BRITISH LIBRARY

(H/B) THE PHILOSOPHY OF COFFEE
The Philosophy of Coffee is the perfect gift for coffee lovers everywhere and includes chapters on the rise of the coffeehouse, legal bans on coffee, Brazil's domination of the world coffee trade and the birth of the espresso. It also discusses variations in taste and brewing techniques with an accessible and engaging tone. (From the publisher)...
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(H/B) THE GOTHIC TALES OF H. P. LOVECRAFT
H.P. Lovecraft is best known for his tales of cosmic horror, in which unnameable nightmares torment the limits of human consciousness. This mastery of weird and unspeakable terror is underpinned by the writer's sizeable contribution to Gothic fiction. This new collection of Lovecraft's stories is the first to concentrate on his Gothic writing and includes tales from the beginning to the very end of the author's career. The writer's weird vision mixes brilliantly with the trappings of earlier Gothic horror to form innovative mosaics of frig...
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(P/B) ROARINGS FROM FURTHER OUT
Four of the best novellas from one of the most underrated names in horror and weird fiction - writers such as H. P. Lovecraft rated Blackwood as one of the very best writers of the genre. This title features an introduction and notes contextualizing this characterful author "It is my firm opinion that?The Willows is the greatest weird tale ever written." - H.P. Lovecraft From one of the greatest and most prolific authors of twentieth century weird fiction come four of the very best strange stories ever told. The Willows: Two men become str...
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(H/B) ANIMALS
Artworks, manuscripts, printed works and wildlife sound recordings come together in this major compendium of the greatest and strangest representations of animals on record. Eighty detailed case studies highlight celebrated works, including John James Audubon's The Birds of America, Matthew Paris's Liber additamentorum, Maria Sibylla Merian's Metamorphosis (1705), Mark Catesby's The Natural History of Carolina, Florida and the Bahama Islands, as well as letters from Charles Darwin, the Baburnama, translated by Mirza Abd al-Rahim Khan, Japa...
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(P/B) Tea on Sunday
On a cold winter's afternoon, Alberta Mansbridge waits at a table set with teacups for eight, musing over her guests. The ex-jailbird Barry, the nephew and his ghastly new flibbertijibbet of a wife, the Italian playboy, the old friend with whom she had so recently fallen out... Alberta returns upstairs to get herself ready. When the guests arrive, the door is locked and there is no response to their knocking. Alberta has been murdered, and with no sign of robbery or break in, the killer must have been somebody she let into the house hersel...
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(P/B) Metropolitan Mysteries: A Casebook of London's Detectives
Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes John Dickson Carr's Dr Gideon Fell Baroness Orczy's Old Man in the Corner Anthony Berkeley's Inspector Moresby Josephine Bell's Dr David Wintringham. The streets of London have been home to many great detectives since the days of Sherlock Holmes and Watson, and the exploits of these city sleuths have flourished in the short story from. Featuring a roster of Scotland Yard's meticulous best, a cohort of daring doctors and a handful of characterful private investigators, this new collection of short storie...
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(H/B) THE PHILOSOPHY OF TATTOOS
The Philosophy of Tattoos' explores tattooing as an innate human impulse throughout history, following its suppression and revival in cultures around the world. A bold and nuanced story of colonial oppression, social deviance and tattooing in the age of social media, it features original tattoo designs from London-based tattoo artist Luca Ortis, as well as illustration from the British library collections. 'History, it seems, is seldom written by the tattooed.' In this impressively broad yet personal account, John Miller explores tattooing...
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(H/B) THE PHILOSOPHY OF TEA
How did drinking the infusions of a unique plant from China become a vital part of everyday life? This gift book presents an entertaining and illuminating introduction to the history and culture of tea, from its origins in the Far East to the flavours and properties of different varieties, and the rituals of tea preparation and drinking around the world. This simple hot beverage is suffused with artistic and religious overtones. The Chinese Ch'a Ching gave very precise guidelines to the preparation and sipping of tea, and the Japanese tea ...
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(P/B) The Horned God
. . . and then the music was so loud, so beautiful that I couldn't think of anything else. I was completely lost to the music, enveloped by melody which was part of Pan. In 1894, Arthur Machen's landmark novella The Great God Pan was published, sparking the sinister resurgence of the pagan goat god. Writers of the late-nineteenth to mid-twentieth centuries, such as Oscar Wilde, E. M. Forster and Margery Lawrence, took the god's rebellious influence as inspiration to spin beguiling tales of social norms turned upside down and ancient ecolog...
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(H/B) The Book by Design
The Book by Design celebrates the book in all its forms, whether manuscript, scroll, concertina, movable, codex, digital. Based around 20 significant items in the Library's collections, this new publication traces major moments in the history of this remarkable invention. Each one has a distinctive and successful design, ranging from famous examples, such as the Lindisfarne Gospels and The Grammar of Ornament to lesser-known formats such as Southeast Asian palm leaf books and Russian futurist wallpaper books. Interspersed between the main ...
