The America’s Cup has been the world’s most prestigious yacht race for over 170 years. This beautifully illustrated and fully updated new edition tells the story of the cup from its inception through to the most recent race, held in 2024.

Named in 1851 in honor of the first winner (New York pilot, ‘America’), the Cup was dominated by American yachts for well over a century. At last, in 1983, Australia II wrestled the trophy away from the USA, albeit briefly. At Barcelona in 2024, the Cup produced one of the best contests yet, with the Royal New Zealand Yacht Squadron winning the race for a fifth time, and a British yacht, Britannia, competing in the finals for the first time in 60 years.

With a painting of each race since 1851, by marine artist Tim Thompson, and detailed descriptions of the boats involved, The Story of the America’s Cup 1851-2024 is an elegant, insightful celebration of a storied contest.

Since 1970, the collection of Panini stickers has accompanied every FIFA World Cup™, which takes place every four years. The collection is not only a practical guide to the final tournament, but also provides a valuable visual archive of all the teams and their memorable matches.

Through the faces of its protagonists, the book tells the story of the FIFA World Cup™ from hosts Mexico in 1970, to Canada, Mexico and the United States in 2026. Famous and less famous champions, loved and less loved, who shared the desire to raise the most coveted football award to the sky.

Includes 1,104 pages of stickers, stadiums, scores, formations, rankings, summary tables and results that have made the history of the FIFA World Cup™.

For lovers of statistics and curiosities, the albums – always published before the competitions and shown in their original format – are completed by graphs and tables of the results of the final phase of the tournament and, starting from South Africa 2010, by an insert with stickers of substitutions.

Text in English, Spanish, French, German, Dutch and Italian.

For the nature and adventure enthusiast: Roaming America is a visually stunning, ultimately practical guide to visiting the US National Parks.
Combining breathtaking imagery, useful planning information for each national park, suggested itineraries, best-of recommendations, and more Roaming America will give you all the inspiration you could need to plan your next national park road trip! Featured inside:

While connoisseurship of natural stones is today well established in the West, books on viewing stones still predominantly feature East Asian examples. This is the first to present the finest North American viewing stones from private and institutional collections, selected by a panel of experts from over 275 professional photographs submitted by over 50 individuals and institutions. Each stone confronts us with the beauty and diversity of the natural world, and each has an uncanny ability to elicit an emotional response in the viewer. Included are introductory essays on Native American stone appreciation and a brief history of stone collecting on the continent.

The project was conceived and developed by Dr. Thomas S. Elias, former Director of the U.S. National Arboretum, Chairman of the Viewing Stone Association of North America, and Honorary Vice-Chairman of the Viewing Stone Association of China.

‘This is me, Hee-haw. I’m going to tell you a story. Not just any old story – a Christmas story. You’re going to see the most beautiful paintings and drawings in the world too. You’ll probably be surprised to see how many pictures I’m in. Hundreds – no, thousands! And that’s because I, Hee-haw, play a very important part in this story. As you will see.’ Martine Gosselink, director of the Mauritshuis museum, tells the Christmas story through the eyes of Hee-haw the donkey, drawn by Thé Tjong-Khing. ‘How come? Because I was always there!’

The great World’s Fairs and Expositions staged around the world since the mid-19th century were among the largest and most dramatic cultural events ever staged. In both beneficial and detrimental ways, they affected the lives of tens of millions of people. Fair World tells the story of these extraordinary exhibitions from the Victorian period to the present day.

