Customer Reviews:
The Book of Kells: informing and illuminating.......2007-09-30
The Book of Kells is one of the most beautiful manuscripts in existence. This booklet enables those of us who are unlikely to ever see the real manuscript to feast our eyes on many of the illustrations as well as to learn a little of its history and preparation. Most of the illustrations are in colour and their vibrancy is still apparent across 12 centuries.
I consider that this booklet is worth acquiring for the illustrations alone. It also contains a lot of useful information for those interested in the physical preparation of such manuscripts as well as the underlying historical significance of this particular manuscript.
Highly recommended.
Jennifer Cameron-Smith
The Book of Kells: An Illustrated Introduction.......2007-01-13
The book was just what I was expecting. Shipping was quick.
Darkness into Light.......2005-08-25
I was glad I had this book along with me when I went to see the real Book of Kells at the Trinity College Library in Dublin. The lines of tourists waiting to view this famous eighth century manuscript were about a quarter of a mile long, and the museum proctors were really hustling us through the area where a small sampling of pages were actually on view.
(If you take the tour, be sure to check out the main chamber of the Old Library with its first editions of Newton and Darwin, plus the harp that is (alas, falsely) attributed to Brian Boru, high king of Ireland).
The first facsimile of the Book of Kells was published in 1974, and although this book only advertises itself as 'an illustrated introduction to the manuscript...' it contains good color plates of many of the most famous pages, e.g. the symbols of the four evangelists and the beginning of the 'Breves causae' of Matthew, among others.
Author, Bernard Meehan, the current Keeper of Manuscripts at Trinity College states that "the sacred text itself was copied in the Book of Kells with a remarkable degree of inaccuracy." It consists of the Latin text of the Gospels, illuminated in the very ornate Hiberno-Saxon style ('Hiberno' refers to the Irish, or Hibernians).
Legend has it that the Book of Kells was produced by St. Colum Cille on the island of Iona off western Scotland. Although it was probably begun in the Irish monastery on Iona, it was taken to the monastery of Kells in County Meath, after a series of Viking raids. The monastery on Iona was pillaged in 795, and again in 802. According to the author, "In 806, sixty-eight of the community were killed in another raid. The following year, the survivors migrated to Ireland and began to erect conventual buildings at Kells..." where the illumination of the manuscript was probably completed.
If you are interested in the historical background of the Book of Kells, the author devotes a whole Appendix to it.
Alas, according to this book's second Appendix, "Losses, Additions and Marginalia," the Book of Kells has not remained intact down through the centuries. "At present there are 340 folios, but around thirty folios, including some major decorated pages have been lost." The monks also used blank spaces in the manuscript to record details of property transactions in the late eleventh and twelfth centuries.
Meehan's book is definitely worth viewing and reading. It also contains a wealth of the smaller decorative illustrations that do not always relate to the sacred text, e.g. hares, dogs, horses, and at least one moth. The color and minute details of these decorations are a source of endless fascination, and the scholarly text, although a trifle dry, is also very interesting.
awesome pictures, horrible writing.......2005-05-16
I like how the author gives various images of the book of kells, but gets really confusing and goes all over the place while writing about it. I think a lot could be learned from this book, but the author crams so many examples into the work that it starts to get annoying. Ever line seems to have parenthesis around something and folio this or that. For that alone i give the book two stars, multiple examples are good, just not when you plague every line with one. It hardly gives the reader a chance to understand the first few.
"The most precious object in the western world".......2002-12-01
Resting at Trinity College Dublin is one of the truly singular products of early European art. This is 'The Book of Kells,' an ornately illuminated rendition of the four gospels, rendered sometime in the Ninth Century. It has been both an influence and an inspiration since the time of its making, illustrating both the story it tells, and the subtle mind of symbolists who wove the story and the art together.
One of the key problems the student of illustrated art suffers in any attempt to study 'The Book of Kells' is the simple matter of access. I believe that the replica edition of the book cost nearly $20,000 when it was published, and most other resources limit themselves to only the most famous of the pages. Only a few detailed studies exist, and this one, written by Bernard Meehan (Keeper of Manuscripts at Trinity College), is one of the best, both in terms of quality and quantity of reproduction as well as a literate and thorough discussion.
Meehan covers the book's history, influences and parallels, the decorative scheme, and many of the decorative themes used by the illuminators. He also spends time on the more technical aspects of ink and paper. He does this in a pleasant, straightforward yet academically thorough style that is often a fount of information. Where he does not go himself, he provides indications of other possibilities for research and thought. Meehan's agenda is simply to present one of the wonders of human creativity for all to see and enjoy, and he succeeds admirably.
