• ART: American
• ART: Art & Politics
• ART: Asian
• ART: Australian & Oceanian
• ART: Caribbean & Latin American
• ART: Ceramics
• ART: Collections, Catalogs, Exhibitions
• ART: Commercial
• ART: Criticism
• ART: Design
• ART: European
• ART: Folk & Outsider Art
• ART: Graphic Arts
• ART: History
• ART: Individual Artist
• ART: Middle Eastern
• ART: Popular Culture
• ART: Prints
• ART: Sculpture
• ART: Study & Teaching
• ART: Subjects & Themes
• ART: Techniques

100 Details

Kenneth Clark

100 Details offers Clark's personal responses to details of paintings in the National Gallery in London. The result resembles a walk through a glorious art collection with a critic of astounding eye and intellect at our side.

Paperback 1990

A' Dilettanti delle Bell' Arti

Eleanor Garvey

This facsimile edition features Betti's elaborate title-page identifying the figures to follow, and twenty-four leaves of plates, each with a different letter of the alphabet, all reproduced at original size.

Paperback 2005

Abstract Expressionist Painting in America

William C. Seitz

Dore Ashton

Robert Motherwell

Hardcover 1983

Ad Usum: To Be Used

Edited by José Luis Falconi

Edited by Pedro Reyes

Contributions by Antanas Mockus

Contributions by Alejandro Jodorowsky

Contributions by Augusto Boal

Contributions by Doris Sommer

Contributions by Ute Meta Bauer

Ad Usum is the catalogue of the retrospective exhibit of celebrated Mexican artist Pedro Reyes mounted at the Carpenter Center and organized by the David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies at Harvard University. This is the first volume entirely dedicated to the works of Reyes, who is considered to be one of the most innovative and radical young Mexican artists.

Paperback 2008

American Colonial Painting

Waldron Phoenix, Jr. Belknap

Hardcover

Ancient Cyprus

Veronica Tatton-Brown

Paperback

Arab-Byzantine Coins

Clive Foss

Paperback 2008

Arrest and Movement

H. A. Groenewegen Frankfort

The beauty of Egyptian, Babylonian, and Cretan art is shot through with oddity. However much we are fascinated by the ancient works, we find ourselves wondering what precisely the artists meant when they rendered objects and indicated spatial relations the way they did. Arrest and Movement is the only book to analyze pre-Greek art in terms of issues such as space and narrative. It is a landmark book that will bring to students and museum-goers deeper understanding of this eloquent but seemingly eccentric art.

Paperback

Art Matters

Peter de Bolla

In the face of a great work of art, we so often stand mute, struck dumb. Is this a function--perhaps the first and foremost--of aesthetic experience? Or do we lack the words to say what we feel? Countering current assumptions that art is valued only according to taste or ideology, Peter de Bolla gives a voice--and vocabulary--to the wonder art can inspire. Working toward a better understanding of what it is to be profoundly moved by a work of art, he forces us to reconsider the importance of art works and the singular nature and value of our experience of them.

Hardcover 2001 / Paperback 2003

Art of Ancient Egypt

Gay Robins

Paperback 2008

The Art of Ancient Egypt

Gay Robins

What did art, and the architecture that housed it, mean to the ancient Egyptians? Why did they invest such vast wealth and effort in its production? These are the puzzles Gay Robins explores as she examines the objects of Egyptian art--the tombs and wall paintings, the sculpture and stelae, the coffins, funerary papyri, and amulets--from its first flowering in the Early Dynastic period to its final resurgence in the time of the Ptolemies.

Hardcover 1997 / Paperback 2000

The Art of Small Things

John Mack

This richly illustrated book celebrates the art of the miniature, but also looks beyond it at the many aspects of "small worlds"--in particular, their capacity to evoke responses that far exceed their physical dimensions. Mack explores the talismanic, religious, or magical properties with which miniatures are often imbued. Considering a wide range of objects, he examines the use of the miniature form in various cultural contexts.

Hardcover 2008

Artistry of the Everyday

Lisa Bernasek

Photographs by Hillel S. Burger

Imazighen! Beauty and Artisanship in Berber Life presents the Peabody Museum's collection of arts from the Berber-speaking regions of North Africa. The book gives an overview of Berber history and culture, focusing on the rich aesthetic traditions of Amazigh (Berber) craftsmen and women. The book also tells the stories of the collectors--both world-traveling Bostonians and Harvard-trained anthropologists--who brought these objects to Cambridge in the early twentieth century.

Paperback 2008

The Arts in Boston

Bernard Taper

Hardcover 1970 / Paperback

Arts of Impoverishment

Leo Bersani

Ulysse Dutoit

Paperback / Hardcover

Artscience

David Edwards

This book is an attempt to show how innovation in the "post-Google generation" is often catalyzed by those who cross a conventional line so firmly drawn between the arts and the sciences. Edwards describes how contemporary creators achieve breakthroughs in the arts and sciences by developing their ideas in an intermediate zone of human creativity where neither art nor science is easily defined.

Hardcover 2008

Assyrian Sculpture

Julian Reade

For almost three centuries, until 612 B.C., the small kingdom of Assyria dominated the Middle East. The story of those years was recorded in stone on the walls of a succession of royal palaces. These sculptures, offering eyewitness views of a long-lost civilization, were not rediscovered until the nineteenth century.and the finest collection is now preserved at the British Museum. This book is both a richly illustrated history of Assyrian sculpture in general and a guide to the outstanding collections of the British Museum.

Paperback 1999

At Home in the Studio

Laura R. Prieto

This engaging cultural history examines the emergence of a professional identity for American women artists. By focusing on individual sculptors, painters, and illustrators, Prieto gives us a compelling picture of the prospects and constraints faced by women artists in the United States from the late eighteenth century through the 1930s.

Hardcover 2001

Audubon: Early Drawings

John James Audubon

Introduction by Richard Rhodes

Notes by Scott V. Edwards

Foreword by Leslie A. Morris

Hardcover 2008

Bathers, Bodies, Beauty

Linda Nochlin

Linda Nochlin explores the contradictions and dissonances that mark experience as well as art. Her book confronts the issues posed in representations of the body in the art of impressionists, modern masters, and contemporary realists and post-modernists. In many ways a personal book, Bathers, Bodies, Beauty brings to bear a lifetime of looking at, teaching, talking about, wrestling with, loving, and hating art to reveal and complicate the visceral experience of art.

Hardcover 2006

Beginning with a Bang! From Confrontation to Intimacy

Edited by Victoria Noorthoorn

Foreword by Susan Segal

Beginning with a Bang! features the shift between the explosive and experimental moment in the Argentine art scene of the 1960s, and the current scene emerging after the extreme crises in Argentina during the last 40 years. The exhibition catalogue brings together a historical section as well as information of performance-based actions and sound and video works by Argentine contemporary artists.

