“Hands down the wine book of the year.” —David McIntyre, Washington Post

“…paints a glorious picture of Bordeaux as seen through the skittish and mischievously observant eyes of Somerville and Ross – cousins and writing partners.” —Victoria Moore, The Telegraph

Journeying through the Medoc in the autumn of 1891, Anglo-Irish cousins and travelling companions, Edith Somerville and Martin Ross (aka Violet Florence Martin) bring their distinctive mélange of wry wit, acute observation and unabashed horror at the barefoot treading of Cabernet Sauvignon to this delightful account of vendangeurs lofty and low-born as they bring in the harvest in time-honoured fashion. Illustrated using Somerville’s equally delightful sketches, this is a story of two feisty ladies for whom anything remotely pretentious is fair game.

Better known for their tales of an Irish R. M. (resident magistrate), Somerville and Ross outraged their respective families – who referred to them ‘the Shockers’ – by combining travel writing with the fight for Women’s Suffrage. The contrast between the emancipated pair and the largely unreconstructed characters they encounter on their travels only serves to heighten the charm of an already indelibly charming book. 

The Classic Editions breathe new life into some of the finest wine-related titles written in the English language over the last 150 years. Although these books are very much products of their time – a time when the world of fine wine was confined mostly to the frontiers of France and the Iberian Peninsula and a First Growth Bordeaux or Grand Cru Burgundy wouldn’t be beyond the average purse – together they recapture a world of convivial, enthusiastic amateurs and larger-than-life characters whose love of fine vintages mirrored that of life itself. 

Coco Chanel revolutionised the fashion world with her timeless style that combined elegance and comfort. She was known for liberating women from the restrictive dresses of the time and offering them a new, more modern silhouette. Chanel bags are among the fashion house’s most important creations, especially the Chanel 2.55, which was launched in February 1955. This bag was one of the first to feature a shoulder strap, which made it particularly practical.

Istanbul represents a vast field for experimentation and dialogue between the wonderful examples of historical and traditional Turkish architecture and the new demands of contemporary design. In the 21st century the city of Istanbul began a new urban transformation process, aimed at becoming an important hub for trade and finance. Today, the Turkish metropolis can be defined as a megacity with the construction of new financial centres, shopping malls, and infrastructures such as airports, bridges and tourist ports.
The structural transformations in society have led to a shift in the urban morphology that, in turn, has generated not only social and cultural changes, but also an identity crisis in the city itself. Within this scenario, the guide not only offers a horizontal view of contemporary architecture, but also acts as a means for analysing new architectural directions and contemporary urban development in Istanbul. As well as the itineraries that feature selected buildings, both contemporary and historic, the guide includes critical essays that provide an analysis of the history, urban planning, and the future of the city.

During the three decades following the Second World War, and before the advent of personal computers, government investment in university research in North America and the UK funded multidisciplinary projects to investigate the use of computers for manufacturing and design. Designing the Computational Image, Imagining Computational Design explores this period of remarkable inventiveness, and traces its repercussions on architecture and other creative fields through a selection of computational designers working today.

Situating contemporary expressions of design in relation to broader historical, disciplinary, and technical frames, the book showcases the confluence, during the second half of the 20th century, of publicly funded technical innovations in software, geometry, and hardware with a cultural imaginary of design endowing computer-generated images with both geometric plasticity and a new type of agency as operative design artifacts.

How can we continue to feed a growing world population in a healthy and sustainable manner? Will we be able to make meals from a 3D printer? What will the role of supermarkets be in the years ahead? This timely book by two experienced retail professionals addresses the future of food, with an insightful overview of trends ranging from urban agriculture to sea farms, cultured meat to applied artificial intelligence, and hybrid supermarkets to new digital platform models.

This publication is the second edition of this contemporary guide to the architecture of Hamburg, Germany’s second largest city and one of its most fascinating destinations.

The guide’s introduction featuring three critical treatises outlines the historic and urbanistic profile of the city. The selection of 74 projects, organised in 5 itineraries, provides a full-immersion in architecture, allowing the reader to dwell on the functional, typological and compositive aspects of the buildings, which are rendered even more legible by images and technical drawings that supplement the descriptions. This volume also contains useful information and advice, making it easier and quicker for readers to get around the city and truly capture the essence of the place even in a short visit.

This is more than simply an architecture guide: it is also and above all an invitation to travel.

The Smart Traveller’s Wine Guide series is written in collaboration with Club Oenologique, with comprehensive listings of restaurants, hotels, cafés and bars, points of wider cultural interest such as art galleries and museums, which wineries you can visit, how to read a Swiss wine list, Swiss winemakers’ favourite restaurants and more.

