French Riviera resorts such as Cannes, The Blue Train which whisked passengers from Paris to the Côte d'Azur overnight, smart Swiss ski resorts like St Moritz, the Venice Lido, Egypt, signified a glamorous and cosmopolitan world populated by a social elite. The railway revolution of the 19th century had triggered a tourism revolution as day-trippers flooded rapidly to developing British seaside resorts such as Blackpool, Scarborough and Margate. The upper classes set their sights on something more exclusive and refined, more picturesque and usually much further away. They expected hotels offering every conceivable home comfort where the entertainment was cherry picked from the best of Paris cabaret and London's West End and where the sporting facilities were unrivalled. The illustrated weekly magazine The Bystander published glamorous Art Deco style advertisements 'Bathing in transparent, warm, blue sea, slicing your drive round an olive plantation, eating ripe figs off the branches, playing lawn tennis in the shade of eucalyptus trees, drinking Bronxes made with tangerine juice instead of the synthetic product of bottled oranges.' The luxurious spas of Mittel-Europe and the golf courses of France became the playground of the idle wealthy. Until foreign travel became more accessible, the picturesque towns and smart hotels catered only to an elite mix of royalty, celebrities and high society. This is where the great and the glamorous could relax, mingle, see and be seen - where rules could be broken and routines forgotten. Drawing from the Mary Evans Picture Library's archives and contributions from Galleria L'Image, Lucinda Gosling takes us on a tour of the exclusive holiday destinations from Monte Carlo and Maidenhead to Biarritz and San Moritz, Baden-Baden to Deauville and the Northern French Coast 'a jewel of a little place' where racing, gambling, polo, tennis, cocktails, yachting and bathing delights are incapsulated in one picture on page 66. Another shows a couple taking a civilised cup of tea under a striped awning of their beach capanna in a Venice Lido in 1935 and there are tourists featured in Gladys Peto's trademark colourful frocks among ancient ruins showing fashions in the winter sun of Heliopolis. Like a very high-end travel brochure, the book is also a mix of gossip and glamour, faces and places and evocative vintage travel posters, brochures, fashion spreads and more. Escapism at its best. All stock shelf worn.160pp in large softback, colour.
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Part travelogue, part history, part memoir of a life-long affair with the northern lands and seas, traveller and scholar Charles Moseley describes a haunting world where the voices of the past are never quiet. From his account of the last days of the Viking settlements in Greenland to his own experiences on the melting glaciers of Spitsbergen, he reminds us how deceptive human ideas of permanence are, and how fragile are the systems of these starkly beautiful lands. The pull of the poles is more than magnetic. It reaches into our soul. 'So what I write, discursive, anecdotal, unsystematic as it is, is in a sense a notation, the shards, of a 40-year-long love affair with the purity, the clarity, of that world of cold seas and light and ice...Memories crowd in of Olaf the Peacock, and Hallgerd Hoskuldsdottir, of Melkorka the Irish princess captured and enslaved, memories of Ngal and his patience, of Gunnar Hamundarson's fatal love for Hallgerd, of Skarp-Hedin's twisted smile, and of Grettir and his grim fate - their ghosts were all around me when I first went to Iceland...' 303pp.

Like a huge jigsaw with pieces the size of the book (27.5 x 20cm) 34 pull out posters can be removed and perhaps even linked if you're clever! Or framed and admired for their astonishing detail and humour, witty observations about cultural life (very expensive nightclubs, football and Ford). In his fantastically detailed maps of the city, Stephen Walter translates these elements into a tangle of insightful yet humorous words and symbols as he explores the boroughs and the City, places of historic interest and birthplaces of important figures. His groundbreaking, oversized map The Island was one of only two works by contemporary artists to feature in the seminal Magnificent Maps exhibition held at the British Library in 2010, the other by Grayson Perry and was exhibited together with some of the most important maps in history, such as Pierre Desceliers's 1550 world map. The work, which reimagines London as an insular body of land surrounded by water, has now been reconfigured and turned into Walter's own version of a London street atlas, from Barking and Dagenham, Barnet, Haringey, Islington to Kingston. A key at the end explains symbols like pawn broker, markets, or where public hangings took place. The large-scale, detailed reproductions allow for close examination of his witty and inventive depictions. Walter's cartographic renderings have a cult following. 33 posters on heavy art card and key to symbols. Rare Prestel first edition 2015. 144 pages.

