www.bibliophilebooks.com 73562 LUKA AND THE FIRE


OF LIFE by Salman Rushdie Luka is Haroun’s younger brother who must save his father from certain doom in this magic-enthused intricate story. Rashid Khalifa, the legendary storyteller of Kahani, has fallen into a deep sleep from which no one can wake him. To keep his father from slipping away entirely, Luka must travel to the Magic World and steal the ever-burning Fire of


Life. Filled with mischievous wordplay. Remainder mark, roughcut pages, US first edition.


$25 NOW £4 73508 ONE FOR SORROW: A Book of Old-


Fashioned Lore by Chloe Rhodes Some proverbial sayings have well-known origins such as the Bible (mankind cannot live by bread alone, or serve two masters), and another well-known phrase advising people not to look a gift horse in the mouth comes from a Bible commentary by St. Jerome around 400 A.D. Even older is the saying “When the cat’s away, the mice will play”, found in ancient Rome and popularised in English by the Elizabethan dramatist Thomas Heywood. 192pp, line drawings. £9.99 NOW £4.50


74355 A BRIEF GUIDE TO THE GREEK MYTHS: Gods, Monsters, Heroes and the Origins of Storytelling


by Stephen P. Kershaw A classicist points out how, although the Greek myths are thousands of years old, they still live in our language and imagination. We have the ‘Midas touch’ or an ‘Achilles heel’. The author retells well-known stories


like Jason and the Argonauts and Theseus and the Minotaur, and forgotten ones such as the Birth of the Gods and the Creation of Man and Woman, exploring how their inspiration has remained vital for western culture, from Renaissance painters through the poets of the Great War to the modern myth makers of Hollywood. 531 paperback pages, maps, family trees, spellings and dates. £9.99 NOW £4.50


73509 ORANGES AND LEMONS: Rhymes from Past Times by Karen Dolby


This collection of over 120 rhymes and jingles blends the old and the new and gives interesting information about the history of the rhymes. “Three Blind Mice” was first published in 1609 in a book of “pleasant roundelays”. Some rhymes are thought to include covert historical references, for instance “Little Boy Blue” (Cardinal Wolsey) or “Georgie Porgie” for which there are several candidates, some of them royal. “Solomon Grundy” was invented to teach children the days of the week, and whole books have been written about the origin of “The House that Jack built”. 192pp, line drawings. £9.99 NOW £4


73541 ANIMAL FABLES FROM AESOP: 20th Anniversary Edition


adapted and illustrated by Barbara McClintock With entirely rescanned artwork and improved typography, these famous tales have been selected and adapted by the artist Barbara McClintock and illustrated in her inimitable, sophisticated anthropomorphic style. The collection includes such time-honoured fables as The Fox and the Grapes, and The Country Mouse and the City Mouse as well as lesser-known stories like The Wolf and the Lamb and The Crow and the Peacocks. 46 pages 26cm x 18.5cm illustrated in delicate colours.


$17.95 NOW £4


73996 SUPERSTITIONS: 1013 Wacky Myths Fables and Old Wives’ Tales by Deborah Murrell


Have you ever stopped to think about why people pick up a ‘lucky’ penny or say ‘God bless you’ when someone sneezes? Who doesn’t sometimes get a shiver down the spine when a black cat crosses his path or feel uneasy when a dog howls in the middle of the night? At Christmastime people kiss under the mistletoe and before an actor goes out on stage someone may call out ‘break a leg!’ Our book reveals the geographical, religious and social origins behind more than 1000 intriguing superstitions from around the world grouped by Hearth and Home, Sickness and Health, Love and Romance, Babies and Children, Spirits and Souls, Magical Little People, Omens, Good Luck Charms, Protective Amulets, Numbers, Calendar Customs and Rituals and more. 200 charming illus, 256 large pages. ONLY £6


73890 THE DEATH OF KING ARTHUR: The Immortal Legend Thomas Malory’s Le Morte d’Arthur A Retelling by Peter Ackroyd


Thomas Malory created for posterity the images of the lovers Lancelot and Guinevere, the bold Galahad and Gawain, sad Tristram and Isolde, Merlin the wily magician and Arthur, the once and future king. It is still a remarkable tribute


to Malory’s inventive genius that Arthur and the Round Table have found a secure and permanent place in the affections of the English-speaking people. As a result of his plangent and often elaborate prose, the song of Arthur has never ended. It inspired both Milton and Dryden. In the 19th century Tennyson revived its themes. William Morris wrote The Defence of Guenevere and Algernon Swinburne composed Tristram of Liones. Ackroyd takes on the task of abridging and retelling this much loved tale, and transforming a 15th century work into a dramatic modern story, bringing to life a world of courage and chivalry, magic and majesty. 316 stirring pages. $26.95 NOW £6


NATURE


Study nature, love nature, stay close to nature. It will never fail you.


