This true bibliophile tells her personal story of salvation and picnics, ravioli and freedom, Dickens and survival. At the age of 14, Laura Freeman was diagnosed with anorexia, but even when recovery seemed impossible, the one appetite she never lost was her love of reading. Book by book, Laura slowly rediscovered how to enjoy food and life through literature. Always intelligent and full of enthusiasm, her highly engaging memoir is packed with astute insights into the books she has read and a rediscovery of the joy of food. She menders into chocolate in books, discovering Virginia Woolf's criticism, polemic in fiction. 'At dinner, when at home, Woolf has omelettes and good coffee. Luncheon might be rissoles and chocolate custard.' There is no guilt here in her consumption of hardbacks and paperbacks. 'If you were to ask me what I was doing among the Portobello book stalls at half past five in the morning, I would have to invoke the defence of a late-night fridge raider caught with a tub of chocolate-chip ice cream.' 260pp, paperback.

'You should have gardens where you can stroll and, on occasion, host banquets...where you can arrange rare and exotic plants with care. In these places, you can especially appreciate the careful arrangement of myrtle, boxwood, citrus trees and rosemary...' Giovanni Pontano (1494). Biblical paradise on earth, here are holy figures and flowers from The Spinola Hours, the Flemish glorious colour illumination on the borders of a prayer book. Here are gardens in life and literature, trellised arches woven with flowers and grapes decorating the borders of images in these books of hours and laypersons' private prayer books. Red flowers are likely the rose campion, associated with the Crucifixion. Dreaming of Gardens sees the Romance of the Rose, an allegorical, chivalric poem that celebrates the mythical garden of Love, with illuminated copies featuring a variety of scenes that took place inside and outside the garden walls. The chapter on Villas, Châteaux and Courtly Spaces shows the illumination of the natural world and the Model Book of Calligraphy where the illustrations rival the script in beauty and complexity. Painted with spellbinding precision, we appreciate the pink and yellow striped tulip by Joris Hoefnagel whose highly accurate illuminations preserved a floral record of species from as far away as modern-day Turkey and Peru. Here are garden peas to lantern plants and rare gems like a European flower called Herb Robert. A beautifully produced J. Paul Getty Museum publication with glossy pages and dripping with colour throughout, 78 large pages.

Printed monthly in The Believer, Hornby's book reviews are suffused with wit, ire and loving insight and his choices often strike into the deeper and odder reaches of the literary world, big books which are ridiculously unfunny but also books that can bring themselves 'all the way through the long march to your soul.' Sub-titled 'Fourteen Months of Massively Witty Adventures In Reading', by the author of the bestselling novels About A Boy and High Fidelity including excerpts from his favourite new books by Sarah Vowell, Jennie Erdal and others. As rich and varied as the world of literature itself, Hornby is perfectly cast as both tour guide and host, and insatiable bibliophiles will devour his columns with delight. Here is his popular collection of essays as Nick Hornby continues the feverish survey of his swollen bookshelves offering funny, intelligent and unblinkered accounts of the stuff he's been reading, with revelations on the intellectual scene and English football in equal measure. In February 2005 he ponders the mystique of Bob Dylan and makes a point about Philip Roth; by May he ponders bird books and true crime then Capote and Gourevitch. He discovers Adrian Mole and considers why he doesn't understand science fiction, and asks if Martin Amis and Marilynne Robinson are modern classics. He ponders the profound effect of literature on life and interesting philosophical debate about blow jobs in a terrific opening scene from Jess Walter's novel. He reads about American lives, Anthony Burgess about Michael Frayn, the foul-mouthed Philip Larkin and rereads William Cooper. 153pp, paperback.

Drama, comedy and tragedy in this, the second edition concerning the best-attested generation of Roman writers and the community around Cicero in the period from 50BCE when the autocratic control of Caesar as dictator forced the old elite out of politics and stimulated its intellectuals to new writing in the prose genres of historiography, antiquarian research, and philosophy. Cicero and Varro were the two most learned men and most voracious readers of their age who had been thoroughly educated in Greek and existing Latin literature and who wrote extensive works in several literary genres. Cicero began and made his career with court speeches but moved on to political advocacy then to dialogues and treatises on oratory and education for public life, on public science, theology and Roman history. Varro seems to have begun with lighter work - satiric usually dramatic sketches on Roman themes, then advanced to serious literary and historical research. It was enthusiasm for classical literature that led Petrarch and Boccaccio to seek out and copy texts of Cicero and Varro including informal letters. The book studies the texts of the Middle Republic, of Naevius and Ennius, Plautus and Terrance, Pacuvius, Accius and Lucilius and illustrates what happened to Roman secular literature after Apuleius and Gellius and how it was received even by committed Christian writers. The book covers nationalism, private and public patronage, the first real histories, love and elegy, Ovid the scapegoat and the sorrows of Augustus, didactic and descriptive poetry, the divergence of theatre and drama, Pliny's letters, the public world of the senator and orator, the world of the auditorium and more. And the book discusses the habits of Roman readers and their access to literature from booksellers and copyists to pirated publications and libraries. With a new Preface and updated bibliography, 340pp, illus. softback.

