16 Literature


72555 YES MINISTER MISCELLANY by Antony Jay


and Jonathan Lynn Yes Minister and its sequel Yes Prime Minister is one of the most popular and critically successful British sitcoms of all time. Originally broadcast in the early 1980s, derived its humour from the eternal conflict between the interests of politicians and their civil


servants. Sir Humphrey’s finest obfuscations, how to be a civil servant, translating civil service speak, how to stall a minister and other essential tips from the show. Includes important dates, classic scenes and the legendary Margaret Thatcher sketch in its entirety, as well as obituaries of the great leaders. 124pp, cartoons. £6.99 NOW £3.50


72934 HYMIE JOKE BOOKS by Michael Winner


Subtitled 50 Shades of Oy Vey, here by popular demand is a collection of the ribald, edgy and funny bon mots from Michael Winner’s much-loved (and hated) alter ego from his Sunday Times column. ‘Police arrest two boys, one for drinking battery liquid, the other for smoking fireworks. They charged the first boy and let the other one off.’ You don’t need to


be Jewish to have a giggle at this collection. 196pp with crude line art.


£12.99 NOW £4.50


72869 101 USES FOR A DEAD MEERKAT by Massimo Fenati


Peppered with brilliant, mercilessly dark humour, here are our furry little friends becoming a chandelier, hair rollers, a TV aerial, a rolling pin, a garden ornament, an entertainment trophy, a cycle helmet, a ship’s figurehead, a place holder, a sled, and even fashioned into a pair of boots! Creepy fun and we are assured that no meerkats were harmed in the making of this book. Cartoons.


£9.99 NOW £3.50


72935 A LAUGH A MINUTE by Reader’s Digest Reader’s Digest’s well known magazine column ‘Laughter, the Best Medicine’ has appeared in every issue of the magazine for more than half a century and over the years they have published more than 100,000 jokes, quotes


and funny stories from the more than 20 million people who have submitted them. Laughter can reduce stress, lower blood pressure, boost the immune system, improve brain functioning and even protect your heart which is why the average person laughs around 17 times a day. On a billboard add for a safe company: ‘If your stuff is stolen, it’s not our vault.’ There is a whole chunk in the Humour and Uniform section from Dad’s Army, timeless humour from the 50s, 60s, 70s and 80s and onwards, fabulous colour cartoons on nearly every page. More than 2,400 jokes, anecdotes, cartoons, quotes and stories. 320pp. £24.99 NOW £6.50


72882 WORLD FAMOUS WEIRD NEWS STORIES by Colin Wilson, Damon Wilson and Rowan Wilson


Brings together some of the strangest tales, goof and oddities as well as newspapers’ most embarrassing and side-splitting mistakes, headlines and insanities. Here is the gourmet magazine that accidently published a recipe for poisonous cookies and poisoner William Palmer on the scaffold asking ‘Are you sure this damn thing’s safe?’ UFOs, freak occurrences and accidents, boobs and misprints, and foot-in-mouth are among the quotes, one liners, blunders and other comic snippits. 184pp in illus paperback.


£3.99 NOW £2.50 LITERATURE 73580 WHATEVER IT IS, I


DON’T LIKE IT by Howard Jacobson From the unusual disposal of his father-in-law’s ashes and the cultural wasteland of Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, to the melancholy sensuality of Leonard Cohen and the desolation of Wagner’s tragedies, Howard Jacobson writes with all the thunder and joy of a man possessed. Absurdity piles


upon absurdity, and glorious sentences accrete to create a uniquely human collection, at times hilarious, often heartbreaking, and always irresistibly entertaining. Jacobson brims with life in this collection of his most acclaimed columns from The Independent, with chapter headings like If It’s ‘Readable’ Don’t Read It, Friendly Banking, Darts and the Man and Corrugation Road which begins ‘Life is a perpetual margarita.’ Ahh! 343pp in paperback. $18 NOW £6


