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This richly illustrated book explores the huge creative endeavour behind Tolkien's enduring popularity. Lavishly illustrated with over 300 images of his manuscripts, drawings, maps and letters, the book traces the creative process behind his most famous literary works and reproduces personal photographs and private papers.

The art of being a good wife is not an easy one. This little guide was written in the 1930s for the middle classes - one of the first modern self-help books. Illustrated with contemporary line-drawings, it contains delightfully arcane and timelessly true advice: After all is said and done, husbands are not terribly difficult to manage.

In the golden age of ocean liners, between the late nineteenth century and the Second World War, shipping companies ensured their vessels were a home away from home. This book leads the reader through each of the stages and secrets of ocean liner travel, from booking a ticket and choosing a cabin to shore excursions and disembarking on arrival.

This essay examines the power of language to shape political ideas. In it, Orwell argues that when political discourse trades clarity and precision for stock phrases, the debasement of politics follows. First published in 'Horizon' in 1946, Orwell's ideas continue to be relevant to our own age.

Close friendships are a heart-warming feature of many of our best-loved works of fiction. This book explores 24 fictional friendships in succinct, structured entries, spanning 400 years, and writers as diverse as Jane Austen to John Steinbeck. Beautifully packaged, this is the ideal gift for your literature-loving friend.

Reynard was once the most popular and beloved character in European folklore. Expanded with new interpretations, innovative language and characterisation, this edition is an imaginative re-telling of the Reynard story and as relevant and controversial today as it was in the fifteenth century.

Garnished with sumptuous illustrations depicting the plants that tell the story of this complex and iconic drink, this enticing book delves into the botany of gin from root to branch. As this book's extraordinary range of featured ingredients shows, gin is a quintessentially botanical beverage with a rich history like no other.

This book is a treasure-trove of cartographical delights spanning over a thousand years. Each map is accompanied by a narrative revealing the story behind how it came to be made and the significance of what it shows. The chronological arrangement highlights how cartography has evolved over the centuries.

This lavishly illustrated book showcases the highlights of the Tolkien archives held at the Bodleian Library. This stunning book is a perfect introduction to Tolkien's creative imagination, giving a unique insight into the life of this extraordinary writer, artist and scholar.

The Latin text of Magna Carta (the 1217 issue of Henry III) is reproduced, together with a modern translation and an introduction which traces the background to the making of the charter and its subsequent revisions through the centuries. It also explains how this text has become an enduring symbol of freedom in Britain and throughout the world.

Accompanied by a range of arresting images, this book is a compilation of some of Lenin's most famous sayings, taken from speeches, tracts, letters and recorded conversations. These proclamations offer an insight into the atmosphere of Revolutionary Russia and the mind of one of the twentieth century's most defining political figures.

'Here I am once more in this Scene of Dissipation and vice, and I begin to find already my Morals corrupted.' Drawing together fifty quotations from Jane Austen's letters and novels with vibrant illustrations which illuminate everyday aspects of life in the Georgian era, this beautifully produced volume is the perfect gift for Janeites everywhere.

An exciting journey through history, this beautifully illustrated new edition tells the stories of fifty plants that have been key to the development of the western world.

Travel through time with words that have shaped the trajectory of the English language across centuries. The world of books has played a striking role in the history of English vocabulary. "Book" itself is one of the oldest words in the language, originating from "boc" in Old English, and appears in many commonly used expressions today, including by the book, bring to book, and bookworm, to name a few. With the arrival of printing and typesetting, and the development of the newspaper industry came terminology that birthed commonly used phrases such as "stop the press," "front-page news," and "hit the headlines." The emergence of the internet generated even more. This anthology presents a selection of more than one hundred words that show the influence of writing, reading, and publishing books on our everyday vocabulary over the centuries, telling the stories behind their linguistic origins and uncovering some surprising twists in the development of their meaning through time.

