Acknowledged as the journal of record in its field, American Furniture presents new research on furniture design, use, production, and appreciation. Begun in 1993, this award-winning annual provides a comprehensive forum on furniture history, technology, connoisseurship, and conservation by the foremost scholars in the field. It is the only interdisciplinary journal devoted exclusively to furniture made or used in the Americas from the seventeenth century to the present.

Out of Focus offers an international perspective on current trends in photography. The companion to the first major photography exhibition at the Saatchi Gallery since I Am a Camera in 2001, this stunning compilation presents 37 international artists working in the medium photography in diverse, innovative and arresting ways. Amongst the renowed practitioners: Mitch Epstein and Ryan McGinley form the USA; Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin from South Africa; Noemie Goudal from France; JH Engstrom from Sweden; Jonny Briggs, Mat Collinshaw and John Stezaker from the UK; and David Noonan from Australia. This stunning, lavishly illustrated volume stnds as a tribute to the best work being done in photography today.

What do Franklin Roosevelt, Dr. Seuss, the U.S. Navy, and Mr. Magoo have in common? They are all part of the surprising story of the pioneering cartoon studio UPA (United Productions of America). Throughout the 1950s, a group of artists ran a business that broke all the rules, pushing animated films beyond the fluffy fantasy of the Walt Disney Studio and the crash-bang anarchy of Warner Bros. Instead, UPA's films were innovative and graphically bold-the cartoon equivalent to modern art. When Magoo Flew is the first book-length study to chronicle the complete story of this unique American enterprise. The book features cameo appearances by Aldous Huxley, James Thurber, Orson Welles, Judy Garland, Robert Goulet, Jim Backus, Eddie Albert, and Woody Allen, as well as a select filmography of the best of UPA.

Frank Tashlin (1913-1972) was a supremely gifted satirist and visual stylist who made an indelible mark on 1950s Hollywood and American popular culture-first as a talented animator working on Looney Tunes cartoons, then as muse to film stars Jerry Lewis, Bob Hope, and Jayne Mansfield. Yet his name is not especially well known today. Long regarded as an anomaly or curiosity, Tashlin is finally given his due in this career-spanning survey. Tashlinesque considers the director's films in the contexts of Hollywood censorship, animation history, and the development of the genre of comedy in American film, with particular emphasis on the sex, satire, and visual flair that comprised Tashlin's distinctive artistic and comedic style. Through close readings and pointed analyses of Tashlin's large and fascinating body of work, Ethan de Seife offers fresh insights into such classic films as Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter?, The Girl Can't Help It, Artists and Models, The Disorderly Orderly, and Son of Paleface, as well as numerous Warner Bros. cartoons starring Porky Pig, among others. This is an important rediscovery of a highly unusual and truly hilarious American artist. Includes a complete filmography.

Every generation produces a counterculture icon. Joss Whedon, creator of the long-running television series Buffy the Vampire Slayer, is famed for his subversive wit, rich characters, and extraordinary plotlines. His renown has only grown with subsequent creations, including Angel, Firefly, Dollhouse, and the innovative online series Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog. Through premises as unusual as a supernatural detective agency run by a vampire and a Western set in outer space, Whedon weaves stories about characters forced to make commonplace moral decisions under the most bizarre of circumstances.The Philosophy of Joss Whedon examines Whedon's plots and characterizations to reveal their philosophical takes on the limits of personal freedom, sexual morality, radical evil, and Daoism.

This small, striking book commemorates the career of experimental music composer Alvin Lucier, and features an interview with Lucier and curator Andrea Miller-Keller, essays by Nicolas Collins, Ronald Kuivila, Michael Roth and Pamela Tatge, and details of a symposium, exhibit and special performances of Lucier's work held at Wesleyan University, November 4-6, 2011. Lucier has pioneered in many areas of music composition and performance, including the notation of performers' physical gestures, the use of brain waves in live performance, the generation of visual imagery by sound in vibrating media, and the evocation of room acoustics for musical purposes. From 1970 to 2011 he taught at Wesleyan University where he was John Spencer Camp Professor of Music. Lucier performs, lectures and exhibits his sound installations extensively in the United States, Europe and Asia.

Gervase Wheeler was an English-born architect who designed such important American works as the Henry Boody House in Brunswick, Maine; the Patrick Barry House in Rochester, New York; and the chapels at Bowdoin and Williams colleges. But he was perhaps best known as the author of two influential architecture books, Rural Homes (1851) and Homes for the People (1855). Yet Wheeler has remained a little known, enigmatic figure. Renée Tribert and James F. O'Gorman's study sheds new light on the course of Wheeler's career in the states, and brings crucial issues to the fore-the international movement of ideas, the development of the American architectural profession, the influence of architectural publications on popular taste, and social history as expressed in the changing nature of the American house. Wheeler's career is traced chronologically and geographically and the book is lavishly illustrated with over fifty images, including building plans and historical photographs.

