front cover of Rare and Wonderful
Rare and Wonderful
Treasures from the Oxford University Museum of Natural History
Kate Diston and Zoë Simmons
Bodleian Library Publishing, 2018
Since its foundation in 1860, the Oxford University Museum of Natural History has become a key center for scientific study, its much-loved building an icon for visitors from around the world. The museum now holds more than seven million scientific specimens, including five million insects, half a million fossil specimens, and half a million zoological specimens. It also holds an extensive collection of archival material relating to important naturalists such as Charles Darwin, William Jones, and James Charles Dale.
            This lavishly illustrated book features highlights from the collections, ranging from David Livingstone’s tsetse fly specimens to Mary Anning’s ichthyosaur, and from crabs collected by Darwin during his voyage on the Beagle to the iconic Dodo, the only soft tissue specimen of the species in existence. Also featured are the first described dinosaur bones, found in a small Oxfordshire village, the Red Lady of Paviland (who was in fact a man who lived 29,000 years ago), and a meteorite from the planet Mars.
            Each item tells a unique story about natural history, the history of science, collecting, or the museum itself. Rare & Wonderful offers unique insight into the extraordinary wealth of information and fascinating tales that can be gleaned from these collections.
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Rijksmuseum
The Building, the Collection and the Outdoor Gallery
Edited by Cees W. de Jong and Patrick Spijkerman
Amsterdam University Press, 2015
Few art collections in the world can rival that of the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam. Built in 1885, the iconic museum holds more than a million works, with a particular focus on Dutch masters—its collection of works by Van Gogh, Vermeer, and Rembrandt are unparalleled.

The museum recently reopened after a ten-year renovation that cost more than $400 million, and the result is stunning: never before has the Rijksmuseum’s collection been displayed so well. This book offers a lavishly illustrated chronicle of both the collection and the building that houses it. Though nothing can replace an actual trip to the Rijksmuseum—as the more than two million annual visitors can attest—this book comes as close as possible, taking art lovers on a virtual tour of the greatest masterworks of Western art in a building that is brilliantly designed to show them at their best. 
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The Rob Roy Kelly American Wood Type Collection
A History and Catalog
David Shields
University of Texas Press, 2022

2023 50 Books | 50 Covers Award, The American Institute of Graphic Arts (AIGA)
2024 Honorable Mention, Design Awards, Graphis
2024 Finalist, Typography Competition, Communication Arts Magazine

A beautifully illustrated exploration of the Rob Roy Kelly American Wood Type Collection.


The Rob Roy Kelly Wood Type Collection is a comprehensive collection of wood type manufactured and used for printing in nineteenth-century America. Comprising nearly 150 typefaces of various sizes and styles, it was amassed by noted design educator and historian Rob Roy Kelly starting in 1957 and is now held by the University of Texas. Although Kelly himself published a 1969 book on wood type and nineteenth-century typographic history, there has been little written about the creation of the wood type forms, the collection, or Kelly.

In this book, David Shields rigorously updates and expands upon Kelly’s historical information about the types, clarifying the collection’s exact composition and providing a better understanding of the stylistic development of wood type forms during the nineteenth century. Using rich materials from the period, Shields provides a stunning visual context that complements the textual history of each typeface. He also highlights the non-typographic material in the collection—such as borders, rules, ornaments, and image cuts—that have not been previously examined. Featuring over 300 color illustrations, this written history and catalog is bound to spark renewed interest in the collection and its broader typographic period.

