Stealing Rembrandts: The Untold Stories of Notorious Art Heist (Palgrave Macmillan), by Anthony M. Amore and Tom Mashberg: In 1997, a gang of criminals escorted Boston Herald Sunday Editor Tom Mashberg to an undisclosed warehouse and showed him an Old Master oil painting.

Inspecting the painting by flashlight, Mashberg believed it to be Rembrandt’s Christ in the Storm on the Sea of Galilee, famously stolen, along with several other priceless pictures, from Boston’s Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in 1990. Since Mashberg’s possible sighting, the missing Gardner artworks have gone back underground, and the crime remains unsolved.

Mashberg has now teamed up with the Gardner Museum’s head of security, Anthony M. Amore, to write Stealing Rembrandts, a detailed look at numerous robberies targeting works by the great Dutch master over the past century. Combining impressive shoe-leather reporting skills with solid art-world knowledge, this fascinating book debunks many myths about museum heists while providing vivid profiles of the criminals and their motives.

The wealthy-but-evil collector who commissions museum robberies to enrich his private holdings is pure Hollywood fantasy, the authors convincingly demonstrate. Most museum heists are carried out by professional criminals who wrongly imagine a Rembrandt can be fenced as easily as other stolen property.

Unlike diamonds or gold, a celebrated old master painting actually has little street value. Instantly recognizable, it cannot be reintroduced into the legitimate marketplace without attracting attention and is therefore difficult for criminals to monetize.

In-depth interviews with several art thieves show that taking a Rembrandt usually nets the robber not a financial windfall but a hostage made of paint and canvas. Ransoms can be demanded and produced, but as the authors note, most hostage situations ultimately go badly for the criminals.

Popular culture too often glamorizes museum heists. As Amore and Mashberg show, stealing a Rembrandt seldom pays off for the thieves but makes the world at large infinitely poorer. With hard facts and a clear-eyed perspective, this book sets the record straight.

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Jonathan Lopez is editor-at-large of Art & Antiques.

 

Copyright 2011 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.

Click here to purchase the book online through amazon.com: http://www.amazon.com/Stealing-Rembrandts-Untold-Stories-Notorious/dp/0230108539

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Killer Stuff and Tons of Money: Seeking History and Hidden Gems in Flea-Market America (The Penguin Press), by Maureen Stanton: Curt Avery buys and sells antiques at flea markets and shows. He knows his stuff. He can date a watercolor to the 1890s by the style of the fishing pole it shows, or a stitched sampler to the late 18th century by a quirk in the lettering.

His knowledge gives him an edge, letting him buy, say, a piece of stoneware from a shop and selling it later for $1,000 profit.

Any fan of PBS’ Antiques Roadshow would love to spend time with him. And that’s just the opportunity Maureen Stanton gives us in Killer Stuff and Tons of Money. She takes us along as Avery loads up his pickup truck with maybe $30,000 of antiques and drives off to yet another hall, or open field, to see what he can do.

It’s a fascinating look at the life of professional dealers who check out all the stuff at these shows before the rest of us even show up. In this world, Avery (that’s a pseudonym, at his request) can make a $1,300 sale before he even sets up, or lose a chance for $1,000 profit by reaching another dealer’s table five seconds too late. The appearance of a rental truck at the setup for a flea market is good news, we learn. It’s the mark of an amateur seller ripe for the picking. “Fresh blood,” as Avery puts it.

But antiques dealers aren’t always in the driver’s seat. Stanton tells us how they’re affected by popular trends, eBay, Antiques Roadshow and even the weather at outdoor events.

For Avery, it’s not really about the money, she tells us. He’s lured by his love for the old objects and the stories they tell. And before long, her readers get swept along by his knowledge and the world he operates in. They may not make a penny from this book, but it’s a wise investment.

Click here to purchase through Amazon.com.

Copyright 2011 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.

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WASHINGTON (AP) – It’s hard to keep up with David McCullough at the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery.

“I think it’s one of the real treasures of the capital city, really of the country,” says the 77-year-old historian during a recent afternoon interview, excited as a school boy as he walks quickly along hallways, up and down stairs, from room to room.

“Here’s the painting I wanted to show you,” he says, stopping in front of an oil portrait by Abraham Archibald Anderson of a pensive, bow-tied Thomas Edison.

