24 Literature


68864 DEFINING MOMENTS IN BOOKS: The Greatest Books, Writers, Characters, Passages and Events that Shook the Literary World


edited by Lucy Daniel


Written by 30 international literary critics, academics, journalists, prize-winning authors, poets and experts. Covering all areas of literature from poetry and plays to children’s books and major reference works, this is the ultimate literature-lover’s guide to 1,000 of the more important moments that shaped a century. Characters such as Atticus Finch, Sherlock Holmes and Harry Potter have carried us through the century, while the discussion about the Da Vinci Code still rages on. Here is the world of literature in a nut-shell. 800 softback pages lavishly illustrated in colour and b/w, with author and book title indexes.


£18.99 NOW £5.50 68923 PUNCH AND JUDY: A Short History


with the Original Dialogues by John Payne Collier


Our book chronicles the origins of the puppetry’s famous duo from Punch’s birth in Italy to his travels across medieval Europe. 30 terrific woodcut illustrations by the great Victorian artist George Cruikshank, Dickens’ illustrator of choice, complement the extensive excerpts of authentic Punch and Judy dialogue. Braggart and bully, the immortal Punch has delighted audiences for centuries on street corners and at country fairs where crowds of English children cheer for this paragon of unrepentant wickedness, shouting encouragement and applauding his gleeful buffoonery. He struts and boasts, cracks jokes and heads, while the casualties mount. 208pp in Dover paperback, 30 illus. £9.99 NOW £5


68987 JOURNEYS: An Anthology edited by Robyn Davidson


An invitation to explore the backroads of the travel genre from Simone de Beauvoir to Martin Luther King, from Buddha to Van Gogh by way of Samuel Butler’s Ramblings in Cheapside, Edmund Wilson’s Notes on London at the End of the War, Proust’s In Memory of a Massacre of Churches, V. S. Pritchett’s The Spanish Temper from the Spain section, and more from Sweden, Iceland, Germany, Slovakia, Russia, North America, Cuba, Brazil, Australia, North Africa, Israel and as far afield as India and Mongolia. Sit in your comfortable armchair to take a great trip around the globe. 467pp in paperback.


£9.99 NOW £3.50 69019 TENNIS WHITES AND


TEACAKES by John Betjeman This is a treasure trove of John Betjeman’s poetry, private letters and musings celebrating his England - a place of patriotic poets and seaside coves, village teashops and eccentric dons. Edited by Stephen Games, Betjeman writes on topics like childhood, school, fags and fires, Oxford, girls, friends, aristocrats and foreigners, decedents and writers, comedy, Englishness, travel and the


outdoors, fun palaces, London, Sundays, optimism, war, churches and clergy and more. 451pp in paperback. £8.99 NOW £4


24273 RUBAIYAT OF OMAR KHAYYAM translated by Edward Fitzgerald This edition presents the classic free translation by Edward Fitzgerald of the great Persian poem by the 12th century astronomer and poet - Omar Khayyam. Fitzgerald’s masterful translation was first published as an anonymous pamphlet in 1859. Its colourful, exotic and remote imagery greatly appealed to the Victorian age’s fascination with the Orient, while its luxurious sensual warmth acted as a striking counterpoint to the growth of scientific determinism. The romantic melancholy of the poem anticipates the poetry of Matthew Arnold and Thomas Hardy, while its epicurean motifs link it to the Aesthetic Movement. 96pp. Paperback. ONLY £2


69026 THE BAD SISTER: An


Emma Tennant Omnibus by Emma Tennant


For the first time three of Tennant’s most acclaimed works are brought together in one omnibus edition, all of which share a spiritual infinity. The Bad Sister and The Two Women of London retell two Scottish masterpieces of the macabre - James Hogg’s The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner and Stevenson’s


Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, resetting their claustrophobic and terrifying examinations of duality in the contemporary environment of London through female protagonists. The third book, Wild Nights, is a tour de force of descriptive writing as well as a tale of old love and family friction, and completes a trilogy of immense power and enduring value. A whirlwind of pure imagination. 388pp in paperback. £7.99 NOW £2


100587 BLEAK HOUSE by Charles Dickens


Dickens divides the narrative between his heroine, Esther Summerson, who is psychologically interesting in her own right, and an unnamed narrator whose perspective both complements and challenges hers. 800 pp. Paperback. ONLY £2


