How to be Happy Though Married, How I Got Licked and Why, The English: Are They Human?, Erections on Allotments, Drummer Dick's Discharge, Planet of the Knob Heads, Tosser Gunman, How to Avoid Being Drowned, Scouts in Bondage, The Art of Faking Exhibition Poultry, Moles and Their Meaning - here is a celebration of all the weird and wonderful books to treat all bibliophiles, booksellers and fans of the bizarre. Complete with covers from our past and books that have inexplicably fallen out of print - now never be forgotten. Beautifully produced full page colour covers, marbled endpapers. 128pp.

The survival of manuscripts is often random. Geoffrey Chaucer's Canterbury Tales survive in 92 manuscripts because Chaucer was a well-connected diplomat. By contrast, no medieval manuscript survives of Julian of Norwich's Revelations of Divine Love, nowadays considered a great religious classic. Julian was a woman, and her radical theology was sometimes at odds with church teaching. In other chapters, the author discusses the Paston Letters, the Lindisfarne Gospel, the artists of the colourful Winchester Bible, Canterbury Pilgrims, the artist Tamaris pictured at work, the only surviving Beowulf manuscript singed at its edges and other books which have survived fires and floods, the personal prayer book of Henry VIII, and the work of hidden writers such as the Saxon nun Hugeburc, who lived in Germany and wrote the lives of saints Willibald and Wynnebald, coding her name into the text. The world of manuscripts is full of breathtaking, can't-believe-it discoveries, and in this fascinating book the author starts with three manuscript discoveries that not only made headlines but changed our understanding of history. In 1934 a house party in search of ping-pong balls found a cache of old books. Luckily one of the guests was a keeper at the Victoria and Albert Museum with an instinct for a find. In fact it was the lost Book of Margery Kempe, the first autobiographical work in English, from the early 14th century. Kempe had 14 children, suffered from post-natal depression, went abroad on pilgrimages and had visions, all of which she described in colourful style. In the same year there was another astonishing discovery, the original manuscript of Thomas Malory's great Arthurian epic, Le Morte D'Arthur, an exploration of the 15th century culture of chivalry. It also confirmed the identity of the author, which had been contested on the grounds that Malory was something of a career criminal unlikely to have penned the refined classic. In fact he wrote it in prison. The author's third dramatic discovery was made in the 12th century, when the monks of Durham Cathedral opened the coffin of St Cuthbert and found the Cuthbert gospel, the earliest intact European book. Created in the early 8th century, it subsequently travelled round the north of England as the monks of Lindisfarne sought to preserve Cuthbert's remains from the marauding Vikings. 340 pages, gorgeous gleaming-with-gold decoration and colour decoration and capitals in reproductions. Please note contents same as Hidden Hands: The Lives of Manuscripts and Their Makers.

For every bibliophile, a compendium of book chat with tasty nuggets about writers and their editors. We join Rebecca Lee, a professional text-improver, as she embarks on a fascinating journey to find out how words get from an author's brain to the finished, printed books. She reveals the dark arts of ghostwriters, explores the secret world of literary agents, and uncovers the hidden beauty of the typesetter. Along the way, her quest will be punctuated by a litany of little known but often controversial considerations that make a big impact - ellipses, indexes, hyphens, esoteric points of grammar, and juicy post-publication corrections. A funny and illuminating peek into publishing below stairs, from foot-and-note disease to the town of Index, welcome to the Gutenberg Galaxy. Get your blaps, blovers and blurbs here! 372pp of delight, paperback.

A deluxe album of 36 colour prints each showing a poet on the left and one of her poems on the right with a frontispiece by Hokusai designed by Hosoda (Eishi) 1756-1829. The volume explores the lives and works of a group of 36 poets and novelists who flourished in the Imperial Court of Japan from the 9th through to the 13th centuries. Aristocratic women of the medieval Japanese court took up waka poetry as their literary vehicle. The poems were circulated at court and assembled in carefully structured anthologies which were copied and studied, even memorised, as models of the finest literature. A poetry competition had developed from games played among court women, and emerged as a significant literary and social structure. The poems were reproduced in calligraphy in 1797 by 36 girls between the ages of six and 15 and we are struck by these gorgeous colourful illustrations with a marginalia noting the name, address and age of the child responsible. For example the poem by Ukon was copied by Toyota Mine, age 6, and the poem by Michitsuna no haha was brushed by the girl's 10 year old sister, Toyota Ito. The children were all pupils of a calligraphy school who sponsored the publication, demonstrating the skill of the woodblock carvers who would have cleaned up any rough spots and showing the skills in drawing kana, the elements of Japanese syllabic script. Over the centuries selected representative examples were illustrated with imaginary portraits of the poets and such handscrolls and books were not only made as artistic works, but as instructional guides for new generations of poets. A student of Utamaro, here we have a reproduction of one such album by Eishi where portraits of poets presented in elegant court dress are paired with one of their most famous poems. Large print text and huge size softback, colour artworks throughout. 192pp, 20.3 x 26cm and a quality George Braziller rare 1991 imported publication from New York.