73276 THE CRANFORD CHRONICLES


by Elizabeth Gaskell Born 1810 and dying suddenly of heart failure in November 1865, Elizabeth Gaskell published much of her work in Charles Dickens’s magazines ‘Household Words’ and ‘All the Year Round’. Here in Vintage paperback classic is her comic masterpiece. Cranford is a sleepy northern town, but modern


life, in the shape of the new railway, is pushing its way relentlessly towards it from Manchester, bringing with it new opportunities and excitement. The arrival of handsome young Doctor Harrison causes further agitation, not just because of his revolutionary methods, but also because of his effect on the hearts of the ladies. Meanwhile Miss Matty Jenkyns watches the comings and goings and remembers when, as a girl, her own heart was broken. Includes ‘Mr Harrison’s Confessions’, ‘Cranford’ and ‘My Lady Lovelow’. 484pp in paperback, revised editions of the 1851 and 1853 originals. £6.99 NOW £3.50


73573 READING MATTERS; Five Centuries of Discovering


Books by Margaret Willes It is easy to forget in our own day of cheap paperbacks, mega- bookstores and Bibliophile, that - until very recently - books were luxury items. Those who could not afford to buy had to borrow, share, obtain second hand, inherit or listen to others reading. In a rich and evocative volume, full of


biographical and historical digressions, the author examines how people acquired and read books from the 16th century to the present, focusing on the personal relationships between readers and the volumes they owned. The meticulously researched account is teeming with anecdotes. As one would expect, the gentry feature large, with accounts of the likes of Bess of Hardwick and the Cavendish family, although the books’ main function at that time may have been to ‘furnish a room’. Space is devoted, too, to such eminent book smiths as Samuel Pepys and Sir John Soane, both of whom had extensive libraries, but there is also a section on three provincial libraries which were much frequented, and a chapter about books for working men and women which may surprise readers. The volume ends with a gripping summary of three 19th century pieces of legislation which had a profound effect upon the lives of generations of Britons, and on their relationship with books. We leave you to find out for yourselves what these were, and how they caused a social revolution. 295 paperback pages illustrated in colour and b/w with notes and appendix: Equivalent Values of the Pound. $24 NOW £10


73125 CHALLENGE by Vita Sackville-West Ready to go to print in 1920, this was Vita Sackville-West’s second novel, but the author suddenly changed her mind for fear of the scandal it would cause. It remained unpublished for over 50 years. Vita’s love affair with Violet Trefusis had reached its peak and they decided to abandon everything - their children and husbands included - to elope to France. They returned


to their families eventually, but ‘Challenge’ remains a testament to their love. The hero Julian may be a Byronic young Englishman, and Eve the woman he adores, it may be an adventure tale set on a Greek island, but this is a love story, written in the presence of the beloved and inspired by her. As the title implies, the novel is a challenge to the society that condemned Vita and her lover. They had been childhood friends since 1904 when Vita was 12 and Violet 10 and felt for each other a physical and intellectual attraction which suddenly in 1918 burst into flames for the next three years. 294pp in paperback. £9.99 NOW £5


73560 LETTERS OF SYLVIA


BEACH edited by Keri Walsh Founder of the Left Bank bookshop Shakespeare & Company and the first publisher of James Joyce’s Ulysses, Sylvia Beach had a legendary facility for nurturing literary talent. In this first collection of her letters we witness her day to day dealings as bookseller and publisher to expatriate Paris. Friends and clients include Ernest


Hemingway, Gertrude Stein, HD, Ezra Pound, Janet Flanner, William Carlos Williams, F. Scott Fitzgerald, James Joyce and William Wright. As librarian, publicist, publisher and translator, she carved out a unique space for herself in English and French letters. The collection reveals Beach’s charm and resourcefulness, sharing her negotiations with Marianne Moore to place Joyce’s work in The Dial, her battle to curb the piracy of Ulysses in the US, her struggle to keep the bookshop afloat during the Depression and her complicated affair with the French bookshop owner Adrienne Monnier. These letters also recount her childhood in New Jersey, her work in Serbia with the American Red Cross, her internment in a German prison camp and her friendship with a new generation of expatriates in the 1950s and 1960s. A tireless champion of the Avant-Garde, her warmth and wit made the Rue de L’Odéon the heart of modernist Paris. We love the invoice showing Hemingway’s borrowings totalling nearly 700 francs with deductions for second hand and damaged books! With 30 illustrations, 347pp. £19.95 NOW £7


73020 A RAGE TO LIVE by John O’Hara


When the beautiful, imperious and moneyed Grace Caldwell Tate wants something, she goes after it. Her extramarital affair scandalises Pennsylvania’s élite, and she must face the costs to her marriage and the man she really loves. A bestseller on publication in 1949, it is a candid tale of idealists and libertines, tradesmen and crusaders,


men of violence and goodwill, and women of fierce strength and tenderness. 713pp in Vintage Classic Paperback.