Book Description
Part design and illustration studio, part pop culture think tank, Push Pin Studios made a phenomenal impact on visual culture from the 1950s to the 1980s, representing an important chapter in postwar graphic design. Founding member Seymour Chwast partners with key figures from the design community -- as well as co-founder Milton Glaser -- to provide a visual history of the studio by way of its signature publication, The Push Pin Graphic. Hundreds of memorable covers and spreads culled from each of the eighty-six inspired and imaginative issues confirms Push Pin's vital role in setting the design curve and influencing the direction of modern visual style. The Push Pin Graphic is the first comprehensive account of a design milestone that continues to influence designers to this day.
Customer Reviews:
I love this book.......2007-06-27
The ideas and concepts in this book are wonderful. When I am not looking at it for inspiration, I am looking at just for sheer enjoyment.
You need this.......2005-09-23
A book that no designer should be without. A lasting source of inspiration.
Shut Down Your Computer and Read This Book.......2005-02-26
Here's how to start a studio, publicize it, become a superstar, and change the world: (1) From birth, draw like a Renaissance angel. (2) Be one of 15 percent of applicants selected to attend New York's Cooper Union. (3) Get fired from your first job, or hate it and quit. (4) Surround yourself with like-minded, equally talented partners. (5) Follow your heart, put forth your ideas, be fearless. (6) In a grid-locked Modernist era, produce fanciful, hand-drawn work. (7) Keep doing it for 50 years.
Over 25 of those years, distribute 86 issues of a self-promotional publication that still continues to inspire.
For a quarter-century, members of Push Pin Studio used every art technique -- woodcut, charcoal, watercolor, collage, pen-and-ink, color adhesive film -- to interpret subjects including Good and Evil, Black and White, and Teens and Bikers. Topics ranged from the serious ("Violence and the American Dream") to the silly ("The Mouth").
Milton Glaser has been known to say that nobody draws any more. This book, which features at least one cover and spread from each issue -- many tattered and yellowing -- may spawn a revival of the artist's hand as a design tool, and a revival of the one-color job. The first 30 or so issues of the Graphic, with a couple of virtuoso two- and three-color exceptions, are a lesson in how to do brilliant work in black on newsprint. Contrast is the designer's best friend and weapon: white space against black, tiny against huge, curlicue against justified column of type. Wit is a powerful tool, too.
A head-and-shoulders portrait of a large barnyard rooster graces the book's cover. Thickly outlined on benday-dotted background, he sports a tuxedo shirt, bow-tie, monocle, dotted beak, and bright red wattle. I'd like to think that the mascot choice has more to do with the concept of "something to crow about" than being fearful-or cuckolded. In a phone interview, Seymour Chwast set me straight by listing the bird's qualities: authoritative, prolific, sophisticated, and on-time. Ah-ha, the real meaning is "the early bird meets the deadline," with a few grains of self-mockery thrown in.
If Push Pin did not singlehandedly transform mainstream culture, as Steven Heller suggests in the introduction, it had a symbiotic relationship with it. Push Pin took from everything around them: from the Victorian, Art Nouveau, and Art Deco, from old signboards and newspapers, American primitives and wood-type specimens, from current art and music, fashion and advertising. The faces in Chwast's "Dante's Inferno" poster of 1967 echo Richard Avendon's solarized Beatles portraits. The Beatles' 1968 animated film Yellow Submarine -- and the rainbows-and-butterflies trend in animation that ensued -- owed its aesthetic to Push Pin. It will take a more diligent researcher than I to ascertain whether the color and line that burst through in the Push Pin Graphic issue 52 (and morphed into Chwast's signature style) was inspired by psychedelic rock posters, or whether the Push Pin style reached San Francisco concert promoters first.
Content aside, the Push Pin Graphic is a book well worth examining for its own design: the hefty squarish format, sense of scale and pacing, fine color and black- and-white printing on uncoated stock. The details also merit pleasurable study: old-fashioned typefaces like Cheltenham and Stymie set in old-fashioned ways like centered and flush-left-and-right; even the placement of the folios on the page. Just as the subject matter of each issue of the Push Pin Graphic mirrored goings-on in the world, the design and pacing of the book mirror the issues being featured. As the Graphic became more eclectic and colorful and began to function as self-promotion for a larger group of artists, the pages of the book become more patterned and colorful. Martin Venezky has honored the Push Pin style while designing a book that's 100 percent up-to-date.
This book may be a walk down memory lane, but it's far from an epitaph. Glaser, 75, now working on posters, books, a museum exhibition, and performance art with a political bent, recently said, "Retiring is for people who fundamentally hate what they do." Chwast, 73, added, "Every era had its doubts, but we kept going. The culture -- music, posters, films, kept rubbing off on us, and we keep reinventing it and rubbing it back on them."