Paperback 2008

The Berenson Archive

Compiled by Nicky Mariano

Hardcover 1965

Bernard Berenson

Ernest Samuels

Who was Bernard Berenson, this supreme connoisseur of Italian Renaissance painting? The answers are to be found in the day-to-day record of his life as he lived it.Samuels, having spent twenty years studying the thousands of letters and other manuscripts, presents his story in absorbing detail.

Hardcover

Bernard Berenson

Ernest Samuels

Critic, arbiter of taste, renowned authority on Renaissance painting and oracle to millionaire art collectors, Bernard Berenson was the most formidable presence in the art world for more than thirty years. Four decades of his life are unfolded in this compelling book.

Hardcover 1979 / Paperback

The Bible in the Twelfth Century

Laura Light

Among the Houghton's medieval manuscripts was an exhibition of twelfth century Biblical manuscripts. Light's catalogue catches the culture of the medieval book at its height, not only in Bibles but in breviaries, lectionaries, commentaries, and works of the Doctors and Fathers of the Church.

Paperback 2005

Body and Face in Chinese Visual Culture

Edited by Hung Wu

Edited by Katherine R. Tsiang

Traditionally the "Chinese body" was approached as a totality and explained by sweeping comparisons of the differences that distinguished Chinese examples from their Western counterparts. Recently, scholars have argued that we must look at particular examples of Chinese images of the body and explore their intrinsic conceptual complexity and historical specificity. This book describes a more complex picture of how the visual culture of the body and face in China has served to depict the living, memorialize the dead, and present the unrepresentable in art.

Hardcover 2004

Byzantium

Rowena Loverance

In this introduction to the history of Byzantium, from the fourth to the fourteenth century, Rowena Loverance draws on the British Museum's rich collections of spectacular Byzantine silver, ivories, jewelry, and icons, as well as pieces from the empire's Persian and Germanic neighbors. This revised edition, featuring a new introduction, is updated to include the most recent finds and interpretations.

Paperback 2004

Centuries of Books and Manuscripts

Anne Anninger

Roger Stoddard

In 1992 the Houghton Library celebrated fifty years of preeminence with an exhibition devoted to its riches. This work catalogs an astonishing range of books, manuscripts, and curiosities, including a miniature stage set made for a 1975 Mabou Mines production of Samuel Beckett's play The Lost Ones; manuscript scores and first editions of works by Fauré, Schumann, and Beethoven; pathbreaking prints of Piranesi and Delacroix; drawings and manuscript items from Edward Lear, Federico Garcia Lorca, and Ben Shahn; primary examples of medieval manuscripts and woodblock printed texts, and early letterpress. Taken together, these items illustrate how a still-young institution becomes a repository of centuries of culture and memory.

Hardcover 2005

Charles Sheeler and Cult of the Machine

Karen Lucic

Charles Sheeler (1886-1965) was one of the most noted American painters and photographers to embrace the iconography of the machine. But was he high priest or heretic in the religion of mass production and technology that dominated his era? Karen Lucic considers this intriguing question while telling us Sheeler's story, and showing us how Sheeler produced images of extraordinary aesthetic power that provocatively confirmed America's technological and industrial prestige in vivid detail.

Paperback

Chinese Art in Detail

Carol Michaelson

Jane Portal

Drawing on the British Museum's extensive collection, Chinese Art in Detail explores the traditional hierarchy of materials and techniques reaching back as far as the Han Dynasty in the third century B.C. in the history and character of the works under scrutiny, this sumptuously illustrated book conveys an understanding of Chinese art in all its great variety, its simplicities, its complexities, its splendors, and its mysteries of craft and inspiration reaching back to Neolithic times.

Hardcover 2006

Chinese Calligraphy

Yee Chiang

This is the classic introduction to Chinese calligraphy. In nine richly illustrated chapters Chang explores the aesthetics and the technique of this art in which rhythm, line, and structure are perfectly embodied. He measure the slow change from pictograph to stroke to the style and shape of written characters by the great calligraphers. It is a superb appreciation of beauty in the movement of strokes and in the patterns of structure--and an inspiration to amateurs as well as professionals interested in the decorative arts.

Paperback

Christian Art

Rowena Loverance

What makes works of art Christian? And what, as such, distinguishes them from other works? These are the questions at the center of this book, which is at once a sumptuously illustrated survey of Christian art across space and time and a probing study of what "Christian art" really means, how it functions, where it arises, and whom it serves.

Hardcover 2007

Circa 1600

S. J. Freedberg

Hardcover 1983 / Paperback

Classic-Period Cultural Currents in Southern and Central Veracruz

Edited by Philip J. Arnold

Edited by Christopher A. Pool

This book explores the diverse traditions and dynamic interactions along the Mexican Gulf lowlands at the height of their cultural florescence. Best known for their elaborate ball game rituals and precocious inscriptions with long-count dates, these cultures served as a critical nexus between the civilizations of highland Mexico and the lowland Maya, influencing developments in both regions.

Hardcover 2008

Cleopatra and Rome

Diana E. E. Kleiner

In this beautifully illustrated book, we experience the synthesis of Cleopatra's and Rome's defining moments through surviving works of art and other remnants of what was once an opulent material culture. This culture best chronicles Cleopatra's legend and suggests her subtle but indelible mark on the art of imperial Rome at the critical moment of its inception.

Hardcover 2005

Clocks and Watches

Hugh Tait

Recording the passing of time has challenged mankind for thousands of years, but it was not until the Middle Ages that a fundamental advance was made when the first mechanical clocks harnessed the power of the falling weight and the unwinding spring. Hugh Tait traces the history of clocks and watches from the earliest medieval examples to modern times. From the grand long-case clocks to the most exquisite of watches, this book shows how invention and mechanical ingenuity have been matched with craftsmanship and artistry for more than five hundred years.

Paperback

Collecting the Weaver's Art

Laurie D. Webster

Foreword by Tony Berlant

This is the first publication on a remarkable collection of sixty-six outstanding Pueblo and Navajo textiles donated to the Peabody Museum in the 1980s by William Claflin, Jr. Claflin bequeathed to the museum not only these beautiful textiles, but also his detailed accounts of their collection histories--a rare record of the individuals who had owned or traded these weavings before they found a home in his private museum.

Paperback 2005

Collector's Choice

Owen Gingerich

This is the catalogue of an exhibition, held in conjunction with the 50th Anniversary of the Class of 1933, featuring items given by Harrison Horblit '33, one of Houghton Library's most distinguished donors. The exhibition includes materials covering Manuscritps and the Cradle of Printing, Early Arithmetics, Early English Printing, the Scientific Renaissance, Printing and Bibliography, Interesting Bindings, and Early Photography.

