Despite its trademark transparency, the Corum Golden Bridge is a wristwatch full of mystery. This new book describes the iconic linear timepiece’s fascinating history including the innovative mechanical invention conceived by a nonconformist autodidact and the difficult technical breakthroughs by two like-minded personalities needed to achieve the dream wristwatch. This story, chock-full of narrative substance, begins in Switzerland of the late 1970s, at a time when electronic timekeeping was threatening to overtake the magical mastery of mechanical ticks and tocks. The Golden Bridge, spanning the gap between mechanics and art, is an integral part of this era as luxury watchmaking teetered on the brink of extinction. The Golden Bridge additionally helped usher in the era of the independent watchmaker, as its very creation was rooted in shedding light on the work of the watchmaker in a way that no other timepiece before or after it ever would.

“It’s very easy to please others, but very hard to please yourself.” Such is the byword of Vincent Calabrese, one of the best-known creative watchmakers in the world today.  Throughout his life he has never stopped trying to surpass himself.  His famous creations (including those relating to the tourbillon and the karussel) have made a decisive contribution to the revitalisation of the Swiss watch industry, and his watches demonstrate his unparalleled boldness as well as his aesthetic sensitivity. But in these pages the reader will above all meet with a rare personality.  Born into a poor family in Naples, Vincent has earned a prominent place in the watchmaking world.  It is not just to his innovations, whose secrets he reveals in this book, that he owes his position. Vincent’s legacy comes every bit as much from his fierce determination, his philosophical and ethical standards, and his legendary broadsides, directed as much at the profession itself as at the industry as a whole.

A great American novelist, illustrated by a great American artist – now available in a collectable two-volume set.

In 1936, the Heritage Press, a publisher of fine editions, commissioned Norman Rockwell to illustrate Mark Twain’s Adventures of Tom Sawyer; four years later, they asked him to illustrate The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn as well. For each book, Rockwell created eight full-colour paintings and numerous pen-and-ink drawings, the product of extensive on-the-ground research in Twain’s hometown of Hannibal, Missouri. Famously, Rockwell even tried to buy some Hannibal residents’ old clothes, to dress his models in.

For years, the Rockwell editions of Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn have been unavailable in stores. Now, Abbeville Press is proud to reissue them as a handsome new clothbound set. The colour plates are reproduced from new photography of Rockwell’s original paintings, the typesetting has been done anew to a high standard, and new introductions – illustrated with Rockwell’s rarely seen preliminary sketches – examine this unique encounter between two legendary chroniclers of America.

Also available: Treasure Island and Kidnapped boxed set ISBN 9780789214089

A head-to-head comparison of the two greatest soccer stars of their generation – and perhaps of all time.

One, diminutive and reserved; the other, tall and theatrical. One with six Ballons d’Or, and the other with five. There’s no doubt about it – Lionel Messi and Cristiano Ronaldo are the best. But which one is better? This lively book compares every aspect of the legendary rivals’ careers, to let the reader decide. It compares their stats, including their ten years of matchups in El Clásico, their club trophies, and their individual awards and milestones. It analyses their style of play, and how it has evolved throughout their careers. And, it looks at how their rivalry continues off the field, in terms of endorsement deals, social media followings, and philanthropic endeavors. Packed with colour photos of the champions in action, Messi and Ronaldo will spark discussion among both players’ partisans.

“Erudite, while still being fun to read.” — Professor Tim Neild, physiologist and medical educator

“A triumph of Social History in the Georgian period.” — Dr Nigel Cooke FRCP, physician and ceramic historian

This is the first biography and reference book dedicated to Samuel Percy, a modeller who produced an impressive oeuvre of wax portraits and tableaux in the mid-to-late eighteenth and early nineteenth century. Based in part on the author’s own substantial collection of Percy waxes, this book follows Percy from his beginnings in Dublin, at the Dublin Society Drawing Schools, working with the famed statuary John Van Nost; to England, where he journeyed from town to town, putting advertisements in regional newspapers. These revealing advertisements have been gathered here for the first time, in order to track his travels. Whether taking the likeness of Princess Charlotte of Wales, or falling victim to a highway robber in Birmingham, these fragments of Percy’s history paint a fascinating picture of his life as a wandering artisan. As well as a chronological narrative of Percy’s life, this book commits an entire chapter to an area of his work that has never been studied before: his miniature tableaux. These portray various subjects, both religious and secular, from Christ on the Cross to playing children. They are catalogued in an appendix, and almost thirty are illustrated. Based entirely on original research, Mr. Percy: Portrait Modeller in Coloured Wax features over a hundred illustrations, celebrating both Percy’s accomplishments and the works of other modellers for comparison.

