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Window Box2019-03-21T18:53:12+01:00

WINDOW BOX

Please browse our window box for some of our recent pleasures – old and new.

  • Rivers of Norfolk

    Tor Falcon, with a foreword by Charles Rangeley-Wilson

    Tor Falcon is an artist working mostly in chalk pastel who has previously done projects on the South Downs with sell-out shows.  For the last four years she has been walking and drawing the rivers of Norfolk, whose names would make Robert Macfarlane – and the rest of us – quiver with pleasure: Ouse, Nar, Thet, Tas, Gadder, Cong, Tud, Yare, Ingol, Glaven, Chet, Wensum and many others.

    Each river is illustrated with several pastel drawings and accompanied with introductory notes by Tor.  Banks, sedge, ancient willows, bends, shores, rushes, chalk, mud, marshes and water meadows, canals, meanders, managed and wild: this is a wonderful book with nothing sentimental about either the notes or the drawings.

    Rangeley-Wilson rightly quotes Ruskin in his foreword in relation to Tor’s eye, skill and knowledge.

    A number of the drawings are on show at Norwich Castle Museum, from 13th July to 12th January 2020.

    Her book is privately published and beautifully produced.

     

    Hardback £25.00
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  • Frank Bowling

    Elena Crippa

    Catalogue for the stunning Frank Bowling exhibition on at Tate Britain – his first (astoundingly) major retrospective in this country. He graduated from the Royal College with a Silver Medal in the same year that Hockney won the Gold, and was the first black artist to be elected by the Royal Academy, in 2005. His work is glorious, and the show an extraordinary experience of colour, experimentation, generosity and skill. Bowling, thank heavens, is till alive and well, painting and experimenting, in his 85th year.

    Paperback £25.00
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  • The Heavens

    Sandra Newman

    An astonishing novel, beautifully and idiosyncractically written, in which a young woman in love falls asleep in a utopian New York and wakes in the 16th century, convinced that she must save the world. The catch: each time she returns to the first few years of the 21st century, that modern world is a little worse, and a little more like our own. This is not science fiction, nor quite a historical novel, but something much stranger. SN has received some ecstatic reviews, not least for holding such a bonkers plot together with such assurance, but it’s the language of this book that really shines. In the midst of her dreams, SN’s heroine is “on the right track at last — she felt it — riding secretly, directly, to save the world. She would make the world perfect — so she felt — and the wild night meadows of its youth acquiesced. She was a candle in the night, a bright seed of heaven.”

    Hardback £12.99
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  • Sensations: A New History of British Art

    Jonathan Jones

    From the Enlightenment to the present day, from Hogarth to Banksy… by a lively and observant author.

     

    The retail price is £29.99 but we are delighted to offer a discount at £25.

     

     

    Hardback £25.00
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  • ‘Cherry’ Ingram: The Englishman Who Saved Japan’s Blossoms

    Naoko Abe

    Collingwood Ingram (1880 – 1981) was an ornithologist and plant collector whose obsession with Japanese cherries earned him the epithet ‘Cherry’. He travelled as a young man in Japan and was introduced to the ideas and displays of cherry blossom (sakura), but when he travelled there again in 1920s, by then a world authority on cherries, he was struck by profound changes in the planting of prunus – variety had been sacrificed for one cloned tree that had become ubiquitous for political reasons. On that trip Ingram saw an illustration of a tree that had become extinct in Japan, a magnificent cherry called the ‘Great White’, which he realised he had seen in poor condition in a Sussex garden. He perpetuated this glorious tree by cuttings and reintroduced it to Japan as well as perpetuating it in the UK.

    Ingram’s life is remarkable, and Naoko’s telling of it a revelation.

    We are delighted that Naoko will be coming to speak at Sandoe’s on 6th June – booking essential. See here for more details.

    Hardback £18.99
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  • The King of the Golden River

    The King of the Golden River

    John Ruskin, illustrated by Quentin Blake

    Ruskin’s only children’s book is an exciting parable of his views about nature, more relevant than ever in today’s world. The memorable cast includes South-West Wind, Esq. Lovely dark blue cloth. Ages 6+.

