Photography by Marc Appleton
Lotusland is a magical and rare place located in Santa Barbara, CA. This sprawling botanical garden was founded by former opera singer, and many times divorced socialite, Madame Ganna Walksa. Deciding six husbands was enough, she turned her attention full time to creating her amazing gardens. …
The Black Dandy and Street Style
Shantrelle P Lewis
Dandy: A man who affects extreme elegance in clothes and manners; a fop.
Dandies, in this day and age, are a rare anachronism. People wear pajamas to the grocery store, and jeans to weddings. But the dandy holds the line to …
A
Guide to the World’s 500 Most Colorful Places
Taylor Fuller
If a colorful punch in the eye is a top priority when you travel, this collection of rainbow-hued locations is for you! They run the gamut of natural locations, including multi-colored lakes, rivers and mountains, to towns with colorful …
A Food Adventurer’s Guide
Cecily Wong and Dylan Thuras
Fans of the website Atlas Obscura, a guide to the world’s many bizarre and hidden wonders, will love this huge collection of food novelties. While in theory, you can eat or drink everything in this collection, many are definitely unappealing. …
Inside the Homes of the World’s Most Creative People
Sam Lubell
This solid collection is a slow read to carefully work your way through. The content itself is not dense – one to three pictures of a home interior along with a page description. But nearly every room and its …
Caroline Cox
“Street” fashion, the organic creation of style influenced by location, culture, politics, religion, social unrest and availability of materials, has always influenced “high” fashion. And vice versa. Author Cox makes an excellent attempt to cataloging and describing some of these various “strains” of fashion that have developed over …
Andria Lo & Valerie Luu
Fashion and Wisdom from Chinatown’s Most Stylish Seniors
Anyone who is a fan of visiting Chinatown – be it Chicago, San Francisco, or New York – will recognize these elderly citizens. Always bundled to the nines, these are long-time residents of their own small cities …
Few things are as intriguing as finding a photo with no caption. Filmmaker Lee Shulman bought a box of old slides and became fascinated into these glimpses of the past. His collection soon grew to include thousands of these images. There’s a short introduction to the book …
Style is timeless and ageless, as evidenced by this gorgeous and engrossing collection of fashion photos. Cohen’s models range from early 60s and on up. The clothing runs from wildly fashion-forward designs to timeless classics. There are perfect suits and curled mustaches, massive rings, wildly colored hair, …
Troy Hess
Hess’s photography collection is the work of years of exploration, down back roads and through abandoned communities. The decline of the dairy industry in Wisconsin is well known, despite our continued insistence on calling ourselves “The Dairy State.” But the days of huge families running a (somewhat) profitable …
Lois Sherr Dubin
Photos by Kiyoshi Togashi and Michael Waddell
When you think “southwest” or “Navajo” jewelry, you probably think big honking belt buckles, silver conchos (flatted “platters” of silver), and chunky turquoise rings at tourist shops. This style of jewelry is mostly knock-offs of the fantastic artistry created by …
Iconic Moments from the Past In Color
Wolfang Wild & Jordan Lloyd
This wide-ranging collection of colorized photos gives a rare glimpse into the past. Photography has been around for a surprisingly long time. The first self-portrait was taken in 1839, almost 30 years before the American Civil War. There …
Robert Winter and Alexander Vertikoff
Craftsman Style is a good starter overview coffee-table book on Craftsman style architecture. Springing from William Morris’s Arts and Crafts movement, this architectural movement aimed to be the antithesis of industrialized, modern building. In the views of the Arts and Crafts movement, things started going …
Clothes We Can’t Believe We Bought
Tom Coleman
Photography by Jerome Jakubiec
Everyone can relate to this book because everyone has had at least one fashion disaster in their life. Maybe it’s the “fashion forward” item you bought because you thought it would be cutting edge, only to discover that …
Cathy Teesdale
Like her counter-part, Brandon Stanton’s book Humans of New York, Teesdale travels the streets of London taking photos of interesting individuals and taking short interviews. Many are mundane – mums in the sun with babies, people on the way to work. More often though, they are extremely …
John Szabo
Malverne High School photography teacher John Szabo is clearly a very talented photographer in his own right. And luckily, he found eye-catching subjects all around him. His collection, Teenage, shows a cohort of his students in the late 1970s. Szabo catches all the facets of the teen …