100768 DIAMOND AS BIG AS THE RITZ AND


OTHER STORIES by F. Scott Fitzgerald


An ominous fable about the pursuit of great wealth. Readers will be transported to a fabulous fantasy land of such opulence that its very existence has to remain a jealously guarded secret. Fatal consequences lie in store for ‘bona fide’ guests and uninvited visitors alike, while the sybaritic luxury of the place is evoked in an effortless prose style which is quintessentially F. Scott Fitzgerald. Also featured in this volume are ‘The Cut-Glass Bowl’, ‘May Day’, ‘The Rich Boy’, ‘Crazy Sunday’, ‘An Alcoholic Case’, ‘The Lees of Happiness’, ‘The Lost Decade’ and ‘Babylon Revisited’. 240pp. Paperback. ONLY £2


67048 THREE TALES by Gustave Flaubert Published in 1877, ‘Three Tales’ was the last of Flaubert’s works published during his lifetime. The ambitious range of stories - A Simple Heart, The Legend of St. Julian the Hospitaller and Herodias, reaches from the author’s own century back to the Middle Ages and the ancient Israel. The second story tells of a bloodthirsty hunter and warrior whose attempts to escape a dire prophecy ultimately lead to a state of grace. The final tale is based on the legend surrounding King Herod, Salome and John the Baptist. Unabridged facsimile reprint, 91 page softback. £5.99 NOW £1.50


67059 UNFORGETTABLE GHOST STORIES BY


WOMEN WRITERS edited by Mike Ashley The editor of these 18 stories by women suggests that women bring a characteristically psychological approach to the subject. In Edith Wharton’s story Kerfol the heroine Anne de Cornault is accused of murdering the husband who killed her pet dogs, but the truth proves more elusive than anything envisaged by the court’s terms of reference. In Edith Nesbit’s story From the Dead a man is deserted by his wife and only learns after her death the desperate love that drove her to abandon him. 313pp, paperback. £10.99 NOW £1.75


23774 GREENMANTLE by John Buchan


Greenmantle continues the thrilling adventures of Richard Hannay. The story takes Hannay from convalescence following the Battle of Loos, back to London for a vital meeting at the Foreign Office and thence on a top-secret mission across war-torn German-occupied Europe. His mission; to neutralise and destroy a cunning and potentially devastating plot to


foment Holy War in the Islamic Near East, which could ignite a powder keg and shake the balance of world power and the course of war. Hannay is assisted by three intrepid companions: the sauve, dashing, exotic and devastatingly romantic Sandy, Arbuthnot, the American - John Scantlebury Blenkiron, and the South African Boer Scout - Peter Pienaar. 240pp. Paperback. ONLY £2


23781 DON QUIXOTE by Miguel de Cervantes Cervantes’ tale of the deranged gentleman who turns knight-errant, tilts at windmills and battles with sheep in the service of the lady of his dreams, Dulcinea del Toboso, has fascinated generations of readers, and inspired other creative artists such as Flaubert, Picasso and Richard Strauss. The tall, thin knight and his short, fat squire, Sancho Panza, have found their way into films, cartoons and even computer games. Supposedly intended as a parody of the most popular escapist fiction of the day, the ‘books of chivalry’, this precursor of the modern novel broadened and deepened into a sophisticated, comic account of the contradictions of human nature. Cervantes’ greatest work can be enjoyed on many levels, all suffused with a subtle irony that reaches out to encompass the reader. Translation by P.A. Motteaux, 787pp paperback. ONLY £2


23783 COMPLETE FATHER


BROWN by G.K. Chesterton Father Brown, one of the most quirkily genial and lovable characters to emerge from English detective fiction, first made his appearance in The Innocence of Father Brown in 1911. That first collection of stories established G.K. Chesterton’s kindly cleric in the front rank of eccentric sleuths. This complete collection contains all the favourite Father Brown stories,


showing a quiet wit and compassion that has endeared him to many, whilst solving his mysteries by a mixture of imagination and a sympathetic worldliness in a totally believable manner. The Complete compenduim is 800pp. Paperback. ONLY £2


23865 WAR AND PEACE by Leo Tolstoy Translated by Louise & Aylmer Maude. With an Introduction by Henry and Olga Claridge, University of Kent at Canterbury. War and Peace is a vast epic centred on Napoleon’s war with Russia. While it expresses Tolstoy’s view that history is an inexorable process which man cannot influence, he peoples his great novel with a cast of over five hundred characters. Three of these, the artless and delightful Natasha Rostov, the world-weary Prince Andrew Bolkonsky and the idealistic Pierre Bezukhov illustrate Tolstoy’s philosophy in this novel of unquestioned mastery. This translation is one which received Tolstoy’s approval. 1024pp, paperback. ONLY £4