“This has a nice story. Edison came to the World’s Fair in Paris in 1889. That was the fair that introduced the Eiffel Tower to the world. He had some 400 of his inventions on display and was a sensation. The crowds followed him everywhere. The electric light was already transforming Paris, let alone the world. So he hid to get away from the paparazzi and the crowds. He stayed with a friend of his (Anderson), and Anderson painted this portrait of him while he was in the studio.”

He points out George Catlin’s sketches of American Indians, and a bronze bust of Abraham Lincoln by Augustus Saint-Gaudens. George Healy is a special passion. McCullough marvels over Healy’s portraits of fiery eyed South Carolina senator John C. Calhoun; a semi-casual Union general William Tecumseh Sherman, coat unbuttoned, hat in hand; a youthful take of Lincoln, painted in Illinois the year before he was elected president; a confident Confederate general Pierre G.T. Beauregard, straight-backed and arms folded.

“He painted this at the time of the attack on Fort Sumter. It ran only a short while after he had painted Lincoln in Illinois,” McCullough says of Healy. “The guy is like Forrest Gump. He keeps showing up wherever history is going on.”

The artists he discusses share two vital qualities, McCullough says. They all spent at least some time in Paris and they all are in the same business as he is. They are historians, documenting the people, the customs and the conflicts of a given era.

McCullough believes that artists share the glory of the presidents and military leaders he has celebrated, and he honors the creative spirit in his new book The Greater Journey. It’s a new telling of a classic American experience – living in Paris – inspired by the most dreary of American experiences, the traffic jam. McCullough was stuck a few years ago in Washington’s Sheridan Circle, where he had little better to do than stare at the equestrian statue of the circle’s namesake, Union general Philip Sheridan.

“I was looking over at him and wondering how many people who drive around this circle every day had any idea who he was,” McCullough says as he drinks from a cup of lemonade in the museum’s courtyard. “And at the same time I was thinking about that, Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue was playing on the radio.

“And I thought, ‘Who is the more important person in American history. Who is the more important expression of who we are?’” he says. “And Rhapsody in Blue started me thinking about Gershwin’s An American in Paris. I grew up in Pittsburgh. (American in Paris star) Gene Kelly grew up in Pittsburgh. And it all sort of connects.”

McCullough won a Pulitzer Prize a decade ago for his biography of John Adams and his new book is meant to validate Adams’ belief that his generation should study war and politics so that the grandchildren can pursue the fine arts. The Greater Journey begins decades after the Revolutionary War has been won, in the 1830s. McCullough ends in the early 20th century and doesn’t bother with the stories he reasons that readers already know: Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin in the 1780s; Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald in the 1920s.

Instead, he tells of novelist James Fenimore Cooper befriending painter and future inventor Samuel Morse, Catlin arriving with an entourage of Iowa Indians, the parallel lives of painters Mary Cassatt and John Singer Sargent, who stayed and worked in Paris around the same time but hardly knew each other.

He frames the narrative, in part, around visits by author and lecturer Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr. He is first seen as a medical student eager for distance from his Puritan father, then 50 years later, as a widower and international celebrity, paying an unannounced visit to Louis Pasteur so he could “look in his face and take his hand, nothing more.” Midway through the book, McCullough devotes a long section to the German siege of Paris in 1870-71 and quotes extensively from rarely seen journals by the U.S. ambassador to France, Elihu Washburne.

“That’s one of the biggest pleasures – that I learned so much. I love it when I’m learning something. That for me is the pull of the work,” he says. “I had a terrific time with every book I’ve written, but this is the best time I’ve ever had. I’ve had more pure joy in writing this book. Structurally, the form is my own creation. I cast it with my own characters. There’s no obligatory group I had to write about, no narrative chronology I had to follow.”

McCullough is a million-selling author, a two-time Pulitzer-winning biographer of presidents Adams and Harry Truman, and perhaps the most recognized historian alive today, with his white hair, jowls and fatherly baritone. But as a boy, and as a young man, he wanted to paint. At age 10, he was dazzled when his art teacher, Miss Mavis Bridgewater, demonstrated the two-point perspective on the blackboard. In college, Yale University, he worked at being a portrait artist.

If artists are really historians, then historians, ideally, are artists, he says. He sees himself as a kind of painter, “drawn to the human subject,” he once wrote, “to people and their stories.”

Paris, of course, is part of the landscape. He remembers visiting the city for the first time, in 1961, arriving in winter late at night, taking a long walk in the rain with his wife, Rosalee. For The Greater Journey, he flew over at least once a year, staying for two weeks. Just as he once re-enacted the morning walks of Truman in Washington, he wanted to make sure he had a firsthand sense of events in Paris.

