In 1508, Pope Julius II commissioned Michelangelo to paint the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. For the next four years, he and a team of assistants laboured over the vast ceiling. This book tells the story of those four years and paints a picture of day-to-day life on the Sistine scaffolding - in the upheaval of early sixteenth-century Rome.

Intends to provide you great wisdom in the morning, several conversational bons mots for the afternoon, and many an enlightened smile after dark. This book contains the 13 principles of witchcraft, the structure of military hierarchy, clothing care symbols, a list of the countries where you drive on the left, and a nursery rhyme about sneezing.

After ten years of The Far Side , this is the distillation of Gary Larson's humour. The book contains early cartoons, some of Larson's favourites with comments, some that didn't quite make it and many other facets of the cartoon series.

One of Taschen's new art albums, tremendous value at 3.99.

MC Escher is not a surrealist drawing us into his dream world, but an achitect of perfectly impossible worlds who presents the structurally unthinkable as though it were a law of nature. The resulting dimensional and perspectival illusions bring us into confromtation with the limitations of our sensory perception.