41491 GREAT EXPECTATIONS by Charles Dickens


Considered by many to be Dicken’s finest novel, Great Expectations traces the growth of the book’s narrator, Philip Pirrip (Pip), from a boy of shallow dreams to a man with depth of character. From its famous dramatic opening on the bleak Kentish marshes, the story abounds with some of Dicken’s most memorable characters. Among them are the kindly blacksmith Joe Gargery, the mysterious convict Abel Magwitch, the eccentric Miss Haversham and her beautiful ward Estella, Pip’s good- hearted room-mate Herbert Pocket and the pompous Pumblechook. Introduction and Notes by Dr John Bowen, Keele University. Illus by Marcus Stone. 432pp paperback. ONLY £2


46364 THE LAST MAN by Mary Shelley


Set in the late 21st century, this is Mary Shelley’s apocalyptic fantasy of the end of human civilisation. Interwoven with her futuristic theme, she incorporates idealised portraits of Shelley and Byron, yet rejects Romanticism and its faith in art and nature. The only daughter of Mary Wollstonecraft and the radical philosopher William Godwin, Mary was educated through contact with her father’s intellectual circle and met Percy Bysshe Shelley in 1812. They eloped in July 1814 and in the summer of 1816 she began her first and most famous novel ‘Frankenstein’. Complete and unabridged text with notes, 432pp in paperback. ONLY £2


Bibliophile Books Unit 5 Datapoint, 6 South Crescent, London E16 4TL TEL: 020 74 74 24 74


53185 CASEBOOK OF CARNACKI - GHOST FINDER by W. H. Hodgson


Thomas Carnacki is a ghost finder, an Edwardian psychic detective, investigating a wide range of terrifying hauntings presented in the nine stories in this complete collection of his adventures. Encountering such spine- chilling phenomena as ‘The Whistling Room’, the life- threatening dangers of the phantom steed in ‘The Horse of the Invisible’ and the demons from the outside world in ‘The Hog’, Carnacki is constantly challenged by spiritual forces beyond our knowledge. To complicate matters, he encounters human skullduggery also. Armed with a camera, his Electric Pentacle and various ancient tomes on magic, Carnacki faces the various dangers his supernatural investigations present with great courage. 192 page paperback. ONLY £3


67238 JANE AUSTEN COLLECTION: The


Masterpiece Library by Jane Austen


Northanger Abbey, Sense and Sensibility, Mansfield Park, Persuasion, Pride and Prejudice and Emma are the six classic novels by this beloved writer. Presented in smart navy blue paperback editions, they have been slotted into an attractively illustrated slipcase, ready to grace any bookshelf and replace old tattered and battered, well-loved and many- times-read editions. ONLY £10


67241 BRONTE COLLECTION:


The Masterpiece Library by Emily, Charlotte and Anne Brontë


Wuthering Heights, The Professor, The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, Jane Eyre and Agnes Grey are the five ever-popular classic novels selected for this elegant box set. All five paperback classics come in a slipcase with colour illustration and will grace any bookshelf, to replace well thumbed, well loved editions. The whole presentation set is of excellent quality. ONLY £11


53189 THE HAUNTED HOTEL AND OTHER STORIES by Wilkie Collins


The star attraction is the novella ‘The Haunted Hotel’, a clever combination of detective and ghost story set in Venice, a city of grim waterways, dark shadows and death. The supernatural horror, relentless pace, tight narrative, and a doomed countess characterise and distinguish this powerful tale. The other stories present equally disturbing scenarios, which include ghosts, corpses that move, family curses and perhaps the most unusual of all, the Devil’s spectacles, which bring a clarity of vision that can lead to madness. 317 page paperback. ONLY £3


65423 A SEAMAN’S BOOK OF SEA STORIES by Desmond Fforde


Set between 1800 and 1945, some of these stories are true, some fiction. We begin with a Hornblower tale by C.S. Forester, then Peter Simple by Captain Marryat, who was a midshipman under Cochrane, the model for many Napoleonic sea heroes. Frank Henry wrote many tales for Blackwood’s Magazine in the 1940s and ’50s - here we have an extract from Down to the Sea. Without Incident by Geoffrey Drake describes what it was like in the Atlantic convoys during WWII. 196 page paperback.