Life Around the Sea is an odyssey of Australia and a deep dive into some of the remarkable individuals who have been transformed by the sea’s enduring embrace; those whose hearts beat in unison with the rhythmic swells of the sea. In this beautiful publication, you’ll encounter people from all walks of life, from fearless big wave riders, and surfers who first felt the tender caress of a wave in their childhood, to artists drawn to the coastline to bring its ancient beauty to life, and shapers who expertly craft boards for wave seekers around the globe.

Be transported to Australian coastal villages, hinterland hideaways, remote beaches, and solitary shaping bays that form the backdrop to the unique lives of these people. Their personal stories, told by surf writer Alex Workman and captured by Russell Ord’s evocative and breathtaking photography, are a testament to the boundless beauty, mystery, and inspiration that the ocean bestows upon us all.

In this new volume of the Watch Book series, successful author Gisbert L. Brunner focuses on Swiss watch history and the watch industry, and in particular on the house of Oris, because what could be a more fitting connection than that of the leading expert when it comes to mechanical timepieces with the watch manufactory that is one of the few to produce exclusively mechanical watches. Founded in 1904, the company stands out in many ways in the luxury world of horology, it is run independently and not by a large corporation, it is valued as a down-to-earth brand and – in an industry that is not necessarily known for this – it focuses on sustainability, true to the motto: “Things have to make sense”. 

Of course, technology should not be missing from this volume; after all, Oris has developed 280 different calibres in its company history and manufactured them in its own factories. Companions have their say and the best watch models of the company’s almost 120-year history are presented in this usual high-quality volume.

The North Atlantic Cities by Charles B. Duff is a book on urban development and urban life masquerading as a book on architecture. It is the story of 400 years of architecture and urban development in four countries: the Netherlands, Great Britain, Ireland and the United States, particularly cities like New York, Boston, Washington D.C., Philadelphia, Baltimore, Savannah, to name a few. The author starts with a kind of building few others have considered – the row house, which could very well be the key to understanding why many of the world’s great cities look and function as they do. From the 1600’s to today as the author theorises, this innocuous-seeming housing type is perhaps the antidote to suburban sprawl, urban decay and the worst catastrophes of global climate change

“Eating less meat, but better quality: that is the future of traditional craft butchery. Dierendonck today stands for craft, terroir and passion. With this book I want to pay tribute to all farmers who raise their animals with respect for nature, and to everyone working in the butchery trade, working day and night in cold rooms, surrounding by four walls.” – Hendrik Dierendonck

Hendrik and his father Raymond Dierendonck have grown in recent years into the benchmark for everything to do with meat. They supply only the highest quality and are followed by any number of top chefs. Dierendonck is one of the pioneers of the international ‘nose-to-tail’ philosophy, in which literally every part of the slaughtered animal is utilised. He has specialised particularly in the processing and maturing of exceptional meat, including from the Belgian Red cattle breed from West Flanders.

Enjoy the most delicious classic cuts from the butcher’s counter; wonder at the craft and skill of the butcher; and learn to process and prepare meat in the Dierendonck style from the dozens of adventurous and timeless recipes in this book. The Butcher’s Book has grown into a true cult publication in recent years and has now been supplemented with more than 20 achievable, refined recipes from his starred restaurant Carcasse.

With text contributions from Hendrik Dierendonck, René Sépul, Marijke Libert and Stijn Vanderhaeghe, and high-class photographs by Thomas Sweertvaegher, Piet De Kersgieter and Stephan Vanfleteren.

Anatolian Tribal Rugs 1050-1750: The Orient Stars Collection, a limited-edition companion to Orient Stars: A Carpet Collection (Stuttgart and London, 1993), presents 33 early rugs and textiles acquired between 1993-2006 by Heinrich and Waltraut Kirchheim. In this volume, Michael Franses discusses these exceedingly rare unpublished carpets with reference to their carbon-14 dating as well as comparative examples, and offers new commentary and dating for 43 of the carpets from the original book. Other contributors include: Anna Beselin, Walter Denny, Eberhart Herrmann, Klaus Kirchheim, Garry Muse and Friedrich Spuhler.

In After Us The Deluge, Dutch photographer Kadir van Lohuizen, co-founder of the photo agency NOOR Images, shows the consequences of rising sea levels for mankind. He travelled to six different regions in the world (Greenland, US, Bangladesh, the Netherlands, UK, and the Pacific) and captured the effects of global warming. The resulting photo essay is thought-provoking, illuminating, and aesthetically impactful. Each chapter includes a contribution from a local expert that addresses the specific problems in their region.

