A Pictorial History of the Spaceship in Art, Science and Literature, a 1993 rare imported edition with a foreword by Arthur C Clarke. This solid, encyclopaedic chronological volume on spaceship design will be a sheer delight to anyone whose pulse quickens at the latest news from NASA. Covering space travel concepts from 360 BC to 1994 AD, the author provides diagrams, specifications and background to history's major schemes for conquering space. Airborne adventure began in 360 BC when Archytas of Tarentum constructed a model pigeon which was made to fly by the reaction of steam or compressed air escaping from holes in its tail. In 150 AD Ptolemy described the sun and planets as orbiting round the earth, and ten years later the first novel of inter-planetary travel appeared. The middle ages saw the creation of steam- or dynamite-powered rockets, and in 1623 a probably apocryphal story describes a manned rocket flight over the Bosporus. Cyrano be Bergerac's fictional journey to the moon followed a few years later. In 1828 a famous cartoon depicted a man on a rocket-propelled flight with Heath-Robinson-style accompaniments and in 1865 Jules Verne published the space travel classic novel From the Earth to the Moon, with mathematical calculations and convincing diagrams. With the 20th century hundreds of space ships were first imagined and then made a reality. Hermann Oberth's Model E formed the basis for the spaceship Friede in Fritz Lang's 1929 motion picture Frau im Mond. In 1939 the British Interplanetary Society concluded a 2-year engineering study of a manned moon landing, based on hexagonal honeycomb clusters of individual rockets, and in 1949 the Canadian Rocket society planned a moon landing by 1960. The first manned space flight in 1961 ushered in the era of the Apollos, the Space Shuttle and finally the Mars-Mission proposals. 714pp, very well illustrated with dreamy line art and etchings, cutaways, magazine articles reproduced from 30s to the 90s, diagrams and black and white photos and interesting appendices on US and Soviet launch vehicles by size, Energia and Buran. Index, 22 x 28.5 cm.

When our ancestors came down from the trees, they brought the trees with them and remade the world. How did the descendants of small arboreal primates manage to stand on our own two feet, become top predators, and take over the world? Roland Ennos shows that the key to humanity's success has been our relationship with wood. He takes us on a sweeping ten-million-year journey from great apes who built their nests among the trees, to early humans who depended on wood for fire, shelter, tools and weapons, from the structural design of wheels and woodwinds to the invention of paper and the printing press. He draws together evidence as far-ranging as primatology, anthropology, archaeology, history, architecture, engineering and carpentry, and charts for the first time how our ability to exploit wood's unique properties has shaped our bodies, minds, societies and lives. Chapters include Losing Our Hair, Tooling Up, Clearing the Forest, Melting and Smelting, Carving Our Communities, Supplying Life's Luxuries, Placing Firewood and Charcoal, Wood in the Nineteenth Century and In the Modern World and finally assessing our impact and mending our strange relationship and rediscovering traditional ways of growing, using and understanding trees that can help combat climate change and bring our lives into better balance with nature. 318pp in large softback, 23 illus.

Written and presented by Sir Patrick Moore and with running time approximately 50 minutes in both colour and black and white, the DVD is entitled The Apollo Story. It features official NASA and Science Museum footage of the momentous Apollo 11 Moon landing. It was July 1969 and a little over eight years since the flights of Gagarin and Shepard, followed quickly by President Kennedy's challenge to put a man on the Moon before the end of the decade. It was only seven months since NASA made a bold decision to send Apollo 8 all the way to the Moon on the first manned flight of the massive Saturn V rocket. Now on the morning of 16th July, Apollo 11 astronauts Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin and Michael Collins sit atop another Saturn V at Launch Complex 39A at the Kennedy Space Center. The three-stage 363-foot rocket will use its 7.5 million pounds of thrust to propel them into space and into history. DVD film running time approximately 50 minutes. With large illustrated soft cover magazine enclosed.

From Ancient Greece to dark energy, full of charm and learning, here are vivid and gripping stories. Sub-titled 'How an Ancient Greek Geometry Text Shaped the World', and previously published as 'The Book of Wonders', this is an astonishingly readable and informative history of the greatest mathematical bestseller of all time. Euclid's Elements of Geometry was a book that changed the world and has shaped 2,000 years of art, philosophy and literature, as well as science and maths. With stories of influence on every continent and encounters with the likes of Ptolemy and Isaac Newton, Hobbes and Lewis Carroll, Wardhaugh gives dramatic life to the evolution of mathematics in a fascinating tour through 2,300 years of reading, re-imagining, and responding to perhaps the most important textbook ever written. 403pp, illustrated paperback.