In 1851 John Ruskin came to the defence of the young artists of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood by writing two letters to The Times, refuting widespread criticism of their paintings. Soon afterwards he published a pamphlet entitled Pre-Raphaelitism, beginning almost a decade of public support for the work of William Holman Hunt, John Everett Millais and their associates.
Already established as one of the leading writers on art, he took a personal risk in defending the Pre- Raphaelite cause, but saw a parallel in the hostile reaction to the paintings of his artistic idol J. M. W. Turner. In Millais especially, Ruskin hoped to nurture a worthy successor in landscape painting, arguing that the Pre-Raphaelites’ attention to truth and detail offered the opportunity to establish a “new and noble school” of British art.
This is the first compilation of all of Ruskin’s published writings relating to the Pre-Raphaelites, beginning with the celebrated passage in the first volume of Modern Painters (1843) exhorting young artists to “go to nature in all …. rejecting nothing, selecting nothing and scorning nothing,” later claimed by Hunt to have been an inspiration. As well as Pre- Raphaelitism (1851), rarely reprinted since, and the fourth of the 1853 Edinburgh lectures, it includes all the comments on paintings in the annual Academy Notes (1855-9) which pertain to Pre-Raphaelitism, underlining Ruskin’s significant contribution to the movement’s popular success and the widespread acceptance of its principles. From the period after 1860, when Ruskin was concentrating more on social issues, come the the little-known articles published in the Nineteenth Century magazine under the title The Three Colours of Pre-Raphaelitism (1878), and a number of lectures, including the last of his Slade Lectures, The Art of England (1883), delivered just a few years before his mental faculties failed.
Edited with a commentary and preface by Stephen Wildman, Director of the Ruskin Library and Research Centre, University of Lancaster, and with an introduction by Robert Hewison, one of Ruskin’s successors as Slade Professor of Art at the University of Oxford.

More than any other civilization, China is renowned for its long tradition of ceramic production, from its terracotta and stoneware works in ancient times to the imperial porcelain manufactured at Jingdezhen from the end of the fourteenth century. These works have been admired and collected over centuries for their outstanding quality and refinement. Now two hundred masterpieces from prominent private collections around the world have been brought together for the first time in a new book. The Baur Collections in Geneva, formed between 1928 and 1951, and the Zhuyuetang Collection (the Bamboo and Moon Pavilion in Hong Kong), which has been building since the late 1980s, reveal the elegance and variety of imperial monochrome porcelain wares produced during the Ming (1368-1644) and Qing (1644-1911) dynasties, which followed on from the Tang (618-907) and Song (960-1279) periods. These restrained pieces – both profane and sacred – exemplify the values of simplicity and modesty espoused by classical Chinese texts. With chapters devoted to the historical, cultural and technical contexts in which these pieces were made, this book will be a key reference on Chinese monochrome ceramics for all lovers of the subject, as well as students, researchers and connoisseurs.

Text in English and French with Chinese summaries.

Another America challenges the notion of truth in photography, blurring the lines between reality and fiction. Set against the backdrop of the 1940s and ’50s —a time when photographic imagery held a unique sense of veracity — the project transports viewers to a parallel universe where historical events take unexpected turns. From surreal landscapes to hauntingly realistic scenes, each AI-generated image invites audiences to question their perceptions and reconsider the narratives that shape our understanding of the past.

For more than 40 years, Benita VanWinkle has traveled the country photographing hometown movie theaters and drive-ins built before 1965 as part of her ongoing documentary project Please Remain Standing—a visual appeal to preserve these historic treasures. VanWinkle has recorded the astonishing range of these iconic structures, from repurposed Quonset huts to grand movie palaces. Her photographs depict magnificent Art Deco detailing and Mayan-style ornamentation, neon-lit theater marquees as well as the whimsical road signs that still entice moviegoers to once ubiquitous drive-ins. An impressive 512 full-page photographs, selected from the thousands VanWinkle has made to date, document 395 present and former movie theaters and drive-ins and conjure a time when Americans embraced the communal experience of going out to the movies—a few hours in which shared laughter and tears unite strangers. The book honors this beloved national pastime and highlights the continuing importance of movie theaters in preserving a town’s sense of community.

The all-American state and county fair tradition is not all carnies, corn dogs, cotton candy, and apple pie. The fair is a place for communities to come together and share some of the most meaningful moments in life that can evoke affection and nostalgia. Liza Gershman’s book is a visual feast—it’s jam-packed with the images, stories, and voices of the folk and tight-knit communities who celebrate this unique slice of Americana each year.

