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.

Award winning photographer Art Wolfe has worked in hundreds of locations and this is THE book of his career recording with great sensitivity a rapidly vanishing natural world. He has taken an estimated two million images in his lifetime and travels nearly nine months out of the year photographing new projects and giving inspirational presentations to educational, conservation and spiritual groups. In 1978 he published his first book 'Indian Baskets of the Northwest Coast' and worked for the world's top magazines such as National Geographic, Smithsonian, Audubon, GEO and Terre Sauvage. Magazines all over the world publish his photographs and stories and he is known for having the broadest range of excellence of any nature photographer. He has said, 'It is in the wild places, where the edge of the earth meets the corners of the sky, the human spirit is fed.' Often haunting compositions, his wildlife portraits show cormorants sitting being petted by Chinese men on a gaslit raft at night, the piercing brown eyes of a Tuareg man in Morocco, the watchful Bengal tiger, ghostly gam trees in Australia, the Milky Way in spectacular colour behind two boulders, naked Bumi children splashing their way into the sea, the painted bodies of Karo Ethiopian tribesmen and the colourful beads and rainbow colours of the costumes and necklaces worn by the Maasai Mara tribespeople. An adult male lion stares vacantly into his camera, a plains zebra amidst white bearded wildebeest, greater and lesser flamingos pictured in Kenya and gemsbok African elephant, springbok and zebras all pictured together in the Etosha National Park, Namibia. There are colourful carpets, Dogon hunters and a spectacular series of gatefold pages including Moroccan architecture and women husking corn, landscapes of unbelievable beauty such as the Antarctic Peninsula, blue glaciers in Iceland, colourful wild flowers and snowy owlets in Alaska, a penguin stranded on a small iceberg, Arctic wolves in Canada, polar bears and cubs in Manitoba Canada, eagle hunters in Mongolia, whirling dervishes and fairy chimneys in Cappadocia Turkey, a crescent moon or a bright blue and red sky. Mountains and clear lakes, the reds, greens and yellows of giant sequoia in California, a rippling patchwork of colourful fields, a bison covered in icicles in Yellowstone and the Sahara Desert in Mali with a long line of camels. The book is organised by Mountain, Polar and Subpolar, Desert and Savannah, Ocean and Island and Tropical and Subtropical. Wolfe's images take us through the world's ecosystems and geographical regions in a vivid display of the fragility and interconnectivity of life on Earth and the book is undeniably breathtaking, an elegantly crafted masterpiece that will thrill collectors of nature photography. 396 enormous pages with dozens of gatefold pullouts, 28 x 3.8 x 35.5cm, spectacular colour.

At the end of the First World War, the German doctor Hans Prinzhorn began collecting the paintings, drawings and sculpture of schizophrenic patients that would astonish and delight the world. The Prinzhorn collection as it was called inspired a new generation of artists, including Paul Klee, Max Ernst and Salvador Dalí. What the doctor could not have known however was that these works would later be used to prepare the ground for mass-murder. Adolf Hitler soon perceived Modernism's interest in madness as a threat - a Jewish-Bolshevik plot aimed at degrading the Aryan soul. Hitler was a failed artist of the old school and he stripped modernist works from German galleries and shamed them in exhibitions of 'Degenerate Art' alongside the 'insane' material of Prinzhorn's collection. He ridiculed the avant-garde and destroyed the cream of Germany's modern art collections. This action was mere preparation in Hitler's onslaught against so-called 'degenerate' people, and Prinzhorn's artists were caught up in both. By 1941, Hitler's regime had killed 70,000 psychiatric patients. It was an extermination campaign that served as the prototype for the Final Solution. Bringing together inspirational art history, genius and madness, and the wanton cruelty of the fanatical 'artist-Führer', this astonishing story lays bare the culture war that paved the way for Hitler's first extermination programme, the psychiatric Holocaust. 16 pages of colour and black and white photos and four pages of maps and list of names of the principal artists. 304pp in large softback.

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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Arthur Rackham (1867-1939) received enormous success with his illustrations for Washington Irving's Rip Van Winkle (1905) which led him to illustrating another 45 major works including such classics as Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, Aesop's Fables and various works by Shakespeare. His imaginative and distinctive characters as well as his command of watercolours and Indian ink made his work not only unique, but dreamlike when he rendered fantastical creatures like fairies and goblins and recreated classic scenes in works like The Night Before Christmas. Here is his The Hare and the Tortoise, Jack and the Beanstalk, the story of The Three Bears, Who Stole the Tarts?, The Fairies are Exquisite Dancers, The Duke's Oak, Tom Make My Small Elves Coats from A Midsummer Night's Dream, and the hookah-smoking caterpillar from Alice, all reproduced in this huge softback. Printed on high quality paper, the 45 vibrant illustrations for you to colour in each has a suggestion of how to start colouring as well as key information such as title and date. You can use a wide variety of pens from gel and pencil to pigment and crayons, ballpoint and rollerball to highlighters, although it is best to avoid very heavy felt pens. Each page is perforated near the spine so you can tear out the artwork and frame it. 96pp, softback, 25.4cm squared.

A National Gallery publication which looks at the revolutionary achievement of the youthful Titian which was made possible by his interaction with four great artists at the start of his career. Schooled by Bellini, associated with Giorgione, competed with Sebastiano del Piombo, he came into early contact with the work of Dürer. Here Antonio Mazzotta provides a fresh view of this brief and extraordinary episode in the history of art, focussing on Titian's great 'Flight into Egypt' and related paintings in the National Gallery. Titian is acknowledged as the greatest of the 16th century Venetian painters, best known for his portraits, mythological pictures and religious subjects, yet by studying the work of Dürer's paintings of plants, animals and landscape, Titian caused a sensation in Venice in the first decade of the 16th century. This is a beautiful and now rare 88 page large square softback art exhibition catalogue from 2012 which we have been lucky enough to discover in the USA and import. Rich with colour throughout with images of the Madonna and child on a donkey, foxes, wolves, a pastoral concert, archangel plus examples from Dürer et al.

LEGO Minifigures are hugely popular with their tiny expressive faces and arms and props and this one is special because it belongs to the magical wizarding world of Hogwarts, Beauxbatons and Durmstrang where students learn how to cast spells, brew potions and battle monsters that live in secret underground dungeons. Find out which witch is one-quarter Veela and which wizards drive a magical bus. Find out about some of the students Harry Potter meets like the Muggle-born witch Hermione Grainger and how in their sixth year, Harry and Ron Weasley are on the Gryffindor Quidditch team together. All the characters and creatures and dark wizards are here like Helga Hufflepuff, Cornelius Fudge and Dobby in this laugh-out-loud funny guidebook packed with fun facts from the films. Includes one Voldemort minifigure with a cheeky grinning face, white body and flexible arms, wizard wands and a long green snake. 128 page softback, packed with colour plus minifigure box set, suit ages 7+ and CE safety approved.