The vehicles of the Marvel comic universe are one of its many glories, and in this comprehensive guide superb graphics enhance the narrative surrounding S.H.I.E.L.D., the organisation tasked with defending the freedoms of every living human being. Not only graphics, but cutaway drawings and full tech specs tell the story of each vehicle piloted by different Avengers, Rangers and Guardians of the Galaxy, together with full information about enemy vehicles. Comment boxes by Cyclops, Nick Fury, Tony Stark, Chase Stein, Spiderman, Beta Ray Bill and others add a personal perspective to the overall picture. X-Vehicles include Stratijet, Dove, X-Copter and Blackbirds of several generations. The first Blackbird is a custom-design RS-150, successor to the Stratijet and leading to a new co-operation with the X-Men, while the second generation was destroyed when the X-men went after Count Nefaria. The third generation was overseen by the mutant technological savant known as Forge. The X on the fuselage came with the 4th generation and was taken over by Cyclops on the collapse of X-corporation. Featured Helicarriers include not only the Iliad but also HAMMER, an ugly vehicle destroyed in the siege of Asgard. The section on Aircraft includes the three Quinjets and Alpha Flight Omnijet Shield Flycar with its underwater capacity. Motorcycles and Guardians of the Galaxy ships are also featured. 110pp, softback, spectacular colour graphics on most pages.

Stan Lee made his name with the Marvel universe and was widely known as the creator of the superheroes X-Men, Spiderman, and the Fantastic Four. This book, first published in 2003, follows Stan's career and ends with his struggle to be credited as creator of Spiderman with the legal aspects still ongoing. The authors are at pains to point out that Lee was co-creator of the big Marvel names, revitalising the Marvel Universe in collaboration with artists Jack Kirby and Steve Ditko, and responsibility was never going to be clear cut. Joining the family firm in his teens Lee was in a privileged position but he worked hard for market share, enabling his artists Kirby and Ditko to do their best work using the Marvel Method, which involved working to Lee's synopsis. The three-way collaboration left all the men scarred. Following the decline of Timely comics with characters such as Captain America, Lee turned the company round as both an editor and marketing manager. Ditko specialised in stylish figures whose tortured body language suggested simmering emotional turmoil. He was responsible for the moral framework of the Marvel Universe where the Fantastic Four, the Avengers, the Guardians of the Galaxy and the X-Men co-existed in a symbiotic world that was able to be infinitely extended. Lee became a public figure at the age of 38 and never stepped away from the spotlight. Even after creating the Hulk, the Silver Surfer and other iconic names he stayed on the front line lecture circuit at the request of the company. "I'm a real ham" he said, describing his love of an audience. He was the guest of honour at numerous comic-book festivals from the 1970s, earning hefty bonuses and the Popular Culture Award of Excellence. 304pp, paperback, photos.

Cameos and Intaglios are different in technique but have the same aim: to create a work of decorative art where the artist's skill in creating an image acts as a showcase for the beauty of the stone. With an intaglio, the picture is created by cutting into the stone and using what lies below to create the design; with a cameo, the design rises above the level of the stone as a relief. Almost 3000 years ago the Old Testament Book of Exodus describes a high priest's breastplate as having 12 engraved stones, and the Roman author Pliny devoted a book of his Natural History to gems and precious stones. Highly sophisticated cameos and intaglios are pictured from Egypt in the last centuries BCE. The Minoan and Mycenean civilisations had engraved gemstones, with a beautiful example being a bull hit by a spear from around 1500 BCE. Dexamenos is a named artist from 500 BCE and his intaglio of a heron in flight was found in the Crimea. In the medieval period gemstone carving was used on reliquaries and liturgical vessels. A Botticelli portrait from 1480 clearly shows a woman wearing an intaglio pendant, and intaglio became a collectors' speciality in the 17th and 18th centuries, continuing into the public buildings of the 19th century. 20 softback pages, 11 of which are cardboard pullouts opening up into two double spreads. Beautiful colour photos.