If the Push Pin conviction, zest, and humor rubs off on today's readers -- and if some of them decide to shut down their computers and digital cameras for a little while and pick up a brush or pen and ink -- this book will be a great success.
(Published in a slightly different version in PRINT magazine, of which I am a contributing editor, Jan-Feb 2005)
Average customer rating:
- Fashion Drawings and Illustrations from "Harper's Bazar"
- Just Fabulous-bought another copy after I wore the 1st out!
- Quaint text and dynamite illustrations of original fashion
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Fashion Drawings and Illustrations from "Harper's Bazar" (Introduction by Stella Blum)
Erte
Manufacturer: Dover Publications
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Erte's Fashion Designs
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Erte Graphics
ASIN: 0486233979 |
Book Description
310 fabulous line drawings and 14 Harper's Bazar covers, 8 in full color. Erté's exotic temptresses with tassels, fur muffs, long trains, coifs, more. "Imaginative and colorful... A fascinating glimpse into the development of fashion." — Arts Review (London).
Customer Reviews:
Fashion Drawings and Illustrations from "Harper's Bazar" .......2007-04-10
As a designer of embroidery designs, this one was a winner for me. I love all of the publicatins from Dover!
Just Fabulous-bought another copy after I wore the 1st out!.......2001-05-14
Great graphics, imaginative design, fabulous period reference. Outstanding in every way!
Quaint text and dynamite illustrations of original fashion.......2000-06-08
Vogue editor Diana Vreeland once said that no one in the 20th century had a greater influence on fashion than Erte, this desite the fact that he worked for a competitor, Harper's Bazaar. That's an indication of just how revolutionary his work was for the times. Working with virtually no direction to blunt his creativity, Erte published paintings and sketches of ingenious fashions that are as playful and lighthearted as they are luxurious and exquisite. He envisioned modern women (from 1915 to 1926) as goddesses, ultra-chic stars, children of nature, and totally feminine creatures to be adored and exalted. His fashions reflect this, individualistic and charming, colorful and startlingly functional. The 8 color covers and many B/W illustrations show insight into a dimension of fashion that one normally sees only on the show runways: the never-ending well of creativity brought to life by a truly inventive mind unhampered with concerns of marketability. Peruse the illustrations and notice allusions to gardens, paper-weaving, architecture, tennis, various members of the animal kingdom, ceremonial draperies, sailing ships, and flames. Dresses, coats, masks, swimming costumes, sleepwear, and gowns all ornamented with beads, fur trim, sheer draperies, corded lacings, silver embroidery, leather and straw. Practical? Not really. Mass manufacturing? Not in a million years. This is extreme fashion, the stuff of couture, such as would be worn to the salon of writers and intellectuals. Erte loved best to design for the stage, and the drama and fantasy of theater is in evidence in each ornate illustration. Although for 3 years he produced designs for Altman and Bendel in NY, most of his work was strictly conceptual, and many readers of Harper's saved covers and sketches to muse over as they would an art history volume, as evidence of another world. Ignoring fashion trends, Erte generated innovative and outre designs that still amaze and delight those of us who appreciate true originality. I'd recommend this book to anyone interested in textile or fashion design, but also to graphic designers, sculptors, and those who really enjoy art for its own sake. This book is, in one word: luscious.
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Adobe Illustrator 9: An Introduction to Digital Illustration
Against the Clock
Manufacturer: Prentice Hall
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ASIN: 0130908274 |
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Technical Sketching with an Introduction to CAD: For Engineers, Technologists and Technicians (3rd Edition)
Dale H. Besterfield , and
Robert E. O'Hagan
Manufacturer: Prentice Hall
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ASIN: 0134725727 |
Book Description
A straightforward approach to engineering graphics that introduces the basics of communicating ideas through detailed and accurate three-view or pictorial sketches. It enables working drawings to be produced by computer and explains how to interpret working drawings as well as the basic principles of graphic communications toward understanding computer-aided drafting and design.
KEY TOPICS: Designed to encourage proficiency, this book introduces the basics of technical sketching techniques, lettering, and instrument drawing. It also provides detailed descriptions of orthographic projections, including pictorials, auxiliary views, and sectioning. The third edition of Technical Sketching with an Introduction to CAD: For Engineers, Technologists and Technicians has been revised to reflect the latest standards of dimensioning and tolerances as well as a new chapter on Autocad. It also includes metric units. An essential reference for any engineering professional.
Product Description
Blue Decorated Boards in blue slipcase
Customer Reviews:
I've been jaded from today's kind of endings.......2007-01-04
This book was a good read. The only problem was on my end. I kept trying to make the book more twisted and deep that it really was. You have to remember when it was written. You can't compare it with today's books or TV shows where there is always another twist coming. I thought the ending was a little disappointing. Even in the movie Casablanca the guy didn't get the girl at the end and that movie was written before this book. Overall the mystery was good and I would recommend it ending and all.
