Books by Jean-Claude Kaufmann

This volume is an unprecedented history of Louis Vuitton's women's bags, the most coveted line of accessories in women's fashion. At the heart of Louis Vuitton are its City Bags, a range of women's bags that dates back to the turn of the twentieth century. Featuring the trademark monograms of the house, the City Bag story began with the Steamer, a resort bag designed in 1901 to be packed inside a much larger steamer trunk. These bags have in a hundred years formally diversified into a dizzying array of handbags for every conceivable function demanded by the modern woman. Profoundly influential, City Bags are now known to millions by their descriptive names (Keepall, Bucket, Papillon, Alma, Locket, Noe, Speedy) and are still evolving into more fantastical forms. Lavishly illustrated with new and archival photography, historical graphics, landmark editorials, and ad campaigns, the volume traces the history of these specific bag families, and examines the earliest specimens and today's most sought-after collectibles, including Vuitton's collaborations with Takashi Murakami, Stephen Sprouse, Richard Prince, Yayoi Kusama, and Rei Kawakubo and one-off projects by Zaha Hadid, Shigeru Ban, Vivienne Westwood, Helmut Lang, Andrée Putman, and of course, Marc Jacobs. Louis Vuitton: City Bags is an ambitious volume on the creation and cultivation of a cultural phenomenon.

* A best-selling sociologist presents a concise and very readable history of love * Kaufmann focuses on the question of why so many people are searching for love, hoping to find in love a kind of happiness that they cannot find in their work or by surrounding themselves with material goods.

We all know what it's like to be annoyed by little things that our husband, wife or partner does - leaving the cap off the toothpaste tube, leaving the toilet lid up, leaving dirty clothes on the floor - and we know how easily these little grievances of everyday life can spin out of control.

The number of one-person households is rising steeply all over the world and a growing proportion of these 'new singles' are women. It is estimated that one woman in three lives on her own.