying paper moulds and are part of the evidence that bibliographers use in dating the paper on which maps and other documents were printed. The images reproduced in the catalogue have been selected from some 1200 beta-radiographs of watermarks gathered from Italian printed maps issued mostly in composite atlases printed in Venice and Rome between 1540 and 1600. These beta-radiographs reveal minute variations that are almost invisible to the eye. A special feature of the book is a visual index of miniature black-and-white line tracings of the watermarks.

Fifteen years in the making, this catalogue will be an essential reference for bibliographers and archivists dealing with rare books and maps of the period, for map collectors, map librarians, and scholars and librarians working with early printed items and manuscripts.
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Clay
The History and Evolution of Humankind’s Relationship with Earth’s Most Primal Element
Suzanne Staubach
University Press of New England, 2013
More than a third of the houses in the world are made of clay. Clay vessels were instrumental in the invention of cooking, wine and beer making, and international trade. Our toilets are made of clay. The first spark plugs were thrown on the potter’s wheel. Clay has played a vital role in the health and beauty fields. Indeed, this humble material was key to many advances in civilization, including the development of agriculture and the invention of baking, architecture, religion, and even the space program. In Clay, Suzanne Staubach takes a lively look at the startling history of the mud beneath our feet. Told with verve and erudition, this story will ensure you won’t see the world around you in quite the same way after reading the book.
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The Collected Letters of Thomas and Jane Welsh Carlyle
January 1854-June 1855, Volume 29
Kenneth J. Fielding, Ian Campbell, Sheila McIntosh, and David Sorensen
Duke University Press
Don’t miss a single volume. Subscribe today!
Back volumes are available for purchase. To ensure that you don't miss a single issue, subscribe to The Collected Letters of Thomas and Jane Welsh Carlyle today. For more information, click here.

Volume 29 resumes themes begun in earlier letters: Thomas's flirtatious exchanges with Lady Ashburton, the recent death of his mother, the improvement of his soundproof room, and his struggle to pursue his research for Frederick the Great. Other notable items include Dickens's dedication of Hard Times to Thomas and Thomas's support of G. H. Lewes during the scandal over Lewes's affair with George Eliot. The highlight of the volume is a passionate and humorous letter by Jane, subtitled "Budget of a Femme Incomprise," in which she defends the rising cost of running their house.

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Collecting the Globe
The Salem East India Marine Society Museum
George H. Schwartz
University of Massachusetts Press, 2020
The East India Marine Society Museum was one of the most influential collecting institutions in nineteenth-century America. From 1799 to 1867, when Salem, Massachusetts, was a premier American port and launching pad for international trade, the museum's collection developed at a nexus of global exchange, with donations of artwork, crafts, and flora and fauna pouring in from distant ports of call. At a time when the country was filled with Barnum-esque exhibitions, visitors to this museum could circumnavigate the globe and gain an understanding of the world and their place within it.

Collecting the Globe presents the first in-depth exploration of the East India Marine Society Museum, the precursor to the internationally acclaimed Peabody Essex Museum. Offering fresh perspectives on museums in the United States before the Civil War and how they helped shape an American identity, George H. Schwartz explores the practices of collecting, exhibiting, and interpreting a diversity of international objects and art in the early United States.
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Corpus Vasorum Antiquorum, Fascicule 10
Athenian Red-Figure Column and Volute Kraters
Despoina Tsiafakis
J. Paul Getty Trust, The, 2019
This expansive catalogue of ancient Greek painted pottery brings an important series into the digital age with a new open-access format. Cataloging some hundred thousand examples of ancient Greek painted pottery held in collections around the world, the authoritative Corpus Vasorum Antiquorum (Corpus of Ancient Vases) is the oldest research project of the Union Académique Internationale. Nearly four hundred volumes have been published since the first fascicule appeared in 1922.
 
This new fascicule of the CVA—the tenth issued by the J. Paul Getty Museum and the first ever to be published open access—presents a selection of Attic red-figure column and volute kraters ranging from 520 to 510 BCE through the early fourth century BCE. Among the works included are a significant dinoid volute krater and a volute krater with the Labors of Herakles that is attributed to the Kleophrades Painter.

The free online edition of this open-access catalogue is available at www.getty.edu/publications/cva10/. Also available are free PDF, EPUB, and Kindle/MOBI downloads of the book, CSV and JSON downloads of the object data, and JPG downloads of the catalogue images.
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Crazy Quilts
A Beginner’s Guide
Betty Fikes Pillsbury
Ohio University Press, 2016

Textile artist and instructor Betty Fikes Pillsbury has won hundreds of awards for her homages to the elegance of Victorian crazy quilting. Grounded in traditional methods but crafted with elements of whimsy, each piece stands on its own as a work of art. In this definitive guide, Pillsbury shares her methods for piecing, embroidering, and embellishing. Her instructions equip readers at any level of quilting skill to use those techniques to express their own visions.

Encouraging her readers to see functional and artistic possibilities beyond quilts (wall hangings, purses, and pillowcases are just some of the options), Pillsbury shows them how to make each work by hand, the slow cloth way. An inspiring primer for beginning and experienced quilters alike, this meticulously illustrated how-to book is far more expansive than previous guides. Pillsbury—a master of the form—shows us why crazy quilting belongs firmly in the twenty-first century.

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Dutch Ovens Chronicled
Their Use in the United States
John G. Ragsdale
University of Arkansas Press, 2015
When a significant number of Americans had to prepare meals in the out of doors—colonists, pioneers moving west, cowboys working the range, or sheep herders—they needed something portable to cook their food in. Iron casters filled that need by turning out various pots, pans, and ovens to be carried to cabins, campfires, wagon trains, and camping trails. One such vessel was the Dutch oven, which had been in use for generations.

Dutch Ovens Chronicled offers a history of the development, care, and use of these ovens, complete with photos and recipes. This authoritative, informative, and eminently readable guide will be appreciated by outdoor enthusiasts, antiquarians, and history buffs alike.
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The Economics of the Manuscript and Rare Book Trade, ca. 1890–1939
Federico Botana
Arc Humanities Press, 2024
The market for rare books has been characterized as unpredictable, and driven by the whims of a small number of rich individuals. Yet behind the headlines announcing new auction records, a range of sources make it possible to analyze the market as a whole. This book introduces the economics of the trade in manuscripts and rare books during the turbulent period ca. 1890–1939. It demonstrates how surviving sources, even when incomplete and inconsistent, can be used to tackle questions about the operation of the rare book trade, including how books were priced, profit margins, accounting practices, and books as investments, from the perspectives of both dealers and collectors.
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European Mail Armour
Ringed Battle Shirts from the Iron Age, Roman Period and Early Middle Ages
Martijn A. Wijnhoven
Amsterdam University Press, 2022
Mail armour (commonly mislabelled 'chainmail') was used for more than two millennia on the battlefield. After its invention in the Iron Age, mail rapidly spread all over Europe and beyond. The Roman army, keen on new military technology, soon adopted mail armour and used it successfully for centuries. Its history did not stop there and mail played a vital role in warfare during the Middle Ages up to the Early Modern Period. Given its long history, one would think mail is a well-documented material, but that is not the case. For the first time, this books lays a solid foundation for the understanding of mail armour and its context through time. It applies a long-term multi-dimensional approach to extract a wealth of as yet untapped information from archaeological, iconographic and written sources. This is complemented with technical insights on the mail maker’s chaîne opératoire.
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French Rococo Ébénisterie in the J. Paul Getty Museum
Gillian Wilson
J. Paul Getty Trust, The, 2021

The first comprehensive catalogue of the Getty Museum’s significant collection of French Rococo ébénisterie furniture.