It is interdisciplinary teams with complex compositions that develop and realise exhibitions. Groenlandbasel directs a network of specialists and with Spaces and Stories enables an insight into the cooperation and the dedicated efforts of a wide range of involved parties. Exhibition thinkers and exhibition makers express themselves alongside each other in essays, shorter highlights and interviews.

The texts are accompanied by a diverse selection of projects by Groenlandbasel: museum developments, special and permanent exhibitions, architecture, as well as indoor and outdoor installations.

With text contributions from: Dominic Huber, Director Rimini Protokoll, Zurich; Nina Gorgus, Curator Historical Museum Frankfurt; Ramon De Marco, Sound Designer Idee und Klang, Basel; Daniel Tyradellis, freelance curator, Berlin; Beat Hächler, Director Alpine Museum of Switzerland, Bern; Sibylle Lichtensteiger, Director Stapferhaus Lenzburg.

Text in English and German.

Raphael arrived in Rome in 1508 and remained there until his death in 1520, working as painter and architect for popes Julius II and Leo X and for the most prestigious patrons. Here the artist changed his painting style several times, looking at the works of Michelangelo, Sebastiano del Piombo and the vast repertoire of ancient painting and sculpture. In the Eternal City Raphael practised architecture for the first time, designing buildings that reflected the models of Antiquity such as the Pantheon, the descriptions deriving from written sources such as Vitruvius’ treaty on architecture, and the examples of modern architects like Donato Bramante.

This guide supplies essential and up to date information on all the civil or religious buildings designed or built by Raphael in Rome, and the frescoes and paintings, housed in churches or museums, whether executed in the city or arrived there at a later stage.

November 19, 1479: a dynastic alliance, two noble scions, a regal wedding, short-lived and with an unhappy ending. These pages reconstruct the story of the magnificent bas relief in the Acton Collection (Villa La Pietra, Florence), commissioned to celebrate the marriage between Antonio Basso Della Rovere, nephew of Pope Sixtus IV, and Caterina Marzano d’Aragona, the niece of King Ferdinand I of Naples. The heraldic symbols of the three coats of arms leave no doubt about the identities of the characters and events surrounding its creation, and lead us to the original location of the work, born as the overdoor to the main portal of the Basso Della Rovere Palace in piazza della Maddalena in Savona. Through close examination of the Della Rovere in Rome, this study highlights some previously unknown facts about the family’s origins and returns to Savona and its role as a political, cultural, and artistic protagonist in late 15th-century Italy.

Yoga and the City photographically documents a variety of people who are committed to yoga philosophy and yoga lifestyles in big cities – people, who live in the middle of hustle and bustle, but manage to maintain their harmony and happiness. It doesn’t matter what is surrounding them, what really matters is how they look at everything around them. Possibly, when people see this photography, they will decide to try yoga or meditation. Yoga and the City combines art, spirituality, and sport. It is a reflection of strength and power – strength to overcome adversities and to find balance while living in a fast paced environment. Yoga is a way to find alignment, to become closer to your spiritual core.

The career of architect Sergei Tchoban, born 1962 and educated in St. Petersburg, follows multiple yet closely linked trajectories in his native Russia and in Germany. He is a founding partner with the Moscow-based firm SPEECH as well as with Tchoban Voss Architekten, with offices in Hamburg, Berlin and Dresden. His designs reflect a deep interest in local and historical contexts of a project rather than an aim to create singular iconic structures. His design process is deeply rooted in sketching and drawing by hand. In 2009 he established the Tchoban Foundation and in 2013 opened the Museum for Architectural Drawing in Berlin as a home to his vast collection comprising ancient and modern masterpieces from around the world.

In four conversations with Kristin Feireiss, Tchoban offers very personal insights into his design process, his understanding of architecture, and his engagement as a collector and museum founder. An essay by the British writer and broadcaster Deyan Sudjic as well as some 130 illustrations round out this beautiful volume.

The concept of Layered Morphologies is a theoretical and methodological approach that investigates the coevolutionary nature of architecture and settlements, to propose an organic and integrated approach to their reading, protection and design enhancement. Transcending some usual spatial ontologies and operating across interdisciplinary fields, it promotes a renewed notion of built heritage as historicised architecture, and landscape as a structure of structures, where any act of modification should start from recognising pre-existing signs, typo-morphological structures, and writing of the ground and formal orders. Advancing critical-theoretical propositions while verifying their operational value in the case study of Fenghuang (Shaanxi) – a famous historic and cultural town in China – the methodology reveals a new reading and the potential underlying of Chinese settlements forms. Architectural and urban-rural design projects are not the colonisation of a void (a tabula rasa) but rather an understanding and interpretation of an existing text with its erasures and absences (tabula plena), which also presents the principles for future writings.

