The Canadian songwriter Joni Mitchell produced her ground-breaking album Blue in 1971. It emerged as a singular commercial and critical success around the world and at the time the artist herself puzzled herself over what to give her friends that Christmas. The result was a handmade book with only 100 copies produced, filled with her own handwritten lyrics and reproductions of her many stunning drawings - portraits, abstracts, random concert goers, a road trip psychedelic dream sequence, a very detailed peacock feathered line art princess and Ottoman style palace line drawing, a pensive self-portrait, an aeroplane engine seen just in the fuselage in black and white under a bright zigzag yellow thunderstorm facing a page with the poem 'A Plane is a Bird' dated 28th May 1969. It is all written in her beautiful cursive handwriting, faithfully reproduced in facsimile in this 2019 first edition published by Canongate Books. The album is a better way of understanding what Joni Mitchell found beautiful and worth holding on to, and the lyrics are from her first five albums as well as some unreleased songs, reminding us of what a stunning lyricist and poet she is. In her own words 'This collection of poems and songs and drawings is for myself and for my friends and loves who are this book.' There is a poem about Woodstock, Temptation, and of course the famous Big Yellow Taxi and Let the Wind Carry Me among the 60 lyrics and poems reproduced very neatly with absolutely no crossings out in her own handwriting. Furthermore there are stunning portraits of friends like Jane Lurie in bold psychedelic colours, Judy Collins, Graham Nash, James Taylor, David Crosby, the cover of Court and Spark, Georgia O'Keefe and Neil Young among the 34 full page colour plates. A beautiful big 128 page first edition, 23 x 28.5cm.
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Pussweek is a publication written by cats for cats and now in book form, from scandalous pawparazzi pics to revealing litter quizzes, hairy exposés to tell-tail interviews, and tips and tricks on dealing with your annoying human, you will finally find the full feline empowerment lies within you. The letters pages are simply hilarious like finding a safe place to dump your uncomfortable load with Ollie. The 'Is that what you're wearing?' face tortures Geraldo's human and makes her feel insecure every time she gets dressed. Beatrice sends a picture of her nipple to Ollie! There are cats on toilet bowls, sheeting (peering out from under the bed sheet), climbing into handbags and the Top 20 Most Satisfying Things to Push off the Table, like books, a vase of flowers and cutlery, all pictured and with hilarious captions. Then there is the vacuum cleaner, playtime and biting: 'Out of nowhere he calls me Fatty and then he just started grabbing at my belly...' and what to do if your human is a creeper and has hundreds of photos of you. They tell you all their problems (and expect you to care). Do you have a catnip problem? Get up to scratch with the curtain call and the rights and wrongs of ascending a net curtain, clawing things at home, even getting your nails painted; pretending you eat the medicine popped into your food then spitting it out on their pillow, and hiding under beds and sofas, spotting rolling playfully with the pet dog. Pussweek is printed with the highest quality material so you can chew on it or pee on it if your like! 152pp, colour photos of cats as we have never seen them before. Highly recommended to our cat loving readers with a good sense of humour. Softback.

As much a part of British culture as warm beer and fish and chips, the Carry On films were hugely popular at the box office and have now become cult films, beloved by some, scorned by just as many. Sex, home life, drunkenness, toilet humour, working class snobbery, busty young women and lecherous middle aged men, much of the human slapstick of Carry On owed a debt to children's comics like The Beano and The Dandy. The publication of the first issue of Viz in 1979, the year after the Carry On series ended for the first time, is no coincidence and they raised the profanity level. The team's first scribe Norman Hudis came from a play and screenwriting background and this is reflected in the gentle, relatively naturalistic style of the early Carry On films. Talbot Rothwell was a man with great experience writing comedy for stage, television and radio and his clients included Arthur Askey and Terry Thomas. Beginning with Carry on Cabbie in 1963 and ending with Carry on Camping in 1969, we recall with great mirth Carry on Doctor, Carry on Screaming, Carry on Follow That Camel, Carry on Sergeant, Carry on Nurse. For nearly all 31 Carry on films there are almost exhaustive cast lists and stats like distribution and production, filming dates, UK release, running time and budget, guest actors and memories galore as Sid James, Barbara Winsor, Kenneth Williams, Joan Sims, Jim Dale and Charles Hawtrey strut among the superb repertory company. 128 page paperback reference, 32 colour illustrations.

