Ancient gems are precious stones with engraved images. Intaglios (gems with incised negative images) functioned as seals, jewelry, and amulets. Cameos (with raised relief images) were jewels or for display. Gems are a testimony to social and cultural history and reflect historical events. This book looks at their history from the Minoan/Mycenaean period to Late Antiquity (4th/3rd millennium BC a " 5th century AD) andtheir continued use and reinterpretation in the Middle Ages, as well as their reception by collectors, experts, and artists from the Middle Ages to Modern Times.

Arkansas Made is the culmination of the Historic Arkansas Museum's exhaustive investigations into the history of the state's material culture past. Decades of meticulous research have resulted in this exciting two-volume set portraying the work of a multitude of artisan cabinetmakers, silversmiths, potters, fine artists, quilters, and more working in communities all over the sate. The work of these artisan groups documented and collected here has been the driving force of the Historic Arkansas Museum's mission to collect and preserve Arkansas's creative legacy and rich artistic traditions. Arkansas Made demonstrates that Arkansas artists, artisans, and their works not only existed, but are worthy of study, admiration, and reflection.

'The Index of Middle English Prose' will ultimately locate, identify and record all extant Middle English prose texts composed between c.1200 and c.1500. The initial volumes, the 'Handlists' give descriptions of each item in a particular collection, with identification, categorisation, and full bibliographical data. This volume examines libraries in Scandinavia containing Middle English prose texts: the Royal Library of Copenhagen, Denmark, the Royal Library of Stockholm, theUniversity Library of Uppsala, Sweden, and the SchA|yen Collection in Oslo, Norway. An extensive collection of alchemical writings in Copenhagen is listed for the first time. Medical texts are well represented, including Lanfrank's surgery and a Canutus treatise in Copenhagen, and the famous medical miscellanies in Stockholm. Uppsala has a number of religious works. The SchA|yen Collection is a private MS collection ontaining items of Middle English prose. IRMA TAAVITSAINEN is a researcher and member of the staff of the English Department at the University of Helsinki, Finland.

Record covers are a sign of our life and times. Like the music on the discs, they address such issues as love, life, death, fashion, and rebellion. For music fans the covers are the expression of a period, of a particular time in their lives. Many are works of art and have become as famous as the music they stand for-Andy Warhol's covers, for example, including the banana he designed for The Velvet Underground. This edition of Record Covers presents a selection of the best rock album covers of the 60s to 90s from music archivist, disc jockey, journalist, and former record-publicity executive Michael Ochs's enormous private collection. Both a trip down memory lane and a study in the evolution of cover art, this is a sweeping look at an underappreciated art form. About the series Bibliotheca Universalis - Compact cultural companions celebrating the eclectic TASCHEN universe!

Thousands of copyright-free images of quaint 19th-century items: fans, corsets, toiletry kits, sewing machine, meat grinder, ice cream freezer, typewriter, camera, lantern, carpet sweeper, high-topped "storm" slippers and much more-all arranged according to category. A fascinating, inexhaustible supply of design inspiration.

Curiosities and Texts The Culture of Collecting in Early Modern England Marjorie Swann "Highly recommended."--"Library Journal" A craze for collecting swept England during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Aristocrats and middling-sort men alike crammed their homes full of a bewildering variety of physical objects: antique coins, scientific instruments, minerals, mummified corpses, zoological specimens, plants, ethnographic objects from Asia and the Americas, statues, portraits. Why were these bizarre jumbles of artifacts so popular? In "Curiosities and Texts," Marjorie Swann demonstrates that collections of physical objects were central to early modern English literature and culture. Swann examines the famous collection of rarities assembled by the Tradescant family; the development of English natural history; narrative catalogs of English landscape features that began to appear in the Tudor and Stuart periods; the writings of Ben Jonson and Robert Herrick; and the foundation of the British Museum. Through this wide-ranging series of case studies, Swann addresses two important questions: How was the collection, which was understood as a form of cultural capital, appropriated in early modern England to construct new social selves and modes of subjectivity? And how did literary texts--both as material objects and as vehicles of representation--participate in the process of negotiating the cultural significance of collectors and collecting? Crafting her unique argument with a balance of detail and insight, Swann sheds new light on material culture's relationship to literature, social authority, and personal identity. Marjorie Swann teaches English at the University of Kansas. Material Texts 2001 288 pages 6 x 9 10 illus. ISBN 978-0-8122-3610-1 Cloth $59.95s 39.00 World Rights History, Literature

'Heartwarming, magical and uplifting' In today's throwaway culture, there's a counter movement growing that urges us to 'make do and mend'. The BBC's The Repair Shop has brought this waste-conscious message to an even wider audience, with its regular viewing figures of 7 million in the UK alone, cementing itself as a classic series in the vein of Antiques Roadshow. This new book concentrates on the show's much-loved experts, including woodworker and furniture restorer Will Kirk, clock restorer Steve Fletcher, metalworker Dominic Chinea, silversmith Brenton West, leatherworker Suzie Fletcher, upholsterer Sonnaz Nooranvary, and seamstresses Julie Tatchell & Amanda Middleditch - aka The Teddy Bear Ladies. Each of the experts shares their own stories and their repairs, capturing in the process the magic and ethos of the barn. Includes quotations and Q & As from the experts as well as Jay Blades on some unique restoration collaborations. With the focus on the experts themselves, readers will feel as though they're stepping straight into the 'workshop of dreams' and experiencing first hand the magic of the barn.