In the heyday of ocean travel—between the late nineteenth century and World War II—ocean liners were a home away from home. Passengers prepared for voyages that could last as long as three months, and shipping companies ensured their guests were as comfortable as possible, providing entertainment, dining, sleeping quarters, and smoking lounges to accommodate passengers of all ages and budgets. Secrets of the Great Ocean Liners leads the reader through each stage of ocean liner travel, from booking a ticket and choosing a cabin to shore excursions, on-board games, social events, and even romances. This book dives into a vast, unique collection of ephemera to reveal the scandals, glamour, challenges, and tragedies of ocean liner travel. Shipping companies produced glitzy brochures, sailing schedules, voyage logs, passenger lists, postcards, and menus, all of which help us to enjoy daily life on board. Diaries, letters, and journals written by passengers also reveal a host of fascinating insights into the experience of traveling by sea.

Yusuf and Zulaykha. Khusrau and Shirin. Layla and Majnun. For hundreds of years, Persian poets have captivated audiences with recitations and reinterpretations of timeless tales of earthly and spiritual love. These tales were treasured not only in Iran, but also across the neighboring Mughal and Ottoman Empires.

In Love and Devotion, leading specialists in literature, art history, and philosophy reveal new perspectives on these evocative stories and the exquisite illustrated manuscripts that convey them. Particularly in courtly settings, poetry was a key component of Persian cultural life from the fourteenth through the eighteenth century, and elite patrons commissioned copies of lyrical poems and epics told in verse. Beautifully presented here in full-page reproductions are more than one hundred folios from these illustrated manuscripts, representing masterful works from Hafiz, Rumi, and many others. Echoes of works by Persian poets are manifest across European literature from Dante and Shakespeare to the present, and this lavishly illustrated book reveals new perspectives on the universal theme of love.

Carl Sandburg was an ardent champion of Chicago, famously issuing the challenge: “Show me another city with lifted head singing so proud to be alive and strong and cunning.” For pianist Otis Spann, it was the “mother of the blues,” and a beacon to “every good musician who ever left the South.” But the union leader Eugene V. Debs had harsher words for the city, calling it “unfit for human habitation,” and Rudyard Kipling claimed it was “inhabited by savages” and hoped never to see it again.
           
Whether you look upon the city with admiration, disgust, or an incongruous combination of the two, Chicago has captured the imagination of generations of poets, novelists, journalists, and commentators who have visited or called it home. Chicago in Quotations offers a compendium of the most colorful impressions that citizens of—or visitors to—the Second City will appreciate.

With Qur'ans: Books of Divine Encounter, Keith E. Small has written a rich visual history of the Qur'an focused on more than fifty manuscripts in the collection of the Bodleian Library, University of Oxford. One of the oldest and finest collections of Qur'an in the English-speaking world, it includes treasures from parchment pages from Islam’s earliest centuries to a highly adorned copy of the Qur'an that once belonged to Tipu Sultan, the eighteenth-century ruler of the Islamic Kingdom of Mysore. Beginning with a brief introduction, Small takes readers through the Qur'an’s origins. The book then follows the development of the Qur'an chronologically and geographically, treating in each chapter the themes of textual development, divine presence, and political and religious identity. A wealth of full-color illustrations facilitates an examination of the artistic legacy of the Qur'an, including the beautiful calligraphy that became the foundation of Islamic visual culture for centuries to come.

A lavishly illustrated historical overview,Qur'ans: Books of Divine Encounter brings together in one volume a magnificent range of Qur'ans, bearing singular insight into these beautiful and significant sacred texts.

Shakespeare is synonymous with English literature. Well-loved the world over, his work endures for its ability to speak powerfully to the follies and foibles of human nature. We endlessly debate not only the finer points of each of his plays and sonnets but also the identity of the Bard himself. Yet no fanfare surrounded the initial publication of Shakespeare’s First Folio—no queue of eager readers, no launch to the top of the best seller list. It wasn’t until four hundred years after Shakespeare’s death that the book would be the subject of a national book tour.
           
