On Dad’s Wish List

Speed, Style, and Beauty

Cars from the Ralph Lauren Collection

Published by MFA Publications.
Text by Winston S. Goodfellow and Beverly Rae Kimes. Foreword and Interview by Darcy Kuronen. Introduction by Ralph Lauren. Photographs by Michael Furman.

Bugatti and Bentley, Alfa and Aston, Mercedes and McLaren—these are not merely cars, they are some of the most exquisite automobiles ever assembled, selected by Ralph Lauren, one of the foremost designers of our time. This breathtaking volume features 29 of these wonders—from such unparalleled masterpieces as the 1930 Mercedes Benz “Count Trossi,” the 1938 Alfa Romeo Mille Miglia, and the 1938 Bugatti Atlantic Coupe to marvels from Jaguar, Aston Martin, Ferrari, Porsche and even a Ford “Woody”—each of these vehicles is lovingly photographed and presented with authoritative elegance. Complementing the images are sketches of these and other cars—rarely seen drawings that give insight into the conceptual and development stages of the automobiles. Now in its fourth printing, Speed, Style, and Beauty is the first book on cars to center its discussion squarely on the car's role as an art object. The 29 chapters, by two of the best known and most respected authors writing about cars today, gives the indispensable background information, but also approaches the cars the way an art historian would approach fine sculpture—treating them as consummate works of decorative art for the modern age. With over 160 color images by world-renowned photographer Michael Furman, plus an introductory interview with Ralph Lauren who discusses the links between the cars and his overall design philosophy, this is an elegant yet informative book that will delight both the rampant car enthusiast and aficionados of great design in any form. The sleekly curved chrome and steel of these timeless dream machines conjures the glamour of the 1930s, the opulent ease of the 1950s and the charged excitement of the 1980s—the perfect marriage of speed, style and beauty.

PUBLISHER
MFA Publications

BOOK FORMAT
Hardcover, 9.75 x 12.25 in. / 210 pgs / 196 color / 37 bw.

PUBLISHING STATUS
Pub Date 3/15/2005
Active

DISTRIBUTION
D.A.P. Exclusive
Catalog: SPRING 2005 p. 179   

PRODUCT DETAILS
ISBN 9780878466856 TRADE
List Price: $60.00 CDN $79.00

AVAILABILITY
In stock

Mercedes-Benz 300 SL Rennsportwagen

Milestones of Motor Sports, Vol. 2

Published by Hatje Cantz.
Text by Günter Engelen.

The 300 SL (W 194) is the first racing car with which Mercedes-Benz renewed its participation in international automobile racing in the postwar period. The car has proven itself in top-ranking racing positions, such as in the 24-hour endurance race in Le Mans, or the Carrera Panamericana in Mexico. Since 1952, this Stuttgart-based make has secured a place in the worldwide motor sports scene. The racing car achieved particular fame for its unusual gull-winged doors, which turned the production sports car 300 SL, introduced in 1954 and directly derived from the W 194, into a lasting icon of automobile history.
This exclusive publication is the second installment of the Milestones of Motor Sports series, and it draws from the numerous archives of Mercedes-Benz Classic. The complete profiles and driving histories of each car are presented in great detail, with some images and documentation that have never before been published.

PUBLISHER
Hatje Cantz

BOOK FORMAT
Slip, Hardcover, 11 x 14.5 in. / 296 pgs / 252 color.

PUBLISHING STATUS
Pub Date 11/24/2015
Active

DISTRIBUTION
D.A.P. Exclusive
Catalog: FALL 2015 p. 93   

PRODUCT DETAILS
ISBN 9783775740036 SDNR30
List Price: $150.00 CDN $200.00

AVAILABILITY
In stock

Koto Bolofo: Horse Power

Published by Steidl.

The horse has a long and rich history as a subject in the visual arts. In sculpture and painting, in the decorative arts and most recently in photography, the horse has been celebrated for its cultural and social importance. Horse Power is a compelling photographic portrait of the horse today. During one week in September 2009, Bolofo documented life on the grounds of esteemed racehorse trainer Christiane Head-Maarek at Chantilly, France's famous racehorse town. Rising early each morning to make the most of the rare access he had gained, Bolofo photographed charming everyday occurrences--a blacksmith forging a horse shoe; filing a horse's hoof; grooming, walking and riding the animals--as well as making candid portraits of ambitious teenage jockeys-to-be. Bolofo explores every aspect of horse power--the physical strength of these million-dollar animals, their cultural and sporting status and their noble beauty.

