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Lampooning the Kaiser and the German army, this satirical cartoon illustration, a parody of the Bayeux Tapestry, was first published in 1915 and, like the original, is printed as a continuous frieze and ‘concertina folded’ into the book covers. Slightly off-mint.

Benjamin Henry Blackwell’s bookshop first opened in 1879 and its archive contains a wealth of information about the early years of this Oxford institution. Ricketts’ survey of the material brings to life many fascinating characters, in particular Blackwell’s scholar-apprentices, chosen for their enquiring minds, whose diaries and memoirs form a remarkable record of bookselling at a time when more people were literate than ever before.

The 55 Qur’ān manuscripts featured here, which include some of the earliest surviving copies, range from luxury editions decorated with gold to a more humble pocket book of selections. They illustrate developments in Arabic script and styles of illumination, as well as more unusual forms of the text, such as a 12th-century Latin translation and a talismanic shirt inscribed with Qur’ān verses and invocations. Slightly off-mint.

Reproduced as a book of postcards, this is an A–Z of decorated initials, each one set within foliate or abstract ornaments, often with miniatures of animals or people within the letters. The initials are from medieval manuscripts in the Bodleian Library’s collection and are introduced by Professor Michelle Brown of the University of London.

Best known for his humorous cartoons featuring over-elaborate contraptions, William Heath Robinson published drawings in magazines satirizing the First World War throughout the conflict, among the most popular being his series ‘Inventions Rejected by the Inventions Board’ which included the ingenious ‘Hot-bottler for Warming Highlanders’ Legs after a Night in the Trenches’. This volume reproduces three collections of the best of this work, originally published during the war: Some Frightful War Pictures, Hunlikely! and The Saintly Hun.

Heath Robinson’s genius for creating absurd machines to execute unnecessary functions is well suited to the world of golf as the telescopic putter, moveable bunker and curled niblick in these cartoons prove. This collection of his drawings making fun of the royal and ancient game is a reproduction of a volume entitled Humours of Golf, first published in 1923, and retains the original introduction by celebrated golf writer and commentator Bernard Darwin.

Originally compiled by Peter Hunt and published as Eating and Drinking: An Anthology for Epicures in 1961, this volume of poetry and prose is full of unexpected delights: the ladies of Elizabeth Gaskell’s Cranford faced with the insurmountable problem of peas and two-pronged forks; Fitzroy Maclean’s account of ‘an unsatisfactory vegetable’ during his desert travels in Eastern Approaches; food-related limericks from Edward Lear; and words of wisdom from the great gastronome Brillat-Saverin.

Educated at Oxford, John Radcliffe (1650–1714) earned vast sums of money as a successful physician to royalty and the aristocracy. At his death, he bequeathed sufficient funds to his alma mater for the building of a new library on a site between St Mary’s and the Bodleian. Beginning with a profile of Radcliffe, this illustrated study traces the history of an architectural masterpiece and its use, from Nicholas Hawksmoor’s initial schemes to its continuing role within Oxford’s library service.

This ‘compendium of writing about books, readers and libraries’, first published in 1911, presents prose and poetry by a who’s who of literature and learning, from Erasmus to Robert Louis Stevenson. The readings are arranged by themes including bibliophilia, the library and ‘literary worlds’ – in which we find this from Francis Bacon’s Apophthegmes: ‘Alonso of Aragon was wont to say of himself that he was a great Necromancer, for that he used to ask counsel of the dead: meaning Books.’

The first book printed in North America, this 1640 translation of the Psalms of David was made for the Massachusetts Puritans. Communal singing of the psalms held a unique importance for the pioneers and their Psalter is in rhyming metrical verse. It was designed not for elegance but, as MacCulloch writes in his introduction, to be ‘roared out by a congregation exalting in its common voice, taking comfort from communal purpose amid a wilderness’. This facsimile is of the Bodleian Library copy. No jacket.