“I would go over to see how much I got wrong – by walking the walk, soaking it up, timing my walk from an apartment to the artist’s studio,” he says.

McCullough was a writer and editor at the United States Information Agency when he first landed in Paris. He soon joined the history magazine American Heritage and while there worked on his first book, The Johnstown Flood. Released in 1968, Johnstown told of the 1889 disaster, the Hurricane Katrina of its day, that overwhelmed the town of Johnstown, Pa., and killed more than 2,000 people. He followed with a story of success, The Great Bridge, published in 1972 and still regarded as the definitive account of the building of the Brooklyn Bridge.

“I feel in some way I’m coming back full circle. The Brooklyn Bridge is a great creation. It is a work of art, an American emblem, just as those pieces of sculpture by Saint-Gaudens are emblems,” he says, adding that publishers had wanted to write about the Chicago Fire or other disasters.

McCullough says he loves the 19th century because of all the extraordinary changes – the telegraph, the telephone, the steam engine, the electric light. His latest book, though, comes during a 21st-century revolution. The Greater Journey is the first full-length McCullough release since 2005, before the Kindle, Nook or other e-book devices. The new market could test even an author as beloved as McCullough. The announced first printing is big, around 500,000 copies, but less than half the 1.25 million for 1776, which came out well before Borders was shuttering stores around the country. And McCullough’s editor, Bob Bender at Simon & Schuster, doesn’t expect The Greater Journey to be a major e-book seller.

“My guess is that e-book sales will be small,” Bender says. “This is the kind of book people will want to keep on their shelves. If we can toot our own horn a bit, it’s a beautiful book, and the images are better seen on paper. This book really makes the case for the physical book.”

McCullough doesn’t deny that he “lives in a different time.” He writes letters, not emails, and uses a manual typewriter. He doesn’t know a thing about computers, and although he was a longtime commentator for the PBS show The American Experience, he doesn’t bother with TV. He had no idea that his publisher had set up a website about his book, www.davidmccullough.com.

He recently purchased a home in an old American city, Boston, and is far more tuned in to the 18th and 19th centuries, not just to the major historical events but to individual stories, to the art and the literature. Asked when he would have preferred to live, he mentions the 1880s in Paris, around the time the Eiffel Tower was built.

McCullough may have a go at the 20th century for his next book: He’s interested in 1913, the year before World War I began, when the United States enacted the federal income tax and the towering Woolworth Building in New York opened. But he has not committed himself to a subject, or even to a schedule. He might even take a break and turn full time to an old passion.

“I’m not 52 anymore,” he says. “I’d like to paint for a year; might just do that. I love it, do it all the time.”

Copyright 2011 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.

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ROSWELL, New Mexico (AP) – The world famous Roswell “incident” was no UFO but rather a Russian spacecraft with “grotesque, child-size aviators” developed in human experiments by Nazi doctor and war criminal Josef Mengele, according to a theory floated by investigative journalist Annie Jacobsen.

Her book, Area 51: An Uncensored History of America’s Top Secret Military Base, is about the secretive Nevada base called Area 51. One chapter offers the new Roswell theory, citing an anonymous source who says Joseph Stalin recruited Mengele and sent the craft into U.S. air space in 1947 to spark public hysteria.

Like past theories, Jacobsen writes that the U.S. government was involved in a cover-up of the UFO report, which has spawned space alien legend and turned this southern New Mexico town into a tourist attraction.

Bill Lyne, who self-published a book called Space Aliens from the Pentagon in 1993, agrees that the Roswell incident was faked, but he thinks the hoax was perpetrated by the U.S. government – not the Russians.

“They’re just saying what I’ve been saying all along, that it was a hoax,” he told the Santa Fe New Mexican. “But that Mengele stuff is a bunch of hogwash because Mengele was recruited by the CIA (rather than the Russians), and he was actually brought to Albuquerque.”

Clifford Clift of the Mutual UFO Network, or MUFON, in Greeley, Colo., said he has not seen Jacobsen’s book but has read other articles that suggest the Roswell incident involved German technology.

“After researching the claim, I found little truth in this theory,” he said. “It is a stretch. One of my concerns is if they wanted to create panic, why in New Mexico and not New York where there are more people to panic? I would suggest it is another conspiracy theory and, heavens, MUFON knows about conspiracy theories. They do sell books.”