Paperback 2005

The Column of Antoninus Pius

Lise Vogel

Hardcover 1973

The Compelling Image

James Cahill

Paperback

The Craft of Ivory

Anthony Cutler

This booklet is an examination of the nature of ivory, both as substance of certain consistent characteristics as well as material of varying availability treated by craftsmen in various and peculiar ways. The framework of this approach is defined by the geographical and chronological limits of the ivories at Dumbarton Oaks.

Paperback 1985

Cycladic Art

J. Lesley Fitton

In the light of current knowledge about early life in the islands, the author draws upon the impressive and remarkably comprehensive collection of Early Cycladic sculptures and other works in the British Museum, supplemented by striking examples from major American and Greek collections, to illustrate the development and increase our enjoyment of Early Cycladic art.

Paperback 1989

The Dada Painters and Poets

Robert Motherwell, Editor

Foreword by Jack D. Flam

The Dada Painters and Poets offers the authentic answer to the question "What is Dada?" This incomparable collection of essays, manifestos, and illustrations was prepared by Robert Motherwell with the collaboration of some of the major Dada figures: Marcel Duchamp, Jean Arp, and Max Ernst among others. Here in their own words and art, the principals of the movement create a composite picture of Dada--its convictions, antics, and spirit.

Paperback

Danish Literature

Nancy S. Reinhardt

A catalog of an exhibition at Houghton Library in 1986 of Danish items, ranging from 1514 to 1942, from Houghton's collection, as well as items on loan from David P. Wheatland, Janet Jurist, and the Boston Public Library.

Paperback 2005

David to Corot

Agnes Mongan

Miriam Stewart

The Harvard University Art Museums hold one of the world's finest collections of early nineteenth-century drawings; the nearly 500 works reproduced in this catalogue include the most significant groups of drawings outside France by the masters of the age--David, Gericault, Ingres, Delacroix, and Prud'hon. Although familiar to scholars, the collection has never been the subject of a comprehensive catalogue, and many of the drawings are published here for the first time.

Hardcover 1996

David to Delacroix

Walter Friedlaender

This renowned study follows the evolution of French painting from the Revolution through the Napoleonic era. Beginning with David's revolutionary classicism, Friedlaender scrutinizes the work of early-nineteenth-century artists against the background of their times.

Paperback

De Stijl 1917-1931

H. L. C. Jaffé

Here is the essential book on De Stijl, one of the longest lived and most influential of modern art movements. H. L. C. Jaffé recounts the history of this abstract movement, explains its artistic goals and practice, delineates its utopian ideology, and describes the special qualities of De Stijl painting, sculpture, architecture, and design.

Paperback 1986

Decorated Book Papers

Rosamond B. Loring

Edited by Hope Mayo

Decorated Book Papers, first published in 1942, remains one of the standard works on its subject. Loring, a collector and maker of decorated papers, explores the extensive history and use of decorated papers in the book arts. Appendices are devoted to the art of marbling, the preparation of paste papers, and a listing of some early makers of decorated paper.

Hardcover 2008

Degas

Theodore Reff

Paperback

Designs on the Heart

Karal Ann Marling

In this book, Karal Ann Marling looks at Grandma Moses as a cultural phenomenon of the postwar period and explores the meaning of her subject matter--and her astonishing fame. Between the cultural ephemera, folklore, song, and history embedded in Moses' paintings and the potent advertising shorthand for Americana that her images rapidly became, this book reveals the widespread longing for the memories, comforts, and small victories of a mythic, intimate American past tapped by the phenomenon of Grandma Moses.

Hardcover 2006

Dignity and Decadence

Richard Jenkyns

Hardcover 1992

Dogs

Catherine Johns

Hardcover 2008

Dumbarton Oaks

Edited by Gudrun Bühl

Dumbarton Oaks houses the extraordinary art collection begun by Mildred and Robert Woods Bliss. In this book the museum publishes the specialist collections in Byzantine and Pre-Columbian art, along with examples from the Blisses’ superb European collection, for the first time.

Paperback 2008

Dumbarton Oaks Papers 61

Edited by Alice-Mary Talbot

This latest volume of Dumbarton Oaks Papers focuses in part on literary and historical texts: historicism in Byzantine thought and literature; the Chronicle of Matthew of Edessa, encompassing the First Crusade and the Armenian diaspora; and a reappraisal of the satirical prose work Mazaris’s Journey to Hades.

Hardcover 2008

Dumbarton Oaks Papers 62

Edited by Alice-Mary Talbot

Hardcover 2008

Early Celtic Art

Ian M. Stead

Paperback

Early Mughal Painting

Milo Cleveland Beach

Beach traces, with an abundance of captivating illustrations, the evolution of the Mughal style. While acknowledging the influence of Akbar the Great's interests and changing tastes, he shows that many of the new tendencies were evident during the short reign of Akbar's father, the Emperor Humayun, whose role as patron of the arts is thereby reassessed. Beach also stresses the traditionalism of the individual painters, who only gradually changed their concepts and compositions in response to foreign influences and to imperial taste.

Hardcover 1987

The Economy of Prestige

James F. English

This is a book about one of the great untold stories of modern cultural life: the remarkable ascendancy of prizes in literature and the arts. James F. English documents the dramatic rise of the awards industry and its complex role within what he describes as an economy of cultural prestige.

Hardcover 2005 / Paperback 2008

Edward Lear as a Landscape Draughtsman

Philip Hofer

Edward Lear has been known best as the author of "The Owl and the Pussycat," the famous Nonsense Books, and other verses and songs. But landscape drawing and painting were his lifelong profession--the nonsense a side line. In this volume, Hofer presents a selection of Lear's landscape drawings chosen from his own collection.

Hardcover 1967

Egyptian Painting

T. G. H. James

This book surveys the whole range of Egypian painting, illustrated chiefly by the wealth of material in the British Museum. Jamesexamines the material used by the ancient painters and explains the conventions and methods which governed some great artists, whose work should be valued in its own right as well as for its incomparable record record of Egyptian life 3000 years ago.

Paperback

Emancipatory Action

Edited by José Luis Falconi

Edited by Gabriela Rangel

Edited by Nicolau Sevcenko

Paula Trope

Contributions by Paulo Herkenhoff

Contributions by Doris Sommer

This volume is based on the exhibition of Paula Trope at the Americas Society (NYC) made in conjunction with Harvard University's Cultural Agency Initiative. Contemporary Brazilian artist Paula Trope has acquired recent notice for the pin-hole photography she creates together with the "Meninos da Rua" (street children) in Rio de Janeiro, of which she is not really the "author" but its facilitator, instructor, and curator.

Paperback 2008

Enigma Variations

Richard Price

Sally Price

In a steamy colonial city, an eccentric Frenchman offers for sale an extraordinary collection of primitive art. The two anthropologists called in to appraise the pieces for the national museum quickly find themselves in a world where the boundaries of authenticity and deception blur in the tropical heat.

