This is the first facsimile publication of "Martha Lloyd's Household Book", the manuscript cookbook of Jane Austen's closest friend. Martha's notebook is reproduced in a colour facsimile section with complete transcription and detailed annotation. In...

Since 1621, and the foundation of the Oxford Botanic Garden, Oxford has built up an outstanding collection of plant specimens, botanical illustrations and rare books on plant classification, collecting and plant biology. These archives, and the livin...

Johann Wilhelm Weinmann was an apothecary who established a botanic garden in Regensburg and set about producing a highly detailed catalogue of plants and their uses, with illustrations commissioned from some of the finest engravers of the time. The...

Close-up photographs of plump apricots, juicy mangoes, crisp lettuce... these are familiar to us all through cookery books and garden guides. But seeing fruit and vegetables as detailed art, viewed through eighteenth-century eyes, is something very d...

Eric Fitch Daglish (1892-1966) was a wood engraver, writer and illustrator. His book "Woodcuts of British Birds" was published in 1925. Daglish learnt the art of wood engraving from Paul Nash and became known for his illustrations of the natural wor...

Before the advent of commercial transatlantic flights in the early 1950s, the only way to travel between continents was by sea. In the golden age of ocean liners, between the late nineteenth century and the Second World War, shipping companies ensure...

Provincial towns in Britain grew in size and importance in the eighteenth century. Ports such as Glasgow and Liverpool greatly expanded, while industrial centres such as Birmingham and Manchester flourished. Market towns outside London developed as c...

"Jones' Icones" is a stunning six-volume manuscript containing paintings of some of the most important butterfly and moth collections at the end of the eighteenth century. It is the work of William Jones (1745-1818), a wealthy wine merchant from Chel...

From its roots in ancient Greek herbal medicine, the popular spirit we now know as gin was established by the Dutch in the sixteenth century as a juniper-infused tincture to cure fevers. It gained notoriety during the London 'gin craze' in the eighte...

Invented to entertain Alice Liddell on boat-trips down the river Thames in Oxford, "Alice's Adventures in Wonderland" has become one of the most famous and influential works of children's literature of all time. It is hard to imagine "Alice's Advent...