The landscape painter Corot is not primarily known for his portraits of women, but this Washington National Gallery catalogue celebrates a significant body of work which the author argues places Corot ahead of his time in the modernist school of portraiture. Corot was noted for his respect for his models and they treated him as a father-figure, a far cry from the stereotype of seduction and exploitation associated with model-artist relationships in the later 19th century. Unlike his contemporaries, Corot preferred a model to move about during a sitting, so that inevitably the finished portrait was not the capture of a moment but a representation of the play of transitory moods. Four authoritative essays by Mary Morton, David Ogawa, Sebastien Allard and Heather McPherson bring the reader developments in Corot scholarship. Figure paintings occupied his final two decades from 1855 to 1875 but they were rarely exhibited during his lifetime. After Corot's death his friend Mary Cassatt was a strong advocate for his figure painting with collectors. The portraits fall into three categories: nudes, single figures in costume, and a late series of allegorical figures. Corot used photos to achieve realism, a technique still in its infancy, and his nudes were attacked by critics and buyers who wanted something more idealised, though his figures have since been compared with the realism of Courbet and Manet. Corot's favourite model was Emma Dobigny who also sat for Degas and Puvis de Chavannes. Among his costumed figures, "The Blonde Gascon" impressed 20th century admirers with the sheer physical authority of the figure, particularly the face, while "The Algerian Woman" has strong features and a direct gaze looking out from the swathes of her headdress. Corot's studio portraits include a series of models involved in the act of painting, transfigured by cultural associations. 179pp, 99 reproductions including 45 full page colour plates.
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Artemisia Gentileschi was the greatest female artists of the Baroque age and one of the most brilliant followers of the great Caravaggio. As a young woman she was raped by her tutor, and then had to endure a seven month long trial during which she was brutally examined by the authorities. This very readable short biography tells us everything we need to know about the life of an extraordinary woman from a rough bit of Rome who survived multiple misogynies to become one of the most sought-after artists of the 17th century, and most celebrated artists of the Italian Baroque. She is currently being celebrated at the Royal Academy of Art in London in a special exhibition. A contemporary of Shakespeare and Rembrandt and friend of Galileo, she was a great woman in an age we usually associate with great men. The emotional directness of her paintings helped to make European art more human and approachable in the democratisation of culture known as the Baroque. She was a child prodigy trained by her artist father and could paint like an expert by the time she was 17. An obvious example of her pain and anger about her own rape is Judith and Holofernes, in which two women are depicted slaughtering a man. Artemisia escaped a hopeless marriage to live independently as the head of a household and brought up her daughter by herself, had at least one passionate affair, and became celebrated for her articulacy, talent and beauty. She worked for the Medici in Florence, and for Charles I in London. She could certainly dress the part and perform music like a born courtier, but she had in reality been born on the wrong side of a dung-spattered alley, growing up illiterate among artists who acted like thugs and who were in and out of prison. She never really lost her rough edge and was as real as her paintings. Painter, murderer and friend of her father, Caravaggio's sensational fusion of art and life enthralled her. A superb introduction, 128pp with 20 colour plates including her most famous works Daivd and Goliath and Susanna and the Elders.

'Some may look at the decay in these buildings as simply reflecting the destruction of the Soviet Bloc and the moral bankruptcy of a flawed ideological system. I perceive them as museums, the buildings and extant objects as beautiful exhibits. They are memorials to the ordinary people who once lived and worked there, but whose existence, whose stories are ephemeral; and at risk of being extinguished forever, if they are not somehow recorded.' Like a ghost hunt, this photographer has indeed recorded faded memories of the former Soviet Union his first trip to the abandoned town of Pripyat, Ukraine, in October 2012, the town that served the powerplant at Chernobyl. His second trip was to Bulgaria to see the abandoned Communist Monument up the beautiful Mount Buzludzha. It is as if life just stood still - with not a human in sight we see inside the dilapidated swimming pool at Pripyat Sports Centre, the strewn books at the Young Pioneer Camp Russia, with access to the dilapidated Teufelsberg Spy Station, East Germany, the Cosmonaut Memorial, Russia, with an old space suit, a satellite communication centre in Russia, the inside of an Antonov aircraft in Bulgaria, a dusty pool table and peeling walls of a sanatorium in Russia with discarded pill bottles, stirrup chairs and other contraptions for the poor inmates, filthy curtains half torn down and blood stained beds. Here is life and work behind the Iron Curtain and inside the Wünsdorf Soviet headquarters East Germany in imagery which becomes surreal and almost suffocating in its post-society, post-human post-life. There are military spaces which once directed such supreme power in the Cold War "now left in an alternative post-apocalyptic vacuum, weeping with the irony that mocks them." Yet there are glimmers of architectural genius with spiral staircases, beautiful wrought ironwork, mosaics, stained glass windows, gigantic proportions and above-cloud vistas, plus of course the prisons and functional aspects of the Soviet-built Communist structures. Breathtaking in its artistry is the monument of the Bulgarian Soviet Friendship hewn in stone with four identical military figures in a cubist style towering over a city. Sights we would never otherwise see, mostly in full page colour photos which Rebecca Litchfield has personally visited as she describes the forgotten historic locations and the ideologies that built them. Approx. 10" square and 200 pages.
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Combining aesthetic sensitivity, technical understanding and psychological insight, Neil Wells brings to life the story of Signature and the significant influence the periodical has had on fine art which has long been overlooked. While few people nowadays will have read it, no journal has greater claim to have stimulated the taste that became British neo-Romanticism in the mid 20th century. Its editor, publisher, patron and printer Oliver Simon was something of an enigma. Shy, he somehow knew 'everyone' in the London literary and arts scene during the 1930s and 40s. So outwardly conservative to be dubbed 'the archbishop' by Ben Nicholson, Oliver elicited adventurous art from his artist contributors to Signature. They were fellow travellers on a journey - young artists working in commercial art to pay the bills. Having mastered graphic techniques for applied purposes, they then began to apply what they had learned into their own artwork, then they went off to War. Those interested in the work of Paul Nash, John Piper, Graham Sutherland, Edward Bawden and Barnett Freedman will enjoy this handsomely illustrated book. Backed by prodigious research and replete with insights into aesthetic connections and artists' lives, the book deepens our understanding of a key strand in English Modernism. Reproduced in glorious colour are many examples such as pattern paper designed for Chatto & Windus, an Evelyn Dunbar illustration for Wuthering Heights, an Eric Gill sketch of Beatrice Warde at work, auto-lithographic advertisements with bold typography and colours, title pages from books, watercolour and pencil drawing, wood engraved patterns and a reproduction of Edmund Blunden's letter to the quiet maverick editor Oliver Simon. With satin pagemarker, hundreds of colour and other reproductions, many full page, a time capsule of images and ideas that still resonate creatively today. 208pp, 19.7 x 24cm. A beautiful quality publication with glamorous decorated endpapers.