When we think of the medieval world we picture spectacular events such as knightly jousting, or mystery plays winding through the streets on the feast of Corpus Christi. This absorbing study of public spectacles in southern Spain in the 15th century gives us a very different picture. The adjacent regions of Castile and Granada represented the Catholic and Muslim worlds: Granada was the only Muslim region left after the north African conquest of Spain six centuries earlier. Until the 15th century co-existence had been relatively peaceful, but the mid 15th century saw a hardening of attitudes and with the advent of the Catholic monarchs Ferdinand and Isabella the Inquisition was on the horizon. Public spectacles took place on the borders between different religions and cultures, and were a demonstration of power and territorial claims. In the knightly tournaments of 1428 and 1434 at Valladolid, King Juan II appeared in the costume of God the Father, pouring blessings on the military efforts of the knights, who might engage in pageantry one day and raid Granada the next. In the 1450s the exiled Miguel Lucas, constable of Castile, settled in the city of Jaen and mounted lavish spectacles in which Muslims were religious enemies but cultural brethren, the ambiguity reflecting the reality of society at the frontier. By 1480 Ferdinand and Isabella had stabilised Castile ready for sustained aggression towards Granada. In the Castilian city of Murcia all citizens paid tax towards the Christian military, including Muslims and Jews, who in Murcia had escaped the 1391 pogrom, and the Corpus Christi play traditionally involved all citizens mixing together, including those of religious minorities. By 1492, after the city had been used as a base for the assault on Granada, the Corpus Christi processions were a victory gala in which the role of Jews and Muslims was to be humiliated. 246pp, black and white reproductions.

This solid, beautifully produced book contains a perfect facsimile of the 15th century manuscript created by the Venetian mariner Michael of Rhodes, with each folio reproduced at its actual size, including a number of blank pages. Michael of Rhodes joined the Venetian navy as an oarsman in 1401, and over the next 40 years he was constantly at sea on voyages with Venice's commercial and military fleets, fighting in several battles and rising to the highest ranks available to someone who was not an aristocrat. In 1434 he began to write a manuscript distilling the knowledge he had acquired, including commercial mathematics, astrology, portolans, and the first extant treatise on shipbuilding. Some parts of the manuscript, particularly the sections on shipbuilding, were copied in the succeeding century, after which the manuscript disappeared for several hundred years until 1966 when it suddenly appeared at Sotheby's and passed into private hands. In 2000 it was sold again to a collector who made it available to the Dibner Institute at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and this facsimile is the first in a three-volume series by MITC. The second volume transcribes and translates the manuscript, and the third collects scholarly studies discussing the world of Michael Rhodes, his mathematics, use of visual imagery, portolan, shipbuilding text, calendar, almanac and system of time reckoning. This first facsimile volume is beautiful to look at, not only because of the elegance of the script but also because of Michael's attractive illustrations, particularly the colourful signs of the Zodiac. 519 facsimile pages in colour.

Sir Anthony Sherley (1565-1633) was one of three brothers from a Sussex gentry family, whose adventures abroad fascinated their contemporaries. Their doings were celebrated and exaggerated in printed pamphlets and a play on the London stage but they are scarcely known today. Anthony was a soldier fighting in France and the Netherlands, and then an unsuccessful privateer before his patron, the Earl of Essex, chose him to lead a group on a mission to Ferrara, which proved abortive. Sherley then undertook on his own initiative to take his young gentlemen adventurers on a highly risky journey across Turkey to Persia. He hoped to persuade the Shah Abbas (the ruthless King who became an Iranian legend) to ally with the West against their mutual enemy, Ottoman Turkey empire. Surprisingly, Shah Abbas the Great (1587-1629) approved the plan, and sent Sherley back to Europe as his ambassador. But after that things went badly wrong. Essex lost all influence at court and was eventually executed for treason. Sherley was refused permission to return to England and was forced to re fashion himself as a cunning "intelligencer" or spy in the multinational and dangerous world of Venice. After various episodes in Venice and Morocco 1598-1606, he ended up in the pay of Spain and was chosen to command a fleet created to stop pirates from attacking Spanish possessions. After the failure of this project he was forced to retire to Granada, and lived the rest of his life on a meagre royal pension. But he continued trying to give advice, based on his past experiences, to the king of Spain and his ministers. The book will concentrate on Sherley's career and spying, and will broaden the theme by including chapters on his father and his two brothers, and in particular on Persia and Shah Abbas, the Persian king whom he met. Anthony was an irascible, complex character, often derided and disliked. This biography is more sympathetic than previous ones and discusses his self-fashioning and his belief in his personal honour, both of which might account for some of his misdemeanours, especially after the death of his patron. Map, 16 pages of illus, 174 pages.

