"The Abu Ambassadeur 2500C, 1500C & related models."

Here is the comprehensive guide to forty years of collectible Swedish-made reels. It contains background information on every manufacturer and discusses every production model made between 1940 and 1980. It includes baitcasters, spinning, and fly reels. With over 675 color photographs, vintage advertisements, and patent drawings, plus a guide to current values, it is a must have reference book for the collector and dealer alike. Today Swedish-made fishing reels are collected all over the globe and are among the most prized. Names such as ABU, Arjon, River, Pebeco, W.D., Nordic, Rainbow, Radius, and Victory make nearly every reel collector perk up his ears. There are several international collector clubs dedicated to the Ambassadeur alone, and many models bring top dollar at the auction block.

Historians of early modern Europe have long stressed how new practices of diplomacy that emerged during the period transformed European politics. Fictions of Embassy is the first book to examine the cultural implications of the rise of modern diplomacy. Ranging across two and a half centuries and half a dozen languages, Timothy Hampton opens a new perspective on the intersection of literature and politics at the dawn of modernity. Hampton argues that literary texts-tragedies, epics, essays-use scenes of diplomatic negotiation to explore the relationship between politics and aesthetics, between the world of political rhetoric and the dynamics of literary form. The diplomatic encounter is a scene of cultural exchange and linguistic negotiation. Literary depictions of diplomacy offer occasions for reflection on the definition of genre, on the power of representation, on the limits of rhetoric, on the nature of fiction making itself. Conversely, discussions of diplomacy by jurists, political philosophers, and ambassadors deploy the tools of literary tradition to articulate new theories of political action.Hampton addresses these topics through a discussion of the major diplomatic writers between 1450 and 1700-Machiavelli, Grotius, Gentili, Guicciardini-and through detailed readings of literary works that address the same topics-works by Shakespeare, More, Rabelais, Montaigne, Tasso, Corneille, Racine, and Camoens. He demonstrates that the issues raised by diplomatic theorists helped shape the emergence of new literary forms, and that literature provides a lens through which we can learn to read the languages of diplomacy.

The first complete biography in English of the painter Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec (1864-1901), whose short but intensely active life is portrayed against a colorful “gay nineties” background of dance-halls, brothels, cafés-concerts, theaters, circuses, and racecourses. A descendant of one of the noblest families in France, grotesquely deformed, hideously ugly, Lautrec voluntarily renounced the life of a country gentleman for the tawdry environment of Montmartre, where dissipation wrecked his health and brought about his premature death at the age of thirty-seven. Strangely enough, drink and debauchery had little apparent effect on his work; he remained to the end a great artist: a sensitive painter, a superb draughtsman and lithographer, and an unrivaled designer of pictorial posters. “Gerstle Mack’s book, so complete, so searching, so just, adds to his already high prestige as a biographer and, once more (as with respect to the previous book on Cézanne) puts the art world in his debt. The Toulouse-Lautrec biography is informed throughout, with a spirit of warm human understanding and of fine critical integrity.” — Edward Alden Jewell, The New York Times (November 6, 1938) “[A] distinguished and authoritative biography... a definitive work..." — Charles Poore,The New York Times (October 15, 1938) “First-rate biography of the dwarf genius who was one of the best draftsmen of his or any age. Lautrec’s circus-and-brothel background is neatly worked in and the book is full of understanding and sympathy.” — The New Yorker “A distinguished book” — The Atlantic “Mr. Mack’s biography [is] complete, unmitigated, authoritative... a thorough documentation not only of the works but of the milieu of Toulouse-Lautrec.” — The Nation “This is a thoroughly sound and entertaining piece of work.” — Saturday Review “Various biographers have chronicled the brief and meteoric career of Lautrec but none has done it with the thoroughness and dispassionate scholarship, the sensitivity and sympathy, as has Gerstle Mack. The personality of the man rather than his analysis as an artist is Mack’s motivating purpose and he has patiently tracked Lautrec through all the haunts he loved and introduced all of the period’s personalities who were habitués of Lautrec’s world. Mr. Mack has also demolished the popular theory that Lautrec loathed his models and really was a-crusader against the vice he portrayed. Lautrec was a powerful critic of the time and place but always presented the scene with a sympathetic, if trenchant, wit. He provided a profound insight into the times. He displayed the tawdriness disguised as glamour and the boredom disguised as excitement. He created a wonderful and powerful style that has influenced generations of artists, particularly in the graphic arts.” — Irvin Haas, Book Find News “Gerstle Mack has written a book of remarkable interest not only from the point of view of the artist but from the point of view of the variety of human personality. This desperate and talented man shoved his way into the late nineteenth century life of Paris. This book will shove its way into the midtwentieth century life of that western world which is still free to contemplate the essential violence and harmony of art.” — Paul Engle, Chicago Tribune “This first complete English biography is an admirable portrait of Lautrec and his times. Based upon thorough research and first-hand interviews, it makes absorbing reading... We are not told specifically how the simple, eager boy became the strange and contradictory man. Nevertheless, in these days of biographies filled with the speculations of amateur psychiatrists, it is both refreshing and good to re-encounter this sound and unpretentious study.” — Art Digest “An artist’s biography, good reading, with a well-filled background of Montmartre cafés and their owners and entertainers, the theatre, the circus, whorehouses and so on. The man himself is interesting. The sources of his artistic material equally so. He loved sports and his eccentric father wanted him to attain physical perfection, but he was handicapped in his teens by having his legs badly broken. So he turned to art, studying, worshipping Degas and Japanese prints, seeking Paris night life for his subjects, and producing illustrations and poster designs that equalled the fame of his lithographs. An art book as well as excellent biography.” — Kirkus Reviews