'Glorious' EMMA THOMPSON'Delightful' PHILIP PULLMAN'Brilliant' JACQUELINE WILSONFrom a reed cut on the banks of the Nile to the Sharpie, the pen has been with us for millennia. And all of humanity – from our faintest notions to our wildest inventions, our gossip and legends, our grandest proclamations and most intimate confessions – has flowed from a quill, ink chamber or ballpoint tip. The pen is the enduring link be...

By the bestselling author of Just My Type: a "thoroughly enjoyable and illuminating" journey into the concept of time "stuffed with fascinating material" ( Observer, UK).Timekeepers is a book about our obsession with time and our desire to measure it, control it, sell it, film it, perform it, immortalize it and make it meaningful. In this fascinating, anecdotal exploration, award-winning author Simon Garfield has two simp...

A glorious gut-wrenching read . . . A Notable Woman makes my heart sing. Jean's diaries are a life in its entirety, in all its glorious mess" ( The Pool ).In April 1925, at the age of fifteen, Jean Lucey Pratt started a journal that she kept until just a few days before her death in 1986, producing over a million words in forty-five exercise books. What emerges is a portrait of a truly unique, sp...

Comic Sans is one of the most used and most reviled typefaces of the digital age. How was it made? How could it spawn a movement to ban it and yet still be so widely promoted by educators? What does its accidental creator make of its contentious and singular history?This quirky and unique book considers how the computer transformed type into something that anyone could use and have an opinion on. It examines how a typeface, correctly used, may sell us almost anything, and how new t...

The classic elegant English typeface, still widely used as a book text more than 250 years since its creation. Baskerville is a transitional design, poised between the first metal types and modern styles, notable for its combination of fat and thin strokes. When it was first used there was genuine concern that it would damage readers' eyes.John Baskerville was a maverick lacquer maker and printer in Birmingham, a flamboyant dresser, an important figure in the Enlightenment. Though ...

Comic Sans is one of the most used and most reviled typefaces of the digital age. How was it made? How could it spawn a movement to ban it and yet still be so widely promoted by educators? What does its accidental creator make of its contentious and singular history?This quirky and unique book considers how the computer transformed type into something that anyone could use and have an opinion on. It examines how a typeface, correctly used, may sell us almost anything, and how new t...

One of the most beautiful handcrafted typefaces in the world, Albertus is also one of the most enduring.The face of thousands of book jackets, and the chosen look for David Bowie, Coldplay, Star Wars and London street signs, Albertus is as as warmly enticing on film posters as it is on memorial plaques.The story of the font is one displacement (its designer Berthold Wolpe was a German Jewish refugee who went on to design the masthead for The Times), but also one of...

** With a new introduction by Russell T Davies **A new edition of the award-winning, ground-breaking account of the early AIDS crisis in Britain.'Masterful.' Jonathan Dean, Sunday Times'A remarkable journalistic achievement.' Time Out'Powerful . . . Indispensable.' Observer'Superb.' London Review of BooksWinner of the Somerset Maugham PrizeHow does ...

'Witty and geekily eclectic' The TimesAn erudite and amusing exploration' Financial Times'Full of jawdropping facts' Mail on Sunday'Remarkable . . . engrossing' Sunday Times'A pleasure' Spectator'An infectiously enthusiastic history' Times Literary SupplementThe encyclopaedia once shaped our understanding of the world. Now these huge books sell for almost nothing on eBay while ...

'DOG'S BEST FRIEND is as fascinating, funny and wise as we've come to expect from Simon Garfield. More than that, it's a book that asks profound questions about what it means to be canine' ANDY MILLER, author THE YEAR OF READING DANGEROUSLY'This is a book that will make your tail wag' KATE HUMBLE'A fascinating, informative and highly entertaining expedition through the highways and byways of dogdom' JOHN BRADSHAW, author of IN DEFEN...

AS HEARD ON RADIO 4'Utterly wonderful' NINA STIBBE, author of Love, NinaTwenty hours have gone since I last wrote. I have been thinking of you. I shall think of you until I post this, and until you get it. Can you feel, as you read these words, that I am thinking of you now; aglow, alive, alert at the thought that you are in the same world, and by some strange chance loving me.In September 1943, Chris Barker was se...

The pen is our oldest tangible connection between an individual mind and the world at large, enabling the grandest proclamations and our most intimate confessions. But the pen's own story is just as eventful as anything it has described. This is the illuminating story of how the simplest tool has shaped our lives.Simon Garfield takes us from a reed on the Nile to the home of Montblanc and Bic, and from the wartime trenches to the desks of Jane Austen, Sigmund Freud and Margaret Atw...