This catalogue focuses on French ébénisterie furniture in the Rococo style dating from 1735 to 1760. These splendid objects directly reflect the tastes of the Museum’s founder, J. Paul Getty, who started collecting in this area in 1938 and continued until his death in 1976.
 
The Museum’s collection is particularly rich in examples created by the most talented cabinet masters then active in Paris, including Bernard van Risenburgh II (after 1696–ca. 1766), Jacques Dubois (1694–1763), and Jean-François Oeben (1721–1763). Working for members of the French royal family and aristocracy, these craftsmen excelled at producing veneered and marquetried pieces of furniture (tables, cabinets, and chests of drawers) fashionable for their lavish surfaces, refined gilt-bronze mounts, and elaborate design. These objects were renowned throughout Europe at a time when Paris was considered the capital of good taste.
 
The entry on each work comprises both a curatorial section, with description and commentary, and a conservation report, with construction diagrams. An introduction by Anne-Lise Desmas traces the collection’s acquisition history, and two technical essays by Arlen Heginbotham present methodologies and findings on the analysis of gilt-bronze mounts and lacquer.

The free online edition of this open-access publication is available at www.getty.edu/publications/rococo/ and includes zoomable, high-resolution photography. Also available are free PDF, EPUB, and Kindle/MOBI downloads of the book, and JPG downloads of the main catalogue images.

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French Silver in the J. Paul Getty Museum
Charissa Bremer-David
J. Paul Getty Trust, The, 2023
Vividly illustrated, this is the first comprehensive catalogue of the J. Paul Getty Museum’s celebrated collection of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century French silver.
 
The collection of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century French silver at the J. Paul Getty Museum is of exceptional quality and state of preservation. Each piece is remarkable for its beauty, inventive form, skillful execution, illustrious provenance, and the renown of its maker. This volume is the first complete study of these exquisite objects, with more than 250 color photographs bringing into focus extraordinary details such as minuscule makers’ marks, inscriptions, and heraldic armorials.
 
The publication details the formation of the Museum’s collection of French silver, several pieces of which were selected by J. Paul Getty himself, and discusses the regulations of the historic Parisian guild of gold- and silversmiths that set quality controls and consumer protections. Comprehensive entries catalogue a total of thirty-three pieces with descriptions, provenance, exhibition history, and technical information. The related commentaries shed light on the function of these objects and the roles they played in the daily lives of their prosperous owners. The book also includes maker biographies and a full bibliography.
 
The free online edition of this open-access publication is available at getty.edu/publications/french-silver/ and includes 360-degree views and zoomable high-resolution photography. Also available are free PDF and EPUB downloads of the book, and JPG downloads of the main catalogue images.
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The Great Texas Stamp Collection
How Some Stubborn Texas Confederate Postmasters, a Handful of Determined Texas Stamp Collectors, and a Few of the World's Greatest Philatelists Created, Discovered, and Preserved Some of the World's Most Valuable Postage Stamps
By Charles W. Deaton
University of Texas Press, 2012

Among the many difficulties the newly formed Confederate States of America endured in the summer of 1861 was the failure of its post office department to provide sufficient numbers of that item most crucial to its service: the postage stamp. Faced with the resulting din of customer complaints, a handful of industrious Texas postmasters solved the problem by simply making their own homemade stamps.

In this thoroughly researched history of these rare and highly coveted stamps, The Great Texas Stamp Collection traces their journey from creation through their rediscovery years later by local, and then international, stamp collectors—a journey that culminated in the sale of a few pieces at a recent auction in New York that fetched more than $250,000. Weaving the larger contexts of Texas and U.S. postal history together with individual tales of greed, intrigue, forgery, and discovery, Deaton’s book is rich with characters from European royalty to early stamp dealers to common criminals, while also providing detailed examinations of the stamps themselves, including a complete census of the stamps now known as the Texas Confederate Postmasters’ Provisionals.

Appealing at once to devoted philatelists, Texas and U.S. history buffs, and amateur collectors of all kinds, The Great Texas Stamp Collection offers a unique vantage point from which to view our history as well as the very nature of collecting.

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Guy Wolff
Master Potter in the Garden
Suzanne Staubach
University Press of New England, 2013
If you mention Guy Wolff to a serious gardener, that gardener will almost certainly admit to either owning a Guy Wolff flowerpot or coveting one. Wolff’s pots—some small and perfect for a sunny windowsill, others massive and just right for a favorite outdoor spot—are widely considered to be the epitome of gardenware. Their classical proportions, simple decoration, and the marks of Wolff’s hands all combine to make plants look their best. His pots possess an honesty and liveliness that machine-made flowerpots lack. Wolff is probably the best-known potter working in the United States today. In gardening circles, he is a highly revered horticultural icon; gardeners flock to his lectures and demonstrations. His work also appeals to lovers of design and fine arts: visit the personal gardens of landscape designers, and you will see Guy Wolff pots. Step inside the gates of estate gardens, and you will see Guy Wolff pots. Yet he is a potter’s potter. He’s a big ware thrower, a skill few have today. He thinks deeply about what he calls the architecture of pots and the importance of handmade objects in our lives. Whether you are a longtime collector of Wolff’s pots, anxious to buy your first one, or simply intrigued by the beauty and practicality of hand-crafted goods in our fast-paced era, you’ll want to add this richly illustrated book to your library.
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The Hours of Marie de Medici
A Facsimile
Marie de Medici
Bodleian Library Publishing, 2016
A stunning facsimile copy of an illuminated manuscript owned by the French queen Marie de Medici.

At the turn of the fifteenth century, private devotionals became a specialty of the renowned Ghent–Bruges illuminators. Wealthy patrons who commissioned work from these artists often spared no expense in the presentation of their personal prayer books, or “books of hours,” from detailed decoration to luxurious bindings and embroidery.

This manuscript owes its name to the French queen, Marie de Medici, widow of King Henri IV. The manuscript was painted by an artist known as the David Master, one of the renowned Flemish illuminators of the sixteenth century. Fine architectural interiors, gorgeous landscapes, and detailed city scenes form the subjects of three full-size illuminations and forty-two full-page miniatures. It is one of the finest examples of medieval illumination in a personal prayer book and the most copiously illustrated work of the David Master to survive.

Together with a scholarly introduction that gives an overview of Flemish illumination and examines each of the illustrations in detail, this full-color facsimile limited edition, bound in linen with a leather quarter binding and beautifully presented in a slipcase, faithfully reproduces all 176 leaves of the original manuscript.
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Liber Amicorum in Honour of Diana Scarisbrick
A Life in Jewels
Edited by Beatriz Chadour-Sampson, Sandra Hindman, and Carla Van De Puttelaar
Paul Holberton Publishing, 2022

Coinciding with Diana Scarisbrick’s ninety-fourth birthday, this work honors her extraordinary career as the “world’s leading jewelry historian.”

