The professional career and success of Wilhelm Bode (1845-1929) relied on the business of connoisseurship. Like other contemporary art historians involved in the commerce of art, he was entangled in the reciprocal dynamics and interdependencies of the nascent discipline of art history, connoisseurship and the art trade. The volume introduces new material and a fresh perspective on Bode's strategic participation in the Western art market, exposing the particular consequences of these entanglements on the birth of the art historical canon and showcasing his complex agency within the art marketplace of the late nineteenth and the early twentieth centuries.

Jason D'Aquino is known for his meticulous, ultra-precise miniature drawings on matchbooks and other kinds of vintage paper. Here he enlists his super-sharp pencil in a slightly larger format: the alphabet book. Based on early 20th-century circus and carnival acts and personalities, these ABCs star an amazing assortment of arcane animals, madcap marvels, and marvelous men and women of the midway. A celebration of all those who venture beyond the mainstream, this exquisitely illustrated book offers a fascinating glimpse into a magical world of fantasy and illusion.

Abolitionist Cosmopolitanism redefines the potential of American antislavery literature as a cultural and political imaginary by situating antislavery literature in specific transnational contexts and highlighting the role of women as producers, subjects, and audiences of antislavery literature. Pia Wiegmink draws attention to locales, authors, and webs of entanglement between texts, ideas, and people. Perceived through the lens of gender and transnationalism, American antislavery literature emerges as a body of writing that presents profoundly reconfigured literary imaginations of freedom and equality in the United States prior to the Civil War.