Jacobsen, a contributing editor the Los Angeles Times magazine, told NPR that said she knows people will be skeptical.

“But I absolutely believe the veracity of my source, and I believe it was important that I put his information out there because it is the tip of a very big iceberg,” Jacobsen said.

Julie Schuster, executive director of the International UFO Museum and Research Center in Roswell, told the Albuquerque Journal she hasn’t read the book. But any new theories fuel public interest, and that’s terrific, she said.

“Every time something new comes out, it piques somebody’s curiosity somewhere, and the come to Roswell, and they come to the museum,” Schuster said.

Copyright 2011 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.

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SYDNEY (AFP) – Philip Roth, America’s most decorated living novelist, on Wednesday won the fourth Man Booker International Prize, beating off competition from 12 other authors for the $97,500 award.

The prize was first presented in 2005, and is given every two years for a body of work that was written either originally in English or is widely available in English translation.

The 78-year-old Roth, who could not travel to Sydney to receive the accolade because of back problems, said it was a great honor to be recognized.

“One of the particular pleasures I’ve had as a writer is to have my work read internationally despite all the heartaches of translation that that entails,” the Connecticut-based author said in a statement.

“I hope the prize will bring me to the attention of readers around the world who are not familiar with my work. This is a great honor and I’m delighted to receive it.”

Roth is one of the world’s most prolific writers, and his acerbically humorous studies of Jewish-American identity have won adulation from critics and readers alike.

He is best known for his 1969 novel Portnoy’s Complaint, and for his trilogy comprising the Pulitzer Prize-winning American Pastoral (1997), I Married a Communist (1998) and The Human Stain (2000).

Aged just 26, he won the U.S. National Book Award in 1960 for his first book, Goodbye, Columbus, and in 1995 for Sabbath’s Theater.

He has also won two National Book Critics Circle awards and three PEN/Faulkner awards. In 2001 he was awarded the gold medal for fiction by The American Academy of Arts and Letters.

His most recent book, Nemesis, was published in 2010.

“For more than 50 years Philip Roth’s books have stimulated, provoked, and amused an enormous, and still expanding, audience,” said the chairman of the Booker judging panel, writer and rare-book dealer Rick Gekoski.

“His imagination has not only recast our idea of Jewish identity, it has also reanimated fiction, and not just American fiction, generally.”

The Man Booker International Prize is different from the better known Man Booker Prize, which is given annually to writers from the British Commonwealth and Ireland, in that it highlights one author’s overall body of work.

It has previously been won by Albanian author Ismail Kadare in 2005, Nigeria’s Chinua Achebe in 2007 and Alice Munro of Canada in 2009.

The award was somewhat overshadowed this year by British thriller writer John le Carre asking that his name be withdrawn from the shortlist because “I do not compete for literary prizes.”

The 2011 prize was the first to include Chinese authors in Wang Anyi, whose Shanghai novels include The Song of Everlasting Sorrow, and Su Tong, writer of Raise the Red Lantern: Three Novellas.

Indian-Canadian Rohinton Mistry and U.S. writer Anne Tyler were also in the running this year.

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NEW YORK – From the book Joan Mitchell, Lady Painter: A Life (Alfred A. Knopf), by Patricia Albers: At age 12, Joan Mitchell decided to be a painter. She had shown a flair for writing and for painting, but her father made her choose between the two, warning against being a dilettante.

He needn’t have worried – Joan turned out to be as driven as he was. When Mitchell died in 1992 at age 67, her paintings sold for millions and belonged to major art museums. But her fame came at a terrible price.

A lifelong alcoholic, Mitchell was a nasty drunk, brawling with lovers until she was black and blue. Reckless, promiscuous and self-destructive, she wanted children yet had several abortions because she believed motherhood was incompatible with a career.

Art historian Patricia Albers, who spent eight years on this densely packed, excellent biography, offers a largely sympathetic portrait of Mitchell, uncovering ample evidence of her warmth and generosity and tracing her outrageous behavior to a variety of unresolved psychological issues.

Born in Chicago, Mitchell grew up in a wealthy family. A championship figure skater as a teen, she went on to study at Smith College and the Art Institute of Chicago, where she was a star pupil.