£9.99 NOW £4 73226 FOUR GREAT


HISTORIES by Shakespeare Henry IV Part One, Henry IV Part Two, Henry V and Richard III are among the most studied, read and admired works in literature by William Shakespeare, unmatched for their dramatic brilliance, beauty of language and profundity of thought. This convenient and affordable volume features all four, masterfully combining comedy and historic events in 15th century England.


The first chronicles the rebellion within Henry’s kingdom and the life of the profligate young prince Hal. Richard III follows the scheming Duke of Gloucester as he systematically exterminates all those who thwart his plans to succeed to the English throne. Unabridged with intro notes and footnotes, 432pp in softback. £5 NOW £3.50


73286 LOVE SEX DEATH AND WORDS


by John Sutherland and Stephen Fender


Literature itself comprises nothing but a mass of randomness. If a novel or poem is rejected early on, a major writer may never happen. The author’s life is full of accident, tosses of the coin - what if Dickens had been killed in the Staplehurst crash (see the entry for 9th June)?


In a sumptuous voyage through literature’s rich past here is a leap year of anecdotes from January 1st and the vexed history of the copyright of Peter Pan to December 31st publication of Richard Yates’s 1961 novel Revolutionary Road. Stop along the way to visit A. S. Byatt fighting for her local, Madame Bovary in the dock, The Pickwick Papers launching and almost sinking, Poe meets Dickens and Ravens Fly, the author of the nation’s anthems born in Covent Garden, why one rude doodle by an engraver delays the publication of a classic (Huckleberry Finn), why the British bestseller list belatedly arrived only in 1974, Roy Campbell punching Stephen Spender on the nose, Titanic poetry and more good clean harmless fun. 512pp with index and contents list, here is one for every bibliophile. Paperback. £10.99 NOW £5


73303 FAREWELL MISS JULIE LOGAN: J. M. Barrie


Omnibus by J. M. Barrie The pioneer of modern fantasy is here edited and introduced by Andrew Nash in this selection of work covering J. M. Barrie’s different genres - Scotland, childhood, fantasy and sentimentality, sexual anxiety, theatrical invention, social comedy and proto-feminism. The disturbing prose fable of ‘The Little White Bird’


contains the first and most original exploration of the Peter Pan theme set in the context of a middle aged man’s engagement with creation, fantasy and loneliness. In a one-act play, the satire ‘The 12-Pound Look’ exposes the pomposities of male pride and public success in 1910 from the point of view of an ex-wife unexpectedly turned as her (be)knighted husband’s typist. Written in diary form and telling of an uncanny romance in a remote winter glen, ‘Farewell Miss Julie Logan’ is a novella of longing and death. 330pp in paperback.


£7.99 NOW £4


73311 MAGNUS MERRIMAN by Eric Linklater


Magnus Merriman is the would-be lover, writer, politician, idealist and crofter, moved by dreams of greatness and a talent for farcical defeat. Linklater’s memories of Orkney and student days informed his first novel in 1929 White Maa’s Sage and his hilarious satirical novel Juan in America (1931) was followed up in 1934 by this equally irreverent novel, based on his


experiences as Nationalist candidate for a by-election in East Fife in 1933. The way is set for a satirical and irreverent portrait of Scottish life, literature and politics in the 1930s. Nothing is sacred and no one is spared, and the book is written at a breathless tempo and full of remarkable passages. 308pp in paperback. £6.99 NOW £3.50


73601 ADVENTURES OF


TOM SAWYER by Mark Twain


A handsome facsimile reprint of the original London 1897 edition with all the many original illustrations by True Williams, beautifully rendered woodcuts. Mark Twain called his 1876 novel a ‘hymn to boyhood’ and it remains an archetypal vision of pre-Civil War small-town America. Readers of every age


delight in its humorous narrative delivered in a voice as mischievous and good hearted as Tom Sawyer himself. Generations have played hooky with Twain’s young hero, chuckling at his pranks and thrilling in his starry- eyed search for buried treasure. Unabridged, 292pp. $14.95 NOW £5