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(P/B) Lessons in Crime: Academic Mysteries
'Dr Greeby was found lying dead there, with his lecture-notes scattered all round him and brickbat in a woollen sock lying beside his head.' An Oxford Master slain on campus during Pentecost. A pupil and teacher face off with a conniving uncle suspected of murder. A sociology student turns the tables on the lies and fictions of an English undergraduate. In the hush of the college library and the cacophonies of school halls, tensions run higher than is healthy and academic achievement can be to die for. Delving into the stacks and tomes of ...
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(P/B) MYSTERY IN WHITE
On Christmas Eve, heavy snowfall brings a train to a halt near the village of Hemmersby. Several passengers take shelter in a deserted country house, where the fire has been lit and the table laid for tea - but no one is at home. Trapped together for Christmas, the passengers are seeking to unravel the secrets of the empty house when a murderer strikes in their midst. This classic Christmas mystery is republished for the first time since the 1930s, with an introduction by the award-winning crime writer Martin Edwards. (From the publisher)...
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(H/B) MEDIEVAL MONSTERS
From satyrs and sea creatures to griffins and dragons, monsters lay at the heart of the medieval world. Believed to dwell in exotic, remote areas, these inexplicable parts of God's creation aroused fear, curiosity and wonder in equal measure. Powerfully captured in the illustrations of manuscripts, such as bestiaries, travel books and devotional works, they continue to delight audiences today with their vitality and humour. Medieval Monsters shows how strange creatures sparked artists' imaginations to remarkable heights. Half-human hybrids...
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(P/B) Evil Roots
Strangling vines and meat-hungry flora fill this unruly garden of strange stories, selected for their significance as the seeds of the villainous (or perhaps just misunderstood) 'killer plant' in fiction, film and video games. Step within to marvel at Charlotte Perkins Gilman's giant wistaria and H. G. Wells' hungry orchid; hear the calls of the ethereal women of the wood, and the frightful drone of the moaning lily; and do tread carefully around E. Nesbit's wandering creepers Every strain of vegetable threat (and one deadly fungus) can ...
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(P/B) HOW TO SURVIVE A CLASSIC CRIME NOVEL
What would you do if you found yourself in the world of the classic crime novel? How would you avoid being framed for murder - or evade an untimely demise? Let classic crime expert Kate Jackson give you the tools to survive the golden age murder mystery. From dinner parties to detective interrogations, you'll need to know how to keep your wits about you in a world of red herrings, hidden identities and one too many suspicious butlers. . . Complete with original illustrations by Joanna Lisowiec, this insightful parody of the genre takes sur...
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(P/B) Fear Stalks the Village
Ambling along the lanes of a sleepy village in the Downs, passing cosy Tudor cottages rustling with wisteria, a novelist imagines the sordid truth hidden behind the quaint, rustic facade. Her musings are confirmed when a spate of anonymous poison pen letters shocks the community, turning neighbour against neighbour and embroiling everyone from the rector and the 'queen of the village' Decima Asprey to the high-born Scudamores. With venom in the air, the perpetrator a mystery and dark secrets threatening to come to light, a shadow of shame ...
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(P/B) A PHANTOM LOVER
An anthology of the best stories, snippets and imaginative pieces by Vernon Lee, the pen name of Violet Paget. During her lifetime Violet Paget, who wrote as Vernon Lee, was referred to as 'the greatest of modern exponents of the supernatural in fiction', and yet today she remains on the periphery of the genre. This collection of her uniquely weird short stories and dark fantasies proves why she was once considered among the best of the genre, and why she deserves to return to those ranks today. From modernised folk tales such as 'Marsyas ...
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(P/B) Before the Fact
'Some women give birth to murderers, some go to bed with them, and some marry them. Lina Aysgarth had lived with her husband for nearly eight years before she realized that she was married to a murderer.' Following the success of Malice Aforethought, novelist Anthony Berkeley Cox returned to his Francis Iles pen-name for another experiment in the inverted mystery. Where Malice Aforethought is a study of murder from the perpetrator's perspective, Before the Fact is a masterful tale of the suspicions of a possible victim and her impressions ...
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(P/B) Stories for Summer
Join a host of female writers in celebrating the sunshine months of the year. As a sister volume to Stories for Winter, this collection of 15 short stories takes its inspiration from the holiday season. Grab a copy as you head off to the beach or to lie by the pool and spend time with female protagonists as they navigate life during the hot summer days and long balmy evenings. In keeping with the spirit of the Women Writers series, the stories are penned by authors whose writing originally appeared in books and magazines in the twentieth c...
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(P/B) Out of the Past
A tale of callous murder and deranged revenge rings out from fifteenth century Italy. A witch-finder's great triumph is also the herald of his own doom in sixteenth-century Britain. A prisoner's fate at the hands of the Inquisition in seventeenth-century Mexico leads to an encounter with the bestial and bizarre beneath the waves. Readers and writers have been fascinated with the past long before the term 'historical fiction' became recognised as its own genre of writing. In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, tellers of strange tales s...
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