An exploration of how art acquires its financial value. It explores the artist and his hinterland, subject and style (from abstract art and banality through surrealism and war), "wall-power", provenance and market weather, in which the trade of the art market is examined and at one point compared to the football transfer market.

The Penguin Guide to Jazz Recordings is firmly established as the world's leading guide to recorded jazz, a mine of fascinating information and a source of insightful - often wittily trenchant - criticism. This is something rather different: Brian Morton (who taught American history at UEA) has picked out the 1000 best recordings that all jazz fans should have and shows how they tell the history of the music and with it the history of the twentieth century. He has completely revised his and Richard Cook's entries and reassessed each artist's entry for this book. The result is an endlessly browsable companion that will prove required reading for aficionados and jazz novices alike.

Gay Talese is the father of American New Journalism, who transformed traditional reportage with his vivid scene-setting, sharp observation and rich storytelling. His 1966 piece for Esquire, one of the most celebrated magazine articles ever published, describes a morose Frank Sinatra silently nursing a glass of bourbon, struck down with a cold and unable to sing, like 'Picasso without paint, Ferrari without fuel - only worse'. The other writings in this selection include a description of a meeting between two legends, Fidel Castro and Muhammad Ali; a brilliantly witty dissection of the offices of Vogue magazine; an account of travelling to Ireland with hellraiser Peter O'Toole; and a profile of fading baseball star Joe DiMaggio, which turns into a moving, immaculately-crafted meditation on celebrity.
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"A joy... essential reading for anyone seeking an engaging and highly informed chronicle of the great composers and their works... takes the story of opera from its roots in late-Renaissance Italy via Mozart, Rossini, Wagner, Verdi, Puccini, Strauss and many less familiar figures through to Berg, Britten and beyond". Daniel Snowman, Opera.

Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio lived the darkest and most dangerous life of any of the great painters. The worlds of Milan, Rome and Naples through which Caravaggio moved and which Andrew Graham-Dixon describes brilliantly in this book, are those of cardinals and whores, prayer and violence. On the streets surrounding the churches and palaces, brawls and swordfights were regular occurrences. In the course of this desperate life Caravaggio created the most dramatic paintings of his age, using ordinary men and women - often prostitutes and the very poor - to model for his depictions of classic religious scenes. Andrew Graham-Dixon's exceptionally illuminating readings of Caravaggio'spictures, which are the heart of the book, show very clearly how he created their drama, immediacy and humanity, and how completely he departed from the conventions of his time.
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When eighteen year old Danny Goldberg wrote his first music review for Billboard, he couldn't have imagined that he would go on to enjoy one of the most varied and influential careers in the world of rock and roll. He went on to do PR for Led Zeppelin and KISS, launched Stevie Nicks' solo career, was Bonnie Raitt's manager when she won four Grammys for Nick of Time, managed the career of Nirvana, signed Warren Zevon to his label for the artist's last album, and, in between, ran Atlantic Records, Mercury Records and Warner Bros Records. In Bumping into Geniuses, Goldberg shares his stories about those artists with whom he worked closely, as well as others who represent a powerful portion of the psychic real estate of the rock and roll kingdom over the last forty years, including Patti Smith, The Moody Blues, Bruce Springsteen, Jackson Browne, Courtney Love, Steve Earle, and more.


But there is more to this story than Goldberg's career. It's a revealing look at the music industry itself: a business that was neither the romantic vehicle for self-expression that its most naive fans imagined, nor the purely crass money machine depicted by its most cynical critics. It was complex and chaotic - a mixture of art and commerce, idealism and selfishness - and sometimes, rock's most gifted musicians were able to transcend it all. Despite the drugs, lies and shallow quests for fame and money that stalked the rock industry, it managed to produce the music that Goldberg and countless fans love.


Above all, this book is Goldberg's love letter to rock and roll and to the countless musical geniuses he bumped into along the course of his extraordinary career. For anyone interested in the rock and roll industry, or simply the mores and temperaments of the musicians themselves, Bumping into Geniuses is an incredible insider's tale that only Goldberg could tell.
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'When Matisse dies, Chagall will be the only painter left who understands what colour really is.' Picasso said this in the 1950s, when he and Chagall were eminent neighbours living in splendour on the Cote d'Azur. But behind Chagall's role as a pioneer of modern art lay struggle, heartbreak, bitterness, lost love, exile, and the miracle of survival.


Born the son of a Russian Jewish herring merchant, Chagall fled the repressive "potato-coloured" czarist empire in 1911 to develop his genius in Paris, living alongside Modigliani and Leger in La Ruche, the artist's colony where "you either died or came out famous". Through war and revolution in Bolshevik Russia, Weimar Berlin, occupied France and 1940s New York, he gave form to his dreams, longings and memories in paintings which are among the most humane and joyful of the 20th century. Drawing on numerous interviews with the artist's family, friends, dealers, collectors, and illustrated with two hundred paintings, drawings and photographs, many previously unseen, this elegantly written biography gives for the first time a full and true account of Chagall the man and the artist - and of a life as intense, theatrical and haunting as his paintings.
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Late in 1939 a chance meeting between Penguin founder, Allen Lane, and natural history publisher, Noel Carrington, changed the future of children's publishing with the formation of a series called Puffin Picture Books. The first four titles appeared in 1940 and the series quickly established a reputation for presenting children's non-fiction in a unique blend of editing and design. Puffin Story Books soon followed with the publication of Worzel Gummidge in 1941 and, like the original launch of Penguin itself, these story books appeared in the three horizontal stripe design.

Looking back at seventy years of Puffin paperbacks, Phil Baines charts the development of Puffin and the role of illustrators and designers in creating and defining the identity of the Puffin list from the very first picture book through to modern day. Rich with stunning cover and inside illustrations, and filled with detail of individual titles, Phil discusses the changes in typography, illustration and printing techniques over Puffin's spectacular 70-year history.

An extraordinary and beautiful book, this is a perfect companion to Penguin By Design.
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Pioneering art historian Jacob Burckhardt saw the Italian Renaissance as no less than the beginning of the modern world. In this hugely influential work he argues that the Renaissance's creativity, competitiveness, dynasties, great city-states and even its vicious rulers sowed the seeds of a new era.


GREAT IDEAS. Throughout history, some books have changed the world. They have transformed the way we see ourselves - and each other. They have inspired debate, dissent, war and revolution. They have enlightened, outraged, provoked and comforted. They have enriched lives - and destroyed them. Now Penguin brings you the works of the great thinkers, pioneers, radicals and visionaries whose ideas shook civilization and helped make us who we are.