Pepin Press

One of my daughters gave me this book and it is wonderful. It is full of designs from Persian tiles and they are all downloadable from a CD which comes with the book. I have discovered that I can download and then edit to change the colours and I use the designs to decorate the "I'm free" stickers which I create and use for my BookCrossing.com books.

Anyone who is interested in decorating web pages, printing cards or using these beautiful designs in other creative ways would love to own this show more book. show less

I really enjoyed looking through the illustrations in this book, and although there are absolutely no instructions to explain how to make anything, I found the majority of the illustrations good enough to use as instruction.

I also just found it fascinating that there are so many designs for something as simple as a box/packaging, which is why I enjoyed looking through it. Sometimes it's the really basic, simple things that give you pleasure!

I got this book pretty cheap from a pilemhigh shop and it is a visual treat. Full of original calligraphy, art and designs from various cultures spanning thousands of years. If you like pattern and decoration combined with a bit of cultural thrust then this ones for you.

This is a coffee-table sized collection of unusual and very early maps. Some of the maps predate written language, many others were made before themiddle ages.

There are maps with projections we don't often see. There are maps of continents made long before those continents were mapped very accurately in outline. Some maps are more like pictographs, made by ancient civilizations.

The book provides a perspective on the many forms maps have taken over human history, as wel as the progress show more toward accuracy and detail achieved the last few centuries.

Another aspect of the book is to show the different styles of map layouts. Many early maps were elabortely decorated around the edges while others employed very fancy fonts for labeling within the map boundaries. Various styles of portraying water bodies and different topology for land surfaces are illustrated as well.

The book is a good reference of at least some of the many styles maps have taken over several millenia. show less