Paperback 1997 / Hardcover 1998

Ethnic Sculpture

Malcolm McLeod

John Mack

This book covers the vast field of sculpture produced by traditional societies of the non-Western world. The sculptures range from the delicate and affectionate ivory carvings of the Eskimo hunters of the Arctic to the dignified King figures of the Bakuba people of Central Africa.

Paperback 1985

The First Emperor

Edited by Jane Portal

Standing guard around the tomb of Qin Shihuangdi, the ranks of a terra-cotta army bear silent witness to the power of the First Emperor of the Qin Dynasty, who unified China in 221 BCE. Six thousand warriors and horses make up the army, while chariots, a military guard, and a command post complete the host. A new look at one of the most spectacular finds in the annals of archaeology, this book also considers its historical and archaeological context, and the extensive research carried out since its discovery in 1974.

Hardcover 2007

First Impressions

Hugh Amory

A catalogue of the exhibition at the Hougton Library and at the Harvard Law School Library in 1989 celebrating the 350th anniversary of the first printing in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Each section of the catalogue focuses on a single book: The Bay Psalms Book, the Eliot Indian Bible, and The Laws and Liberties of Massachusetts.

Paperback 2005

First Supplement to James E. Walsh's Catalogue of the Fifteenth-Century Printed Books in the Harvard University Library

David R. Whitesell

The late James E. Walsh's pioneering catalogue of the Harvard collection of fifteenth-century printed books was published in five volumes. The First Supplement describes 202 new incunabula at Harvard: 67 complete or nearly complete copies and 135 single leaves or fragments, representing a total of 173 editions, including 110 not in Walsh's original five volumes. The apparatus follows the Walsh model, and the book is designed to be used both on its own and in conjunction with the five original volumes.

Hardcover 2006

Five Centuries of Books and Manuscripts in Modern Greek

Evro Layton

This work explores the emergence of modern Greek language, thought, and sensibility reflected in Harvard's collection of Greek books and manuscripts, ranging from fifteenth century liturgical manuals to Renaissance translations into modern Greek of Homer and other classical authors to the works and papers of twentieth-century Greek literary figures. With copious illustrations of Greek writing, design, and typography, Evro Layton's catalogue is a visual and intellectual treat for philhellenes.

Paperback 2005

Florence

Michael Levey

Nestled in the Apennines, cradle of the Renaissance, home of Dante, Michelangelo, and the Medici, Florence is unlike any other city in its extraordinary mingling of great art and literature, natural splendor, and remarkable history. Intimate and grand, learned and engaging, Michael Levey's Florence renders the city in all of its madness and magnificence.

Hardcover 1996 / Paperback 1998

Florentine Painting and its Social Background

Frederic Antal

Paperback 1986

Francis Bacon and the Loss of Self

Ernst Van Alphen

Paperback / Hardcover

Francis Calley Gray and Art Collecting for America

Marjorie B. Cohn

Hardcover 1986

Fregi e Majuscole Incise e Fuse da Giambattista Bodoni

Afterword by Eleanor Garvey

A facsimile of Giambattista Bodoni's first type specimen, "Fregi e Majuscole" of 1771, two copies of which were given to the Department of Printing and Graphic Arts of the Houghton Library by William Bentinck-Smith, Class of 1937.

Paperback 2005

Friends of Interpretable Objects

Miguel Tamen

Tamen's concern is to show how inanimate objects take on life through their interpretation--notably, in our own culture, as they are collected and housed in museums. It is his claim that an object becomes interpretable only in the context of a "society of friends." Thus, he suggests, our inveterate tendency as human beings to interpret the phenomenal world gives objects not only a life but also a society.

Hardcover 2001 / Paperback 2004

From Egypt to Babylon

Paul Collins

Hardcover 2007

Fu Shan's World

Qianshen Bai

For 1,300 years, Chinese calligraphy was based on the elegant art of Wang Xizhi (A.D. 303-361). But the seventeenth-century emergence of a style modeled on the rough, broken epigraphs of ancient bronzes and stone artifacts brought a revolution in calligraphic taste. By the eighteenth century, this led to the formation of the stele school of calligraphy, which continues to shape Chinese calligraphy today. A dominant force in this school was the eminent calligrapher and art theorist Fu Shan (1607-1685). Because his work spans the late Ming-early Qing divide, it is an ideal prism through which to view the transformation in calligraphy.

Hardcover 2003

George Parker Winship as Librarian, Typophile, and Teacher

Edited by Roger Stoddard

As librarian and curator at Brown and later at Harvard, George Parker Winship championed the primacy of the role of rare books in American higher education. As a connoisseur and printer, he played an active role in promulgating enthusiasm for fine printing among collectors and readers in the early twentieth century. This slim, elegant volume collects three talks given on April 17, 1997, at a symposium held in Winship's memory, and includes an essay by grandson Michael Winship, himself one of America's preeminent bibliographers.

Paperback 2005

George Washington Slept Here

Karal Ann Marling

Hardcover 1988

Graceland

Karal Ann Marling

He wasn't articulate on the subject of himself, but when he created his dream house Elvis Presley spoke volumes. What the mansion says of Elvis, and what it says to--and of--the millions of fans who make the journey there each year, is what Graceland is about.

Hardcover 1996 / Paperback 1997

Greek Architecture and Its Sculpture

Ian Jenkins

From Athens and Arcadia on one side of the Aegean Sea and from Ionia, Lycia, and Karia on the other, this book brings together some of the great monuments of classical antiquity--among them two of the seven wonders of the ancient world, the later temple of Artemis at Ephesos and the Mausoleum at Halikarnassos. With 250 photographs and specially commissioned line drawings, the book comprises a monumental narrative of the art and architecture that gave form, direction, and meaning to much of Western culture.

Hardcover 2007

Greek Vases

Dyfri Williams

Paperback

Hadrian

Thorsten Opper

Hardcover 2008

Harvard Art Museum Handbook

Edited by Stephan Wolohojian

Paperback 2008

Henry Fielding

Hugh Amory

Introduction by Charles Donahue

Foreword by Charles Donahue

An edition of fragments of Henry Fielding's unpublished treatise on eighteenth-century law, which were displayed at an exhibition at Houghton Library in 1987, including fragments from Harvard, Yale, and the Hyde Collection, now also at Harvard.

Paperback 2005

Hindu Art

T. Richard Blurton

In a survey that stretches back to prehistory, Blurton discusses the religious, cultural, and historical influences that figure in Hindu art. Tracing its evolution, he shows how Hindu art has come to embrace widely varying styles, reflecting differences between regions from Nepal to Afghanistan, from Sri Lanka to Bangladesh.

Paperback / Hardcover

His Other Half

Wendy Lesser

Hardcover 1991 / Paperback 1992

The History of Surrealism

Maurice Nadeau

Richard Howard, Translator

Roger Shattuck

The History of Surrealism, first published in French in 1944 and in English in 1965, has become a classic. It is both lucid and authoritative--by far the best overall account of this complex movement. Nadeau traces the evolution of Surrealism, bringing to life its many internal debates about politics and art. He relates the movement to its intellectual and artistic environment. And he provides the statements and manifestos of Breton, Aragon, Tzara, and others.

