On a business trip to Taos, New Mexico, Muhlbach, a Manhattan executive, becomes obsessed with a terra cotta figurine of pre-Columbian art

Connoisseur's Book Japanese Swords is a Kodansha International publication.

From Jennifer Scott—author of the New York Times bestselling Madame Chic series and founder of the Daily Connoisseur blog—comes this playful take on manners and being a good global citizen. Parents and younger children work together to read about a wide range of topics: communication, table manners, tidiness, thinking of others, grooming, and health. Activities, learning games, fill-in-the-blanks, letter-writing exercises, recipes (for food and for slime!), and some fun songs and rhymes help kids learn concepts and practice good behaviors. Featuring charming illustrations and go-to advice from a trusted source, this is a timely guide for raising well-mannered, neat, and gracious children for parents, grandparents, and children of reading age.

The delightful crime-solving and aristocratic social adventures of an American antiques expert and a British feline with finesse It’s love at first sight when a businessman visiting London meets a silver-gray cat named James in the lobby of his apartment house. The two begin meeting regularly for cocktails—single-malt whiskey, neat, for James—and attending posh parties, where James first makes a name for himself by cracking the case of a priceless jewel scam. Soon James is on the prowl, deterring pickpockets on the subway and ferreting out stamp forgeries and counterfeit paintings. In between crime capers, he screens potential tenants, spends the holidays at an ancestral estate in Devon where the crème de la crème of British society anoints him Sir James, and indulges in his penchants for pâté de fois gras and matchmaking with inimitable panache. James the Connoisseur Cat is the 1st book in the Connoisseur Cat novels, but you may enjoy reading the series in any order.

Here at last is an origami book intended solely for the advanced paperfolder. Groundbreaking in concept and challenging in content, it presents sixty-five ingenious projects by respected masters working in a variety of themes and origami genres. From Toshikazu Kawasaki's Unique Iso-area Folding Method to David Briil's remarkable "bottle" to Peter Engel's playful "kangaroo," the featured designs have been carefully chosen to test the refined sensibilities and stimulate the artistic appetites of the origami devotee. If you are an accomplished paperfolder you will be inspired by the beauty and logic of the geometric form as discovered in such designs as Hourglass, Rotating Tetrahedon, Brain Ticklers, and Extraterrestrial Being. You will delight in the wit and poetry of representational origami as you create delicate and winsome patterns for Kitten, Goose, Pelican, Giraffe, Camellia, Spiral Snail Shell, Ground Beetle, Pine Cone, Fox, and many more designs. What's more, you will find the key to successfully mastering numerous intricate techniques and complex paper fold...with ease! This is no ordinary origami workbook. Complicated processes are made highly accessible-yet remain daring-through clear, concise instructions and highly detailed diagrams. One of the unexpected joys of the book is that its mentally invigorating text will serve as an ongoing inspiration to novel approaches and new origami adventures - even after you have completed a project.

Celebrated connoisseur, drawings collector, print dealer, book publisher and authority on the art of antiquity, Pierre-Jean Mariette (1694-1774) was a pivotal figure in the eighteenth-century European art world. Focusing on the trajectory of Mariette?s career, this book examines the material practices and social networks through which connoisseurs forged the idea of art as an object of empirical and historical analysis. Drawing on significant unpublished archival material as well as on histories of science, publishing, collecting and display, this book shows how Mariette and his colleagues? practices of classification and interpretation of the graphic arts gave rise to new conceptions of artistic authorship and to a history of art that transcended the biographies of individual artists. To follow Mariette?s career through the eighteenth century is to see that art was consolidated as a specialized category of intellectual inquiry-and that style emerged as its structuring analytic device-in the overlapping spaces of the collector?s cabinet, the connoisseur?s portfolio and the dealer?s shop.