Duarte 15 Historic Postcards

Equal parts mail art, data visualization, and affectionate correspondence, Dear Data celebrates "the infinitesimal, incomplete, imperfect, yet exquisitely human details of life," in the words of Maria Popova (Brain Pickings), who introduces this charming and graphically powerful book. For one year, Giorgia Lupi, an Italian living in New York, and Stefanie Posavec, an American in London, mapped the particulars of their daily lives as a series of hand-drawn postcards they exchanged via mail weekly—small portraits as full of emotion as they are data, both mundane and magical. Dear Data reproduces in pinpoint detail the full year's set of cards, front and back, providing a remarkable portrait of two artists connected by their attention to the details of their lives—including complaints, distractions, phone addictions, physical contact, and desires. These details illuminate the lives of two remarkable young women and also inspire us to map our own lives, including specific suggestions on what data to draw and how. A captivating and unique book for designers, artists, correspondents, friends, and lovers everywhere.

Nothing speaks to us like great literature. It presents us with truth, challenges, humor, and delight. This collection of 100 postcards showcases bold graphic interpretations of 50 of the greatest literary quotes of all time. From Virginia Wolf to Oscar Wilde, from Bront to Poe to Austen, each piece will spark your imagination and kindle your creative spirit. Cards range from an F. Scott Fitzgerald quote set against a Jazz Age champagne glass, to Emily Bronte's Wuthering Heights visualized as puzzle pieces, to Immanuel Kant's musings juxtaposed with a constellation-filled night sky. This is the perfect stationery for any bibliophile, and a set sure to be repurposed by many design and decor buffs for wall art.

Robert Bogdan combines a richly descriptive text with striking illustrations to create vivid biographical sketches of these pioneer photographers, who worked their individual styles to illuminate six different regions of the Adirondack Mountains. The book also provides insight into the popular culture of the times mainly through postcards but it also takes an in-depth look at the families and work lives of these artisans as they plied their trade in the popular venue of commercial postcards. Aside from the Adirondack locals and a few postcard connoisseurs, the gifted folk artists and craftspeople profiled here were virtually unknown until now. Bogdan has collected nearly 250 illustrations including postcards and photographs depicting Adirondack life of the time. Many of these images have never before been published.

San Joseans have long had their pick of the best in stage and screen entertainment. In the late 19th through the mid-20th centuries, theatres were beloved places. Whether in downtown, the neighborhoods, or surrounding communities, theatres provided the thrill of a night on the town. Most of the early theatres built in San Jose exist only in photographs, many exhibited in this book for the first time. A few, such as the palatial California Theatre and the venerable Jose Theatre, serve exciting new uses in todayas entertainment marketplace. Even such relative newcomers as the Century 21 Theatre and its fellow domed cinemas have begun to gain a romance of their own.

The Real Photo Postcard Guide is an informative, comprehensive, and practical treatment of this wildly popular American phenomenon that dominated the United States photographic market during the first third of the twentieth century. Robert Bogdan and Todd Weseloh draw on extensive research and observation to address all aspects of the photo postcard from its history, origin, and cultural significance to practical matters like dating, purchasing, condition, and preservation. Illustrated with over 350 exceptional photo postcards taken from archives and private collections across the country, the scope of the Real Photo Postcard Guide spans technical considerations of production, characteristics of superior images, collecting categories, and methods of research for dating photo postcards and investigating their photographers. In a broader sense, the authors show how "real photo postcards" document the social history of America. From family outings and workplace awards to lynchings and natural disasters, every image captures a moment of American cultural history from the society that generated them. Bogdan and Weseloh’s book provides an admirable integration of informative text and compelling photographic illustrations. Collectors, archivists, photographers, photo historians, social scientists, and anyone interested in the visual documentation of America will find the Real Photo Postcard Guide indispensable.

What is fascism? By focusing on the concrete: what the fascists did, rather than what they said, the esteemed historian Robert O. Paxton answers this question. From the first violent uniformed bands beating up “enemies of the state,” through Mussolini’s rise to power, to Germany’s fascist radicalization in World War II, Paxton shows clearly why fascists came to power in some countries and not others, and explores whether fascism could exist outside the early-twentieth-century European setting in which it emerged. "A deeply intelligent and very readable book. . . . Historical analysis at its best." –The Economist The Anatomy of Fascism will have a lasting impact on our understanding of modern European history, just as Paxton’s classic Vichy France redefined our vision of World War II. Based on a lifetime of research, this compelling and important book transforms our knowledge of fascism–“the major political innovation of the twentieth century, and the source of much of its pain.”

Popular and Visual Culture: Design, Circulation and Consumption is a transnational project that fosters a dialogue with multiple origins, both in geographical and academic terms. From the onset, this book questions the concepts of visual and popular culture, terms which are currently applied both to describe scientific fields, as operative concepts in theoretical discourse, and to characterize specific cultural contexts. The book’s analysis and categorization of visual and popular culture pursues discourses and practices which mark different historical eras and shape social orders. Because popular iconic and written productions are the outcome of a network of political, economic, ideological and social circumstances that are often hardly detectable and too taken for granted to be critically recognized, even by those who draw, paint or write (and live) under their influence. That is why visual figurations of popular culture should be studied as the support of a deeply motivated symbolic discourse on the values shared by a community. This book deals, in a way or another, with how popular and visual artefacts and sceneries are socially built, preserved and/or contested. The volume brings together, not only different disciplinary perspectives, but also diverse empirical phenomena, while approaching the wide subject of visuality and popular culture.