Steve Roud was Local Studies Librarian for the London Borough of Croydon and served as Honorary Librarian of the Folklore Society for over fifteen years. He has been researching British folklore for over thirty years and is the joint author of the Oxford Dictionary of English Folklore, plus other books on traditional drama and folk song, and the Penguin Guide to the Superstitions of Britain and Ireland, which won the Katharine Briggs Folklore Award in 2004. His publications include London Lore (2008) and The Lore of the Playground (2010). He also compiles the Folk Song Index and the Broadside Index, two internationally acclaimed computer databases of traditional folk and popular song. He lives in Sussex.

Steve Roud

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Mario Gmurr

Learn something new about yourself today. 
 
What does your workspace say about you? The most revealing clues aren’t on your desk or on your computer. Rather, they’re those paperclips in your bin – the ones you’ve fiddled with, probably without even realising it. 
 
When psychiatrist Mario Gmür started scrutinising paperclips bent by his patients, he found that they actually reveal multitudes about the creator’s character, quirks and hidden desires. Are you an optimist? A pushover? A Lothario? A bully? 
 
After studying the links between paperclip shapes and distinct character types, Gmür has created a delightful collection of quizzes and psychological profiles that allow readers to discover their innermost truths using these miniature metallic sculptures. 
 
Part Rorschach test and part humorous horoscope, The Paperclip Test offers an amusing yet astonishingly insightful personality gauge for anyone who has ever bent a paperclip without thinking about what secrets that tiny shape might hold.

The Paperclip Test

David Lodge

When the university merged his Department of Linguistics with English, Professor Desmond Bates took early retirement, but he is not enjoying it. He misses the purposeful routine of the academic year, and has lost his appetite for research. 
 
His wife Winifred's late-flowering career goes from strength to strength, reducing his role to that of escort and househusband, while the rejuvenation of her appearance makes him uneasily conscious of the age gap between them. The monotony of his days is relieved only by wearisome journeys to London to check on the welfare of his eighty-nine-year-old father, an ex dance musician who stubbornly refuses to move from the house he is patently unable to live in with safety. 
 
But these discontents are nothing compared to the affliction of hearing loss, which is a constant source of domestic friction and social embarrassment. In the popular imagination, he observes, deafness is comic, as blindness is tragic, but for the deaf person himself it is no joke. It is through his deafness that Desmond inadvertently gets involved with a young woman whose wayward and unpredictable behaviour threatens to destabilise his life completely. 
 
Funny and moving by turns, Deaf Sentence is a brilliant account of one man's effort to come to terms with deafness and death, ageing and mortality, the comedy and tragedy of human lives.

Deaf Sentence

Gerry Stergiopoulos

'I look at the way some women behave when they're dating, and I'm sorry girls, but it's an absolute car crash. The rules of successful dating are simple, but I bet you've been breaking them all.' 
 
After seeing too many of his female friends left all dressed up with nowhere to go, Gerry Stergiopoulos, every woman's ultimate best gay friend, has gone on a quest to understand why so many fabulous women have a catastrophic love life. 
 
Gerry unflinchingly enters a world of waxing, Spanx pants, dodgy self-help books, internet dating, wingwomen and smirting, to bring you his tried-and-tested History Channel technique, his perfect killer one-liners, the ingenious blackjack-based Scottish Shower system, the unbreakable three-month rule and even some sound lessons from his native Greece. 
 
Treat Them Mean and Keep Them Keen is the only dating book that gives it to you straight: it tells you what to hide and just how much to reveal, what to do and when to do it. You might be shocked at what Gerry suggests - but his advice works.

Treat them Mean and Keep them Keen

Margarita Woodley

Crafting has never been more popular and Maggy Woodley, the creative force behind Red Ted, is passionate about making things with her children, Max, four, and Pippa, two. 
 
Using recycled materials and bits and bobs collected when out and about, here are over 60 utterly irresistible things to make with your kids. From adorable peanut shell finger puppets to walnut babies, loo roll marionettes and egg carton fairy lights, fabric mache bowls, stick men and shell crabs, stone people, and many more, these are projects for all the family to have fun with. And what's more, the end results are so cute and desirable that they look great around the home, or make wonderfully unique and personal gifts. 
 
With a funky, modern design and vibrant full colour photography throughout, this is a must-have addition to every young family's bookshelf.

Red Ted Art

Cute and Easy Crafts for Kids

Tom Hickman

Throughout history man has revered his penis as his 'most precious ornament'. 
 
Yet, ambivalently, his penis has always been the source of man's deepest neuroses too. Do women find it, in the erect state, inherently ridiculous? Why can't a man be certain his penis will stand and deliver when he commands? If and when it steadfastly refuses, what can he do to remedy the situation? And then, of course, there's the matter of size... 
 
To possess a penis, Sophocles said, is to be 'chained to a madman'. God's Doodle examines the schizophrenic relationship between man and this madman - and the joint relationship this odd couple has with the female sex. 
 
God's Doodle is the tale of the penis and the ups and downs of history - the macabre and the bloodcurdling, the funny and the sad, distilled from myth, world cultures, religion, literature, science, medicine and contemporary life - all told with mordant wit.