    Hardback £14.95
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  • Idols: The Power of Images

    Idols: The Power of Images

    Annie Caubet

    Wonders of early civilisations: figurines from the Cyclades, Mesopotamia, Anatolia, the Oxus and Indus valleys, Iran, Iberia, etc. ‘Idols’ does not seem the right descriptive for these as we only guess at their function; but their small, highly concentrated presences give each of them an extraordinary power. Superbly illustrated.

    Hardback £50.00
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  • Copsford

    Walter J. C. Murray, Introduction by R. B. Russell

    With photographs by the author.

    Out of print since the 1940s, this is the story of a gruelling but rewarding life in Sussex, beginning in a ruined house not without its hauntings. Bears comparison with Richard Jefferies and Thoreau.

    This handsome new hardback edition also contains Murray’s essay, ‘Voices of Trees’.

     

    For Little Toller Books’ new paperback edition click here.

    Hardback £35.00
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  • Last Days in Old Europe: Trieste '79, Vienna '85, Prague '89

    Last Days in Old Europe: Trieste ’79, Vienna ’85, Prague ’89

    Richard Bassett

    RB embraced Trieste in our Cuckoo Press piece of 2013. Here is the fully-fledged version, with RB as hornist in the Ljubljana opera house, then as Times Foreign Correspondent in Vienna and Warsaw. A memoir of both ease and grit in the last decade of the Cold War, full of irony, subtlety and humour

    Hardback £16.99
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  • Fryderyk Chopin: A Life and Times

    Fryderyk Chopin: A Life and Times

    Alan Walker

    An outstanding biography of Chopin that wears its scholarship lightly.

    Hardback £30.00
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  • Born to Be Posthumous: The Eccentric Life and Mysterious Genius of Edward Gorey

    Born to Be Posthumous: The Eccentric Life and Mysterious Genius of Edward Gorey

    Mark Dery

    Author, illustrator, librettist, puppet-maker, master of pseudonyms, owner of 20,000 books and 6 cats: there is so much to say about the Awdrey-Gore legacy that all we shall announce is that this is a very fine biography. And that Ogdred Weary had a suspiciously normal and fantod-free childhood.

    Hardback £18.99
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  • The Map of Knowledge: How Classical Ideas Were Lost and Found: A History in Seven Cities

    The Map of Knowledge: How Classical Ideas Were Lost and Found: A History in Seven Cities

    Violet Moller

    A fascinating study of the ideas of Euclid, Galen and Ptolemy through seven cities over a thousand years: Alexandria, Baghdad, Cordoba, Toledo, Salerno, Palermo, Venice.

    Hardback £20.00
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  • The Handsome Monk and Other Stories

    The Handsome Monk and Other Stories

    Tsering Dondrup

    This contemporary author writes about the nomadic world of his native north-western Tibet.

    Paperback £14.99
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  • Lanny

    Max Porter

    The author’s first novel ‘Grief Is the Thing with Feathers’ was an astonishing triumph, for all its strangeness. This follow-up is strange too, but marvellously, brilliantly so: it tells the story of an odd boy growing up in an English village. Shades of ‘Under Milk Wood’ and ‘Lincoln in the Bardo’.

    Hardback £12.99
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  • Harald Sohlberg: Infinite Landscapes

    Harald Sohlberg: Infinite Landscapes

    Nationalmuseet Oslo

    Ravishing, mysterious paintings by the Norwegian painter (1869-1935). Catalogue of the show in Oslo that is transferring to Dulwich Picture Gallery. A master of half-lights, after-glows and the domestic.

    Hardback £36.00
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  • Textiles of Japan: The Thomas Murray Collection

    Textiles of Japan: The Thomas Murray Collection

    Thomas Murray & Virginia Soenksen

    A fabulous range of textiles from shamanistic appliqué to workers’ clothes and household goods as well as ravishing kimonos. A stunning book and generous at the price.

    Hardback £65.00
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  • Lolly Willowes

    Lolly Willowes

    Sylvia Townsend Warner

    A classic cult story about an Edwardian spinster lured into witchcraft. Perfect for any fans of Warner’s The Corner That Held Them, one of our summer favourites, whose number include Patrick Gale and Andrew Miller.