True accounts of groundbreaking women anthropologists defying gender norms in the early 20th century. The extraordinary women featured in Intrepid Women defied early twentieth-century conventions to carry out groundbreaking field research in distant parts of the world where ladies were not meant to travel. In this book, you will meet Barbara Freire-Marreco living among Pueblo people in Southwestern USA; Maria Czaplicka with reindeer herders of Siberia; Beatrice Blackwood in remote villages of Papua New Guinea; Elsie McDougall among textile artists in Mexico and Guatemala; and Ursula Graham Bower in the Naga Hills of Northeast India. Coping with illness, shipwreck, loneliness, and misogyny, these pioneering anthropologists learned local languages, established relationships across supposed cultural boundaries, insisted on the dignity of humanity in all cultural settings, and documented--with remarkable meticulousness--the lives of the peoples with whom they lived and worked. Each of these women collected objects and left archives of photographs, manuscripts, diaries, and letters, which tell the inspirational stories of their encounters and adventures.

Your favorite author may not be who they say they are. The stories behind why an author chose their literary alias can be just as compelling as the works that they wrote. Writers publish under pen names for a variety of reasons. Some use them to fit in while others employ them to stand out from the crowd. Pen Names traces the history of literary aliases from the nineteenth century to the present day through forty novelists, poets, and playwrights. These include famous pseudonymous writers such as George Eliot (Mary Anne Evans), Currer Bell (Charlotte Brontë), Lewis Carroll (Charles Lutwidge Dodgson), George Orwell (Eric Blair), crime writers such as Josephine Tey and Nicci French, and those lesser-known writers whose real identities have been obscured behind their literary aliases. Pen Names also explores the wide range of motivations for taking on new names, including gender, the use of pseudonyms for different genres, and writing as a team. Collectively, the stories in this book give the audience unusual insights into authors, publishers, and readers over the last two hundred years.

This book is both a guide and a history, exploring the curious and entertaining glories of Oxford through two of the most famous fantasies in world literature.

A new kind of biography on Jane Austen examining the objects she encountered during her life alongside newer memorabilia inspired by the life she lived. More than two hundred years after Jane Austen's death at the age of just forty-one, we are still looking for clues about this extraordinary writer's life. What might we learn if we take a glimpse inside the biographies of objects that crossed her path in life and afterward: things that she cherished or cast aside, that furnished the world in which she moved, or that have themselves been inspired by her legacy? Among objects described in this book are a teenage notebook, a muslin shawl, a wallpaper fragment, a tea caddy, the theatrical poster for a play she attended, and the dining-room grate at Chawton Cottage where she lived. Poignantly, the last manuscript page of her unfinished novel and a lock of hair, kept by her devoted sister, Cassandra, are also featured. Objects contributing to Austen's rich cultural legacy include a dinner plate decorated by Bloomsbury artists Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant, Grayson Perry's commemorative pot from 2009, and even Mr Darcy's wet shirt, worn by Colin Firth in the 1995 BBC adaptation. This is a different kind of biography, in which objects with their own histories offer shifting entry points into Jane Austen's life. Each object, illustrated in color, invites us to meet Austen at a particular moment when her life intersects with theirs, speaking eloquently of past lives and shedding new light on one of our best-loved authors.

The libraries of Oxford University are among the finest, but also among the least-known, buildings in the city. Ranging in date from the 13th to the 21st centuries, they incorporate successive changes in internal design and architectural taste. This profusely illustrated book explains these changes though a close study of the library buildings of the University, its departments and its colleges.

This exquisitely illustrated collection of essays by leading scholars and experts offers a glimpse into the Bodleian Library's collection of rare Japanese books and manuscripts. The Bodleian Library houses one of the oldest institutional collections of Japanese rare books and manuscripts in Europe, dating back to the first half of the seventeenth century. This beautifully illustrated collection of essays written by leading scholars and experts offers a glimpse into its rich and multifaceted history, celebrating four hundred years of collecting. In Splendours of Japan, readers will learn about early encounters between England and Japan, explaining how Japanese books and manuscripts arrived in England from the archipelago in the seventeenth century. In addition, other contributions include an examination hand-brushed poetry anthologies, which arrived at the Bodleian at the turn of the century; the production and use of hand-made paper, color pigments and ink; and an overview of the thriving publishing market in Japan during the early-modern and modern period. Among the stunning items are exquisitely painted scrolls, manuscripts of Noh plays, the oldest trade agreement between England and Japan, and early printed books.

