Delve into the curious history of print and publishing—from the Gutenberg Bible and Shakespeare's folios to rare book forgers, literary scandals, and more.The printing press is one history's greatest achievements. It allowed us to record and spread some of humanity's most brilliant ideas. But let's not forget that humankind is also full of idiots. In Printer's Error, historian J.P. Romney and rare book specialist Rebecca Romney take readers on a rollicking ...

J.P. Romney's The Monster on the Road Is Me is a darkly comic debut novel about the unexpected strength we find when we are tested beyond our limits.It starts with the crows. When you see them, you know he's found you.Koda Okita is a high school student in modern-day Japan who isn't very popular. He suffers from narcolepsy and has to wear a watermelon-sized helmet to protect his head in case he falls. But Koda couldn't care less about his low social ...

A collection of sixty classic and contemporary essays, stories, lists, poems, quotations, and cartoons that celebrates the joys of reading, the feeling of spending hours browsing through a bookstore, and the people for whom buying books is a necessity.Booklovers will find themselves in good company within the pages of A Passion for Books, beginning with science-fiction great Ray Bradbury's foreword and throughout contributions like-- Umberto Eco's How ...

The enduring and engaging guide to educating yourself in the classical tradition.Have you lost the art of reading for pleasure? Are there books you know you should read but haven’t because they seem too daunting? In The Well-Educated Mind, Susan Wise Bauer provides a welcome and encouraging antidote to the distractions of our age, electronic and otherwise.Newly expanded and updated to include standout works from the twenty-first century as well as ...

Welcome to my library.Dog-eared paperbacks falling to pieces.Second-hand books from the stores and barrows of four continents.Modern first editions, some inscribed ...In My Reading Life, a personal investigation into the nature of democracy, dictatorship, decency and the hardwired human condition, Bob Carr shares his profound love of books and reading - books you've never heard of, books you've always wanted to read,...

A much-loved author brings the world of literature alive for all agesThis 'little history' takes on a very big subject: the glorious span of literature from Greek myth to graphic novels, from The Epic of Gilgamesh to Harry Potter. John Sutherland is perfectly suited to the task. He has researched, taught, and written on virtually every area of literature, and his infectious passion for books and reading has defined his own life. Now he guides young readers and the ...

The past remains essential - and inescapable. A quarter-century after the publication of his classic account of man's attitudes to his past, David Lowenthal revisits how we celebrate, expunge, contest and domesticate the past to serve present needs. He shows how nostalgia and heritage now pervade every facet of public and popular culture. History embraces nature and the cosmos as well as humanity. The past is seen and touched and tasted and smelt as well as heard and read about. Empathy, r...

All the signs show that the worthy art of letter writing is in decline. One third of 16-year-olds have never written a letter, and in the next ten years it is predicted that first-class mail will drop by 37%. Emails and texts have overtaken the humble pen and paper as the most popular method of communication. In Kind Regards, Liz Williams explores the popular history of letter writing and how it has shaped the world today - from the early Greek philosophers, to the great letter wr...

What PC English professors don't want you to learn from . . .- Beowulf: If we don't admire heroes, there's something wrong with us- Chaucer: Chivalry has contributed enormously to women's happiness- Shakespeare: Some choices are inherently destructive (it's just built into the nature of things)- Milton: Our intellectual freedoms are Christian, not anti-Christian, in origin- Jane Austen: Most men would be improved if they were more patriarchal than th...

The Oxford Companion to English Literature has long been established as the leading reference resource for students, teachers, scholars, and general readers of English literature. It provides unrivalled coverage of all aspects of English literature - from writers, their works, and the historical and cultural context in which they wrote, to critics, literary theory, and allusions. For the seventh edition, the Companion has been thoroughly revised and updated to meet the ne...

There is a longstanding confusion of Johann Fust, Gutenberg's one-time business partner, with the notorious Doctor Faustus. The association is not surprising to Elizabeth L. Eisenstein, for from its very early days the printing press was viewed by some as black magic. For the most part, however, it was welcomed as a "divine art" by Western churchmen and statesmen. Sixteenth-century Lutherans hailed it for emancipating Germans from papal rule, and seventeenth-century English radicals viewed...

"Knowledge is of two kinds," said Samuel Johnson in 1775. "We know a subject ourselves, or we know where we can find information upon it." Today we think of Wikipedia as the source of all information, the ultimate reference. Yet it is just the latest in a long line of aggregated knowledge--reference works that have shaped the way we've seen the world for centuries.You Could Look It Up chronicles the captivating stories behind these great works and their contents, and the w...