One of the best mysteries from the British Classic Period.......2006-12-28
This and, Tey's Brat Farrar, are two of the very best from the decades around WWII when British mystery writing was so good. Unlike many of the books by Dorothy Sayers, Marjorie Allingham or Ngaio Marsh, classics in their day, these two by Tey stand up well to the passage of time. The story of The Franchise Affair is timeless and the characters and local so beautifully written that the book is not dated at all. The modern reader can appreciate the difference in lifestyle in the post War time without feeling that it is too period or quaint. A fine story that is suspenseful even though the reader knows from the beginning how the tale will end.
An important mystery.......2006-06-21
This is a great book with an excellent mystery at its core that raises a fascinating question: when people seem to have information they shouldn't know unless some claim they're making is true, and yet seem to be lying about who they've come by that information, what is one to do? The mystery in this book, which was inspired by real events, is about a young girl who claims that she was kidnapped and held hostage in an attic room of a house in England. The owners of the house swear that not only is this not the case, but that 1) this girl has never set foot in their house, and 2) they have never seen her before. A character in the book seems to think that the owners of the house are telling the truth, only, there's one problem: the girl can describe details concerning the interior of the house. Does this fact prove that her story is true? No, obviously it does not. Why it does not is an important lesson, and is one that surely extends beyond the confines of this mystery. The answer, for instance, has much to do with how con artists fool people into thinking they are "psychic." Though The Daughter of Time is often hailed as Tey's greatest accomplishment, I must disagree. I found The Franchise Affair to be a far superior novel. This is must reading for mystery fans.
Psychological morality tale.......2006-05-12
No question that Tey was a fine writer--especially with her characterizations & wonderful turns of phrase. For example, "The Governor to whom a tear in the eye was just a drop of H2O," "Awful to be suffering for port you never drank," & "If you see a giraffe once a year it remains a spectacle; if you see it daily it becomes part of the scenery." The crime is cleverly drawn, esp. the question of how the girl's description of "The Franchise" house could be so accurate, though Tey never really explains it--it is implied in the conspiratorial relationships. The activities of the protagonist (a country lawyer) reminds me of a Dick Francis novel. Still, I think the plot/mystery is quite obvious and the resolution rather banal--though I liked the final ending. It's not "Daughter of Time," but if you're looking for a very enjoyable read, this would be a fine choice.
Excellent psychological study.......2006-04-18
Josephine Tey is widely regarded as one of England's best mystery writers, and deservedly so.
In THE FRANCHISE AFFAIR, she has written a taut psychologivcal thriller, the emotional equivalent of a locked room mystery.
When THE FRANCHISE AFFAIR first was published, back in 1949, it provided a knowing glimpse of life in a tiny English village. Due to its modern theme and the suspense that Ms. Tey was able to build, this mystery has been re-issued several times over an entire half-century, proof in itself as to its excellence.
The story revolves around the accusation of a young girl against two older women, respectable women, mother and daughter, that these women had kidnapped her, imprisoned her, beat her. The older women insist that not only have they committed no criminal act, but that they never set eyes on the girl before this extraordinary accusation was made against them. The local media attention all but turns the women into witches in the public perception.
The general opinion locally is that this young girl could have no reason to lie about the women, that there would be no purpose for her to make such charges if these were not true, and no way for her to know such thorough detail as she claimed.
To the rescue, and almost against his will, a country lawyer agrees to represent the ladies. Yet how does one prove a negative, that his clients did not do these heinous acts, that they had no way even of knowing their purported victim?
In the process of making a defense that is more than the accuser's word against the accused, the reader is given a peek into small town English rhythms and morality.
THE FRANCHISE AFFAIR makes for compelling reading, even if Ms. Tey, as the story's creator, has too much control and too neatly finds "angels" and makes "miracles" (the nouns used in the tale) to resolve the dilemma.
Almost sixty years after the story's first printing, some of the details have become charming anachronisms: the post-World War II patriotism, the lack of technology. No faxes, no cell phones, cut telephone hardwires--what a different plot it would have had to be if it were written today.
Rather than dragging down this mystery, these old-fashioned discrepancies make THE FRANCHISE AFFAIR even more enjoyable reading. And human emotions, which Josephine Tey understood as well as anyone, do not change over time, which means that THE FRANCHISE AFFAIR remains as compelling a psychological study as it had been when she wrote it in the 1940s.
Book Description
This Elibron Classics book is a facsimile reprint of a 1884 edition by Macmillan and Co., London.
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