Art & Books

One for the Books by Joe Queenan
Since Gutenberg first began moving type around five centuries ago, the book--one of the great achievements of human culture--has been subjected to any number of indignities, from being banned to being burned to being turned into a breathtaking quantity of unspeakably appalling movies. It has managed to survive all of these, only to find itself at the dawn of the twenty-first century facing the most radical challenge to its existence from the digital tsunami that has already left the tattered remains of the music business in its wake. As bookstores disappear and readers, apparently, along with them, alarmed bibliophiles everywhere can't help but wonder: Whither the book?

The Lost Battles: Leonardo, Michelangelo, and the Artistic Duel that Defined the Renaissance by Jonathan Jones
This is the galvanizing story of a sixteenth-century clash of titans, the two greatest minds of the Renaissance, working side by side in the same room in a fierce competition: the master Leonardo da Vinci, commissioned by the Florentine Republic to paint a narrative fresco depicting a famous military victory on a wall of the newly built Great Council Hall in the Palazzo Vecchio, and his implacable young rival, the thirty-year-old Michelangelo.

The Art of the Epigraph: How Great Books Begin by Rosemary Ahern
For many book lovers, there is no more pleasing start to a book than a well-chosen epitaph. These intriguing quotations, sayings, and snippets of songs and poems do more than set the tone for the experience ahead: the epigraph informs us about the author's sensibility. Are we in the hands of a literalist or a wit? A cynic or a romantic? A writer of great ambition or a miniaturist? The epigraph hints at hidden stories and frequently comes with one of its own.

New Pick of the Week!

Playing with Books: The Art of Upcycling, Deconstructing, and Reimagining the Book by Jason Thompson
In these pages, Jason Thompson has curated an extensive and artistic range of both achievable upcycled crafts made from books and book pages and an amazing gallery that contains thought-provoking and beautiful works that transform books into art. The content encompasses a wide range of techniques and step-by-step projects that deconstruct and rebuild books and their parts into unique upcycled objects. The book combines in equal measure bookbinding, woodworking, paper crafting, origami, and textiles and decorative arts techniques, along with a healthy dose of experimentation and fun. The beautiful high-end presentation and stunning photography make this book a delightful, must-have volume for any book-loving artist or art-loving book collector.

About the Author:  Jason Thompson is the founder of Rag & Bone Bindery in Pawtucket, Rhode Island, a bookbinding studio dedicated to creating unique hand-bound books and albums for gift and stationery industries.

New Fiction this Week

The Sisters by Nancy Jensen
Growing up in hardscrabble Kentucky in the 1920s, with their mother dead and their stepfather an ever-present threat, Bertie Fischer and her older sister, Mabel, have no one but each other--with perhaps a sweetheart for Bertie waiting in the wings. But on the day that Bertie receives her eighth-grade diploma, good intentions go terribly wrong. A choice made in desperate haste sets off a chain of misunderstandings that will divide the sisters and reverberate through three generations of women.

The River Killers by Bruce Burrows
Danny Swanson, Department of Fisheries and Oceans employee and ex-fisherman, isn't exactly upset when he's reassigned from a desk job in Ottawa to a job on the West Coast. His superiors think they're punishing him for insubordination, but Danny is pleased to be back on the Pacific, reconnecting with his old fishing buddies. Revisiting his past life, though, is trolling up some old memories, including a troubling incident from ten years ago, when Danny and his crew pulled up a deformed fish. His shipmate, Billy, reported it to the DFO in Vancouver. Billy and the fish were never seen again. Danny's buddy is on his mind when he stumbles across a photo of the fish in the DFO database, and now Danny won't let Billy's disappearance go unsolved.

The Curse by Harold Robbins
Art investigator Madison Dupre knows a fake when she sees it. When the mysterious Dr. Kaseem offers to pay her a handsome sum to "ransom" a scarab stolen from the tomb of King Tut, her gut tells her to walk away. Since she still needs to pay the rent, Madison throws caution to the wind and prepares to search for the Heart of Egypt. Before she can pack a suitcase, she finds herself framed for murder and on the run. Drawn to Egypt in search of the scarab, Madison is trapped in the land of pharaohs when her passport is seized at the airport. She knows she is being played by Kaseem, who believes the Heart has the power to galvanize the masses to support his secret cause.