Search results for ""Little Toller Books""
Little Toller Books Something of his Art: Walking to Lubeck with J. S. Bach
In the depths of winter in 1705 the young Johann Sebastian Bach, then unknown as a composer and earning a modest living as a teacher and organist, set off on a long journey by foot to Lubeck to visit the composer Dieterich Buxterhude, a distance of more than 250 miles. This journey and its destination were a pivotal point in the life of arguably the greatest composer the world has yet seen. Lubeck was Bach's moment, when a young teacher with a reputation for intolerance of his pupils' failings began his journey to become the master of the Baroque. More than three hundred years later, the writer Horatio Clare set off to recreate this walk, following in Bach's footsteps. The result of this journey is Something of his Art, an imaginative evocation of what the twenty-year-old composer would have seen and felt on his long journey is a sustained visualisation of the landscape, light and wildlife of early eighteenth century northern Germany. Bach becomes Clare's walking companion, a vestigial but real presence, as he acutely observes the season and places he passes through.
£10.00
Little Toller Books Herbaceous
As climate change erodes the familiar pattern of the seasons, we turn instinctively to the life cycles of herbaceous plants to guide us through the year. The growing, flowering, seeding and dying back of wild flowers, weeds, herbs and garden perennials sustain and enrich our lives. Herbaceous is a journey which follows the colour pulse of plants through the year, looking for the new and emerging rhythms. Beginning with the bright yellow, followed by the vernal whites of spring and the pinks of summer, the blues of early autumn and finally the browns of seeds set as winter comes. Herbaceous is gardening with words - asking us to look again at our relationship with plants and celebrates their power to nourish our spirits.
£8.43
Little Toller Books In Pursuit of Spring
In mid to late March 1913, as the storm clouds of the Great War which was to claim his life gathered, Edward Thomas took a bicycle ride from Clapham to the Quantock Hills. The poet recorded his journey through his beloved South Country and his account was published as In Pursuit of Spring in 1914. Regarded as one of his most important prose works, it stands as an elegy for a world now lost. What is less well-known is that Thomas took with him a camera, and photographed much of what he saw, noting the locations on the back of the prints. These have been kept in archives for many years and will now be published for the very first time in the book. Thomas journeys through Guildford, Winchester, Salisbury, across the Plain, to the Bristol Channel, recording the poet's thoughts and feelings as winter ends.
£14.00
Little Toller Books Wild Life in a Southern County
Wild Life in a Southern County traces the course of a spring which rises on an Iron Age hillfort and gradually broadens into a brook, flows through a nearby village and hamlet, skirts a solitary farmhouse and its orchard, before draining into water meadows and a lake where the wildfowl nest. Immersed in the detail of this ancient landscape, its people and the habitats of its wildlife, what emerges from Jefferies' dazzling prose is his sense of perpetual wonder and the deep affection he felt for his homeland, from the clatter of a milkmaid's boots to a pike lying in ambush.
£14.00
Little Toller Books King of Dust
King of Dust is a craftsman's personal journey through the landscapes of ancient sculpture which first inspired him to pick up tools. This journey through the Romanesque celebrates the lives of medieval carvers and contemporary stonemasons, interwoven with Alex's own life as he becomes a stonemason.
£12.00
Little Toller Books The Shining Levels
John Wyatt first encountered the Lake District during a boyhood camping trip to Windermere. He was overwhelmed by the freedom of the landscape and the closeness to nature he felt. It was as if he belonged here, amongst the fells, the crags and the endless horizon. This call to the wild stayed with him, becoming so powerful that one day he did what many only dream of: he left a steady job and his town life to become a forestry worker in a Lakeland wood at Cartmel Fell. This is one of the finest books ever written on the Lake District. Like Thoreau, John Wyatt embraced the simplicity of living alone in a woodland hut, immersing himself in a life made rich by birdsong, foraging for food the smell of woodsmoke, and the extraordinary companionship of Buck, a young roe deer discovered in the woods.
