In a rather beautiful metallic navy blue tin box decorated with silver embossed bottles, contained within are 21 sonic feats to amaze your guests. Enjoy Glacial Glockenspiel in which the host plays it cool. Fill a baking tray with about 4cm of water and leave it in the freezer overnight. In the morning, remove the slab of ice and let it rest for around five minutes. With a large, serrated knife, gently and slowly saw the ice width ways into five slabs of decreasing size, in rough proportion. Scrape off the edges until they are fairly smooth and then put them back in the freezer for another few hours. Cut a cucumber into two, long flat strips and place about 8cm apart in parallel and balance the ice bars between them like railway sleepers. Your instrument is now ready. Your mallets, in this instance, are a pair of teaspoons. Virtuosi could use carrots as mallets with your ice now resonant, compose a hymn to polar extremes while we still have them and tap out a tribute to the penguins. Let the room temperature dictate how long your piece lasts and listen as it melts for new and undiscovered tunings. Free Jazz Popcorn needs the equipment of cooking oil, four saucepans, popcorn, tin foil, baking paper and elastic bands or string for a fantastic two minute drum solo. When the Marrow Blows involves a courgette and a wooden spoon and the Ballad of the Greengrocer a cucumber, knife, wooden spoon, apple corer or potato peeler, a carrot and a pepper. Purse your lips and blow through them like a high-pitched raspberry and place your fingers over the holes to make different notes. Dinner parties will never be tame again as you liven up evenings with these hilarious after dinner sound and music experiments, a favourite of which here is recreating the fizz and crackle of a barbershop quartet on an old-time gramophone. You're in for a good time. 21 handsome double sided colourful cards of a large size, get out those wine glasses now and start to sing! Pity the poor dog!

Every time you send an email you have a choice of hundreds of fonts, and this exquisite collection focuses on fonts that are based on handwriting or cursive script. Over 300 examples are collected in the book, and an accompanying CD gives you a free download of 122 to use for your own special purposes, for instance invitations, posters, or business cards. Each font has a page to itself where the whole alphabet is displayed in upper and lower case, followed by numerals and the most common punctuation marks. Finally a whole sentence showcases the font by using every word in the alphabet: "Forsaking monastic tradition, twelve jovial friars gave up their vocation for a questionable existence on the flying trapeze." Many of the fonts are accompanied by illustrations in which they feature on posters and book covers. The different styles of script are classified according to the way they are produced, for instance "Italian and French Italics", "Brush and Swash" or "Decorative and Freestyle". One of the most popular cursive fonts today is Mistral, illustrated here by a specimen sheet from 1957. The bold and assertive Ballpark is accompanied by an advertising poster for a DKW motorbike from 1938, while the whimsical and spidery LainieDaySH is illustrated by a book cover for a 1992 novel Margaret in Hollywood. ITC Zapf Chancery was used for the 1979 edition of The Amorous Adventures of Fanny Hill, while Pablo, a typeface of 1995, is based on a 1906 letter of Pablo Picasso to Leo and Gertrude Stein. Xiparos is inspired by the crabbed script of a German manuscript of 1206, while FranciscoLucas Llana comes from a writing manual of 1540 by Palatinus. Fonts can be works of art, and a gorgeous New York Times magazine cover from 2009 uses Volupia, created in 2005, in an abstract swirl incorporating the names of contributors. 14.6 x 22cm, 496pp, index of designs, numerous colour illustrations, CD.
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Since software programmes have come to dominate offices and studios, the pencil has become a symbol for creative freedom and the modern creative's ultimate fetish. This book presents a unique collection of close-up pictures of pencils from some of our foremost artists, designers, writers, architects and musicians. Here is Philippe Starck's stylish black and red, Paul Smith's is a classic jewel-like thing worth £3000 (a present from Jonathan Ive), William Boyd's is nicely aged and rusty, while Anish Kapoor's is sculpted into a mini ArcelorMittal Orbital tower. Other celebrated pencils of leading creatives are from Dave Eggers, Tracey Emin, Christian Louboutin, James Dyson and Cindy Sherman. There is a short interview with David Bailey and the hat designer David Schilling, make-up artist Michèle Burke and British industrial designer Sebastian Bergne, Wallace and Gromit creator Nick Park and English cartoonist and illustrator Sir Quentin Blake. There is the pink rubber tip of author Louis de Bernières' pencil, and many quotes like 'The pencil lets us talk without words' and 'I used my pencils until they almost disappear.' Sculptors, fashion designers, here is the HB, 4B and 2B and not 2B, close up and very personal on these beautifully coloured and exquisitely designed 144 pages. Foreword by William Boyd.