This concise introduction to the life and work of Wilfred Owen (1893–1918) draws on manuscripts, artefacts and family photographs to describe his upbringing on the Welsh borders, his search for a profession and his military service, including his time at the Craiglockhart sanatorium where he met Siegfried Sassoon. Accompanied by some of his best-known poems, it explores the literary apprenticeship of the ‘poet’s poet’, and the growth of his reputation after his death just a week before the Armistice.

A unique style of court painting, combining Persian, Indian and European elements, developed under the Mughal emperors who ruled India from the 16th to the 18th centuries. Drawing on the collection of Oxford’s Bodleian Library, this book reproduces 80 examples, ranging from scenes of adventure and court ceremonial to botanical illustrations. The introduction and accompanying texts explain the development of the genre and the context of the paintings.

Published eight years before the First World War, this novel was intended to alert the British government to the danger of Kaiser Wilhelm’s military ambitions. It describes in detail a German army landing on the east coast of England and laying siege to London.

Extolling the virtues of motorcycles for ‘lady war workers’ and ‘absolutely waterproof’ trench coats for soldiers, the advertisements collected and discussed here illustrate how the First World War offered companies new commercial opportunities and fundamentally changed British society.

First published in 1920, this manual reveals a golden age of elegant dining. Advice on table settings and decorations, etiquette, food and wine is complemented by menus for breakfasts, al-fresco luncheons, wedding receptions and garden parties. A chapter on ‘freak dinners given by wealthy people’ offers a glimpse into the decadent world of the Jazz Era.

This collection adds some of the most eloquent voices of the age to the body of eyewitness evidence of the First World War. Drawn from the manuscript collection of the Bodleian Library in Oxford and covering the first two years of the conflict, from the front line to the Cabinet Office, the correspondents and diarists include Margot Asquith, Lewis Harcourt, TE Lawrence, WB Yeats and a young Harold Macmillan.

Presenting 130 treasures now preserved in Oxford, this volume examines how the idea of ‘genius’ has been understood through history. Manuscripts and printed books from around the world illustrate the revolutionary ideas of individuals as well as the beautiful results of artistic collaboration. Also featured are ephemera and artefacts associated with geniuses (Mendelssohn’s conducting batons, a portrait of Galileo) and material that was donated to the Bodleian (books from Christopher Wren’s library, Dorothy Hodgkin’s hand-drawn insulin map).

Coming to life in just a few, seemingly effortless lines and the occasional wash of colour, Edward Lear’s nonsense birds have personality, attitude and, quite often, very human traits. Drawing on the British Library collections, this book presents birds from several of Lear’s original nonsense books, and includes stories, limericks, birds for learning colours and birds for learning the alphabet.

William Buchan’s Domestic Medicine was an 18th-century bestseller, a self-help manual intended for those who could not afford professional medical assistance. It covered everything from hiccups to consumption but, as Robert Winston writes in his foreword, ‘most remedies in Buchan’s time remained distinctly dodgy’. Melanie King introduces a selection from his A–Z of often hair-raising advice.

With tales ranging from King Arthur’s Round Table to Alexander the Great’s journeys in the Far East, romance was the most fertile narrative form of the Middle Ages. This book presents treasures from the Bodleian Library to introduce the literary genre of romance and the manuscripts that preserve its texts. The authors also discuss later responses to the tradition: Pre-Raphaelites’ aesthetic appreciation, the enthusiasm of Sir Walter Scott and CS Lewis and the affectionate mockery found in Cervantes and Monty Python.

Peter Mundy was a 17th-century trader whose journeys took him to Istanbul, India, China, Danzig, Russia and the Arctic. His account of his remarkable travels, illustrated with his own lively drawings of the strange people and animals he encountered, survives in a single manuscript. This edited selection provides a vivid and fascinating account of the Ottoman, Mughal, Chinese and Russian empires, as well as events in London following the coronation of Charles II in 1661.

Where depictions of peasant revels may be exuberant and unfettered, the stately codes of formal dance before the modern era created a tension between sobriety and decorum and underlying emotion or sexual tension. This art history curates images of dance from the Bodleian Library and explores their different meanings and themes, including how artists have conveyed the movement of dance technically and the social and historical information that can be gleaned from depictions of dancing, instructional illustrations and satirical sketches.