Paperback

Horses

Catherine Johns

The remarkable relationship between people and horses has been evoked in art from the beginning of the bond between them. In this beautifully illustrated book, Catherine Johns explores the horse in art from the ancient world to the modern era. From the Horse of Selene to Persian miniatures and prints by Duerer, Stubbs, and Hokusai, this book will inform, entertain, and delight horse lovers and all readers interested in this inspiring animal and its profound contribution to human culture.

Hardcover 2007

A Houghton Library Chronicle, 1942-1992

Hugh Amory

Elizabeth A. Falsey

Nancy Finlay

This 1992 volume, compiled by senior Houghton librarians, blends documentary with oral history to look back on the library's origins, the growth of its collections, and the activities of the staff who made it a home for precious books and original scholarship.

Hardcover 1992

Icons

Robin Cormack

Byzantine and Russian Orthodox icons are perhaps the most enduring form of religious art ever developed--and one of the most mysterious. This book provides an accessible guide to their story and power. Illustrated mostly with Cretan, Greek, and Russian examples from the British Museum, which houses Britain's most important collection, the book examines icons in the context of the history of Christianity, as well as within the perspective of art history.

Hardcover 2007

Illustration

J. Hillis Miller

Hardcover 1992 / Paperback

The Image of the Black in Western Art, Volume I, From the Pharaohs to the Fall of the Roman Empire

Ladislas Bugner, General Editor

Amadou-Mahtar M'Bow

Jean Vercoutter

Jean Leclant

Frank M. Snowden

Jehan Desanges

Ladislas Bugner

Hardcover

The Image of the Black in Western Art, Volume II, Part 1, From the Demonic Threat to the Incarnation of Sainthood

Ladislas Bugner, General Editor

Jean Devisse

Jean Marie Courtes

Hardcover

The Image of the Black in Western Art, Volume II, Part 2, Africans in the Christian Ordinance of the World (Fourteenth to the Sixteenth Century)

Ladislas Bugner, General Editor

Jean Devisse

Michel Mollat

Hardcover

The Image of the Black in Western Art, Volume IV, Part 1,

Ladislas Bugner

Hardcover

The Image of the Black in Western Art, Volume IV, Part 2,

Ladislas Bugner

Hardcover

Indian Art in Detail

A. L. Dallapiccola

The rich and diverse cultures of India are represented in exquisite detail in this book, which begins with a simple question: what is Indian art? Each thematically organized chapter delves into such topics as religion and myth, epics, festivals, courtly and village life, and the natural world. The gorgeous close-ups of paintings, textiles, and sculptures in metal, ivory, and wood illuminate the aesthetics and workmanship, as well as recurrent motifs that are distinctly Indian.

Hardcover 2007

Interpreting Cézanne

Sidney Geist

Hardcover 1988

The Invention of Photography and its Impact on Learning

Paperback

Islamic Art in Detail

Sheila R. Canby

This richly illustrated book allows readers to identify the elements and themes of Islamic art forms, and to examine them in works of painting and metalwork, in calligraphy and manuscripts, ceramics, glass, wood, and ivory.

Hardcover 2006

Jan van Krimpen

Introduction and notes by John Dreyfus

Jan van Krimpen

A facsimile of a letter from calligrapher, typographer, theoretician, and author, Jan van Krimpen, to Paul Hofer, Curator of the Department of Printing and Graphic Arts at Houghton Library, on certain problems connected with the mechanical cutting of punches.

Hardcover 2005

Japanese Art in Detail

John Reeve

Beginning by asking, "What is Japanese art?" this book supplies an answer so broad in its reach, so rich in detail, and so extensively illustrated that it gives a reader not just a true picture but also a fine understanding of Japanese art. Arranged thematically, the book includes chapters on nature and pleasure, landscape and beauty, all framed by the themes of serenity and turmoil, the two poles of Japanese culture ancient and modern.

Hardcover 2006

John Singleton Copley

Jules David Prown

Hardcover 1966

Leaves from Paradise

Edited by Jeffrey F. Hamburger

Paperback 2008

The Lewis & Clark Collection Postcard Book

Castle McLaughlin

Photographs by Hillel S. Burger

The Peabody Museum's Lewis and Clark collection is a set of magnificent objects long thought to be the only surviving ethnographic items acquired by Lewis and Clark during their epic exploration of the American West. This exquisite postcard book contains photographs of eleven of the finest pieces in the collection, interleafed with informative discussions of the objects, their collection histories, and significance. It commemorates the ongoing bicentennial of the Lewis and Clark Expedition.

Paperback 2005

Lighting in Early Byzantium

Laskarina Bouras

Maria Parani

Paperback 2008

Lipstick Traces

Greil Marcus

Greil Marcus, author of Mystery Train, widely acclaimed as the best book ever written about America as seen through its music, began work on this new book out of a fascination with the Sex Pistols: that scandalous antimusical group, invented in London in 1975 and dead within two years, which sparked the emergence of the culture called punk. "I am an antichrist!" shouted singer Johnny Rotten-where in the world of pop music did that come from? Looking for an answer, with a high sense of the drama of the journey, Marcus takes us down the dark paths of counterhistory, a route of blasphemy, adventure, and surprise.

Hardcover 1989 / Paperback 1990

The Lyric Journey

James Cahill

Poetic paintings--works done in response to lyric poems or as pictorial equivalents to them--compose a major category of East Asian art. In this beautifully illustrated book James Cahill, looks at three exemplary traditions in this genre.

Hardcover 1996 / Paperback 2002

Manet's Silence and the Poetics of Bouquets

James Rubin

A sense of stillness and silence pervades Manet's painting. It is this silence that James Rubin explores in this book. Applying J. L. Austin's notion of the performative, which bridges the gap between language and action or between the painted image and its social effect, Rubin goes beyond past theorists to describe the curious ways in which Manet's paintings act upon us.

Paperback 1995 / Hardcover

Manga from the Floating World

Adam L. Kern

Manga from the Floating World is the first full-length study in English of the kibyôshi, a genre of sophisticated pictorial fiction from late-eighteenth-century Japan. By combining analysis of the socioeconomic and historical milieus in which the genre was produced with three annotated translations of works by author-artist Santô Kyôden (1761-1816), Adam Kern offers a close reading of the vibrant popular imagination of the mid-Edo period. Based on extensive research using primary sources in their original Edo editions and illustrated with rare prints from Japanese archival collections, these entertaining works will appeal to the general reader as well as to the more experienced student of Japanese cultural history.