Through twenty contributions by noted scholars, Liber Amicorum explores the pioneering research accomplished by jewelry historian Diana Scarisbrick. These collected pieces celebrate both the length of Scarisbrick’s career and its wide-ranging nature, touching upon her work with everything from gems, rings, chalices, bindings, and crown jewels to contemporary jewelry production, jewel theft, and individual collections.

Throughout the book, the insightful historical research of the contributors is beautifully supported by high-quality illustrations. These bring their essays to life, highlighting the splendor and fragility of some of the objects that are discussed as each delves into the work of this eminent scholar.

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Looking at Jewelry
A Guide to Terms, Styles, and Techniques
Susanne Gänsicke
J. Paul Getty Trust, The, 2019
What is a cabochon? What are the various types of gilding? What is vermeil? This accessible book—the first of its kind—offers concise explanations of key jewelry terms. The fascination with personal adornment is universal. It is a preoccupation that is primal, instinctive, and uniquely human. Jewelry encompasses a seemingly endless number of ornaments produced across time and in all cultures. The range of materials and techniques used in its construction is extraordinary, even revolutionary, with new substances and methods of fabrication added with every generation. In any given society, master artisans have devoted their time, energy, and talent to the fine art of jewelry making, creating some of the most spectacular objects known to humankind.
 
This volume, geared toward jewelry makers, scholars, scientists, students, and fashionistas alike, begins with a lively introduction that offers a cultural history of jewelry and its production. The main text provides information on the most common, iconic, and culturally significant forms of jewelry and also covers materials, techniques, and manufacturing processes. Containing more than eighty color illustrations, this guide will be invaluable to all those wishing to increase their understanding and enjoyment of the art of jewelry.
 
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front cover of Manuscripts of the Latin Classics 800-1200
Manuscripts of the Latin Classics 800-1200
Erik Kwakkel
Amsterdam University Press
This volume explores the production and use of medieval manuscripts that contain classical Latin texts. Six experts in the field address a range of topics related to these manuscripts, including how classical texts were disseminated throughout medieval society, how readers used and interacted with specific texts, and what these books look like from a material standpoint. This collection of essays also considers the value of studying classical manuscripts as a distinct group, and demonstrates how such a collective approach can add to our understanding of how classical works functioned in medieval society. Focusing on the period 800-1200, when classical works played a crucial role in the teaching of grammar, rhetoric, and dialectics, this volume investigates how classical Latin texts were copied, used, and circulated in both discrete and shared contexts.
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Measuring the Flow of Time
The Works of James A. Ford, 1935-1941
James A. Ford, edited by R. Lee Lyman and Michael J. O'Brien
University of Alabama Press, 1999

A Dan Josselyn Memorial Publication


This collection of Ford's works focuses on the development of ceramic chronology—a key tool in Americanist archaeology.

 

When James Ford began archaeological fieldwork in 1927, scholars divided time simply into prehistory and history. Though certainly influenced by his colleagues, Ford devoted his life to establishing a chronology for prehistory based on ceramic types, and today he deserves credit for bringing chronological order to the vast archaeological record of the Mississippi Valley.


 

This book collects Ford's seminal writings showing the importance of pottery styles in dating sites, population movements, and cultures. These works defined the development of ceramic chronology that culminated in the major volume Archaeological Survey in the Lower Mississippi Alluvial Valley, 1940-1947, which Ford wrote with Philip Phillips and James B. Griffin. In addition to Ford's early writings, the collection includes articles written with Griffin and Gordon Willey, as well as other key papers by Henry Collins and Fred Kniffen.


 

Editors Michael O'Brien and Lee Lyman have written an introduction that sets the stage for each chapter and provides a cohesive framework from which to examine Ford's ideas. A foreword by Willey, himself a participant in this chronology development, looks back on the origin of that method. Measuring the Flow of Time traces the development of culture history in American archaeology by providing a single reference for all of Ford's writing on chronology. It chronicles the formation of one of the most important tools for understanding the prehistory of North America and shows its lasting relevance.


 

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Merton College Library
Julia C. Walworth
Bodleian Library Publishing, 2020
The Merton library is rightly known for its antiquity, its beautiful medieval and early modern architecture and fittings, and its remarkable collection of manuscripts and rare books. However, a nineteenth-century plan to tear the medieval library down and replace it was only narrowly prevented. This brief history of Europe’s oldest surviving academic library begins with its origins in the thirteenth century, when a new type of community of scholars was first being set up, and follows through to the present day and its multiple functions as a working college library, a unique resource for researchers, and a delight for curious visitors.

​Drawing on the remarkable wealth of documentation in the college’s archives, this is the first history of the library to explore collections, buildings, readers, and staff across more than seven hundred years. The story is told in part through stunning color images that depict not only exceptional treasures but also the library furnishings and decorations, and which show manuscripts, books, bindings, and artifacts of different periods in their changing contexts. Featuring a historical timeline and a floor plan of the college, this book will be of interest to historians, alumni, and tourists alike.
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front cover of Minting, State, and Economy in the Visigothic Kingdom
Minting, State, and Economy in the Visigothic Kingdom
From Settlement in Aquitaine through the First Decade of the Muslim Conquest of Spain
Andrew Kurt
Amsterdam University Press, 2020
This study of the Visigothic kingdom monetary system in southern Gaul and Hispania from the fifth century through the Muslim invasion of Spain fills a major gap in the scholarship of late antiquity. Examining all aspects of the making of currency, it sets minting in relation to questions of state - monarchical power, administration and apparatus, motives for money production - and economy. In the context of the later Roman Empire and its successor states in the west, the minting and currency of the Visigoths reveal shared patterns as well as originality. The analysis brings both economic life and the needs of the state into sharper focus, with significant implications for the study of an essential element in daily life and government. This study combines an appreciation for the surprising level of sophistication in the Visigothic minting system with an accessible approach to a subject which can seem complex and abstruse.
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The News from Lone Rock
Observations and Witticisms of a Small-Town Newsman
Freeland Dexter
Wisconsin Historical Society Press, 2016

At the turn of the twentieth century, the bustling railroad town of Lone Rock, Wisconsin, was home to about a thousand residents, and Freeland Dexter seemed to know the business of every single one. Dexter reported all the news from Lone Rock—from the significant to the trivial, the tragic to the comical—for the Weekly Home News of neighboring Spring Green from 1884 to 1912.

This collection of Dexter’s most fascinating, amusing, and poignant stories and observations brings back to life the colorful characters of his time and takes readers on a journey to a world that was both simpler and changing fast. Whether he was reporting who grew the biggest watermelon, teasing the local lovebirds, or taking a side on the ever-controversial question of whether the town should go dry, Dexter wrote with a distinctive wit and an obvious affection for his town and its people. The News from Lone Rock also provides an illuminating window into a time period of rapid technological progress, showing how the introduction of electric light, telephones, and cars changed lives and connected this quaint village more and more to the outside world.

