The first ever B-format edition of Tolkiens complete Father Christmas letters including a new introduction & rare archive materials. Every December an envelope bearing a stamp from the North Pole would arrive for J.R.R. Tolkiens children. Inside would be a letter in strange spidery handwriting & a beautiful coloured drawing or some sketches. The letters were from Father Christmas. They told wonderful tales of life at the North Pole: how all the reindeer got loose & scattered presents all over the place; how the accident-prone Polar Bear climbed the North Pole & fell through the roof of Father Christmass house into the dining-room; how he broke the Moon into four pieces & made the Man in it fall into the back garden; how there were wars with the troublesome horde of goblins who lived in the caves beneath the house! Sometimes the Polar Bear would scrawl a note & sometimes Ilbereth the Elf would write in his elegant flowing script adding yet more life & humour to the stories. No reader young or old can fail to be charmed by the inventiveness & authenticity of Tolkiens Letters from Father Christmas. To mark ten years since the publication of the complete edition of Tolkiens Letters from Father Christmas in 1999 this new edition is the first time the letters have been available in B format. ...

Two people. An unforgettable moment. One extraordinary love story. In Chicago Illinois two people are about to lock eyes across a crowded dance floor. The following moment will spark the love story of a lifetime! The year is 1944 & America has just entered the war. Young men & women are being drafted in to fight with their allies on Europes distant shores. Throughout America sweethearts are saying their last goodbyes. Liz Stephens is already betrothed to budding US politician Dalton Harris but when she meets GI Morgan Mc Clain she feels an instant & intense connection. But then he dances with her flirtatious best friend Betty & Liz is left feeling like just another soldiers fancy. Betty is mesmerized by Morgan & begs Liz to write letters for her to post to him overseas. Liz reluctantly agrees in the end anxious to retain a connection to him. As the last searing days of World War II loom a correspondence begins that will alter the course of their lives forever. ...

Hernan Cortess Cartas de Relacion written over a seven-year period to Charles V of Spain provide an extraordinary narrative account of the conquest of Mexico from the founding of the coastal town of Veracruz until Cortess journey to Honduras in 1525. Pagdens English translation has been prepared from a close examination of the earliest surviving manuscript & of the first printed editions & he also provides a new introduction offering a bold & innovative interpretation of the nature of the conquest & Cortess involvement in it. J. H. Elliots introductory essay explains Cortess conflicts with the Crown & with Diego Velazquez the governor of Cuba. ...

18 June 1940 Oh my Margaret You have no secrets from me but I've kept a part of myself locked away always. A part of me that started scratching at the wall the day this other war started that started howling to get out right now the day you ran off to meet your soldier. I should have told you should've taught you to steel your heart. Taught you that a letter isn't always just a letter. Words on the page can drench the sould. If only you knew. Mother Elspeth is fond of saying to her daughter that 'the first volume of my life is out of print'. But when a bomb hits an Edinburgh street & Margaret finds her mother crouched in the ruins of her bedroom pulling armfuls of yellowed letters onto her lap the past Elspeth has kept so carefully locked away is out in the open. The next day Elspeth disappears. Left alone with the letters Margaret discovers a mother she never knew existed: a poet living on the Isle of Skye who in 1912 answered a fan letter from an impetuous young man in Illinois. Without having to worry about appearances or expectations Elspeth & Davey confess their dreams & their worries things they've never told another soul. Even without meeting they know one another. Played out across oceans in peacetime & wartime but most of all through paper & ink Letters from Skye is about the transformative power of a letter
- the letter that shouldn't have been sent the letter that is never sent & the letter the reader will keep for ever.
...

Harry Lamin was born in Derbyshire in 1877 & left school at thirteen to work in the lace industry but by December 1916 he had been conscripted into the 9th Battalion York & Lancaster Regiment & sent to war. Harrys letters home to his family describe the conflict with a poignant immediacy even ninety years on detailing everything from the action in battle to the often amusing incidents of life amongst his comrades. Throughout the letters Harrys tone is unwaveringly stoical uncomplaining & good-humoured. Letters From The Trenches" is a fitting tribute to the unsung heroes of the Great War who fought & endured & returned home & the one in six who did not. The letters describe the war through the eyes of those who really lived it bringing the horrors & triumphs to life for the twenty-first-century reader. Edited by Harrys grandson Bill " Letters From The Trenches" tells the moving story of a brave selfless & honourable man who endured everything that the war could throw at him & still came up smiling." ...

