Dreamers Rise

Archaeologist Alan Hardy describes a find that emerged during the excavation of a long barrow in the Berkshire Downs: A book was found w...

This double-view postcard of scenes from Orkney was issued by J. M. Stevenson, a longtime stationer in Kirkwall and Stromness. It also bears...

W. Jeffrey Bolster: Able-bodied seamen versed in “the Mariner’s art” were admittedly a minority among black seamen; but men like Daniel W...

A prim middle-aged woman steps up to the counter and asks if we have any books by the novelist Catherine Cookson. I say I don't think so...

This volume of stories, texts, and illustrations was published by Profile Books in 2003. For a while it seemed to have become scarce, but it...

Above, a page of ads from Barney Rosset's Evergreen Review, Vol. 2. No. 7 (Winter 1959). This was a themed issue devoted to Mexico, but...

Publishing pioneer Jason Epstein has died. At 93, he managed to outlive his obituarist , Christopher Lehmann-Haupt, who died in 2018. Eps...

The revered British folksinger Norma Waterson has died. The Guardian has an obituary and a nice appreciation . Though she recorded contem...

Henry Mayhew: I may mention that in the course of my inquiry into the condition of the fancy cabinet-makers of the metropolis, one elderly...

Henry Mayhew, the great chronicler of 19th-century London's working poor, collected the following tale in the course of an interview wit...

The above illustration by the late French artist Jean-Claude Pertuzé is from a version of a folktale known in French as "Jean de l'...

Let some traveller, on seeing Hermes of Commagene, aged sixteen years, sheltered in the tomb by fate, call out: I give you my greetings, l...

Stepan Krasheninnikov: The Kamchadals regard Mount Kamchatka as the dwelling place of the dead; they say that when it emits flames, it means...

Slawomir Rawicz was a Polish military officer in World War II who in the 1950s dictated to a ghost-writer a stirring account of how he and s...

I'm walking in the woods at night in the company of Willie McTell. I see three deer standing a few yards away; somehow, in spite of his ...

I stepped into a little café that was simply a small room with a counter in the rear and a table on either side of the door. The woman behin...

Edward Gibbon: Diocletian, who, from a servile origin, had raised himself to the throne, passed the nine last years of his life in a priva...

I pulled out this slender letterpress chapbook the other day when I was looking for something else. I had forgotten that I owned it. The cov...

Sir James George Frazer: Not only among the Celts but throughout Europe, Hallowe’en, the night which marks the transition from autumn to...

It's a frightening thought that I've reached an age where there are now books that I first read almost fifty years ago, and I'm...