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Not Just a Pretty Face
Dolls and Human Figurines in Alaska Native Cultures
Molly Lee
University of Alaska Press, 2006
Now in a full-color second edition, Not Just a Pretty Face is an engaging exploration of the role of dolls and doll making in Alaska Native cultures. From ancient ivory carvings to the thriving tourist market, dolls and human figurines have played integral parts in the ritual, economic, and social lives of Native Alaskans. Dolls served as children’s playthings, represented absent community members at ceremonies, and predicted the movements of game animals for shamans. Not Just a Pretty Face surveys these and other uses of dolls and figurines, illustrating in beautiful color photographs the diversity of the doll-making tradition in Eskimo, Athabaskan, and Northwest Coast Native communities.
Authors explore the ethnographic literature, twentieth-century oral histories, and photographic documentation of dolls and the doll-making process. Contemporary doll makers explain, in their own words, how they learned to make dolls and what doll making means to them. The second edition features a photo essay on Rosalie Paniyak of Chevak, one of the most influential doll makers in Alaska today.
Not Just a Pretty Face provides a panoramic view of an ancient tradition and situates the art of doll making within a contemporary context. Scholarly, yet accessible, Not Just a Pretty Face is a lively contribution to the literature on dolls, anthropology, and Native studies.
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Objects of Liberty
British Women Writers and Revolutionary Souvenirs
Pamela Buck
University of Delaware Press, 2024
Objects of Liberty explores the prevalence of souvenirs in British women’s writing during the French Revolution and Napoleonic era. It argues that women writers employed the material and memorial object of the souvenir to circulate revolutionary ideas and engage in the masculine realm of political debate. While souvenir collecting was a standard practice of privileged men on the eighteenth-century Grand Tour, women began to partake in this endeavor as political events in France heightened interest in travel to the Continent. Looking at travel accounts by Helen Maria Williams, Mary Wollstonecraft, Catherine and Martha Wilmot, Charlotte Eaton, and Mary Shelley, this study reveals how they used souvenirs to affect political thought in Britain and contribute to conversations about individual and national identity. At a time when gendered beliefs precluded women from full citizenship, they used souvenirs to redefine themselves as legitimate political actors. Objects of Liberty is a story about the ways that women established political power and agency through material culture.


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The Odes of Horace
A Facsimile
William Morris
Bodleian Library Publishing, 2016

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The Origins of the Exhibition Space (1450-1750)
Pamela Bianchi
Amsterdam University Press, 2023
Before the first purpose-designed exhibition spaces and painting exhibitions emerged, showing art was mainly related to the habit of dressing up spaces for political commemorations, religious festivals, and marketing strategies. Palaces, cloisters, façades, squares, and shops became temporary and privileged venues for art display, where sociability was performed, and the idea of exhibition developed. >cite>What were those places and events? What aesthetic, cultural, social and political discourses intersected with the early idea of exhibition space? How did displaying art shape a new vocabulary within these events, and conversely, how have these occasions conditioned exhibiting practices? This book traces the origins of the exhibition space by studying its visual and written imagery in the early modern period. It reconsiders events and habits that contributed to shaping the imagery of the exhibition space, and to defining exhibition-making practices, exploring micro-histories and long-term changes.
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Pearl
Nature's Perfect Gem
Fiona Lindsay Shen
Reaktion Books, 2022
From their creation in the maw of mollusks to lustrous objects of infatuation and conflict, a revealing look at pearls’ dark history.
 
This book is a beautifully illustrated account of pearls through millennia, from fossils to contemporary jewelry. Pearls are the most human of gems, both miraculous and familiar. Uniquely organic in origin, they are as intimate as our bodies, created through the same process as we grow bones and teeth. They have long been described as an animal’s sacrifice, but until recently their retrieval often entailed the sacrifices of enslaved and indentured divers and laborers. While the shimmer of the pearl has enticed Roman noblewomen, Mughal princes, Hollywood royalty, mavericks, and renegades, encoded in its surface is a history of human endeavor, abuse, and aspiration—pain locked in the layers of a gleaming gem.
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Picturing Illinois
Twentieth-Century Postcard Art from Chicago to Cairo
John A. Jakle and Keith A. Sculle
University of Illinois Press, 2012

At the outset of the twentieth century the debut of the American picture postcard incited widespread enthusiasm for collecting and sending postcard art that lasted decades. In Picturing Illinois, John A. Jakle and Keith A. Sculle examine a diverse set of 200 vintage Illinois picture postcards revealing what locals considered captivating, compelling, and commemorable. They also interpret how individual messages impart the sender's personal perception of local geography and scenery. Jakle and Sculle follow the dialogue between urban Chicago and rural downstate, elucidating the postcard's significance in popular culture and the unique ways in which Illinoisans pictured their world.


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Postcards from the Baja California Border
Portraying Townscape and Place, 1900s–1950s
Daniel D. Arreola
University of Arizona Press, 2021
Postcards have a magical pull. They allow us to see the past through charming relics that allow us to travel back in time. Daniel D. Arreola’s Postcards from the Baja California Border offers a window into the historical and geographical past of storied Mexican border communities. Once-popular tourist destinations from the 1900s through the 1950s, the border communities explored in Postcards from the Baja California Border used to be filled with revelers, cabarets, curio shops, and more. The postcards in this book show the bright and dynamic past of California’s borderlands while diving deep into the historic and geographic significance of the imagery found on the postcards.

This form of place study calls attention to how we can see a past through a serial view of places, by the nature of repetition, and the photographing of the same place over and over again. Arreola draws our focus to townscapes, or built landscapes, of four border towns—Tijuana, Mexicali, Tecate, and Algodones—during the first half of the twentieth century. With an emphasis on the tourist’s view of these places, this book creates a vivid picture of what life was like for tourists and residents of these towns in the early and mid-twentieth century. Postcards from the Baja California Border is a rich and fascinating experience, one that takes you on a time-travel journey through border town histories and geographies while celebrating the visual intrigue of postcards.

 
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Postcards from Utopia
The Art of Political Propaganda
Edited by the Bodleian Library
Bodleian Library Publishing, 2009

Politicians are famous for making extravagant campaign promises. But there are few promises as powerful—or as idealistically utopian—as those put forth by state-sponsored propaganda. Collected here are colorful images of political ideology created and disseminated by the political regimes of Europe, the Soviet Union, and China from the 1920s through the ‘70s.

State leaders of the twentieth century were highly conscious of the need to present a unified national image during a time of serious political transition in Europe, and state-sanctioned art performed a key function in an attempt to consolidate a country behind an idea. These spectacular images provide a rare opportunity to witness how abstract political ideas were rendered as visual picture for a mass audience. Fifty compelling postcards, held in the collection of the Bodleian Library, from the former Soviet Union, China, Germany, Italy, Spain, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, and Albania, reveal that despite national differences there are surprising similarities in political expression and the idealized images presented by each government. An introduction that contextualizes the images within a broader understanding of the ideologies and political powers of the time is provided by European historian, Andrew Roberts.

Taken together, the images in Postcards from Utopia offer a striking look at the art of power and its mythical representation at a time of great political upheaval and experiment.

