Literature 23


70560 THE ARABIAN NIGHTS: Collector’s Library Edition The Book of a Thousand Nights and a Night translated by Sir Richard Burton and William Harvey


Everyone must surely have heard of The Arabian Nights, and even have read abridged versions, but here is a superb unexpurgated edition that many people will not have seen and which is unique. It is translated by Sir Richard Burton, who was an orientalist, explorer, diplomat and eccentric and whose mastery of Arabic enabled him to mix with Arabs disguised as one of them. In 1853 he even made Haj, the trip to Mecca that is required of every Muslim. Such an exploit by a European could have meant his death if he had been found out. This magical edition, which is totally unexpurgated, is rendered even more enchanting by the engravings of the Dalziel brothers, who regarded their illustrations as their finest work. Full of mischief, valour, ribaldry and romance, even in its truncated form, The Arabian Nights has enthralled readers for centuries. In it, Shahrazad has married a king who is in the habit of executing each of his wives after a single night of marriage. But Shahrazad is not that stupid. She begins an exciting story each evening, always withholding the ending until the following night, so that the king postpones her execution because he cannot bear not to know the end. In this way, she manages to postpone the evil day for nearly three years. Then she brings in her three children and the king, of course, is overwhelmed and decides not to kill her after all. Readers will be familiar with the stories of Aladdin, Sinbad the Sailor and Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves but will they know the Tales of the First and Second Eunuchs, The Tale of Ghanim Bin Ayyub the Distraught, the ribald How Abu Hazan Brake Wind or what the porter got up to with the Three Ladies of Baghdad? We bet not. Illus by Thomas Dalziel and Edward Dalziel. Gory and “Grimm” original tales. A huge 528 pages 24cm x 30cm with hundreds of incredible woodcuts and delightful


engravings and the original footnotes.


£29.99 NOW £25


70057 CRIMSON PETAL AND THE WHITE by Michel Faber


The plot constantly simmers with violence, sex, coincidences and melodramatic surprises. ‘Watch your step. Keep your wits about you: you will need them…’ So begins the irresistible voyage into the dark side of Victorian London. Amongst an unforgettable cast of low- lifes, physicians, businessmen and prostitutes. Meet our heroine, Sugar, a young woman trying to drag herself up from the gutter any way she can. With touches of Wilkie Collins and Charles Dickens, here is a cracking Victorian page-turner of the 21st century. Savour the sweat, noise, filth and colour of the streets and the drawing room. Paperback. 833pp. £9.99 NOW £4.50


28746 TREASURED WRITINGS OF KAHLIL GIBRAN


The immortal savant of Lebanon Kahlil Gibran created verses and lyric prose which impart to the reader a grand symphony of sparkling joys, indeed treasured writings of a now lost Persian age. This claims to be the most comprehensive volume of works of the Lebanese poet and philosopher


ever published. It is an enriching collection of stories, prose, poems, verse, parables and autobiographical essays. Each of the ten books included in this nicely bound collectors’ volume has been hailed by critics as a literary masterpiece. His writings reflect the wistful beauty, fierce anger, lofty majesty and the abiding peace that Eastern wisdom achieves in its contemplation. Contents include Tears and Laughter, Secrets of the Heart, The Broken Wings, The Voice of the Master, Thoughts and Meditations, A Self Portrait and Mirrors of the Soul. Handsome reprint of the 1957 original. 902 pages.


ONLY £11 70150 HER HUSBAND: Hughes and Plath: A


Marriage by Diane Wood Middlebrook Drawing on a trove of newly available papers, the biographer seeks to show how the whole body of work of Ted Hughes and his first wife, Sylvia Plath, needs to be considered together, as a whole, and not as two separate oeuvres of literature. She argues that Plath’s suicide, after little more than six years from their wedding day, changed not only the widower’s life and his closest relationships but also his standing in the literary world - bringing new significance to his poetry and to hers. In a biographical tour de force, she demonstrates that Hughes, as a man, a poet and a husband was, during his entire life, both haunted and nourished by the aftermath of his years with Plath. 361 paperback pages, illus. £9.99 NOW £4


