Covering Elizabethan, 18th century, Victorian and 20th London and looking at witches, witchcraft, Nicholas Hawksmoor, secret societies and more, the book describes practitioners of the occult and their unorthodox beliefs. London more than any other city has a secret history concealed from view, a city of esoteric traditions, obscure institutions and forgotten locations. The book rediscovers this history, from the Elizabethan magic of Dr Dee and Simon Forman to the occult designs of Wren and Hawksmoor, from the Victorian London of Spring-Heeled Jack to the fin de siècle heyday of Madame Blavatsky and Aleister Crowley. A gazetteer maps the sites of the most resonant occult locations. 224pp, paperback.

A classic blues novel of 1950s America, here in Penguin Classic 25th anniversary edition. Set in Chicago and Omaha, the novel features Manfred Banks called 'Man', a young harmonica-blowing blues singer who creates colourful and amazing music. Painfully torn between his friendship with fellow musician Solly and his great love for and a responsibility to his beautiful wife Cleo and daughter Karina, while struggling with the constraints of racist America, Man seeks relief in 'Dirty Bird' whiskey. He also relocates to Omaha with hopes of better opportunities as a blue-collar worker and singer, but the blues in his heart and mind keep bringing him back to face himself. After a nightmarish descent into his own troubled depths of alcoholism, Man emerges with fresh awareness of possibility of renewal. He faces responsibilities to the rhythm and rhyme of his lyrics that groove a hollow in his mind and his family, and beneath both is the awful grinding racism he meets daily on the streets which pluck opportunity from his grasp. One of the most influential novels and an extraordinary portrayal of 20th century Black reality, and also an ode to the richness and power of blues music. 288 page paperback. Small remainder mark.

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.

Paris is famous for its art and art bookshops, and Bibliophile struggled to resist this beautiful temptation of a book! The most iconic bookshops such as Delamain or Galignani have passionate booksellers with a vocation to open new horizons to readers and these bookshops feel a little bit like a social club. Sound familiar? The role of bookshops was so essential during the pandemic lockdowns that books were considered an essential need and bookshops were allowed to stay open alongside food shops and pharmacies. Food for thought. Like all of us, Parisians cannot resist stopping at a box of books put out in front of a bookshop. The name of the City of Paris evokes many stories from Notre-Dame de Paris by Victor Hugo and also as a refuge for authors who fled prejudice, like Oscar Wilde, Richard Wright and James Baldwin. From the oldest café in Paris, Le Procope, where philosopher Voltaire had his desk, to the Shakespeare & Co. bookshop where so many Americans come on pilgrimage in the footsteps of the Beat Generation, to green book stalls punctuating the banks of the River Seine, you'll be drawn to Paris after reading this book, if only from your armchair, with these delightfully engaging colour photographs on every page. Currently hosting the 2024 Olympics, the City of Light is here explored in a cultural odyssey of its historic bookshops, restaurants and the haunts of writers who have made Paris their home. For example the Drouant restaurant which is inextricably linked with the Goncourt Literary Prize, Le Döme at 108 Boulevard du Montparnasse where occultist Aleister Crowley, artist Paul Gauguin and Vladimir Lenin frequented, and follow in the footsteps of Paul Verlaine whose new poetry was published in a weekly review from the nightclub Le Chat Noir and despite an ongoing addiction to absinth was voted 'Prince of Poets' in 1894. The prolific author and self publicist Georges Simenon wrote his Inspector Maigret novels here and added to the glitterati literati list are Marcel Proust, Molière, James Joyce, Ernest Hemingway, Alxandre Dumas, Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre and many more and the places they knew and loved like theatres, Parisian alleyways, the opera house and the riverside booksellers who have been in business in one form or another since the 16th century. We love this book. 160 landscape format pages, packed with colour photos, 23 x 19.6 cm.

The Times: 'The masterpiece of one of the most important and overlooked British women writers of the twentieth century, with a new introduction'. Orlando King is a trilogy about a beautiful young man, raised in a remote and eccentric wilderness, arriving in 1930s London and setting the world of politics ablaze. In a time of bread riots and hunger marches, with the spectre of Fascism casting an ever-lengthening shadow over Europe, Orlando glidingly cuts a swathe through the thickets of business, the corridors of power, the pleasure gardens of the Cliveden set, acquiring wealth, adulation, a beautiful wife, and a seat in Parliament. But the advent of war brings with it his downfall, and his daughter Agatha, cloistered with him in his banishment, is left to pick through the rubble of his smoking, ruined legacy. "Elegant and muscular, powerful and razor-sharp, here is Greek tragedy and political saga all in one, a glittering exorcism of the inter-war generation's demons". Please do not overlook this superb evocation of that sticky, feverish time which has just the right mixture of doomed fun and faintly lascivious despair. 608pp, paperback.