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Postcards of Lost Royals
Edited by the Bodleian Library
Bodleian Library Publishing, 2009

This enchanting, unique collection of postcards recovers an old world swept away and forgotten over the decades. The lost royals captured here have not been misplaced or gone missing—what has been lost is the very foundation of their royalty. Collected here are royal figures from around the world who lost their titles and were displaced as a result of World War I and other early twentieth-century political movements.

            The royal houses of Europe, Africa, and Asia once ruled a continent and held dominions beyond the seas. Today, just ten monarchs still reign in Europe, and those with only limited powers. Captured in these distinctive postcards held in the collection of the Bodleian Library are these lost emperors, kings and queens, czars and czarinas, princes and princess, and grand dukes and duchesses, who were left behind by the sweep of history. Featuring monarchs from the Balkans to the Iberian Peninsula, from Ethiopia to Korea, these portraits include members of the Russian imperial family, and royals from Romania, Bulgaria, and Germany, among others. But this is more than just a picture book; it provides a narrative snapshot of world history—alongside each postcard is an intriguing mini-biography of the pictured royal that provides a gripping account of his or her story.

            Reminiscent of a forgotten era of glamour, grace, and regal power, Postcards of Lost Royals brings history to life and distills the essence of a long-vanished world of royalty.

[more]

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The Poster
Art, Advertising, Design, and Collecting, 1860s–1900s
Ruth E. Iskin
Dartmouth College Press, 2014
The Poster: Art, Advertising, Design, and Collecting, 1860s–1900s is a cultural history that situates the poster at the crossroads of art, design, advertising, and collecting. Though international in scope, the book focuses especially on France and England. Ruth E. Iskin argues that the avant-garde poster and the original art print played an important role in the development of a modernist language of art in the 1890s, as well as in the adaptation of art to an era of mass media. She moreover contends that this new form of visual communication fundamentally redefined relations between word and image: poster designers embedded words within the graphic, rather than using images to illustrate a text. Posters had to function as effective advertising in the hectic environment of the urban street. Even though initially commissioned as advertisements, they were soon coveted by collectors. Iskin introduces readers to the late nineteenth-century “iconophile”—a new type of collector/curator/archivist who discovered in poster collecting an ephemeral archaeology of modernity. Bridging the separation between the fields of art, design, advertising, and collecting, Iskin’s insightful study proposes that the poster played a constitutive role in the modern culture of spectacle. This stunningly illustrated book will appeal to art historians and students of visual culture, as well as social and cultural history, media, design, and advertising.
[more]

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A Potter's Progress
Emanuel Suter and the Business of Craft
Scott Suter
University of Tennessee Press, 2019
Born into a traditional culture in 1833, Emanuel Suter cultivated the art of pottery and expanded markets across the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia, creating a thriving company and leaving thousands of examples of utilitarian ceramic ware that have survived down to the present. Drawing on Suter’s diary—rich with meticulous descriptions of his ceramic wares, along with glazing recipes and the quotidian details of nineteenth-century business—as well as myriad other primary and secondary sources, Suter’s great-great-grandson Scott Hamilton Suter tells the story of how a farmer with a seasonal sideline developed into a technologically advanced entrepreneur who operated a modern industrial company. As a farmer, Emanuel Suter innovated by adopting new time-saving equipment; this progressive thinking bled over into his religious life, as he endeavored to change the traditional way of choosing ministers by lot and advocated for the formation of Sunday schools in the Mennonite Church. But Suter largely made his mark as a potter, and A Potter’s Progress is enhanced by nearly two dozen color images and a close study of the techniques (including kilns and jigger wheels), products, shop organization, marketing, and labor of Suter’s shops, revealing the revolutionary role they played in the world of Rockingham County, Virginia, pottery manufacture. This tightly focused case study of the trials and triumphs of one craftsman as he moved from a cottage industry to a full-scale industrial enterprise—prefiguring the market economy that would characterize the twentieth century—serves as a microcosm for examining the American spirit of progress in late nineteenth-century America.
 

 
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The Pre-Modern Manuscript Trade and its Consequences, ca. 1890–1945
Laura Cleaver
Arc Humanities Press, 2024

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Quilts of the Ohio Western Reserve
Ricky Clark
Ohio University Press, 2005

Quilts of the Ohio Western Reserve includes early quilts brought from Connecticut to the Western Reserve in northeastern Ohio and contemporary quilts, including one by a conservative Amish woman and another inspired by Cleveland’s Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.

Ricky Clark, one of Ohio’s foremost quilt historians, has assembled exquisite examples of calamanco, “T” quilts, and borderless pieced quilts to show the influence of Connecticut aesthetics and history on the making of early quilts in this region. Rich in color, detail, and inventiveness, and often beautifully designed, the quilts of this region commemorate community history, from town fundraisers of the 1890s to a quilt designed by a Lake Erie shipbuilder. Sections of the book include quilts made during the Civil War and for postwar veterans’ organizations as well as military and presidential quilts that relate to the history of the Western Reserve.

Quilt design in Ohio has been celebrated in biennial exhibits, round-robin quilts, and most recently proudly painted on barns in rural Ohio. Quilts of the Ohio Western Reserve, lavishly illustrated with forty color photos of quilts, launches the Ohio Quilt Series. A welcome addition to Ohio’s cultural legacy, this book will interest the wider world of quilt and textile enthusiasts and historians.

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Railroad Postcards in the Age of Steam
H. Roger Grant
University of Iowa Press, 1994

Out of the tradition of those long-gone days of great, heaving steam locomotives and endless rail lines comes this remarkable selection of vintage cards, a treasure trove selected from John Vander Maas' consummate collection at the University of Iowa Libraries.

This lavish volume is the first general book-length work devoted to the once-ubiquitous railroad picture postcard. It comprises an introductory essay and an album of cards. The former fully examines the nature of the postcard craze, which reached its zenith about 1910, and discusses why images of American railroads played such an important part in the card phenomenon. The album divides an engaging assortment of more than 150 representative views into five sections: “Trains and Rolling Stock,” “Depots and Railway Structures,” “The Railroad Corridor,” “People and Railroads,” and “The Lighter Side of Railroading.”

Railroad historians, train enthusiasts, postcard collectors, and all other readers will find much to interest them in this selection of images. Not only are the cards themselves visually striking, but they convey a sense of how important railroads once were to the nation's citizenry. The sight of steaming locomotives and the hustle and bustle associated with “train time” caused hearts to quicken. These feelings made views of railroad scenes popular with buyers of postcards and now with latter-day railroad fans and card collectors.

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Rhetoric and Guns
Lydia Wilkes
Utah State University Press, 2021

Guns hold a complex place in American culture. Over 30,000 Americans die each year from gun violence, and guns are intimately connected to issues of public health, as is evident whenever a mass shooting occurs. But guns also play an important role in many Americans’ lives that is not reducible to violence and death—as tools, sporting equipment, and identity markers. They are also central to debates about constitutional rights, as seen in ongoing discussions about the Second Amendment, and they are a continuous source of legislative concern, as apparent in annual ratings of gun-supporting legislators. 