    Paperback £9.99
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  • Joyride to a Reunion at Kardamyli

    Tony Scotland

    In October 1990 three wonderful old birds – Coote Heber Percy, Billa Harrod and Freda Berkeley – set off in a car with with indifferent springs for the Peloponnese, to soothe their widowhood by seeking out the warm south and, in particular, their old friends Patrick and Joan Leigh Fermor in their beautiful house at Kardamyli.

    This charming account is another of Tony Scotland’s beautifully self-published books to follow ‘Bazouker: The Untold Scandals of Captain Lennox Berkeley, 7th Earl of Berkeley’, ‘Gradual: A Rennaissance Chant Book’ and ‘Fleche: Brief Encounter with Stravinsky”.

    Hardback £17.50
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  • Charmed Lives in Greece: Ghika, Craxton, Leigh Fermor

    Evita Arapoglou, Ian Collins, Michael Llewellyn-Smith & Ioanna Moraiti

    The catalogue to accompany an exhibition first held in Cyprus at the A G Leventis Gallery in 2017 which then moved to the Benaki Museum in Athens. The exhibition is on at the British Museum from March – July 2018.

    The charmed lives were those led by Nikos Ghika, John Craxton and Patrick Leigh Fermor in  Crete, Corfu, Hydra, Athens and the Peloponnese. Their paths first crossed in Greece in the mid 1940s and their friendship was to last five decades. There is a profusion of material – letters, notebooks, diaries and copious photographs as well as many paintings and designs by Ghika and Craxton. Joan Leigh Fermor and Barbara Ghika are ever-present, of course; other figures in the labyrinthine network of their friendships and acquaintances include Rex Warner, Stephen Spender, Steven Runciman, Niko Kazantzakis, Ann Fleming, Jock Murray, Peter Watson, Lucian Freud, George Pyschoundakis, Konstantinos Mitsotakis – a roll-call of lasting fascination.

     

    Paperback £35.00
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  • From Omega to Charleston: The Art of Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant 1910-1934

    Edited by Matthew Travers

    In the early 1930s Kenneth and Jane Clark dined with the art dealer and collector Joseph Duveen, where they ate from a fabulous blue and gold Sevres dinner service made for Catherine the Great; so taken were they with the splendour that they commissioned a dinner service from Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant. The result – that, incidentally, Kenneth Clark did not much like – was their ‘Famous Women’ dinner service. The set of 48 dinner plates from the service are adorned with portraits of actresses, writers, queens and notorious beauties from all parts of the world and from all eras, from Helen of Troy, Sappho and Lady Shikibu to Greta Garbo, Ellen Terry and Virginia Woolf.

    This catalogue shows each of these plates, as well as other works by DG and VB. It also includes a brief memoir by Richard Shone about Duncan Grant and of Charleston, which he first visited in 1965 as a schoolboy, his friendship with DG struck up over two days spent sitting for a portrait. There are contributions by many others, including Frances Spalding and Hana Leaper.

    Hardback £75.00
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  • Peter Lanyon

    Peter Lanyon

    Toby Treves

    This is the first catalogue raisonné of Lanyon’s oil paintings and three-dimensional works – all 613 of them. A substantial and beautifully produced volume by the publisher behind the marvellous William Nicholson catalogue of a few years ago (the latter in collaboration with Yale.)

     
    “…Uneasy, loveable man, give me your painting
    Hand to steady me on the word-road home.
    Lanyon, why is it that you’re earlier away?…”

    From W S Graham’s ‘The Thermal Stair’, his elegy to his friend, killed in a gliding accident.

     

    For more details of the William Nicolson, click here.

     

     

     

    Hardback £150.00
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  • Are You Sitting Comfortably? The Book Jackets of Edward Bawden

    Are You Sitting Comfortably? The Book Jackets of Edward Bawden

    Peyton Skipwith & James Russell

    From the team who gave us one of last autumn’s most delicious books, ‘The Snail that Climbed the Eiffel Tower & Other Work by John Minton‘.

    Hardback £35.00
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