Philadelphia's Mütter Museum has an expansive and historic collection of crania and bones and is home to the towering skeleton of the Mütter American Giant, the remains of a woman so tightly corseted for so long that the garments changed the very structure of her bones together with dozens of other people whose final act is to educate the rest of us of what lives inside. The place is populated by the remarkable dead, a medical mausoleum where bones have taken on a second life. Here is the story of lives stripped down, of the vascularised tissue embedded in an extracellular matrix containing type I collagen - bone. Bone is our structural core giving us support while acting as a foundation for our flesh and internal protection that wraps around our vital organs. It never moves by itself but is essential to our ability to move. Bone has manifested itself in wings, sails, horns, armour and an ever greater array of appendages and ornaments since the time of its origin. We can define bone by its biochemical components, its evolutionary history, its shape and variation, but to boil down bone to numbers, measurements or landmarks will always seem incomplete. The truth of the bone very much depends on who is looking at it. Bones is a marvel, an adaptable and resilient building material developed over more than 400 million years of evolutionary history. Arguably no other part of the human anatomy has such rich scientific and cultural significance, brimming with life and with a potent symbol of death. In this delightful natural and cultural history, Switek explains where our skeletons came from, what they do inside us, and what others can learn about us when these artifacts of mineral and protein are all we have left behind. He makes a compelling case for getting better acquainted with our skeletons and their surprising roles and he bridges the worlds of palaeontology, anthropology, medicine and forensics to illuminate the complex life of bones inside our bodies and out. The elegant and surprising tales make a lyrical love letter to the 206 or so bones in the human skeleton and the colourful figures studied them over the centuries, considering in turn dinosaurs, saints, kings and our own possible future. 276pp, line art.

From an MIT scientist, gifted historian and SpaceX mission manager, here is a thrilling and irresistible history of human exploration. In one single, book-sized expedition, Rader retraces a 10,000 year history from the Stone Age to the Space Age in a smashing narrative about the innately human drive to explore. From the days of antiquity and the classical world, the people of the sea and early wanderings, the chronicle take us to meet barbarians from the north, to travel to the Mediterranean, see China's age of exploration, plunder and gold, empires of trade, opening continents, frontiers of science, lands of ice and snow, and the space race to the sky, seen through robotic eyes, into the future the road to Mars, becoming spacefaring, going interstellar and life on other worlds. An exciting trip, 344pp, maps. Tiny remainder mark.

'Here Phillip, a father, laid down his highest hope: a twelve year old son, Niccolites.' 'This is the tomb of Megistias, Slain by the Medes at Thermopylae. Famous prophet, he knew what was coming. Still, he wouldn't leave the Spartan side.' A superb bilingual collection of 127 short, witty and often tender epigrams that span one thousand years of the written word. The book is evidence that Ancient Greek life was not only celebrated in great heroic epics, but was also commemorated in hundreds of artfully composed verse epitaphs, preserved in anthologies and gleaned from weathered headstones. These miniature masterpieces testify to the richness and variety of ancient life and to the wry dignity of commemorations to loved ones. It is a treasure trove of the obsessions, passions, fears, drudgeries, shortcomings and victories of ordinary Greeks and a reminder of death as a goad to the well-lived life. With introduction and biographies of the poets. 178pp, paperback.

From the Baroque courts via the upstairs-downstairs layout of turn of the last century mansions, through the distributed application structures and digitally connected smart houses of today, the world beneath and above our visual horizon is teeming with the invisible hands and handles of service. In Krajewski's interpretation, the servers are the ones producing, steering, guiding, channelling, creating the conditions of possibility of knowledge. The book offers an examination of service as a cultural technique, and the server as its central media-technical figure at several intersecting configurations in history. We look at the domestic transitioning from the 18th century court to the 19th century bourgeois household; the little helper of scientific work and finally the electronic server as a prime mover of present-day information channels. We are introduced to forgotten or misremembered figures of subalternity - Lessing's Waitwell, Maxwell's Demon, dumbwaiters and Lazy Susans, library servants and Internet bots. All inhabit fictional, social and architectural levels of knowledge acquisition, storage, processing and distribution. The book offers a playful use of arcane sources blending literary texts, styles, discourses, theoretical models, pop cultural and historical references - Jonathan Swift, Jacques Tati and Aristotle, Thomas Aquinas and the Xerox PARK Papers to The Smiths. Classic servants like the butler or the governess have largely vanished, where the Internet is filled with servers - Web, ftp, email and others perform their daily drudgery, going about their business noiselessly and unnoticed. Why then are current-day digital drudges called servers? A superb blend of media studies, cultural history and literature, the work recounts the gradual transition of agency from human to non-human actors. 441pp, illus.

