The rich history of a centuries-old document security technology—folding and securing a letter into its own envelope for delivery—and a comprehensive guide to learning how to make your own locked letters.Before the invention of the gummed envelope in the 1830s, how did people secure their private letters? The answer is letterlocking—the ingenious process of securing a letter using a combination of folds, tucks, slits, or adhesives such as sealing wax, so that it be...

Liber amicorum H. R. Woudhuysen: a Bibliographical Tribute is a Festschrift for Henry Woudhuysen, one of the most senior and influential early modernists, book historians, and scholarly editors of his day, who retires as Rector of Lincoln College, Oxford, in 2024. It brings together essays by friends and colleagues spanning some 500 years of literary history, with a strong focus on texts and the people who produce them.

Perhaps more than any other kind of book, manuscript miscellanies require a complex and ’material’ reading strategy. This collection of essays engages the renewed and expanding interest in early modern English miscellanies, anthologies, and other compilations. Manuscript Miscellanies in Early Modern England models and refines the study of these complicated collections. Several of its contributors question and redefine the terms we use to describe miscellanies and anthologies. Two senior sc...

“A journey as epic, and varying, as the Silk Road itself...[The Fabric of Civilization is] like a swatch of a Florentine Renaissance brocade: carefully woven, the technique precise, the colors a mix of shade and shine and an accurate representation of the whole cloth” (The New York Times)The story of humanity is the story of textiles―as old as civilization itself. Since the first thread was spun, the need for textiles has driven technology, busine...

In her famous speech to rouse the English troops staking out Tilbury at the mouth of the Thames during the Spanish Armada's campaign, Queen Elizabeth I is said to have proclaimed, "I may have the body of a weak and feeble woman, but I have the heart and stomach of a king." Whether or not the transcription is accurate, the persistent attribution of this provocative statement to England's most studied and celebrated queen illustrates some of the contradictions and cultural anxieties that dom...

"Informative and entertaining...Rogers is a seasoned raconteur, unreeling an eons-spanning tale with skill." — Wall Street JournalA lively account of our age-old quest for brighter colors, which changed the way we see the world, from the best-selling author of Proof: The Science of BoozeFrom kelly green to millennial pink, our world is graced with a richness of colors. But our human-made colors haven't always matched natur...

How should we live? That question was no less urgent for English men and women who lived between the early sixteenth and late eighteenth centuries than for this book's readers. Keith Thomas's masterly exploration of the ways in which people sought to lead fulfilling lives in those centuries between the beginning of the Reformation and the heyday of the Enlightenment illuminates the central values of the period, while casting incidental light on some of the perennial problems of human exist...

This is a biography of a book: the first collected edition of Shakespeare's plays printed in 1623 and known as the First Folio. It begins with the story of its first purchaser in London in December 1623, and goes on to explore the ways people have interacted with this iconic book over the four hundred years of its history. Throughout the stress is on what we can learn from individual copies now spread around the world about their eventful lives. From ink blots to pet paws, from annotations...

A guidebook for beating the monotony of the everyday by purposefully cultivating the surprising joys that come from living an off-kilter lifeIt's all too easy to get caught up in the often monotonous nature of our day to day--moving from one rote task to the next, only to rinse and repeat the next day. Weirdness, however, is an easily accessible antidote to these feelings of languishing. The quirky, eccentric, and peculiar can take us out of our normal habits of th...

The never-before-told story of how the makers of The First Folio created Shakespeare as we know him today.2023 marks the 400-year anniversary of the publication of Mr William Shakespeare’s Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies, known today simply as the First Folio. It is difficult to imagine a world without The Tempest, Twelfth Night, Antony and Cleopatra, The Winter’s Tale, and Macbeth, but these are just some of t...

Table of ContentsIntroductionELEMENTS OF DRAWINGDot/ PointLinesShapesCharacterOverview of Character DrawingDrawing the character from the basicsHeadOUTLINE OF THE FACEEYESUsing V as GuidelineUsing Circle/Oblong as GuidelineNOSEMOUTHEARSCOLORING THE CHARACTERSkinHairEyesClothesAuthor BioPublisherIntroductionManga is...

John Skelton is a central literary figure and the leading poet during the first thirty years of Tudor rule. Nevertheless, he remains challenging and even contradictory for modern audiences.This book aims to provide an authoritative guide to this complex poet and his works, setting him in his historical, religious, and social contexts. Beginning with an exploration of his life and career, it goes on to cover all the major aspects of his poetry, from the literary traditions in which h...