The latest volume in our popular Art Deco series, German Modern explores one of the fountainheads of modern graphic design. The renowned design team of Heller and Fili presents over 200 of the distinctive images that helped define the look of "the modern"-many never before published. Through posters, advertising stamps, letterheads, package design, magazine jackets, and numerous other commercial ephemera, the cool sophistication of this hybrid deco style looks as fresh today as it did when it first appeared between the world wars. Unique to German Modern is a chapter on the provisional currency known as Notgeld, which towns and even companies were allowed to print in the years of Germany's dire inflation. A key reference work and inspirational sourcebook for designers, artists, and aesthetes, German Modern is a colorful exploration of a classic and influential chapter of international design history.

In 1500 few Europeans regarded nature as a subject worthy of inquiry. Yet fifty years later the first museums of natural history had appeared in Italy, dedicated to the marvels of nature. Italian patricians, their curiosity fueled by new voyages of exploration and the humanist rediscovery of nature, created vast collections as a means of knowing the world and used this knowledge to their greater glory.

Drawing on extensive archives of visitors' books, letters, travel journals, memoirs, and pleas for patronage, Paula Findlen reconstructs the lost social world of Renaissance and Baroque museums. She follows the new study of natural history as it moved out of the universities and into sixteenth- and seventeenth-century scientific societies, religious orders, and princely courts. Findlen argues convincingly that natural history as a discipline blurred the border between the ancients and the moderns, between collecting in order to recover ancient wisdom and the development of new textual and experimental scholarship. Her vivid account reveals how the scientific revolution grew from the constant mediation between the old forms of knowledge and the new.

"The Libraries of Thought and Imagination" celebrates books, libraries and bibliophilia. It includes an anthology of "Bookshelves" for which artists and writers were invited to select and write about a bookshelf. Their commentaries establish connections between the different books. The introduction by Colin Sackett considers the different characteristics of private and public libraries - we are "all librarians".

Postbellum America makes for a haunting backdrop in this historical and supernatural tale of moonlit cemeteries, masked balls, cunning mediums, and terrifying secrets waiting to be unearthed by an intrepid crime reporter.

Edward Clark is a successful young crime reporter in comfortable circumstances with a lovely, well-connected fiancée. Then an assignment to write a series of exposés on the city’s mediums places all that in jeopardy.

In the Philadelphia of 1869, photographs of Civil War dead adorn dim sitting rooms, and grieving families attempt to contact their lost loved ones. Edward’s investigation of the beautiful young medium Lucy Collins has unintended consequences, however. He uncovers her tricks, but realizes to his dismay that Lucy is more talented at blackmail than she is at a medium’s sleights of hand. And since Edward has a hidden past, he reluctantly agrees that they should collaborate in exposing only her rivals.

The mysterious murder of noted medium Lenora Grimes Pastor as Lucy and Edward attend her séance results in a plum story for Edward—and a great deal more. The pair want to clear themselves from suspicion, but a search spanning the houses of the wealthy to the underside of nineteenth-century Philadelphia unearths a buzzing beehive of past murder, current danger, and supernatural occurrences that cannot be explained…

Preface- The idea for this exhibition started with a library exhibit in 2005 at the New York Academy of Medicine. The exhibition, entitled "Holes in the Head" was organized by the staff of the Malloch Rare Book Room....

Why spiritual and supernatural yearnings, even investigations into the occult, flourished in the era of rationalist philosophy.In The Dark Side of the Enlightenment, John V. Fleming shows how the impulses of the European Enlightenment—generally associated with great strides in the liberation of human thought from superstition and traditional religion—were challenged by tenacious religious ideas or channeled into the “darker” pursuits of the esoteric and the occult. His engaging topics include the stubborn survival of the miraculous, the Enlightenment roles of Rosicrucianism and Freemasonry, and the widespread pursuit of magic and alchemy.

Though we tend not to associate what was once called alchemy with what we now call chemistry, Fleming shows that the difference is merely one of linguistic modernization. Alchemy was once the chemistry, of Arabic derivation, and its practitioners were among the principal scientists and physicians of their ages. No point is more important for understanding the strange and fascinating figures in this book than the prestige of alchemy among the learned men of the age.

Fleming follows some of these complexities and contradictions of the “Age of Lights” into the biographies of two of its extraordinary offspring. The first is the controversial wizard known as Count Cagliostro, the “Egyptian” freemason, unconventional healer, and alchemist known most infamously for his ambiguous association with the Affair of the Diamond Necklace, which history has viewed as among the possible harbingers of the French Revolution and a major contributing factor in the growing unpopularity of Marie Antoinette. Fleming also reviews the career of Julie de Krüdener, the sentimental novelist, Pietist preacher, and political mystic who would later become notorious as a prophet.

Impressively researched and wonderfully erudite, this rich narrative history sheds light on some lesser-known mental extravagances and beliefs of the Enlightenment era and brings to life some of the most extraordinary characters ever encountered either in history or fiction. 20 illustrations

Joseph Carey Merrick, born in England on August 5, 1862, is better known as The Elephant Man. Through horrible physical deformities which were almost impossible to describe, he spent much of his life exhibited as a fairground freak until even nineteenth-century sensibilities could take no more. Hounded, persecuted and starving, he ended up at London’s Liverpool Street Station where he was rescued, housed and fed by the distinguished surgeon Frederick Treves. To Treves’ surprise, he discovered during the course of their friendship that lurking beneath the mass of Merrick's corrupting flesh lived a spirit that was as courageous as it had been tortured, and a nature as gentle and dignified as it had been deprived and tormented. The subject of several books, a Broadway hit, and a film, Joseph Merrick has become part of popular mythology. Here, in this fully revised edition containing new details, are the true and unromantic facts of his life. This is an extraordinary and moving story, set among the brutal realities of the Victorian world, telling of a tragic individual and his survival against overwhelming odds.

One of the first modern exhibitions of living humans was produced by the great American showman and charlatan P. T. Barnum who infamously introduced the public to Siamese twins Chang and Eng Bunker and George Washington’s supposed “mammy,” Joice Heth, in 1835. Human zoo exhibits like Barnum’s—forgotten symbols of the colonial area predicated on a vague scientific racism—have been largely  repressed in our collective memory. Human Zoos, which begins with the early nineteenth-century exhibition of the Hottentot Venus and proceeds through a history of showcasing “savages” and “peoples of the world”—in New York, Moscow, Paris, and Tokyo, among other places—in a chronicle of our cultural effort to present the Other as a spectacle, unearths the men, women, and children who became extras in an imaginary history that was by no means their own. A bestseller on its original publication in France, with the addition of newly commissioned chapters and a contemporary translation, this unique and remarkable volume discusses a crucial phenomenon at the heart of Western fantasies, allowing us to understand anew the genesis of popular racism and cultural identity that fueled our fascination with colonial and imperial cultures.