- Frank Lloyd Wright 74908 WATER SUPPLY: A


Shire Book by Peter Naylor Since the recent floods at the beginning of 2014, Britain is more aware than ever about large quantities of water and how we deal with water supply which are basic to our needs. Every day we turn on the tap to get water for drinking, cooking or washing, and use it for sanitation, washing the car


or watering the garden. But where does it come from, how does it get to our taps and how is it cleaned to a potable standard? The book explains how the expansion of towns and cities from Jacobean times necessitated the bringing of water long distances to ensure a supply of pure and unpolluted water and to achieve this, the construction of large dams and reservoirs that flooded valleys and submerged villages. The book includes a list of places to visit throughout the UK where water supply and its history can be better understood like pumping stations with historical machinery such as beam engines in steam. With a list of reservoirs and outdoor recreations. 56 page Shire paperback with colour photos and diagrams.


£5.99 NOW £3


75108 THE ENGLISH YEAR: A Literary Journey Through the Seasons


edited by Peter Buckingham This delightful anthology focuses on the weather and the landscape, with occasional observations about the people who inhabit it. On 15 January Coleridge sees “the brightest halo circling the roundest and brightest moon I ever beheld”, and the next day Queen Victoria


regretfully leaves her private retreat at Claremont for the grandeurs of the palace at Windsor. On 24 March Katherine Mansfield exclaims “Thank God! There’s a sprinkle of sun today!” and by 31 May Jane Austen hears that “an apricot has been detected on one of the trees”. On 31 July Dorothy Wordsworth admires “the river and a multitude of little boats” while crossing Westminster Bridge, and no anthology of the seasons would be complete without Keats’s “Ode to Autumn”: “Then in a wailful choir the small gnats mourn”. On 13 November Dickens notes “a dark column of smoke from Chatham Dockyard” and a few days later Queen Victoria reports to Lord Melbourne in the third person that “the Queen has just returned from a walk”. On 23 December, the darkest time of the year, Thomas Hardy notes that “a lavender curtain with a pale crimson hem covers the east and shuts out dawn”. A quotation for every day of the year. 255pp, line drawings. £9.99 NOW £4.50


74104 PHILIP’S GUIDE TO THE MUSHROOMS AND TOADSTOOLS OF BRITAIN AND NORTHERN EUROPE by Geoffrey Kibby


Fungi are neither animals nor plants and are a hugely under-researched form of life: it is estimated that only half the planet’s fungi have been identified, so far totalling around 100,000. This book takes 400 of the most common mushrooms and


toadstools and makes them easy to identify and classify. A field key at the beginning summarises the most obvious features such as size, cap colour and shape, spores, stem, root and smell, and then directs you to detailed entries for the fungi that match your initial description, giving habitat and full measurements including the length of the spores. 256pp, paperback, diagrams, colour illus.


£9.99 NOW £3 72772 ILLUSTRATED ENCYCLOPEDIA OF


ANIMAL LIFE by Charlotte Uhlenbroek et al Here in thrilling close-up are the amazing secrets of wild animals in dramatic detail, all combined with an authoritative text provided by 15 internationally renowned experts. The first section takes us through a billion years of animal history, evolution, classification and groupings. The second, Animal Anatomy, looks at how animals’ bodies enable them to maintain shape, move around and sense and react to their surroundings. We see how an animal’s behaviour encompasses every aspect of its life - living space, hunting and feeding, defence, sex and reproduction, birth and development, animal society, communication and intelligence. Spectacular colour photography. 512pp, 8½”×10¼”.


£19.99 NOW £6


73177 BIRDS: Mini Archive with DVD by Fiorella Congedo


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Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon (1707-1789) was one of the greatest French naturalists and a master of copper engraving. His extraordinarily ambitious work, the 36-volume Histoire Naturelle, Generale et Particulière, was intended to showcase the world’s three kingdoms - animal, vegetable and mineral. Beginning the project in 1749, by the time of his death 40 years later the 36 published quarto volumes only covered the minerals, quadrupeds and birds of the world. This book showcases 350 of the best of his coloured engravings of the world’s birds. He exquisitely rendered the vibrant hues of their feathers, the tiniest variations in lengths of wings, tails and legs and alert stances. Original text plus a DVD containing the images. 288pp softback. £14.99 NOW £6.50


73328 WILD LAND: Images of Nature from the Cairngorms


by Peter Cairns and Mark Hamblin The Cairngorms of east-central Scotland is Britain’s largest National Park and is home to a huge variety of wildlife. Because of its northerly location and relatively low impact from human activity, there are many species to be found here that are rarely seen further south such as golden eagle, osprey, red deer, red squirrel, pine marten, mountain hare, wild cat and otters. Photographers Peter Cairns and Mark Hamblin take a look at the animals, now extinct, that once roamed the Grampians, such as bear, wolf, elk, beaver, wild boar, bison and lynx. 152pp, softback, 12"×9", colour.