The Making of Shakespeare’s First Folio offers the first comprehensive biography of the earliest collected edition of Shakespeare’s plays. In November 1623, the book arrived in the bookshop of the London publisher Edward Blount at the Black Bear. Long in the making, Master William Shakespeare’s Comedies, Histories, and Tragedies—as the First Folio was then known—appeared seven years after Shakespeare’s death. Nearly one thousand pages in length, the collection comprised thirty-six plays, half of which had never been previously published. Emma Smith tells the story of the First Folio’s origins, locating it within the social and political context of Jacobean London and bringing in the latest scholarship on the seventeenth-century book trade.
           
Extensively illustrated, The Making of Shakespeare’s First Folio is a landmark addition to the copious literature on Shakespeare. It will shed much-needed light on the birth of the First Folio—of which fewer than 250 copies remain—and the birth of Shakespeare’s towering reputation.

In July 1917, a young man in the 12th East Surrey Regiment kept a journal of his experiences at the front. This account is narrated with a keen sense of observation, bringing to life the sights, sounds, smells, and horrors of war. The anonymous author candidly describes his daily life: dodging shells to fetch meals from the rations cart; his regiment lost on a march, straying perilously near enemy lines; the selfishness of his commanding officer; the daily distribution of rum; the soar of shells above his head; communicating by sign language with a captured German soldier living in his trench; catching sleep in snatches of ten or fifteen minutes; and always, the endless mud. The young soldier describes how his comrades gradually fall one by one, until he and three remaining fellow soldiers are captured by the enemy, an event that abruptly ends the narrative.A Month at the Front offers a fresh and personal perspective on war. The manuscript, acquired by the Bodleian Library, is an authentic firsthand account from a young, anonymous soldier. It is a poignant and moving story of a young man thrust into fatal circumstances.

Liturgical psalters are among the most important—and beautifully illustrated— of medieval Christian books. In their simplest form, psalters included 150 psalms, preceded by a calendar and followed by canticles, or biblical texts, meant to be sung at church services. Though this core content remained relatively unchanged throughout the Middle Ages and across countries, psalters show considerable variation in size, style of presentation, and choice of supplementary texts.

Latin Liturgical Psalters in the Bodleian Library describes more than one hundred psalters from Britain, France, the Netherlands, Germany, Austria, Italy, and Spain, ranging from the ninth to the sixteenth century and reflecting a wide range of requirements and interests. Each entry includes a description of the psalter’s contents, physical makeup, and provenance, alongside full-color images of pages, a bibliography, and tables to assist in the study of illumination and the liturgical use of psalms.

Bringing together important information on a stunning selection of little-known manuscripts held by the Bodleian Library, this volume will prove a valuable resource.

“If a hen and a half lays an egg and a half in a day and a half, how many eggs will seven hens lay in six days?”
 
“By rearranging the letters in the word ‘plea,’ make three new words.”
 
“Which is heavier, milk or cream?”
 
If you think you know the answers to these questions, you may be a genius! Before the Mensa admissions test or the awarding of MacArthur “Genius Grants,” self-described geniuses Robert A. Streeter and Robert G. Hoehn set out in the 1930s on a mission to find more men and women of above-average intelligence. Central to this undertaking were tests filled with fiendishly difficult brainteasers, tortuous trick questions, and complex calculations that could be administered to the unsuspecting.

Are You Really a Genius? collects a series of Streeter and Hoehn’s tests into a quirky quiz book. Throughout the tests are timeless favorites, as well as many charmingly old-fashioned scenarios reflecting simpler times past. For those struggling to reach the correct answers, a final three-point “brain twister” offers a chance for redemption. And for those not quite up to the challenge, a “moron’s morgue” may help improve one’s intellectual standing. Using the answer key found at the back of the book, each test can be carefully scored to determine the exact level of genius attained.

