2008 CALENDAR  365 Cats Page-A-Day Calendar 2008 By Workman Publishing Company The one and only. A luminary of cat calendars. Now in its 16th year of setting the bar?in terms of quality and cuteness?365 Cats features the hundreds of winners of the 200 Cat Calendar Contest in full color. Here are tabbies with attitude. Persians with poise. Playful tigers, striking calicoes, and lots of sweet little kittens. Plus cats in high places?rooftops, refrigerators, and tree branches. And cats crunching through leaves, tiptoeing over piano keys, frolicking in the snow. Cats in baskets, cats in sinks, cats in hammocks, too. Photos are accompanied by breed information, quotes and lore, health and care tips, and trivia. Read more details 365 Dogs Page-A-Day Calendar 2008  By Workman Publishing Company The cute, the cuter, the cutest. Okay, they're all the cutest. Curly Poodles and silken-haired Shelties. Teeny-tiny Chihuahuas, energized Jack Russells, never-in-a-hurry Bassets. Plus playful Westies, sprightly Spaniels, always-game Labs, and mutts galore. Featuring the hundreds of winners of the 200 Dog Calendar Contest, 365 Dogs is the dog calendar gold standard?now celebrating its 16th full-color year of wagging tails, floppy ears, and those utterly lovable expressions. Here are dogs at play. Dogs at rest. Dogs clowning, dogs leaping, dogs stretching, and dogs posing every which way. Read More Details  MORE 2008 CALENDAR click   ART & PHOTOGRAPHY 30,000 Years of Art By Editors of Phaidon 30,000 YEARS OF ART: THE STORY OF HUMAN CREATIVITY ACROSS TIME AND SPACE is the follow-up to Phaidon's phenomenally successful THE ART BOOK. This is an accessible, fun and informative compendium of world art that offers a fresh perspective on the whole of art history, from 28,000 BC to the present day. It debunks art historical classifications and hierarchies by presenting 1,000 masterworks of art in simple chronological order, demonstrating what was being created all over the globe at the same time. Only here can you find the Venus de Milo next to a mural from the Mayan civilization, or Velazquez' Las Meninas next to a painting from the Chinese Ming Dynasty, an Indian jade wine cup, a ritual Nepalese plaque, a Korean portrait, and Vermeer's Milkmaid. Each work has been chosen for its unique place in the history of art, and as a representative example of the art of its culture. By juxtaposing works of art from different cultures throughout time, this is the first book to offer a balanced appraisal of world art history, revealing the huge diversity of and similarity between man's artistic achievements. Each entry includes a full-page color image of the work and a concise descriptive text that sets the work in context, explaining its contribution to the development of art and the medium in which it was created. A comprehensive index, illustrated timelines, and a glossary of terms and movements make this book an invaluable reference tool and teaching resource. Read more details ...................................................................................................... A Life of Picasso: The Triumphant Years, 1917-1932 By John Richardson The long-awaited third volume of John Richardson?s definitive biography of Pablo Picasso combines the critical astuteness, exhaustive research, and stunning narrative that made the first two volumes an art-historical breakthrough as well as a pleasure to read. The Triumphant Years takes up the artist?s life in 1917, when Picasso and Cocteau left wartime Paris for Rome to work with Diaghilev?s Ballets Russes on their revolutionary production of Parade. Visits to Naples, above all to the Farnese marbles in the Museo Nazionale, would leave Picasso with a lifelong obsession with classical sculpture as well as the self-referential commedia dell?arte. After returning to Paris and marrying one of Diaghilev?s ballerinas, Olga Khokhlova, he abandoned bohemia for the drawing rooms of Paris. Hence, his so-called Duchess period, which coincided with his switch to neoclassicism, and would ultimately be absorbed into a metamorphic form of cubism. In the summer of 1923, Picasso and his American friends Gerald and Sara Murphy transformed the French Riviera from a winter into a summer resort, when they persuaded the proprietor of the Hôtel du Cap at Antibes to keep the place open for the summer. In doing so, they made the Riviera Europe?s major playground. Mediterraneanism was in Picasso?s bones. Born in Málaga, he would always identify with this inland sea. In 1927 the artist?s life underwent a major change; he abandoned society for a life out of the spotlight with a beautiful seventeen-year-old girl, Marie-Thérèse Walter. His erotic obsession with Marie-Thérèse would result in an ever-growing antipathy for his neurasthenic, understandably jealous wife. Balletic clues have enabled Richardson to identify a number of baffling figure-paintings as portrayals of Olga and reinterpret the work of the late 1920s and early 1930s. Picasso?s passionate love for his mistress and his passionate hatred for his wife can be fully understood only in light of each other. The last three chapters constitute an annus mirabilis?spring 1931 to spring 1932?during which the artist celebrated his fiftieth birthday. Challenged to scale new heights by the passage of time, Picasso lived up to his shamanic belief that painting should have a magic function. In the course of this year, he reinvented sculpture and to a great extent his own imagery in a bid to Picassify the classical tradition. The resultant retrospective in Paris and Zurich in the summer of 1932 confirmed Picasso as the leader of the modern movement. Read more details ......................................................................................................   IN ASSOCIATES WITH