An exploration of a significant art: type designing. The twentieth century saw many developments in printing techniques and how fonts were made. Beginning with cold metal type at the start of the century, the industry moved to hot metal type, phototypesetting, and finally digitization. In each phase, certain type designers excelled in harnessing the latest techniques to create beautiful, innovative, and functional new fonts. Against a background story of the evolution of technology, the role of the designer, the rise of the advertising agency, and the changing function of the printer, this book explores thirty-eight key type designers, how they worked, the fonts they designed, and their lasting influence on typography. Here, you will find Frederic Goudy and Edward Johnston, Stanley Morison and Roger Excoffon, Hermann Zapf and Adrian Frutiger, and renowned contemporary designers Neville Brody and Carol Twombly, plus many more. Taken together, the work and working lives of these extraordinary designers chart the radical changes in typography during the twentieth century.

This is the story of how early radio transformed the sense of home and of nationhood in 1920s and 1930s Britain. The arrival of "wireless" is commonly covered from the broadcasters' point of view, but this book is about its reception by listeners, tracking how they integrated the new medium into their own households, and, through it, became connected in a new sense of nationhood. It will also shed light on how the dynamic digital newcomers of the early 21st Century - downloads and podcasts - are changing society today. Illustrated with archival material, It accompanies an exhibition in 2025

A 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.

Featuring some of the most ferocious and humorous book curses ever inscribed, this is a lively, engaging introduction to the history and development of bookish maledictions. Have you ever wanted to protect your books from forgetful borrowers, merciless page-folders, or outright thieves? Perhaps you have even wished harm on those who have damaged your books--but would you threaten them with hellfire, hanging, or the plague? This book contains a collection of some of the most ferocious and humorous book curses ever inscribed--from fearsome threats discovered emblazoned on stone monuments from the ancient Near East to elaborate manuscript maledictions and chilling warnings scribbled in printed books. Book curses are entertaining writings in themselves, but they also offer a tantalizing insight into how passionately texts and books have been valued by their owners and readers over the centuries. Here you will find an engaging introduction to the history and development of the book curse and perhaps some inspiration to pen a few of your own.

A hilarious anthology of the funniest bits from Dickens' novels, with a foreword by bestselling author Nick Hornby.Dickens: The Funny Bits is a brilliant anthology of the funniest extracts from Dickens' novels featuring his famous comic characters such as the Artful Dodger, Mr. Pickwick, Mr. Micawber, Dick Swiveller, Mr. Wopsle, and the Aged P. Organized by novel, the extracts act as standalone vignettes or set pieces and are illustrated with the much-loved line drawings from the early editions, including work by George Cruikshank, Phiz, John Leech, and Marcus Stone. Complete with an introduction from author Nick Hornby, this work also includes passages from Oliver Twist, David Copperfield, Bleak House, Great Expectations, and A Christmas Carol, as well as the unfinished Mystery of Edwin Drood. This work is a super gift for any Dickens fan as well as any reader with an appreciation of the power of humor.

An exquisite edition of William Blake's Songs of Innocence, accompanied by an introduction to his life and work. One of the most important books of illustrated poetry in English literature, William Blake's Songs of Innocence was meticulously relief-etched, printed, and colored in 1789. A unique work of composite art, Song of Innocence contains some of Blake's most enduring and popular poems, delicately illustrated with his exquisite and idiosyncratic designs. This beautiful book reproduces, in color, the twenty-seven pages of the Bodleian Library's copy of Songs of Innocence together with page-facing transcriptions and an introduction on Blake, his life and work, his illuminated printing process, and the genre and continuing influence of Songs of Innocence. Including the much-loved "Nurse's Song," "Little Boy Lost," and "Spring," Blake's captivating lyrics celebrate childhood as a period of harmony and spontaneity, where the defining traits of the world are compassion, empathy, and love.