Hardcover 2007

Mannerism

Arnold Hauser

Paperback

Marbled and Paste Papers

Facsimile Edition

Rosamond B. Loring

Introduction by Sidney E. Berger

Edited by Hope Mayo

Loring, author of Decorated Book Papers, was also a skilled maker of marbled and paste papers. Her recipe book has been preserved in the Rosamond B. Loring Collection of Decorated Papers at Houghton Library, Harvard University. This facsimile edition is accompanied by an essay by Sidney E. Berger commenting on the recipes and analyzing Loring's materials and techniques.

Paperback 2008

Marks in Books, Illustrated and Explained

Roger Stoddard

In 1984, Roger Stoddard curated "an exhibition devoted to those mysterious traces left in books by printers, binders, booksellers, librarians, and collectors." The resulting catalogue, Marks in Books, Illustrated and Explained, is cherished by curators, collectors, and scholars for the insight it offers into the making and the use of books. With sumptuous illustrations and prose at once pithy and polemical, Stoddard describes the glosses, cancels, catchwords, and signature marks that shed light on both printer's craft and author's art.

Paperback 2005

Master Drawings of the Italian Renaissance

Claire Van Cleave

A beautifully designed selection of the finest Italian Renaissance drawings from the British Museum, the Louvre and other French public collections, giving remarkable insight into the creative processes of some of the greatest artists in history.

Hardcover 2007

Merry Christmas!

Karal Ann Marling

It wouldn't be Christmas without the "things." How they came to mean so much, and to play such a prominent role in America's central holiday, is the tale told in this delightful and edifying book. In a style characteristically engaging and erudite, Karal Ann Marling, one of our most trenchant observers of American culture, describes the outsize spectacle that Christmas has become.

Hardcover 2000 / Paperback 2001

The Merrymount Press

Martin Hutner

Daniel Berkely Updike (1860-1941) founded the Merrymount Press in 1893, which quickly came to represent the flowering of the Arts and Crafts movement in American book arts. This catalogue demonstrates the breadth and beauty of the Press's work, and the standard it set for commercial and fine printing.

Paperback 2005

Mosaics as History

G. W. Bowersock

Over the past century, exploration and serendipity have uncovered mosaic after mosaic in the Near East--maps, historical images and religious scenes that constitute a treasure of new testimony from antiquity. In their complex language, G. W. Bowersock finds historical evidence, illustrations of literary and mythological tradition, religious icons, and monuments to civic pride. Attending to one of the most evocative languages of the ages, his work reveals a fusion of cultures and religions that speaks to us across time.

Hardcover 2006

The Naked Gaze

Carlos Rojas

Hardcover 2008

Niche

David Edwards

Jay Cantor

Photographs by Daniel Faust

Niche tells the story of an artist who meets a scientist and through the encounter makes a hypothesis: If the artist became a stem cell and then divided into a neuron, would he discover the meaning of intelligence? Edwards and Cantor introduce a new fiction genre—the novel catalogue—to coincide with the opening of the new art and design innovation center in Paris, Le Laboratoire. The novel catalogue fictionalizes the creative process of an exhibition season which opens with the artistic outcome of an experiment between Fabrice Hyber, a French artist, and Robert Langer of MIT.

Paperback 2008

Numismatic Art in America

Cornelius C. Vermeule

Hardcover 1971

Olympic Sculpture Park for the Seattle Art Museum

Edited by Joan Busquets

Envisioned as a new urban model for sculpture parks, the Seattle Art Museum’s Olympic Sculpture Park is located on the city’s last undeveloped waterfront property—a nine-acre industrial site sliced by train tracks and an arterial road. The park not only brings art outside the museum walls but also brings the park itself into the landscape of the city. This study offers an opportunity to take a fresh look at the city and explore some hypotheses about the wider meaning of an urban design project.

Paperback 2008

On the Study of Indian Art

Pramod Chandra

Hardcover 1983

Pacing the World

Whitney Davis

This extensively illustrated book is the first full-length study of the Canadian-born sculptor David Rabinowitch. Whitney Davis closely analyzes six groups of works produced by Rabinowitch between 1963 and the present, and explores Rabinowitch's relations to the work of modern painters and sculptors as well as his involvement with the wider history of art.

Paperback 1997 / Hardcover

Painting outside the Lines

David W. Galenson

In a work that brings new insights, and new dimensions, to the history of modern art, David Galenson examines the careers of more than 100 modern painters to disclose a fascinating relationship between age and artistic creativity.

Hardcover 2002

The Parthenon Sculptures

Ian Jenkins

The Parthenon sculptures in the British Museum are unrivaled examples of classical Greek art, an inspiration to artists and writers since their creation in the fifth century BCE. A superb visual introduction to these wonders of antiquity, this book offers a photographic tour of the most famous of the surviving sculptures from ancient Greece, viewed within their cultural and art-historical context.

Hardcover 2008

Pattern and Person

Martin J. Powers

In Classical China, crafted artifacts offered a material substrate for abstract thought as graphic paradigms for social relationships. Focusing on the fifth to second centuries B.C., Martin Powers explores how these paradigms continued to inform social thought long after the material substrate had been abandoned. Historically, Pattern and Person traces the evolution of personhood in China from a condition of hereditary status to one of achieved social role and greater personal choice.

Hardcover 2006

The Philip Hofer Collection in the Houghton Library

Eleanor Garvey

In this exhibition catalogue, Philip Hofer's successor, Eleanor Garvey, explores the rich legacy he bequeathed to Harvard: extraordinary manuscripts, writing manuals, illustrated books, and examples of fine and unusual printing. The objects of Hofer's fancy constitute a teaching collection and a scholarly resource of the highest kind.

Paperback 2005

The Philip Hofer Collection in the Houghton Library

Edited by William H. Bond

This book records the proceedings of a symposium held in conjunction with the 1988 exhibition of the Philip Hofer bequest to the Department of Printing and Graphic Arts at Houghton Library. Contributors include William H. Bond, Charles Ryskamp, Arthur Vershbow, William Bentinck-Smith, and Lucien Goldschmidt. Their recollections of one of Harvard College Library's most generous donors provide a fascinating portrait of one of America's great bibliophiles.

Paperback 2005

Poetry and Painting in Song China

Alfreda Murck

During the Song dynasty (960-1278), some members of China's elite found an elegant and subtle means of dissent: landscape painting. By examining literary archetypes, the titles of paintings, contemporary inscriptions, and the historical context, Alfreda Murck shows that certain paintings expressed strong political opinions--some transparent, others deliberately concealed. She argues that the capacity of painting's systems of reference to allow scholars to express dissent with impunity contributed to the art's vitality and longevity.

Hardcover 2000 / Paperback 2002

Political Landscape

Martin Warnke

Translated by David McLintock

Little in the landscape remains untouched by human hands, and every touch, from the simplest ditch to the most intricate monument, reveals a political decision or design. This is how Martin Warnke, one of Germany's leading art historians, looks at landscape in this book, which leads to a new way of seeing nature as we have appropriated, represented, and transformed it over time. Covering nearly a thousand years and most of western Europe, he provides a compelling summary history of modern humanity's ill-fated attempt to master nature.

