A seasonal touchstone packed full of quotes, book lists, recipes, poems and observations on the natural world to keep close at hand and to accompany you through the year.

Commonplace books have been kept for centuries, and have historically been used to record favourite passages from books, poetry, anecdotes, extracts from letters, proverbs, lists, shared recipes, quotes, prayers and lyrics. ‘Commonplacing’ has seen a recent revival and can now be seen more as a highly personal anthology – a joyful place where the keeper can develop a deeper sense of self by selecting fragments of language that feel meaningful and reflect their tastes, beliefs and values.

In this book, delve into blogger, Instagrammer and YouTuber Miranda Mills’ ultimate commonplace book, a carefully curated guide to the seasons. Including poetry by Robert Browning, Emily Brontë, Sara Teasdale, Lemn Sissay, and with extracts from Edith Wharton, George Eliot, Alison Uttley, Louisa May Alcott, Adrian Bell and many, many more. Connect more deeply with yourself and your creative impulses as you explore everything each season has to offer, and even be inspired to create your own personalised commonplace book.

Myths, Legends and Tales for a Greener World is a captivating collection of stories, retold by master folklorist Rosalind Kerven, all of which offer a new and inspiring perspective on the climate breakdown that threatens our modern world.

Inspired by traditional myths and folklore from across the world and retold with integrity and respect, the stories in this collection offer a hopeful perspective on how we can better appreciate the natural environment and the species that share our planet. The book is split into five chapters: In the Beginning, The World in Trouble, Respect the Earth, Our Animal Relations and World Without End.

Among these fascinating tales are a retelling of a Chinese story of dragons that help to control the climate, a spiritual tale about a desert stream from Tunisia, a Canadian First Nations story about the coexistence between humans and bears, and a Norse legend about rebirth in springtime. Each story is accompanied with carefully researched notes, detailing the cultural and historical background and other related tales.

This book harnesses time-honoured wisdom to help imagine how we can transcend environmental degradation and species loss, to offer a more harmonious vision of life on earth.

Are you a Kasparov, a Carlsen or a Fischer? Use this book to identify your own unique chess style and discover how it aligns with the tactics of the game’s greatest players. Then explore tips and tricks that help you avoid pitfalls, improve your strengths and become the best player you can be.

Every chess player has a naturally individual style of playing, based on the moves they like to play. Some people choose the kind of moves world champion Magnus Carlsen regularly uses, while others prefer a strategy favoured by the legendary Bobby Fischer. And some even find themselves emulating the way a chess computer works. But very few players are aware of how these moves fit together to create a consistent, personal chess style.

Reveal Your Chess Style contains 100 diagrams, each with a multiple choice of possible moves for the reader to choose from. Analysing the answers will explain how the reader’s choices reveal their hidden style, and which famous player they most identify with on the chessboard.

A host of advice is also included, on developing the player’s style further to avoid regular errors, increase skill and win more games – or they may want to adopt traits from other styles instead! This truly original book, from an International Grandmaster and venerable chess author, is a must-have for anyone who wants to improve their game and really get to know themselves as a chess player.

Published in collaboration with the National Churches Trust, this fascinating book is a sumptuous and authoritative photographic history of churches in England, as told through the objects inside them.

Arranged chronologically from the Roman era to the present day, it covers a huge range of church objects including ornate fonts, beautiful stained glass windows, carved bench ends and rood screens, precious silverware and even church organs, and each piece has a fascinating story to tell. Within these pages, you’ll discover:

• The Hinton St Mary mosaic in Dorset, created in the early 4th century AD and showing the first depiction of Jesus Christ in Britain.

• The full Norman repertoire of abstract geometrical forms displayed in the Tower Arch, St John’s Church, Northampton.

• The Becket pilgrims represented in glowing medieval stained glass in Canterbury Cathedral.

• Exquisitely carved misericords showing scenes from spiritual life through the year in Ripple church, Worcestershire.

• Destruction and survival through the Dissolution of the Monasteries at Croyland, Lincolnshire.

• Works of art in glass by William Morris and Edward Burne-Jones in Brampton, Cumbria.

• Dame Elizabeth Frink’s intimate ‘Walking Madonna’ statue outside Salisbury Cathedral.

With all of this and many other glorious treasures of England’s Christian history, it’s the perfect book for architecture enthusiasts, countryside explorers, dedicated churchgoers and anyone interested in the ongoing story of English churches.

Bring your personal story to life in colourful, vibrant textile art.

