Photo Adventures is an activity book by photographer and professional fun-maker Jan von Holleben, who reveals the secret to bending reality using nothing more than a simple smartphone and a playful approach. With the aid of props lying about the house, and a generous dose of imagination, children will discover how to fly like a superhero by turning the ground into the sky; create a `brain portrait' of what's hiding in their heads by re-photographing an existing photo; put their parents up a pole using tricks of perspective; devise an impossible pinball machine by combining some junk with a tight picture crop; and transform siblings into one-eyed, three-legged monsters with only a mirror and a sharp camera angle! Featuring pro tips and secret tricks from von Holleben, whose trademark photos fill the book with energy, colour and creative inspiration, Photo Adventures shows that there's more to photography than tech wizardry or applying a filter. Using just a camera phone or basic digital camera, Jan's addictively playful projects are readily accessible, not to mention enormous fun, for the whole family

Living with Matisse, Picasso, and the New Decade explores one of the most ambitious and idiosyncratic - yet largely unknown - private collections of 20th-century Western art, and its complex, charismatic creator Theodor `Teto' Ahrenberg (1912-89). Containing over 6,000 artworks acquired between the late 1940s and late 1980s, the collection featured, throughout its dramatic existence, key works by artists as distinguished and diverse as Picasso, Matisse, Chagall, Le Corbusier, Olle Baertling, Sam Francis, OEyvind Fahlstroem, Tadeusz Kantor, Lucio Fontana, Christo, Jean Tinguely and Niki de Saint Phalle. Ahrenberg's ever-renewing collection was shaped by his commitment to the changing notion of contemporary art, his dedication to young and marginalized artists, his intuition, and a self-declared conviction that he was not merely a collector but a `catalyst' - one who facilitated exhibitions, collaborations and commissions, and who employed art as an instrument against conservatism and complacency. Ahrenberg passionately believed in personally meeting those artists whose works he acquired, and he accordingly established rich, long-term friendships that transcended the conventional artist-collector dynamic. Living with Matisse, Picasso, and the New Decade, the first monograph on Ahrenberg's fascinating collection and life, draws on a wealth of personal correspondence between Ahrenberg and `his' artists, and presents much previously unpublished visual material including artworks, photographs and architectural plans

"Gerhard's like a Communist. You have to go into the salt mines with him. If you're willing to go there then you're like brothers in arms and he'll do what needs be." Robert Polidori
Concentric Circles chronicles the time between 26 August 2008 and 27 January 2009 at Steidl Publishers. The book is the first to document the printing and publishing house, and is a window into the processes, experiences and bustle of Dustere Strasse 4, Gottingen.
Comprising a log of hundreds of entries, Concentric Circles retells and records events as they unfolded in their unpredictability and urgency - Gunter Grass tapping tobacco into his pipe while refining the typography of his book Die Box, Gerhard Steidl deciphering the arabesque faxes of Karl Lagerfeld, the sudden breakdown of the printing press. These daily entries are enriched by interviews with, and original texts by, some of Steidl's most important collaborators including Lewis Baltz, Jim Dine, David Bailey, Roni Horn, Karl Lagerfeld, Juergen Teller, Tacita Dean, and Joel Sternfeld. A circle owes its symmetry to its centre, from which every point on the circumference is equidistant. What, then, is the centre of Steidl's concentric circles, in all their different guises? Perhaps the initial idea from which a book grows; Gottingen, where every Steidl book is crafted; or Gerhard Steidl himself, who founded the company 41 years ago and continues to determine the substance of its creations - the nature of its circles?
Steidl's concentric circles are in flux: new circles of progress and difficulty constantly emerge, while others dissolve. Look closely and the seemingly empty rings of space between circles are actually imbued with traces of past activities - the memory of circles that once were."