The Penguin Classics with covers designed by Coralie Bickford-Smith are now available on Amazon — the series includes Cranford, Great Expectations, Jane Eyre, The Picture of Dorian Gray, Pride and Prejudice, Sense and Sensibility, Tess of the D’Urbervilles, and Wuthering Heights. (Design*Sponge recently posted an interview with the designer.)
While I realize that part of the […]

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Just noticed today that two of the long out-of-print books from the
Museum of London’s “Medieval Finds from Excavations in London” series are coming back into print as of next March!
The Medieval Household: Daily Living c.1150-c.1450 — which, personally, is my absolute favorite out of the series — covers a lot of the things that […]

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I saw a reference to this book earlier today, and thought it would make a good addition to the earlier list of new books (for holiday wishlists, or adding to one’s own library, etc.):
The Alchemy of Paint: Art, Science and Secrets from the Middle Ages — “Spike Bucklow shows us how in medieval times, color […]

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Several nifty new books coming out this autumn — along with some of the books that came out earlier this year — might just deserve a place on your holiday wishlist or on your bookshelf.
Since this blog’s readers have a lot of different sorts of interests, here’s some titles to consider and/or covet …

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Peterkin’s book [One Thousand Beards: A Cultural History of Facial Hair] chronicles the ebb and flow of facial fuzz throughout history.

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At long last, an update! But just a few bullet points & highlights, I’m afraid. More later; juggling summer coursework and other projects, including updates to the linkspages.

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Even if you don’t end up reading the book he’s reviewing (An Elizabethan in 1582: The Diary of Richard Madox, Fellow of All Souls), there are several readers of this blog who’ll enjoy James Fenton’s review in The Guardian.

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A review of Out of the East: Spices and the Medieval Imagination:
Now here’s a great piece of myth busting. If, for most of your life, you have believed that the medieval spice trade was all about getting spices to kill the smell of rotting meat (because those Europeans didn’t have fancy fridges at the time) […]

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I have decided to ignore our crashing economy, exploding debt, and the withering away of the dollar, fascinating though it all is, and have turned my attention to 15th-century Florence and the financial legerdemain of the Medicis. My guide has been Tim Parks’s lucid and witty “Medici Money: Banking, Metaphysics, and Art in Fifteenth-Century Florence” […]

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The volume is based on The Travels of Sir John Mandeville, a medieval chronicle of the supposed adventures of a knight who leaves England on Michaelmas Day 1322, and criss-crosses the globe for more than three decades. It is part travel manual (Christopher Columbus apparently cribbed from it) and part unalloyed fantasy - Sir […]

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