Beginning with the work of the master builders of antiquity, Frank Joseph shares his personal investigations into ancient mysteries and paranormal enigmas in America and abroad examining Old World connections with the New World sacred centres. These include similarities between Ohio's Mound City and the pyramids and tombs of the Giza Plateau, ancient American cities of the Sun, China's Great Pyramid, and the possibility of a Templar treasure on Oak Island. He explores modern sacred sites such as Iowa's Grotto of Gems, Tennessee's Greek Temple of the goddess Athena, and Florida's Coral Castle. He investigates pre-Columbian sites and underwater pyramids in the Midwest, Wisconsin's UFO hot-spot, lost Aztec Cities of Gold in Kansas, and giant-built constructions in Illinois and the afterlife. He details how the intriguing acoustics of Newgrange in Ireland are echoed in its spiral carvings, and explores ritual uses of altered states, looking at the practices of Minoan snake handlers, Mayan shamans, and prophets through the ages. Plus EVP or Electronic Voice Phenomena, the Bermuda Triangle, Atlantis, and the Ark of the Covenant and extraordinary personalities including Jules Verne, Sir Francis Bacon, Mother Shipton and the real-life inspiration for Indiana Jones. 308pp in large well illustrated softback.

Paris is the City of Light in all its facets. In the 1920s La Ville des Lumières gleams especially bright and becomes a magnet for creative people from around the world. This is the decade of Coco Chanel and Josephine Baker, Art Deco and Surrealism, café culture and cabaret. The most famous artists of the epoch, later called Classic Modernism, are in close contact and have lively exchanges with one another - including Marcel Duchamp, Francis Picabia, Pablo Picasso, René Clair, Sonia Delaunay, Henri Matisse, Man Ray, Marc Chagall, Le Corbusier, André Breton, Paul Éluard, Max Ernst and Salvador Dalí. The creative life and all its excesses flourish - bohème is the word for this way of living. Composers like Igor Stravinsky, writers like James Joyce or Ernest Hemingway and exiles from Eastern Europe like Constantin Brancu?i or Marc Chagall enrich the illustrious scene on Montparnasse. The pulsing bars and dance halls of Montmartre are captured by photographers André Kertesz and Brassaï. The French economy is booming and luxury department stores like La Samaritaine open their doors. Coco Chanel creates her own perfume and designs the little black dress. More than 30 outstanding works of architecture, painting, sculpture, film, photography, design and fashion are presented, including Giacometti's Surrealist Suspended Ball and the film Un chien andalou by Dalí and Buñuel. Colour images like Tamara de Lempicka's Self Portrait in the Green Bugatti and Paul Colin's Josephine Baker in a Banana Skirt and many mono photos too. 21 x 26cm, 96 pages. New from Taschen.

The church steeple is the glory of the English landscape and for over a thousand years has evolved a grandeur and a beauty unrivalled in Europe. It is the icon of every parish. These exquisite line drawings celebrate some of the finest medieval buildings to survive, each parish church tower and spire a testament to the architectural and artistic achievements of England in the Middle Ages. The 16 distinctive individual cards are blank for every occasion and printed on quality card and include St Mary the Virgin, Oxford, Ludlow Shropshire, Southwold Suffolk, Chipping Camden Gloucestershire and St Michael Coventry among them. Elegant, simple, 16 white envelopes and in a lidded box for safe keeping.

Tim Walker's photographs have been entrancing the readers of Vogue for over a decade, the V&A Museum and the NPG. Pour yourself a cuppa tea and join the journeys of Miss Marple-types eloping to Egypt in head-to-toe tartan or jetting off to Mars on a flying saucer. A special twinset collection of characterful photographs of real grannies accompanied by short, gently humorous verses by Kit Hesketh-Harvey. The volume is delightfully populated with Lawrence Mynott's drawings of lively old ladies - spirited, stylish, sweet like Lucinda with her hat addiction, Kitty whose knitting skills are second to none and our late Her Majesty the Queen. It is a whimsical vision of rose-printed, feline-filled arcadia where fur coats, tiny pooches, yummy cakes, walking sticks, glasses and grey hair are matched with great style in this alphabet with M for Mink and H for Hat etc. The book has a fashion photographer?s genius touch and beautiful shots of grannies doing things that they love with great style. A Thames & Hudson luxury publication, 148pp, 20.3 x 27cm, two volumes slipcased.

