Beautifully illustrated throughout, this book shows the social, cultural and historical importance of plants and their role in both formal and folk medicine. Herbs have been used for centuries to cure all manner of ailments. They were especially imp...

A cartographic snapshot of late Tudor England, gorgeously reproduced with the first county maps of England and Wales. Nowadays, we take for granted the ready availability of maps of all kinds, but in Tudor England, maps were rare. All this changed i...

An eye-opening history of the exploration and mapping of our globe's northernmost regions. Maps have played a central role in our understanding of what and where defines the North. At the same time, the northernmost reaches of our world have, for mu...

A beautiful reproduction of naturalist Mark Catesby's flora and fauna illustrations of North America and the Caribbean. Mark Catesby was an eighteenth-century naturalist and artist whose work on the natural history of North America and the Caribbean...

An informative introduction exploring our fascination with shells, complete with stunningly reproduced illustrations. In 1811, architect, stone mason, and shell obsessive George Perry published his lavishly illustrated volume, "Conchology or the Nat...

An intimate account of Albert Einstein's visit to Oxford in the 1930's, casting new light on why he continues to be the world's most famous scientist. In 1931, Albert Einstein visited Oxford to receive an honorary degree and lecture on relativity an...

A richly illustrated collection that maps twenty historical journeys. "Adventures in Maps" features twenty awe-inspiring journeys, ranging in distances from a few miles to great treks across land, sea, air, and space. Some chart the route a traveler...

A richly illustrated volume, which reproduces one of the finest collections of eighteenth-century ornithological art in its entirety. In 1786, Austrian natural history artist Ferdinand Bauer traveled to Italy and the Levant. The watercolors he creat...

Reynard - a subversive, dashing, anarchic, aristocratic, witty fox from the watery lowlands of medieval East Flanders - is in trouble. He has been summoned to the court of King Noble the Lion, charged with all manner of crimes and misdemeanours. How...

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...