A collection of four all-new strange stories from the sleepy town of Gravity Falls in one original graphic novel. Written by Alex Hirsch. Illustrated by Asaf Hanuka, Dana Terrace, Ian Worrel, Jacob Chabot, Jim Campbell, Joe Pitt, Kyle Smeallie, Meredith Gran, Mike Holmes, Priscilla Tang, Serina Hernandez, Stephanie Ramirez, and Valerie Halla.

During the Ming Dynasty numerous new animal themes were created to convey political and ethical messages current at court. As the result a sophisticated language of Chinese animal painting was developed, employing both the animals' symbolic associations and homonymic puns. Hou-mei Sung's exciting rediscovery of some of these lost meanings has led to a full-scale investigation of the evolving history of Chinese animal painting. Distinct symbolic meanings were associated with individual motifs, but all animals were assigned a place in the universe according to the Chinese concept of nature. From the very early yin/yang cosmology to later developments of Daoist and Confucian philosophies and ethics, Chinese animals gained new meanings related to their historical contexts. This book explores these new findings, using the colorful animal images and their rich and evolving symbolic meanings to gain insight into unique aspects of Chinese art, as well as Chinese culture and history. Exhibition Schedule: Cincinnati Museum of Art (October 2009 - February 2010)

To defeat your enemies you must know them well. In wartime, however, enemy codemakers make that task much more difficult. If you cannot break their codes and read their messages, you may discover too late the enemy's intentions. That's why codebreakers were considered such a crucial weapon during World War II. In Secret Messages, David Alvarez provides the first comprehensive analysis of the impact of decoded radio messages (signals intelligence) upon American foreign policy and strategy from 1930 to 1945. He presents the most complete account to date of the U.S. Army's top-secret Signal Intelligence Service (SIS): its creation, its struggles, its rapid wartime growth, and its contributions to the war effort. Alvarez reveals the inner workings of the SIS (precursor of today's NSA) and the codebreaking process and explains how SIS intercepted, deciphered, and analyzed encoded messages. From its headquarters at Arlington Hall outside Washington, D.C., SIS grew from a staff of four novice codebreakers to more than 10,000 people stationed around the globe, secretly monitoring the communications of not only the Axis powers but dozens of other governments as well and producing a flood of intelligence. Some of the SIS programs were so clandestine that even the White House—unaware of the agency's existence until 1937—was kept uninformed of them, such as the 1943 creation of a super-secret program to break Soviet codes and ciphers. In addition, Alvarez brings to light such previously classified operations as the interception of Vatican communications and a comprehensive program to decrypt the communications of our wartime allies. He also dispels many of the myths about the SIS's influence on American foreign policy, showing that the impact of special intelligence in the diplomatic sphere was limited by the indifference of the White House, constraints within the program itself, and rivalries with other agencies (like the FBI). Drawing upon military and intelligence archives, interviews with retired and active cryptanalysts, and over a million pages of cryptologic documents declassified in 1996, Alvarez illuminates this dark corner of intelligence history and expands our understanding of its role in and contributions to the American effort in World War II.

Untie the string and unwrap the brown paper to reveal . . . Journal 3 Limited Edition! This 288-page book contains all of the content of the regular edition, plus all-new top-secret black light pages on real parchment; a cover with leather texture and shiny metallic pieces; a magnifying glass; a tassel bookmark; and removable photos and notes. This $150 limited edition will also include a signed note from the creator of Gravity Falls and co-writer of Journal 3, Alex Hirsch himself.

Why are we here? Who really wrote the Bible? Was Jesus actually a messenger of God? Can science and religion be reconciled? Do we have free will? Divine Wisdom and Warning: Decoded Messages from God introduces a new way of using the ancient system of Gematria to solve these and other timeless questions. Nicholas Gura has developed an original technique, easily reproducible without the use of computers, that uncovers hidden, encoded messages in the Bible. These mathematically generated messages are both profound and metaphoric and will contribute to the meaning, quality, and purpose of our lives. Divine Wisdom and Warning reveals new insights on the parting of the Red Sea, suffering, quantum physics, the environment, treatment of women, and answers the eternal question: What is God’s true religion?

“A novelistic mosaic that simultaneously reads like a thriller and like a strange, dreamlike excursion into the subconscious.” —The New York Times Years ago, when House of Leaves was first being passed around, it was nothing more than a badly bundled heap of paper, parts of which would occasionally surface on the Internet. No one could have anticipated the small but devoted following this terrifying story would soon command. Starting with an odd assortment of marginalized youth -- musicians, tattoo artists, programmers, strippers, environmentalists, and adrenaline junkies -- the book eventually made its way into the hands of older generations, who not only found themselves in those strangely arranged pages but also discovered a way back into the lives of their estranged children. Now this astonishing novel is made available in book form, complete with the original colored words, vertical footnotes, and second and third appendices. The story remains unchanged, focusing on a young family that moves into a small home on Ash Tree Lane where they discover something is terribly wrong: their house is bigger on the inside than it is on the outside. Of course, neither Pulitzer Prize-winning photojournalist Will Navidson nor his companion Karen Green was prepared to face the consequences of that impossibility, until the day their two little children wandered off and their voices eerily began to return another story -- of creature darkness, of an ever-growing abyss behind a closet door, and of that unholy growl which soon enough would tear through their walls and consume all their dreams.

In this “charming” and melancholic novel, a former child sleuth “investigates the hard-to-crack case of Lost Innocence” (Entertainment Weekly). A Chicago Tribune, Kirkus Reviews, and Booklist Book of the Year In the twilight of a mysterious childhood full of wonder, Billy Argo, boy detective, is brokenhearted to find that his younger sister and crime-solving partner, Caroline, has committed suicide. Ten years later, Billy, age thirty, returns from an extended stay at St. Vitus’ Hospital for the Mentally Ill to discover the world full of unimaginable strangeness: office buildings vanish without reason, small animals turn up without their heads, and cruel villains ride city buses to complete their evil schemes. Lost within this unwelcoming place, Billy befriends two lonely, extraordinary children—one a science fair genius, the other a charming, silent bully. With a nearly forgotten bravery, he experiences the unendurable boredom of a telemarketing job; encounters a beautiful, desperate pickpocket; and confronts the nearly impossible solution to his sister’s case. Along a path laden with hidden clues and codes, the boy detective may learn the greatest secret of all: the necessity of the unknown. “Haunted by the mystery of his sister’s death and feeling that a lapse in his sleuthing may be to blame, Billy is determined to find out the reason for her suicide and to punish those responsible . . . The story of Billy’s search for truth, love and redemption is surprising and absorbing. Swaddled in melancholy and gentle humor, it builds in power as the clues pile up.” —Publishers Weekly “The author gives Billy a gallery of rogues to combat and even sends him to investigate the Convocation of Evil at a local hotel (‘Featured Panel: To Wear a Mask?’). Meno sets himself a complicated task, marooning his straight-arrow, pulp-fiction protagonist in a world uglier than the Bobbsey Twins ever faced but refusing to go for satire. Instead, the author takes his compulsive investigator at face value.” —Kirkus Reviews, starred review “Comedic, imaginative, empathic . . . investigates the precincts of grief [and] our longing to combat chaos with reason.” —Booklist