Lars Johnsson lives on the island of Gotland in the Baltic Sea. He is an artist, author and ornithologist, and started painting birds at the age of four, and is celebrated as one of the world's leading wildlife artists. With him we meet the Chiff-Chaff, Bullfinch, Great Black-backed Gulls in stormy waters, Eurasian Wigeons and Curlews sunbathing, buzzards and crows, Golden Eagle, Greenfinch and the all-knowing White Gyrfalcon captured masterfully in watercolour. Plus elder-flowered orchid, trees and foliage, sky and sea as authentic locations for his avian subjects. His unique style is based on a deep understanding of birds and an extraordinary power of observation, and his paintings are executed directly in or based on sketches and studies made in the field. This gorgeous book uses not only the thoughts of the artist himself, and his descriptions of those habitats where he finds most of his inspiration - the Sea, Shorelines, Coastal Meadows and Arctic tundras - but also essays by a leading wildlife sculptor to convey something about the brilliance of Jonsson's work. Here are his early works, sketchbooks, watercolours, oil paintings, lithographs and ornithological projects to dazzle readers with his genius. Here too are descriptions of how he manages to capture his subjects so that they appear to leap off the page. We loved his piece about trying to portray the Wood Sandpiper. Apparently, this bird is constantly busy foraging, and usually hides its feet in the mud. It is also a challenge to get it to show its face and reveal its special facial expressions. 192 pages 30.5cm x 24.5cm in living colour.

Oceans, rivers, forests, caves, deserts, skies and soil are home to extraordinary species from the tiny dragon-like olm to the colossal sequoia tree. They have survived for hundreds of thousands of years by adapting to unique environments, but their future remains far from certain. Their story is our story too. This book is a stunning homage to the planet's most mysterious, bizarre and wondrous creatures and plants, a love letter to life on Earth and an urgent summons to protect what is precious and lovely in our world. Exquisitely illustrated with beautiful full page, double page and other artworks in colour throughout, we meet the Amur tiger, Chinese crested tern, Kakapo, Sunda pangolin, dusky gopher frog, Andean condor, Javan rhinoceros, Ethiopian wolf and African grey parrot, all vanishing species that are diminished by wildlife trading, hunting or destruction of habitat. In the insect world we meet the pine hoverfly, dung beetles, lesser long-nosed bat, European turtledove and Iberian lynx and rust lemur, all species that grow out of soil, nourish it, or have been made rare by our use of land. Then there are species that live in the deep ocean, in coral reefs, mangroves and some of the species affected by Australian bush fires. The book is organised by air, water, soil and homo sapiens, and each beautiful drawing has been engraved, printed and coloured by hand by the author Beatrice Forshall in this beautiful Bloomsbury publication. 256 pages, 18.5 x 27cm.

French flower painter Pierre-Joseph Redouté (1759-1840) devoted himself exclusively to capturing the diversity of flowering plants in watercolour paintings which were then published as copper engravings, with careful botanical descriptions. The darling of wealthy Parisian patrons including Napoleon's wife Josephine, he was dubbed "the Raphael of flowers," and is regarded to this day as a master of botanical illustration. His illustrations of the Botanical Alphabets of D. N. Guillamain were a landmark in flower painting and he was an innovator in the techniques of printing including 'stipple-engraving'. This glorious and completely faithful reproduction includes Roses from 1817-1824 following The Lilies 1802-1816 and Selection of the Most Beautiful Flowers, each exquisite botanical illustration afforded one full page in colour. Quality heavyweight paper, stitched binding, one for all lovers of nature and art. With text in English, French and German. Beautiful colour artworks, new from Taschen, superheavyweight luxury hardback. This collection brings Taschen?s best-selling XL-sized edition to a smaller, more convenient format, still gathering some of the finest colour engravings from Redouté's illustrations of Roses, Lilies, and Choix des plus belles fleurs et quelques branches des plus beaux fruits (Selection of the Most Beautiful Blooms and Branches with the Finest Fruits). Offering a vibrant overview of Redouté's mixture of accuracy and beauty, it is also a privileged glimpse into the magnificent gardens and greenhouses of a bygone Paris. Text in English, Italian and Spanish. 16 x 22cm, rich with colour, 512 pages. New from Taschen.