Sub-titled 'Two Years of Reading Begat More Reading', presented in easily digestible, hysterical monthly instalments. This is the final collection of Hornby's monthly column for The Believer magazine about the books he has bought and the books he has read. It begins in August 2006 and the challenges of reading during a World Cup month, knowing too much about the author whose work you are reading, taking seriously bad books, literature's obstruction by sex, his musical preferences, recommendations from Stephen Frears, Orwell on Dickens, good wine and Sartre, the third greatest children's book of the last 70 years, and blank-verse werewolf novels. A companion to Housekeeping vs. The Dirt, 131pp, paperback.

From growing up as an orphan in 1920s New York, to serving in the Navy at the D-Day landings in Normandy, to a vagabond life drinking in Parisian cafés, to befriending America's greatest counter-cultural writers, Little Boy has seen it all. 'Grown Boy came into his own voice and let loose his word-horde pent-up within him.' This is the story of one man's extraordinary life, steeped in the exhilarating energy of the Beats, a magical cascade of language that gleams with Walt Whitman's visionary spirit, a meditation of iconic publisher and poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti's 99 years on the planet, rich in wisdom, emotion and memories. 'A spiralling stream of consciousness that celebrates the divine transcendence of poetry and an all too human coming-of-agelessness. His mentoring example and love of the written word is illuminating and inspirational.' Ferlinghetti, born 1919, was the co-founder of City Lights Booksellers in San Francisco and was arrested on obscenity charges for publishing Allen Ginsberg's book Howl, and he has written over 40 poetry collections. This memoir was first published in 2019 and he died in February 2021. 179pp.

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.

Eleanor Farjeon mischievously tilts our workaday world to reveal its wonders and follies. Her selection of her favourite stories describes powerful - and sometimes exceedingly silly - monarchs and commoners who are every bit their match; musicians and dancers who live for art rather than earthly reward; and a goldfish who wishes to "marry the Moon, surpass the Sun, and possess the World." Other stories are The King and the Corn, the Girl who Kissed the Peach Tree, the Barrel Organ, the Little Dressmaker, the Little Lady's Roses, the Lovebirds, the Glass Peacock, Old Surly and the Boy, and the Connemara Donkey among the 27 stories. For ages 9-12 years and a gem for reading aloud. Line art illus. by the wonderful artist Edward Ardizzone, Afterword by Rumer Godden. Remainder mark. Paperback, 328Pp. A rare import.

The publishing house of John Murray was founded in Fleet Street in 1768 and remained a family business for over seven generations. Published in its 250th year to celebrate this remarkable achievement, this book is a collection of some of the best letters from hundreds of thousands held in the John Murray Archive and elsewhere, intended to entertain and inspire, and never intended for publication. They reveal not only the story of some of the most interesting and influential books of all time, but also the remarkable friendships and occasional animosities between author and publisher, readers, editors, printers and illustrators. Correspondents include Charles Darwin, Jane Austen, Lord Byron, John Betjeman, David Livingstone, Freya Stark, Patrick Leigh Fermor, even Queen Victoria plus Walter Scott, Caroline Lamb, James Hogg, William Wordsworth, Thomas Carlyle, Mary Somerville 'The queen of science', George Bernard Shaw Man and Superman, and 'I've been bribed to go on RTE' from Dervla Murphy. 'One letter describes the excitement when Paddy Leigh Fermor tracked down Lord Byron's slippers in Missolonghi and sent back a tracing of them for my father to check against Byron's boots in our collection.' By 2006, the 'dynasty' of the Murrays consisted of over 500,000 manuscript letters as well as manuscripts of many of their authors? works. It was the largest private publishing archive in the world covering writers, explorers, scientists, politicians, and archaeologists. A super book to dip into time and again, 298pp, illus.

How do you find a book when you can't recall the title...or the author? This homage to a common reader's dilemma is a gift the booklover in your life won't soon forget. Inspired by this torturous predicament, artist Marina Luz creates paintings of books based on the descriptions we use when we can't remember their titles - and finds the quirky, vague, and often hilarious language we come up with in these moments. This volume collects dozens of these imaginary books into a library all their own: titles like "I am certain it was about dogs and definitely blue, maybe red." "Cat, Possibly Named Henry," "It Was All a Dream," or "Something-Something, Beverly Hills" inspire dreaming up their contents, often as entertaining as trying to guess the real book behind them. A celebration of book love unlike any other, this petite book is a clever gift for bibliophiles that will spark knowing smiles. This is a loving tribute to the wonderful and bizarre ways that books leave impressions on our souls, if not always perfectly in our memories. It's a fun and fresh appreciation of bibliophilia that still delivers long after the first read. 96 pages.