70154 FOUNTAIN OVERFLOWS by Rebecca West


‘The Fountain Overflows’ is unusual in that it charts a progress towards an unexpected harmony and hope. Published in 1957, it stands on its own as West’s highly autobiographical account of her extraordinary childhood. Rose observed her musical, bohemian family with a child’s wisdom, sometimes with innocence and occasionally with cruelty. There is her twin sister Mary, whose nature chimes perfectly with her own; beautiful, obtuse, Cordelia, pitied for not being musically gifted; her adored little brother Richard Quin; and her charming, unprincipled father Piers, whose streak of folly ever threatened to bring his family to financial and social ruin. It is their mother Clare, beleaguered, kind and quixotically eccentric, who emerges as the family’s true strength. 432pp in paperback. £10.99 NOW £4


70263 GARDEN OF IMPRESSIONIST VERSE: Nineteenth-Century French Poetry selected by Michael Brunstrom


This little gem of a book features verses by such highly esteemed poets as Baudelaire, Stéphane Mallarmé, Paul Verlaine and Victor Hugo, matched with the master works of Monet, Renoir, Degas, Pissarro and Sisley to name but a few. Poets and painters worked side by side in an atmosphere of experimentation and political conviction. They attempted to be the visual recorders of modern life, and to paint or write directly from nature. Text in English and French. 77 pages with an impressionist painting illustrating each extract, brief biographies of the poets, and notes on the art. £9.99 NOW £3


69764 THE WORLD’S


GREATEST LETTERS: From Ancient Greece to the 20th Century


edited by Michelle Lovric This fascinating collection of extracts starts with the theme of love in the letters of Sappho in ancient Greece, moving on to the 12th century nun Heloise and her former lover Peter Abelard, and then to extracts from the secret correspondence of Henry


VIII and Anne Boleyn. The section on family life and friends includes letters by Jane Austen, Mendelssohn, Dickens, Dostoevsky and Calamity Jane, while a chapter focusing on creativity includes Wilde, Tchaikovsky, Virginia Woolf and Kenneth Tynan. Historical letters feature Neville Chamberlain’s letter to Hitler of August 1939. 192pp. £14.99 NOW £3.50


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


56857 WIZARD OF OZ by L. Frank Baum NB there are many duplicated pages (printing error). Clothbound with marbled endpapers,satin bookmark, gold blocking and a tipped-in illustration on the front cover, each volume in this illustrated classic series is a beautiful facsimile edition with original pen and ink and woodcut illustrations together with a number of full page colour plates. Individually shrinkwrapped. With facsimile of original dedication page ‘To my good friend and comrade. My Wife’ - L. F. B. Should only be used as shelf decoration (books by the yard!) as text is imperfect! 184pp. ONLY £1.50


68846 THE COMPLETE FOUR


JUST MEN by Edgar Wallace Criminals and malefactors beware! Here are the complete adventures of Edgar Wallace’s daring and ingenious vigilantes. This fascinating bumper collection contains all six volumes of the Just Men saga: The Four Just Men, The Council of Justice, The Just Men of Cordova, The Law of The Four Just Men, The Three Just Men and Again the


Three. In these thrilling yarns of daring do, mystery and international intrigue, the Just Men tackle wrongdoers of all kinds from criminal masterminds and desperate anarchists to cunning murderers and obsessive madmen. Where Scotland Yard fails - they succeed. With a finely blended mixture of suspense, humour and action. 936 page paperback. ONLY £3


65442 I WANDERED LONELY AS A CLOUD: And Other Poems You Half-Remember from School by Ana Sampson


Here is a wide-ranging collection of the greatest of English poems that you may have learned at school, or others that have contributed to our everyday speech. The poems are arranged in chronological order, rather than impossible-to-get-it-right genre order, which throws up some lovely juxtapositions, for instance the wit and deliberate obscurity of T.S. Eliot, next to the tragedy of Wilfred Owen, next to Dorothy Parker, rakishly cradling her martini. A masterly index makes sense of it all, allowing searches by first lines and by well-known phrases, as well as author. 192pp. £9.99 NOW £3.50