Migration is one of the key issues of our time and this highly praised study steps back from current anxieties round the subject and looks at the whole picture in Europe since the end of World War II. The author discusses both economic migrants and those seeking asylum, examining the impact of a wide variety of forces driving the movement of peoples, from Irish nurses crossing the Irish sea to work in the newly-formed NHS to the controversies surrounding the people-trafficking in the English Channel today. The term 'migration' rather than 'immigration' suggests a two-way traffic and an unwillingness on the part of many migrants to close the option of returning to their birth-country. After the war there was a huge and chaotic movement of displaced people, with 17 million Europeans on the move. The Hungarian uprising of 1956, the Turkish invasion of Cyprus in 1974, the disintegration of the Soviet bloc in 1989 and the upheaval of Yugoslavia in the 1990s were further events prompting mass migration. At the same time there was colonial migration of Moroccans to France and Indians to the UK. In the 21st century the rhetoric has changed as migrants are perceived as a possible threat. There are abundant instances of generosity on the part of nations and individuals, but there is also the "hostile environment" which was an aim of Theresa May's government. The author looks in detail at cases such as the Italian island of Lampedusa which took the brunt of Libyans escaping Colonel Gaddafi. Rarely has it been acknowledged that many asylum seekers are extremely resourceful and well-educated, with news reports dismissing them as a "wave" or "flood". The author believes that migration in Europe is multi-layered and open-ended, and is a testament to co-operation and cultural encounter. 548pp, photos, maps.

'What? You mean the earl does it for money? That's way beyond the barbed wire!' This explosion of disgust from Blotto is provoked when Twinks informs him of the activities of the Earl of Woking. The gentleman in question is owner of Clusters, a stately home not far from Tawcester Towers, and he has been renting out parts of Clusters for private functions and charging his guests! The discovery of this appalling lapse in aristocratic behaviour sets the brother and sister duo off on their latest adventure, determined to find out more about the activities. They discover the existence of a sinister group called Aristotours, brokers between impoverished owners of stately homes and the common people, offering 'a taste of the high life' to characters such as stockbrokers, surgeons and solicitors. And if this were not bad enough, the siblings discover Aristotours trying to infiltrate their evil practises into Tawcester Towers itself. The pair set off on a quest to identify and stop the evil genius behind it all and his acolytes, until 'the ruffled green baize on the dividing door was once again smoothed down.' 202pp, 2022 new hardback.

Sub-titled 'Scenes From England's Last Literary Salon' the book is a Who's Who of the arts in post-war Britain and a rich, luscious account of a charming, kind and generous group of people. In 1945, Eddy Sackville-West, Desmond Shawe-Taylor and Eardley Knollys purchased Long Crichel House, an old Dorset rectory with no electricity and inadequate water supply. In this improbable place, the last English literary salon began. The Visitors' Book attracted such names as Nancy Mitford, Benjamin Britten, Laurie Lee, Cyril Connelly, Somerset Maugham, E. M. Forster, Cecil Beaton, Vita Sackville-West and Harold Nicolson, who were attracted by the good food, generous quantities of drink and excellent conversation. In later years the house and its inhabitants were to weather the aftershocks of the Crichel Down affair, the Wolfenden Report and the AIDS crisis. The book brings a fine balance between nostalgia and commemorates the privileged world long since vanished and the problems caused by having four neurotic personalities intermittently at large under a single roof. The trio were later joined by the literary critic Raymond Mortimer and members became one another's surrogate family and their companionship became a stimulus for writing. Yet there was more to the place than just a 'prose factory' than what critics variously referred to as a group of 'gentleman-aesthetes'. The book unveils a missing link in English literary and cultural history and we relish the details of the central characters who are of course homosexual or bisexual, but there is nothing here to surprise or disturb apart from croquet on the lawn, music and literary debate. 354pp, paperback, photos.

Sub-titled 'True Tales From London's Streets', the book is an x-ray of life and stories in their own words of those who live and work in our capital. On the surface, the streets of London in 1861 and in 2019 are entirely different places, but dig just a little and the similarities are striking and in many cases shocking. Taking Henry Mayhew's London Labour and the London Poor (available product code 56595 to compare) as inspiration, Jennifer Kavanagh explores the changes and continuities by collecting and mapping stories from today's London. Beggars, street entertainers, stalls selling a variety of food, clothes, second-hand goods, and thieves and the sex trade are all still predominant. The rise of the gig economy has brought a multitude of drivers and cyclists, delivering and moving goods, transporting meals, food and people, all organised through smartphones but using the same streets as Mayhew's informants. The precarity faced by this new workforce would also be familiar to the street sellers of his day in terms of resources; gone are the workhouses, alms-houses, pauper's lunatic asylums, and enter day centres, shelters, hostels and food banks. There are still many kinds of market like the privately run farmer's markets which are doing especially well, typically open once a week with a trend towards healthy and organic food. There is a pair of builders pictured in a line art illustration, street food sellers and in local streets shopkeepers and long term residents know each other and the Big Issue seller around the corner. There is getting around, going out in the fresh air, Fitzrovia (a favourite for film and period dramas), Hassene an Algerian street sweeper, Victorian railway stations and parks. According to the 1861 census, the population of inner London was 2,808,494. In 2011 it was 3,231,901 - not such a great difference. In 1851 over 38% of Londoners were born somewhere else and in 2011 37% is made up of different nationalities and now London is rightly proud of its multiculturalism. The changing city as seen from the end of 2018 to spring 2020 which leads us through the streets of London and to places we would never find for ourselves. 395pp, paperback. Illus.

