A catalog of more than 1,500 collectible pieces features tips on purchasing costume jewelry, a guide to desireable prices, and a detailed history of costume jewelry from ancient times to the present day.

Classic, bawdy, seductive and witty, Mae West is one of the most iconic actresses in motion picture history. Notorious for pushing the envelope with her suggestive innuendos and racy persona, she is often cited as a major contributor to the enforcement of the strict Production Code in 1934 that would change the way movies were made for decades to follow. Mae West: The Essential Collection features 9 of her best films including her debut with George Raft in Night After Night, She Done Him Wrong and I'm No Angel both co-starring Cary Grant, Belle of the Nineties and her only collaboration with W.C. Fields, My Little Chickadee. Filled with comedy, romance, drama, music and some of the wittiest dialogue ever captured on film, this unforgettable collection highlights the true essence of one of the most influential actresses of the last century.

"4 of 5 stars overall, 5 for originality....make the world and the opportunities for animating beautiful sequences a real selling point....keep it up!" --Jonny Perl for Rob Minkoff, director "The Lion King". Corporate-backed, black ops, they fed the world to the worms. Armed to the teeth with genetic weaponry and temporal spy-tech... Diplomatic geniuses like Oxridge College's Skall, Dor and Dimmack alone can oppose them. Skall has his time machine calibrated to nudge history's path a bit. But he didn't foresee a trio of time-tripping deities with their own agendas. --Of how they want to use humanity, and lesser magic beings too. So seeming invulnerable enemies are squeezing both sides of time, and the human race itself. The thinnest thread of hope is intuitive mastery of mythic time. Which music-scholars -- aka bards -- alone possess. PRAY one of the fatcats miscalculates, somehow, somewhere, sometime.5-minute animated trailer can be seen at amazon.com/author/swwilcox. That's an excerpt from the 100min. Previs film I made where all scenes, dialogue, and music were tested for fluidity: it is not, however, a version for commercial release. Rather, it's aimed at a future director's u... [Read More]

India has been at the heart of the global trade in textiles since ancient times, and cotton has been at the heart of the Subcontinent's economy for millennia. Indian dyed and painted cottons were admired in and traded to the Far East and the Mediterranean world for many generations before European interest in chintz created a new market. The trade in Indian cloth flourished due to the ability of its craftsmen to create a multitude of detailed and expressive patterns with strong and fast colors. Such textiles gained high esteem among the elite at home and abroad, ultimately acquiring heirloom status.Karun Thakar has been collecting textile art for more than 30 years, and has one of the world's leading private collections from the Indian Subcontinent, with costume and fabrics from the 14th century through to the early 20th. Aspects of the Thakar Collection have been exhibited in the Victoria & Albert Museum in London and at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.The Indian dyed and painted cotton cloths in the Thakar Collection are perhaps the best in private hands. Many have never previously been published. Dating from the 15th century onwards, the collection illustrates the tra... [Read More]

The provocative punk aesthetic and its incendiary influence on high fashion Since its origins in the 1970s, punk has had an explosive influence on fashion. With its eclectic mixing of stylistic references, punk effectively introduced the postmodern concept of bricolage to the elevated precincts of haute couture and directional ready-to-wear. As a style, punk is about chaos, anarchy, and rebellion. Drawing on provocative sexual and political imagery, punks made fashion overtly hostile and threatening. This aesthetic of violence – even of cruelty – was intrinsic to the clothes themselves, which were often customized with rips, tears, and slashes, as well as studs, spikes, zippers, D-Rings, safety pins, and razor blades, among other things.This extraordinary publication examines the impact of punk’s aesthetic of brutality on high fashion, focusing on its do-it-yourself, rip-it-to-shreds ethos, the antithesis of couture’s made-to-measure exactitude. Indeed, punk’s democracy stands in opposition to fashion’s autocracy. Yet, as this book reveals, even haute couture has readily appropriated the visual and symbolic language of punk, replacing beads with studs, paillettes ... [Read More]

Restored in 4K from 8K scans of the original 65mm elements with 96K resolution English 7.1 Dolby TrueHD audio, this 50th Anniversary Edition celebrates the breathtaking musical extravaganza that won 8 Academy Awards, including Best Picture. This beloved adaptation of the Broadway stage hit stars Audrey Hepburn as Eliza Doolittle, a sassy, working-class London street vendor, and Rex Harrison as the elitist Professor Higgins, who attempts to turn Eliza into a sophisticated lady through proper tutoring. But, when the humble flower girl blossoms into the toast of London society, her teacher may have a lesson or two to learn himself!

A poignant history of the cartoonists and illustrators from the Connecticut SchoolFor a period of about fifty years, right in the middle of the American Century, many of the the nation’s top comic-strip cartoonists, gag cartoonists, and magazine illustrators lived within a stone’s throw of one another in the southwestern corner of Connecticut―a bit of bohemia in the middle of those men in their gray flannel suits. Cullen Murphy’s father, John Cullen Murphy, drew the wildly popular comic strips Prince Valiant and Big Ben Bolt, and was at the heart of this artistic milieu. Comic strips and gag cartoons read by hundreds of millions were created in this tight-knit group―Superman, Beetle Bailey, Snuffy Smith, Rip Kirby, Hagar the Horrible, Hi and Lois, Nancy, Sam & Silo, Amy, The Wizard of Id, The Heart of Juliet Jones, Family Circus, Joe Palooka, and The Lockhorns, among others. Cartoonists and their art were a pop-cultural force in a way that few today remember. Anarchic and deeply creative, the cartoonists were independent spirits whose artistic talents had mainly been forged during service in World War II.Illustrated with never-before-seen photographs, cartoons, and drawin... [Read More]

Foreword by Rob SheffieldFilled with stunning full-color infographics, a unique, album-by-album visual history of the evolution of the Beatles that examines how their style, their sound, their instruments, their songs, their tours, and the world they inhabited transformed over the course of a decade.Combining data, colorful artwork, interactive charts, graphs, and timelines, Visualizing the Beatles is a fresh and imaginative look at the world’s most popular band. Meticulously examining the songs on every Beatles’ album from Please Please Me to Let It Be, UK-based graphic artists John Pring and Rob Thomas deconstruct:lyrical contentsongwriting creditsinspiration for the songsinstruments usedcover designschart positionand more . . . .They also break down the success of Beatles’ singles across the world, their tour dates, venues, and cities, their hairstyles, fashion choices and favorite guitars, and a wealth of other Beatles’ minutiae. Visualizing the Beatles also includes illustrations involving the conspiracy theories of the "Paul is dead" hoax as well as A-to-Z lists of every artist or performer who has ever covered a Beatles’ song.Comprehensive, entertaining, and packed... [Read More]

Renaissance in Italy the Age of the Despots

Renaissance in Italy the Age of the Despots