From baker, beekeeper and birdwatcher, to falconer, farrier and forager, join poet Angus and printmaker Lilly as they explore the British Isles, uncovering and celebrating our crafts and traditions. This collection of poetry and printmaking aims to capture and celebrate the heritage and craftsmanship through 30 poems with accompanying striking mono linocut prints. We read about the salt harvester walking beside the water's edge, the angler watching for hours on end like stooping herons on a rushing bend, the forester whose view is one of a thousand kind in solid spruce or wondering beech, the ploughman trudging in muddied land towing blade and plodding beast, the shepherd from head to source of upland flow. With hand and tool we are invited into the life and craftsmanship that stirs within the great British countryside. With glossary, superb design and illustrations. 96pp.

'It was Nashwa who'd put the rope round my neck, at our first encounter. She alone could bind and loose, she alone controlled the thick rope, which she could jerk on, pulling me to wherever she chose. She might pull violently, dragging me in wherever she felt like it, whenever she wanted me, or let it out a little, according to her mood.' The novel describes the three day sex, drink and drug binge of a 30-something newsreader in the back streets and crumbling apartments of his native Giza, that pullulating mass of humanity that, like an ugly sister, sits opposite Cairo on the River Nile's West Bank. Pursued by an unshakable sense of impending doom that is only partly attributable to the fear of retribution at the hands of a sadistic police officer with whose wife he is conducting a frenzied affair, the narrator observes with fascinating horror his own stumbling progress through a world of menace and wonder. It is a world inhabited by philosophical prostitutes, nightmarish butchers, serene Quran-readers, pious family members, religious con-men, autistic tissue-sellers and others. Milleresque in its treatment of sex, the novel captures the essence of the phantasmagoric world of the Egyptian mega-city, disintegrating under the pressures of its home-grown horrors, while pining for the sublime. Told with vigorous language, humour and authenticity. 224 pages, paperback.

A prize winning masterpiece, this little book is ruminative, humane and genre-defying. Mendelsohn explores the mysterious links between the randomness of the lives we lead and the artfulness of the stories we tell. Combining memoir, biography, history, and literary criticism, the book weaves together the stories of three exiled writers who turned to the classics of the past to create masterpieces of their own works that pondered the nature of narrative itself. Erich Auerbach was the Jewish philologist who fled Hitler's Germany and wrote his classic study of Western literature Mimesis in Istanbul. François Fenelon was the 17th century French archbishop whose ingenious sequel to the Odyssey, named The Adventures of Telemachus, was a veiled critique of the Sun King. It was the bestselling book in Europe for 100 years and resulted in his banishment. And the German novelist W. G. Sebald, self-exiled to England, whose distinctively meandering narratives explore Odyssean themes of displacement, nostalgia and separation from home. Intertwined with these tales of exile and artistic crisis is an account of Mendelsohn's struggles to write his own family saga of the Holocaust and memoir about reading the Odyssey with his elderly father. Haunting tales of oppression and wandering, his book moves to a startling conclusion about the way in which the lives of its three heroes were linked across borders, languages and centuries. 128pp, paperback.

In these two "astonishing" novellas (The New Yorker), the Booker Prize-winning author of Possession returns to the landscape of Victorian England, where science and spiritualism are popular manias, and domestic decorum coexists with brutality and perversion. Beautifully written, the first story Morpho Eugenia concerns an explorer who realises that the behaviour of the people around him is alarmingly similar to that of the insects he studies. In The Conjugal Angel, curious individuals - some fictional, others drawn from history - gather to connect with the spirit world. Throughout both, Byatt examines the eccentricities of the Victorian era, weaving fact and fiction, reality and romance, science and faith into a sumptuous, magical tapestry. Includes a special message from Byatt not available in the trade edition, the novella was the basis for a movie with Mark Rylance, Kristin Scott Thomas and Patsy Kensit. Franklin Center, Pennsylvania Franklin Library 1993. Book accented in 22kt gold. Printed on archival paper with gilded edges. The endsheets are of moire fabric with a silk ribbon page marker. Smyth sewing and concealed muslin joints to ensure the highest quality binding. This book is in full leather with hubbed spines. Signed by author A. S. Byatt. Sealed in publisher's shrink wrap, never opened. Current rare book retail price:

The 23rd novel of Iris Murdoch, first published in 1987. Considered by some critics to be among her best novels, it is the story of a circle of Oxford University graduates in 1980s England. The eponymous book is a theoretical work on Marxism which is to be written by a member of the group. After graduating from university, the friends had agreed to finance the writing of this book as 'brotherhood' but grow uneasy as no written work is in sight and the stipend continues to be paid. David Crimond, tasked with writing the book, resurfaces at a Commemoration Ball the friends attend. His sudden re-appearance induces the group to attempt resolving the untenable situation by pressing for clarification. In turn they find themselves confronted with how far removed they are from their former Marxist beliefs and their own philosophical disorientation. As Crimond promises progress in the book, his draw causes the members of the circle to plunge into chaos. He is a classic example of Murdoch's "enchanter" archetype: the enigmatic character whose charisma inspires others to devote themselves to him. Franklin Center, Pennsylvania: Franklin Library, 1993. This Limited First Edition features 22k Gold Accents, 22k Gold Gilt Edges, Silk Endpapers, and a Sewn-In silk ribbon page marker. The endsheets are of moire fabric with a Smyth sewing and concealed muslin joints to ensure the highest quality binding. This book is in full leather with hubbed spines. Rare copies sell for over