God's Doodle

The Life and Times of the Penis

Bill Clegg

The goal is ninety: just ninety clean and sober days to loosen the hold of the addiction that caused Bill Clegg to lose everything. With seventy-three days in rehab behind him he returns to New York and attends two or three meetings each day. It is in these refuges that he befriends essential allies including the seemingly unshakably sober Asa, and Polly, who struggles daily with her own cycle of recovery and relapse. 
 
At first, the support is not enough: Clegg relapses for the first time with only three days left, turning his calendar back to day one. Written with uncompromised immediacy, Ninety Days begins where Portrait of an Addict as a Young Man ends - and tells the wrenching story of Bill Clegg's battle to reclaim his life. As any recovering addict knows, hitting rock bottom is just the beginning.

Ninety Days

Philippa Rice

Baby: A Soppy Story is a collection of comics by New York Times bestselling graphic novelist Philippa Rice, based on real-life moments with her baby. 
 
It is a collection about the small, intimate, heart-warming experiences of a couple expecting their first baby. From planning and pregnancy to childbirth and raising a newborn, Baby focuses on the everyday moments of parenthood. 
 
Easily read between naps, it is the perfect gift for new or expectant parents.

Baby

A Soppy Story

Elizabeth McCracken

'This is the happiest story in the world with the saddest ending.' 
 
A prize-winning, successful novelist in her 30s, Elizabeth McCracken was happy to be an itinerant writer and self-proclaimed spinster. Then she fell in love, got married, and continued her life of writing, travelling, and teaching with her husband.Two years ago, she found herself in a remote part of France, waiting for the birth of her first child. 
 
This book is about what happens next. In the ninth month of her pregnancy, a baby is lost.Just over a year later, a baby is born. In a profoundly moving display of humour, heart, and unfailing generosity, McCracken tenderly presents her story: a story of true love and unfathomable sadness, of courageous recovery and bittersweet moments, of steadfast memories and deep affection.Grief walks through these pages of this remarkable book, but so do happiness and hope.

An Exact Replica of a Figment of My Imagination

Sofka Zinovieff

Faringdon House in Oxfordshire was the home of Lord Berners, composer, writer, painter, friend of Stravinsky and Gertrude Stein, a man renowned for his eccentricity – masks, practical jokes, a flock of multi-coloured doves – and his homosexuality. Before the war he made Faringdon an aesthete’s paradise, where exquisite food was served to many of the great minds, beauties and wits of the day. 
 
Since the early thirties his companion there was Robert Heber-Percy, twenty-eight years his junior, wildly physical, unscholarly, a hothead who rode naked through the grounds, loved cocktails and nightclubs, and was known to all as the Mad Boy. If the two men made an unlikely couple, at a time when homosexuality was illegal, the addition to the household in 1942 of a pregnant Jennifer Fry, a high society girl known to be ‘fast’, as Robert’s wife was simply astounding. 
 
After Victoria was born the marriage soon foundered (Jennifer later married Alan Ross). Berners died in 1950, leaving Robert in charge of Faringdon, aided by a ferocious Austrian housekeeper who strove to keep the same culinary standards in a more austere age. This was the world Sofka Zinovieff, Victoria’s daughter, a typical child of the sixties, first encountered at the age of seventeen. Eight years later, to her astonishment, Robert told her he was leaving her Faringdon House. 
 
Her book about Faringdon and its people is marvellously witty and full of insight, bringing to life a vanished world and the almost fantastical people who lived in it.

The Mad Boy, Lord Berners, My Grandmother And Me

Claire Eastham

"An electric, warm, comforting and funny handbook on panic and how to cope and live alongside it. Accessible, reassuring, practical and relieving." Laura Dockrill 
 
"I wish I had this book when I was 18 and having panic attacks. It's smart, witty, informative and importantly, it lets you know that if you have panic attacks too... you are not alone." Dr Sophie Mort 
 
 
An uplifting, personal account on living with panic and how to stop it defining you. 
 
'You're dying. F**k, you're having a heart attack, or is this a stroke? You're going crazy, you are right this second losing your mind. It's game over. Get out' All the work I'd put into preparing for this interview, my job, my career, money, future - it all seemed insignificant next to the burning desire to get out of the room and run. 
 
Award-winning blogger and author of We're All Mad Here, Claire Eastham is an expert on panic. She's not a doctor or an academic, but over a seven-year period, she has experienced 371 panic attacks (and counting), and learnt a thing or two along the way. 
 
Part memoir, part guide, F**k I Think I'm Dying is an intimate, honest and ultimately uplifting exploration into panic attacks. In practical thematic chapters Claire covers the crisis points where panic can hit: job interviews, social situations, attacks at night. She interviews a host of people - scientists, professors, dieticians, psychologists and people who struggle with panic - to anatomise how panic works and how it can be managed. 
 
Frank, funny and blazing, Claire's story will speak to all those seeking to reclaim their power. With a little work and understanding, panic attacks do not have to control you.

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