This exquisitely illustrated collection of essays by leading scholars and experts offers a glimpse into the Bodleian Library's collection of rare Japanese books and manuscripts. The Bodleian Library houses one of the oldest institutional collections...

Curated illustrations of the architectural design and history of the most beautiful libraries in Oxford and a close look at the artistic prowess of the architects responsible. The libraries of the colleges and the University of Oxford are among the...

An exploration of a significant art: type designing. The twentieth century saw many developments in printing techniques and how fonts were made. Beginning with cold metal type at the start of the century, the industry moved to hot metal type, photot...

The world as we know it would not exist without plants. Have you ever stopped to think about how your morning cappuccino came to be? From the coffee bush that yielded the beans to the grass for the cattle, or perhaps the soya, that produced the milk...

A guide and history of the town and young girl that inspired Lewis Caroll's famous Alice stories. "Alice's Adventures in Wonderland" and "Through the Looking-Glass" are two of the most famous fantasies in world literature, and yet their roots are fi...

Travel through time with words that have shaped the trajectory of the English language across centuries. The world of books has played a striking role in the history of English vocabulary. "Book" itself is one of the oldest words in the language, or...

True accounts of groundbreaking women anthropologists defying gender norms in the early 20th century. The extraordinary women featured in "Intrepid Women" defied early twentieth-century conventions to carry out groundbreaking field research in dista...

A new kind of biography on Jane Austen examining the objects she encountered during her life alongside newer memorabilia inspired by the life she lived. More than two hundred years after Jane Austen's death at the age of just forty-one, we are still...

Your favorite author may not be who they say they are. The stories behind why an author chose their literary alias can be just as compelling as the works that they wrote. Writers publish under pen names for a variety of reasons. Some use them to fi...

Intimate stories that offer entertaining perspectives on what it was like to engage with radio when it was new. Radio, today, can feel like a faithful old companion, but its early history was sensational. Between 1922 and 1939, British life was tran...