Cannabidiol is used for a wide variety of ailments, mainly related to pain relief, and can be bought in the UK from pharmacies and health food outlets, though care must be taken with dosage and the form in which it is ingested. An introduction outlines the various forms in which the oil can occur, including a chart of dosage by body weight, and we learn that the author herself cooks with full-spectrum CBD infused into a fat- or oil-based product. The recipes start with breakfast, where Hearty Breakfast Potatoes are fried in CBD coconut oil with the addition of garlic, onion, peppers and a range of spices. Other breakfast dishes include Simple Egg Scramble, Glazed Blueberry Muffins, Cinnamon-Baked Doughnuts, and CBD Avocado Toast. Mains are equally mouthwatering, with a bias towards vegetarian dishes, though they also include Shrimp Summer Rolls with Sweet Chilli Sauce and Fish Tacos. Each recipe can be adjusted to use different ingredients. Side dishes include Spinach-Artichoke Gratin and Roasted Ginger Carrots, and there are accompanying drinks such as a Calming Berry Vanilla Smoothie and a Rum Thai Iced Tea. Pet snacks are not forgotten, with a choice of 10 treats, and the book concludes with Self-Care recipes, including Face Masks (of the cosmetic type), toners, exfoliation scrubs and a massage oil. 160pp, a beautifully produced book with colour photos of every recipe. 20 x 24.2cm.

Brutal, surreal and darkly funny, this bold new novel follows and ever-expanding cast of characters, each in pursuit of their own brand of justice and belonging. Colin Winnette breaks down the classic Western and builds a bloody leanto from the scraps. Brooke and Sugar are contract killers without a contract. Bird is the 13 year old who appears in their camp one night, with no memory and palms as smooth as stones, who mysteriously woke beside them while between towns. For miles there is only desert and wilderness, and along the fringes, people. Driven from town after a bathhouse brawl, it's only a matter of time before the sheriffs will find them. Before the cannibals and stampedes and marauders will find them. Before the past will clamber up from where they buried it, covered in animal skins and teeth. The story follows Bird and the middling bounty hunters after they've been chased from town, and features gunfights, cannibalism, bar-room piano, a transgender birth, a wagon train, and the tenuous rise of the West's first one-armed gunslinger. A novel which possesses an unsettling humour. 224pp, paperback.

Born into slavery in Talbot County, MD, Frederick Douglass became a champion of the Abolitionist Movement after escaping to the North in 1838. He later remarked upon his arrival in New York 'I have often been asked how I felt when I first found myself on free soil. And my readers may share the same curiosity.' A much-admired orator and writer, active in both the Abolitionist and the Women's Suffrage Movements, Douglass is best remembered for this autobiography along with 'My Bondage and My Freedom' and his speeches, all of which offer important glimpses into American history. This Knickerbocker Classics edition has a flexibound fabric jacket with a repeating wire decorative pattern and an elastic closure, as well as a comprehensive introduction. First published 1845 the text describes not only Douglass' life as a slave but also his tremendous journey to freedom, a coloured man who became a self-made man: 'I shall not be charged with slandering Americans.' Quotes and speeches included and a remembrance of Abraham Lincoln.

1984 saw the publication of the controversial first novel by Iain Banks The Wasp Factory and he since became a celebrated novelist and science fiction writer. What is less well known is that his first published work was the poem 041 in New Writing Scotland in 1983. Like the poems that appeared within his novels, this was selected from the many he had written between 1973 and 1981. He took poetry seriously and worked on in assiduously but showed it mostly to friends. He first thought of publishing his poetry late in 2012, provided that it appeared in a joint collection with works by his lifelong friend Ken MacLeod. The two were working on this project when Banks learned of his terminal diagnosis and he made his final revisions just days before his death. MacLeod edits and introduces this collection. 'We are nothing, who crawl upon the surface, unseen from these heights, diffused by distance baffled by, frustrated by our little, little scale.' 'There is a skull beneath the skin alright, but beneath the bone a brain. And though the hard outlives the soft in the reckonings of decay that hardness too in dust's betrayed while that other can, and can choose to Leave Changes - and one of those isn't discarding the grain and milling the chaff.' Skull, May 1973. 'Days unstrung by us and spent, slattern's litter, wrenched necklace; fallen beads, three calm hearts in a fevered corpse, and history an old man sweeping up...' Two thirds of the collection are by Banks. 162pp, pagemarker.

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.

'What My Listeners Say and Why We Should Take Note' is the premise of this enjoyable memoir from an entertaining raconteur. A keen candidate on Strictly Come Dancing, presenter of Eggheads, Points of View, Crimewatch, interviewer and brother of comedian Tim Vine, on his popular BBC Radio 2 lunchtime show, Jeremy Vine has taken over 25,000 listener calls. He has decided to take stock of the wisdom his listeners have imparted over the airwaves like the man who describes getting an infection on his genitals after touching a fish, a caller arrested for being naked and why he was annoyed about it, a futuristic robot that comes into the studio and won't even turn on, a man who cooks and eats dolphin live on air in 2015, George aged 75 describing his sex life, a caller admitting to having shot and killed several cats, an item about the murder of a village goose, possibly by a sniper, and a caller not happy about cows living outside a nightclub in Bristol. It's clearer than ever before that caller wisdom is far more valuable than most of what we hear from 'the experts'. Totally unvarnished and unspun, the ordinary person turns out to be not so ordinary after all and here are the moments of truth from the world of politics, war, Brexit - and it always helps to make people laugh. A hilarious account of Jeremy Vine's life, by way of musings on everything including love, lollipop ladies, Len Goodman and poisonous plants. 340pp, paperback, colour photos.