£16.99 NOW £4


73726 DRAWN FROM PARADISE by David Attenborough and Errol Fuller


Rare archival art, here is the natural history, art, and discovery of the Birds of Paradise, the birds that truly live up to their name. More than 40 distinct species are currently recognised. The tiny King Bird of Paradise for instance has an exquisite red plumage, metallic green breast band and peculiar curled ends to the tail feathers. The book showcases these extravagant beauties, hybrids, the meaning of dances, the Rifle Birds, the Sicklebills, here are the King and his cousins in all their splendour. Nearly every page is devoted to a full page detail or entire image of these magnificent birds by famous watercolourists, engravers, works in acrylic and oil, from many of the mid-1800s famous hand-coloured lithographs and prints from American and European ornithologists’ collections and rare books. With satin bookmark, apologies for remainder mark. Heavyweight 254 page tome.


$45 NOW £17


74093 GARDEN BIRD CONFIDENTIAL: Discover the Hidden World of Garden Birds by Dominic Couzens


Watching the interactions of our garden birds as they come to your bird table, fatballs, peanut holders or good old-fashioned crusts chucked on the lawn is fascinating enough, but what happens when they have eaten their fill? Here are full profiles of the most popular garden species, 60 in total, which includes superb colour photos (often full-page) and colour artworks of each alongside Latin name, identification rules, shape and character, song, habitat, preferred food, habits in the garden, breeding, migration, distribution and abundance. Keep one by your lounge window, 192pp softback, 7½”×10". £14.99 NOW £5


74081 BEAUTIFUL CHICKENS: Portraits of Champion Breeds


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by Christie Aschwanden and Andrew Perris Showcases over 40 breeds such as the robust heavyweight British Dorking which can weigh up to 14lbs, the Rumpless Tufted Araucana from Chile, one of the strangest looking creatures we have ever set eyes upon, the Scots Dumpy which, as you may have guessed, sports very short legs below its heavy body, the Asian Frizzle and Silkie, both of which look as though they have just stepped out of a beauty parlour, the long-legged and extremely elegant English Modern Game. Plus behind-the-scenes reportage from some of the world’s top poultry shows, and a short history of the domestic chicken. 112pp softback, colour, 10"×8½”.


£12.99 NOW £6


74238 THE INSHORE FISHERMEN OF WALES by J. Geraint Jenkins


From salmon trapping on the river Wye and cockle gathering at Pen-clawdd in north Gower, to fishing for herring off the Llyn peninsula and mussel dredging in the Conwy estuary, over-fishing and pollution have reduced fish stocks, modern equipment has replaced age-old practices, and international restrictions on fishing grounds and the quantity of fish caught have all imposed new patterns on the industry. This volume is the first full- scale survey of Welsh coastal fishermen, past and present. 167 paperback pages, map, diagrams.


£17.99 NOW £5.50


74389 A LAND by Jacquetta Hawkes A Land is Jacquetta Hawkes’s seminal work, a classic piece of British nature writing, first published in 1951. It leaps from ecology to geology and archaeology to anthropology and assuming the mantle of, by turns, a patriotic hymn of love to the British Isles, a romantic view of the British countryside as a vast work of art, an account of British identity and a lamentation of centralisation, industrialisation and severance from the land. Robert Macfarlane provides an excellent short history of the author’s life and achievements, and we begin the book proper with Hawkes’s musings on the physical and human geography of London from her Primrose Hill back garden on a summer’s evening. There follows her own take on the formation of the Earth, and Britain in particular, the creation of lowland Britain and the dinosaurs which roamed it and the combination of rock, soil and man that leads to civilisation, and her vision of what the future might hold for Britain, particularly its rural regions. Colour and b/w photos and maps. 242pp, handsomely bound in olive-green linen.