In 1949, she moved to New York with her former husband, Barney Rosset Jr., who later founded the legendary Grove Press, at Joan’s suggestion. They arrived just when a group of downtown artists, later called the New York School, was about to set the world on fire. Mitchell fell under the spell of Willem de Kooning and Franz Kline, whose bold, large-scale abstractions liberated her from her academic training.

Sometimes called a second-generation abstract expressionist, Mitchell defies such labeling. Although she borrowed their gestures and techniques, her paintings capture remembered landscapes and emotions, not the artist’s inner world. Nor did she emulate the random effects of an artist like Jackson Pollock; every brushstroke was intentional.

Although Mitchell never created a movement, she stands out for her striking use of color. Like one of her idols, Wassily Kandinsky, she was a synesthete, perceiving color in other sensory perceptions. People, weather, landscapes, memories _ all throbbed with the intensity of the palette of another hero, Vincent van Gogh.

Fiercely competitive from an early age, Mitchell waged a lifelong battle against sexism. Even her father – who badly wanted a John, not a Joan – told her she’d never amount to much because of her gender. Thus her ironic references to herself as “lady painter,” a sly put-down she used knowing full well that her art deserved to hang alongside that of her more celebrated male contemporaries.

Click here to purchase the book Joan Mitchell, Lady Painter: A Life through Amazon.com: http://www.amazon.com/Joan-Mitchell-Painter-Patricia-Albers/dp/0375414371

Copyright 2011 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.

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SALT LAKE CITY (AP) – Book dealer Ken Sanders has seen a lot of nothing in his decades appraising “rare” finds pulled from attics and basements, storage sheds and closets.

Sanders, who occasionally appraises items for PBS’s Antiques Roadshow, often employs “the fine art of letting people down gently.”

But on a recent Saturday while volunteering at a fundraiser for the small town museum in Sandy, Utah, just south of Salt Lake, Sanders got the surprise of a lifetime.

“Late in the afternoon, a man sat down and started unwrapping a book from a big plastic sack, informing me he had a really, really old book and he thought it might be worth some money,” he said. “I kind of start, oh boy, I’ve heard this before.”

Then he produced a tattered, partial copy of the 500-year-old Nuremberg Chronicle.

The German language edition printed by Anton Koberger and published in 1493 is a world history beginning in biblical times. It’s considered to be one of the earliest and most lavishly illustrated books produced after Johannes Gutenberg invented the printing press and revolutionized publishing.

“I was just absolutely astounded. I was flabbergasted, particularly here in the interior West,” Sanders said. “We might see a lot of rare Mormon books and other treasures, but you don’t expect to see a five centuries old book, you don’t expect to see one of the oldest printed books in the world pop up in Sandy, Utah.”

The book’s owner has declined to be identified, but Sanders said it was passed down to the man by his great uncle and had been just gathering dust in his attic for decades.

Because of the cotton bond paper it was printed on, not wood pulp paper like most present-day works, Sanders said the remaining pages have been well-preserved albeit literally coming apart at the seams

“Barring further calamity or disaster, it will last another 500 years,” he said.

And Sanders is certain it’s not a fake.

“It passes the smell test,” he said. “I’m not sure there’s ever been a forger born who is ambitious enough to hand-create a five-centuries-old book in a manner sufficient enough to fool people.”

But what’s it actually worth? Turns out, not so much.

It is believed there are several hundred copies in circulation worldwide, making it not-so-rare of a find, and about two-thirds of its pages are missing.

Still, it’s not the monetary value that excites Sanders.

“Just the opportunity to handle something from the very beginning of the printed word and the book itself, especially, ironically, in the 21st century with all this talk of the death of the book, and here we have a book that’s survived 500-plus years,” he said. “It’s just exciting … The value of an artifact like this to me is the least interesting part of it all.”

Sanders is displaying the copy at his rare book shop in Salt Lake City.

San Francisco-based antiquities book dealer John Windle said if this copy of the Nuremberg Chronicle were in mint condition and fully intact, it could be worth up to a million dollars.

One in such shape sold last year at a London auction for about $850,000, Windle said, but not so much because it’s such a rare find.

“The rarity of the book has almost nothing to do with its value,” he said. “If you’re collecting monuments of printing history, monuments of human history, if you’re collecting achievements of the human spirit through the printed word, this is one of the foundation books … Every book collector wants a copy of that book or at least some pages from it.”

Windle noted that while its worth to collectors is priceless, it is “probably the most common book from the 15th century making its way onto the market these days.”

“We have a saying in the book trade: there’s nothing as common as a rare book,” he added.