£14.39
Little Toller Books In the Country
At the end of the 1960s, Kenneth Allsop, a famous television presenter and literary man-about-town, left London and settled amid the sunken lanes, ancient forests and chalk streams of west Dorset. He was at his very happiest here. He thought it the loveliest place on earth, and for three years he devoted a weekly newspaper column to his day-to-day life at the mill, brimming with humor and delight for the wildlife which shared his home. In the Country is not rustic or romantic. It is never unrealistic about agricultural modernisation and social change in the countryside. Yet, steeped with a deep sense of the past, Kenneth Allsop's writing speaks in defense of the natural world and stands firmly against the unchecked exploitation of the land. First published 1972 by Hamish Hamilton.
£14.39
Little Toller Books Wanderers in the New Forest
Known as the 'grandmother of herbalism', Juliette de Bairacli Levy travelled throughout Europe and North America in pursuit of her passion for herbs and holistic medicine, living mostly in rural places whose nomadic communities helped expand her knowledge of plants and living from the land. In the early 1950s, she settled in a thatched 'cabin' in the New Forest for three years and raised her children in the woods.Originally published in 1958, Wanderers in the New Forest describes an extraordinary family life living wild: drawing spring water from Abbots Well, bathing in Windmill Hill Pond and sharing the water with their animal neighbours, foraging for fruits and fungi or tending to their forest garden of herbs, flowers and vegetables. Juliette's friendships within the local Gypsy community enabled her to record the impact that post-war modernisation was having on their traditions, ancient rights and intimate knowledge of the New Forest. This new edition is illustrated throughout with photographs taken by Juliette while living in the forest.
£15.00
Little Toller Books Landfill
The unlikely stars of Landfill are gulls. No, not seagulls. Gulls. Over the past century gulls have been brought ashore by modernity, living in our slipstream, following trawlers, ploughs and now rubbish trucks. They are more our contemporaries than other birds, living their wild lives in towns and cities, grabbing a bite where they can. Our story is theirs too. In Landfill, Tim Dee follows gulls to rubbish dumps, meets gull-watchers, discovers ancient poets, Victorian novelists and learns how gulls continue to tell us how the wild can share our world, if we'd only listen.
£12.00
Little Toller Books Nemesis, My Friend: Journeys Through the Turning Times
This new book of essays from the author of Wild tracks the turning light of the day and seasons, an almanac of the turning times. Beginning in night and winter, it moves to dawn and spring, then noon and summer and finally evening and autumn. Set partly at the author's home in Wales, the book journeys widely, searching for a dead father in Prague, listening to the Sky-Grandmothers of Mexican myth and staying with the people of West Papua who, when they know they will fall over laughing, lie down first. It asks: what is the real gift of the misunderstood Goddess Nemesis? Why should flowers be prescribed as medicine? What do male zebra finches dream of? Where do the sands of time run fastest, and how is that connected to the age of anxiety? It explores the dawn chorus; the tradition of sacred hospitality; dust from the time before the sun even existed; the twilight time of the trickster and the daily rituals of morning. In all of these it asks: why does light, through the hours of the day and the seasons of the year, affect us? Griffiths concludes this extraordinary collection by deciding that light is in fact how we think.
£18.00
Little Toller Books The Unofficial Countryside
During the early 1970s Richard Mabey explored crumbling city docks and overgrown bomb-sites, navigated inner city canals and car parks, and discovered there was scarcely a nook in our urban landscape incapable of supporting life. The Unofficial Countryside is a timely reminder of how nature flourishes against the odds, surviving in the most obscure and surprising places. Originally published in 1973 this landmark book was described by Iain Sinclair as 'a proper reckoning, the Domesday Book of a topography too fascinating to be left alone.' This beautiful new edition forms part of the Richard Mabey library, published to celebrate the author's 80th birthday and has a cover by the artist Michael Kirkman.
£18.00
Little Toller Books No Matter How Many Skies Have Fallen: Back to the land in wartime England
On 'Lady Day', March 1943 a group of Christian pacifists took possession of a vacant farm in Frating, a hamlet on the Essex Tendring Peninsula. There they established a working community, inspired by their association with The Adelphi journal, where D.H.Lawrence, John Middleton Murry, Vera Brittain, Iris Murdoch, George Orwell and others shared ideas for the future with European religious radicals such as Nikolai Berdyaev, Martin Buber and Simone Weil. Frating Hall Farm provided a settlement and livelihood for individuals and families (as well as a temporary sanctuary for refugees and prisoners-of-war), and over time became a successful arable and livestock land-holding of more than 300 acres. Scorned initially by their neighbours for their anti-war views, the Frating community won respect not only through their farming achievements, but having established a touring theatre company and choir, for bringing new life to the villages and churches around them. The lost story of Frating Hall Farm is based on the reminiscences of those who grew up on the farm, together with photographs, letters and organisational records, never before seen or published. The book is a kaleidoscopic history of a farm during its eleven-year occupation, and an enquiry into the passionate religious and political ideals of the back-to-the-land movement in wartime and post-war rural England.