Even as guns are wrapped up with other crucial areas of concern, they are also fundamentally a rhetorical concern. Guns and gun violence occupy a unique rhetorical space in the United States, one characterized by silent majorities, like most gun owners; vocal minorities, like the firearm industry and gun lobby; and a stalemate that fails to stem the flood of the dead. How Americans talk, deliberate, and fight about guns is vital to how guns are marketed, used, and regulated. A better understanding of the rhetorics of guns and gun violence can help Americans make better arguments about them in the world. However, where guns are concerned, rhetorical studies is not terribly different from American culture more generally. Guns are ever-present and exercise powerful effects, but they are commonly talked about in oblique, unsystematic ways. 

Rhetoric and Guns advances more direct, systematic engagement in the field and beyond by analyzing rhetoric about guns, guns in rhetoric, and guns as rhetoric, particularly as they relate to specific instances of guns in culture. The authors attempt to understand rhetoric’s relationship to guns by analyzing rhetoric about guns and how they function in and as rhetoric related to specific instances—in media coverage, political speech, marketing, and advertising. Original chapters from scholars in rhetorical studies, communication, education, and related fields elucidate how rhetoric is used to maintain and challenge the deadly status quo of gun violence in the United States and extend rhetoricians’ sustained interest in the fields’ relationships to violence, brutality, and atrocity.


Contributors: Ira J. Allen, Brian Ballentine, Matthew Boedy, Peter Buck, Lisa Corrigan, Rosa Eberly, Kendall Gerdes, Ian E. J. Hill, Nathalie Kuriowa-Lewis, Patricia Roberts-Miller, Craig Rood, Bradley Serber, Catherine R. Squires, Scott Gage
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Sculpture and Coins
Margarete Bieber as Scholar and Collector
Carmen Arnold-Biucchi
Harvard University Press

This volume addresses the question of the relation between sculpture and coins—or large statuary and miniature art—in the private and public domain. It originates in the Harvard Art Museums 2011 Ilse and Leo Mildenberg interdisciplinary symposium celebrating the acquisition of Margarete Bieber’s coin collection. The papers examine the function of Greek and Roman portraiture and the importance of coins for its identification and interpretation. The authors are scholars from different backgrounds and present case studies from their individual fields of expertise: sculpture, public monuments, coins, and literary sources.

Sculpture and Coins also pays homage to the art historian Margarete Bieber (1879–1978) whose work on ancient theater and Hellenistic sculpture remains seminal. She was the first woman to receive the prestigious travel fellowship from the German Archaeological Institute and the first female professor at the University of Giessen. Dismissed by the Nazis, she came to the United States and taught at Columbia. This publication cannot answer all the questions: its merit is to reopen and broaden a conversation on a topic seldom tackled by numismatists and archaeologists together since the time of Bernard Ashmole, Phyllis Lehmann and Léon Lacroix.

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The Search for the Codex Cardona
Arnold J. Bauer
Duke University Press, 2009
In The Search for the Codex Cardona, Arnold J. Bauer tells the story of his experiences on the trail of a cultural treasure, a Mexican “painted book” that first came into public view at Sotheby’s auction house in London in 1982, nearly four hundred years after it was presumably made by Mexican artists and scribes. On folios of amate paper, the Codex includes two oversized maps and 300 painted illustrations accompanied by text in sixteenth-century paleography. The Codex relates the trajectory of the Nahua people to the founding of the capital of Tenochtitlán and then focuses on the consequences of the Spanish conquest up to the 1550s. If authentic, the Codex Cardona is an invaluable record of early Mexico. Yet there is no clear evidence of its origin, what happened to it after 1560, or even where it is today, after its last known appearance at Christie’s auction house in New York in 1998.

Bauer first saw the Codex Cardona in 1985 in the Crocker Nuclear Laboratory at the University of California, Davis, where scholars from Stanford and the University of California were attempting to establish its authenticity. Allowed to gently lift a few pages of this ancient treasure, Bauer was hooked. By 1986, the Codex had again disappeared from public view. Bauer’s curiosity about the Codex and its whereabouts led him down many forking paths—from California to Seville and Mexico City, to the Firestone Library in Princeton, to the Getty Museum in Los Angeles and Christie’s in New York—and it brought him in contact with an international cast of curators, agents, charlatans, and erudite book dealers. The Search for the Codex Cardona is a mystery that touches on issues of cultural patrimony, the workings of the rare books and manuscripts trade, the uncertainty of archives and evidence, and the ephemerality of the past and its remains.

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Secrets of the Great Ocean Liners
John G. Sayers
Bodleian Library Publishing, 2020
In the heyday of ocean travel—between the late nineteenth century and World War II—ocean liners were a home away from home. Passengers prepared for voyages that could last as long as three months, and shipping companies ensured their guests were as comfortable as possible, providing entertainment, dining, sleeping quarters, and smoking lounges to accommodate passengers of all ages and budgets. Secrets of the Great Ocean Liners leads the reader through each stage of ocean liner travel, from booking a ticket and choosing a cabin to shore excursions, on-board games, social events, and even romances. This book dives into a vast, unique collection of ephemera to reveal the scandals, glamour, challenges, and tragedies of ocean liner travel. Shipping companies produced glitzy brochures, sailing schedules, voyage logs, passenger lists, postcards, and menus, all of which help us to enjoy daily life on board. Diaries, letters, and journals written by passengers also reveal a host of fascinating insights into the experience of traveling by sea.
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Shaker Textile Arts
Beverly Gordon
University Press of New England, 1982
Today we witness a steadily growing interest in the Shakers and their way of life, especially their crafts. Although Shaker furniture, architecture, and herbs, for example, have been written about repeatedly, there are no other studies in depth of another all-important element in Shaker lives--Shaker textiles. Beverly Gordon, an experienced craftswoman and teacher, presents a comprehensive, illustrated book on the kinds of textiles the Shakers used, how they were produced, and their cultural and economic importance to the communities. She shows how Shaker beliefs were manifested in the actual artifacts and integrates detailed technical information in a way that will appeal to the nonprofessional admirers of these crafts as well as to experts. Professional dealers may use the book to verify the authenticity of a variety of items. An introductory chapter is followed by sections on the general characteristics of the textiles, their importance in Shaker lives, and the types of textile activities they undertook. Textile production, including fiber preparation, spinning, weaving, dyeing, knitting, crocheting, and sewing, is examined. Detailed descriptions of rugs and floor coverings, chair and seat tapes and cushions, clothing and personal accessories, popular cloth, and fancywork are followed by appendices on original Shaker weaving drafts, analyses of rugs and chair seat tapes, dye recipes, and instructions for knitting and constructing “fancy” items. This indispensable reference work results in part from the author’s close association with Shaker textiles between 1973 and 1977, when she was a textile interpreter at Hancock Shaker Village. Since then she has had access to artifacts and original manuscripts and documents throughout the country, works that are reflected in her full bibliography. A study from the procurement and processing of materials to the uses of finished products, this is a book of lasting value to collectors and antique dealers, museum curators, home economists, historians, weavers, and fiber artists with related specialties.
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Silver
Nature and Culture
Lindsay Shen
Reaktion Books, 2017
From spoons to bullets to sterling coins, silver permeates our everyday culture and language. For millennia we’ve used it to buy what we need, adorn our bodies, or trumpet our social status, and likewise it’s been useful to vanquish werewolves, vampires, and even our own smelly socks.  This book captures all of these facets of silver and more, telling the fascinating story of one of our most hardworking precious metals.
           
