Walter Potter S Curious World Of Taxidermy

Welcome to Victorian taxidermist Walter Potter’s fantasy world of rabbit schoolchildren, cigar-smoking squirrels and exemplary feline etiquette in Walter Potter’s Curious World of Taxidermy… Walter Potter (1835–1918), a British country taxidermist of no great expertise, built anthropomorphic taxidermy tableaux that became famous icons of Victorian whimsy, including his masterpiece The Death & Burial of Cock Robin. His tiny museum in Bramber, Sussex, was crammed full of multi-legged kittens, two-headed lambs, and a bewildering assortment of curios. Potter’s inspired and beguiling tableaux found many fans in the contemporary art world: it was reported that a £1M bid by Damien Hirst to keep the collection intact was refused when the museum finally closed. Here, perhaps for the last time, many important pieces from the collection are showcased and celebrated with new photographs of Potter’s best-loved works. Darkly witty and affecting, Walter Potter’s Curious World of Taxidermy makes a charming, whimsical (and yes, slightly morbid) gift.

A humorous look at what happens when taxidermy goes terribly wrong, by the founder of the hit website crappytaxidermy.com. A relaxed toad enjoying a smoke and a brew. A cat with eerily flexible front legs. A smiling lion with receding gums. Whether you choose to laugh or cringe at these spectacularly bad attempts at taxidermy, you won't be able to tear your eyes away from the curiosities inside. This volume brings together the very best of the worst (along with a DIY "Stuff Your Own Mouse" lesson by an Insect Preparator from the American Museum of Natural History), showcasing the most perverse yet imaginative anatomical reconstructions of the animal kingdom you'll ever see.

The enthralling new Sunday Times bestselling gothic novel from the author of THE WINTER GHOSTS, LABYRINTH and THE CITY OF LIES The clock strikes twelve. Beneath the wind and the remorseless tolling of the bell, no one can hear the scream . . . 1912. A Sussex churchyard. Villagers gather on the night when the ghosts of those who will not survive the coming year are thought to walk. And in the shadows, a woman lies dead. As the flood waters rise, Connie Gifford is marooned in a decaying house with her increasingly tormented father. He drinks to escape the past, but an accident has robbed her of her most significant childhood memories. Until the disturbance at the church awakens fragments of those vanished years . . .

In this book, Tim Dee tells the story of four green fields spread around the world: their grasses, their hedges, their birds, their skies, and both their natural and human histories. These four fields—walkable, mappable, man–made, mowable, knowable, but also secretive, mysterious, wild, contested, and changing—play central roles in the sweeping panorama of world history and in the lives of individuals. In Dee's telling, a field is never just a setting for great battles or natural disasters, though it is often this as well. A field is the oldest and simplest and truest measure of what a man needs in life, especially when looked at, contemplated, worked in, lived with, and written about. Dee's four fields, which he has known and studied for more than twenty years, are the fen field at the bottom of his private garden, a field in southern Zambia, a prairie in Little Bighorn, Montana, and a grass meadow in the Exclusion Zone at Chernobyl, Ukraine. Meditating on these four fields, Dee makes us look anew at where we live and how. He argues that we must attend to what we have made of the wild.

From Pulitzer Prize-winning author Morris comes a revelatory new biography ofThomas Alva Edison, the most prolific genius in American history.

The Improv Handbook is the most comprehensive, smart, helpful and inspiring guide to improv available today. Applicable to comedians, actors, public speakers and anyone who needs to think on their toes, it features a range of games, interviews, descriptions and exercises that illuminate and illustrate the exciting world of improvised performance. First published in 2008, this second edition features a new foreword by comedian Mike McShane, as well as new exercises on endings, managing blind offers and master-servant games, plus new and expanded interviews with Keith Johnstone, Neil Mullarkey, Jeffrey Sweet and Paul Rogan. The Improv Handbook is a one-stop guide to the exciting world of improvisation. Whether you're a beginner, an expert, or would just love to try it if you weren't too scared, The Improv Handbook will guide you every step of the way.

At head of title: Morbid Anatomy Museum.

“One of the most profound and illuminating studies of this century to have been published in recent decades.”—John Gray, New York Times Book Review Hailed as “a magisterial critique of top-down social planning” by the New York Times, this essential work analyzes disasters from Russia to Tanzania to uncover why states so often fail—sometimes catastrophically—in grand efforts to engineer their society or their environment, and uncovers the conditions common to all such planning disasters. “Beautifully written, this book calls into sharp relief the nature of the world we now inhabit.”—New Yorker “A tour de force.”— Charles Tilly, Columbia University