£15.00
Little Toller Books An English Farmhouse
Originally published in 1948, and edited by the artist John Piper, An English Farmhouse is Geoffrey Grigson's careful survey of the old English farmhouse, and its associated buildings, whether made from sarsen, thatch, timber, tile or brick. Grigson paints a vivid and human picture of rural life in the preceding centuries and creates a delicate weave of social history.
£15.00
Little Toller Books Beyond the Fell Wall
Richard Skelton spent nearly half a decade living in a small valley high in the Furness hills of Cumbria, in northern England. When not writing or composing music, most of his days were spent beating the valley's bounds, exploring its network of paths, streams and walls. Beyond the Fell Wall is a distillation of his observations and thoughts about this particular patch of land. It is a poetic enquiry into the life of an seemingly inanimate landscape - its otherwise unheard melodies and unseen movements. It considers both vast geological epochs and brief moments of intimacy, and in turn it asks us to consider sentience in all things, whether animal, vegetable or mineral. At the heart of the book is the fell wall itself: vast and serpentine - a vessel for the lives, voices and myths of the landscape.
£8.43
Little Toller Books Orison for a Curlew: In Search of a Bird on the Edge of Extinction
The Slender-billed Curlew, Numenius tenuirostris, 'the slim beak of the new moon', is one of the world's rarest birds. It once bred in Siberia and wintered in the Mediterranean basin, passing through the wetlands and estuaries of Italy, Greece, the Balkans and Central Asia. Today the Slender-billed Curlew exists as a rumour, a ghost species surrounded by unconfirmed sightings and speculation. The only certainty is that it now stands on the brink of extinction. Birds are key environmental indicators. Their health or hardship has a message for us about the planet, and our future. What does the fate of the Slender-billed Curlew mean for us, and for the natural world? What happened to it, and why? In Orison for a Curlew Horatio Clare journeys through a fractured Europe in search of the Slender-billed Curlew, following the bird's migratory path on an odyssey that takes us into the lives of the men and women who have fought to save the landscapes to which the bird belongs. This is a story of beauty, triumph, and the struggles of conservation. It is a homage to a bird which may never be seen again.
£10.00
Little Toller Books The Fat of the Land
In the 1970s, John Seymour's book, The Complete Book of Self Sufficiency was a huge, international best-seller, inspiring a new generation to "down-shift" to a new way of life. The book has remained in print ever since. But years earlier, Seymour had written and published The Fat of the Land, telling of how he and his family settled in Suffolk and began a life entirely separate from the modern world. This was a seminal book, published the year before Silent Spring, and offers a personal, practical and optimistic vision of a less-mechanized and less polluting world, one that works in harmony with nature, rather than against it. He goes on to document their life and struggles on the land in chapters on cows, pigs, vegetables and wild food in charming prose. More than fifty years on, The Fat of the Land remains an important and inspiring book, one which retains its power to make us think carefully about our own lives. This new edition comes complete with Sally Seymour's original illustrations, a foreword by Anne Seymour and a new introduction by Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall.
£15.00
Little Toller Books Farmer's Glory
First published in 1932 and written in simple, direct prose, Farmer's Glory is a portrait of a farming life in southern England and in western Canada, and is a model of the genre: warm and humorous as well as an astute and unflinching account of the hardships of a farming life. Introduced, in this new, edition by James Rebanks, bestselling author of The Shepherd's Life.
