In 1783, Princess Dashkove was appointed director of Russia's Imperial Academy of Arts and Sciences by Catherine the Great. It was just two years after she had met with another fascinating personality, Benjamin Franklin.

In The Secrets of Alchemy, Lawrence M. Principe, one of the world’s leading authorities on the subject, brings alchemy out of the shadows and restores it to its important place in human history and culture. By surveying what alchemy was and how it began, developed, and overlapped with a range of ideas and pursuits, Principe illuminates the practice. He vividly depicts the place of alchemy during its heyday in early modern Europe, and then explores how alchemy has fit into wider views of the cosmos and humanity, touching on its enduring place in literature, fine art, theater, and religion as well as its recent acceptance as a serious subject of study for historians of science. In addition, he introduces the reader to some of the most fascinating alchemists, such as Zosimos and Basil Valentine, whose lives dot alchemy’s long reign from the third century and to the present day. Through his exploration of alchemists and their times, Principe pieces together closely guarded clues from obscure and fragmented texts to reveal alchemy’s secrets, and—most exciting for budding alchemists—uses them to recreate many of the most famous recipes in his lab, including those for the “glass of antimony” and “philosophers’ tree.” This unique approach brings the reader closer to the actual work of alchemy than any other book.

This Reader brings together, for the first time, key writings about the nineteenth century, a key period in contemporary discussion of visual culture.

Exploring such topics as photographs, exhibitions and advertising the editors suggest that 'modernity' rather than 'modernism' is a valuable way of understanding the changes particular to the visual culture of the time, and they investigate a variety of nineteenth-century images, technologies and visual experiences.

With three specially-written essays about definitions of visual culture as an object of study, the book examines genealogies and introduces key writings about culture from writers living in the nineteenth century itself or from those who scrutinized its visual culture from early in the twentieth century such as Walter Benjamin and Siegfried Kracauer.

The Nineteenth Century Visual Culture Reader is organized around key themes:

* technologies of vision

* practices of display and the circulation of images

* cities and the built environment

* visual representations of the past#

* visual representations of catagories of racial, sexual and social differences

* spatial configurations of inside and out, private and public.

Selections include well-known authors and new research by younger scholars to produce a well-balanced and comprehensive collection.

Night is a time when mystery reigns and the beauty of contrast is most intense. This collection of 30 colored postcards, dating from the late 19th and early 20th centuries showcases American cities at night. Scenes included are: Niagara Falls, the Brooklyn Bridge in 1905, the original Flamingo Hotel in Las Vegas, Davenport's Restaurant in Spokane, WA, the Statue of Liberty, the Christmas Lights of Corpus Christi and Grauman's Chinese Theater in Hollywood just to name a few.

Dwarves, giants, conjoined twins, hairy people, albinos, humans with animal heads—SPECIAL CASES explores humanity's age-old obsession with monstrosity. Using photographs and artwork from numerous private and public collections, celebrated photographer Rosamond Purcell delves into the flip side of what we call normal. An art book for and about the curious, but definitely not for the squeamish. 100 full-color and b&w illustrations.

"Looking at cabinets of curiosities and natural hisory collections" from University of Utrecht, by Rosamund Purcell

“Fascinating examination of the museum’s unconventional role in contemporary art....Highly recommended.”—Library JournalThis book examines one of the most important and intriguing themes in art today: the often obsessive relationship between artist and museum.

From Marcel Duchamp’s “Portable Museum” (Boîte en valise) of the early 1940s to Damien Hirst’s distinctive use of vitrine displays in the 1990s, the artists of the past seventy years have often turned their attention—both creatively and critically—to a reappraisal of the ideas and systems of classification traditionally associated with curatorship and display.

The works included here, accompanied by quotations from the writings of individual artists, offer a wide-ranging coverage of projects by established and emerging figures alike, including Christian Boltanski, Sophie Calle, Tracey Emin, Hans Haacke, Donald Judd, Olafur Eliasson, and Takashi Murakami. The book has been updated to include recent projects that make use of grand architectural spaces within the museum, as well as those that explore off-site locations and the internet. 239 color, 51 b&w illustrations