PUBLISHER
Steidl

BOOK FORMAT
Clth, 11.5 x 14.5 in. / 218 pgs / illustrated throughout.

PUBLISHING STATUS
Pub Date 2/1/2011
Active

DISTRIBUTION
D.A.P. Exclusive
Catalog: FALL 2014

PRODUCT DETAILS
ISBN 9783869301297 TRADE
List Price: $65.00 CDN $87.00

AVAILABILITY
Out of stock

Russian Criminal Tattoo Police Files

Volume I

Published by FUEL Publishing.
Edited by Damon Murray, Stephen Sorrell. Text by Arkady Bronnikov.

Russian Criminal Tattoo Police Files Volume I features more than 180 photographs of Russian criminal tattoos and official police papers from the collection of Arkady Bronnikov, regarded as Russia’s foremost authority on criminal tattoo iconography. From the mid-1960s to the late 1980s, Bronnikov worked as a senior expert in criminalistics at the USSR Ministry of Internal Affairs, and part of his duties involved visiting the correctional institutions of the Ural and Siberia regions. It was there that he interviewed convicts, gathering information and taking photographs of their tattoos, amassing one of the most comprehensive archives of this phenomenon. Bronnikov regularly helped to solve criminal cases across Russia by using his collection of tattoos to identify culprits and corpses. Selections from Bronnikov’s collection, which includes more than 900 photographs, will be published by Fuel in two volumes. The Bronnikov collection was made exclusively for police use, to further the understanding of the language of these tattoos and to act as an aid in the identification and apprehension of criminals in the field. Unimpeded by artistic aspirations, these amazing vernacular photographs present a seemingly straightforward representation of criminal society. Every image discloses evidence of an inmate’s character: aggressive, vulnerable, melancholic, conceited. The prisoners’ bodies display an unofficial history waiting to be deciphered, told not just through tattoos, but also in scars and missing digits. Yet close inspection seems only to make the language of the tattoos more baffling and incredible, pointing to the unimaginable lives of this previously unacknowledged caste.

PUBLISHER
FUEL Publishing

BOOK FORMAT
Hardcover, 5 x 8 in. / 256 pgs / 186 color.

PUBLISHING STATUS
Pub Date 3/22/2016
Active

DISTRIBUTION
D.A.P. Exclusive
Catalog: SPRING 2016 p. 43   

PRODUCT DETAILS
ISBN 9780956896292 TRADE
List Price: $32.50 CDN $42.50

AVAILABILITY
In stock

A Handbook for the Perfect Adventurer

Published by Wakefield Press.
By Pierre Mac Orlan. Translation by Napoleon Jeffries.

Pierre Mac Orlan’s 1920 Handbook for the Perfect Adventurer was at once a paean to the adventure story, a tongue-in-cheek guidebook to the genre’s real-life practitioners and a grim if unspoken coda to the disasters of World War I. “It must be established as a law that adventure in itself does not exist,” Mac Orlan stipulates. “Adventure is in the mind of the one who pursues it, and no sooner is he able to touch it with his finger than it vanishes, to reappear much farther off in another form, at the limits of the imagination.” This handbook outlines two classes of adventurer: the active adventurer (sailors, soldiers, criminals) and the passive adventurer (sedentary parasites who draw sustenance from the exploits of the former). Roaming from battlefields to pirate ships to port-town taverns, and offering advice on reading, traveling and eroticism, Mac Orlan’s Handbook is ultimately a how-to manual for the imagination, and a formulation of the stark choice all would-be adventurers must face: to live or write.
Generally known as the author of Le Quai des brumes (the basis for Marcel Carné’s film of the same name), Pierre Mac Orlan (1882–1970) was a prolific writer of absurdist tales, adventure novels, flagellation erotica and essays, as well as the composer of a trove of songs made famous by the likes of Juliette Gréco. A member of both the Académie Goncourt and the Collège de ’Pataphysique, Mac Orlan was admired by everyone from Raymond Queneau and Boris Vian to André Malraux and Guy Debord.

PUBLISHER
Wakefield Press

BOOK FORMAT
Paperback, 4.5 x 7 in. / 104 pgs / 1 bw.