£7.99 NOW £2


65655 THE COMPLETE CANTERBURY TALES by Geoffrey Chaucer translation by Frank Ernest Hill


The Kelmscott Chaucer, produced in 1896 by William Morris and Edward Burne-Jones, is one of the most beautiful books in the world, and Kelmscott engravings illustrate this edition of the Canterbury Tales in a modern English verse translation that stays close to the original text. The famous opening words introduce a cast of 29 motley pilgrims who agree to tell stories on their journey to Canterbury. The Knight opens with the romantic story of Palamon and Arcite who joust for a woman’s love, and in direct contrast the earthy Miller tells one of the most famous bawdy stories of all time, where an old carpenter’s young wife is courted by two young men with painful and hilarious results. Illus by Edward Burne Jones and William Morris. 383pp. £16.99 NOW £9.50


66329 CONTESTED WILL: Who Wrote


Shakespeare? by James Shapiro For 200 years after William Shakespeare’s death, no one thought to argue that somebody else had written his plays. Since then dozens of rivals including Sir Francis Bacon and the Earl of Oxford have been proposed as the true author. The book unravels the mystery of when and why so many people began to question whether Shakespeare wrote the plays, among them Sigmund Freud, Henry James, Mark Twain, Helen Keller, Orson Welles and Sir Derek Jacobi. Shapiro’s fascinating search for the source of this controversy retraces a path strewn with fabricated documents, calls for trials, false claimants, concealed identities, deception and a failure to grasp what could not be imagined. 367pp with many illus. £20 NOW £3.50


66746 SHAKESPEARE’S GENEALOGIES


(SLIP-CASED) by Vanessa James This ingeniously designed long box holds over 17 feet of double-sided concertina-folded genealogical information about Shakespeare’s plays and dramatic poems, covering over 1,000 characters altogether. The characters in the Continental comedies such as Love’s Labour’s Lost and Twelfth Night are fictitious but a synopsis of each plot indicates the possible sources of the stories. The Roman plays include not only Julius Caesar and Antony and Cleopatra, but also the distantly related Titus Andronicus, Coriolanus and The Rape of Lucretia. The history plays have a complex and full genealogy accompanying the story of how Henry IV seized the crown from Richard II. 100 colour images. 12 x 4" folded size.


$24.95 NOW £4 66810 LATIN LOVE LESSONS: Put A Little


Ovid Into Your Life by Charlotte Higgins Here are Ovid’s tips on picking up girls and getting away with cheating on the wife, Catullus on how to deal with


e-mail: orders@bibliophilebooks.com


a broken heart and how to get your own back when some musclebound centurion steals your best girl and Virgil’s textbook case of how not to dump a girl. With plenty of Latin laughs to be had too, with love poetry we have one more thing that those Romans did for us! “Sic ego nec sine te nec tecum uiuere possum” - “I can’t live with you, I can’t live without you”. Lovely! 190pp, with b/w illus. £12.99 NOW £2


66893 THREE MUSKETEERS by Alexandre Dumas


With its rousing cry of ‘One for all, and all for one’, Dumas’s thrilling adventure novel is a swashbuckling epic. A son of impoverished nobility, D’Artagnan arrives in Paris in the early 1600s to find the Musketeers disbanded by the cunning Cardinal Richelieu who hopes to seize power from the weak-willed Louis XIII. The daring youth joins Porthos, Athos and Aramis in a heroic struggle to defend the king and his lovely queen, Anne of Austria. Unabridged facsimile reprint and the English translation of 1844. 545pp in paperback. £5 NOW £1


66898 TROILUS AND CRESSIDA by Geoffrey Chaucer


Set during the siege of Troy, the epic poem tells of Troilus, a Trojan prince who has fallen hopelessly in love with Cressida, the daughter of a Trojan priest who has defected to the Greeks. Remarkable for his beauty and bravery, Troilus is an engaging youth, noble, sensitive and pure-souled who lives and eventually dies for Cressida, a virtuous and tender-hearted young woman driven to infidelity by circumstance. Regarded by many as Chaucer’s most notable work of art. Unabridged facsimile reprint of the 1939 original rendered into modern English verse. 274pp in paperback. £4 NOW 90p