Written by an acclaimed black American author who died in 1960, master chronicler Richard Wright brilliantly expanded his literary horizons with 'Pagan Spain'. The Spain he visited in the mid 20th century was not the romantic locale of song and story, but a place of tragic beauty and dangerous contradictions. He offers a blistering, powerful yet scrupulously honest depiction of a land and people in turmoil, caught in the strangling dual grip of cruel dictatorship and an undercurrent of primitive faith. A mix of expert travel reportage, dramatic monologue and arresting sociological critique and controversial in the extreme, it was first published in 1957. 288pp in paperback, remainder mark.

Gathered in this book is a whole archipelago of undiscovered islands, grouped into six sections - Mythical Places Confined to Stories, Islands Found by Early Travellers in the Atlantic and Pacific when few people knew the world beyond their own shores, the Age of Exploration, Sunken Islands thought to have been submerged, and Fraudulent Islands invented by hoaxers and liars. The sixth and final group are recent un-discoveries made during the 20th and 21st centuries. Each of these places has its own story and none is alike. Some have helped to shape entire cultures while others have been barely noticed. All reflect in some ways the values of their age, and all have enriched the geography of the mind. This glamorous book seeks to celebrate and commemorate these undiscovered islands and through them tell the story of how man has created our image of the world. Their names include the Isles of the Blessed, Kibu, Hawaiki, St Brendan's Isle, the Island of Seven Cities, Hy Brasil, Davisland, the Auroras, Atlantis, Sarah Ann Island, Javasu, Crockerland and Los Jardines among them. Wondrous stories and equally wondrous colour decorations of whales and serpents and fruit and skulls and palm trees as we traverse these mysterious lands. 144 large pages, colour.

"For Belgian photographer David De Vleeschauwer, the best travel destinations are often the hardest to get to." - cnn.com. "Dive into slow travel, a captivating mix of portraits, landscapes, and even vintage icebreaker interiors." Escape to our world's most remote destinations with photographer David De Vleeschauwer and travel journalist Debbie Pappyn. Immerse yourself in 12 journeys that unfold through fascinating firsthand texts and enthralling photographs. Teetering rocks, indigenous people with skull masks, Arctic and the North Pole, the Andes and Port Lockroy in Antarctica, to gaucho chic in the Patagonian wilderness, Remote Experiences is the visual account of the extraordinary journeys of photographer David De Vleeschauwer through the world's most uncharted territories. Focused on 12 unexpected destinations, it wanders to paradise-like, off-the-radar forgotten kingdoms with ancient Buddhist outposts in the foothills of the Himalayas and traces the footsteps of pilgrims and shepherds in Italy. From the plains of Botswana to the outer realms of Antarctica aboard a superyacht icebreaker, this unique guide outlines its own geography of the world. Along the way, we meet individuals, landscapes and even vessels that become the serendipitous heroes of these wondrous adventures. De Vleeschauwer's shared experiences depict a world where the foreign becomes familiar, the isolated accessible. In our digital, overly consumptive age people want a true sense of place, which might be rugged, refined, or rural. Complete with travel accounts and detailed descriptions of trips that range in price from an affordable 250 euros to an ambitious one million euros, we go on an unforgettable voyage to those overlooked or sometimes forgotten spaces "where time stands still", encouraging us to do just that - maybe just from our armchairs. New from Taschen, 25 x 30 cm, 424 pages.

An award-winning book about seven deserts in five continents, divine and eternal, William Atkins travels to Oman, Australia, China, Kazakhstan, United States and Egypt. Blending travel, natural history, memoir and a little bit of spiritualism, here are stories that will live with you for a long time, human stories from the dead nuclear wastelands of Australia, the misery at the US-Mexico border, and the encroaching deserts of Kazakhstan. In the Black Rock Desert in Nevada, the author spends a week in the Burning Man Festival. He is humorous and makes sharp observations on people, history, nature and symbolism in these remarkable and apparently barren places as he encounters atmospheric, geological and geographical features in deserts we will never explore as well as touching on modern political issues. 408pp, paperback.