Sewage systems to sculpture, chocolate to coal, free trade to electoral emancipation, the book is a personal exploration of why and how village utopias came about, what they tell us about the past, and how they still resonate with us today. 20 years ago Jacqueline Yallop began her working life leading guided walks at a small village high in the fells of the North Pennines. Built by philanthropic employers for families working the lead mines, the isolated settlement was one of a network of 'model' villages which sprang up across Britain during the 18th and 19th centuries. Here she visits and revisits some of these utopian experiments to understand the social, political and cultural contexts from which they emerged. From Scotland's New Lanark Mills to the imposing market square at Tremadog in Wales and the Arts and Crafts cottages of Port Sunlight, she walks the avenues and terraces and considers what remains of the ideals which made these villages so fashionable. Mixing social and political history, art and architecture, travelogue, biography, aesthetics and philosophy with memoir and on-the-ground observation, her years of experience as a novelist brings Yallop's scholarly research to life in her energetic account of the complex and contradictory factors which changed the British landscape. 218pp, archive photos.

12th and 13th century French chants, Latin carols and absorbing gothic music including Gaudete! from the 15th century, a carol performed by The Richmond Consort are among the 19 tracks on the CD enclosed inside the front cover of this Pitkin Guide. The very word Gothic brings to mind fairy tale castles and baronial halls of Merrie England, yet there is an undercurrent of dungeons and dragons, and torture. This slim introduction looks at the art and architecture of the Middle Ages with examples of church interiors and magnificent cathedrals built to the glory of God, village churches, Englishmen's homes with tracery and gabbled windows such as Stokesay Castle in Shropshire, a look at cults and symbols, the medieval Round Table and a revival with Georgian Gothick. 20 page softback, colour illus.

A companion to 93286 and 93287, we have three in this set of facsimile reprints to collect of the glorious and affectionate pen and ink illustrations to the original 1890s publications. The three popular Jane Austen novels covered in this collection are Sense and Sensibility, Northanger Abbey and Persuasion. 'He cut off a long lock of her hair.' - John Willoughby and Marianne Dashwood. With her sisters, here are the compliments of the young ladies being quite charming, Mrs Ferrars looking down her nose, whispers and feathers, the housekeeper and manservant and Edward arriving at Barton Cottage. In Northanger Abbey we meet Mr and Mrs Morland talking about young Catherine who 'grows quite a good-looking girl' and in Persuasion, Charles Musgrove spoiling his children, and Captain Wentworth removing young Walter from Anne Elliot and Wentworth attending to the unconscious Louisa Musgrove. 33 illustrations, 20 page softback.

Sub-titled 'Prince Philip's Life in His Own Words', at the age of 21 he wrote to a relative: 'I know you will never think much of me. I am rude. But it is fun' he added prophetically. He complained to a friend: 'I am nothing but a bloody amoeba. I am the only man in the country not allowed to give his name to his children.' And he once remarked 'Constitutionally, I don't exist.' 'I would have been of great value to the Queen to have someone who was, in a sense, professionally qualified in something, not just traipsing around.' The worst part about marrying British royalty for Prince Philip was having to give up his career in the Navy. When pressed for his secret for handling so many public appearances, he shot back to the interviewer: 'I never pass up a chance to go to the loo or take a poo.' 'One reason I took up carriage driving is that I like watching the ponies doing all the work' the self-confessed 'pretty idle' Prince Philip once said. Despite his reputation for never suffering fools gladly, he said that after 50 years he had learned to suffer fools 'with patience' and even humour. This affectionate self-portrait brings together the best of his blunt speech making, his mocking of the media and captains of industry, fond teasing of Her Majesty himself and a host of less well-known stories about the Prince to give a fascinating firsthand insight into the royal world as a 'fella who belongs to Mrs Queen'. Bibliophile misses our dear Royal Warrant grantor. 192pp, paperback.