A beautiful reproduction of naturalist Mark Catesby's flora and fauna illustrations of North America and the Caribbean. Mark Catesby was an eighteenth-century naturalist and artist whose work on the natural history of North America and the Caribbean still resonates today. During several perilous trips, Catesby collected specimens and made extensive observations in the field, gathering material that would eventually become The Natural History of Carolina, Florida and the Bahama Islands, which featured 220 elaborate, distinctive hand-colored illustrations. With their striking combinations of animals and plants paired together with the first-hand observations he made, Catesby's stunning illustrations were widely appreciated in their time and catalyzed interest in the natural history of Colonial America. Ultimately, his work was established as a key reference for the scientific understanding of natural history. As an artist, Catesby meticulously recorded the environment, sifting fact from fiction about the lives of the plants and animals he observed. As a collector, he introduced many living plants to Britain, thereby changing European gardens forever. Catesby's Natural History reproduces all the original plates and shows how Catesby's practical field experience shaped his work in all areas. Whether through the now-extinct species he recorded or the cultural changes he witnessed, his research continues to be relevant, demonstrating the vulnerability and fragility of the natural world.

A haunting anthology of supernatural stories and the macabre. First published in 1898, The Eerie Book is a chilling anthology featuring classic gothic authors like Edgar Allan Poe, Mary Shelley, Thomas de Quincey, and Hans Christian Andersen alongside well-known, influential fairy tales and folklore. All the macabre stories and extracts from longer works have hints of the supernatural and many include malevolent spirits and grotesque murders. Yet this varied selection also features melancholy hauntings and poignant memoirs in a fascinating mix of gothic horror and disturbing legend. In this new compendium, each story is illustrated with a striking engraving by art nouveau artist W.B. Macdougall. Beautifully produced, carefully curated, and timeless, The Eerie Book is the perfect gift for anyone who likes to be haunted by ghost stories. Read it if you dare.

An intimate account of Albert Einstein's visit to Oxford in the 1930's, casting new light on why he continues to be the world's most famous scientist. In 1931, Albert Einstein visited Oxford to receive an honorary degree and lecture on relativity and the universe. While teaching, he naturally chalked equations and diagrams on several blackboards. Today, one of these boards is the most popular object in Oxford's History of Science Museum. Yet Einstein tried to prevent its preservation because he was modest about his legendary status. Having failed, he complained to his diary: "Not even a cart-horse could endure so much!" Nevertheless, he came back to Oxford in 1932 and again in 1933--then as a refugee from Nazi Germany. In many ways, the city appealed deeply and revealed him at his most charismatic as he participated in its science, music, and politics, and wandered its streets alone. Einstein in Oxford is an eye-opening exploration of the world's most famous scientist, told through the personal writings he left behind from an important period of his life. From the pages of his diary entries, poem, and other written observations, readers gain a deeper understanding of the unique man--and humor--who continues to fascinate the world.

An extraordinary account of Oxford's role in the Second World War. Oxford played a unique part in the national endeavor to defend Britain in the Second World War. Thanks to its proximity to London, the city provided an alternative base for civil servants from the Ministry of Food, the Foreign Office, the Ministry of Home Security, the Ministry of Information, and the Ministry of Works. The Admiralty, the War Office, the Air Ministry, MI5, and Bletchley Park all also had a presence in Oxford. Colleges became military hospitals, evacuee centers, and both cadet and senior officer schools. Students fit for active service took shortened degree courses and underwent military training while they studied. Grassy quadrangles were converted into vegetable plots and the New Bodleian Library provided underground storage for treasures from Parliament and national museums. Drawing on first-hand narratives and the University of Oxford's archival material, this pioneering account reveals the essential role Oxford played in producing military intelligence, creating propaganda, and developing radar and the atomic bomb. It also explores how the university provided sanctuary for academics fleeing fascism who in turn made significant contributions in their fields of expertise, painting an astonishing picture of the war's profound impact on an ancient seat of learning.