Bridge Hunt

Bridge Hunt chronicles a young man’s unforgettable quest to discover the 42 revolutionary bridges designed by Robert Maillart, a pioneering Swiss engineer and architectural luminary, between 1899 to 1940. Many of these graceful structures still hide along remote back roads and alpine valleys, while a few iconic landmarks endure in Bern, Geneva, and Zurich.Maillart’s breathtaking Salginatobel Bridge was recently designated as a Swiss heritage site for its national significance. It has also been named an International Historic Civil Engineering Landmark by the American Society of Civil Engineers.This visually rich travelogue presents the only complete published collection of photos and descriptions of all Maillart’s extant European bridges, capturing his unique engineering artistry. It will appeal to civil engineers, architects, and students, as well as travellers, adventure-seekers and anyone fascinated by treasures that unite rather than divide our world.More than a precious record of a unique chapter in infrastructure history, the book is at heart a human story. Through one young man’s eyes, we rediscover Maillart’s timeless bridges, which embody the soaring of imagination transformed into structures that bring people together.

The Steinway That Wouldn't Budge (Confessions of a Piano Tuner)

Peter Tryon's Confessions of a Piano Tuner is a charming, autobiographical tale of life spent travelling around rural East Anglia tuning pianos. But this is also a personal account from boyhood of how music and more specifically the mechanics of that wonderful instrument, fired early imagination and gave rise to a lifelong fascination and involvement with the piano.As much a social commentary on people, the anecdotes about different characters are filled with humour and the text is light and easy to read. The unspoiled beauty and charm of East Anglia provides a perfect backdrop to Peter Tryon's account, all combining together to make this a book that you won't want to put down.

My Life Photographing Royalty and the Famous

A fascinating insight into the real lives of royal figures, state leaders and Hollywood stars, through the eyes of photographer Reginald Davis - awarded an MBE in 2008 for his work. Reginald shares both his photographs and the experiences he had with his many subjects around the globe. The text reflects on the kindness of Queen Elizabeth II and the Prince Philip's sense of humour, the exotic Imperial world he was plunged into when photographing the Shah of Iran, his most difficult project with Princess Grace of Monaco, the beauty of Princess Paola of Belgium, the glamour of diamond-clad Sophia Loren, and much more. Reginald's work has graced the pages of most big media outlets, in this country and around the world. Now 92, he continues to release his pictures for publication worldwide from the precious library he started in the 1950s.  

How To Photograph Garden Plants and Wildlife Through Four Seasons

Arnold Wilson is a professional biologist and an award-winning photographer, and both these skills are shown to their best advantage in How to Photograph Garden Plants and Wildlife through Four Seasons.As the title suggests, this book is a comprehensive guide to all aspects of garden photography throughout the year. Its early chapters discuss the technical intricacies of the camera and the many models currently available, before giving an impressively practical overview of the vital, but often misunderstood, subject of photographic composition.The next four chapters cover each of the seasons in turn, explaining what techniques to use to get the best out of flowers and other plants and how to produce appealing and unusual action shots of garden wildlife.Throughout, Arnold Wilson very much practises what he preaches. The book is illustrated with over 200 of his magnificent photographs – becoming, in effect, a showcase for the glories to be found in a British garden.How to Photograph Garden Plants and Wildlife through Four Seasons is an indispensable guide for every nature photographer, from aspiring to accomplished.

Beyond The Face

Delve into the exquisitely creative mind of award-winning Australian make-up artist Chereine Waddell, as she reveals and conceals childhood memories re-constructed through over sixty unique make-up designs. Each mesmerising image captures distinct moments in time for the artist, who provides vivid descriptions of the emotional junctures that promoted the inspiration for the painting of each face. Intimate and emotive, Beyond the Face is a book for make-up artists, creatives or indeed anyone seeking a very real and raw stimulus for their own creative ignitions.

The Professional Approach to Sculpting the Human Figure

The Professional Approach to Sculpting The Human Figure is the first book by Andrew Sinclair MRSS SWAC, recognised as a master of world-class figurative sculpture.
It is based on Andrew’s ground-breaking Sinclair Method, as taught at The Sculpture School, which completely transforms the building and creation of Contemporary Realist sculpture. This method is revolutionising the approach to sculpture, also acting as a powerful source of knowledge, enabling students searching for excellence to become professional masters of their art.
This book deals with the foundations of good figurative sculpture and offers a profound understanding of measurement, anatomy, design and composition in an easy to understand format that will inspire established sculptors and beginners alike.
So if you want to raise your game and lift your sculpture talents to a professional level – this book is dynamite! Consider it food for the sculptural soul.

