Burton Holmes (1870-1958) travelled the grand boulevards of Paris to China's Great Wall, from the construction of the Panama canal to the 1906 eruption of Mount Vesuvius. Holmes delighted in finding "the beautiful way around the world" and made a career of sharing his stories, colorful photographs, and films with audiences across America. As a young man, Holmes was mentored by John L. Stoddard, a pioneer of the U.S. travelecture circuit, who passed on his well-established mantle when he retired. Holmes roamed the globe throughout the summer and traversed the United States all winter, transforming the staid lecture tradition into an entertaining show.

Nostalgic poster images evoke a world of romance, glamour, and adventure. Twelve colorful postcards in a variety of early-20th-century styles offer appealing invitations to vacation at the New York World's Fair of 1939, Atlantic City, the beaches of California and the Mediterranean, Italy, France, and other exciting locales.

Stylish, aspirational homes and the dogs that live in them in a beautifully photographed celebration of style and canines. Just as every home is different, so is every dog. In this stunningly photographed book of architecturally superb houses—many of them architects’ own homes—we see how the presence of a dog brings warmth and life to the most dramatic spaces. From mid-century raw brick to a penthouse apartment, gracious Edwardian to Scandinavian modern, from beach house to country retreat, there is always room for a dog or two. They trot, nap, and sniff through every page, at times more rambunctious than their surroundings, and at others perfectly in tune with the setting. Peek inside the most breathtaking homes that feature French bulldogs, golden retrievers, Labradoodles, and more as your guides. Oblivious to designer furniture, heritage considerations, or serious design aesthetics, dogs can make themselves at home anywhere. In fact, the homes in this book are all the more appealing because of their resident dogs.

In Images of China in Polish and Serbian Travel Writings (1720-1949), Tomasz Ewertowski examines how Polish and Serbian travelers from the 18th to the mid-20th century described China, showing various factors which influenced their representations of the Middle Kingdom.

This book is a facsimile of an album of Eggleston's Polaroids assembled by the photographer himself, and containing the only photos he made in this medium. Consisting of 56 images taken with the Polaroid SX-70 (the now cult camera produced between 1972 and 1981) and handmounted in a black leather album also produced by the company, Polaroid SX-70 is the fi rst publication of Eggleston's Polaroids. The gloriously mundane subjects of these photos--a Mississippi street sign, a telephone book, stacked crates of empty soda bottles--are familiar Eggleston territory, but fascinatingly all of these Polaroids were taken outdoors. They are rare records of Eggleston's strolls or drives in and around Mississippi, complement the majority of his work made with color negative fi lm or color slides, and show his ironic fl air for photo-sequencing in book form. Something new always slowly changes right in front of your eyes--it just happens. -- William Eggleston

This is a book by and about Frank O. Etheridge, an African-American musician from an age of cultural explosion. The decade after World War II saw the coming-of-age of marginalized cultures, and in North America a new voice emerged among peoples of African descent. Etheridge performed in a period when some of the greatest cultural producers of the African-American heritage assumed center-stage. From Shanghai to Singapore; from India to Africa and beyond, Frank Etheridge left us a detailed record of his travels in his unpublished manuscript. The book contains his views, insights, and international itinerary during the 1920s. His book is an important volume in the annals of African-American history, not just for its content, but for what it means and symbolizes. Its readers will journey with him, see through his eyes, understand race and racial prejudice as lived in ordinary skin, and sample culture. Some of Etheridge’s reflections and personal biases will seem like unpleasant contradictions from the way we think about racial prejudice today. However, these jarring moments of dissonance are rich learning opportunities that will connect us to his times, while unraveling a greater understanding of ourselves in our current moment. This manuscript, published for the first time, will be accompanied by editorial commentary written by Professor Ben Vinson III, and will be of great interest to students and scholars of African American history.

Who minds sleeping under a mosquito net when it's royally draped over the bed in a lush Kenyan, open-walled hut, fashioned from tree trunks and shielded from the sun by a sumptuous thatched roof? This selection of the most-splendid getaway havens nestled throughout the African continent is sure to please even the most finicky would-be voyagers. Photos.

Since precious few architectural drawings and no theoretical treatises on architecture remain from the premodern Islamic world, the Timurid pattern scroll in the collection of the Topkapi Palace Museum Library is an exceedingly rich and valuable source of information. In the course of her in-depth analysis of this scroll dating from the late fifteenth or early sixteenth century, Gülru Necipoğlu throws new light on the conceptualization, recording, and transmission of architectural design in the Islamic world between the tenth and sixteenth centuries. Her text has particularly far-reaching implications for recent discussions on vision, subjectivity, and the semiotics of abstract representation. She also compares the Islamic understanding of geometry with that found in medieval Western art, making this book particularly valuable for all historians and critics of architecture. The scroll, with its 114 individual geometric patterns for wall surfaces and vaulting, is reproduced entirely in color in this elegant, large-format volume. An extensive catalogue includes illustrations showing the underlying geometries (in the form of incised “dead” drawings) from which the individual patterns are generated. An essay by Mohammad al-Asad discusses the geometry of the muqarnas and demonstrates by means of CAD drawings how one of the scroll’s patterns could be used co design a three-dimensional vault.