PUBLISHING STATUS
Pub Date 10/31/2013
Active

DISTRIBUTION
D.A.P. Exclusive
Catalog: FALL 2013 p. 72   

PRODUCT DETAILS
ISBN 9781939663009 TRADE
List Price: $12.95 CDN $18.50

AVAILABILITY
In stock

Cédric Delsaux: Dark Lens

Published by Editions Xavier Barral.
Introduction by George Lucas.

Jabba the Hut lurks in the shadows of a decrepit, abandoned warehouse, his toady eyes glowing; Boba Fett looms up from the fluorescent glare of an indoor car park, poised to kill; Yoda peers out inquiringly from the window ledge of some otherwise untenanted institutional building; Han Solo's cryogenically frozen form on a slab stands, installed bizarrely in an anonymous concrete plaza. Of the many scenarios to which Star Wars fans have dispatched the films' protagonists over the years, none--not even Seth McFarlane's Family Guy homages--are as unlikely as Cédric Delsaux's. In Dark Lens, Delsaux transports Darth Vader and the whole gamut of Star Wars iconography to a post-apocalyptic, urban-suburban landscape of endless parking lots, highrises and wasteland interzones, vacant of ordinary human life. Delsaux's “mythology of banality” (as he describes it) produces images that are not just funny or preposterous, but also weirdly compelling; in their photographic plausibility they successfully incorporate Star Wars into an everyday reality that we can all recognize, but in ways that make both worlds seem strangely real and absurdly false. Delsaux's Dark Lens will captivate both film and photobook fans alike with its fantastically bizarre recasting of Star Wars on planet Earth after the apocalypse.

PUBLISHER
Editions Xavier Barral

BOOK FORMAT
Hardcover, 14.5 x 11.25 in. / 118 pgs / 56 color.

PUBLISHING STATUS
Pub Date 10/31/2011
Active

DISTRIBUTION
D.A.P. Exclusive
Catalog: FALL 2011 p. 53   

PRODUCT DETAILS
ISBN 9782915173703 TRADE
List Price: $75.00 CDN $99.00

AVAILABILITY
In stock

Mercedes-Benz 300 SLR

Milestones of Motor Sports, Vol. 1

Published by Hatje Cantz.
Text by Günter Engelen.

In 1955, Mercedes-Benz won The Sports Car World Championship with the racing car 300 SLR (W 196 S). In addition to the titles achieved that same year in The Formula 1 World Championship and The European Touring Car Championship, this success is proof of the unprecedented dominance of a single manufacturer on the stage of international automobile racing. Stirling Moss and Juan Manuel Fangio, the most successful drivers of their era, had impressive victories in the 300 SLR at the most demanding road races in the world, triumphs that continue to afford this unparalleled racing car lasting fame to this day.
This first volume of the Milestones of Motor Sports limited edition series provides exhaustive and authentic documentation of the technical development of the W 196 S. All the races, as well as the biography of each individual vehicle, are presented with the aid of exclusive images and illustrations.

PUBLISHER
Hatje Cantz

BOOK FORMAT
Slip, Hardcover, 11 x 14.5 in. / 508 pgs / 316 color.

PUBLISHING STATUS
Pub Date 10/27/2015
Active

DISTRIBUTION
D.A.P. Exclusive
Catalog: FALL 2015 p. 93   

PRODUCT DETAILS
ISBN 9783775740012 SDNR30
List Price: $150.00 CDN $200.00

AVAILABILITY
In stock

Nick Brandt: Inherit the Dust

Published by Edwynn Houk Editions.

In a series of epic African panoramas, Brandt records the impact of man in places where animals used to roam 

Three years after the completion of his trilogy, On This Earth, A Shadow Falls Across the Ravaged Land, Nick Brandt returned to East Africa to photograph the escalating changes to the continent's natural world and its animals. In each location, Brandt erected a life-size panel of one of his portrait photographs—showing groups of elephants, rhinos, giraffes, lions, cheetahs and zebras—placing the displaced animals on sites of explosive urban development, new factories, wastelands and quarries. The contemporary figures within the photographs seem oblivious to the presence of the panels and the animals represented in them, who are now no more than ghosts in the landscape. Inherit the Dust includes this new body of panoramic photographs along with original portraits of the animals used in the panoramas, the unique emotional animal portraiture for which Brandt is recognized. There are also two essays by the artist: a text about the crisis facing the conservation of the natural world in East Africa, and behind-the-scenes descriptions of Brandt’s elaborate production process, with accompanying documentary photographs.