65529 COMPLETE MAPP & LUCIA: Volume Two by E. F. Benson


These three wonderful comic novels, Mapp and Lucia, Lucia’s Progress and Trouble for Lucia, drolly record the battle between Lucia and Elisabeth Mapp for social and cultural supremacy in the village of Tilling (based on Rye). Their constant skirmishes ensure that every game of bridge, tea or dinner-party, church service, council meeting or art-exhibition are thrilling encounters that ensure Tilling is always on ‘a very agreeable rack of suspense’. Concentrates on the novels’ disturbing, bitchy, ‘camp’ humour whenever ‘that horrid thing which Freud calls sex is raised’. 665 page paperback. ONLY £2


69034 DEAR MR BIGELOW: A Transatlantic


Friendship by Frances Woodsford Frances Woodsford wrote over 700 letters to retired Commodore Paul Bigelow of Long Island, New York, between 1949 and 1961. There was some 50 years between their ages, there was no romance between the two of them. She was an unmarried woman living in austerity-years Bournemouth in a house with her mother and ne’er-do-well bother Mac, working in a job she loathed at the Pier Approach Baths for a ghastly boss and having to constantly evade the unwanted attentions of Dr Russell - he was a wealthy widower 3,000 miles across the ocean. Her “Saturday Specials” as she called them (those penned in her free time on that day) are brilliantly packed missives which sparkle with comic genius, and in them we follow her travails, and those of post-War England in general. Photos. 382pp. £15.99 NOW £5


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67944 AGAMEMNON’S DAUGHTER: A Novella and Stories by Ismail Kadare


The narrator is waiting to meet his lover, Suzana, and gradually realises that she will not turn up and that their love has been sacrificed to her father’s ambitions to become ruler of the country. Wandering distractedly through the crowds at the May Day celebrations, he meets his colleague G.Z., who has gained promotion through the desperate measure of setting a trap for a dissident playwright. The Blinding Order is about the public and private cost of blinding used as a form of social control, while The Great Wall takes the reader to the Chinese borders in the days of Tamburlaine. 226pp. £15 NOW £2.25


68077 SHAKESPEARE ON FAIRIES AND


MAGIC compiled by Benjamin Darling Most of Shakespeare’s plays involve fairies or magic, or both. Perhaps his most popular play, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, brings fairies and the charming consequences of their magic to vivid life. And who can forget the famous incantation ‘Double, double, toil and trouble’ from another favourite Macbeth, which, for many people, epitomises the magic spell. Imaginative paintings by masters from Edmund Dulac to Arthur Rackham, William Heath Robinson to George Cruikshank, William Blake, Edwin Landseer and a host of other artists, combine with the brilliant words to evoke the supernatural world. 88 pages illus in beautiful colour. $18 NOW £3


68847 LIFE ON THE


MISSISSIPPI by Mark Twain An invaluable companion to The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, Life on the Mississippi is Mark Twain’s inimitable portrait of ‘the great Father of Waters’. Part memoir, part travelogue, it expresses the full range of Twain’s literary personality, and remains the most vivid, boisterous and


provocative account of the cultural and societal history of the Mississippi Valley, from ‘the golden age’ of steamboating to the violence wrought by the Civil War. Extensive annotations and a guide to further reading. 412 page paperback. ONLY £2


68330 JOHN BETJEMAN COLLECTED POEMS introduced by Andrew Motion


Commenting on the decline of the City of Bath, the Great Western or Metropolitan railways, late flowering lust or a Pot Pourri from a Surrey garden, John Betjeman was the best loved English poet whose ‘Collected Poems’ first appeared in 1958. No player of a local life was too small to be at the centre of his poems. As for his friend Philip Larkin, a formal conservatism was the foil for some of the most pointed and memorable commentaries on his age. Also includes the modern classic ‘Summoned by Bells’. 498pp, paperback. £14.99 NOW £1.75


