4 comments about An Illustrated Dictionary of Jewelry.

1. While I will admit that this book is very informative, I was slightly disappointed for the same reason I have experienced with some other jewelry books. Of all the pictures only a handful are in color. Always confusing to me why they do this because jewelry is one thing that you really need to see in color to appreciate. I would recommend this book for it's information but if you are looking for great color pictures to go along with the definitions I would pass on buying it.



2. I have a problem with a book whose first words are: "The first problem".



3. This book is wonderful! Visually stunning, some of the pictures are enough to make you drool! Filled with extremely well photographed color and B&W photos of museum quality pieces, used to illustrate the jewelry terms being defined. The definitions are well written, and reference related terms in a very smooth and easy to follow way. This book is a MUST if you are fond of jewelry! MORE than worth the money!



4. From A to Z, the best jewelry dictionary I've seen. Aside from looking something up, it gives you the opportunity to learn terms you've never heard before. Even if you've been in the business a long time. Fantastic. Every antique lover should have this book!

1 comments about Exhibit Labels: An Interpretive Approach: An Interpretive Approach.

1. Even though the information in this book is almost nine years old, it is still relevant and useful. People tell me so, and I find myself going back to see what I said when I get questions about label length, typesize, levels of information, or how long it takes to write. Do not buy the other book listed here, Making Museum Labels, because it is out of date (and out of print), and all the good content is in this one.

2 comments about Drawing the New Adventure Cartoons: Cool Spies, Evil Guys and Action Heroes.

1. I happened to walk into the book store last week where a good size crowd of youth and adults were gathered listening to a presentation about this book. The presenter and the book caught my eye and interest so I decided to take a close look and ended up purchasing the book. After 10 days of owning the book, I have no regrets. I spent hours this past weekend having fun creating numerous adventure style cartoon characters. With easy to follow examples accompanied by the hints Harts provides, it was quite enough guidance for me do dive into a new world of cartooning. I highly recommend this book to anyone who enjoys adventure character cartooning



2. This book was chock full of great drawings and instructions on how to draw in the new adventure style. It was easy to follow, easy to grasp but most importantly, enjoyable to read. I learned a lot and I also laughed a lot - tubby types. I loved the section on punching! Highly recommended.

No comments about The Art of the Brick - The Pictorial.

1 comments about ArtTalk, Student Edition.

1. I used a much older edition of this book in high school (it had a brown cover way back then). This text was good suppliment to the hands-on projects we did in class. It taught about art basics like types of meduim, technique, and touched on artists, famous works, and how to look at art. This is a great text to ensure students develop and hold an interest, love and understanding of art.

3 comments about Perspective as Symbolic Form.

1. Panofsky's book on perspective, Perspective as Symbolic Form, is a short book about the development of perspective from ancient perspective to the full, abstract space of an Alberti. This is interesting for a number of reasons, which are:

   a) ancient perspective is the perspective of angles, not of distances. This is hard to explain without a diagram, but basically an object at a 45 degree angle is 3/4 as large as an object at a 60 degree angle. This is in contrast to modern perspective, where size is in inverse proportion to distance, not angle. The idea that the ancients did not have perspective is simply false. Modern perspective as a third antiquity.

   b) the grid of perspective preceded the abstract space of the cartesian grid. The equivalence of extension and object or mass is already present in kpainting before it was ever devised by Descartes.

   c) the "vanishing point" is the "actual infinite," the infinite in this world. A theological point.

   d) modern perspective is actually a falsification of the "psychophysical" perception of the world, which is really curved. We live in a curved world. Comets tails, for instance, look curved even though they are straight. Buildings look curved likewise. See Vitruvius for the ancient discussion of this phenomenon.




2. One of the most interesting problems we had in our drawing class was regarding linear perspective and I picked up this book hoping that it would go in detail about perspective in historical and cultural context and it did!

   This book is written by and for educated man. The translation is great and I finished the book in one reading because it was so compelling. It is above and beyond the mere mechanics of horizon lines and vanishing points.

   The end notes are great too.

   A must read for all art lovers.




3. A comprehensive review of the thought behind mathematical perspective and how it differs from our empirical experience. Explains how the concept of the infinate has forever altered the way in which we represent space in pictures. Short essay with extensive end notes.

1 comments about Magical Secrets about Line Etching & Engraving: The Step-by-Step Art of Incised Lines, with an Appendix on Printing by Kathan Brown.

1. A must read for novice and experienced. The DVD accompanying it is as in other Crown Point books used worth the money on its own.

3 comments about Art Deco New York.

1. For lovers of the 1920s and 1930s this is a fabulous book. From New York's stunning architecture to the social lives of the rich and famous, everything associated with New York when Gotham was truly the center of it all, this book is a trip back in time. Historically rich and a visual treat! New York in its finest hour.



2. Art Deco New York by cultural historian and author David Garrard Lowe (who is also President of the Beaux Arts Alliance and lectures in such noted forums as the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, the American Academy in Rome, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York) offers a superbly organized and presented tour of seminal decorative designs during the transformative decades of the 20s and 30s when the art style known as "art deco" was affecting architecture, fashion, furniture, textiles, graphics, trains, automobiles, even Hollywood movie and Broadway theater stage sets. Profusely illustrated with period photography and artifacts, Art Deco New York is an impressive, "reader friendly", coffee-table book that would significantly enhance any personal, professional, academic, or community library architectural studies, art history, or American popular culture collection.



