The quality of the prints is very good and they are a good size. The price is good enough to buy 2, one to use to frame and the other for the coffee table. Great photos!!

This book offers 27 beautiful, botanical prints in a variety of colors that are ideal for framing. (Between my sister, best friend and myself we're framing 20 of the 27). However, if you are looking for a nice coffee table book keep in mind that this is paper-backed. Also, if you are interested in reading about botanical prints this book has little narrative.

In the 1600s, the Prince-Bishop of Eichsttt, Germany created a stunning garden filled with flowers, fruit, vegetables, trees and pleasure-houses, at the center of which was his palace. His intention was to recreate the Garden of Eden here on earth, and he searched everywhere for the rarest and most lovely of plants to include. His endeavor was documented by some of the best artists of the time, who drew these beautiful botanical images, which then were printed on the largest paper then made, and bound into books. Only a handful of these were hand-colored, to be offered for sale to those whose pockets were deep enough to afford them.

The 27 images selected for this book are exquisitely printed, each measuring about 10" x 13". The colors are fresh and the paper stock has a beautiful, soft sheen and a good weight. These botanical illustrations are fine enough to be framed, and are useful as resource for the artist and designer.

The first time I encountered these images was in poster form about 20 years ago. I loved them, and was so happy to see them offered again. The designs are elegant, some more graphic and modern than others, some more clearly antique. This book is worthwhile for all those who love botanical illustrations.

I saw this book in my doctor's office waiting room, I was swallowed up in it during my wait. After my appointment I stayed and looked more, amongst the sneezing feverish folks even! Beautiful inspirational drawings!

Ably edited by Nicholas Barker, A Potencie Of Life: Books In Society is a welcome and impressive collection of erudite and knowledgeable essays by leading biblio-scholars on the history of the book. The contributions comprising this unique outstanding compendium include: American Papermakers and the Panic of 1819 (John Bidwell); Bookbinding and the History of Books (Mirjam M. Foot); A New Model for the Study of the Book (Thomas R. Adams & Nicolas Barker); The Codex in the Fifteenth Century: A Manuscript and Print (Lotte Hellinga); The "Trade of Authorship" in Eighteenth Century Britain (W.b. Carnochan); and Libraries and the mind of Man (Nicolas Barker). An excellent reprint of the first edition and co-published with The British Library, this Oak Knoll Press edition of A Potencie Of Life is enthusiastically recommended for bibliophile reading lists and academic reference collections.

"Unmade Beds" cleverly uses the motif of the dating game to take a clear-eyed, penetrating look at modern neurosis and how the myriad distractions of urban life mirror our fractured sense of self. The four characters are initially quite sympathetic in their quest for love, but as the film progresses they reveal a pathological sense of self-loathing and meaninglessness, in turn making them very unattractive. It's a very entertaining and vastly underrated film, and the soundtrack is in fact very witty and contemporary. Recommended.

I found the art in this book version of the cult classic Unmade Beds to be riveting. It makes an excellent companion to the movie, of which I am a big fan.

I thought the soundtrack on this film was sensational -- and I was completely captivated by the story of these four singles lives. I highly, highly recommend you buy a copy.

Very informative, well written, witty and interesting. A good read for a reference book. Lack of an index keeps it from being a great book.

One of the earlier reviewers -- a history grad student -- noted that this book is "outdated and unorganized." Both of those claims are inaccurate. I'm a manuscripts curator by profession, and this text is certainly not outdated. Book knowledge, and the subtleties of collecting and discriminating among important texts, are the highest priorities of John Carter's book, and he imparts those things with great skill. Several reviewers also criticize the lack of an index or table of contents. Folks, it's an encyclopedia; each term has its own heading, in alphabetical order! The book IS the table of contents and the index. This book was required reading for the "Introduction to Descriptive Bibliography" calss when I first attended Rare Book School in Charlottesville, Virginia in 1998; I'm sure it still is.

