Furniture Books

I bought this book a fair while ago and I still love looking at it. I love colour photos and this book has tons of them. The pieces in this book are simply beautiful. They cover everything from tapestries to furniture to painting to metalwork. A good general overview of the important designs in the arts and crafts style. I was most impressed by the examples of furniture.

This is a wonderful book that chronicles the Arts and Crafts movement in California. Telling of The Mission Inn, Roycroft, Batchelder and many more. This book is wonderfully illustrated with plenty of color photographs. The book is from a exposition at a Museum. An overall great book.

This book was informative, we happen to have a copy of the desk pictured on the cover, but with a few more details, and this was great to help track it's history.

As a rather novice level woodworker, I bought this book primarily because of the subtitle, "10 projects you can build." "No big deal," I thought. A quick trip to the lumber yard and a few casual hours in the shop and I'd be napping in my new rocker. Actually starting on the projects, however, has been like being sucked into an unexpectedly rewarding and demanding contest with large pieces of wood. What the title doesn't mention (and probably wisely so) is that the most desirable pieces in the book require you to make a variety of jigs and tooling - from scratch - in order to decently build the projects. A fair sample of these jigs and tooling (e.g., post bending form, side rung mortise jig, front rung mortise jig, box molds, lid molds, slat bender, etc.) now hang from the rafters of my rather small shop and threaten the safety of my skull on a regular basis. However, I don't think that the process of building these pieces would have been as pleasurable, or even possible, without acquiring the skills learned in the process of building the tooling. Kerry is a great teacher and his style is easy and encouraging. He helps you to believe that you really can build these projects. I now own four or five of his books (if my shop were less "crowded" I'd be sure of the number) and enjoy both the prose and the projects in each. I believe that this guy is top rate and would strongly recommend his work to anyone looking to learn and/or improve on their skills. I hope that you all enjoy his work as much as I do.

I love the historical accuracy in miniature settings. This book is a must for anyone who has an interest in historic tudor/ half-timbered houses. Whether miniaturist or not.

In addition to the houses themselves the author also discusses period furniture.

This book deserves more than 5 stars in my opinion

This book is a delight for adults and children alike. Easy-to-follow instructions with incredible and colorful photographs. The clothes are so simple to make you'll end up making several for friends and collectors. There are even recipes for the holiday themes. I gave this book to my mom and to my niece who is 12 - they had fun making things together.

Where as I wouldn't say this is a beginners book, it does cover the basics. I think this is a great book for someone who is interested in seeing what else is possible with this medium.

BEYOND THE SCREEN is an apt title; it describes this book both literally and metaphorically. Nancy Berliner and fourcontributing writers dissect both the life and furniture of sixtheen and seventeenth China in a work that combines art, craft and social history. My husband, an amateur woodworker, was fascinated with descriptions of workmanship and digrams of joinery. I preferred the sections that talked about the people -- both the craftsmen (usually anonymous) that made the furniture and the elite who commissioned it. But the focus point of the book is undoubtedly the photographs of the furniture itself -- some pieces which are classically simple, others that are intricately carved. Berliner comments at length on each piece. For collectors of antique Chinese furniture -- or reproductions -- this book is an absolute must-have. It gives the story behind the craft and makes sitting down so much more interesting!

From a furniture viewpoint this book provided a thorough history of the style and showed many examples of this wonderful period to give me inspiration and understanding.

Start dreaming. Let yourself be carried away into an amazing world of Art, Architecture and Design. And order another book for your best friend.

This is what blowup will do to you.
My wife is the design author Ingrid Wenz-Gahler, and when I gave her this book her first words were: How much work to get all this information, to collect all those pictures. She knows what she is talking about.

blowup by Sean Topham is a richely illustrated history of inflatable design and pneumatic technology which encompasses us in all aspests of life. This book takes you through two hundred years of engineering inflatables from the first start of a Montgolfière in France in 1783 to pneumatic dummy Sherman tanks used in World War II by the British and to architectural challenges like the Eden project of 2001 in the American West.

What I like most about this book is the use of inflatables in modern art, the film industry and even fashion. Sean Topham has looked into every corner of this world and came up in this book with pictures of Woody Allen in an inflabable body-suit for the film Sleeper, with fashion created by Jean-Paul Gaultier and many others, and with countless pieces of art like Andy Warhol's Silver Clouds and Hans Haakes Sky Line. - Just to name a few.

What Sean Topham is showing us that inflatable art, architecture and design is adding beauty to our lives. WELL EARNED FIVE STARS.