£20 NOW £8


74434 NATURE NEAR LONDON by Richard Jefferies


Today, as we contemplate the killing of such sacred cows as the Green Belt around London to accommodate our ever-rising population, interest in what Richard Mabey termed “unofficial countryside” and its inhabitants has never been higher. However, Richard Jefferies got there in 1883, which is when Nature Near London was first published. Arranged as a collection of observational pieces from locations near London, it is full of the minutest details of near-city wildlife. One bittersweet tale, A London Trout, describes an overgrown brook in which, by a small bridge, lived for four years a trout that was so wily it eluded both the eyes and lures of countless anglers and passers-by. One day the brook was dammed and the trout became trapped in a pool barely deep enough to cover its back - Jefferies remorsefully relates how four men then got into the muddy pool intent on capturing his iridescent friend. This and a further 18 similarly heartfelt tales make this book simply unique. 207pp in handsome duck-egg blue linen binding. £20 NOW £7


Nature 27


73725 SKULLS: An Exploration of Alan Dudley’s Curious Collection by Simon Winchester


Over many years, Alan Dudley became an extremely accomplished collector, known as an authority and with a collection of skulls prepared and labelled to a quality fit for a museum. Unfortunately, when he began trading on the internet, he was found to have breached the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora. His possession of: a howler monkey, a penguin, a loggerhead turtle, a chimpanzee, a Goeldi’s marmoset and a tiger was found to be illegal and he was fined and sentenced to 50 weeks in prison - luckily for him, suspended. Since then, he has been more careful, but remains as enthusiastic as ever. Here is every kind of animal you can imagine, from amphibians, birds and fish to mammals and reptiles. We were particularly gripped by the Longnose Gar, the Hammer- headed Bat and the fearsome Sabre-toothed Cat. What a collection! 256 pages 26cm x 26cm, clear, close-up photos. £19.95 NOW £12.50


74781 DISCOVERING HERBS: A Shire Book by Kay Sanecki


Mint, parsley, nasturtium to add colour, thyme, rosemary, sage, marjoram, nepeta, alchemilla and feverfew can all be grown very easily in hanging baskets. In troughs chives, thyme and chamomile, in window boxes basil, lavender cotton, tarragon and parsley, tubs nearly anything including fennel, hyssop and lemon balm, and indoors even more including lemon verbena and pineapple sage. Care, cultivation, properties and propagation of medicinal plants, pot herbs, culinary delights, household sweeteners, dye plants and those with fragrance. 136pp in paperback, colour photos. £5.99 NOW £3


74416 STORY OF FOSSILS: In Search of


Vanished Worlds by Yvette Gayrard-Valy The tale of the discovery in August 1900, in Siberia, of a spectacularly well-preserved mammoth, completely entombed in the earth and ice, its massive body frozen solid. As the study of fossils became a science, the reality uncovered by palaeontologists was found to be even more astonishing than the myths. This gripping book reveals the tasks and tools of palaeontology, the wondrous world of microfossils, and much more. Fossil hunters are still making revolutionary finds which, with the aid of modern technology, continue to rewrite the history of life on earth. 191 paperback pages teeming with illus in colour, sepia/w and b/w with timeline. £7.95 NOW £4


NEW AGE AND OCCULT


Dreams are necessary to life. - Anais Nin


74909 WIZARDS: A History


by P. G. Maxwell-Stuart The author ‘has firmly established himself among the new wave of British witchcraft historians through his mastery of demonological and related works…’ - TLS. In an age of scientific certainties, the idea that scientific absolutes can be breached at will by individuals asserting themselves against such laws is rather attractive. Throughout the ages the wizard, magician, sorcerer,


has claimed to do just this. From Simon Magus to Merlin, Faust to Cornelius Agrippa, the Comte de St. Germain to Aleister Crowley, the magician has been both fêted and feared. An awesome figure in real life and in literature, the wizard has retained his hold on the Western imagination in the teeth of scientific advance. No wonder Harry Potter was so popular! 226pp in paperback.


£9.99 NOW £5


74669 MASKELYNE’S BOOK OF MAGIC


by Jasper Maskelyne Maskelyne assembled a squad known as the ‘Magic Gang’ to misdirect Axis bombers and camouflage the activities of the Allied forces with illusions of tanks, battleships and armies. A classic book first published in 1936 and here with a new introduction by Edwin Dawes. It is a charming glimpse of stage magic in the early 20th century. This engaging


manual’s time-honoured tricks range from sleight of hand with coin, cards and rope to thought-reading and juggling, simple chemical tricks like the Silver Egg illusion, what to do when your magic goes wrong, magic with pieces of paper and tricks without elaborate apparatus. There is an original illustration reproduced in black and white of ‘the man without a middle’ and line art and other illus throughout this Dover paperback, 286pp.


£12.49 NOW £5


74723 RUNNING PRESS CYCLOPEDIA DREAMS by David Lohss


More than 350 symbols and interpretations in one simple, compact and precise encyclopedia. Learn about the meaning of dreams. You are making a speech to a large audience and suddenly realise your clothes are missing or


your teeth are falling out or you’re floating in mid air!


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