With the first publication in this edition of all the surviving letters of Ernest Hemingway (1899-1961) readers will for the first time be able to follow the thoughts ideas & actions of one of the great literary figures of the twentieth century in his own words. This first volume encompasses his youth his experience in World War I & his arrival in Paris. The letters reveal a more complex person than Hemingways tough guy public persona would suggest: devoted son affectionate brother infatuated lover adoring husband spirited friend & disciplined writer. Unguarded & never intended for publication the letters record experiences that inspired his art afford insight into his creative process & express his candid assessments of his own work & that of his contemporaries. The letters present immediate accounts of events & relationships that profoundly shaped his life & work. A detailed introduction notes chronology illustrations & index are included. ...

Nancy Mitford & Evelyn Waugh were two of the twentieth century's most amusing & gifted writers who matched wits & traded literary advice in more than five hundred letters over twenty-two years. Dissecting their friends criticizing each other's books & concealing their true feelings beneath a barrage of hilarious & knowing repartee they found it far easier to conduct a friendship on paper than in person. This correspondence provides a colorful glimpse into the literary & social circles of London & Paris during the Second World War & for twenty years after. ...

In the period covered by this richly detailed collection which brings the poet to the age of forty T.S. Eliot was to set a new course for his life & work. Forsaking the Unitarianism of his American forebears he was received into the Church of England & naturalised as a British citizen
- a radical & public alteration of the intellectual & spiritual direction of his career. The demands of Eliots professional life as writer & editor became more complex & exacting during these years. The celebrated but financially-pressed periodical he had been editing since 1922
- The Criterion"
- switched between being a quarterly & a monthly before being rescued by the fledgling house of Faber & Gwyer. In addition to writing numerous essays & editorials lectures reviews introductions & prefaces his letters show Eliot involving himself wholeheartedly in the business of his new career as a publisher. His Ariel poems " Journey of the Magi" (1927) & "A Song for Simeon" (1928) established a new manner & vision for the poet of " The Waste Land" & " The Hollow Men". These are also the years in which Eliot published two sections of an exhilaratingly funny savage jazz-influenced play-in-verse
- " Fragment of a Prologue" & " Fragment of an Agon"
- which were subsequently brought together as " Sweeney Agonistes". In addition he struggled to translate the remarkable work " Anabase" by St. John Perse which was to be a signal influence upon his own later poetry. This correspondence with friends & mentors vividly documents all the stages of Eliots personal & artistic transformation during these crucial years the continuing anxieties of his private life & the forging of his public reputation."




...

Volume 4 of the letters of T. S. Eliot which brings the poet critic editor & publisher into his forties documents a period of anxious & fast-moving professional recovery & personal & spiritual consolidation. Following the withdrawal of financial support by his patron Lady Rothermere Faber & Gwyer (subsequently Faber & Faber) takes over the responsibility for Eliots literary periodical The Criterion". He supplements his income as a fledgling publisher just as I did ten years ago by reviewing articles prefaces lectures broadcasting talks & anything that turns up. His work as editor is internationalist above all else & Eliot makes contact with a number of eminent & emergent writers & thinkers as well as forging links with European reviews. Eliots responsibilities during this period extend to caring for Vivien who returns home after months in a French psychiatric hospital & whom he looks after with anxious fortitude; & the personal correspondence with his mother closes with her death in September 1929." ...

Volume Two covers the early years of his editorship of The Criterion" (the periodical that Eliot launched with Lady Rothermeres backing in 1922) publication of " The Hollow Men" & the course of Eliots thinking about poetry & poetics after " The Waste Land". The correspondence charts Eliots intellectual journey towards conversion to the Anglican faith in 1927 as well as his transformation from banker to publisher ending with his appointment as a director of the new publishing house of Faber & Gwyer in late 1925 & the appearance of " Poems 1909-1925" Eliots first publication with the house with which he would be associated for the rest of his life. It was partly because of Eliots profoundly influential work as cultural commentator & editor that the correspondence is so prolific & so various & Volume Two of the " Letters" fully demonstrates the emerging continuities between poet essayist editor & letter-writer." ...