“This book celebrates teamwork and collaboration over the individual, a refreshing take on a practice which is given to celebrating starchitects.” —Peter H. Miller, Traditional Building
In 1897, Frank Lloyd Wright, Robert Spencer, Dwight Perkins, and Myron Hunt, all young architects just starting out in practice, shared office space in Chicago. This book is both a history of that brief period and an attempt to assess the extent to which they collaborated on their architectural designs and on the creation of architectural theory which would impact a half century of architectural design. While there is little firsthand documentation of the time spent in their shared loft office in Steinway Hall, this study engages in a side by side comparison of projects they each designed while working there. Overlapping ideas, design similarities, and an analysis of their subsequent work, all suggest that these men formed a creative “collaborative circle” of friends, who jointly developed ideas later claimed as the work of Frank Lloyd Wright. This is a book about artistic collaboration at a time when discussions of art and architectural history are still largely dominated by the belief that significant works are created by the lone artistic genius.
At the turn of the last century Spencer, Perkins, Hunt, and Wright were part of a community of architects who were all active members of the Chicago Architectural. Steinway Hall, an office building designed by Dwight Perkins, became a home to Chicago’s architectural community with as many as 50 different architects renting space in that building at the turn of the last century. Based on Real Estate Directories from 1897 through 1910 the book includes a listing of the architects that worked and interacted there. Also included are brief biographies of Spencer, Perkins, and Hunt. Excepting Hunt, none of these men have been the subject of individual publications. While Frank Lloyd Wright’s life and work have been extensively chronicled, this book reexamines the period between Wright’s arrival in Chicago in 1887 and his move into the loft office in Steinway Hall in 1897.

Glaciers in the Alps and on Greenland have been melting away slowly for decades. Global warming has increased the speed of their retreat drastically in recent years. Swiss geophysicist Alfred de Quervain (1879-1927) carried out the first survey of the Clariden glacier in the Swiss canton of Glarus and initiated and led important scientific expeditions on Greenland in 1909 and 1912.

Swiss artist Martin Stützle and photographer Fridolin Walcher also link Glarus with Greenland. Both have made the Swiss glaciers the subject of their work and, in May 2018, joined a Swiss research campaign investigating the current state of the glaciers on the world’s largest island. The photographs and prints they produce reflect an intense awareness of scientific facts, yet they strike the viewer emotionally and aesthetically.

This book blends the essence of glaciological and geophysical research with contemporary art and picks up on Alfred de Quervain’s legacy. Prints and photographs are featured alongside three easy-to-read essays offering a concise survey of the findings of the 2018 expedition. A fourth essay comments on Stützle’s and Walcher’s works and explores current trends in climate art.

Text English, German and Kalaallisut (Greenlandic).

Jewelry’s Shining Stars: The Next Generation brings together 45 new women designers who have liberated the way we view and buy jewellery. This compilation of talented women, who hail from around the globe, use techniques such as enamelling, engraving, and creating nuanced textural details in wax models, to bend the rules and break with tradition. While some work with their own hands, whether schooled or self-taught, challenging themselves at the bench, others work alongside artisans to reinvigorate the old school into relevant yet enduring pieces.

The book’s stunning photographs offer a glimpse into each designer’s different aesthetic and are accompanied by the jeweller’s own words, revealing what drives their approach and giving us an insight behind these innovators. With reverence for quality, style, and technique, these 45 talented jewellers are creating today’s collectibles and shaping jewellery’s future.

Traditional thought fused with modern science when Hiroshima’s nuclear annihilation on August 6, 1945, proved the interdependence of space and time. Since the war, Japanese architects have probed the relativity of spacetime through critical debates, pivotal theories, and consequential buildings. The Hypospace of Japanese Architecture pushes past clichés of an exotic Japan to confront the modernity of an island nation whose habit of importing foreign ideas is less about assimilation than transformation, less a process of indigenisation than one of cultural invention. The realisation that buildings are dynamic events — phenomena of space-in-time, not inert objects outside time — continues to inform Japanese architecture and suggests how we can rethink the history, theory, and practice of architecture more generally.

“…contributions from hundreds of people in public life — many famous, others (like me) less so — all offering bite-sized lessons for life.” —  The Times

‘Wisdom is sold in the desolate market where none come to buy,’ wrote William Blake. It is a rare, precious commodity. Difficult to come by. Hard to acquire.

The aim of The Book of Nuggets is to draw together in one place over 350 ‘Nuggets’ of wisdom which others have found important in their lives. Some of the contributors are well known, others less so, but all were generously offered by people from all walks of life. But regardless of the finders’ status or fame, these jewels have brought solace, succour and serenity along the way. The book’s compiler, Juliet Solomon, hopes they might do the same for you.