73312 THE MASTER OF BALLANTRAE and WEIR OF HERMISTON


by Robert Louis Stevenson Two fast-paced classic novels of travel, romance and adventure with an introduction by John Burnside. In 1887 Stevenson travelled to Saranac Lake in New York in search of a healthier climate. There he began work on The Master of


EDWARD ARDIZZONE


Collectable finds by collectable illustrator


73666 TIM’S FRIEND TOWSER


by Edward Ardizzone The New York Times summed up Edward Ardizzone’s seascapes perfectly - “[he]...paints the wettest sea you ever saw.” Ardizzone (1900-1979) moved to Ipswich aged five. It was there that he learned to know and love the little steamers that worked


the shallow estuaries and creeks of the Suffolk coast which would later appear in the Tim series of children’s adventure books, which remain firm favourites with readers young and old across the globe. He illustrated over 170 books during his career, and won the prestigious Kate Greenaway Medal in 1956. Tim’s Friend Towser was originally published in 1949 and is here presented in a handsome 2006 edition featuring the marvellous original colour and b/w watercolour and pen and ink illus. alongside the full text. Tim and Ginger are cabin boys on the SS Royal Fusilier. One day they find a stowaway puppy in a lifeboat and decide to keep him, a little risky as Captain Piper hates dogs. Towser, as they name him, is a loving creature and also a hungry one, and as he grows ever larger keeping him a secret gets harder and harder. Published by Frances Lincoln, a superb 7¾”×10½” edition of a classic book which has enthralled children for generations and is set to win the hearts of many more. 50pp.


£10.99 NOW £5


73652 JOHNNY THE CLOCKMAKER


by Edward Ardizzone Another superb new edition from Frances Lincoln children’s books, here is a timeless children’s story by Edward Ardizzone, originally published in 1960, beautifully illustrated with his original watercolours and pen and ink artwork. Johnny loves making


things - he is always sawing, hammering, nailing, screwing and glueing bits of wood and iron. However, his parents find his hobby infuriating and as soon as he starts they chorus “Oh dear, Johnny is up to his nonsense again!” So it was no surprise this refrain rang out once more when he announced that he was going to make a grandfather clock, of all things. Helped by Susannah, the only classmate who believes in him, and Joe the local blacksmith, slowly, slowly the case, face and mechanism of his long-case clock take shape. But even when he installs the working clock in the house, nobody believes in it, until one morning his father’s watch stops. Not believing that his son could build a working clock he refuses to believe it is telling the right time, so he rushes to the station and only to discover Johnny’s clock was keeping perfect time and he has arrived much too early for his train. A few days later he buys his son all the tools a clockmaker could ever need and Johnny, Susannah and Joe set up their own clockmaker’s business in Joe’s forge. 50pp, facsimile reprint, 7¾”×10½”. £12.99 NOW £6


Ballantrae, a powerful tale of rivalry, obsession and bitter hatred between two brothers. Taking in piracy, political intrigue and buried treasure, the story begins in Scotland and moves across three continents to a harrowing climax in the American wilderness. The second novel is set in Scotland during the Napoleonic Wars. RLS’s fascination with the divided nature of the self comes to the fore in this fierce conflict between the romantic Archie Weir and his formidable father Lord Hermiston. 338pp with useful glossary, paperback. £9.99 NOW £4


73330 A DAY IN THE LIFE


OF A SMILING WOMAN by Margaret Drabble A beautifully turned collection of Margaret Drabble’s complete short stories, never before collected and have their own unique brilliance. They are perceptive, sharp and funny, exploring marriage, female friendships, the tourist abroad, love affairs with houses, peace demonstrations, gin and tonics.


Glimmering with lyricism and moral vision, this complements her many novels which have entertained us over the last 50 years. 227pp in paperback. $13.95 NOW £5


72317 HERO OF A HUNDRED FIGHTS by Ned Buntline


Edward Zane Carroll Judson, better known to millions of late 19th century readers as Ned Buntline, was a sailor, soldier, duellist, showman, gambler, bigamist and all- round rabble-rouser. This unabridged, handsome rough- cut collection contains his four signature Old West novels and the author’s own larger than life adventures. The


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