Howling Frog Books

Edward Lear: The Life of a Wanderer, by Vivien Noakes This one got on my list because of the Slightly Foxed podcast, which luckily is only monthly, because it usually adds at least one book to my wishlist.  When I looked this one up, I was pleasantly surprised to discover it in our library collection at work.  So I took it right home. I only know Edward Lear as a writer of nonsense verse, but that isn't what he did for a living.  And he was just a lovely man, but he had a really difficult life.  So here we go... Edward was the 20th child of his very tired mother (she had 22!!! and a lot of them died), and after he was about 4, she left him to his older sister.  The sister was kind and loving, but the poor little guy was devastated, and his parents had an awful marriage.  That and a couple other things he never talked about just blighted his life; he was terribly lonely, yet couldn't really contemplate living with anyone. He also had epilepsy, which at the t...

The Dark Crystal: Creation Myths (3 vols.), by Brian Froud, et al. A couple of years ago, we bought these graphic novels for our oldest.  With the release of Netflix' and Jim Henson Studios' new Dark Crystal series imminent, I decided I'd better get with the program and read them.  I'm glad I did that before we started watching the series (we've finished episode 2; we are no good at binge-watching anything and like to digest in between episodes). We got these in separate volumes; they were out of print at the time, but now everything is being re-published and you can get them in a collected volume as well.  So that's what I've linked to. A mysterious storyteller narrates the beginning of Thra and its peoples.  We see the origin of Aughra,  the arrival of the urSkeks from another planet, and their eventual division.  Gelfling folktales are sprinkled throughout, such as 'How the Gelfling Maiden Got Her Wings' or tales of an adventurous sailor lo...

Winconsin Death Trip, by Michael Lesy I first heard of this book when I started listening to a podcast called Medieval Death Trip, named in homage to this...cult classic?  I'm not sure what to call it.  It started off as a very unusual PhD dissertation in 1973, but it's sort of an experiment in immersive history. Lesy found all these photographic plates taken by a photographer in Black River Falls, Wisconsin, between 1890 and 1910 -- just piles of them.  Many were ruined by time, but he salvaged a whole lot and put the most interesting ones together for this collection.  Quite a few have been slightly altered -- trimmed, mirrored, framed or something.  There are trends: photos of incredibly elderly people in one section, little girls in dance classes in another, buddy photos and sets of girlfriends, families, and one photograph of a fellow without a stitch on showing off his physique -- from the back, thank goodness.  Interspersed with these photo...

The Macclesfield Alphabet Book: a Facsimile , ed. Christopher de Hamel and Patricia Lovett After reading Meetings With Remarkable Manuscripts , I wondered what else de Hamel might have produced, and I found this neat book!  With the magic of InterLibrary Loan, it was soon in my hands. This is a facsimile of an unusual manuscript.  It's not very long, and it dates from the late 1400s.  It's a sort of design or idea book for the fancy initials in illuminated manuscripts!  It contains fourteen different kinds of decorative letters: a sort of blackletter type, several with leaves, and some very whimsical alphabets made of human and animal figures.  Most aren't colored in or anything; they're diagrams. It's a lot of fun to look at and full of great design ideas.  I'm very tempted to use some of them in embroidery, and maybe someday I will (I've got plenty to do right now).  If you're interested in lettering, this is a great resource!

Celtic, Viking, and Anglo-Saxon Embroidery, by Jan Messent This is such a great book, people.  If you are at all interested in textile arts, or the British Isles a thousand years ago, you've got to find a copy of this and sink into it. Jan Messent has been doing various forms of textile arts, painting, and design for a long time, and if you look you can find a fairly long list of books to her name, most of which are about design or knitting.  She's also written a lot of historical romances under the name Juliet Landon.  In the 1990s, she produced an entire panel of Bayeux embroidery that was a theoretical fill-in for the missing final panel of the Bayeux tapestry (several people have done this).  And in about 2010, she was amusing herself by making mixed-media embroidered books and items in homage to Celtic, Viking, and Anglo-Saxon styles, which became this book. Messent gives some nice history about the clothing and textile styles, and she explains what sh...

The Young Ardizzone , by Edward Ardizzone I shall now dip my toes back into book blogging with a delightful little volume -- Edward Ardizzone's memoir of his younger years.  I grew up on Ardizzone illustrations, what with Little Tim picture books* and The Little Bookroom .  When Lori mentioned this volume in her post about Slightly Foxed Editions , it promptly went on my wishlist...but they're only available in the UK.  Happily, my mom went on a trip to London in June (she accompanied my brother and his family, and thus saw a lot of Harry Potter attractions!) and she went armed with instructions to hunt down a couple of these. Edward Ardizzone was actually born in what is now Vietnam, in Hai Phong.  His father was Italian and French, and his mother British, and Ardizzone says they were each very good people, but totally unsuited to each other, and so they frequently lived apart.  His mother took them to England when he was five, and they lived a somewhat uns...