Our dear friend Gyles is and always was a huge fan of the Duke of Edinburgh, and together with our Annie dined at a banquet with the Duke at the Natural History Museum in London several years ago, and he had had the pleasure of meeting him on many occasions and enjoying his wit, intellect and bon viveur. Elusive, complex, controversial, challenging, often humorous and sometimes irascible, Prince Philip was the man Elizabeth II once described as her 'constant strength and guide'. What was he really like and what is the truth about those 'gaffes' and the rumours of affairs? Gyles is the writer who got closest to the human truth about our long-serving senior royals and this is the revised and updated 2022 paperback edition. 'I knew the Duke of Edinburgh over a period of more than 40 years. I was accustomed to his sense of humour. I liked it, I liked him. I admired him as much as any man I have known. It was knowing him as I did that led me to write this book about him, and his wife, and their remarkable marriage - the longest-lasting marriage of any sovereign and consort in history. I first met Prince Philip in the 1970s, when he was in his 50s and I was in my 20s, and I became involved in the world of the National Playing Fields Association.' 'I suppose the polo was fun. Playing cricket was fun, in the old days. The carriage driving is fun - when you don't fall off the box seat. Then it's just bloody painful.' 'I enjoyed flying... I think I should have joined the Air Force instead of the Navy.' Prince Philip's grandfather King George I of Greece was assassinated a few years before he was born. His favourite sister Cécile was killed in an aeroplane accident when he was still a teenager. His favourite uncle and guardian at the time George Milford Haven died of cancer soon after. His father, Prince Andrew of Greece, died when Philip was just 23. His other favourite uncle, Earl Mountbatten of Burma, was murdered by the IRA when blow up in his own boat in 1979. 'I'm quite ready to die. It's what happens - sooner or later.' And now it has and how sad we are here at Bibliophile since he was our patron and gave us a Royal Warrant, by Royal Appointment, which by the gracious gift of the Queen, we can still refer to in perpetuity. Here are candid photos like the tell-tale photograph of Philip and Elizabeth in October 1946 entitled 'The First Look', and their first dance, seen together publicly for the first time in July 1947 in Edinburgh. Gyles' book tells the story of two contrasting lives and assesses the Duke of Edinburgh's character and achievements, relationships with his wife, children and their families, and with the press and public and those at court who were suspicious of him in the early days. A moving account of a long life well lived and a remarkable royal partnership the likes and length of which we shall never see again. 513pp, paperback, well illus. with many colour plates.

A gripping thriller set in the Derbyshire Peak District, a novel about family and betrayal, injustice and violence, fear and love, resilience, kindness and hope. A missing schoolgirl, a middle-aged recluse, an exploited teenager. Lives thrown into chaos and set on a collision course, with the police in hot pursuit. Scarlett is dancing in the school talent show tomorrow. Nana, who Scarlett lives with since Mum died, reckons Scarlett will be on Strictly at this rate except Scarlett doesn't make it home from school. She's abducted by a man she never imagined she would see again, a man on the police's most wanted list - her dad. Ron had made a living as a house and pet sitter since quitting his career on the front line in the fire service. He's currently looking after a place deep in the Derbyshire Peaks. The solitude suits him, and managing animals is so much simpler than coping with other people. Dylan's a 'cuckoo', dealing drugs on the county line, moving from nest to nest, picking out people who daren't say no. Keeping his head down, one step ahead of the law so far, but now everything's falling apart. DS Laura O'Neil is running on empty after nights dealing with her teething toddler, but she is driving the hunt for Scarlett and knows that every minute counts. PC Ahmed Ali discovers a seriously injured man in a drug den and chases his suspected attacker across the hills. He is determined to bring him to justice, but fate has other plans in store. A race against time played out in the brooding wilderness, the limestone gorges and gritstone edges of the Peak District with themes of escape and entrapment, shifting loyalties and new alliances. 262pp, paperback.

If you like the sly humour and witty observations of David Sedaris, here is the follow up to his 'Theft by Finding Diaries'. Now a celebrity, David Sedaris travels first class, reads what readers say about his books, and tells anecdotes in his typical diary form as he goes from New York to Seattle to London to Philadelphia to Los Angeles, to Dubai, Spokane ('I was in a murderous temper yesterday. Part of it was lack of sleep, part was general tour fatigue'), Bucharest, Emerald Isle, Santiago Chile. Here are his observations of a fight between two men on a bus, a fight between two men on the street, collecting Romanian insults or being taken round a Japanese parasite museum. There's a dirty joke shared at a book signing and a dirtier one told at a dinner party. The diary entries reflect an ever-changing background of new administrations, new restrictions on speech and conduct and his descriptions of Eastern European countries is darkly humorous. 566pp, large softback.