Here’s someone who bursts on to your screen, words tumbling out of his mouth. Enthusiasm is his trademark. Meet Jonathan Glancey, co-author of our autumn double-header Logomotive. Leaping on to the footplate with his fellow logo spotter Ian Logan, he transports you back to the mid-century heyday of American style.
When the days are drawing in, it’s easier to feel winter blues than winter joys, but we can change all that. Give your friends a copy of Very Heath Robinson, send out Heath Robinson Christmas Cards and you’ll banish all woes. We will help you make it happen.
Adam Hart-Davis, author of Very Heath Robinson, will be speaking at Exeter’s second Literary Festival at 3.30 p.m. this Sunday, 10th November. You will find him at the magnificent 17th-century Custom House by the quay, where Adam will take you on a journey through the Weird and Wacky World of Heath Robinson.
We have matured! From the figment of an idea tossed about while walking the dog on Clapham Common, we have become a publishing house with finished books on the shelves, each with its sales history around the world, each with Herculean labours, and a few jaw-dropping moments, behind it. To celebrate 40 years of publishing, we are giving away a book a month.
Are you looking for a way into publishing? Our publishing traineeships introduce recent graduates to every aspect of the industry. We give you the opportunity to work in the editorial, sales and marketing, production and foreign rights departments. We are recruiting now.
If you had to name places with literary associations, you might say Haworth, Stratford, the Lakes and Knole, but hardly Yeovil. If anything, the town is known for making gloves, helicopters and Yeo Valley yoghurt. But at the end of October a thriving literary festival takes over the Georgian Manor Hotel, built of local Ham stone, and other venues in the town centre. Though few people know it, Yeovil is also linked with Thomas Hardy and his Wessex novels.
On 31st May 1872 William Heath Robinson was born in Hornsey Rise, north London. Over the next 72 years he made a huge name for himself as a humorous illustrator. He was as well known as Picasso. Going one better, he got his name in the English dictionary as both a noun and an adjective. To mark his birthday, we offer the De Luxe limited edition of our book Very Heath Robinson at a third off the published price.
Publishers, booksellers and authors today celebrate the UK and Ireland’s second national Bookshop Day. To mark the occasion, we announce a series of bookshop interviews that we will publish over the next three months as the days draw in and you long for a good book to read by the fire.
Congratulations to Chris Schüler, senior editor of some major Sheldrake Press books, who has published a highly readable history of the Authors’ Club. You can now watch a video of him talking about it in the Smoking Room of the National Liberal Club in London.
You can also dance with robots, date by slot machine and boil an egg straight from the chicken, thanks to Heath Robinson. Helpful devices to do all these things are now on view in the big new book we publish today, Very Heath Robinson. The author is Adam Hart-Davis, presenter of What the Romans Did for Us, and Philip Pullman has written the Foreword.
The Children’s Laureate Michael Rosen used a Heath Robinson contraption to cut the ribbon when he opened the Heath Robinson Museum in Pinner.
The opening of the Heath Robinson Museum on 15th October was a delightfully parochial event.
On 31st May 2016 Heath Robinson would have been 144. Artist, humorist and Contraptioneer Extraordinary, he satirized the technical advances and social pretensions of three generations, from the 1890s to the 1940s. To celebrate a birthday blow-out, we are proud to announce that the well-known television presenter and author Adam Hart-Davis will write a new book for us called Very Heath Robinson.
In our Architectural Mini-Quiz, launched on 23rd August, we asked you to say which of these three buildings you preferred: (from left) A, B or C. We can now report that 71% of respondents chose A, 20% B and 9% C. There is a lesson here.
The invention of Coade stone in 1769 allowed architects to add more ornamentation to buildings than had previously been possible. Coade stone mimicked natural stone but was cheaper and longer lasting. The history of artificial stone, including Coade stone, is chronicled in a book by Simon Scott, director of Haddonstone Ltd. His company, just added to our Victorian House Decoration page, produces its own variety of artificial stone.