Juliet chose ‘Nuggets’ of wisdom as the theme of this collection in tribute to her late mother, Judith Solomon. Judith died of end-stage renal failure, and all proceeds from the sale of this book will go to increasing wider public awareness of kidney disease, and to raise much needed funds for research into the condition, its prevention and for the amelioration of the suffering of patients living with kidney disease, and their loved ones.

This sumptuous book offers a behind-the-scenes look at the Grand Prix world, featuring rare on-track moments, fashion shows and extravagant parties that make up the glamour and excitement of this elite sport. A stunning collection of over 100 high-quality photographs that capture the flair of Grand Prix racing – from vintage black and white shots to vibrant colour photos of prized cars, legendary drivers and glamorous celebrities.  

High-quality photography captures the essence of a fascinating lifestyle full of beauty and prestige.

In 2023, The Little Prince will celebrate 80 years of unsurpassed success. One of the most published and translated books in the world (by some accounts, second only to The Bible). Never before have its themes of loneliness, loss, love, and friendship been more relevant. While The Little Prince is packaged for children, it is appreciated and celebrated by parents and friends. This edition includes the entire, unmodified, original text by Antoine de Saint-Exupery, first published in English after his exile to the U.S. in 1943 – accompanied by exclusive illustrations from Mondo Mombo, a well-known, Italian, children’s-art firm founded by Claudia Bordin. Ages 7 plus

A captivating journey through the collages of the legendary Antwerp-Six fashion designer, Walter Van Beirendonck. Dive into a selection of original and inspiring collages, tracing Van Beirendonck’s creative journey from his early days at the Antwerp Fashion Academy right up to the present. Cut the World Awake is a wild ride through Van Beirendonck’s imaginative evolution, showcasing his bold and boundary-pushing style like never before. Whether you’re a fashion fanatic or just love a good visual feast, this collection offers a vibrant glimpse into the mind of a true mastermind in fashion design.

The Veronese wine regions of Soave and Valpolicella – home to Amarone – are currently producing some of the world’s most drinkable quality wines. But both regions still struggle with a reputation for cheap, poor-quality wines brought about through industrial-scale production during the economic depression following the Second World War. In Amarone and the Fine Wines of Verona, Italian wine specialist Michael Garner traces a shift in focus towards new levels of quality driven by a generation of producers inspired by the area’s outstanding potential for producing fine wine.
Both regions produce versatile wines which, as well as being both deliciously drinkable and relatively affordable, have the flavour and structure to accompany a wide range of foods. In Valpolicella an appassimento wine, the famed Amarone, has gained comparable status to Barolo and Brunello di Montalcino, while Soave overlaps with the tiny denomination of Lessini Durello, where sparkling wine is produced from the rare, local white grape Durella.
Garner begins Amarone and the fine wines of Verona with a summary of the region’s history, before detailing its geography, grape varieties and approach to both viticulture and winemaking, leading into a discussion of each denomination’s character and wine styles. A cross-section of around 100 producers provides a capsule profile of each, along with analysis of some of their best and most distinctive wines.
For students of wine, those in the wine business and wine adventurers alike, Amarone and the Fine Wines of Verona provides a gateway to a sorely misunderstood wine region.

Great sports figures are the modern equivalent of heroes. An history of sport is necessarily a story of individuals: tales of redemption and emancipation from modest upbringings, stories of sacrifice and success. Each volume of WATCH, We are the champions, the new series from Officina Libraria, will narrate the history of a sport through 30 engaging biographies of its great champions. And since the publishing house is specialised in high-quality illustrated books, the riveting stories written by Giorgio Martignoni are illustrated by the masterful hand of Roberto Ronchi, in a colourful explosion of energy, icons of those magic moments in sports, from the goal that assigns a Champions League in the last minutes to the climb on the famous Alpe d’Huez, from the three-pointer that decides a collegiate championship to the knockout hook of a boxing match. The biographies of thirty great champions are exciting as a run toward the goal posts, they keep you holding your breath as in those seconds that precede a penalty kick, and in each of them there is a curious aspect, an heroic moment and a touch of poetry. The books starts with the great footballers of the pre-war era, such as Sindelar and Meazza, to finish with today’s idols, Lionel Messi and Cristiano Ronaldo, and those of all the champions that have gifted us with those unforgettable moments, at the stadium or in front of the small screen. Who doesn’t remember Pele or Maradona? Who has never heard of George Best or Cruyff? Beckenbauer or Jascin?