A fascinating, full-colour compendium of extremely rare, late 19th and early 20th century Krampus postcards culled from key postcard collections around the world, this lavishly illustrated book features over 150 striking and stylised full-page examples, as well as a short introduction tracing the character's origin and overwhelming popularity throughout Europe. Saint Nicholas's dark servant, Krampus is a hairy, horned, supernatural beast who paid a visit each year to disobedient children, punishing them until they promised to be good!
“The Devil holds the strings which move us!” (Charles Baudelaire, The Flowers of Evil, 1857.) Satan, Beelzebub, Lucifer... the Devil has many names and faces, all of which have always served artists as a source of inspiration. Often commissioned by religious leaders as images of fear or veneration, depending on the society, representations of the underworld served to instruct believers and lead them along the path of righteousness. For other artists, such as Hieronymus Bosch, they provided a means of denouncing the moral decrepitude of one’s contemporaries. In the same way, literature dealing with the Devil has long offered inspiration to artists wishing to exorcise evil through images, especially the works of Dante and Goethe. In the 19th century, romanticism, attracted by the mysterious and expressive potential of the theme, continued to glorify the malevolent. Auguste Rodin’s The Gates of Hell, the monumental, tormented work of a lifetime, perfectly illustrates this passion for evil, but also reveals the reason for this fascination. Indeed, what could be more captivating for a man than to test his mastery by evoking the beauty of the ugly and the diabolic?
Steve Badanes, Jim Adamson, and John Ringel believe an architect's job does not stop at designing a building, but that it extends to constructing it as well. Now working into their fifth decade, Jersey Devil, the loose-knit group they founded in 1972, bands together under this design/build ethos that an architect's place is just as much on the job site as it is at the drawing board. The trio pioneered design/build practice and their influence has spawned more than one hundred design/build programs. Jersey Devil's process and expertise are unpacked in this Architecture Brief, providing students and teachers with a toolkit for design/build education. Through stories, didactic commentary, and sample exercises, the Design/Build complements nuts-and-bolts content with Jersey Devil's philosophy and perspective, allowing the book to impart practical instruction while acting as a valuable guide for navigating the elusive challenges of design/build. Themes touch on socially responsible architecture, intuition and intentionality, detailing and fostering craftsmanship, group work and collaboration, off-the-shelf components and nonstandard applications, educational reform, ethos and risk, good life and play, the politics of building, and university-community relations.
For 25 years the architects who make up Jersey Devil have been constructing their own designs while living on site in tents or Airstream trailers, making adjustments to their structures in response to problems encountered during the building process. Jersey Devil is a name that has been attached to work by Steve Badanes, John Ringel, Jim Adamson, or any combination of the above, plus many other people who have participated in their diverse projects. This loose-knit group of designer-builders has created projects that critique conventional practice, both the process of making architecture and the accepted definitions of architecture itself. Jersey Devil's architecture shows a concern for craft and detail, an attention to the expressiveness of the construction materials, and a strong environmental consciousness. Devil's Workshop contains complete project descriptions, photographs, drawings, and plans on more than a dozen projects, including the Snail House, the Silo House, the Hoagie House, and the Seaside Pavillion. Essays analyze Jersey Devil's work, providing an insight into the design-build process and its historical context, and discussing the formal qualities inherent in these projects.
With an additional 32 pages, superior printing and a secure hardcover binding, Krampus! picks up where the paperback edition of The Devil in Design (Fantagraphics, 2003) left off. In the early Christmas traditions of Western Europe, the Krampus was St. Nicholas' dark servant - a hairy, horned, supernatural beast whose pointed ears and long slithering tongue gave misbehaving children the creeps! Whereas St. Nick would reward children who had been good all year, those that had behaved badly were visited by the Krampus.
"In the first part of the book, Jacobs contemplates the work of people whom he takes to be exemplary truth seekers: Rebecca West, W.H. Auden, Albert Camus, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Linda Gregerson, and Leon Kass. He then engages writers who challenge the search for truth: Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Iris Murdoch, Wole Soyinka, Philip Pullman, and Anne Carson. The third section of the book consists of a single lengthy essay that pursues the provocative question of whether today's computer technology helps or hinders us in our pursuit of truth."--Jacket.
In the last fifteen years a controversial new theory of the origins of biological complexity and the nature of the universe has been fomenting bitter debates in education and science policy across North America, Europe, and Australia. Backed by intellectuals at respectable universities, Intelligent Design Theory (ID) proposes an alternative to accepted accounts of evolutionary theory: that life is so complex, and that the universe is so fine-tuned for the appearance of life, that the only plausible explanation is the existence of an intelligent designer. For many ID theorists, the designer is taken to be the god of Christianity. Niall Shanks has written the first accessible introduction to, and critique of, this controversial new intellectual movement. Shanks locates the growth of ID in the last two decades of the twentieth century in the growing influence of the American religious right. But as he shows, its roots go back beyond Aquinas to Ancient Greece. After looking at the historical roots of ID, Shanks takes a hard look at its intellectual underpinnings, discussing modern understandings of thermodynamics, and how self-organizing processes lead to complex physical, chemical, and biological systems. He considers cosmological arguments for ID rooted in so-called "anthropic coincidences" and also tackles new biochemical arguments for ID based on "irreducible biological complexity." Throughout he shows how arguments for ID lack cohesion, rest on errors and unfounded suppositions, and generally are grossly inferior to evolutionary explanations. While ID has been proposed as a scientific alternative to evolutionary biology, Shanks argues that ID is in fact "old creationist wine in new designer label bottles" and moreover is a serious threat to the scientific and democratic values that are our cultural and intellectual inheritance from the Enlightenment.
A spellbinding story of loss, romance and betrayal set in 18th-century Portugal, from internationally bestselling Canadian historical fiction author Linda Holeman. Diamantina is 13 when her father, a Dutch sailor who washed up on the Portuguese island of Porto Santo, abandons her and her African-born mother and sets off for the New World. Unbaptized, tainted by her mother's witchcraft and her foreign blood, the girl is an outcast who seems doomed in her struggle to survive. Diamantina refuses to accept her destiny and vows to escape her circumstances and forge a life of her own, no matter the cost. But as the price of her desires rises, can she live with the choices she has made? Diamantina's odyssey to change her life is a sweeping narrative of starvation and plenty, cruelty and love, disaster and triumph.
The devil hasn't always been depicted in art as we know him today. From the Middle Ages through to the Renaissance and into modern times Satan has had many different incarnations in art. Scholars say that no artistic representation of Satan was produced before the sixth century., and was only made official by the Ecumenical Council of 553. From then on, however, and throughout the Middle Ages, Satan's imagery was everywhere, in manuscripts, in paintings, sculptures and architecture. As Christianity grew and spread, so did belief in the Devil, who was blamed for illness, accidents, immoral behavior, crop failures and natural disasters. He was also said to be the leader of heretics enemies of the Church. This beautifully illustrated book by E.R. Vernor details the history of artwork of the Devil with over two hundred woodcuts, drawings, and paintings and postcards from the earliest days of printing to the 1900s.
