Joseph Delaney used to be an English teacher, before becoming the best-selling author of the Spook's series, which has been published in 30 countries and sold over 4.5 million copies worldwide. The first book, The Spook's Apprentice, was adapted into a major motion picture starring Jeff Bridges and Julianne Moore.

Joseph Delaney

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John James Audubon

The finest editions available of the world's greatest classics from Homer to Achebe, Tolstoy to Ishiguro, Proust to Pullman, printed on a fine acid-free, cream-wove paper that will not discolour with age, with sewn, full cloth bindings and silk ribbon markers, and at remarkably low prices. All books include substantial introductions by major scholars and contemporary writers, and comparative chronologies of literary and historical context.

John James Audubon (1785-1851) was for half a century America's dominant wildlife artist. His seminal Birds of America, a collection of 435 life-size prints, is still a standard work, and the name Audubon remains synonymous with birds and bird conservation the world over. Born in Haiti, the illegitimate son of a French sea-captain, he was raised in France and sailed to America at the age of 18 where he went into business and began his study of birds. In 1819 he was briefly jailed for bankruptcy; with no other prospects, he set off on his epic quest to depict America's avifauna, with nothing but his gun, artist's materials, and a young assistant. Floating down the Mississippi, he lived a rugged hand-to-mouth existence while his devoted wife, Lucy, earned money as a tutor to wealthy plantation families. In 1826 he sailed with his partly finished collection to England. Lionized as the 'American woodsman', he hit just the right Romantic note for the era, and was an overnight success, finding printers for his book first in Edinburgh, then London. It was a classic American tale of triumph over adversity. 
Here are vivid 'bird biographies', his correspondence with Lucy, journal accounts of his dramatic river journeys and hunting trips with the Osage Indians, and a generous sampling of brief stories that have long been out of print, 'The Burning of the Forests' and 'Kentucky Barbecue on the Fourth of July' among them. The Audubon Reader is an unforgettable encounter with early America: with its wildlife and birds, with its people and its primordial wilderness.

The Audubon Reader

Pocket clothbound volumes from the world's greatest poets, and with a stunning range of anthologies. Each volume has an elegant jacket, full cloth sewn binding, silk ribbon marker and headbands, with gold stamping on front and spine and decorative endpapers. In size, price and presentation they make ideal gifts and are a joy to read and collect. More than eighty titles in print.

Rivers were the arteries of our first civilizations - the Tigris and Euphrates of Mesopotamia, India's Ganges, Egypt's Nile, the Yellow River of China - and have nourished modern cities from London to New York, so it is natural that poets have for centuries drawn essential meanings and metaphors from their endless currents. 
 
 English poets from Shakespeare and Dryden, Wordsworth and Byron to Ted Hughes, John Betjeman and Alice Oswald; Irish poets - Eavan Boland, Seamus Heaney, Paul Muldoon, to name but a few; Scottish and Welsh poets from Henry Vaughan and Robert Louis Stevenson to Robin Robertson and Gillian Clarke. A whole raft of American poets from Whitman, Emerson and Emily Dickinson to Langston Hughes, Mary Oliver, Natasha Trethewey and Grace Paley. Folk songs. African-American spirituals. Poems from ancient Egypt and Rome. From medieval China and Japan. And a truly international selection of modern poets from Europe (France, Italy, Russia, Serbia), India, Africa, Australia and South and Central America, all combining in celebration of the rivers of the world. From the Mississippi to the Limpopo. From the Dart to the Danube. 
 
 Plunge in.

River Poems

Hesiod (Work and Days) and Virgil’s Georgics set the scene in the early pages with their poetry about farming, while nymphs and shepherds cavort through the Arcadian landscapes of Theocritus, ushering in the pastoral genre. Appropriately the book ends with Alice Oswald, whose much admired nature poetry reflects the influence of classical poets. 
 
From Chaucer onwards English poetry is full of the countryside. Here are plenty of fine examples from major poets, including Shakespeare, Spenser and Sidney; Jonson and Milton; Pope, Gray and Blake; Tennyson, Hopkins and Housman; Robert Frost, Edward Thomas, Ivor Gurney and Dylan Thomas. Alongside them, editor Paul Quarrie has placed some delightful gems from poets less well-known – Ambrose Philips’s ‘Description of Winter’, Margaret Cavendish’s ‘A Landscape’, James Henry’s ‘The Pleasure of Pigeons’ and poems by Felicia Hemans, Charlotte Mew, John Davidson and Kim Taplin, to name but a few. A lively choice of folk songs and anonymous poems about farming life adds to the mix, as do telling extracts from longer poems penned in the 18th century - the peak period for rural poetry.

Poems of the Countryside

John Muir

This volume of John Muir's selected writings chronicles the key turning points in his life and study of the American wilderness. The Story of My Boyhood and Youth is Muir's account of his childhood on a Wisconsin farm, where his interest in nature was first piqued; in The Mountains of California, The Yosemite, and Travels in Alaska we follow him on long journeys into stunning mountain ranges and valleys, where he records native flora and fauna and finds proof of his theories of the effect of glaciers on landscape formation. These four full-length works--along with a selection of important essays also included here--helped galvanize American naturalists, leading to the founding of the Sierra Club and several national parks. In these pages, written with meticulous thoroughness and an impassioned lyricism, we witness Muir's awakening to the incredible beauty of our planet, and the honing of an eye turned as acutely toward the scientific as the spiritual.

Selected Writings

Oliver Sacks

Neurologist Oliver Sacks investigates the complex relationship between the brain and the mind and, almost impossibly, manages to make his subject matter not only accessible to the general reader, but utterly absorbing. The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat tells the stories of individuals suffering from perceptual and intellectual disorders: patients who have lost their memories and with them the greater part of their pasts; who are no longer able to recognize people and common objects; whose limbs seem alien to them; who lack some skills yet are gifted with uncanny artistic or mathematical talents. Their struggles are recounted with sympathy and respect. A great healer, Sacks never loses sight of medicine's ultimate responsibility to assist 'the suffering, afflicted, fighting human subject'. 
A work of profound humanity.

The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat

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