A wonderful assortment of bells from around the world identified and shown in over 590 color photographs includes bells of many sizes, shapes, styles, colors, and textures, from school bells, cowbells, and bicycle bells to souvenir bells, commemoratives, and figurines. Basic bell types include open mouth bells, crotals, gongs, mechanical bells, and chimes. Bells for every taste and inclination!

Bells have played a prominent role in our society since the earliest of civilizations, yet few realize the scope of objects encompassed by this broad heading. While all bells share certain qualities--like the ability to produce sound--they vary amazingly in terms of size, shape, style, and material. A flat round Chinese gong is as much a bell as the graceful figurine hiding a swinging clapper beneath her skirt or a strap of round metal "sleigh bells" from the nineteenth century. Featuring over 620 beautiful color photos, this absorbing and entertaining book showcases the wonderful diversity of collectible bells, from animal bells, call bells, and rattles to commemoratives, figurals, miniatures, and holiday bells. Here you will find bells made of different materials, bells with more than one purpose, bells with common motifs, and much more. Both antique and modern, well-known to unique, one of these bells is sure to grab your fancy! Values, an index, and a bibliography are all included.

Showcases more than 850 glass bells produced primarily during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in America, England, and Europe. Included are cut glass bells, engraved bells, blown and pressed glass bells, and a special chapter on wedding bells. Each bell is identified by type, date made, country of origin, producer if known, size, color, decoration or pattern, and current value. Background information on the manufacturers is provided as well. A treasure for those who appreciate bells, glass, and the decorative arts.

Features over 750 bells from 29 countries, including cut glass bells, blown and pressed glass bells, engraved bells, and the highly desirable glass wedding bells. Companies represented include Dorflinger, Hawkes, Pairpoint, Seneca, Sinclaire, Fenton, Fostoria, Val St. Lambert, Goebel, Moser, Hofbauer, Wedgwood and many more. Captions provide bell type, country of origin, maker and date (if known), size, pattern or decoration, and current value. A splendid addition to the libraries of bell collectors, glass enthusiasts, and all who appreciate beautiful artistry.

Dazzling, enchanting and epic, The Bells is the confession of a thief, kidnapper and unlikely lover — a boy with the voice of an angel whose exquisite sense of hearing becomes both his life's tragic curse and its greatest blessing. Moses Froben was born in a belfry high in the Swiss Alps, the bastard son of a deaf-mute woman banished to the church tower to ring each day the Loudest and Most Beautiful Bells in the land. His life is simple but he is content, until the day his father recognizes Moses's singular sense of hearing and its power to expose his sins. Cast into the world with only his ears to protect and guide him, Moses finds refuge in the choir of the great Abbey of St. Gall and becomes its star singer, only to endure the horrifying act of castration meant to preserve his angelic voice and turn him into a musico. In a letter to his son, Moses recounts his humble birth in eighteenth-century Switzerland and his life as a novice monk, and tells of the two noble friends — and a forbidden lover — whom he cherished during his chaotic years in Mozart's Vienna as apprentice to the great Gaetano Guadagni, and even as he ascended Europe's most celebrated stages as Lo Svizzero. But in this letter he will also reveal the astonishing secrets of his past and answer the question that has shadowed his fame: how did Moses Froben, world-renowned musico, come to raise a son who by all rights he could never have sired?

Explores the technology & the history of the telephone, from the Coffin sets of the 1870s to the Princess phones of the 1960s and beyond.

A maid who is unexpectedly left her wealthy employers' worldly possessions, when they flee the country after the Nazi occupation; a loyal bank clerk, who steals a Renaissance portrait of a Spanish noblewoman, and falls into troublesome love with her; a middle-aged travel agent, who is perhaps the least well-travelled man in the city and advises his clients from what he has read in books, anxiously awaits his looming honeymoon; a widowed villager, whose 'magnetic' (or perhaps 'crazy') twelve-year-old daughter witnesses a disturbing event; and a tiny village thrown into civil war by the disappearance of a freshly baked cheesecake - these stories about the tremendous upheaval which results when the ordinary encounters the unexpected are vividly told, with both humour and humanity. This is the first ever English publication of these both literally and metaphorically enchanting Bohemian tales, by one of the great overlooked writers of the twentieth century.

More than 200 novelty telephones here including character phones, advertising products and figural phones that are all in demand. Starting in the 1970s, these were produced to promote company products, television shows, comic strips, movies, and sports. Miniature and toy telephones are included. Descriptive captions list each phone's specific features.

“Beautiful and haunting . . . one of literature’s most unlikely picaresques, a road novel in which the rogue heroes can’t seem to leave home.”—The Boston Globe SHORTLISTED FOR THE MAN BOOKER INTERNATIONAL PRIZE • NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY San Francisco Chronicle • Chicago Tribune • St. Louis Post-Dispatch • The Kansas City Star • Booklist Homer and Langley Collyer are brothers—the one blind and deeply intuitive, the other damaged into madness, or perhaps greatness, by mustard gas in the Great War. They live as recluses in their once grand Fifth Avenue mansion, scavenging the city streets for things they think they can use, hoarding the daily newspapers as research for Langley’s proposed dateless newspaper whose reportage will be as prophecy. Yet the epic events of the century play out in the lives of the two brothers—wars, political movements, technological advances—and even though they want nothing more than to shut out the world, history seems to pass through their cluttered house in the persons of immigrants, prostitutes, society women, government agents, gangsters, jazz musicians . . . and their housebound lives are fraught with odyssean peril as they struggle to survive and create meaning for themselves. Praise for Homer & Langley “Masterly.”—The New York Times Book Review “Doctorow paints on a sweeping historical canvas, imagining the Collyer brothers as witness to the aspirations and transgressions of 20th century America; yet this book’s most powerfully moving moments are the quiet ones, when the brothers relish a breath of cool morning air, and each other’s tragically exclusive company.”— O: The Oprah Magazine “A stately, beautiful performance with great resonance . . . What makes this novel so striking is that it joins both blindness and insight, the sensual world and the world of the mind, to tell a story about the unfolding of modern American life that we have never heard in exactly this (austere and lovely) way before.”—San Francisco Chronicle “Wondrous . . . inspired . . . darkly visionary and surprisingly funny.” —The New York Review of Books “Cunningly panoramic . . . Doctorow has packed this tale with episodes of existential wonder that cpature the brothers in all their fascinating wackiness.”—Elle

Whether you simply find watches fascinating or you have an old watch that you are curious about, this book is the one for you. This exploration of the evolution of the pendant/pocket watch is divided into centuries. Each century explores what was happening in the world and how these events and fashions influenced watch making. It includes information on makers, their marks, and even the serial numbers for the American watch movements. Filled with clues, it will help you determine when a watch was made, how it was made, what it is made of, and what makes it tick. The amount of photographs of timepieces in this volume is impressive - hundreds of watches are featured in beautiful color photographs. Cases, dials, and movements are included in the photographs - this book encompasses the entire watch. 2004 values.