It's important for historians (grad student or no) to familiarize themselves with this terminology. "All the terms and abbreviation in the book can be found on the Internet," notes the aforementioned grad student. Whoa! The great hulking trash barge that is the Internet does indeed pull up search terms for all of Carter's entries, but I don't trust them to be accurate. Many book-collecting terms are highly subjective ("first edition," for instance) and I'd never rely on an unvetted digital source for an accurate description if I knew nothing of the subject. You can trust John Carter's book. It should be handy on the bookshelf of every bibliophile. You'll find yourself reaching for it a lot. -Dan Lewis, Ph.D., Curator of the History of Science, the Huntington Library.

In the short span that I have owned this book it has already proved its self to be indispensable. No ordinary dictionary of terms, it goes into detail when needed with some facinating and sometimes funny anecdotes.

I am one for truly bizarre stories, so when I read the reviews for this book I just had to order it. However, upon reading it I was more disappointed than delighted. I felt like the author was trying too hard to be deep and profound. Often times the story would abruptly end and I would be left wondering if there was symbolic or poetic value in it ending where it did, or whether the author just got tired of writing and so ended the story. However, unwilling to leave this book without having given it every chance to redeem itself (or rather, the author, not the book) I read until the very end. I suppose I found in the last story "Parker Swells" some remnants of a decent story and so the book is the better for this story. However, I would not recommend this book to anyone and hope that those who do choose to read it are not as disappointed as I was.

belonging on the bookshelf near will self and aimee bender, this collection is absolutely brilliant.

nicola barker is an empress of originality, seamlessly combining in her characters, dialogue and plots, the real and surreal, possible and impossible, humourous and pathetic. she captures so many aspects of humanity in her stories, and, in almost all of them, will have you falling off your chair.

read this book.

This is one of the funniest, insightful collection of short stories I have ever read. The author's keen observations on the darker side of human nature made me cringe when I recognized myself as well as roll over laughing when I recognized my neighbors! Her attention to detail is second to none. I'm on the lookout for other books by this writer, but in the meantime I'll be passing this one along to my friends for Christmas.

The review excerpts on the back of this book are glowing and lead me to expect a satisfying and rich character study of some rather odd and eccentric people. Well, the characters are odd but the author's disjointed writing style and uneven storyline left me cold. It was absolutely ponderous wading though this book and I found it quite hard to care about the characters or their lives. I would occasionally be drawn in and believe that the book was finally going to get interesting but was inevitably disappointed.

Wide Open left me cold and disappointed.

i managed to finish this book in the matter of a few hours ... bt not because the book was wildly thrilling -- honestly the book is about a group of very odd people who happened to meet at a point in time and managed to witness a "triumphant tragedy" ...

WIDE OPEN isn't madly suspenseful but it was very addictive. The characters were very queer but you could imagine that there are people like them lurking on the streets. The treatment of the book was mildly disturbing and very intriguing. The most satisfying thing about this book is the fact that it ends -- not like books that you can imagine might recur over and over again. WIDE OPEN is an account of an episode that only happens once and like Nietzsche's theory of eternal return states, this could be the reason why it is so significant and unforgettable a book.

Barker herself once described this as a novel of "cornball perversion," and no one who reads it will ever dispute that! It is filled with the weirdest group of gonzo characters ever assembled, among them Ronny, a homeless man whose real name is Jim; Jim, a hairless man whose real name is Ronny and who works spraying weed killer along the roads; Luke, a photographer of pornography who smells like fish; and Lily, a violent and rebellious teenager who suffers from a clotting disorder and worships The Head. And if these characters were not already bizarre enough, Barker also opens the Pandora's box of their not-in-the-textbook psyches to the reader--showing them to be even more off-the-wall than we had ever dreamed! Providing fertile ground for all the aberrations to flourish, the author sets the characters in a remote seaside resort/nudist colony during the off-season, with additional forays to a nearby boar farm, the Lost and Found Department of the London Underground, and a bat cave in Sumatra, where a character we know only from her letters is searching for a hairy hominid with no big toes. Obviously, not your grandmother's novel.

Wide Open is like nothing you've ever read before-absolutely original, sometimes wacky, sometimes poignant, sometimes violent, and always fascinating. The fluidity of Barker's prose keeps the reader zipping along, despite the fact that we can't always tell when she's putting us on, aren't always sure what's going on, and often suspect there are deep themes here if only we could catch our breaths long enough to figure them out. This is an absolutely exhilarating wild ride if the reader is willing to be "wide open."