The Nobile Index is a series of monographic publications of art sales prices achieved at auction, for a selection of leading 20th-century British artists. They involve the collaboration of a commercial art dealership, Piano Nobile Works of Art and the University at Bristol's History of Art Department; bringing together academic and commercial expertise on the artists for the benefit of those with an interest in their work. They are funded by the generosity of a private benefactor. The studies are confined to analyses of auction results over the last 21 years. Although largely from UK sales, data supplied by international salerooms are also included. Graphs and interpretations of these figures are analysed and significant trends and buying patterns revealed. It is envisaged that this data will be of growing value to private and corporate clients, museums and fine art funds. Accurate commercial appraisal has always played an important role in the consideration of new acquisitions throughout the history of art. No more so than today is this seen with the fluctuating, but ever more significant rise in value commanded by the best of many 20th-century artists' work. Written by Dr Louise Hughes as part of her doctoral studies at the University of Bristol, this publication establishes the art market fortunes of one of Britain's foremost modern artists, Walter Sickert. Examining factors such as general and specific market trends, media, genres and biography, Dr Hughes' analysis of sales prices provides an invaluable research tool in assessing the commercial positioning of Sickert's work. The publication consists of two sections - biography, results and analysis and an insert with an appendices of works sold between 1990 and 2011.

Listening and Longing explores the emergence of music listening in the United States, from its early stages in the antebellum era, when entrepreneurs first packaged and sold the experience of hearing musical performance, to the Gilded Age, when genteel critics began to successfully redefine the cultural value of listening to music. In a series of interconnected stories, American studies scholar Daniel Cavicchi focuses on the impact of industrialization, urbanization, and commercialization in shaping practices of music audiences in America. Grounding our contemporary culture of listening in its seminal historical moment-before the iPod, stereo system, or phonograph-Cavicchi offers a fresh understanding of the role of listening in the history of music.

Proceedings from the British Archaeological Association contain music studies from 150 years ago. Lawson raises a historiographical concern for these early discussions, as many of the authors are forgotten.

Hickmann describes a 17th century work by Guaman Poma chronicling the first period of the Conquista. Details from this book are comparable to archaeological finds of musical instruments that have since disappeared. The author provides illustrations of ancient Andean instruments.

Lund describes the development of Scandinavian music history from 1797 with the first discovery of lurs in Denmark to the modern discipline as it is established in research during the 19th and 20th centuries. Systematic orientation came in the 1970s.

This paper contains an overview of Pre-Columbian music research between 1880 and 1920. Figures and the interdisciplinary direction of the research movement are discussed in detail. Many of these early studies remain ignored, which is a concern for music historiography.

The pioneers who contributed towards the formative period of Scandinavian musicology (ca. 1915–1940) were highly interested in ancient music. Kolltveit describes approaches by pioneers Hammerich, Panum, Andersson, Norlind, Leden and Tveitt in their cultural, political, and academic contexts.

Now in its eleventh year of publication, Ceramics in America is considered the journal of record for historical ceramic scholarship in the American context.Included in 2011 edition:• The Chinese Scholar Pattern: Style, Merchant Identity, and the English Imagination-Sarah Fayen Scarlett• Digging Up Salem's Golden Age: Ceramic Use among the Merchant Class-George Schwartz• Ceramic Treasures among Seventeenth-Century Trash: A 1660s Cellar Deposit-Al Luckenbach and John E. Kille• The Stoneware Years of the Thompson Potters of Morgantown, West Virginia, 1854-1890-Richard Duez and Don Horvath with Brenda Hornsby Heindl• Cap-Hole Oyster Jars: A Racial Message In The Mud; or Shipping Crassostrea Virginica-Ivor Noël Hume• Mind Mud: Ai Weiwei's Conceptual Ceramics-Garth ClarkPlus ten New Discoveries and six new book reviews

A collection of 16 essays on the artist’s painting and works for the theatre between 1910 and 1924. The essays explore the colour theories that gave rise to her abstract painting and the basic laws of structure that gave order to her Cubist, Simultaneist, Non-Objective painting and her stage and costume design. Contemporary accounts of her three plays, Famira Kifared, Salome, and Romeo and Juliet are included together with extracts from Alexander Tairov’s, Notes of a Director (1921). The book closes with a detailed and illustrated Chronology of Exter’s exhibitions and paintings.