Beautifully illustrated throughout with stunning color photographs of food, vintage, and retro ephemera, showcased here are close to 80 Blue Ribbon–winning recipes from across America’s heartland. What’s not to love about homemade pies and cakes, jams and jellies, pickles, preserves, and sweets! County Fair weaves together a celebration of classic, prize-winning regional specialties, secret tips for stocking your pantry, and the legacy of an American institution.

As some American artists began to eliminate people and remove extraneous details from their compositions, they often employed neat, orderly brushwork or close-up, unemotional photography. Artists as diverse as Patrick Henry Bruce, John Covert, Georgia O’Keeffe, Paul Strand and Arthur Dove navigated European and American avant-garde circles, picking and choosing new ideas and methods. Inspiration ranged from cubism and machine parts to new technologies, and they found ways to bring order to the modern world through extreme simplification.

For them, abstraction involved absence and presence – the evacuation of human beings but also the desire to depict something that would not otherwise be visible or to render visible unseen natural processes like the passage of time, sound waves, or weather patterns. Their artworks provide a new context for the precisionist works in the subsequent sections and point to modern ideas about what art could be. How does a crisp painting technique relate to an aesthetic of absence?

As part of a major urban renewal project in the Humayun’s Tomb Hazrat Nizamuddin Basti area of Delhi, the Aga Khan Trust for Culture has been hosting the Jashn-e-Khusrau festival with the support of the Ford Foundation since 2010. Hazrat Amir Khusrau Dehlavi, the renowned 13th-century Sufi poet, was the favorite disciple of Hazrat Nizamuddin Auliya. His remarkable legacy is entwined with the rich cultural heritage of the Hazrat Nizamuddin Basti.

This volume is a compilation of discussions, lectures, exhibitions, heritage walks, musical performances, as well as film screenings devoted to illustrating the impact of Hazrat Amir Khusrau Dehlavi’s legacy in folk and classical music all held as part of the Jashn-e-Khusrau festival. The book is accompanied by a set of three music CDs that will have selected tracks from spanning the repertoire of Jashn 2013 concerts.

Published in association with Aga Khan Trust for Culture, New Delhi.

“Seldom does a collection of art history essays leave readers yearning for a second volume…”—Barbara Wisch, Renaissance Quarterly

Roman church interiors throughout the Early Modern age were endowed with rich historical and visual significance. During the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, in anticipation of and following the Council of Trent, and in response to the expansion of the Roman Curia, the chapel became a singular arena in which wealthy and powerful Roman families, as well as middle-class citizens, had the opportunity to demonstrate their status and role in Roman society. In most cases the chapels were conceived not as isolated spaces, but as part of a more complex system, which involved the nave and the other chapels within the church, in a dialogue among the arts and the patrons of those other spaces. This volume explores this historical and artistic phenomenon through a number of examples involving the patronage of prominent Roman families such as the Chigis, Spadas, Caetanis, Cybos and important artists and architects such as Federico Zuccari, Giacomo della Porta, Carlo Maderno, Alessandro Algardi, Pietro da Cortona, Carlo Maratta.

A Sino-Chinese family find their destiny is inseparably entangled with that of the country they have adopted as a home. Not long before the Communist revolution, Tong, sent by his peasant-parents in impoverished rural China to work with a relative in Siam, has risen to become a rice-trading tycoon in Bangkok’s Chinatown, married a former palace cook and built a large family in the town of Pad Riew. Haunted by the dream of returning to his true home in China, Tong, along with his wife and their five children, are swept along by the torrents of history as World War II breakout and China turns red, while the military strongman in Thailand act out the interminable cycle of power struggle, rebellion and coup d’état.

Memories of the Memories of the Black Rose Cat, the award-winning second novel by Veerapon Nitiprapha, is a generations-spanning family saga that explores the roots of the Chinese diaspora in Siam and how the tragedy of ruined love, maternal betrayal and futile ambition shape the lives of Tong’s clan members, each of them hounded by their own ghosts and burdened by their own sins. All of this is played out against the backdrop of Siam’s mid-century social and political history, the most chaotic period the formation of the nation.