In the autumn of 2020, Christo will wrap the Arc de Triomphe in Paris in silvery fabric for 16 days, returning to his signature style – after realising The Floating Piers in Italy, the London Mastaba, and a quarter of a century after he and Jeanne-Claude wrapped the Reichstag building in Berlin. As a prelude, a major exhibition at PalaisPopulaire in the German capital will celebrate this 25-year anniversary in the spring of 2020. At the same time, the Pompidou Center will pay tribute to Christo and Jeanne-Claude by staging The Pont Neuf Wrapped Documentary exhibition as well as a comprehensive show highlighting their early years in Paris.

To accompany these events, Matthias Koddenberg, art historian and long-time friend of both Christo and his wife Jeanne-Claude, who was the other half of the artistic duo until her death in 2009, has edited an elaborate collection of interviews. The book is composed of many conversations held between Koddenberg and Christo in the artist’s New York studio over the last few years.

With rare frankness, Christo describes how he fled from Bulgaria and made his way into the Western world. He talks about his time in Vienna and Geneva, his vibrant life in Paris that was full of hardship, and the fateful moment when he met Jeanne-Claude.

This publication provides an exceptional inside view, uniting texts and numerous archival images and photographs, many of which have never been published before, or depict early works by Christo that have only recently been rediscovered.

British flower painting has its own unique, if relatively recent, history, but it can only be judged in the light of the wider history of the subject and by comparison with other, particularly European, countries. The first chapter of A History and Dictionary of British Flower Painters, therefore, sets the scene with a brief introduction to floral art world wide before the next four chapters concentrate on British flower painting in the seventeenth, eighteenth, nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The dictionary provides the biographical details of almost 1,000 British flower painters, offering information regarding their specialities, awards and exhibitions.

Whilst many books have been published about war, the role of the prisoner of war has been largely ignored or paid scant attention. This book, along with the author’s other title – The Arts and Crafts of Napoleonic and American Prisoners of War 1756-1816 – aims to correct this imbalance, and is the result of the author’s quest over thirty years into this almost-forgotten field of history. Part One tells of the various wars that saw the men, from many different countries, become prisoners. Tales of individuals and their voyages, mutinies, fortunes and failures also feature, adding more personal touches to the history and, as with the author’s other title, all the accounts are written in a highly evocative style. Part Two is largely devoted to the prison hulks, describing the vessels and the conditions on board that the prisoners would have had to endure. Many of these hulks were former warships. Now stripped of all their equipment, and with their masts, sails and rigging removed, they sat disabled offshore, filled with their human cargo. Part Three concerns itself primarily with the depots and prisons on land, beginning with a general overview, and going on to explore in greater detail individual establishments and the conditions within. The final three chapters in this section deal with the terms and conditions of various types of parole – many officers granted parole were able to live almost as free men, as long as they did not take up arms against their captors – as well as the punishments to be expected should parole be broken. Written with numerous personal accounts, and drawing upon many years of painstaking and dedicated research, this important book fills a significant gap in the literature of military history.

This wide-ranging study is the outcome of the author’s thirty-year quest to collect information about a neglected and almost forgotten field of history – the prisoner of war, the conditions under which he was held and how he employed his time during long years of captivity. In this instance, the whole is set against an historical background dating from the Seven Years War (1756-63) to Napoleon’s downfall in 1816. Information has been painstakingly acquired by detailed searches through the Public Records Offices of England, Scotland and Wales and the archives of numerous county towns. The author has also studied more than one hundred towns and villages, where paroled captured officers were detained, and visited the sites of prison depots – great and small – and ports and rivers where the dreaded prison hulks had once been moored. The gathering and examination of artefacts, relics and other relevant material was a further important aspect of this extensive study. During the course of his lengthy researches, the author assembled what may well be one of the largest private collections of prisoner of war artefacts in existence. Although thousands of items of prisoners’ work have survived to the present day, most have disappeared into private collections and museums, at home or abroad. A representative selection of items from the author’s own extensive collection is featured in the second part of this book and will show the extraordinary high standard of workmanship achieved by many of the prisoners of war.