68620 A CONTINENTAL SHELF by The Bodleian Library, Oxford Subtitled ‘Books Across Europe From Ptolemy to Don Quixote’, this book was published for an exhibition to mark the reopening of the Bodleian Exhibition Room in 1994 and is a first edition. Sir Thomas Bodley opened his library in 1602 and here experts from the staff and their colleagues have selected, annotated and displayed some 57 items. The highlights are from cartography and navigation, pilgrim maps of the Holy Land, the classics and Christendom, monastic copies of the classics, Spain and the Roman Emperors, the Bible in Latin and Greek, the Gutenberg Bible, the production of printed books and printings for bishops, devotional pictures for collectors, international learning including law, medicines, science, mathematics, Aristotle, theology and the Bible, vernaculars across Europe, troubadours and courtly love, illustrating Dante, and the language of architecture, marvels of the East, Arabic medicine, translating Islam, crusading, translating Christianity, astrology and mapping the moon. Hundreds of colour illus in 140 page large softback on glossy paper. £25 NOW £14


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69729 LITERARY HOAXES: An Eye-Opening History of


Famous Frauds by Melissa Katsoulis The ultimate exposé of literary hoaxes that have fooled publishers, readers and critics all over the world. Way back in 400 BC, Dionysus famously faked a text by Sophocles and the process has been going on ever since. The history of The Hitler Diaries, The JFK Letters


and The Abraham Lincoln Letters will keep you on the edge of your seat as will the many other hoaxes detailed here. For fame, money, political reasons or even simple amusement, whatever the motive, the hoaxes revealed here will amaze and intrigue. 328 pages. $22.95 NOW £3.75


68668 1001 BOOKS YOU MUST READ BEFORE YOU DIE


edited by Peter Boxall and Peter Ackroyd Provides brief 300-word library of reviews of over 1001 classic works of world literature. Most of them are illustrated by a photo or portrait of the author, a reproduction of a book cover or an illustration. Old favourites make their appearance - Clarissa, Rebecca, Dracula, Jane Eyre, The Water Babies, Crime and Punishment, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, The Hitchhikers’ Guide to the Galaxy, Foucault’s Pendulum, The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Trainspotting - and also less frequently read works such as The 120 Days of Sodom by the Marquis de Sade, Oroonoko by Aphra Behn, The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway and Inside Mr Enderby by Anthony Burgess. 960pp, illus, 22 x 16cm.


$34.95 NOW £6.50


68838 THE COMPLETE NOVELS OF JAMES JOYCE by James Joyce


This collection comprises Joyce’s three novels, plus the short story collection Dubliners. The stories in Dubliners show us truants, seducers, hostesses, corrupt politicians, failing priests, struggling musicians, poets, patriots, and many more simply striving to get by. ‘A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man’ falls between the realism of Dubliners and the symbolism of Ulysses. ‘Ulysses’ is James Joyce’s astonishing masterpiece. Scandalously


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70783 BEST OF JOHN BUCHAN by John Buchan Three rip-roaring Richard Hannay thrillers The 39-Steps, Greenmantle and Mr Standfast here in a bumper large size well bound softback with satin bookmark. Long before James Bond was born, the man of action to whom HM’s government turned when there was a devious


espionage ring to be infiltrated was Richard Hannay. The most famous fictional creation of author, politician and statesman John Buchan, Hannay averted disaster for king and country on many occasions bringing evil international superspies to justice. Together in this one epic volume are three thrilling First World War adventures. The 39-Steps sees Hannay first involved in the despicable skulduggery of a German spy network battling to expose them while wanted by the police for a murder he didn’t commit. He is pursued by the enemy in one of the greatest manhunts of all time. Just as he finishes convalescing from wounds received on the battlefield in France, Hannay, now Major Hannay, is reunited with some old friends and sent to thwart German plans to investigate a holy war in the Middle East in the adventure story Greenmantle. In Mr Standfast, Hannay is drafted back into the Secret Service once more and is working undercover as a pacifist to bring down German operations in Britain. He comes up against the enemy’s most cunning spymaster, meeting the love of his life along the way. Omnibus softback, 624pp with satin bookmark. £14.99 NOW £6


frank, it tells of the events which befall Leopold Bloom and Stephen Dedalus in Dublin on 16 June 1904, during which Bloom’s voluptuous wife, Molly, commits adultery. ‘Finnegans Wake’ is the book of Here Comes Everybody and Anna Livia Plurabelle and their family - their book, but in a curious way the book of us all as well as all our books. 1482 page paperback. ONLY £7


