Amherst College: The Campus Guide is an architectural tour of one of North America's most prestigious liberal arts colleges. Founded in Western Massachusetts some two hundred years ago, the one thousand-acre campus is a living museum of architectural history, bearing the imprint of distinguished firms in architecture and landscape architecture: Frederick Law Olmsted; McKim, Mead & White; Benjamin Thompson; Edward Larrabee Barnes; Shepley Bulfinch; and Michael Van Valkenburgh. Organized as a series of six walks, the guide interweaves the history of the college with the story of the campus's development. Newly commissioned photographs and a hand drawn pocket map enhance this engaging journey through Amherst's architecture, landscape, interior design, and sculpture.

Circus Americanus is a riotous excursion through America's changing visual landscape. Exploring its remote corners and bizarre byways, Ralph Rugoff takes us on a tour of theme park slums and mystical police cars, futurist war and the "aesthetics of safe chaos." With an idiosyncratic eye for detail, he maps a culture in which "reality" has become just another theme, revealing an America much stranger than the glamorous kitsch of its surfaces. Whether he is writing about Las Vegas casinos, forensic cartoons, the enigma of Napoleon's preserved penis or the aesthetics of sewage treatment, Rugoff considers everyday marvels with a concern for how we live together in a world beyond belief.

A stunningly original portrait of one of England's grandest country houses No house embodies the spirit of one dynasty better than Chatsworth. Set in an unspoilt Derbyshire valley, surrounded by wild moorland, and home to the Cavendish family for sixteen generations, this treasure house is filled with works of art and objects - from Nicolas Poussin's The Arcadian Shepherds and Antonio Canova's Endymion to great contemporary paintings by Lucian Freud and David Hockney - which have all, in their time, represented the very best of the new. As Stoker Cavendish, the twelfth Duke of Devonshire, likes to point out: 'Everything was new once.' Following the completion of a decade-long programme of renovations, the exterior of Chatsworth is gleaming, its stone facade newly cleaned and its window frames freshly gilded. Inside, through the inspired juxtaposition of old and modern, its rooms fizz with creative energy. Chatsworth, Arcadia, Now tells the story of this extraordinary place through seven scenes from its life, alongside a stunning photographic portrait of the house and its collections, captured at a moment of high optimism in its long history. With a foreword by the Duke and Duchess of Devonshire.

Well known for its world-renowned art museums - from the Clark Art Institute in Williamstown to the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston - Massachusetts is also home to numerous institutions with more eclectic collections and, oftentimes, lower profiles. These include Mansfield's National Black Doll Museum of History and Culture, Watertown's Plumbing Museum, and Granville's Noble and Cooley Center for Historic Preservation. In Massachusetts Treasures, Chuck D'Imperio explores more than forty museums scattered throughout the Bay State, from Cape Cod to the Berkshires. Many - but not all - might be considered ""offbeat,"" and each and every one is enchanting. Through personal visits and interviews with founders and directors, D'Imperio offers an inside glimpse into some of the Commonwealth's most unique museums, providing a valuable guide for road warriors and history buffs discovering Massachusetts either for the first or the tenth time.

November 19, 1479: a dynastic alliance, two noble scions, a regal wedding, short-lived and with an unhappy ending. These pages reconstruct the story of the magnificent bas relief in the Acton Collection (Villa La Pietra, Florence), commissioned to celebrate the marriage between Antonio Basso Della Rovere, nephew of Pope Sixtus IV, and Caterina Marzano d'Aragona, the niece of King Ferdinand I of Naples. The heraldic symbols of the three coats of arms leave no doubt about the identities of the characters and events surrounding its creation, and lead us to the original location of the work, born as the overdoor to the main portal of the Basso Della Rovere Palace in piazza della Maddalena in Savona. Through close examination of the Della Rovere in Rome, this study highlights some previously unknown facts about the family's origins and returns to Savona and its role as a political, cultural, and artistic protagonist in late 15th-century Italy.

This volume of essays explores the scope for a further extension of ecocriticism across the environmental humanities. Contributors, who include both established academics and early career researchers in the humanities, were given free rein to interpret the brief. The collection is unusual in that it considers collaboration between individuals both in the same discipline and across creative disciplines. Subjects include familiar environments close to home and those such as Iceland and Antarctica, where narratives of climate, geology and ecology provide a stark backdrop to creative output. A further innovation is the inclusion of essays on public art, natural heritage interpretation and the visualisation and aesthetic impact of wind farms. The book will be of interest to writers, artists, students and researchers in the environmental humanities and those with a general interest in the cultural response to the environment. -- .