Think you’re in the company of the “rare Craneo-Bulgis species?” In the words of the authors, “sneak up on your friends and spring the questions on the following pages.”

Still wondering about the answers to the questions at the top?
 
1) 28 eggs

2) leap, peal, and pale

3) milk, because cream comes to the surface

For nearly half a century, Roy Strong has been a prominent presence in Britain’s art world. Yet little is known about his life before the Swinging Sixties, when, at the age of thirty-one, he came on the scene as the revolutionary young director of London’s National Portrait Gallery.

In this book, Strong recounts his early years and the stirrings of what would become a lifelong passion for art. During a childhood spent in suburban North London, Strong recalls himself as a shy and solitary boy who spent his time painting Elizabethan miniatures and Shakespearean set designs. The book follows his progression through grammar school, which he attended alongside Alan Bennett and David Hockney, and university, where he developed a love of learning and enjoyed visits to the theater, opera, and ballet. With remarkable honesty, he explores the important relationships in his life—family, friends, and a schoolteacher with whom he maintained a long correspondence—as well as his debt to figures like Cecil Beaton, Frances Yates, C. V. Wedgwood, and A. L. Rowse.

Richly illustrated throughout with photographs, drawings, and letters, this book offers a compelling look at a young man poised for success.

The life of Jane Austen has fascinated the millions of readers around the world who cherish her work. A new collection presents an intimate portrait of Austen in her own words, showing the many details of her life that found echoes in her fiction, especially her keen observations of the “little matters”—the routines of reading, dining and taking tea, paying visits to family and friends, and walking to the shops or to send the post.
            Brilliantly edited by Kathryn Sutherland, Jane Austen: The Chawton Letters uses Austen’s letters drawn from the collection held at Jane Austen’s House Museum at her former home in Chawton, Hampshire, to tell her life story. At age twenty-five, Austen left her first home, Steventon, Hampshire, for Bath. In 1809, she moved to Chawton, which was to be her home for the remainder of her short life. In her correspondence, we discover Austen’s relish for her regular visits to the shops and theaters of London, as well as the quieter routines of village life. We learn of her anxieties about the publication of Pride and Prejudice, her care in planning Mansfield Park, and her hilarious negotiations over the publication of Emma.  (To her sister, Cassandra, Austen calls her publisher John Murray, “a Rogue, of course, but a civil one.”) Throughout, the Chawton letters testify to Jane’s close ties with her family, especially her sister, and the most moving letter is written by Cassandra just days after Jane’s death. The collection also reproduces pages from the letters in Austen’s own distinctive hand.
            This collection makes a delightful modern-day keepsake from one of the world’s best-loved writers on the two-hundredth anniversary of her death.
 

The life of Jane Austen has fascinated the millions of readers around the world who cherish her work. A new collection presents an intimate portrait of Austen through her personal possessions, showing the many details of her life that found echoes in her fiction, especially her keen observations of the “little matters”—the routines of reading, dining and taking tea, paying visits to family and friends, and walking to the shops or to send the post.
           
Brilliantly edited by Kathryn Sutherland, Jane Austen: Writer in the World offers a life story told through the author's personal possessions. In her teenage notebooks, literary jokes give a glimpse of her family’s shared love of reading and satire, which can be seen in the subtler humor of Austen’s published work. Pieces from Austen’s hand-copied collection of sheet music reveal how music was used to create networks far more intricate than the simple pleasures of home recital. A beautiful brown silk pelisse-coat, together with lively letters between Austen and Cassandra, give insight into her views on fashion. All feature in this lavishly illustrated collection, along with homemade booklets in which she composed her novels, portraits made of Austen during her lifetime, and much more. Also included are objects associated with the era in which Austen lived: newspaper articles, naval logbooks, and contemporary political cartoons, shedding light on Austen’s wider social and political worlds.
           
This collection makes a delightful modern-day keepsake from one of the world’s best-loved writers on the two-hundredth anniversary of her death.