` It is said the Bintheyr Map to Everywhere will take its possessor wherever he or she needs to go...` Master thief, Fin, is unusual
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The Map Tour is an exquisite collection of maps tracing the evolution of tourism from the late 1600s to the elite realms of the Grand Tour & then beyond the boundaries of the known world. Produced with the Royal Geographical Society, with access to their archives of rare maps, it charts a course across the globe on the first steam voyages, captures the romance of the golden age of train travel & navigates to the heart of why we travel. Arranged chronologically & including personal anecdotes, diary extracts & photographs of intrepid early travellers, The Map Tour looks at the ways in which maps facilitated & directed the travel industry. It reveals the progress in mapmaking techniques & shows how people used maps to navigate & understand the world. It considers the shape of global tourism today, reflecting on just how accessible the world has become. ...

An updated edition of the classic, much praised history of cartography. It traces the adventures, discoveries, & feats of technical ingenuity by which mapmakers, over the centuries, have succeeded in charting first the surface of the globe, then the earth`s interior & the ocean floors, & finally the moon & the planets of our solar system. The author has added three new chapters, as well as many updates & amplifications, to reflect the great changes that have taken place in mapmaking in the past two decades. The Mapmakers will continue to be the definitive book on this fascinating subject. ...

We are proud to sell this wonderful book, as The Mapmakers is quite literally, all about us. One of London’s best known specialist shops, we have been trading, in Charing Cross & now Covent Garden, for more than 150 years & we are famous all over the world as a premier supplier of maps & geographical books. This book celebrates the history of our company, charting its role as a publisher of worldwide maps in the era when the British Empire was at the height of its power, & as a sales agent for the Ordnance Survey for more than a century. It tells the story of the company’s Victorian founders & some of their distinguished customers
- real & fictitious
- including John Ruskin, Florence Nightingale, Captain Scott, General Gordon & Sherlock Holmes. The specialist family business was almost destroyed by the wars & economic crises of the 20th century, but we survived to become once again unrivalled as a supplier of maps & guidebooks to a new generation of world travellers. In order to succeed, any business must mirror in some important way the society around it; this fascinating book shows how Stanfords reflected many of the forces which shaped the 19th & 20th century worlds.

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In the tradition of Allende, this is a magical novel, written in the form of an opera, & set in Seville & Mexico in the late 1800s. Act I opens in Seville. Emilio has been forced by his overbearing mother into the priesthood. Monica is a governess in a wealthy household who falls pregnant by the head of the house. A chance meeting in Seville cathedral suggests a solution to both their predicaments -- they decide to marry, though it is not a love match. Emilio raises Monica`s son Diego as his own, & they form a close bond over their mutual love of language, books, maps & birds. When Emilio dies, Monica reveals that he was not Diego`s father. She grows ever more embittered & eventually dies, leaving Diego to pursue his true calling
- his love of birds. Act 2 follows Diego`s life in Mexico
- his apprenticeship to an American who is mapping the birds of Mexico; his love for Sofia, the beautiful, independent daughter of a Mexican farmer; & his obsession with saving the Passenger Pigeon from extinction. The cities of Seville & Merida are so central to the narrative, & evoked so beautifully, that they are almost characters themselves. Taking in many of the stock characters that appear in the best operas -- the philanderer, the wronged wife, the harassed servant, the star-crossed lovers -- The Mapmaker`s Opera is an original & magical novel which will appeal to lovers of Gabriel Garcia Marquez & Isabel Allende.

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In the early years of the 18th century, a band of French scientists set off on a daring, decade-long expedition to South America in a race to measure the precise shape of the earth. Like Lewis & Clark`s exploration of the American West, their incredible mission revealed the mysteries of a little-known continent to a world hungry for discovery. Scaling 16, 000foot mountains in the Peruvian Andes, & braving jaguars, pumas, insects, & vampire bats in the jungle, the scientists barely completed their mission. One was murdered, another perished from fever, & a third-Jean Godin-nearly died of heartbreak. At the expedition`s end, Jean & his Peruvian wife, Isabel Grameson, became stranded at opposite ends of the Amazon, victims of a tangled web of international politics. Isabel`s solo journey to reunite with Jean after their calamitous twenty-year separation was so dramatic that it left all of 18th-century Europe spellbound. Her survival-unprecedented in the annals of Amazon exploration-was a testament to human endurance, female resourcefulness, & the power of devotion. Drawing on the original writings of the French mapmakers, as well as his own experience retracing Isabel`s journey, acclaimed writer Robert Whitaker weaves a riveting tale rich in adventure, intrigue, & scientific achievement. Never before told, The Mapmaker`s Wife is an epic love story that unfolds against the backdrop of ”the greatest expedition the world has ever known.” ...

This is the visual story of life in Maasai Mara, Kenya, wild home of African big game & one of the world s most famous wildlife reserves. Anup Shah s distinctive style of photography propels the reader into the middle of this evocative land & its resident animals, immediately & intimately. ” The Mara ”reveals a magnificent stage for the performance of life. The drama is driven by the rhythm of the seasons, from the start of new life at the end of the rainy season, through to the hardships endured during the long, dry season. The images capture anger, death, hope, arrivals, & departures, & provide a startlingly fresh & rarely seen view of life in this popular reserve. The images are accompanied by thought-provoking captions which describe the breathtaking land that Anup experienced first-hand during trips to the Mara between 2011 & 2015. Now the reader can experience the essence & wonder of Mara life with this astounding volume.” ...

Home is where you start from, but where is a swallow`s real home? & what does `native` mean if the English oak is an immigrant from Spain? In ninety richly varied poems & illuminating prose interludes, Ruth Padel`s original new book weaves science, myth, wild nature & human history to conjure a world created & sustained by migration. ` We`re all from somewhere else”, she begins, tracing the millennia-old journeys of cells, trees, birds & beasts. Geese battle raging winds over Mount Everest, lemurs skim precipices in Madagascar & wildebeest, at the climax of their epic trek from Tanzania, brave a river filled with the largest, hungriest crocodiles in Africa. Human migration has shaped civilisation but today is one of the greatest challenges the world faces. In a series of incisive portraits, Padel turns to the struggles of human displacement
- the Flight into Egypt, John James Audubon emigrating to America (feeding migrant birds en route), migrant workers in Mumbai & refugees labouring over a drastically changing planet
- to show how the purpose of migration, for both humans & animals, is survival. Poignant, thought-provoking & utterly compelling, here is a magnificent tapestry of life on the move from the acclaimed author of ” Darwin: A Life in Poems”.

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Parisian bookseller Victor Legris finds a new case to investigate very close to home, when his business partner`s apartment is burgled. Curiously the only item stolen is a decorative goblet of little value. But on learning that two people have been murdered who were connected to to the goblet, Victor becomes convinced of its secret significance. How quickly can he recover it & end the killing spree, in a city beset with terrorist activity? In this fourth case for the bookseller sleuth, Claude Izner offers a convincing portrait of a Paris shaken by anarchist bombings in the spring of 1892. ...

A box of possessions. A father with no memory. A daughter with just one day to piece together the past. When Sabrina Boggs stumbles upon a mysterious collection of her father`s belongings, her seemingly uneventful life suddenly alters & shifts. In the single day she has to search for answers about the man she thought she knew, a man who can no longer remember his own story, Sabrina uncovers far bigger secrets than she could have imagined. & discovers that sometimes it`s the people closest to us that we know the least. ...