This theoretical work on architecture examines the meaning and relevance of a neutral stance in the face of contemporary urban chaos. It stems from a desire to move beyond a paradigmatic reading of urbanization and to establish a calmer relationship to this condition. The neutral stance in question is not one of passivity, but of heightened receptivity. It articulates a desire for a just relationship with the present that is attentive and unassuming, and that readily accepts the polyphonic character of the contemporary city. Its central argument concerns the creative and productive potential of neutrality and the way it engages with chaos as an inexhaustible source. This research draws on a broad body of multidisciplinary work (art, literature, photography, psychoanalysis etc.) to define a position within the architectural discipline.

The publication emerges from Ido Avissar’s in-depth research at the École nationale supérieure d’architecture de Versailles. It is closely connected to a monograph on the work of LIST, the architecture and urban planning office founded by Avissar in 2012, and complements it with a more in-depth theoretical perspective.

“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 modeler 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.

What is assembled here might look like a modern ‘Cabinet of Curiosities’, an assemblage of the exotic and curious from the four quarters of the world. There is an intention behind it, however, that goes beyond presenting a wide variety of curiosities. We are today linked up to all those four quarters, and while a huge amount of information is available to us, unlike to those who awaited the ships in the ports of Amsterdam, Genoa, Lisbon, London, Marseille, Seville or Venice, the horizon of what interests us seems to have shrunk. The art market is an interesting barometer of this shrinkage. The point is, therefore, that we can connect with the whole world on a much more profound level than can be gained from package touring, through the possession of, and study of even the most modest objects of different cultures. The purpose of collecting, as Moliere might have put it, should not be limited to becoming rich through the investment in one’s purchases, but to become enriched through the possession of what one has acquired. Highlights include: the silver libation cup of Mongke Khan, grandson of Genghis and ruler of an empire that stretched from modern Bucharest to Peking, and Karachi to Novgorod; the apple from the Garden of Eden – a silver pomander belonging to the Stuart Kings, with bite marks, opening to reveal a silver skull; a Scythian (6-7th centuries BC) jade pendant of the endangered Saiga antelope, as nely carved as anything by Faberge; a bronze Bacchus head from a tripod table belonging to the Emperor Augustus; a limestone bear carved in 3rd millenium BC Bactria.

Part of Watchprint’s Story Books series profiling the world’s most renowned watches, Chronomat Story sees investigative journalist Gerard Tubb draw on original research to reveal the full, untold history behind Breitling’s most transformative chronograph. Through newly uncovered archives and first-hand accounts, Tubb traces how the Chronomat – created for Italy’s elite Frecce Tricolori aerobatic team in the 1980s – sparked Breitling’s revival and reshaped the landscape of modern mechanical watchmaking. Richly illustrated and meticulously documented, the book brings to light the people, ideas, and risks that defined an era of reinvention. 

María Campos Carlés de Peña, a leading expert in furniture history, has undertaken an exhaustive project of research into the large and varied production of furniture made in Peru in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries – the colonial period – for churches, convents, monasteries and private collections. Over eleven chapters she provides a thorough description of this type of furniture, which was inspired by artistic styles ranging from Mannerism to Neoclassicim, with their many variants and creators.

Her analysis allows for an appreciation of the way vice-regal furniture in Peru is a valuable witness to its time: an example of a syncretism of varied and different cultures, endowed with symbolism, iconographic meaning and enormous beauty.

Using the formalist conventions of an ironic heritage, William Ludwig Lutgens attains the expression of something sincere. Like the philosophical idiot who did his utmost best to unlearn all the fallacies he was acquitted with since birth and now only knows he knows nothing, the artist made the world into his own theater wherein he can stomp around like a bull in a china shop with the grace of a prima ballerina. Forcing a pathway to possible exits by presenting us with the alloy of his observations, imagination and scattershot references. Not merely asking questions, which seems to be the hype in contemporary art nowadays, he is unraveling the framework wherein these questions originate. The image deconstructed by the story of its creation, alternating between the power and impotence of the theatrical madness at the end of the world as we know it. William Ludwig Lutgens presents with his Comedy of Humours the dysfunctional family of man.

Text in English and Dutch.