As Lindsay Shen shows, while always valued for its beauty and rarity—used to bolster dowries and pay armies alike—silver today is also exploited for its chemistry and can be found in everything from the clothes we wear to the electronics we use to the medical devices that save our lives. Born in the supernovae of stars and buried deep in the earth, it has been mined by many different societies, traded throughout the world, and been the source of wars and the downfall of empires. It is also a metal of pure reflection, a shining symbol of purity. Featuring many glistening illustrations of silver in nature, art, jewelry, film, advertising, and popular culture, this is a superb overview of a metal both precious and useful, one with a rich and eventful history.
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Stability and Change in Guale Indian Pottery, A.D. 1300-1702
Rebecca Saunders
University of Alabama Press, 2000

Through a comprehensive study of changing pottery attributes, Saunders documents the clash of Spanish and Native American cultures in the 16th-century southeastern United States.

By studying the ceramic traditions of the Guale Indians, Rebecca Saunders provides evidence of change in Native American lifeways from prehistory through European contact and the end of the Mission period. The Guale were among the first southeastern groups to come into contact with Spanish and French colonists, and they adapted various strategies in order to ensure their own social survival. That adaptation is reflected, Saunders shows, in the changing attributes of pottery recovered on archaeological sites on the coasts of Georgia and Florida.

Saunders traces the evolution of Guale pottery from the late prehistoric Irene phase through the Mission period at the three archaeological sites. She uses both technological and stylistic attributes to monitor change, paying particular attention to changes in execution and frequency of the filfot cross—a stylized cross that is a symbol of Guale cosmology. The frequency of this symbol in different ceramic components, according to Saunders, is a measure of change in the worldview of the missionized Guale. Although the symbol abruptly changed after the first Spanish contact, it showed remarkable stability through the Mission period, suggesting that traditional craft training and production remained strong despite high mortality rates and frequent relocation.

Only after 1684, when the Guale were relocated to Amelia Island in present-day Florida, did the use of the cross motif decline, suggesting that the Guale who remained in Spanish territory may have conceived of their place in the cosmos differently from their forebears or their contemporaries who fled to the interior.

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A Stitch in Time
The Needlework of Aging Women in Antebellum America
Aimee E. Newell
Ohio University Press, 2014

Drawing from 167 examples of decorative needlework—primarily samplers and quilts from 114 collections across the United States—made by individual women aged forty years and over between 1820 and 1860, this exquisitely illustrated book explores how women experienced social and cultural change in antebellum America.

The book is filled with individual examples, stories, and over eighty fine color photographs that illuminate the role that samplers and needlework played in the culture of the time. For example, in October 1852, Amy Fiske (1785–1859) of Sturbridge, Massachusetts, stitched a sampler. But she was not a schoolgirl making a sampler to learn her letters. Instead, as she explained, “The above is what I have taken from my sampler that I wrought when I was nine years old. It was w[rough]t on fine cloth [and] it tattered to pieces. My age at this time is 66 years.”

Situated at the intersection of women’s history, material culture study, and the history of aging, this book brings together objects, diaries, letters, portraits, and prescriptive literature to consider how middle-class American women experienced the aging process. Chapters explore the physical and mental effects of “old age” on antebellum women and their needlework, technological developments related to needlework during the antebellum period and the tensions that arose from the increased mechanization of textile production, and how gift needlework functioned among friends and family members. Far from being solely decorative ornaments or functional household textiles, these samplers and quilts served their own ends. They offered aging women a means of coping, of sharing and of expressing themselves. These “threads of time” provide a valuable and revealing source for the lives of mature antebellum women.

Publication of this book was made possible in part through generous funding from the Coby Foundation, Ltd and from the Quilters Guild of Dallas, Helena Hibbs Endowment Fund.

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Texas Furniture, Volume One
The Cabinetmakers and Their Work, 1840-1880, Revised edition
By Lonn Taylor and David B. Warren
University of Texas Press, 2012

The art of furniture making flourished in Texas during the mid-nineteenth century. To document this rich heritage of locally made furniture, Miss Ima Hogg, the well-known philanthropist and collector of American decorative arts, enlisted Lonn Taylor and David B. Warren to research early Texas Furniture and its makers. They spent more than a decade working with museums and private collectors throughout the state to examine and photograph representative examples. They also combed census records, newspapers, and archives for information about cabinetmakers. These efforts resulted in the 1975 publication of Texas Furniture, which quickly became the authoritative reference on this subject.

Now updated with an expanded Index of Texas Cabinetmakers that includes information that has come to light since the original publication and corrects errors, Texas Furniture presents a catalog of more than two hundred pieces of furniture, each superbly photographed and accompanied by detailed descriptions of the piece’s maker, date, materials, measurements, history, and owner, as well as an analysis by the authors. The book also includes chapters on the material culture of nineteenth-century Texas and on the tools and techniques of nineteenth-century Texas cabinetmakers, with a special emphasis on the German immigrant cabinetmakers of the Hill Country and Central Texas. The index of Texas cabinetmakers contains biographical information on approximately nine hundred men who made furniture in Texas, and appendices list information on the state’s largest cabinet shops taken from the United States census records.

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Texas Furniture, Volume Two
The Cabinetmakers and Their Work, 1840–1880
By Lonn Taylor and David B. Warren
University of Texas Press, 2012

The art of furniture making flourished in Texas during the mid-nineteenth century. To document this rich heritage of locally made furniture, Miss Ima Hogg, the well-known philanthropist and collector of American decorative arts, enlisted Lonn Taylor and David B. Warren to research early Texas furniture and its makers. After more than a decade of investigation, they published Texas Furniture in 1975, and it quickly became the authoritative reference on this subject. An updated edition, Texas Furniture, Volume One, was issued in the spring of 2012.

Texas Furniture, Volume Two presents over 150 additional pieces of furniture that were not included in Volume One, each superbly photographed in color and accompanied by detailed descriptions of the piece’s maker, date, materials, measurements, history, and owner, as well as an analysis by the authors. Taylor and Warren have also written a new introduction for this volume, in which they amplify the story of early Texas furniture. In particular, they compare and contrast the two important traditions of cabinetmaking in Texas, Anglo-American and German, and identify previously unknown artisans. The authors also discuss nineteenth-century Texans’ desire for refinement and gentility in furniture, non-commercial furniture making, and marquetry work. And they pay tribute to the twentieth-century collectors who first recognized the value of locally made Texas furniture and worked to preserve it. A checklist of Texas cabinetmakers, which contains biographical information on approximately nine hundred men who made furniture in Texas, completes the volume.

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True Faith, True Light
The Devotional Art of Ed Stilley
Kelly Mulhollan
University of Arkansas Press, 2015
In 1979, Ed Stilley was leading a simple life as a farmer and singer of religious hymns in Hogscald Hollow, a tiny Ozark community south of Eureka Springs, Arkansas. Life was filled with hard work and making do for Ed, his wife Eliza, and their five children, who lived in many ways as if the second half of the twentieth century had never happened.