Hardcover 1995 / Paperback 1996

The Practice of Letters

David P. Becker

After the invention of the printing press in the fifteenth century, the art of writing in manuscript took on fresh meaning. Printed manuals for the teaching of handwriting quickly appeared, marketed to a growing literate readership anxious to express humanistic values through fine writing. Hofer, Founding Curator of Printing and Graphic Arts in Houghton Library, was long fascinated with the printed works of writing masters, and amassed one of the great collections of early penmanship textbooks before his death in 1984. Becker's catalogue tells the story of this collection while amply illustrating the diversity and expressive power of the arts of the pen.

Paperback 2005

Primitivism in Modern Art

Robert Goldwater

This now classic study maps the profound effect of primitive art on modern, as well as the primitivizing strain in modern art itself. Robert Goldwater describes how and why works by primitive artists attracted modern painters and sculptors, and he delineates the differences between what is truly primitive or archaic and what intentionally embodies such elements.

Paperback

A Principality of its Own

Edited by José Luis Falconi

Edited by Gabriela Rangel

Foreword by Patricia Phelps de Cisneros

This collection of critical essays examines distinctive moments of the Americas Society's visual art program and its impact on the formation of a Latin American market in the United States. Founded in 1965, the Americas Society has played a pivotal role in Latin American art, from Pre-Colombian to modernism. A Principality of Its Own explores the achievements and experiments that modeled the institution from the Cold War to the present.

Paperback 2007

Pushkin and His Friends

John Malmstad

In 1987 the Houghton Library observed the 150th anniversary of the death of Aleksandr Pushkin with an exhibition of materials drawn from the extraordinary Russian literature collection assembled by Bayard Kilgour. From this vast trove, curator John E. Malmstad chose books, letters, and manuscripts that illuminated Pushkin's life, career, and the world of influences and rivals that shaped Russia's most important literary voice.

Paperback 2005

Res: Anthropology and Aesthetics, 47, Spring 2005

Edited by Francesco Pellizzi

Res is a journal of anthropology and comparative aesthetics dedicated to the study of the object, in particular cult and belief objects and objects of art. The journal presents contributions by philosophers, art historians, archaeologists, critics, linguists, architects, artists, among others.

Paperback 2005

Res: Anthropology and Aesthetics, 48, Autumn 2005

Edited by Francesco Pellizzi

Res is a journal of anthropology and comparative aesthetics dedicated to the study of the object, in particular cult and belief objects and objects of art. The journal presents contributions by philosophers, art historians, archaeologists, critics, linguists, architects, artists, among others.

Paperback 2005

Res: Anthropology and Aesthetics, 49/50, Spring/Autumn 2006

Edited by Francesco Pellizzi

Res is a journal of anthropology and comparative aesthetics dedicated to the study of the object, in particular cult and belief objects and objects of art. The journal presents contributions by philosophers, art historians, archaeologists, critics, linguists, architects, artists, among others.

Paperback 2006

Res: Anthropology and Aesthetics, 51, Spring 2007

Edited by Francesco Pellizzi

Res is a journal of anthropology and comparative aesthetics dedicated to the study of the object, in particular cult and belief objects and objects of art. The journal presents contributions by philosophers, art historians, archaeologists, critics, linguists, architects, artists, among others.

Paperback

Res: Anthropology and Aesthetics, 52, Fall 2007

Edited by Francesco Pellizzi

Res is a journal of anthropology and comparative aesthetics dedicated to the study of the object, in particular cult and belief objects and objects of art. The journal presents contributions by philosophers, art historians, archaeologists, critics, linguists, architects, artists, among others.

Paperback 2008

Res: Anthropology and Aesthetics, 53/54, Spring and Autumn 2008

Edited by Francesco Pellizzi

Paperback 2008

Roman Britain, Second Edition

T. W. Potter

The four centuries during which the Roman presence in Britain rose, flourished, and then declined changed every aspect of life. This revised and updated edition of Roman Britain outlines with clarity and authority this critical period of history, and illustrates it fully with pictures of the surviving objects of the period, largely from the incomparable collections of the British Museum.

Paperback 1997

Ruskin and the Art of the Beholder

Elizabeth K. Helsinger

Helsinger here explores the profound changes Ruskin induced in the way nineteenth-century viewers looked at nature and at art. She argues that Ruskin transformed the artist- or poet-oriented aesthetics of romanticism into a beholder- or reader-oriented criticism. Combining critical attention to Ruskin's prose with her own wide-ranging scholarship, Helsinger places Ruskin's perceptual reforms within previously unexplored intellectual and cultural contexts.

Hardcover 1982

Russia Engages the World, 1453-1825

Cynthia Hyla Whittaker, Editor

This elegant new book created by a team of leading historians in collaboration with The New York Public Library traces Russia's development from an insular, medieval, liturgical realm centered on Old Muscovy, into a modern, secular, world power embodied in cosmopolitan St. Petersburg. Featuring eight essays and 120 images from the Library's distinguished collections, it is both an engagingly written work and a striking visual object.

Paperback 2003 / Hardcover 2003

Sappho in the Making

Dimitrios Yatromanolakis

This book offers the first interdisciplinary and in-depth study of the cultural practices and ideological paradigms that conditioned the politics of the "reading" of Sappho's songs in the early and most pivotal stages of her reception. Yatromanolakis investigates visual representations and ancient texts in their synchronic and diachronic multilayeredness to trace the discursive nexuses that defined the making of "Sappho" in the late archaic, classical, and early Hellenistic periods.

Paperback 2008

The Sculpture of India, 3000 B.C.-A.D. 1300

Pramod Chandra

This exhibition catalogue has been written by one of the world's leading experts on Indian art. He provides an introductory survey of Indian sculpture over the ages--its various styles and schools and diverse idioms--followed by illuminating analyses of the individual works.

Hardcover 1985

The Shape of Content

Ben Shahn

Hardcover 1957 / Paperback 1992

Spanish and Portuguese 16th Century Books in the Department of Printing and Graphic Arts

Anne Anninger

A catalogue of the exhibition at Houghton Library in 1985 of Spanish and Portuguese 16th Century Books in the Department of Printing and Graphic Arts, with a apreface by Anne Anninger. The catalogue describes forty exceptional items included in teh exhibition, while the Bibliography offers information on 210 additional Iberian items in houghton collections.

Paperback 2005

Studio Works 12

Edited by Paula Meijerink

Edited by Laura Miller

Edited by Martin Zogran

The aim of Studio Works is to capture the essential character of the design studio experience at the Harvard University Graduate School of Design. Studio Works 12 features outstanding GSD student work from school years 2005–2006 and 2006–2007, along with material documenting exhibitions, research seminars, and thesis projects.