Because of this book’s tattered state, Windle said it’s likely worth less than $50,000.

“It basically kills the value,” he said. “If it turned up in perfect condition in Salt Lake City, now that would be amazing. That would be astounding.”

Luise Poulton, curator and head of rare books at the University of Utah’s J. Willard Marriott Library, called it “an exciting find,” but largely just because of the way it surfaced.

“It’s that classic story,” said Poulton, who has several pages from another copy of a Nuremberg Chronicle on display. “You really never know what’s in your attic.”

Copyright 2011. Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.

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LONDON (AP) – The bride’s dress, it can now be revealed, is made of wool. So are the groom, the guests and the royal corgi.

Amid the acres of souvenirs, memorabilia and merchandise produced to mark the wedding of Prince William and Kate Middleton, one surprise success is Knit Your Own Royal Wedding, a stitch-by-stitch guide to creating the April 29 event out of yarn.

The book has sold 50,000 copies and been through four print runs since it was released last month by a small English publisher, Ivy Press. It is part of a tide of stitching, printing, painting and other handicrafts that are commemorating the royal nuptials – and celebrating a quirkily old-fashioned sense of British style.

Knit Your Own author Fiona Goble spent a month creating patterns for wedding figures including William and Kate, Queen Elizabeth II, Prince Philip, Prince Harry, the Archbishop of Canterbury and even one of the queen’s beloved corgi dogs.

“Kate was quite hard, because she doesn’t have many distinguishing features,” said Goble, whose previous books include Knitivity, a woolen Christmas scene.

“The one that was the easiest was Harry because he has bright red hair – I say that as a fellow redhead – with close-set eyes and a square jaw.”

Like many other royal wedding crafts, Knit Your Own is irreverent – it’s accompanied by a promotional video that shows the woolly royals dancing a conga line – without being mean-spirited.

Goble said her book was created in a spirit of “creativity and frivolity.”

“I wanted them to look quirky and friendly, not hideous caricatures – there have been enough of those of the royal family,” she said. “I wanted them to look like the real people. Obviously there is a limit to what you can do in a knitted doll, but I wanted there to be some distinguishing figures.”

Much of the figures’ charm lies in the details Goble has labored to create, from the medals on the men’s military uniforms to the blue oval engagement ring on Kate’s finger. The book includes instructions for different outfits, including the blue wrap dress Middleton wore at the engagement announcement in November.

“We took a lot of trouble getting the clothes right,” Goble said. “And I spent a lot of time getting the hairstyles right: Camilla’s flicks and the queen’s hairspray and set.”

The book has proved a big hit, even though the time commitment involved in making the figures is daunting. Goble says it should take a competent knitter between five and seven hours to create each figure. She found the corgi the hardest, its tiny legs a challenge to even the seasoned knitter.

Can’t knit? Don’t despair. Royal wedding fans also can purchase William and Kate coloring books, paper dolls and a William and Kate Dress-up Dolly Book. Cross Stitcher magazine has offered a “funky commemorative sampler” of Kate, while individual craftspeople have produced everything from a “Keep Calm and Marry On” cross-stitch, inspired by a famous wartime poster, to Kate and William gloves – the “Kate” one embroidered with a blue engagement ring.

A hip private members club in London recently held a craft fair dedicated to the royal wedding. Craft writer and blogger Perri Lewis said the diversity of the creations was striking.

“Half the people had done anti-monarchy stuff like ceramic anarchist mugs, and on the other side were people selling Kate and William jewelry,” she said.

The explosion of handcrafted creativity is part of a movement that has seen Britain’s army of crafters responding to current events – sometimes satirically, often affectionately, in a blaze of retro typography and Union Jack stripes.

Lewis said she first noticed it during last year’s British election, which produced knitted versions of Liberal Democrat leader Nick Clegg and cross-stitched Conservative chief David Cameron.

“It’s the inappropriateness of it – you don’t expect to see politicians in knitted form or Kate and Will made out of felt,” Lewis said. “The whole unexpectedness of it is what makes it go viral.

“It attracts people who don’t necessarily care for knitting. They wouldn’t look at a scarf or a cardigan, but if you tell them there’s a knitted David Cameron, they’ll have a look.”

That’s certainly true of Knit Your Own Royal Wedding, whose appeal goes well beyond Britain’s knitting circles. Goble said she thought the buyers would be “knitters who wanted to do something a bit different.”

