Between the 1870s and the 1930s competing European powers carved out and consolidated colonies in Melanesia, the most culturally diverse region of the world. As part of this process, great assemblages of ethnographic artefacts were made by a range of collectors whose diversity is captured in this volume. The contributors to this tightly-integrated volume take these collectors, and the collecting institutions, as the departure point for accounts that look back at the artefact-producing societies and their interaction with the collectors, but also forward to the fate of the collections in metropolitan museums, as the artefacts have been variously exhibited, neglected, re-conceived as indigenous heritage, or repatriated. In doing this, the contributors raise issues of current interest in anthropology, Pacific history, art history, museology, and material culture.

Featuring over 1,000 photographs of inkwells and inkstands from circa 1750 to 1920 by makers in the United States, Europe, and Asia, including Tiffany, Wedgwood, Quimper, Staffordshire, Sandwich and Vaseline glass, majolica, art pottery, faience, milk glass, and Delft. Also are others of porcelain, sterling silver, pewter, cast iron, brass, wood and other natural materials, and some with precious and semi-precious stones. Detailed descriptions, a historical perspective, tables on United States patents and designs, up-to-date price guide, and index included.

John Tamberlain is The Tomahawk, the universe’s most feared food critic – though he himself prefers the term ‘forensic gastronomer’. He’s on a quest, in search of the much-storied Hotel Grand Skies, a secretive and exclusive haven where the rich and famous retreat to bask in perfect seclusion. A place where the waiters know their fish knife from their butter knife, their carotid from their subclavian artery, and are trained to enforce the house rules with brutal efficiency. Blurring the lines between detective story, horror and sci-fi, Hunters & Collectors is a mesmeric trip into the singular imagination of M. Suddain – a freewheeling talent whose poise, invention and sensational sentences have already earned him comparisons to Vonnegut, Pynchon and Douglas Adams.

Hunters and Collectors is about historical consciousness and environmental sensibilities in European Australia from the mid-nineteenth century to the present. It is in part a collective biography of amateur antiquarians, archaeologists, naturalists, journalists and historians: people who shaped the Australian historical imagination. Dr Griffiths illuminates the way these avid collectors and investigators of the Australian land and of its indigenous inhabitants contributed a sense of identity at colony-wide and eventually nationwide level. He also considers the rise of professional history, anthropology and archaeology in the universities, which ignored the efforts of the amateurs. Griffiths shows how the seemingly trivial activities of these hunters and collectors feed into the political and environmental debates of the 1990s. This book is outstanding in its originality, interpretative insight and literary flair.

"... collection of photographs assembled around a particular theme: in each image, the gaze of the subject is averted, the face obscured or the eyes firmly closed. The pictures present a catalog of anti-portraiture, characterized at first glance by what its subjects conceal, not by what the camera reveals. Amassed over the course of thirty years by New York collector W. M. Hunt, the collection includes works by masters such as Richard Avedon, Diane Arbus, Imogen Cunningham, William Klein, Robert Mapplethorpe, and Robert Frank as well as lesser-known artists and vernacular images." --book jacket.