£16.00
Little Toller Books The Tree
John Fowles' writing life was dominated by trees. From the orchards of his childhood in suburban Essex,to the woodlands of wartime Devon, to his later life on the Dorset coast, trees filled his imagination and enriched his many acclaimed and best-selling novels.Told through his lifelong relationship with trees, blending autobiography, literary criticism, philosophy and nature writing, The Tree is a masterly, powerful work that laid the literary foundations for nature-as-memoir, a genre which has seen recent flourishings in Roger Deakin's Wildwood, Richard Mabey's Nature Cure, Robert Macfarlane's The Old Ways and Helen Macdonald's H is for Hawk.As lyrical and precise as his novels, The Tree is a provocative meditation on the connection between the natural world and human creativity, and also a rejection of the idea that nature should be tamed for human purpose. Now, nearly forty years after its first publication, Little Toller is proud to republish this classic book as a special hardback, featuring a new foreword by William Fiennes and especially commissioned wood engravings,in the spirit of The Man Who Planted Trees.This edition will be an important addition to Fowles' published works and appeal to the growing audience for new nature writing as a classic of the genre.
£15.00
Little Toller Books Pattern Under the Plough: Aspects of the Folk Life of East Anglia
In 1948, shortly after settling with his family in the village of Blaxhall, Suffolk, George Ewart Evans started recording the conversations he had with neighbours, many of whom were born in the nineteenth century and had worked on farms before the arrival of mechanisation. He soon realised that below the surface of their stories were the remnants of an ancient, rural culture previously ignored by historians. In the detail of village architecture, the of superstitions of tree-planting and rituals house-building, in the esoteric practices of horse cults or the pagan habit of 'telling the bees', The Pattern Under the Plough unearths the rich seam of customs and beliefs that this old culture has brought to our communities. Even in modern societies, governed by science and technology, there are still traces of a civilisation whose beliefs were bound to the soil and whose reliance on the seasons was a matter of life or death.
£15.00
Little Toller Books Island Years, Island Farm
Unhappily land-locked in his early adult life, Frank Fraser Darling's fortunes changed when he began visiting Scotland's west coast in the 1930s. Surviving treacherous boat journeys, a broken leg, and hell-bent storms, he made temporary homes with his family on some of the remotest Hebridean islands so he could study the habits of grey seals and seabirds. The family finally settled on an abandoned croft in the Summer Isles, on Tanera Mor, and started farming the barren land. They repaired a ruined herring fishery and its stone quay. They fertilised the ground with seaweed, cut peat for the fires, planted a garden behind sheltered walls. Slowly, they brought life back to the island. Little Toller republishes classic books about nature and rural life.
£16.00
Little Toller Books Through the Woods
H E Bates carried a woodland in his imagination. He fell under its spell as a boy growing up in the Midlands, becoming increasingly enchanted each time he stepped below the wooded canopy. Memory magnified its mystery over the years, enriching his stories as he grew successful as a writer. But why did this place become a part of him? What are the qualities of all woodlands that make them so special? Set in Kent, Bates returns to those trees of his youth to breath life into the changing character of a single woodland year, revealing how precious they are to the English countryside. Our new edition is illustrated throughout with Agnes Miller Parker's wonderful engravings. Little Toller republishes classic books about nature and rural life.
£14.00
Little Toller Books The Natural History of Selborne
A century before Charles Darwin, decades before the French Revolution, Gilbert White began his lifelong habit of measuring and observing the world around his Hampshire home. Daily rainfall levels and temperature shifts were recorded with home-made instruments. Bird song and seasonal migrations were noted. The feeding habits of frogs, bats and mice were jotted into his diaries and nature journals, as were the simple delights he felt hearing a cricket in the meadow or a blackbird in the hedgerows. The extraordinary detail of the natural history he described has given us, two hundred years later, a glimpse into ecosystems untouched by industry and an account of how changes in global climate can affect local weather patterns. Gilbert White is now considered England's first ecologist. The Natural History of Selborne is one the most published books in the English language. Yet the most enduring quality of his writing is the spirit of curiosity that bounds across every page, inspiring us to explore the abundance of life at our doorsteps and around our parishes.
£15.00
Little Toller Books Men and the Fields
Adrian Bell's travels through East Anglia and lowland Britain reflect a world on the brink of change. Published in 1939, on the eve of the Second World War, his down-to-earth descriptions of the countryside were shaped by his own life working the land. Whether it be hedgerow flowers, a livestock auction, traditional farmyard, village forge, wheelwright's shop, the arrival of the tractor in the harvest field, the work of the ploughman, shepherd or woodman, Men and the Fields captures the character of rural life before modern agriculture altered the landscape and changed forever the way we eat and live.This new edition restores the original colour lithographs and black and white line drawings by John Nash that appeared in the first edition.
£14.00