3. Garrard revives the restless, utopian, sensationalistic mood of the 1920s and '30s giving rise to the inimitable Art Deco style not only by pointing to buildings and their design features representing the style, but also by including posters, advertising, architectural drawings, furniture, and varied aspects of popular culture. The author evokes an understanding of Art Deco not mainly by discussion of aesthetics or art criticism, but by immersion in the spirit of the time between the World Wars, frequently with bountiful and in many cases, unfamiliar visual matter. The Empire State Building and Paul Manship's sculpture of Prometheus ringed by signs of the zodiac in Rockefeller Center are familiar Art Deco images, if often taken for granted. But designs of rooms, architectural details of buildings, trains and cars, and magazine covers and clothing fashion are often overlooked. Garrard demonstrates how deeply--thoroughly--Art Deco pervaded the culture; and points to elements of this vibrant, short-lived cultural period which continue.

4 comments about Story of Architecture.

1. I was looking for a readable inroduction to varied styles and history of architecture that was jargon free but not overly simplified. This book did the job well. Perhaps Glancey could have provided a bit more text to go along with the beautiful pictures, but he still informs.
   
   Recommended for newcomers or those with an incomplete education in the field of architecture.



2. THis is a very, very good introduction to the complexities of architecture, at about the freshman level of college. Starting with the dawn of civilization (in what is now Iraq), Glancey takes the reader on a tour of human history from the angle of what we build to worship, work, and live in. THe basics are covered extremely well, providing a context for further research.

   Glancey writes with grace and clarity, dividing each major movement into regular cuts of two pages, each with brilliant images. While this format shoehorns things into categories that are a bit too sharply delineated, that kind of reductionism is a necessity in this kind of survey. In the latter part of the book, some of the distinctions appear artificial, but then we are in a period where no dominating style - you get post-modern, decontructivist, and organic, etc. - has emerged and the author had to make some decisions regarding how to put them in the format. To his credit, Glancey does not ignore the exceptions and quirks.

   One thing I enjoyed about the book is that Glancey does not shy away from making strikingly loud judgements, many of which I did not share. Corbusier, he writes, "was the most inventive and poetic architect who ever lived." Now that is strong stuff and I would never have expected it in a routine survey! (While I can respect and understand what Corbusier did, I don't love it like Glancey.) But that is what makes this book more than a run of the mill overview - it adds flavor and stimulates. Also, while international, because Glancey is a Brit, much of it focuses on Britain and contemporary Europe, which provides a valuable contrast to more US-centric views.

   Recommended.




3. Great book to review the history of architecture, it is concise and well illustrated.



4. As a freshman architecture student, this book was exactly at my level. The photographs are splendid, and the dialogue informative. This book provides a complete history of architecture in every area of the world, as well as some theory. Great for anyone truly interested in architecture, but not an expert (yet!)

3 comments about Hero, Hawk, and Open Hand: American Indian Art of the Ancient Midwest and South.

1. This is a spectacularly beautiful book. Hundreds of exquisite photographs of Indian pottery and other pre-historic artifacts, plus maps, drawings, and paintings illustrate the text.
   
   The illustrations accompany about 20 essays on the Indians of southern and midwestern United States from archaic times until contact with Europeans. The essays vary in quality and interest, but most are well written in scholarly but accessible prose. The contributors include anthropologists, art historians, folklorists, and members of several Indian tribes. Footnotes and a substantial bibliography round out a scholarly and artistic book of real merit.
   
   Throughout the book the continuity of ancient Indian cultures with those known to the Europeans is emphasized. One of the most interesting essays concerns the people of Cahokia, the largest Northamerican archaelogical site dating from about 1200 AD, in which the author speculates about the identity of the inhabitants, relating them to present day Indian tribes. Other essays concern the Bread Dance of the Shawnee Indians -- written by a Shawnee -- and the cultural continuity from pre-historic to present day Caddo Indians. Hopewell, Poverty Point, Moundville, and other important pre-historic Indian cultures are also given meticulous attention.
   
   Smallchief



2. I saw the show in Chicago!!! Amazingly, the book, due to the excellent phothgraphy and printing comes close to the gallery experience. The text is insightful. A definite buy. I bought the book at the museum shop($60) and immediately purchased two copies for friends from my favorite bookseller - Mother Amazon!



3. The sheer number of gorgeous images in this book is breathtaking. But for many readers I suspect the most astonishing image might be a fairly simple one on page 17: a rendering of a orderly semicircle of structures facing a river, it is a city in Louisiana----in 1500 B.C. This book reveals Native American civilizations rivaling what we know of the Maya and Inca, but in the heartland of North America.
   
   In the south and Midwest a series of sophisticated cultures left behind artifacts and even structures that we are just now beginning to study and understand. For example, the Hopewell site in Ohio, where "the most dramatic" sacred structures were "geometric in form and combined circular, oval, square, octagonal, or other elements in compositions covering hundreds of acres."
   
   The artistry of the artifacts presented here is amazing, and this book has a generous selection of large, excellent photographs. But the prose is equally good: intelligent but intelligible, often with an interesting narrative. Even the occasional semiotic language is used as vocabulary rather than jargon. Not only does this book explore so much about these next-to-unknown cultures, but it provides an exemplary context of explaining a worldview shared by many Native cultures and peoples. Although this is a scholarly presentation based on a traveling art exhibit, it is pretty graceful about integrating contemporary Native views and information. It's only in recent years that scholars have taken the testimony of contemporary Native Americans about their own culture as seriously as they take their own theories about old artifacts that survived.
   
   For all of these reasons I count this book as instantly one of my most treasured.