Observer Best Art Book 2021, it is an illuminating exploration of the intersection between life, art and the sea from the award-winning author of Leviathan. Albrecht Dürer changed the way we saw nature through art. From his prints in 1498 of the plague-ridden Apocalypse, the first works mass produced by any artist, to his hyper-real images of animals and plants, Dürer's art was a revelation. It not only showed us who we are, but also foresaw our future, a vision that remains startingly powerful and seductive today. Philip Hoare encounters medieval alchemists and modernist poets, eccentric emperors and queer soul rebels, ambassadorial whales and enigmatic pop artists. He witnesses the miraculous birth of Dürer's fantastical rhinoceros and his hermaphroditic hare and traces the fate of the star-crossed leviathan and the artist pursued. 'In another scene, from Eden, other animals slipped out of the forest, the humans as naked and content as them, until then. The scene receded, three-dimensionally, in layers. In the distance, a goat teetered on a cliff. Maybe this is where the world began... Then in another picture I saw an angel... Another sleepy dog dozed at the hem of their robes, a comet burst over the distant sea.' We can appreciate the many famous artworks through the eyes of a dreamer and wonderfully descriptive writer. 'Dürer gave you more ink per square inch. Peter Ursem, a Dutch artist, tells me that woodcuts differed from wood engravings... They're fossils, or contour maps of the seabed. In their gullies and crevices, agony collects. Dürer turned these blocks in his inky fingers, before the next run. Adam and Eve are chased from Eden; an archangel wields a sword; Christ dies, over and over again.' In 1515 Dürer created his Man of Sorrows, the first metal etching known to western history. If his woodcuts are astounding, his engravings are almost uncanny. Very well illustrated and with a series of colour plates at the end of this fine 4th Estate publication with its witty accounts and delight in the fragile beauty of the natural world. 304pp.

Original illustrations from Audubon's masterwork Birds of America. Favourites include the Blue Jay, Golden Eagle, colourful flycatchers, warblers, waterbirds, the Barred Owl, Passenger Pigeon, Belted Kingfisher, Red-shouldered Hawk, Carolina Wren, Baltimore Oriole, American Flamingo, Yellow-billed Magpie, all with vibrant plumage and ideal subjects for colouring in. John James Audubon (1785-1851) was born in Haiti and raised in France, emigrating to North America when he was 18 to avoid conscription into the Napoleonic Wars. His true passion was ornithology and he spent many years identifying and recording bird species. Peter Gray, a long established illustrator of books, provides the outline on each right hand page, some portrait some landscape orientation, and we can follow the colours of Audubon's originals in situ on branches and sometimes with berries and flowers on the opposite page. 96 pages, 22.5 x 28cm, softback.

Large, glamorous art publication by Philip Wilson Publishers of Bloomsbury, the topic is William Powell Frith (1819-1909), one of the most successful painters of the Victorian age, celebrated for his highly original depictions of modern life subjects in the 1850s and 1860s. He was virtually a household name due to the widespread dissemination of reproductive engravings which made his images familiar throughout the world. His three great panoramas of the contemporary world, Life at the Seaside (Ramsgate Sands), The Derby Day and The Railway Station depicted Victorians at leisure and are scrutinised in depth. Similarly covered is Frith's later and more exclusive panorama reconstructing the Private View of 1881 at the Royal Academy, where Oscar Wilde has centre stage. Essays explore important and hitherto neglected areas of his personal life and professional activity, of significant biographical interest are studies of his connections with Yorkshire, the county of his birth and also his first wife Isabelle's, and his friendships with the contemporary writers notably the sensation novelist Mary Elizabeth Braddon, and his historical genre pictures focussing on the early success of 'An English Merry-Making, A Hundred Years Ago.' An intriguing angle is the recreation of certain of his famous compositions as Tableaux on the London Stage, yet another fresh topic in this presentation of 'The People's Painter'. So lifelike are the eyes and skin in page after page of gorgeous colour images on these heavy glossy white pages - Poor Maria, The Beautiful Grisette, Vanessa who was a longtime lover and correspondent of Jonathan Swift. It was well known that Frith was a friend as well as a devotee of Charles Dickens and his paintings are brimming with life and incident such as Alexander Pope's vain declaration of love to Lady Mary Wortley Montagu. The courtyard of Millbank Prison provides a unique view of life in disgrace wearing shaming uniform dotted with arrow motifs. Another favourite of ours is Frith being buttonholed by a flower seller as they stand against a backdrop of the Bay of Naples. 192 glamorous pages, 22.9 x 27.6cm.
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