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Completed circa 1474, Sébastien Mamerot’s lavishly illustrated manuscript is the only contemporary document to describe several centuries of French crusades, when successive kings tried to seize the Holy Land. Jean Colombe, the medieval illuminator best known for his work on the Très Riches Heures du Duc de Berry, is the principal artist of its 66 exquisite miniatures.Les Passages d’Outremer (The Expeditions to Overseas) comprises 277 parchment folios, illustrated by Colombe and the finest calig...

Scandtastic! (TASCHEN's 25th anniversary special edition) Scandinavians are exceptionally gifted in design. They are world-famous for their inimitable, democratic designs which bridge the gap between crafts and industrial production. The marriage of beautiful, organic forms with everyday functionality is one of the primary strengths of Scandinavian design and one of the reasons why Scandinavian creations are so cherished and sought after. This guide provides a detailed look at Scandinavian desig...

'If you go to Tokyo, I think it becomes very obvious that there's this almost seamless mixture of popular culture and Japanese traditional culture.' – Kazuo IshiguroFrom the youthful maximalism of Harajuku to the luxurious sophistication of Ginza, Tokyo is the city of a thousand styles. With diverse and unique subcultures like the kitsch Sweet Lolitas, the dark and dramatic goths and punks, the retro rockbillys and the elegant and traditional Wa Lolitas, Tokyo is home to an explosion of fashion...

Today designers often focus on making technology easy to use, sexy, and consumable. In Speculative Everything, Anthony Dunne and Fiona Raby propose a kind of design that is used as a tool to create not only things but ideas. For them, design is a means of speculating about how things could be -- to imagine possible futures. This is not the usual sort of predicting or forecasting, spotting trends and extrapolating; these kinds of predictions have been proven wrong, again and again. Instead, Dunn...

Giambattista Piazzetta, together with Giambattista Tiepolo, dominates history painting in 18th-century Venice. Regarded as the greatest religious painter of his time, he was also widely known for his delightful small secular paintings, and his exquisite decorations and illustrations for printed books, when Venice was an important and influential centre of book production. His drawings, especially the characteristic studies of heads of ordinary men and women, were popular with collectors, and wid...

Before dust jackets wrapped every hardcover behind a shield of paper, a book's binding was its only advertisement, and the shelves of bibliophiles were lined with staid leather-bound tomes. Then came the Art Deco designs of Pierre Legrain and Rose Adler, who transformed bookbinding into a medium of playful and dazzling experimentation and craftsmanship. Their colorful, imaginative works, often made in exotic materials, are found only in a few prized collections and have rarely been available to...

Delightfully unpredictable, ABZ is a wonderbook of typography, graphics, and symbols. Julian Rothenstein (creator of our Gift divisions popular Redstone line of cards and calendars) turns his idiosyncratic eye towards eccentric alphabets, emblems, and logos discovered in avant-garde modernist publications and other curious sources. Hundreds of examples of graphic ephemera sit side-by-side in inimitable Redstone fashion, mixing peculiar charm with useful reference in one stunning package. Special...

Today, more than 85 years after its inception, the Bauhaus style still emanates vitality. As a school that strove to combine applied art with both the fine arts and technology, the Bauhaus movement has outlasted all other trends in architecture and design. The present volume provides insight into the historical, cultural, philosophical, political and pedagogical background of the 1930s, when the Bauhaus was founded. It also portrays the famous Bauhaus directors and teachers and describes their s...

Candace Wheeler emerged as the leading American textile designer of the late nineteenth century by educating herself to match and then surpass the accomplishments of advanced European designers. Moving from embroidery to the design of fabrics and interiors, she wrote influential books on decorating and was a driving force behind the professionalisation of women in the design field. This book contains a biographical essay and a catalogue of over 100 designs for textiles, wallpaper, and other inte...

There are many successful and famous graphic designers in the history of Austrian graphic design, but closer examination shows that women are generally not involved in it or only along the fringes. This publication traces the work of women in applied graphics and puts them, their lives and their creations in center stage. Based in a selection of 14 female graphic designers who were based and worked in Vienna from 1920 to 2000, this book offers an overview of female work in applied graphics. The...

The second edition of SIGNS. Contemporary Italian Graphic Design continues the work of the first edition of 2016 with the aim of introducing the general public to the profession and discipline of graphic designers as well as to the different languages, unique characteristics and orientations of some of the leading figures of visual design, always able to renew itself and dialogue with the international scene, in the footsteps of a great historical tradition. The designers and projects in this bo...

A visually dynamic homage to the paperback. In 1968, John Leonard, then editor of The New York Times Book Review, listed the many merits of mass-market paperbacks: They can be stuffed in purses, left in buses, dropped in toilets, used as coasters, eaten and thrown away. Their covers can be ripped off! Their spines can be broken! To buy a paperback today is to buy the means of revenging oneself on Western culture. Fast-forward forty years. Leonard's affectionately flippant assessment may need to...