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From our How To Read Maps series: we examine puffery and policy in map dedication

The London Underground is the world’s oldest underground railway. In the decade or so that I’ve been specialising in Tube maps I’ve seen spiralling interest in collecting the cartographic record of 150 years of underground travel. Hundreds of maps have...

This ‘Plan of the Kendal & Windermere Railway with the centre of the Lake District’ was published in Liverpool by the firm of Maclure, MacDonald & MacGregor circa 1850. The Lancaster & Carlisle Railway has been coloured blue, the Kendal...

The atlas in front of me has quite a story. Published at the beginning of the French Revolutionary Wars, this is a British-produced pilot book. It's a marine atlas with charts, coastal profiles and descriptive text, which in this case...

An Interesting Book With An Interesting Pedigree My enthusiasm for poring over lists of subscribers is probably almost as great as that of the original subscribers themselves. I am currently pondering what prompted Sir Isaac Newton to splash out on...

On 23 April the International League of Antiquarian Booksellers will, for the second time, promote a worldwide series of "pop-up book fairs". In 2015 this initiative, based around UNESCO's World Book and Copyright Day, raised over 10,000€ to support child...

The Kelmscott Chaucer lends itself to superlatives. The first page is perhaps the most celebrated example of typography in English. It’s certainly the most famous in the context of of private press books, inspired by the skills and craftsmanship of...

Roman love poetry this week. These two quarto volumes bound in vellum are both examples of the 1708 Broukhusius edition of Albius Tibullus published in Amsterdam by Johann Heinrich Wettstein - one of the better separate editions (Tibullus was often...

Greek bucolic poetry this week, and an absolute joy it is, too. The works of Theocritus in quarto, published in Paris in 1561 by Guillaume Morel, who had succeeded Turnebus as King’s Printer in Greek in 1555. The woodcut Basilisk...

It is almost a century since M.K. Gandhi returned permanently to India, in 1915. He was a London-trained lawyer in his mid forties, already possessing an international reputation after twenty years in South Africa, where he developed his theories of...

The National Book Tokens scheme goes back to 1932. I imagine that this is their busiest time of year, and I was always happy to be given book tokens myself when I was a kid: I always wanted more books,...

My friend Angus O’Neill (Omega Bookshop) found this gem of a bookmark tucked into a 1936 pocket edition of Norman Douglas’s South Wind, an outré title which - at that time - carried with it certain connotations. It rates an...

At Bryars & Bryars, discussions about favourite authors, contentious points of bibliography, superior cartographic technique etc are usually quite civil. Opinions are set forth in an atmosphere of mutual respect. The correct preparation of scones, however, has been a subject...

Victorian prisons may not be such a great topic for Christmas (except for Dickens, perhaps, in one of his bleaker moods) but as usual I’m guided by the things that I’ve found. Today we have one of the original ground...