'Adventures in Scientific Curiosity' is the sub-title of this beautifully written elegy to science, wonder, mystery and curiosity. Robin Ince abandoned science at secondary school, bored by a fog of dull lessons and intimidated by the barrage of equations. But 20 years later he fell in love with it, and now he presents one of the world's most popular science podcasts. Every year he meets hundreds of the world's greatest thinkers and in his witty and often profound tour through science, he argues that scientific wonder should be for everyone. Filled with interviews featuring astronauts, comedians, teachers, quantum physicists, neuroscientists and more, as well as charting his own journey with science, his book explores why many wrongly think of the discipline as distant and difficult. From the glorious appeal of the stars above to why scientific curiosity can encourage much needed intellectual humility, this optimistic book will leave you with a thirst for intellectual adventure. Fans of Radio Four's The Infinite Monkey Cage and Professor Brian Cox who wrote the foreword, he touches on biophilia to black holes, the origins of the Universe to human mortality, armchair time travel, on coping with the size of the Universe, and looking back at the planet from a height, he asks if we are waiting for our alien saviours and how the mind is a chaos of delight. Robin's father Mr Ince is also a loyal Bibliophile customer! And our Annie went to see Robin and Professor Cox in one of their superb live performances together and until then, science had not really interested her! 384pp, illustrated paperback. Apologies for sticker.

Hot off the press and weighing in at a spectacular 2.35kg with glossy purple, pink, fluorescent pink and orange and yellow and lime page edges and on glossy white paper, extraordinary statistics are brought to life on nature and environment, science and technology, economy and development, society and people and culture and media. This superb and selective history of graphic information begins with medieval maps of the world and Portolan charts to navigate the oceans, mapping the body and knowledge, the Universe and planets, dinosaur timeline, currents of air showing the global wind system as it was perceived in the mid 19th century, tsunamis, where fish are caught, a world of sensations and a fantastic voyage of the incredible shrinking robots, racial inequality and the Corona virus, waste in space, imports and exports and a woman's place in the economy, Africa missing infrastructures, disputed areas of the world. In the centre pages is a spectacular triple gatefold showing on one side gun nations and states, on the other gay acceptance where countries like Spain and Germany have become more accepting of homosexuality. Foods, unsafe water, inadequate sanitation and poor hygiene, a guide to coffee and a cocktail chart of film and literature, the periodic table of heavy metals, comic characters and the football clubs of Europe in a spectacular double page map, this is a very special coffee table book featuring 280 colourful graphics, seven fold-out spreads and all focussing on the 21st century but including some historical masterpieces. 456pp, 21.59 x 33.02cm. Text in three languages, new full price from Taschen.
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Revised second edition of this seminal work with 250 new entries, some illustrated, bringing the total individual bridges described to 1,600 and information describing more than 2,200 different structures. Here are road bridges, some of which are moveable, moat, packhorse, footbridge, park or garden bridges, aqueducts, canal bridges, tramways and railway bridges and seaside piers which number over one million to cross roads and canals and motorways. Far from dull, the book is quite beautiful, spanning (excuse the pun!) history and in an A-Z format covering the developing technology behind arch bridges, inhabited bridges and lifting bridges. From the wall enclosing the ancient abbey at Bury St Edmunds which carries over the River Lark three ribbed and pointed stone arches probably dating from the 13th century, there is the beautiful Aberdulais aqueduct over the River Neath with ten low stone arches and 340 feet long at Port Talbot. Page after page as you just scroll through and enjoy the archive and modern colour photographs numbering 900 including the beautiful Baddesley Clinton Moat Bridge in Warwickshire around a National Trust property, the gatehouse fortified wall and moat guarding Bishop's Palace at Wells from around 1340, Boathouse Bridge at Longleat, the Brunel Swing Bridge in Bristol, the Clyde Caledonian Railway Viaduct and so it goes on as we amble through Great Britain at a leisurely pace and are shown historical places of interest. One of our favourites is the Lower Brockhampton Manor Gatehouse Bridge, a quaint timber-framed gatehouse from 1550 with knee-braced deck beams. The last entry in the A-Z is handsome Ystrad Suspension Bridge of the type pioneered by James Dredge. Next there is a Bridge Miscellany describing aesthetics, aluminium, ancient British bridges, bridges in art, architectural periods, depictions in commercial art and on banknotes, stamps and medals, collapses and failures of bridges, sea bridges and a whole section on record-breaking bridges with the longest cantilever arm spans or laminated timber beam bridges. Finally, a geographical index. 444 big glossy pages, 22.2 x 28.6cm.

