Botanical: Observing Beauty

This handsome volume invites readers on an intimate stroll through centuries of jewelry, botany, drawing, prints, video-game imagery and scientific illustrations, offering a primer on the beauty and ingenuity of nature as reflected in art. Five contributions punctuate the visually structured journey, including a previously unpublished leporello by the late artist Etal Adnan that pulls out into a six-page gatefold. Indeed, this book-as-object is a masterpiece in and of itself, featuring a cover infused with fluorescent and silver inks and titled with a serigraph, in addition to eight pages of sumptuous endpapers printed in deep forest green.

Artists and designers include: Noyubushi Araki, Emile Gallé, Joan Fontcuberta, Christian Dior, Claude Monet, Sarah Bernhardt, Eugène Delacroix, Giuseppe Arcimboldo, Anna Atkins, Gustave Courbet, Henri Cartier-Bresson, René Lalique, Georgia O'Keeffe, Otto Dix, Robert Mapplethorpe and Yves Saint-Laurent.