In the winter of 1921 a Springboks rugby team toured New Zealand for the first time, captivating the country. An all-white team of mostly Afrikaners, they came cloaked in a powerful mystique – blue-eyed, “youthful giants” from a fellow British colony. Twenty-three of the team had served in the just-ended Great War. Wherever they went the Springboks were saluted as “sons of Empire.” But the tour was rocked amid claims the Springboks resented having to play a Māori team, as the race issue that would bedevil New Zealand-South Africa rugby relations for seventy years reared its head. Two terrible events backdropped the Springboks visit: the 1914-18 war and the influenza epidemic. Together they’d taken nearly 30,000 New Zealanders’ lives, and the effects of both calamities were still being felt. To compound the gloom, the economy nose-dived and many soldier-settlers were forced from their recently-acquired land. This book casts back one hundred years to bring together the story of an eagerly-anticipated rugby tour, and the troublesome memories of its time.

Bind: paperback

Pages: 240

Dimensions: 160 x 240 mm

Publication Date: 31-10-2021

Heard a funny one-liner in the playground? Found some hilarious jokes online? Jot them all down in The Joke Collector's Notebook, complete with 100 illustrated jokes, fun challenges, and handy tips on finding and telling jokes. Perfect for joke-lovers aged 8 and up.

Bind: paperback

Pages: 230

Dimensions: 152 x 229 mm

Publication Date: 01-10-2021

Publishing three times a year, this sought-after journal of articles and photographs caters for readers with a wide range of interests in the gardening world, including: • Gardens and Gardeners • Plants and Trees • Landscape and Design • Garden History • Travel Experiences

Bind: paperback

Pages: 112

Dimensions: 148 x 210 mm

Publication Date: 29-10-2021

Two years after graduating, Kees Bruin was exhibiting alongside Leo Bensemann, Don Binney, Doris Lusk, Trevor Moffitt, Peter Siddell, Olivia Spencer-Bower, Grahame Sydney, Robin White, and Brent Wong. For more than five decades of dedicated painterly practice and exhibition, Kees Bruin has established a unique visionary identity within the framework of New Zealand realism that is enthusiastically commissioned and collected internationally. His three overlapping categories: photo-realism, super-realism and what he terms “visionary-realism,” sprung from a personal search for all things truth hence his clever use of symbol, have gifted us exquisite panoramic landscapes, expressions of cultural pursuits such as surfing and skateboarding often imbued with metaphor, single and group portraits, reinterpretations of masters, especially the Dutch Golden Age, elaborated ‘still-lifes’ and works that explore elements of western Judaeo-Christian histories combined with contemporaneous fashions, settings and views to and from the earth. This personal genre launches us as art viewers into emotional odysseys of timeless human concern: Spirituality, the universe, beauty, truth, life and death, sex, betrayal, vanity and loss, as well as using paint to express beauty for its own sake.

Bind: hardback

Pages: 192

Dimensions: 300 x 300 mm

Publication Date: 12-10-2021

Who Am I? is a question at the centre of what it is to be human and for artist Kelcy Taratoa (Ngāi Te Rangi, Ngāti Ranginui, Ngāti Raukawa) it has formed the sub-ject of his painting for two decades. Kelcy Taratoa: Who Am I ?... Episode 001 is a bilingual English and Te Reo publication written by Warren Feeney and translated by Hēni Jacob (Ngāti Raukawa). It  traverses the artist’s life from growing up in the suburbs of Levin to Te Haka a Te Tupere, the artist’s wharenui at Rangiwaea marae in Tauranga Harbour. Through his paintings he contends that contemporary technology’s virtual realities and appetite for destruction and distraction is undermining our humanity and experience of the world. Yet painting, that most ancient means of visual communication, is something that continues to remind us of our humanness.

Bind: hardback

Pages: 112

Dimensions: 210 x 295 mm

Publication Date: 06-10-2021

There is absolutely nothing so inspiring, worthwhile or satisfying as your last mountain biking adventure, except of course the next mountain biking adventure, regardless of how it unfolds. Mountain biking is life, the rest is detail. The 2022 New Zealand Mountain Biking Calendar by renowned mountain biker and photographer Dave Mitchell presents fabulous colour photographs capturing the essence of off-road biking in Aotearoa New Zealand.

Bind: stationery

Dimensions: 340 x 240 mm

Publication Date: 20-07-2021

This book accompanies Yayoi Kusama’s first major European retrospective exhibition, offering a comprehensive overview of the Japanese artist’s influential oeuvre, which spans more than eighty years. The companion to the groundbreaking new retrospective at the Gropius Bau, this publication examines Kusama’s life and work through wholly original insights by leading experts. The book traces the development of Kusama’s creative output from her early paintings and accumulative sculptures to her immersive environments, as well exploring her lesser-known artistic activity in Europe and Germany in particular. It illuminates Kusama’s commitment to political and social issues in Europe, the US and Japan. A diverse selection of images and archival documents feature alongside texts by authors from different theoretical backgrounds. Essays discuss Kusama’s accomplishments in the worlds of fashion, film, art marketing and publishing. They focus on her engagement with different artistic spheres and offer genre-specific observations about her performances, installations and painting series. As panoramic and fascinating as its subject, this monumental retrospective guides viewers interested in Kusama towards a deeper understanding of her creative trajectory and of the breadth of her extraordinary career.

Pages: 352

Dimensions: 220 x 280 mm

Publication Date: 30-04-2021