No amateur or math authority can be without this ultimate compendium of classic puzzles, paradoxes, and puzzles from America's best-loved mathematical expert. 320 line drawings.

Peter Mason takes a bold, multidisciplinary approach in this account of the idea of the colossal in culture. He gathers instances of the colossal throughout history—including the obelisks of Egypt, the Colossus of Rhodes, the Roman Colosseum, the heads of the Olmecs, and the stone statues of Easter Island—using historical and archaeological evidence to position them within the context of time and culture. Mason establishes a vision of the colossal that encompasses both the colossal in scale and another, overlooked sense of the word: the archaic Greek kolossos, a ritual effigy, and its modern equivalents. Combining fascinating detail with a rigorous account that spans three millennia, The Colossal argues that the artist who best understood and tapped into the kolossos was Alberto Giacometti. Mason shows that the Swiss sculptor and painter’s work articulated themes of death and mourning in ways rarely seen since the art of archaic Greece, themes most evident in his enigmatic work, The Cube. From the monolithic sculptures of long-dead civilizations to Giacometti’s imposing and unsettling heads, The Colossal is an innovative book that traces unexplored thematic threads through visual history.

A true pioneer in the field of recreational mathematics, Martin Gardner has been wrangling words for decades, and his latest opus is nothing short of extraordinary. From amazing anagrams and silly spoonerisms to alphamagic squares and cryptarithms, this mind-bending compendium is chock-full of whimsical forms of wordplay that are sure to have sesquipedalian scholars and limber-minded logophiles racking their brains in delight.

A collection of oft-repeated urban legends brings together the best of modern myths, from the stoned baby sitter who mistook a baby for a turkey to the fabulously expensive recipe for chocolate chip cookies.

Introduction to the giants that roamed the earth millions of years ago. Combines adventure-filled stories with true-to-life narrative and facts.

An 8x8 storybook based on the deep-sea adventures of the Octonauts! As they travel through deep, dark waters, the Octonauts find themselves in a battle with a colossal squid! The squid is determined to win against the Octopod—can the crew keep hold of their ship in this tough round of tentacle wrestling?

Adapting several stellar Robert E. Howard works, Dark Horse's award-winning King Conan comics by Timothy Truman, Tomas Giorello, and Jose Villarrubia are all collected into one deluxe hardcover! Including adaptations of Howard's short stories 'The Scarlet Citadel,' 'The Phoenix on the Sword,' and 'Wolves Beyond the Border', as well as the twelve-issue adaptation of Howard's only Conan novel, The Hour of the Dragon. Plus original series cover work by Gerald Parel, Darick Robertson, Andrew C. Robinson, and Sanjulian.

Leading politicians, diplomats, clerics, planters, farmers, manufacturers, and merchants preached a transformative, world-historical role for the Confederacy, persuading many of their compatriots to fight not merely to retain what they had but to gain their future empire. Impervious to reality, their vision of future world leadership—territorial, economic, political, and cultural—provided a vitally important, underappreciated motivation to form an independent Confederate republic. In Colossal Ambitions, Adrian Brettle explores how leading Confederate thinkers envisioned their postwar nation—its relationship with the United States, its place in the Americas, and its role in the global order. Brettle draws on rich caches of published and unpublished letters and diaries, Confederate national and state government documents, newspapers published in North America and England, conference proceedings, pamphlets, contemporary and scholarly articles, and more to engage the perspectives of not only modern historians but some of the most salient theorists of the Western World in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. An impressive and complex undertaking, Colossal Ambitions concludes that while some Confederate commentators saw wartime industrialization as pointing toward a different economic future, most Confederates saw their society as revolving once more around coercive labor, staple crop production, and exports in the war’s wake.

In October 1869, as America stood on the brink of becoming a thoroughly modern nation, workers unearthed what appeared to be a petrified ten-foot giant on a remote farm in upstate New York. The discovery caused a sensation. Over the next several months, newspapers devoted daily headlines to the story and tens of thousands of Americans—including Oliver Wendell Holmes, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and the great showman P. T. Barnum—flocked to see the giant on exhibition. In the colossus, many saw evidence that their continent, and the tiny hamlet of Cardiff, had ties to Biblical history. American science also weighed in on the discovery, and in doing so revealed its own growing pains, including the shortcomings of traditional education, the weaknesses of archaeological methodology, as well as the vexing presence of amateurs and charlatans within its ranks. A national debate ensued over the giant's origins, and was played out in the daily press. Ultimately, the discovery proved to be an elaborate hoax. Still, the story of the Cardiff Giant reveals many things about America in the post-Civil War years. After four years of destruction on an unimagined scale, Americans had increasingly turned their attention to the renewal of progress. But the story of the Cardiff Giant seemed to shed light on a complicated, mysterious past, and for a time scientists, clergymen, newspaper editors, and ordinary Americans struggled to make sense of it. Hucksters, of course, did their best to take advantage of it. The Cardiff Giant was one of the leading questions of the day, and how citizens answered it said much about Americans in 1869 as well as about America more generally.

A huge sea of pink Blubbo has been discovered and on its islands live a lost tribe of humos who work with a marvellous material called Gossmo. Their only contact with the mainland is through a tribe of green conically shelled humos called Weinisplats. To establish contact wit these, the help of the pink shelled Weinisplat, Babblo. And the only ones capable of getting her to comply are the youngers Zarchia, Ambo and Aandt. Of course the White Pursho has to tag along. The party is led by the veteran soldat, Newtobero. There are unforeseen dangers here too, bellcro, the evil tri-eyes and the mysterious force that controls everything on the sea, Dhacoopo.