This easy-to-carry guide includes Bologna, Parma, Modena, Piacenza, Ravenna, Rimini and the Po delta. Art historian, Italy resident and long-time Blue Guides author Alta Macadam explores this beautiful region of fine cities, splendid cuisine and long history, providing a fascinatingly detailed guide, with carefully chosen recommendations of hotels and restaurants.

This easy-to-carry guide includes Genoa, San Remo, Savona, Portofino, the Cinque Terre, La Spezia and Lerici. Art historian, landscape architect and long-time Italy resident Paul Blanchard explores this beautiful region of fishing villages, coastal resorts and plunging mountain valleys, with a seafaring history and a fine culinary tradition, providing a fascinatingly detailed guide, with carefully chosen recommendations of hotels and restaurants.

The West Somerset Railway is Britain's longest standard gauge heritage railway and carries more than 200,000 passengers per year, making it one of Somerset's most popular tourist attractions. Passenger trains run during most months of the year, with services from early February to early December. In addition to offering an 80-minute 'pink knuckle' ride through the Quantock Hills and along the Exmoor Coast, the Railway has also developed a number of combined packages with other local attractions including Dunster Castle and Hestercombe Gardens, as well as day trips around Exmoor and exploring the remains of the old West Somerset Mineral Railway. Here is the official West Somerset Railway Guide Book which is one of a set of three comprehensive books that Silver Link are pleased to produce for the railway. These beutifully illustrated, high quality full colour books, are of course not just to be enjoyed by those fortunate enough to visit the railway but make for interesting and informative arm chair reading. However once read a visit may well be placed on the agenda!

Julius Baer, established in Zurich in 1890, is the leading Swiss wealth management group and an icon of Swiss banking tradition. For nearly as long, the founder family has been engaged in supporting visual and performing arts and in 1981, on the initiative of Hans J. Bar (1927-2011), the company began to build its own collection of contemporary art, guided by a firm belief that art in a business environment enhances the culture of discussion and is inspirational to employees and clients alike. Today, the Julius Baer Art Collection comprises more than 5,000 works in a range of media painting, drawing, sculpture, photography, and video-by Swiss artists, internationally renowned ones as well as emerging talents. This book offers a survey of the collection that is on rotating display at the bank's offices around the world and highlights its origins and development over the past four decades. Artistic positions of 35 contemporary Swiss artists, such as John M Armleder, Silvia Bachli, Miriam Cahn, Lutz & Guggisberg, Markus Raetz, Shirana Shahbazi, and Roman Signer, are introduced through brief texts and illustrated with some 300 works from the collection.

This fascinating lexicon examines the quixotic architectural expressions found on select mid-20th-century modern commercial buildings in South Florida. Showcasing the work of 13 noted architects from Miami Beach to Fort Lauderdale, it highlights the playful decorative details and gestures-swooping overhangs, brise-soleil, cheese holes and arches, and screening-that expressed the era's shiny optimism and the region's carefree resort culture. With brief bios of the architects and street maps pinpointing the location of each building, this book offers tourists, architects, history buffs, and preservationists a new context and appreciation for these works of art, many of which are endangered.

This new study examines how nineteenth-century industrial Lancashire became a leading national and international art centre. By the end of the century almost every major town possessed an art gallery, while Lancashire art schools and artists were recognised at home and abroad. The book documents the remarkable rise of visual art across the county, along with the rise of the commercial and professional classes who supported it. It examines how Lancashire looked to great civilisations of the past for inspiration while also embracing new industrial technologies and distinctively modern art movements. This volume will be essential reading for all those with an interest in the new industrial society of the nineteenth century, from art lovers and collectors to urban and social historians. -- .