69706 A TRUTH UNIVERSALLY


ACKNOWLEDGED edited by Susannah Carson Subtitled 33 Great Writers On Why We Read Jane Austen. Great authors and literary critics of the past offer insight into the timelessness of Jane Austen’s moral truths while highlighting the unique confines of the society in which she composed her novels. Virginia Woolf examines her maturity as an artist and speculates on how her writing would have changed if she had lived until she was 60. From Harold Bloom to Martin Amis, Somerset Maugham to Jane McInerney, each writer here reflects on Jane Austen’s place in both the literary canon and our cultural imagination. 296 pages. $25 NOW £5


70399 THE BOOKSHOP, THE GATE OF


ANGELS, THE BLUE FLOWER by Penelope Fitzgerald


Bound together in one elegant Everyman’s Library hardback volume, here is a trilogy of novels which all display Fitzgerald’s characteristic wit, intellectual breadth and brilliant narrative. Penelope Fitzgerald began her writing career at the age of 59 in 1975 and went on to publish three biographies, nine novels and a collection of short stories. Here are three - The Bookshop, a post war tragicomedy of manners set in an isolated seaside town. An enterprising woman opens a bookshop only to find it beset by poltergeists, weather and hostile townsfolk. The Gate of Angels is an Edwardian romance within a novel of ideas - a young doctor devoted to science and to his all-male Cambridge College finds his life and views disrupted by a nurse named Daisy. The Blue Flower revitalises historical drama through the story of Novalis, an 18th century German romantic poet and visionary genius, and his unlikely love affair with a simple child- woman. 472pp. $23 NOW £7.50


69750 THE ANNOTATED SECRET GARDEN


by by Frances Hodgson Burnett The much-loved tale read by generations is not only reproduced in full in this big lavish collectable volume but is accompanied by photos and pictures (many in colour) which tell a story of their own, depicting scenes from the novel. The thoroughly enchanting book has an expert commentary by Gretchen Holbrook Gerzina which brings to light many ideas from the text we may have overlooked or been unaware of. There are pictures of the study at Long Island where Burnett wrote The Secret Garden, a picture of Burnett and her granddaughter in the garden, even a flyer for her mother Eliza Hodgson’s shop in Manchester and a first edition book jacket reproduced in colour. The Secret Garden is the story of an orphan girl who moved from India to the British countryside. Gerzina presents details of the Victorian England setting - the tasks of different servants, the role of education, the attitudes towards children, Burnett’s spiritual leanings which tended towards the mystical as she captures the timeless and magical nature of this beloved tale of three children who come together to restore a hidden garden. 288 large pages, 8½” x 10", colour illus. £22 NOW £9


68855 SELECTED WORKS OF VIRGINIA WOOLF by Virginia Woolf


‘Mrs Dalloway’, the society hostess Clarissa, is giving a party and her thoughts on that one day, and the interior monologues of others with interwoven lives reveal the characters of the central protagonists. ‘To the Lighthouse’ is the most autobiographical of Virginia Woolf’s novels. It is at its most trenchant when exploring adult relationships and the changing class-structure in the period spanning the Great War. ‘Orlando’, ‘the longest and most charming love letter in literature,’ playfully constructs the figure of Orlando as the fictional embodiment of Woolf’s close friend and lover, Vita Sackville-West. ‘The Waves’ conveys the rhythms of life in synchrony with the cycle of nature and the passage of time. In these, as in ‘A Room of One’s Own’, ‘Between the Acts’, ‘Three Guineas’, ‘The Years and Jacob’s’ Room, Virginia Woolf displays her genuine humanity and concern for the experiences that enrich and stultify existence. Paperback, 1280 pages. ONLY £7


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