A tour of the astonishing and stunning newly painted Victorian homes now beautifying all of the United States as ancestors of the original Painted Ladies of San Francisco! 172 full-color photographs.

This happy, gloriously colorful book celebrates the unique collection of Victorian houses in San Francisco--houses of such highly eclectic architectural charm that they can only best be described as being of the San Francisco Style. The great photographs show us, and the delightful text and captions tell us, how San Francisco's Painted Ladies have enjoyed an astonishing renaissance.

This book spans more than 50,000 miles and three hundred cities in every part of the country to present a photographic celebration of Victorian architecture and interiors.

Now, eleven years after the original Painted Ladies these authors feel it is the perfect time to take their thousands of readers back to San Francisco and give them a house tour of another marvelous collection of proud Victorians--inside and out. Illustrated.

How to paint and decorate elaborately.

A heartrending, gripping novel about two sisters in Belle Époque Paris and the young woman forever immortalized as muse for Edgar Degas’ Little Dancer Aged Fourteen. 1878 Paris. Following their father’s sudden death, the van Goethem sisters find their lives upended. Without his wages, and with the small amount their laundress mother earns disappearing into the absinthe bottle, eviction from their lodgings seems imminent. With few options for work, Marie is dispatched to the Paris Opéra, where for a scant seventeen francs a week, she will be trained to enter the famous ballet. Her older sister, Antoinette, finds work as an extra in a stage adaptation of Émile Zola’s naturalist masterpiece L’Assommoir. Marie throws herself into dance and is soon modeling in the studio of Edgar Degas, where her image will forever be immortalized as Little Dancer Aged Fourteen. There she meets a wealthy male patron of the ballet, but might the assistance he offers come with strings attached? Meanwhile Antoinette, derailed by her love for the dangerous Émile Abadie, must choose between honest labor and the more profitable avenues open to a young woman of the Parisian demimonde. Set at a moment of profound artistic, cultural, and societal change, The Painted Girls is a tale of two remarkable sisters rendered uniquely vulnerable to the darker impulses of “civilized society.” In the end, each will come to realize that her salvation, if not survival, lies with the other.