London Bridge lined with houses from end to end was one of the most extraordinary structures ever seen in London. It was home to over 500 people, perched above the rushing waters of the Thames, and was one of the city's main shopping streets. It is among the most familiar images of London in the past, but little has previously been known about the houses and the people who lived and worked in them. This book uses plentiful newly-discovered evidence, including detailed descriptions of nearly every house, to tell the story of the bridge and its houses and inhabitants. With the new information it is possible to reconstruct the plan of the bridge and houses in the seventeenth century, to trace the history of each house back through rentals and a survey to 1358, revealing the original layout, to date most of the houses which appear in later views, and to show how the houses and their occupants changed during five and half centuries. The book describes what stopped the houses falling into the river, how the houses were gradually enlarged, what their layout was inside, what goods were sold on the bridge and how these changed over time, the extensive rebuilding in 1477-1548 and 1683-96, and the removal of the houses around 1760. There are many new discoveries - about the structure of the bridge, the width of the roadway, the original layout of the houses, how the houses were supported, the size and internal planning of the houses, the quality of their architecture, and the trades practised on the bridge. The book includes five newly-commissioned reconstruction drawings showing what we now know about the bridge and its houses.

This completely reconceived and rewritten guide to the Metropolitan's encyclopedic holdings--the first new edition of the guidebook in nearly thirty years--provides the ideal introduction to almost 600 essential masterpieces from one of the world's most popular and beloved museums. It features a compelling and accessible design, beautiful color reproductions, and up-to-date descriptions written by the Museum's own experts. More than a simple souvenir book, The Metropolitan Museum of Art Guide provides a comprehensive view of art history spanning more than five millennia and the entire globe, beginning with the Ancient World and ending in contemporary times. It includes media as varied as painting, photography, costume, sculpture, decorative arts, musical instruments, arms and armor, works on paper, and many more. Presenting works ranging from the ancient Egyptian Temple of Dendur to Canova's Perseus with the Head of Medusa to Sargent's Madame X, this is an indispensable volume for lovers of art and art history, and for anyone who has ever dreamed of lingering over the most iconic works in the Metropolitan Museum's unparalleled collection.

Castles and palaces around the world are structures of grandeur, might and beauty.

From the flamboyance of Germany’s fairy tale-Neuschwanstein Castle to the gothic, Dracula-inspiring Bran Castle, perched high in the craggy peaks of Romania’s Carpathian Mountains; Tokyo’s Imperial Palace, previously home to samurai warriors to Ireland’s Blarney Castle, where ‘the gift of the gab’ will be granted to any who kiss its stone, the world’s castles and palaces are steeped in history and stories to tell.

Travel writer and journalist Gilly Pickup shares these stories, providing a tour of 50 of the world’s greatest castles and palaces, filled with humour, interesting facts and tips on how best to visit them.

This modern and GPS located guidebook to the WW1 battlefields of Ypres and the Somme includes contextual information, maps, photographs and personal stories. This is the book that gives you the experience of a professional guide but allows you to 'dip in' and go at your own pace in your own car. Many people visit the First World War battlefields and leave disappointed, not understanding the connection to the sites they go to or their significance. This guidebook by an experienced teacher, explains the sites, the context and the stories in a simple and easily understood way so that you can enjoy your visit more fully. The book is new and fit for the modern day with GPS locations that can be easily looked up on smart phones and other devices and map diagrams which show how to get the most out of the sites when there. There is also contextual information, diagrams and tables to help the understanding of the sites. The book is packed with over 100 maps, illustrations and photographs showing locations, routes and conditions at the time. It also includes personal stories, the ones normally reserved for the professional guides. It is less about the big picture of brigades and armies and more about what happened on the ground and how you can link the stories to what you can still see.

As the site of literary pilgrimage since the eighteenth century, the home of the Royal Shakespeare Company and the topic of hundreds of imaginary portrayals, Stratford is ripe for analysis, both in terms of its factual existence and its fictional afterlife. The essays in this volume consider the various manifestations of the physical and metaphorical town on the Avon, across time, genre and place, from America to New Zealand, from children's literature to wartime commemorations. We meet many Stratfords in this collection, real and imaginary, and the interplay between the two generates new visions of the place.

As the site of literary pilgrimage since the eighteenth century, the home of the Royal Shakespeare Company and the topic of hundreds of imaginary portrayals, Stratford is ripe for analysis, both in terms of its factual existence and its fictional afterlife. The essays in this volume consider the various manifestations of the physical and metaphorical town on the Avon, across time, genre and place, from America to New Zealand, from children's literature to wartime commemorations. We meet many Stratfords in this collection, real and imaginary, and the interplay between the two generates new visions of the place.