Past Sounds

This is a book about classical music – for people who say they love music “but don’t understand how it works”, as well as for performers and music students of all ages.
Proposing that deeper enjoyment begins with an understanding of music’s basic structures, the book describes how the simple template of earlier dance-songs was adapted by composers writing music for instruments. The instrumental sonata became one of the great formal frameworks of western music: in symphonies, concertos, chamber music and solo sonatas, it dominated concert music for some 250 years – yet it is little understood by many music lovers. To simplify this vast field, Past Sounds singles out for study “sonatas” for piano trio – piano, violin and ’cello. These instruments have well-contrasted and easily identifiable sounds, and as the story unfolds the reader is introduced to many rarely heard but beautiful works for piano trio.
This is a lively, clearly-written narrative as well as a handbook for subsequent listening. The book has two distinctive features. Firstly, technical terms are carefully explained, and for those not familiar with music notation, audio clips in an accompanying website reproduce the actual sound of the music described. Secondly, in a broad historical sweep from mid-18th to 20th centuries, the development of the sonata is followed in its context of contemporary arts and literature – demonstrating how the sonata idea of classical music well deserves to be understood and valued as a western cultural archetype alongside other great artistic and literary forms.

New Realism in Contemporary Israeli Painting

Art today can be whatever one wants it to be: a rotting cadaver, a photograph of someone else’s photograph, a banana… In this post-modern age of post-truth, of social media and the selfie, when everyone has a high-resolution digital camera at their fingertips, one wonders what would possess a talented artist to sit for days, weeks, often months, to paint a portrait of a friend or a landscape of home. Today, a group of 20 or so remarkable painters have revived a fascinating style of realistic painting, and in Israel of all places, where realistic art has never played any significant role. Their brand of realism is not mundane photographic realism, but rather it is an intensified sort of realism, a kind of hyper-realism. This book offers an initial explanation as to what these artists are doing, and how they are doing it.

My Tiny Black Book of Secrets

Technology is moving so rapidly in quantum leaps... 

I cannot even catch my breath following it

We get blindfolded when so entangled with the trivial

Do we ever stop for a bit and wonder, what kind of illusion we are living in...? 

A new hybrid species is evolving among us...

Smoothly numbing us...

Making us dependable

Less and less indispensable 

A.I. is catching up with us 

Are we ready? Scary but true 

Siri ends up being my best friend. 

Every Flower Has Its Place

Embark on an enchanting journey of artistic innovation in Every Flower Has Its Place. Acclaimed floral artist Graham King takes you on a visual odyssey to intriguing and uncommon settings, where he brings to life his extraordinary floral arrangements. Captured in striking detail by professional photographer Stephen Barney, each composition showcases the rich textures and exquisite craftsmanship that are King’s signature style. Page after page, allow yourself to be inspired and captivated by the endless possibilities of floral design when blended with unconventional crafting techniques. This book isn’t merely a collection of images, it’s an invitation to explore your own creative landscape, guided by the breathtaking work of a master artist.

Art, Design, Craft, Beauty and All Those Things…

Responding to many recent calls for redress and restitution, Richardson summarises the historical and current situation and attributes its problematics to the fact that theorists and historians have taken the concept art as a generic that includes both design and craft – which are actually and validly distinguishable from art by application of the concept function/al ­– or else ignored the two entirely. Considering the concept function/al, he maintains, calls into question the view that the three may be sub-classes of the one class: whereas in a work of art, typically there is a resolution of the tension between form and content, in works of design and craft the resolution is between form and function. How this recognition can clarify the issue informs the entire book.

The book’s other major thesis is the realisation that aesthetic values are inherently human and that, therefore, they apply not only to art but to life in general. Far from being frivolous or a mere ‘emotion’, the aesthetic is a sense of equivalent psychic status to sight and hearing ­and, like them, is employed at almost every moment of our daily lives – which fact grounds art, design and craft deeply in human life. This is reflected in the universal use of the human form (including the exhibition of sexual characteristics) in art.

The eternal conflict between making art and making a living from making art is examined and contrasted to the rarely-recognised, but positive, role of design in planning and industry.

Richardson also critiques common theories of representation and composition, including ‘creativity’, Albertian perspective and scientific and geometric theories of beauty and composition; also the relevance of the camera and the computer in the field.

A Clarinet Almanac

More than 60 years’ experience in playing the clarinet has led to a very personal and idiosyncratic review of the repertoire. From the point of view of being both a player and a programmer the author has endeavoured to find works for unusual combinations involving the clarinet. This book includes a few orchestral solos and several vocal works (both chamber and operatic), but it is focussed on chamber music and includes gems from the repertoire for the standard wind quintet. The clarinet features as a solo instrument, in duos with a surprisingly large variety of instruments and in mixed trios, quartets and so on to larger ensembles. During the course of one year the reader will be exposed to 366 works, probably some unfamiliar, by 245 different composers. The author hopes it will whet the appetites of students, teachers and concert organizers alike.