This manual shows the decisive role that a selective palette can play in conveying mood, enhancing a picture's composition, and turning ordinary shots into compelling camera art. The author shows through numerous examples how careful choices such as limiting color range, using complementary hues, and other decisions based on principles of the color wheel, can produce stunning results.

Michael Busselle is an internationally known, best-selling author of sixteen previous books, a professional photographer, and a Fellow of the Royal Photographic Society.

"Literary critics make natural detectives," says Maud Bailey, heroine of a mystery where the clues lurk in university libraries, old letters, and dusty journals. Together with Roland Michell, a fellow academic and accidental sleuth, Maud discovers a love affair between the two Victorian writers the pair has dedicated their lives to studying: Randolph Ash, a literary great long assumed to be a devoted and faithful husband, and Christabel La Motte, a lesser-known "fairy poetess" and chaste spinster. At first, Roland and Maud's discovery threatens only to alter the direction of their research, but as they unearth the truth about the long-forgotten romance, their involvement becomes increasingly urgent and personal. Desperately concealing their purpose from competing researchers, they embark on a journey that pulls each of them from solitude and loneliness, challenges the most basic assumptions they hold about themselves, and uncovers their unique entitlement to the secret of Ash and La Motte's passion.

Winner of the 1990 Booker Prize—the U.K.'s highest literary award—Possessionis a gripping and compulsively readable novel. A.S. Byatt exquisitely renders a setting rich in detail and texture. Her lush imagery weaves together the dual worlds that appear throughout the novel—the worlds of the mind and the senses, of male and female, of darkness and light, of truth and imagination—into an enchanted and unforgettable tale of love and intrigue. —Lisa Whipple

In this delightful and illuminating look into a crucial but little-known "hinge" of history, Thomas Cahill takes us to the "island of saints and scholars," the Ireland of St. Patrick and the Book of Kells. Here, far from the barbarian despoliation of the continent, monks and scribes laboriously, lovingly, even playfully preserved the West's written treasury. When stability returned in Europe, these Irish scholars were instrumental in spreading learning, becoming not only the conservators of civilization, but also the shapers of the medieval mind, putting their unique stamp on Western culture.

"But Always Fine Bourbon" is the story of the Stitzel Weller Distillery, which, for a large part of the 20th century was known for making the finest bourbon in the world. It's the tale of the Van Winkle family, of the legendary "Pappy" Van Winkle, of an era when businesses were still run by larger-than-life men who had other priorties than maximizing the bottom line. It's the story of the American Dream: the creation of a family company, so common a part of this country's history, but now disappearing in our age of mergers and acquisitions. It's a story anyone with an interest in bourbon, or Kentucky, or the history of this country will relish. The book is filled with large beautiful photographs.

For the first time ever, noted animation historian and animator John Canemaker documents the lives and works of Disney's "inspirational sketch artists" from the 1930s to the present. These are the people who visualize all the details surrounding each character in the initial creative period before the grueling labor of animation begins. "Through daydreams and doodles, they attempt to 'find' the film." The happy result of these flights of fancy are dancing ostriches and personality-rich broomsticks. Drawings and paintings of Disney characters leap right off the pages of this lush book, where you'll find pastels from Fantasia, faux wood-cuts of the Seven Dwarfs, paintings of Alice in Wonderland, and hundreds of other delightful, rarely seen images.

The stories of artists such as Ty Wong, who created Bambi, and Bianca Majolie, the first woman to join the story department at Walt Disney (in 1935), are as provocative as their art. Canemaker does a fine job of placing the artists' lives and interactions with Disney studios in the historical context of modern art. Before the Animation Beginsis a beautiful book.