Divination, oracles & omens
£25.00A spellbinding collection of twenty-four divinatory techniques from around the world exploring our need to appeal to powers beyond our realm for prediction and clarification.
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Book curses
£14.99Featuring some of the most ferocious and humorous book curses ever inscribed, this is a lively and engaging introduction to the history and development of bookish maledictions.
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Adventures in maps
£25.00Twenty historical journeys, routes and adventures followed through the maps that made them.
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Drink maps in Victorian Britain
£25.00A fascinating exploration of the history of alcohol in Victorian Britain via the ‘drink maps’ that were produced by the temperance movement to promote sobriety.
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Clare Leighton’s rural life
£30.00A stunningly packaged anthology of writings and artwork by noted wood engraver Clare Leighton, including beautifully reproduced extracts and a detailed introduction to the artist’s life and work, reflecting Leighton’s lifelong fascination with the virtues of the countryside and the people who worked the land.
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A date with language
£25.00A collection of 366 witty and fascinating facts, events and stories about language, for every day of the year (with one extra for leap years).
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A Christmas carol
£25.00An exquisitely illustrated, luxury collector’s edition of Dickens’s Christmas tale.
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A splendour of succulents & cacti
£16.99Succulents, especially cacti, are the current focus of serious ecological studies but also the darlings of designers and style influencers. Their endearing, characterful looks have given them the status of trendy ‘plant pets’. But succulentomania is not new. While these plants have always been part of the landscape in the dry vastnesses of the Americas, Australia and Africa, curiosities such as furry-flowered stapeliads and euphorbias like snakes were a source of fascination for early European plant collectors – and in eighteenth-century Bavaria a prosperous apothecary grew an ‘American aloe’ that astounded all who saw it. This apothecary, Johann Wilhelm Weinmann, was the mastermind behind a groundbreaking book in which he aimed to include thousands of plants from all over the world, describing their individual characteristics and commissioning magnificent colour illustrations of each specimen.
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Inventing photography
£40.00William Henry Fox Talbot is celebrated today as one of the English inventors of photography. He made early photographic experiments in the 1830s, released the details of his photogenic drawing process in January 1839, and introduced important innovations to the medium in the 1840s and 1850s. Drawing on archive material in the Bodleian Library, including three albums given by Talbot to his sister, Horatia Feilding, as well as his illustrated books, ‘Sun Pictures in Scotland’ and ‘The Pencil of Nature’, this volume shows how Talbot was continually inventing photography anew. A selection of eighty full-page plates provides a thematic survey of Talbot’s work, reproducing images that document his travels, his home and his family, as well as his intellectual interests, from science to literature to ancient languages.
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The Happy Prince & Other Tales
£20.00Oscar Wilde’s children’s stories explore timeless themes of good and evil, freedom and responsibility, love and death, beauty and self-sacrifice. This beautiful collectors’ edition with original watercolour illustrations and decorative motifs by Charles Robinson and an introduction by Michèle Mendelssohn will delight adults and children alike.