“But it’s also people who buy royal wedding souvenirs, people who want something that’s a bit different – not a mug or a tea towel.”

Copyright 2011 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.

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Leaving van Gogh (Spiegel & Grau), by Carol Wallace: Although he merely dabbled with paint and brush, French physician Paul Gachet occupies a significant place in art history.

The intriguing novel Leaving van Gogh imagines what the good doctor might say in looking back on the two months in 1890 during which he tried – and failed – to rescue the painter Vincent van Gogh from madness.

Author Carol Wallace’s sympathetic portrait of van Gogh is secondary to that of Gachet himself, a man of science who marvels at the artistic talent of his 37-year-old patient. He treats van Gogh’s mental illness with modern methods, at least for the late 19th century. His chief tool is a sense of compassion for the tortured soul.

Just as van Gogh studies Gachet and others for portraits during his stay in the French countryside, Wallace offers her own study of the doctor. He mourns a dead wife, tries to be a good father to a blossoming young daughter and maturing teenage son, and seeks worth in a practice that often deals with the deranged.

Gachet is aware that he, too, is on an emotional tightrope at times, if not as lacking as van Gogh in maintaining mental balance. He shares another quality with the troubled artist: self-doubt. In Wallace’s rendering, the doctor’s memories are colored by the elation that comes from having discovered a genius in his midst – and the knowledge that the tragedy that lies ahead, like his wife’s fatal illness, proves to be beyond his powers to prevent.

Many readers will come to Leaving van Gogh with their own knowledge of the painter’s life. (The famous incident in which he cut off part of an ear took place before he met Gachet.) In sublime prose, Wallace subtly refers to van Gogh’s artworks, and his signature style, as she allows Gachet the opportunity to lift the burden of regret from his mind.

Most appropriately, a sense of melancholy marks Leaving van Gogh, though it makes the novel no less enjoyable. And there is no small amount of irony attached to the subject of van Gogh and Gachet: In 1990, van Gogh’s portrait of the doctor sold for $82.5 million, then the highest price paid at auction for a work of art. In his lifetime, van Gogh managed to sell but a single painting.

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Douglass K. Daniel is the author of Tough as Nails: The Life and Films of Richard Brooks (University of Wisconsin Press).

Copyright 2011 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.

AP-WF-04-18-11 1325GMT

 

 

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Madame Tussaud: A Novel of the French Revolution (Crown), by Michelle Moran: Writing historical novels can be tricky. Michelle Moran expertly balances fact and fiction in her latest novel, Madame Tussaud, about a woman whose wax modeling told the tale of the French Revolution.

Moran tells the true story of Marie Grosholtz, later known as Madame Tussaud (namesake of the wax museum), who was Paris’ premier wax modeler when the revolution began in 1789. She worked tirelessly at her family’s home business, where she displayed models of the royal family in different aspects of their lives.

In the months leading up to the revolution, Marie entertained King Louis XVI and the queen (Marie Antoinette). The Grosholtz family’s “Salon de Cire” displayed life-size reenactments of the royal family that were so famous, the king and queen had to see for themselves.

Slowly, Marie began to notice the working class questioning the monarchy, and it became clear it was no longer safe to depict the royal family in a favorable light. Her family’s salon was in a unique position because she was essentially delivering the news with her exhibitions. Each day, she made sure to be in the middle of what was going on so she could go home and recreate it for her patrons. She showed famous scenes like Thomas Jefferson and the Marquis de Lafayette contemplating the revolution in Jefferson’s study and the Marquis de Sade in his jail cell in the Bastille Saint-Antoine.

When she is asked to model the heads of those who have died for the cause, her internal struggle begins. How much success is worth this? When does being arrested become the more appealing option?

Moran eloquently recreates the thin line that Marie walked as she entertained the leaders of the revolution while also tutoring the king’s sister in the art of wax modeling. (The story of how she got the famous name, Madame Tussaud, is the smallest plot in the tale.)

Moran has done the research, and she includes all the famous players of the French Revolution. Written from Marie’s point of view, the book gives readers an intimate and entertaining take on events during that time.

No one knows if Madame Tussaud was a patriot or a royalist, and Moran doesn’t stray too far either way. By the end, Marie’s opinion is clear, and it is Moran’s clever writing that sways the reader as well.

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Online:

 

http://www.michellemoran.com/

 

Copyright 2011 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.

 

AP-CS-03-07-11 1357EST

 

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