In Animals, we discover a different side to the famed photographer who skillfully explores animals' complex relationship with humans and the environment. Tenderness abounds, particularly in scenes of unkempt street dogs sleeping contentedly next to a human. But there's also a kind of essential solitude, with animals belonging to no one and simply wandering through life with only their survival instincts to guide them. See the goat balanced on his owner's back, a wild horse at dawn beside a lake-filled canyon, family pets and cheeky otters and chimps, a beautiful Arabian woman in Dubai with her hawk, an Ethiopian tribe dancing with the dog and a Tibetan monk holding his goose. We witness camels caught in the crossfire during the first Gulf War, a shepherd from Northern Pakistan tenderly feeding his goats, Beverly Hills designer dogs, racehorses on a Hong Kong rooftop, elephants in Thailand and more images selected by ace photographer Steve McCurry from his vast archives. From an elephant resting with his master to a dog led through the rubbles of Kabul, these images by Steve McCurry tell a thousand stories, each a touching tribute to the creatures who share our planet. The photographer presents his favourite shots of animals in this collection ranging from many images from Afghanistan, Asia to South America, the United States to Europe. This kaleidoscopic collection is at once a beautiful travelogue and a touching tribute to the creatures who share our planet. Compact 14 x 19.5 cm, 192 pages, stunning colour. New from Taschen.

You cannot move far in London without being reminded of the personalities who made its history - Dick Whittington who helped make London the centre of the trade in wool, Thomas Gresham who ensured that London would become the financial centre, Prince Albert who left behind the Kensington museums. Then there is Big Ben which caused its creator so much trouble that he died prematurely, and the Underground Railway. Whatever is that strange London Stone almost hidden behind a grill attached to a bank in Cannon Street, not to mention the metal tube which passes above the trains within Sloane Square underground station? Why that's the River Westbourne of course. Here are amphitheatres and temples, bars, taxes and taxis, Bazalgette and the Great Stink, rhyming slang, smog, parks, how the posh streets got their names, retail therapy and the story of Leicester Square along with royal rowing and dodgy dealing, fountains, lost rivers, hidden tube stations, famous prisons, police forces and power stations, Art Deco, philanthropy and the poor, tea shops and corner houses, theatreland and life beyond the fringe, London's drinking culture and its cemeteries, all the colourful characters and history, surprising events and iconic buildings of our capital city. New full price, 144pp, woodcut illus.

At the time of writing, over 200 underground railways are in service or under construction and here are the technical challenges they faced and the colourful personalities involved in their stories. In January 1863, London's Metropolitan Railway, running from Paddington to Farringdon, became the world's first underground railway. Budapest and Glasgow followed London in 1896 and in 1900 Paris added its Métro. Another 10 cities joined the underground club by 1939, many only a few kilometres in length with some tracks above ground. Since 2001, 79 underground railways have entered service, mostly in Asia with Chinese cities leading the way, in particular Beijing and Shanghai with its 420 miles of track, with both approaching four billion passengers a year. The deepest station is in St Petersburg at 86 metres or 282ft below ground built in the 1950s. From Auckland and Berlin's U-Bahn, Buenos Aires, the Chicago 'L', Crossrail, the Madrid Metro, we travel to Mexico City, Moscow, the New York subway, Pyong Yang, Stockholm, and Vienna, absorbing stories and trivia from innovative engineers and corrupt politicians, earthquakes and morning rush hours to great successes and terrible tragedies. With tales of secret networks and nuclear shelters, Art Nouveau and woolly mammoths, we delve deep underground. New full price. 144pp, well illus. with photos and line art.

With gold embossed linen cover and magnificent design and presentation as befitting a Thames & Hudson publication and with marbled endpapers, Martin Rees Astronomer Royal introduces us to the starry sky, the 'Vault of Heaven' which has been viewed with awe throughout human history. Over the centuries geocentric cosmology was 'improved' to take account of successively more accurate data as proposed by the great Tycho Brahe and Nicolaus Copernicus with his heliocentric system which eventually triumphed, losing some of its complicity after Kepler (1571-1630) discovered planetary orbits to be ellipses rather than circles. In Atlas Coelestis, Johann Gabriel Doppelmayr (1677-1750) masterfully presents a panorama of what was believed about the cosmos in the early 18th century. The splendid ornamentation of his illustrations reflect the cultural breadth and intelligence of his intended readers. His sky maps portray the most prominent stars, the tracks of comets, and the orbits of Saturn's and Jupiter's moons, themselves 'cosmic clocks', observable in principle by navigators. Some of Doppelmayr's most remarkable illustrations depict how the solar system would appear if viewed not from Earth but from another planet. Today we are sending probes to these other worlds. Across 30 remarkable colour plates published by a great cartographic house in Nuremberg, Germany, in 1742, this spectacular outsized guide showcases the 1742 Map of the Cosmos and is a superb introduction to the fundamentals and history of astronomy. Charting constellations, planets, comets and moons, the Atlas presents the ideas of all the famous influential astronomers including Copernicus, Riccioli, Kepler, Newton and Halley. The intricate colour plates interweave annotated diagrams and tables with figurative drawings and ornamental features. At this size we can appreciate the beauty of these exquisite plates which are also presented in a step-by-step deconstructed form by astronomer Giles Sparrow who elucidates the scientific ideas inherent in each plate. He expertly decodes and analyses the complex information in them in this spectacular, revelatory celestial compendium of the cosmos. All in colour, 256 massive pages, 37.5 x 27cm.
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Let us go back to Christopher Columbus, to his diary of his first journey, as well as some of his other writings. The originality of the sites confronting the Discoverer, new landscapes, a flora and fauna never seen before, and even human beings different from Europeans, seems to often excite the senses of the Navigator and his mates, but it was hard to convey. His observation is striking. Gerbi wrote that through Columbus's eyes America had 'emblematic parrots and lizards. Myriads of singing birds fill the sky while the ocean is teeming with shoals of playful, multi-coloured fish.' Landscape and nature, portraits, feather-dressed natives, pygmies fighting cranes, depictions of the fountains of youth, engravings, ink, watercolour, gold and silver on paper illustrations plus woodcuts, there is even iconography on cannibalism. 655 pages on special watermarked Italian paper, profusely illustrated, much in colour. Printed on special watermarked paper (as in all this series) in Rome, 1996 First Edition.

