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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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

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.

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