From the artist behind the popular Pigeon Letters website, an easy, no-skills-necessary guide to drawing flowers, leaves, and cacti with 200 step-by-step prompts. Line drawing is an easy-to-master art form featuring illustrative, doodle-like designs. It's used widely among artists of many types with both fine and bold lines, creating different variations. Botanical Line Drawing teaches you how to start with the simplest doodles, building into more elaborate, delicate illustrations. This book focuses on the extremely popular subject matter of the natural world and includes flowers, leaves, succulents, houseplants, trees, branches, mushrooms, and more. These simple line drawings will allow you to branch out and have fun with your own personal style, as well as inspire you to add flourishes to other projects.

In every walk of life, from relationships, to work, to politics, sport and the news, our everyday use of English harbours duplicities of meaning. We say 'I'm sorry' when we mean 'absolute nonsense', and write 'Yours faithfully' when we're thinking 'Sod you!' Jealousy, rage, love, affection – we're equally good at disguising them all. Leaves on the Line compiles this secret language – this 'double English' – in a hilarious and forthright volume exposing the doublespeak of the British language. For the first time, everyday terms which we casually deploy to loved ones and total strangers, and have been thrown at us from the radio or TV will be 'glossed' (yes, we really mean 'stripped') to reveal the unadorned, raw truth below. The book will be over 200 hilarious phrases of common doublespeak and will be essential reading for everyone from puzzled foreigners to young people to whom the dark art of linguistic dissembling are not yet second nature. The book includes phrases and the truths behind them, such as: Transport: 'This service is delayed because of leaves on the track...' Social: 'I'm not being racist but...' Weather: 'Nice weather we're having...' Sport: 'We're taking each game as it comes...' Relationships: 'I've never met anyone like you before...' Polititcs: 'Spending on health has increased in real terms, year on year, since we were elected...'

Pen & Ink Drawing: A Simple Guide covers the essential aspects of pen and ink drawing and more. It explores basic materials and instruments; fundamental properties of strokes and pen control; key elements of shading; and indispensable techniques for creating vibrant textures. As a bonus, a chapter is devoted to what the author refers to as, the secret Line of Balance. This book is not just written to instruct but also to inspire enthusiasts of pen and ink and drawing as well.

Whether it’s leaves on the line or the wrong kind of snow, whether the extortionately priced, curled-up sandwich on sale in the buffet car, or the militancy of the rail unions that seem to be endlessly on strike over nothing, everyone in Britain has an opinion about our railways. After the weather, they are probably the country’s most reliable talking point. With Telegraph readers being the trenchant, choleric and waggish letter-writers that they are, our railways have always figured high on the list of subjects requiring a missive to the Editor. Now, in this fascinating and hilarious selection, Gavin Fuller has put together the best letters on trains to the paper over the years. Here is the end of Steam and the start of Eurostar; the punctuality of Swiss trains and the signal failures of ours; the laments for the branch lines lost under the Beeching cuts, and also for the much-missed peace and quiet of a railway carriage, replaced by the menace of personal stereos and fellow passengers booming, ‘I’m On The Train!’ into their mobile phones.

“A novelistic mosaic that simultaneously reads like a thriller and like a strange, dreamlike excursion into the subconscious.” —The New York Times Years ago, when House of Leaves was first being passed around, it was nothing more than a badly bundled heap of paper, parts of which would occasionally surface on the Internet. No one could have anticipated the small but devoted following this terrifying story would soon command. Starting with an odd assortment of marginalized youth -- musicians, tattoo artists, programmers, strippers, environmentalists, and adrenaline junkies -- the book eventually made its way into the hands of older generations, who not only found themselves in those strangely arranged pages but also discovered a way back into the lives of their estranged children. Now this astonishing novel is made available in book form, complete with the original colored words, vertical footnotes, and second and third appendices. The story remains unchanged, focusing on a young family that moves into a small home on Ash Tree Lane where they discover something is terribly wrong: their house is bigger on the inside than it is on the outside. Of course, neither Pulitzer Prize-winning photojournalist Will Navidson nor his companion Karen Green was prepared to face the consequences of that impossibility, until the day their two little children wandered off and their voices eerily began to return another story -- of creature darkness, of an ever-growing abyss behind a closet door, and of that unholy growl which soon enough would tear through their walls and consume all their dreams.

It's time for America to move beyond zoning, argues city planner M. Nolan Gray in Arbitrary Lines: How Zoning Broke the American City and How to Fix It. With lively explanations, Gray shows why zoning abolition is a necessary--if not sufficient--condition for building more affordable, vibrant, equitable, and sustainable cities. Gray lays the groundwork for this ambitious cause by clearing up common misconceptions about how American cities regulate growth and examining four contemporary critiques of zoning (its role in increasing housing costs, restricting growth in our most productive cities, institutionalizing racial and economic segregation, and mandating sprawl). He sets out some of the efforts currently underway to reform zoning and charts how land-use regulation might work in the post-zoning American city. Arbitrary Lines is an invitation to rethink the rules that will continue to shape American life--where we may live or work, who we may encounter, how we may travel. If the task seems daunting, the good news is that we have nowhere to go but up