Paperback 2008

Tenniel’s Alice

Eleanor Garvey

William H. Bond

Tenniel's Alice explores the work of Sir John Tenniel, the artist who furnished illustrations for the first editions of Louis Carroll's best-known works. Although Tenniel and Carroll parted ways after publication of Through the Looking-Glass, the artist's designs fixed in the public's mind images of Carroll's characters that thrive down to the present day.

Paperback 2005

The Theory of the Avant-Garde

Renato Poggioli

Convinced that all aspects of modern culture have been affected by avant-garde art, Poggioli explores the relationship between the avant-garde and civilization. Historical parallels and modern examples from all the arts are used to show how the avant-garde is both symptom and cause of many major extra-aesthetic trends of our time, and that the contemporary avant-garde is the sole and authentic one.

Hardcover 1965 / Paperback

Thomas Eakins

Lloyd Goodrich

Hardcover

Thresholds of the Sacred

Edited by Sharon E. J. Gerstel

From the walls and curtains of first-century Judaism to the tramezzo of Renaissance Italy, screens of various shapes and sizes have been used to separate the sacred from the secular. Drawn from papers presented at a recent Dumbarton Oaks Byzantine Studies symposium, this volume provides insightful new research on the history of the iconostasis.

Hardcover 2007

Toulouse-Lautrec

Peter A. Wick

This catalogue documents a collection of 24 black and white reproductions of book covers and brochures illustrated by Toulouse-Latrec housed in the Department of Printing and Graphic Arts at the Houghton Library. This is a sequel to Philip Hofer's A Bestiary by Toulouse-Lautrec.

Paperback 2005

Traditions of Japanese Art

Kimiko and John Powers

Hardcover 1970

Tsars and Cossacks

Serhii Plokhy

Ukrainian Cossacks used icon painting to investigate their relationship not only with God but also their relationship with the Russian tsar. In this groundbreaking study, Serhii Plokhy examines the political and religious culture of Ukrainian Cossackdom, as reflected in the Cossack-era paintings, icons, and woodcuts. By encouraging the iconography to "speak," Tsars and Cossacks enriches our understanding of Ukrainian iconography as well as Russian imperial political culture.

Paperback 2003

Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, Volume 1, 1913-1926

Walter Benjamin

Marcus Bullock, Editor

Michael W. Jennings, Editor

This first volume shows that even as a young man Benjamin possessed astonishing intellectual range and depth. His topics here include poetry and fiction, drama, philosophy, history, religion, love, violence, morality, mythology, painting, and much more. He is as compelling and insightful when musing on riddles or children's books as he is when dealing with weightier issues such as symbolic logic or epistemology.

Hardcover 1996 / Paperback 2004

Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, Volume 2, part 1, 1927-1930

Walter Benjamin

Series edited by Michael W. Jennings

Series edited by Howard Eiland

Series edited by Gary Smith

In the frenzied final years of the Weimar Republic, Benjamin emerged as the most original public intellectual in the German-speaking world. Volume 2 of the Selected Writings is now available in paperback in two parts. In Part 1, Benjamin is represented by two of his greatest literary essays, "Surrealism" and "On the Image of Proust," as well as by a long article on Goethe and a generous selection of his wide-ranging commentary for Weimar Germany's newspapers.

Paperback 2005

Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, Volume 2, part 2, 1931-1934

Walter Benjamin

Series edited by Michael W. Jennings

Series edited by Gary Smith

Series edited by Howard Eiland

Volume 2 of the Selected Writings is now available in paperback in two parts. Part 2 contains, in addition to the important longer essays, "Franz Kafka," "Karl Kraus," and "The Author as Producer," the extended autobiographical meditation "A Berlin Chronicle," and extended discussions of the history of photography and the social situation of the French writer, previously untranslated shorter pieces on such subjects as language and memory, theological criticism and literary history, astrology and the newspaper, and on such influential figures as Paul Valery, Stefan George, Hitler, and Mickey Mouse.

Paperback 2005

Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, Volume 4, 1938-1940

Walter Benjamin

Edited by Howard Eiland

Edited by Michael W. Jennings

This volume ranges from studies of Baudelaire, Brecht, and the historian Carl Jochmann to appraisals of photography, film, and poetry. At their core is the question of how art adapts to survive and thrive in an age of violence and repression. The book is remarkable for its inquiry into the nature of "the modern," for its ideas about the transmogrification of art and the radical discontinuities of history, and for its examples of humane life and thought in the midst of barbarism.

Hardcover 2003 / Paperback 2006

The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility, and Other Writings on Media

Walter Benjamin

Edited by Michael W. Jennings

Edited by Brigid Doherty

Edited by Thomas Y. Levin

Benjamin’s famous “Work of Art” essay sets out his boldest thoughts—on media and on culture in general. This book contains the second, and most daring, of the four versions of the “Work of Art” essay—the one that addresses the utopian developments of the modern media. The collection tracks Benjamin’s observations on the media as they are revealed in essays on the production and reception of art; on film, radio, and photography; and on the modern transformations of literature and painting. 

Paperback 2008

The Work of Stephen Harvard

David P. Becker

Calligrapher, stonecutter, illustrator, and type designer, Harvard's art and craftsmanship were rooted equally in the history of the book and the natural world. At his untimely death in 1988, he left a body of work that explored his dream of an ideal alphabet, 'a perfect, proportionate set of images that shine with a pythagorean light,' a dream that Harvard found as compelling and impossible 'as the search for perpetual motion.' Becker's lovingly edited and sumptuously illustrated catalog bears out Harvard's conviction that typography, which is at once art and craft, must 'strive to satisfy the intelligence and not the intelligentsia.'

Paperback 2005

Working Space

Frank Stella

Here is a rare opportunity to view painting through the discerning eyes of one of the world's foremost abstract painters. Stella uses the crisis of representational art in sixteenth-century Italy to illuminate the crisis of abstraction in our time. Professionals, students, collectors and all lovers of art will find Stella's non-traditional evaluations of the masters' work controversial and his fresh concepts wonderfully provocative.

Hardcover 1986 / Paperback 1986

Worthy Monuments

Daniel J. Sherman

Choosing the art museums of provincial France in the previous century as a paradigm, Sherman reaches toward an understanding of the museum's place in modern society by exploring its past. He uses an array of previously unstudied archival sources as evidence that the museum's emergence as an institution involved not only the intricacies of national policy but also the political dynamics and social fabric of the nineteenth-century city.

Hardcover 1989

The Yellow Book

Margaret D. Stetz

Mark Samuels Lasner

A commemorative exhibition of the one-hundredth anniversary of The Yellow Book, the most important and notorious British magazine in the 1890's, the first to include market high Culture to mass audiences in England and America through modern advertising strategies. It includes a 40-page essay, illustrations, and a cheklist of the exhibition held at Houghton Library in 1994.

Paperback 2005