Who had birds called Death, Wigs and Spinach? How do you spell the noise of a door slamming? Whose working title was The Chronic Argonauts?
Henry Eliot – author, editor and insatiable bookworm – has ransacked the libraries and archives of world literature, compiling hundreds of bookish lists. This eclectic gallimaufry showcases his favourites: we witness the tragic ends of the Ancient Greek tragedians, learn the name of George Orwell’s pet cockerel and rummage through Joan Didion’s travelling bag; we consider the history of literary fart jokes, orbit the Shakespearean moons of Uranus and meet several pigs with wings. From the sublime to the ridiculous – and everything in between – Eliot’s lists, recommendations and nuggets of trivia will delight, inspire and surprise anyone who loves reading.
Beautifully presented with supplementary maps and illustrations, Henry Eliot’s Book of Bookish Lists is the essential gift for book-lovers.
Henry Eliot is the author of The Penguin Classics Book, The Penguin Modern Classics Book, Follow This Thread and Curiocity: An Alternative A-Z of London. An inveterate bookworm, Henry has tackled a number of bookish adventures, such as recreating Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, leading pilgrims from Southwark to Canterbury and retelling the tales along the way; mounting a quest for the Holy Grail based on Malory’s Morte d’Arthur; swimming across the Hellespont from Europe to Asia on the bicentenary of Lord Byron’s crossing (the subject of Byron’s 1810 poem, ‘Written after Swimming from Sestos to Abydos’); and reading Ulysses in real-time on Bloomsday, 16 June, starting at 8am with grilled kidneys and finishing in the early hours of the following morning. He produced an interactive edition of Shakespeare’s The Tempest in collaboration with Sir Ian McKellen and Professor Sir Jonathan Bate, which Apple named one of the ‘10 best apps of 2016’, and for five years he was an editor of the Penguin Classics series in London. Today he is one of the QI research elves and hosts the podcast On the Road with Penguin Classics, in which he travels to discuss books with guests including Frank Cottrell Boyce, Louis de Bernières, Rachel Joyce, Patience Agbabi, Andrew Motion and Will Self.