The Genoese Cartographic Tradition and Christopher Columbus. A staggeringly beautiful, watermarked 1997 first edition, this comes with mostly full colour gatefold, fold-out maps, 31 in total, 23 in colour. The history of cartography is also that of methods of surveying and techniques of representation, ranging from rock carvings and rudimentary sketches, to the parchment manuscripts of medieval nautical charts, and the first engravings cut into wood, copper or stone, and later reproduced on paper in relatively limited quantities. Such are the cartographic documents reproduced in this entire series. Together with many other plates, volume XII in the series has 216pp.

Pull open the first gatefold page to see fine cut-away line drawings of the 'Pinta', the caravel of Columbus's first fleet, 1492. Next is the 'Santa Maria', a theoretical reconstruction, followed by detailed line drawings of tackle, blocks, a sketch of a 15th century sail, and superb detailed drawings from as early as 1892, reconstructions, woodcut illustrations and even reproductions of coloured 16th century nautical charts. These luxury editions were certainly not the type used by ship's pilots. Charted are the place names or coastal toponyms, densely drawn and with the rhumblines networked marking the intercepting courses. Printed on special watermarked paper (as in all this series) in Rome, first edition 1997. 310pp.

Julius Caesar tried to destroy Alexandria with only partial success, and the city famed for its cosmopolitan intellectual life has weathered many cultural changes since its foundation by Alexander the Great. This anthology starts with the ancient writer Plutarch describing the city's foundation and concludes with atmospheric pieces from the 20th century in which Jean Cocteau regrets that the city is losing its character following World War II and Naguib Mahfouz describes love and loss on returning to his homeland. Alexandria's fame in the ancient world was associated with the Lighthouse of Pharos, and when the Arabs captured the city in AD 642 the country's centre moved to Cairo. In 1183 Ibn Jubayr praised the city's beautiful structures, commenting like many others on the subterranean system of wells and watercourses that harvested water from the Nile to supply the population in times of drought. The Turkish invasion of 1517 turned the country into a backwater of the Ottoman Empire and building materials were taken from Alexandria to Cairo. In the 18th century the traveller James Bruce commented that Cleopatra would not recognise her own city. Conquest by Napoleon was followed by the rule of Mohammed Ali and a big building programme. 19th century travellers include Florence Nightingale and Mark Twain, while 20th century Alexandria attracted E. M. Forster, Constantine Cavafy, and Noel Coward, who scandalised the Yacht Club by wearing shorts. An entertaining and informative pocket anthology. Designed on cream paper stock and beautifully illustrated with line drawings and archival photographs. 158pp.

Cairo became a leading city of Egypt in the medieval period as power shifted away from Alexandria, with a history encompassing the Pharaonic, Early Christian, Arabic, Medieval and Modern. In the early 19th century tourism began to dominate Cairo's economy and this fascinating pocket anthology covers the past 200 years which saw a huge surge in travel writing. The Citadel is one of the glories of the country, celebrated as much as the Pyramids which stand on the opposite bank. Harriet Martineau in the mid 19th century wrote that "in the evening the beauty is beyond description", and as a social reformer she is impressed that the mosques are home to the "houseless poor". Florence Nightingale comments that the view from the Mosque built by the ruler Muhammad Ali is the finest in the world, but almost a century later Baedeker's Guide remarks that the city looks yellowish grey from there, possibly enveloped in a haze. The bazaars and streets of the city are irregular and Murray's 1897 handbook encourages the visitor to regard this in a romantic light, while Lady Lucie Duff Gordon invokes the Arabian Nights. In 1834 Alexander Kinglake visited the slave market, although the trade was in the process of being outlawed. The Pyramids are introduced by the ancient writer Herodotus, and they prompt Lord Byron to muse "what are the hopes of man?". Novelist Norma Lorimer writes that on the road to the Pyramids "you will find the most extraordinary mixture of ancient and modern life Designed on cream paper stock and beautifully illustrated with line drawings and archival photographs. 150pp.

How did a small agricultural settlement surrounded by hostile nomadic tribes first documented in the second millennium BCE become the central earthly focus for the three great monotheistic religions? How did it cling to its arid hills despite sieges, sacks, wholesale banishments, invasions, massacres and occupations? These old stones have soaked up more blood and witnessed more pain and destruction than the human mind can comprehend, and from the late 17th century to the end of the 19th it seems that almost anyone from Europe and America with the means to do so visited Jerusalem and very few resisted the temptation to record their impressions for posterity. Further back in time are accounts written by pilgrims and soldiers, precious records of a long-vanished past in Byzantine, early-Islamic or Crusader times. Under roughly chronological chapters, each piece of writing itself or the time it describes then separate chapters describe Grand Tours and Jewish, Christian and Muslim holy places, street life, celebrations and politics. There are over 50 pieces from anonymous blood-soaked soldiers and exhausted 13th century pilgrims to well-known names such as Mark Twain, T. E. Lawrence, Gustave Flaubert, Gertrude Bell, Karl Marx and even a suitably rapturous account from 1911 (when the city was under Ottoman control) of the Easter Festival of the Cross by none other than Grigorii Rasputin. A beautifully produced pocket-sized with atmospheric sepia illus, 151pp.