'Oh! I am delighted with the book! I should like to spend my whole life reading it.' - Northanger Abbey. Since the first publication of her six novels in the 19th century, Jane Austen has never gone out of style and has delighted generations of fans with classic stories that have never changed - and countless book jacket covers that have. This special book compiles two centuries of design showcasing one of the world's most celebrated novelists in over 200 images plus historical commentary, Austen trivia and a little bit of wit. There are facts such as Northanger Abbey's working title was Susan, written 1798-1803, revised 1816, published 1818, 'composed when Jane Austen was in her early twenties, Northanger Abbey is a bridge between the rollicking humour of the stories Jane wrote as a young girl and her more mature work. It is an affectionately comic parody of the gothic and sentimental novels popular in her time as well as a coming-of-age story of the naive but loveable heroine, Catherine Morland.' See the Japanese translation book jacket of Pride and Prejudice from 2010 with the image of a lady with her hair in a neat bun, showing a bit of decolletage as a Regency lady might but in a more woodblock print style with the title translated. There is a 1951 Finnish edition with a watercolour illustration of Captain Wentworth glowering over his shoulder at Anne Elliot; a 1970 Spanish edition of Pride and Prejudice which brings in an iconic black bowler hat of Magritte; and the BBC 1980 mini-series Pride and Prejudice on the cover of a Fontana paperback. Or you might prefer the beautiful MGM Gone with the Wind style front cover, the Penguin Classics Deluxe edition and other timeless classics, some illustrated, some quirky like the ultraviolet Zombie Mayhem classic regency romance series which are still huge sellers, Marvel comics, Daily Telegraph editions, Soho Press and other small press Internet and eBook editions, Bloomsbury Classics, Vintage and Hesperus, Everyman and Modern Library Classics, Reader's Digest, Oxford World Classics, Virago and of course Penguin and Pan or the Brock Lithograph edition from 1892 and George Allen's 1894 truly iconic Peacock Editions featuring the stunning line drawings of Hugh Thomson, one of the most popular illustrators of his time. For all Bibliophiles, this is truly a celebration of books of intrinsic merit from the 19th century right through to modern productions up to 1989. Bibliophile do of course stock the budget priced new Wordsworth Classics also with their own beautiful jacket designs. 224 large pages in glamorous landscape format, hundreds of colour illus.
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Regarded by many as the greatest novel in the English language, Ulysses was banned as obscene, officially or unofficially, throughout most of the English-speaking world for over a decade. Being forbidden is part of what made Joyce's novel so transformative. It changed not only the course of literature in the century that followed, but the very definition of literature in the eyes of the law. This is the biography of that book, charting the development of Ulysses from the first tug of inspiration in 1906 when it was just an idea for a short story - a Homeric name appended to someone Joyce met in Dublin one drunken night - to the novel's astounding growth during and after World War One as Joyce wrote out its 732 pages in notebooks in more than a dozen apartments in Trieste, Zurich and Paris. It was serialised in a New York magazine, monitored and censored even by its most vocal advocate, modernism's unstinting ringleader, Ezra Pound. A portion was burned in Paris while it was still only a manuscript draft, and it was convicted of obscenity in New York before it was even a book. Joyce's woes inspired Sylvia Beach, an American expatriate running a small book shop in Paris, to publish Ulysses when everyone else including Virginia Woolf refused. Government authorities on both sides of the Atlantic confiscated and burned more than a thousand copies of the novel - the exact number will never be known. Other countries soon followed. Most copies came from Shakespeare and Company, Sylvia Beach's Paris Bookshop, 'stacked like dynamite in a revolutionary cellar.' James Joyce lived in exile, his supporters on the edge of the law. This book tells the painful yet exhilarating story and its place as a masterpiece in world literature. Joyce refused to yield to the demands of burgeoning governments and markets, to the laws that restricted the circulation of literature and to the readers that made literature a professional option in the first place. The body was central to his work because he was a captive of both its erotic pleasures and its intense pains. He himself suffered from a swelling of the iris which brought about episodes of acute glaucoma almost to the point of blindness. He collapsed on city streets and rolled on the floor in pain during these recurrent 'eye attacks' and feared they would end his career. When Sylvia Beach launched an official protest against the piracy of Ulysses in 1927, 167 writers from around the world signed it and T. S. Eliot promoted Joyce throughout literary London and Samuel Beckett took dictation from Joyce when he couldn't see and several donors helped Joyce when times were bleak. It took a transformation of artists, readers, patrons, the publishing industry and the law to make modernism mainstream and until now the fight to publish Ulysses has never been told in its entirety. 434pp, paperback, photos.

Sub-titled 'A Story of Education, Evacuation and Endurance in the Second World War', the book marks the first time that the extraordinary tales of drama and trauma experienced by many English schools has been collected into a single book. It has been made possible by the Association of Representatives of Old Pupils' Societies (AROPS). Founded in 1971, this group of old boys' and old girls' organisations had at the time of publication more than 260 members. It decided to conduct a survey to discover what actually happened during the years 1939-45 and tracked the movements of schools and the stories that emerged covered a truly amazing diversity of experiences. Here are schools in the heart of the country who are virtually untouched by the global conflict, schools in towns and cities where staff suffered the knowledge that, after the previous night's air raids, they would not be seeing some of their pupils again, and there are stories of hard work, commitment, bravery and doggedness and often humour. The extreme disruption and privations on these young lives is difficult to imagine today. With over 200 contributions, the list of schools begins with Adcote School in Shrewsbury, and includes Batley Grammar, City of London School for Girls, Croydon High School, Lancing College, Pocklington School in York which hosted Hymers College from Hull, Walthamstow Hall in Sevenoaks to Wycombe Abbey School High Wycombe where for four years girls spent their lives in enforced educational exile at such schools as Malvern Girls and Cheltenham Ladies' College. Wycombe Abbey rejoiced at their reunion in May 1946. Entries differ in length. Slim 80 pages, 20 archive photos of good quality, 2005 rare Phillimore publication.