A beautifully illustrated global history of collage from the origins of paper to today While the emergence of collage is frequently placed in the twentieth century when it was a favored medium of modern artists, its earliest beginnings are tied to the invention of paper in China around 200 BCE. Subsequent forms occurred in twelfth-century Japan with illuminated manuscripts that combined calligraphic poetry with torn colored papers. In early modern Europe, collage was used to document and organize herbaria, plant specimens, and other systems of knowledge. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, collage became firmly associated with the expression of intimate relations and familial affections. Fragmentary Forms offers a new, global perspective on one of the world’s oldest and most enduring means of cultural expression, tracing the rich history of collage from its ancient origins to its uses today as a powerful tool for storytelling and explorations of identity. Presenting an expansive approach to collage and the history of art, Freya Gowrley explores what happens when overlapping fragmentary forms are in conversation with one another. She looks at everything from volumes of pilgrims’ religious relics and Victorian seaweed albums to modernist papiers collés by Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque and quilts by Faith Ringgold exploring African-American identity. Gowrley examines the work of anonymous and unknown artists whose names have been lost to history, either by accident or through exclusion. Featuring hundreds of beautiful images, Fragmentary Forms demonstrates how the use of found objects is an important characteristic of this unique art form and shows how collage is an inclusive medium that has given voice to marginalized communities and artists across centuries and cultures.

Anne Troelstra’s fine bibliography is an outstanding and ground-breaking work. He has provided the academic world with a long-needed bibliographical record of human endeavour in the field of the natural sciences. The travel narratives listed here encompass all aspects of the natural world in every part of the globe, but are especially concerned with its fauna, flora and fossil remains. Such eyewitness accounts have always fascinated their readers, but they were never written solely for entertainment: fragmentary though they often are, these narratives of travel and exploration are of immense importance for our scientific understanding of life on earth, providing us with a window on an ever changing, and often vanishing, natural world. Without such records of the past we could not track, document or understand the significance of changes that are so important for the study of zoogeography. With this book Troelstra gives us a superb overview of natural history travel narratives. The well over four thousand detailed entries, ranging over four centuries and all major western European languages, are drawn from a wide range of sources and include both printed books and periodical contributions. While no subject bibliography by a single author can attain absolute completeness, Troelstra’s work is comprehensive to a truly remarkable degree. The entries are arranged alphabetically by author and chronologically, by the year of first publication, under the author’s name. A brief biography, with the scope and range of their work, is given for each author; every title is set in context, the contents – including illustrations – are described and all known editions and translations are cited. In addition, there is a geographical index that cross refers between authors and the regions visited, and a full list of the bibliographical and biographical sources used in compiling the bibliography.