This book became famous as the suggestion in Chris Hadfield's 'An Astronaut's Guide to Life on Earth' for its excellent quality artistic photos. It proves the talent of Don Pettit as being not only a well trained astronaut, but also a professional photographer, and the printing quality of these pictures is excellent. It is a collection of stunning photographs from the ISS, a space station in continual freefall, and they are spellbinding images of our planet, its cities, weather patterns and landforms, a rainbow of blurry colourful stars shooting by, aerial shots of such familiar cities as Cairo where you can try and spot the pyramids, the Panama Canal, Chicago and nightscapes of cities with scatterings of lights in patterns, light and dark all with a story to tell. An urban core shaped by a modern master plan appears as a matrix laid out in a perfect grid. Older cities have more organic, even chaotic shapes. The scattered lights of the countryside form fractal patterns that resemble a snapshot from Mandelbrot space. 'I've lived in space for months on end. Light patterns readily become a guide to the part of the world passing below.' The Northern Lights, a European Space Agency un-piloted cargo vehicle approaches the ISS snorting fire from its nozzles, the transit of Venus across the face of the Sun in June 2012, there are even pictures of the Space Station toilet! See an Expedition 31 crew portrait, submerged coral sand dunes in the Bahamas, an erupting volcano in Patagonia, an asteroid impact crater, the Mongolian desert and even some amazing shots in black and white for the eyes to discover as new pleasures and new perspectives come into focus. Page after page covering nighttime, black and white, infrared, inner space, cities by night, star trails and shooting space which are the most spectacular colours. Save £40! 176pp, 25.4 x 33cm.
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Named a Best Book of 2021 by the Financial Times and a Best Science Book of 2021 by The Guardian. "Rovelli is a genius and an amazing communicator... This is the place where science comes to life." - Neil Gaiman. A startling new look at quantum theory, from the bestselling author of Seven Brief Lessons on Physics and The Order of Time. One of the world's most renowned theoretical physicists, Carlo Rovelli has entranced millions of readers with his singular perspective on the cosmos. In Helgoland, he examines the enduring enigma of quantum theory. The quantum world Rovelli describes is as beautiful as it is unnerving. Helgoland is a treeless island in the North Sea where the 23 year old Werner Heisenberg made the crucial breakthrough for the creation of quantum mechanics, setting off a century of scientific revolution. Full of alarming ideas (ghost waves, distant objects that seem to be magically connected, cats that appear both dead and alive), quantum physics has led to countless discoveries and technological advancements. Today our understanding of the world is based on this theory, yet it is still profoundly mysterious. As scientists and philosophers continue to fiercely debate the meaning of the theory, Rovelli argues that its most unsettling contradictions can be explained by seeing the world as fundamentally made of relations rather than substances. We and everything around us exist only in our interactions with one another. This bold idea suggests new directions for thinking about the structure of reality and even the nature of consciousness. Rovelli makes learning about quantum mechanics an almost psychedelic experience. Shifting our perspective once again, he takes us on a riveting journey through the universe so we can better comprehend our place in it. "There is something called Schrodinger's wave equation, which explained the behaviour of atomic particles. We learn of this important concept before branching off into some theories such as many worlds, hidden variables, and physical collapses." 256 pages. Line art. Remainder mark.

'From Ancient Egypt to The Martian, A Deep-Space Dive into Our Obsession with the Red Planet', here is the most comprehensive look at our relationship with Mars yesterday, today and tomorrow. Using history, archival images, pop culture ephemera, and interviews with NASA scientists, Mars has been a source of fascination and speculation ever since the ancient Egyptians observed its blood-red hue and named it for their god of war and plague. It wasn't until the 19th century when 'canals' were observed on the surface of the Red Planet, suggesting the presence of water, that scientists, novelists, filmmakers and entrepreneurs became obsessed with the question of whether there's life on Mars. Since then Mars has fully invaded pop culture, inspiring its own day of the week (Tuesday), and many novels and movies from Ray Bradbury's Martian Chronicles to The Martian and to inspire advancements in exploration from NASA's launch of the Mars rover Perseverance to Elon Musk's quest to launch a manned mission to Mars through SpaceX. Mars has been a muse for many early writers and Isaac Asimov the great sci-fi writer, Arthur C. Clarke and The Empire Strikes Back have all been inspired by Mars, and not forgetting of course in the wonderful world of sweeties, the Mars bar. Beautifully decorated large softback with many colour photos, book covers, film stills, tales of pranksters, screwballs and believers, artists' impressions, Mars Exploration scientific photographs, news articles, early telescopes and all the big hopes and big misunderstandings about Mars through history. There is so much to be discovered. 20.5 x 25.4cm, 304pp in colourful well illustrated softback with tiny remainder mark.