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Robert Kipniss
Paintings and Poetry, 1950–1964
Marshall N. Price
The Artist Book Foundation, 2013
A comprehensive look at a memorable period in the celebrated painter and printmaker’s life and career, Robert Kipniss: Paintings and Poetry, 1950–1964 is the result of his many arduous months revisiting his more-than-half-a-century-ago writings, poems that were stashed away and essentially forgotten. “Some of the poems are straightforward, some are infused with surreal irony, and some are angry,” says Kipniss in his candid and honest preface. Thoughtful and articulate from conception to completion, his never-before-published poems are choreographed with his early paintings in this monograph’s contemplation of these influential and foundational fourteen years. “When I stopped writing [in 1961] my vision was no longer divided between word-thinking and picture-thinking: these approaches had merged and in expressing myself I was more whole,” reflects Kipniss in his retrospective musings. This written and visual account of previously unpublished poems and critically acclaimed early paintings includes two astute and illustrative essays that further engage the reader in the evolution of the artist’s prolific oeuvre. His prints, drawings, and paintings are remarkable for their eloquence and refinement, earning him international recognition for his expansive landscapes and smalltown vistas, as well as quiet interiors and intimate still lifes. Thoughtful and articulate from conception to completion, his never-before-published poems are choreographed with his early paintings. Readers of this seminal volume are all the richer for catching a glimpse of an intensely personal segment of this accomplished artist’s private history. In an unambiguous assessment, Kipniss elaborates, “The most significant insight that arose in this undertaking...came when I began to collate reproductions of my paintings of the 1950s. I could clearly see that my work in the two mediums were from very differing parts of my psyche, and that while they were both in themselves completely engaged, they were not in any way together.” Kipniss’s work can be found in the permanent collections of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, The British Museum, London, the Albertina, Vienna, Austria, the Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Paris, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston and the Morgan Library, New York, among others.
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front cover of Rock of Ages, Sands of Time
Rock of Ages, Sands of Time
Paintings by Barbara Page, Text by Warren Allmon
Barbara Page and Warren D. Allmon
University of Chicago Press, 2001
Two tiny trilobites in a vast Cambrian ocean drift past sea cucumber parasols and a shaggy, tree-like sponge. Snail tracks loop enigmatically against brushed-gray Silurian slate, and ghostly white crinoids feather a Devonian seascape. A delicate pterosaur flies bravely into the Jurassic gloom, while a Tyrannosaurus rex so big that its teeth fill our field of vision stalks the deep orange sands that mark the end of the Cretaceous period.

These are just a few scenes from the magnificent drama that unfolds in glorious full color and three-dimensional texture in Rock of Ages, Sands of Time. Each of Barbara Page's 544 contiguous painted panels represents a million years of the history of life on earth, with fossil plants and animals depicted at the same scale and in association with each other just as they might be found by a paleontologist in the field. A muted rainbow of background colors evoke the rocks in which the fossils were found—the Texas Red Beds, for instance, or the yellow Solnhofen limestone—and keystone events are shown metaphorically, with fat rolls of paint marking major extinctions or continental drift.

To fully experience the awesome impact of an eon's worth of time spread across 500 feet of bas-relief panels, you'd have to visit the Museum of the Earth in Ithaca, New York, where Page's specially commissioned work will be installed when the museum opens in 2002. But this book is the next best thing. Not only does it contain crisp color reproductions of each painting, but it also includes an accessible essay from paleontologist Warren Allmon giving the scientific context behind the art.

For fossil lovers of all ages, and anyone interested in the merging of art and science, Rock of Ages, Sands of Time will be the find of a lifetime.


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front cover of Roman Brick Stamps in the Kelsey Museum
Roman Brick Stamps in the Kelsey Museum
John P. Bodel
University of Michigan Press, 1983
A catalogue of the largest known collection of brick stamps outside Italy
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front cover of Roman Mosaics in the J. Paul Getty Museum
Roman Mosaics in the J. Paul Getty Museum
Alexis Belis
J. Paul Getty Trust, The, 2016

The mosaics in the collection of the J. Paul Getty Museum span the second through the sixth centuries AD and reveal the diversity of compositions found throughout the Roman Empire during this period. Elaborate floors of stone and glass tesserae transformed private dwellings and public buildings alike into spectacular settings of vibrant color, figural imagery, and geometric design. Scenes from mythology, nature, daily life, and spectacles in the arena enlivened interior spaces and reflected the cultural ambitions of wealthy patrons. This online catalogue documents all of the mosaics in the Getty Museum’s collection, presenting their artistry in new color photography as well as the contexts of their discovery and excavation across Rome's expanding empire—from its center in Italy to provinces in southern Gaul, North Africa, and ancient Syria.

The free online edition of this open-access catalogue, available at www.getty.edu/publications/romanmosaics/, includes zoomable high-resolution photography, embedded glossary terms and additional comparative images, and interactive maps drawn from the Digital Atlas of the Roman Empire. Also available are free PDF, EPUB, and Kindle/MOBI downloads of the book, CSV and JSON downloads of the object data from the catalogue, and JPG and PPT downloads of the main catalogue images.

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