Nick Brandt (born 1964) photographs exclusively in Africa. Born in Britain and currently based in Southern California, Brandt cofounded Big Life Foundation in 2010, which helps protect the endangered wildlife inhabiting a large area of East Africa.

PUBLISHER
Edwynn Houk Editions

BOOK FORMAT
Hardcover, 15.25 x 13.25 in. / 124 pgs / 68 tritone.

PUBLISHING STATUS
Pub Date 2/21/2016
Active

DISTRIBUTION
D.A.P. Exclusive
Catalog: SPRING 2016 p. 56   

PRODUCT DETAILS
ISBN 9780692520543 TRADE
List Price: $65.00 CDN $87.00

AVAILABILITY
In stock

Soviet Space Dogs

Published by FUEL Publishing.
Edited by Damon Murray, Stephen Sorrell. Text by Olesya Turkina.

This book is dedicated to the Soviet Space Dogs, who played a crucial part in the Soviet Space program. These homeless dogs, plucked from the streets of Moscow, were selected because they fitted the program's criteria: weighing no more than 15 pounds, measuring no more than 14 inches in length, robust, photogenic and with a calm temperament. These characteristics enabled the dogs to withstand the extensive training that was needed to prepare them for suborbital, then for orbital, space fights. On 3 November 1957, the dog Laika was the first Earth-born creature to enter space, making her instantly famous around the world. She did not return. Her death, a few hours after launching, transformed her into a legendary symbol of sacrifice. Two further strays, Belka and Strelka, were the first beings to make it back from space, and were swiftly immortalized in children's books and cartoons. Images of the Space Dogs proliferated, reproduced on everyday goods across the Soviet Union: cigarette packets, tins of sweets, badges, stamps and postcards all bore their likenesses. Soviet Space Dogs uses these unique items to illustrate the story (in fact and fiction) of how they became fairytale idols. The first book to document these items, it contains more than 350 images, almost all of which are previously unpublished, and many of which have never been seen before outside Russia. The rich and varied ephemera (from cigarette packets to sweet wrappers and children's toys) of Soviet graphics will have immense appeal to the art and design market, as well as appealing to dog-lovers everywhere.

PUBLISHER
FUEL Publishing

BOOK FORMAT
Clth, 5 x 8 in. / 240 pgs / 350 color.

PUBLISHING STATUS
Pub Date 9/30/2014
Active

DISTRIBUTION
D.A.P. Exclusive
Catalog: FALL 2014 p. 47   

PRODUCT DETAILS
ISBN 9780956896285 TRADE
List Price: $32.95 CDN $43.95

AVAILABILITY
In stock

Treatise on Elegant Living

Published by Wakefield Press.
By Honoré de Balzac.

Honoré de Balzac's 1830 Treatise on Elegant Living was a keystone text on dandyism, preceding Jules Barbey d'Aurevilly's Anatomy of Dandyism (1845) and Charles Baudelaire's “The Dandy” (in The Painter of Modern Life, 1863), and marking an important shift from the early dandyism of the British Regency to the intellectual and artistic dandyism of nineteenth-century France. The Treatise is the first true philosophical expression of dandyism, and is full of well-crafted aphorisms: “Elegant living is, in the broad acceptance of the term, the art of animating repose,” runs one classic definition of dandyism, and “One must have studied at least as far as rhetoric to lead an elegant life” asserts the importance of verbal pirouette and dexterous quipping to the dandy. Further embellished with anecdotes and historical and personal illustrations, Balzac's Treatise even features a fictitious encounter with the original dandy himself, Beau Brummell. Never before translated into English, this witty tract makes for an illuminating cornerstone to Balzac's Human Comedy (which was originally to have included a never-completed four-part philosophical “Pathology of Social Life”). Above all, it represents a decisive moment in the history of dandyism, and an entertaining exposition on the profundities of what lies deepest within all of us: our appearance.

PUBLISHER
Wakefield Press

BOOK FORMAT
Paperback, 4.5 x 7 in. / 112 pgs / 1 bw.

PUBLISHING STATUS
Pub Date 2/28/2010
Active

DISTRIBUTION
D.A.P. Exclusive
Catalog: SPRING 2010 p. 178   

PRODUCT DETAILS
ISBN 9780984115501 TRADE
List Price: $12.95 CDN $18.50

AVAILABILITY
In stock