Ailish Henderson is an exciting young textile artist whose work is fun, quirky, tells interesting stories and uses a diverse range of media, though always grounded in cloth. In this gorgeous book, she explains her working methods and how you can harness them in your own work to create unique, deeply personal textile art pieces. She encourages you to draw on your own personal memorabilia to create work that is meaningful to you – the intention is to capture a moment in time, a memory to treasure, a look on a face, a glance of love from a pet.

Along with work from the author, the book also showcases work from textile artists such as Aran Illingworth, Jenni Dutton, Woo Jin Joo and Jordan Cunliffe. It includes:

• Materials: where to source cloth, using found and recycled materials, curating vintage fabric, incorporating precious family pieces in your work.

• Processes: finding inspiration, creating mood boards, keeping sketchbooks, developing work from drawings, capturing character.

• Techniques: Screenprinting, hand and machine stitching, appliqué, mixed-media collage.

• Subject matter: the narrative line, self-portraits, family snapshots, history, identity, travel, favourite animals, even famous faces.

Throughout the book the author encourages you to work with freedom, instinct and honesty, bringing in a wealth of different techniques to create authentic stories in cloth, and most importantly, enjoy yourself along the way.

A thoughtful, meditative guide to the ways creative textile art can soothe and comfort us during challenging times.

Renowned British textile artists Cas Holmes and Deena Beverley, each well known for their richly textured, deeply evocative work in stitch, collaborate for the first time in this important and timely book. Beautifully illustrated with a wealth of work from both artists along with other embroiderers and textile artists from around the world, Soulful Stitch documents a wide range of stitched responses to crisis, both personal and global. With invaluable advice on how to develop your own work in times of trouble, it explores:

• How the restrictions and trials of everyday life can inform your textile work, enabling you to develop imaginative new approaches.

• The healing power of stitch to soothe and console, with the simple act of putting needle into fabric providing a mindful route to inner calm.

• Practical ways to continue with your textile art practice in the face of seismic life changes, finding creative opportunity in difficult situations.

• How to use found objects, repurposed threads and personal items to create deep emotional resonance in your own work.

Both authors have recent lived experience of having to navigate new paths through big life challenges, making this book particularly heartfelt. It truly demonstrates how even in the toughest times, creativity in textile art can keep you afloat.

Explore how sacred art evolved in early Mexico, adapting to local cultures and artistic traditions.

This beautifully illustrated book reveals the importance of saints in New Spain, a viceroyalty that was part of the Spanish Empire from 1521–1821, covering modern-day Mexico, Central America, and the US Southwest. In the late sixteenth century, Rome’s attempts to manage sanctity as an official process had a profound impact throughout Spain and the Spanish viceroyalties. Saintly devotions traveled to Mexico, and circulated within the vast territory as images or print, then to be transformed by New Spain’s own communities. Drawing on collections from Mexico and the United States, this book examines the role of images in the construction of the holy: these paintings, sculptures, and engravings routinely used to propagate, celebrate, and venerate saintly figures, and used in official beatification and canonization proceedings. The relationship between sanctity and the pictorial is a long, revered tradition that continues in the work of New Mexico’s santero artists today.

Step inside the historic homes of the Guinness family and enter a world of power, privilege and palatial living.
 
The Guinnesses became famous as brewers, philanthropists and socialites, but they also created some of the most distinctive homes in Britain and Ireland, where they lived, loved and entertained in high style.
 
Royalty was a frequent visitor to Ashford Castle and Elveden Hall. At Luggala Oonagh Guinness welcomed rock stars, actors and artists. At Biddesden Bryan Guinness lived the life of an urbane country squire, while at Kelvedon his cousin Honor left her husband Chips Channon to play the country gentleman while she ran off with her land agent. The family’s Dublin mansions – Farmleigh, St Anne’s and 80 St Stephen’s Green – were a byword for grandeur and opulence. And the Guinnesses spent a fortune buying two spectacular country houses, Kenwood and Castletown, not to live in, but simply to save them from destruction and to give them away.
 
Adrian Tinniswood, the bestselling historian of the country house, opens the door to castles and mansions that once belonged to the greatest brewing dynasty the world has ever seen.

