Borders And Scrolls

Invaluable overview of domestic wall paintings in the northeast from 1890-1820

Hundreds of beautiful copyright-free line illustrations of intricately carved furniture trimmings. Delicate floral wreaths, scrolls, more.

Borders and Scrolls provides a fascinating glimpse of domestic wall painting in the historic Northeast. It looks in detail at how and why Americans in New York, Vermont, Massachusetts, and Connecticut decorated the walls of their houses in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Wallpaper was just too expensive for even well-to-do merchants and farmers, who turned to craftsmen to stencil and freehand paint the walls around them. Much of this exquisite domestic art does not survive today: houses were remodeled, some torn down; walls have been repainted, papered over, or removed. Striking examples of those that remain are found in this richly illustrated volume, which reveals intricate technical processes, schools of design, similar designs and techniques on other objects and media, and engrossing histories and stories surrounding the houses, families, and craft painters. Margaret Coffin is the author of Death in Early America: The History and Folklore of Customs and Superstitions of Early Medicine, Funerals, Burials, and Mourning and The History and Folklore of American Country Tinware, 1700–1900.

The series Ethiopic Manuscripts, Texts, and Studies offers, in the first place, catalogues of the Ethiopic Manuscript Imaging Project, whose purpose it is to digitize and catalogue collections of Ethiopic manuscripts in North America and around the world. Beyond this, though, the series offers a venue for monographs, revised dissertations, and texts that explore the rich historical, literary, and artistic traditions of Ethiopia and the Ethiopian Orthodox Church. From the Series Foreword

The Vessantara Jataka tells the story of Prince Vessantara, who attained the Perfection of Generosity by giving away his fortune, his children, and his wife. Vessantara was the penultimate rebirth as a human of the future Gotama Buddha, and his extreme charity has been represented and reinterpreted in texts, sermons, rituals, and art throughout South and Southeast Asia and beyond. This anthology features well-respected anthropologists, textual scholars in religious and Buddhist studies, and art historians, who engage in sophisticated readings of the text and its ethics of giving, understanding of attachment and nonattachment, depiction of the trickster, and unique performative qualities. They reveal the story to be as brilliantly layered as a Homeric epic or Shakespearean play, with aspects of tragedy, comedy, melodrama, and utopian fantasy intertwined to problematize and scrutinize Theravada Buddhism's cherished virtues.

Learn the decorating secrets and luscious recipes of a master cake designer and instructor at the prestigious Institute of Culinary Education in New York City.