68026 THE AMBASSADORS by Henry James Penguin Classic with an introduction by Harry Levin which discusses the novel’s depiction and significance of Paris to the American mind. Concerned that her son Chad may have become involved with a woman of dubious reputation, the formidable Mrs Newsome sends her ‘ambassador’, Strether, from Massachusetts to Paris to extricate him. Strether’s mission however is gradually undermined as he falls under the spell of the city and finds Chad refined rather than corrupted by its influence and that of his charming companion, the Comtesse de Vionnet. Strether’s view of the world has changed profoundly. 526pp. £8.99 NOW £2.50


67064 BOOKSELLER OF


KABUL by Asne Seierstad For more than 20 years Sultan Khan defied authorities, be they Communist or Taliban, to supply books to the people of Kabul. He was arrested, interrogated and imprisoned by the Communists, and watched illiterate Taliban soldiers burn piles of his books in the street. He even resorted to hiding most of his stock, almost 10,000 books, in


attics all over Kabul. But while Khan is passionate in his love of books and his hatred of censorship, he also has strict views of family life and the role of women. As an outsider, visiting journalist Asne Seierstad spent four months from the spring of 2002 living with the bookseller and his family. We learn of proposals and marriages, crime and punishment, hope and fear. 288pp, paperback.


$12.95 NOW £2.50 67922 READ ME: A Poem for Every Day of the


Year Tenth Anniversary Edition by Gabby Morgan


Published for children but so what? There are great riches to be found between the covers of this unassuming book, a treasure trove celebrating the variety of the English verse. Emily Dickinson, Wordsworth, Gareth Owen, Ian MacMillan, Wes Magee, William Blake, Seamus Heaney, William Shakespeare, A. E. Housman, Charles Causley, W. H. Auden and Coleridge’s Kubla Khan to Colin McNaughton’s Mummy’s Having a Baby! - a rich mix indeed of short and poignant reads for ages ten to adult. 492pp in paperback. £6.99 NOW £3


67242 CANDIDE OR OPTIMISM by Voltaire,


introduced by Anne Rooney Voltaire’s mordant satire of philosophy, religion, governments, and the military is as entertaining today as it was when its pages first rolled off the press back in 1759. After being caught kissing the Baron’s daughter Cunégonde, gullible ingénue Candide is evicted from the castle where he lives to


find himself wandering a world awash with disease, injustice and slaughter. Can he reconcile what he sees and experiences with the optimistic philosophy of his mentor Pangloss, that they live in ‘the best of all possible worlds’ and that ‘everything is for the best’? 128pp with blue ink and satin bookmark. £6.99 NOW £3


68550 BRIEF GUIDE TO WILLIAM


SHAKESPEARE WITHOUT THE BORING BITS introduced by Peter Ackroyd


Following a brief biography charting his life from obscurity in Stratford-upon-Avon to success and royal patronage in London, here is a perfect introduction to the Bard. The book includes summaries of all the plays along with descriptions of the casts of the dramas, the best speeches, the wit and wisdom, including all the sonnets and best lines from the great tragedies like Hamlet and King Lear, the romances like The Tempest and The Winter’s Tale, to the history plays, the Greek and Roman plays and the great comedies. 447pp in paperback. £8.99 NOW £4


68657 BEAUTIFUL LOSERS by Leonard Cohen One of the series published by Banned Books, this erotic tragedy is singer/songwriter Leonard Cohen’s most defiant and uninhibited work. At the centre of the novel are the hapless members of a love triangle, united by their sexual obsessions and by their fascination with Catherine Tekawitha, a mythic 17th century Mohawk saint. They are the nameless, bereaved narrator, an authority on the A***** tribe, his wife Edith, one of the tribe’s last members, and their domineering friend F. By turns rhapsodic, vulgar and viciously witty, the book


www.bibliophilebooks.com


Page 1  |  Page 2  |  Page 3  |  Page 4  |  Page 5  |  Page 6  |  Page 7  |  Page 8  |  Page 9  |  Page 10  |  Page 11  |  Page 12  |  Page 13  |  Page 14  |  Page 15  |  Page 16  |  Page 17  |  Page 18  |  Page 19  |  Page 20  |  Page 21  |  Page 22  |  Page 23  |  Page 24  |  Page 25  |  Page 26  |  Page 27  |  Page 28  |  Page 29  |  Page 30  |  Page 31  |  Page 32  |  Page 33  |  Page 34  |  Page 35  |  Page 36  |  Page 37  |  Page 38  |  Page 39  |  Page 40