By your own hand, prints to be proud of in no time at all. Nick Morley is a seasoned expert at guiding aspiring printmakers through their first projects, and this accessible book distils his knowledge into friendly step-by-step projects, each chosen to demonstrate a particular skill, and illustrated with clear photography. With templates accompanying each project making it easy to get started, the reader will quickly find themselves growing in confidence and skill.

A Christmas-themed mix-and-match rubber stamp set for adults to create endless festive combinations. Jingle Stamps is a jolly collection of twenty-two shapes and textures waiting to be mixed and matched into any festive Christmas scene you can dream up. Triangles become santa hats or, when stacked vertically, evergreen trees. Dots and squares become wrapped gifts. The pieces of a candle can be repurposed into a decorative ornament. An assortment of shapes and textures offer infinite combinations and endless fun.

One of Britains foremost printmakers, Norman Ackroyd CBE RA has spent a lifetime recording the coastal landscapes of the British Isles. A Shetland Notebook contains forty of his vivid landscape sketches in watercolour. Made in the open air, often aboard a pitching and tossing fishing boat, these lively, spontaneous works capture the unique atmosphere of these remote and beautiful islands. The notebooks unusual format is due entirely to the artist, who uses sheets of various types of paper torn to fit into a loose-leaf ring binder made from two pieces of wooden picture-backing; this he tucks into his coat pocket, ready for use whenever the need arises. His brief but engaging commentaries place each sketch in its context. Following the success of A Line in the Water , Ackroyds collaboration with the award-winning poet Douglas Dunn OBE, published by the Royal Academy in 2009, A Shetland Notebook is an essential purchase for all admirers of this most characterful artists work.

Creative genius, war artist, adventurer, lover. These are just some of the words that can be used to describe Aberdeenshire-born painter and printmaker James McBey (1883-1959). McBey was a Scottish superstar amongst the creative spirits that fuelled the Etching Revival of the late nineteenth century and Etching Boom of the early twentieth century, and in an historical context, was the acknowledged heir to Whistler and Rembrandt. But after his death in Tangier, Morocco, in 1959, his renown as one of Britain's most accomplished artists - who took the art world by storm - faded from public consciousness. Born illegitimately in the tiny parish of Foveran, Aberdeenshire, in the late Victorian era, he was brought up by his blind mother and elderly grandmother amid the rigid Presbyterian confines of Scotland's north-east. Tragedy, dreary work as a bank clerk and a craving for success on his own terms all precipitated his leaving Aberdeen to live the life of an artist in London where he quickly became one of the most-talked about creatives of his generation. At the heart of this biography - the first ever to be published on McBey - is his time as a war artist in the Middle East during the Great War - where he would meet and paint T. E. Lawrence - his many love affairs, marriage to the beautiful American, Marguerite Loeb, and his enduring passion for Morocco. Drawing on his many diaries and letters and artistic creations, this is the story of one man who - clever, kind, intrepid, dashing, insecure and flawed - triumphed against the odds.

Digitised facsimiles, with notes and transcription, of the earliest printed texts produced in Scotland. In 1508 the partnership of Andrew Myllar and Walter Chepman brought printing to Scotland. Their early publications brought into print works by two of medieval Scotland's most celebrated poets, Robert Henryson and William Dunbar, Walter Kennedy and Robert Henryson; they also contain less well-known but important poems and prose in Scots and in English by other writers. The prints feature a wide variety of genres: romance; fable; advice to princes; chivalrictreatise; lyric; dream vision; along with a classic example (by Dunbar and Walter Kennedy) of the Scots genre of `flyting', a stylised but scurrilous exchange of poetic insults. In celebration of the anniversary, the Scottish Text Society, in association with the National Library for Scotland, has published a DVD of prints produced by Chepman and Myllar in or close to 1508, containing digitised facsimiles of each of the twenty printed items. Eachfacsimile is accompanied by a headnote, explaining the print's literary significance and technical features, and a transcription. There is also an introduction by the general editor, SALLY MAPSTONE, which sets the Chepman and Myllar press within the context of early sixteenth-century Scotland and Scottish book history. The edition thus gives readers informative access to Scotland's earliest texts; easily navigable, it will become a vital teaching and research tool. CONTRIBUTORS: PRISCILLA BAWCUTT, A.S.G. EDWARDS, JANET HADLEY WILLIAMS, RALPH HANNA, BRIAN HILLYARD, LUUK HOUWEN, EMILY LYLE, SALLY MAPSTONE, JOANNA MARTIN, NICOLE MEIER, RHIANNON PURDIE

The significance of the media and communications revolution occasioned by printmaking was profound. Less a part of the standard narrative of printmaking's significance is recognition of the frequency with which the widespread dissemination of printed works also occurred beyond the borders of Europe and consideration of the impact of this broader movement of printed objects. Within a decade of the invention of the Gutenberg press, European prints began to move globally. Over the course of the fifteenth to the eighteenth centuries, numerous prints produced in Europe traveled to areas as varied as Turkey, India, Iran, Ethiopia, China, Japan and the Americas, where they were taken by missionaries, artists, travelers, merchants and diplomats. This collection of essays explores the global circulation of knowledge, both written and visual, that occurred by means of prints in the Early Modern period.