‘Tinniswood … [is] an erudite historian of country-house life in all its anecdote-worthy vagaries.’ – Financial Times

‘We are in the company of a confident and skilled historian who understands the mores of his era and wears his learning lightly…’ – Virginia Nicholson, The Times

‘Few authors can combine serious social history with the sometimes sad and often hilarious narratives of country-house life in the way that Tinniswood can.’ – Jeremy Musson

100 contemporary patchwork designs using the traditional log cabin block, ideal for anyone wanting a modern take on this popular pattern.

The log cabin block has been one of the foundations of patchwork quilting for over a century and a half. From the key idea – strips of fabric (the logs) are sewn around a central square – it lends itself to almost countless variations. In this beautiful and practical book, textile artist Catherine-Marie Longtin guides you through 100 of these variations, ranging from the traditional to the contemporary.

Starting with an inspirational showcase of the block designs, Log Cabin Quilt Blocks then offers step-by-step instructions on how to create each of the blocks for yourself, as well as ideas on how to play with the basic elements of the log cabin to produce stunning new designs. The techniques and step-by-step instructions include:

• How to develop your own sense of colour and work with less traditional patchwork materials like linen.

• How to create 4-, 3- and 2-sided blocks, quarter circles, courthouse steps, rectangle and polygonal designs.

• How to use double strips and cornerstones to create striking graphic effects.

• How to create more texture with foundation piecing, and much more…

A comprehensive block directory includes diagrams of each block, along with measurements for each component. Once completed, the blocks can be stitched together to create unique quilts, or used as they are for cushions, artworks and other handmade objects.

Whether you wish to reproduce the blocks, use the book for inspiration to create your own designs, or simply leaf through this captivating series of log cabin studies, this book is the perfect resource.

A lively exploration of Volvo, one of the world’s best-loved car brands, with evocative vintage photography and entertaining text that explains why you should want to own one.

This iconic Swedish marque is highly regarded across the world for safety, longevity and precision in the design and manufacture of their cars. Originally evolving from the Swedish Ball Bearing Factory, established in 1907, the company went from strength to strength through the twentieth century and beyond. It became a much-admired manufacturer of reliable family cars as well as exciting sports models and today’s innovative electric vehicles, including through its sister brand, Polestar.

The Spirit of Volvo outlines all the most popular and enduring Volvo models, including the early ÖV 4, made to stand up to the challenging Swedish climate, the sporty P1800, famous in the 1960s for appearing in the TV series The Saint, suavely driven by Roger Moore, and the quintessential large family car through several decades, the 240. The insightful text, from an author who is a Volvo owner and superfan as well as an expert in design, is accompanied by glorious photography showing the Volvo brand at its very best.

The perfect gift for every car enthusiast, whether they are a Volvo driver or not, this beautifully illustrated book, the fourth title in the ‘Spirit of Classic Cars’ series, delivers a captivating insight into this classic brand. 

An illustrated guide to the history and use of corduroy in fashion.

A true classic, corduroy is the unsung hero of many an outfit. From country lanes to the salons of the intelligentsia, corduroy has secured its place as a reliable and unmistakable fabric; everyone has a memory of a cherished piece of corduroy clothing.

A staple of many a wardrobe, it comes in many weights and widths, and its ridged profile is instantly recognisable: from sports jackets with elbow patches (a professor’s classic) to dungarees, corduroy has a popularity probably only rivalled by denim. The Book of Corduroy features some of corduroy’s most famous fans, from Picasso and Rodin to Bob Dylan and David Bowie. Delve into the origins and history of the cloth and how it got its name – originating in Manchester in the UK, corduroy is called ‘Manchester’ in countries such as Sweden, Germany and the Netherlands. 

This beautiful book features a tactile ridged cover finish, as well as over 200 colour photographs documenting the long life of corduroy, accompanied by essays from Eric Musgrave who has been a fashion writer for over 40 years. Discover corduroy’s roots, its position in the high fashion world as well as the workwear sphere, and where it is destined to go. Wherever it is currently sitting in the fashion cycle, it’s a look that is unmistakable and enduring.

A quirky illustrated flip book featuring a myriad of mix-and-match cats.

Cats in Pants is a hilarious swing through the underwear preferences of several cats with lots of personality. Uniquely hand-illustrated in a charming and textured style by Naomi Tipping, this book is guaranteed to be a hit with children and adults alike. 

Each page is equally divided into three parts so that the head, body and (clothed) tail-end of the cat can be swapped around with the respective parts from other pages to create a huge number of cats.

Whether you’re looking to buy this for a child, a cat lover or yourself, this book provides a new and refreshing look at one of the most important questions of our time: what do cats look like in pants?