But one day Ed’s life was permanently altered. While plowing his field, he became convinced he was having a heart attack. Ed stopped his work and lay down on the ground. Staring at the sky, he saw himself as a large tortoise struggling to swim across a river. On his back were five small tortoises—his children—clinging to him for survival. And then, as he lay there in the freshly plowed dirt, Ed received a vision from God, telling him that he would be restored to health if he would agree to do one thing: make musical instruments and give them to children.

And so he did. Beginning with a few simple hand tools, Ed worked tirelessly for twenty-five years to create over two hundred instruments, each a crazy quilt of heavy, rough-sawn wood scraps joined with found objects. A rusty door hinge, a steak bone, a stack of dimes, springs, saw blades, pot lids, metal pipes, glass bottles, aerosol cans—Ed used anything he could to build a working guitar, fiddle, or dulcimer. On each instrument Ed inscribed “True Faith, True Light, Have Faith in God.”

True Faith, True Light: The Devotional Art of Ed Stilley documents Ed Stilley’s life and work, giving us a glimpse into a singular life of austere devotion.
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Turning over a New Leaf
Change and Development in the Medieval Book
Erik Kwakkel
Amsterdam University Press
This book looks particularly at the shift from manuscripts to the physical book, while taking into account the medieval book as not only as a source of information, but also as an aesthetic experience, a status symbol, and a shrewd investment. Tracing the rise of the book in the ninth and tenth century, this insightful study looks at the way in which the scribes eased the shift from manuscript to book through additions such as running titles and chapter numbers. A rich and intriguing history, Turning over a New Leaf examines how readers and the reading experience shape books, and vice versa.
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The Vernor's Story
From Gnomes to Now
Lawrence L. Rouch
University of Michigan Press, 2003
Amply illustrated, The Vernor's Story -- From Gnomes to Now captures the spirit and genius of the people who transformed Vernors into an iconic American soft drink that has spanned two centuries of shifting public taste. With over seventy photographs depicting the history of the company, The Vernor's Story is an insider's look at early operations, as well as the firm's famous marketing blitz, featuring Vernor's distinctive green and gold packaging and its engaging gnome.
Add to that the legion of devoted Vernor's fans, and the beverage itself, a unique, spicy, mysteriously flavored carbonated ginger drink that's appealed to generations of Michiganders and others alike, and you have the makings of a great American success story.
A treasure on its own and sure to be a future collectible, this is a fascinating slice of Americana for Vernor's fans everywhere.
Lawrence Rouch is President of Studio3/Innovations, a marketing and consulting firm representing fine artists in the automotive and fine-arts fields.
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Villa Landscapes in the Roman North
Economy, Culture and Lifestyles
Edited by Nico Roymans and Ton Derks
Amsterdam University Press, 2012
This edited volume presents a synthesis of recent research on villas and villa landscapes in the northern provinces of the Roman world. It offers an original, multi-dimensional perspective on the social, economic and cultural functioning of villas within the context of the Roman empire. Themes discussed include the economic basis of villa dominated landscapes, rural slavery, town-country dynamics, the role of monumental burials in villa landscapes, and self-representation and lifestyle of villa owners. This study offers a major contribution to the comparative research of villa landscapes and the phenomenon of regionality in Roman rural landscapes.Amsterdam Archaeological Studies is a series devoted to the study of past human societies from the prehistory up into modern times, primarily based on the study of archaeological remains. The series will include excavation reports of modern fieldwork; studies of categories of material culture; and synthesising studies with broader images of past societies, thereby contributing to the theoretical and methodological debates in archaeology.
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Vintage Advertising
An A to Z
Julie Anne Lambert
Bodleian Library Publishing, 2020
Taking readers on a journey through the colorful history of advertising, this book showcases one of the most important and extensive collections of printed ephemera in the world to uncover rarely-seen examples of ads, posters, and handbills. How did the advertisers of the past sell electric corsets, carbolic smoke balls, or the first televisions? Which celebrities endorsed which products? How did innovations in printing techniques and design play a part in the evolution of advertising? What can these items tell us about class, transport, war, and even the royal family?

Richly illustrated with over one hundred images from the Bodleian Library’s John Johnson Collection, Vintage Advertising: An A to Z takes a fresh look at historical advertising through a series of thematic and chronological juxtapositions, with topics arranged alphabetically from Art to Zeitgeist to provide striking, often unexpected, insights into changing culture, politics, and technology. Topics include new fashion trends such as patterned hosiery and the advertisement of new medical treatments, tonics, and devices. These advertisements shed new light on social issues such as the changing roles of women and the rising middle class. Highlighting how nineteenth- and early twentieth-century advertisements often capture the spirit of their age, each page is a rich repository of information, a new piece of the jigsaw puzzle of the past.
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Was This Heaven?
A Self-Portrait of Iowa on Early Postcards
Lyell D. Jr. Henry
University of Iowa Press, 1995

In the early decades of the twentieth century, Iowans all across the Hawkeye State succumbed to the nationwide craze for exchanging photographic postcards, mailing each other thousands of images—serious and whimsical—of Uncle Bob and Baby Dora, the Sunday school outing, train wrecks, the Fourth of July celebration, the merchants' carnival, the record-setting blizzard following the bin-busting harvest, the new courthouse, Ackley's Sauer-Kraut Band. Now, thanks to the generosity of David A. Wilson, whose ample collection of photographic cards would be the envy of those early Iowans, Lyell Henry has organized more than two hundred postcards into eight reflective chapters that create a beguiling collective portrait of Iowa life and culture from 1905 to 1919.

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Wonderful Things from 400 Years of Collecting
The Bodleian Library 1602-2002
Edited by the Bodleian Library
Bodleian Library Publishing, 2002
A timeless selection of Wonderful Things, this book highlights the tremendous range of the Bodleian Library's collections. From the sixth-century Laudian Acts—a manuscript probably used by Bede himself—to modern treasures such as one of Tolkein's own illustrations for TheHobbit, the objects chosen show the extent, variety, and quality of the Library's holdings and how they came to the Bodleian. Each work is sumptuously displayed in full-page color with facing-page descriptions. Collectively, they offer a fascinating glimpse into the principles, history, and future of collecting by a world-class institution.
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Woodland Potters and Archaeological Ceramics of the North Carolina Coast
Joseph M. Herbert
University of Alabama Press, 2009
The first comprehensive study of the meaning of pottery as a social activity in coastal North Carolina.

Pottery types, composed of specific sets of attributes, have long been defined for various periods and areas of the Atlantic coast, but their relationships and meanings have not been explicitly examined. In exploring these relationships for the North Carolina coast, this work examines the manner in which pottery traits cross-cut taxonomic types, tests the proposition that communities of practice existed at several scales, and questions the fundamental notion of ceramic types as ethnic markers.

Ethnoarchaeological case studies provide a means of assessing the mechanics of how social structure and gender roles may have affected the transmission of pottery-making techniques and how socio-cultural boundaries are reflected in the distribution of ceramic traditions. Another very valuable source of information about past practices is replication experimentation, which provides a means of understanding the practical techniques that lie behind the observable traits, thereby improving our understanding of how certain techniques may have influenced the transmission of traits from one potter to another. Both methods are employed in this study to interpret the meaning of pottery as an indicator of social activity on the North Carolina coast.


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