With a beautifully decorated colourful slipcase of mushrooms and butterflies and flowers, slip out the heavyweight hessian cloth backed 24 x 32cm hardback and you are in for a treat. The Julio Mario Santo Domingo Collection, 50,000 plus books, manuscripts, posters, photographs and ephemera, was placed on long-term loan at Harvard University in the summer of 2012 by his family. The bulk of the collection explores drug use by individuals with emphasis on the 1800s and 1900s in America. Domingo (1957-2009) was a collector and visionary who filled his homes and warehouses with the world's greatest private collection related to the subjects of drugs, sex, magic and rock and roll. A library of more than 100,000 items, it contained everything from rare manuscripts and photos to posters, bottles, letters, opium pipes, pinball machines, newspaper articles, Allen Ginsberg's stars and stripes paper top hat, posters for Andy Warhol's films like Trash (1970) and Heat (1972), a large cardboard stand of Brigitte Bardot to small rather beautiful booklets, rare posters and book jackets, Japanese erotica or shunga, love letters and pictures of naked girlfriends. It included the work of diverse figures including Timothy Leary, Sigmund Freud, the Marquis de Sade, Charles Baudelaire, the Rolling Stones, Aleister Crowley and many more. There are huge full page images of vintage medicine boxes and bottles, some containing cocaine and the government report on Coca-Cola from 1907 on its chemical breakdown. One poster says Attention Coke Lovers - Freebase: The Greatest Thing Since Sex! A veritable cornucopia organised by the following chapters: Stones, Weed, Beat, Pop, Acid, Erotica, Coke, Revolt, Occult, Opium, Mots et Images and Rock. At once fantastical, informative and hallucinatory, this is a rare art book with a difference. 24 x 32cm, 480 pages dripping with quality colour images, a real trip down the rabbit hole of libraries.

Based on formerly unknown and hitherto unpublished archival documents, the volume offers new insights into the definitive role of Russian Avant-Garde artists who would disseminate their artistic values through numerous educational, research and experimental laboratories and institutions throughout Russia, reaching even the most remote backwaters of the Russian Empire. Avant-Garde art was something alien and impenetrable to the Bolshevik rulers in the early post-revolutionary years. Party leaders did not understand it, and certainly attached no great value to it, but tolerated and even found ways of using it. But the alliance was short lived, a unique period in which modern art was put into service of the state and the new government. The enthusiasm amongst the artists themselves was understandable - they went from being an underground movement to a force endowed with administrative powers to change artistic culture and achieve their agenda. The so-called leftists believed that it was their ideas and methods that would lie at the heart of a new artistic culture. This historical study looks at the various divisions and sections of the Visual Arts Department of IZO, a new type of museums of painterly culture unique in the world at the time, and a countrywide network of new museums and art schools. The architects and leaders of the programme included such figures as Vassily Kandinsky, Alexander Rodchenko, Kazimir Malevich, Vladimir Tatlin, Marc Chagall and Olga Rozanova, and the challenges they faced in their collaboration with the Soviet State. Fine full page colour examples throughout such as Natalya Goncharova's Spring: Petrovsky Park 1909-10 and Lev Yudin's Cubism. 148pp, 18.4 x 25.4cm.

A rare 1976 George Braziller first paperback edition which comes highly recommended, includes a brief biography of the artist, and reproduces in full page not only his drawings and preparatory sketches but full colour plates in a 23 page Photographic Album. There are 50 photos of Schiele, his family and friends in what was the third book by Dr Comini. She looks at the 'humanitarianism' of the unpeopled land and townscapes which was the artist's obsession, his pathos and melancholy allegories, and existential portraits. Egon Schiele died at the age of just 28, a meteor that flashed across the galaxy of Klimt, Kokoschka, Schönberg, Loos, Freud and Wittgenstein. Like many of his contemporaries, Schiele was disturbingly dualistic - his provocative explorations of erotica do not prepare the viewer for the tenderness revealed in his lyrical landscapes and town scenes. 20.3 x 28cm large softback, colour plates.