British Museum Book Club
British Museum Press, one of the largest museum publishers in the world, offers award-winning titles for many different markets, including general readers, academics, children and families. These highly-illustrated books cover archaeology, history, the Classical world, treasures from the Middle East, Asia, Africa, and much more, all drawn from the British Museum's unrivalled collections.
Here our authors, British Museum curators and experts in their fields, give us a sneak preview of their forthcoming books.
21 July 2010

Look Here by Axelle Russo
The ultimate picture book, Look Here is a witty collection of visual delights from the British Museum. Packed with wonderful photography, the book appeals to people of all ages and speakers of all languages. Introducing the title is author Axelle Russo; a Picture Researcher at the British Museum:
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14 July 2010

South Indian Paintings
Join us for a special chance to meet author Anna L. Dallapiccola who’s new book South Indian Paintings has just been published.
The British Museum’s outstanding collection of South Indian paintings features around1000 works which range from the 17th to the 20th century. This is the first publication of the entire collection, and reproduces 250 of the most important works in full colour. Read the rest of this entry »
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9 June 2010

1 July, 6-8pm
Join us for a chance to meet Clarissa von Spee, author and curator of The Printed Image in China, who will be talking about the exhibition and signing books.
Receive 20% off all British Museum Press books on Chinese Art.
Enjoy a free glass of wine.
For more information:
Click here for more information on the exhibition.
Click here to look inside the book.
The British Museum Book Shop is located just beyond the cloakroom, at the South end of the Egyptian Sculpture Gallery.
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19 May 2010

14 May – 15 August 2010
A small temporary display in Gallery 90 (Prints & Drawings) to complement the new book by C. Gere and J. Rudoe Jewellery in the age of Queen Victoria: a mirror to the world. Read the rest of this entry »
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19 May 2010
The British Museum Bookshop is delighted to announce the launch of late night Thursdays – discounts and booksignings over a glass of wine, on the first Thursday of every month.
3 June, 6-8pm
Ancient Greece and Rome
A chance to meet the authors and have your book signed by Sam Moorhead and David Stuttard (authors of AD 410: The Year That Shook Rome). Customers will receive 20% off all British Museum Press books on Ancient Greece and Rome and a glass of wine.
“AD 410 tells the story with splendid set pieces, lovely pictures and excellent maps…exciting, but also complex, personality-packed tale.”
BBC History Magazine, April 2010
Dates for your diary:
Thursday 1 July: receive 20% off books on China and have your book signed by Clarissa von Spee, author and curator of The Printed Image in China.
Thursday 5 August: receive 20% off books on India, with signings by Anna L. Dallapiccola, author of South Indian Paintings, Indian Love Poetry, Indian Art in Detail.
If you can’t make this event you can still take advantage of this fantastic offer by shopping online. Please enter the promotional code THURSDAYLATE at the checkout. Shop online now.
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5 March 2010
The Benin collection of the British Museum is one of the world’s most prominent. Benin objects fall into two distinct groups – the works of ivory and cast metal (’Bronzes’), made by court artists as marks of royal distinction, and the exquisite carved ivories made as souvenirs for the foreigners who were among the first Europeans to visit West Africa. While the latter objects have been in the West since the sixteenth century, the former were almost unknown when they were dramatically revealed at the end of the nineteenth century and both the general public and professional ‘experts’ on Africa struggled to incorporate them into the world as then known.
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22 February 2010

David Stuttard, co-author of AD 410: The Year that Shook Rome
As we enter the period of Lent, it is perhaps as good a time as any to consider the impact of Christianity on the Roman world in the years leading up to the momentous events of AD 410. And as good a place as any to witness the growing influence of the new religion is in England, just south of the M25 corridor in Kent, at a Roman country house now called Lullingstone villa.
For much of its three-hundred-year life span, Lullingstone villa was relatively unremarkable. It was probably built around AD 100, one of a number of well appointed and comfortable mansions, each with its own estate, which dotted the fertile Darent Valley, within easy distance of the province’s new capital Londinium and the estuary of the River Thames. Indeed, its owners seem to have valued the fecundity of their valley to such an extent that they later built a shrine, apparently to the local water nymphs, whose walls they painted with graceful representations of the goddesses. Read the rest of this entry »
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3 February 2010

David Stuttard
Our book, AD410 The Year That Shook Rome, will be published by the British Museum Press in March 2010. It celebrates (if that’s the right word) a hotly debated event, whose 1600th anniversary is being marked this year: the sack of Rome by Alaric and his Goths.
In this blog, we hope to follow the story of the anniversary year as it unfolds for us, including, as it will, not only our own book’s publication, but conferences and events in the UK (to mark the simultaneous 1600th anniversary of the Roman army leaving Britain), and further real-time reflections on the doomed and chaotic events as they happened month by month in AD410. We shall even be blogging direct from Rome on 24th August, the date of Alaric’s sack.
In the week which sees the launch of the British Museum’s excellent series for BBC Radio 4, A History of the World in 100 Objects, it’s salutary to remember that objects and artefacts, while contributing so much to our knowledge of antiquity, call tell only part of the story.
If our book succeeds at all, it will be in good part down to the different backgrounds from which Sam and I approached the subject. Sam’s background is principally that of an archaeologist and numismatist (at the British Museum), while I am a classicist with a fair experience of translating, adapting and staging ancient Greek drama. Together, then, we bring to the story not only a rigorously scholarly approach, but – as importantly – an understanding of the human dimension. Read the rest of this entry »
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