A collection of 100 postcards, each featuring a different jacket from Pelican Books, Penguin's iconic non-fiction series. Covering subjects from socialism to sex, psychoanalysis to atomic physics, and written by great thinkers ranging from Sigmund Freud to Martin Luther King, Pelican brought accessible, intelligent books to a generation, making knowledge everybody's property. In 1936 Allen Lane, the founder of Penguin, overheard a woman at a King's Cross Station bookstall asking for 'one of those Pelican books'. She meant Penguin, but Lane, concerned a rival might snatch up the name, decided to launch a new range of non-fiction books. Pelican was born. Allen Lane said he 'believed in the existence in this country of a vast reading public for intelligent books at a low price, and staked everything on it'. The gamble paid off. Customers queued in the streets for the first Pelican, George Bernard Shaw's The Intelligent Woman's Guide to Socialism, which sold a million copies in six weeks. In the years to come Pelican Books - including H. G. Wells's A Short History of the World, Freud's Psychopathology of Everyday Life and J. K. Galbraith's The Affluent Society, as well as guides to everything from jazz to witchcraft, guerrilla warfare to smashing atoms - would educate a generation. They became, in Lane's words, 'the true everyman's library for the twentieth century'. ury'.

A collection of 100 postcards, each featuring a different and iconic Penguin book jacket. From classics to crime, here are over seventy years of quintessentially British design in one box. In 1935 Allen Lane stood on a platform at Exeter railway station, looking for a good book for the journey to London. His disappointment at the poor range of paperbacks on offer led him to found Penguin Books. The quality paperback had arrived. Declaring that 'good design is no more expensive than bad', Lane was adamant that his Penguin paperbacks should cost no more than a packet of cigarettes, but that they should always look distinctive. Ever since then, from their original - now world-famous - look featuring three bold horizontal stripes, through many different stylish, inventive and iconic cover designs, Penguin's paperback jackets have been a constantly evolving part of Britain's culture. And whether they're for classics, crime, reference or prize-winning novels, they still follow Allen Lane's original design mantra. Sometimes, you definitely should judge a book by its cover.

From the first Rose Carnival in 1864, to the Great Earthquake in 1906, and the building of Highway 101, this book documents the history of Santa Rosa, illuminated in over 200 vintage postcards. Included are postcards of Luther Burbank, horticulturalist and local hero, as well as many views of Fourth Street as it changed and grew with the town.

New Orleans in Golden Age Postcards showcases over three hundred vintage postcard images of the city, printed in glorious color. From popular tourist attractions, restaurants, and grand hotels to local businesses, banks, churches, neighborhoods, civic buildings, and parks, the book not only celebrates these cards’ visual beauty but also considers their historic value. After providing an overview of the history of postcards in New Orleans, Matthew Griffis expertly arranges and describes the postcards by subject or theme. Focusing on the period from 1900 to 1920, the book is the first to offer information about the cards’ many publishers. More than a century ago, people sent postcards like we make phone calls today. Many also collected postcards, even trading them in groups or clubs. Adorned with colorized views of urban and rural landscapes, postcards offered people a chance to own images of places they lived, visited, or merely dreamed of visiting. Today, these relics remain one of the richest visual records of the last century as they offer a glimpse at the ways a city represented itself. They now appear regularly in art exhibits, blogs, and research collections. Many of the cards in this book have not been widely seen in well over a century, and many of the places and traditions they depict have long since vanished.

With its distinctive, comical walk, large bill, and association with the conservation movement, the pelican has attained iconic status. But as Barbara Allen reveals, this graceful skimmer of ocean waves has a checkered history. Originally classed as “unclean” in the King James Bible, the legend of the compassionate pelican was later appropriated by Christianity to symbolize Christ’s sacrifice. This majestic bird, gifted to British royalty in 1664, has been celebrated in art and literature, from Shakespeare’s King Lear to the writing of Edward Lear, and is the holder of three Guinness World Records. The pelican’s anatomy has been copied for paper plane construction, aircraft design, and in 3D imaging, and its resilience is as remarkable as its make-up: the pelican has rallied against threats of extinction, habitat destruction, and environmental disasters such as the Deepwater Horizon oil spill. A must-read book for all bird enthusiasts, Barbara Allen’s Pelican weaves together wildlife trivia, historical tales, and the latest research to provide an engaging, many-feathered account of this emblematic bird.

If anything is endangered in America it is our experience of wild nature—gross contact. There is knowledge only the wild can give us, knowledge specific to it, knowledge specific to the experience of it. These are its gifts to us. How wild is wilderness and how wild are our experiences in it, asks Jack Turner in the pages of The Abstract Wild. His answer: not very wild. National parks and even so-called wilderness areas fall far short of offering the primal, mystic connection possible in wild places. And this is so, Turner avows, because any managed land, never mind what it's called, ceases to be wild. Moreover, what little wildness we have left is fast being destroyed by the very systems designed to preserve it. Natural resource managers, conservation biologists, environmental economists, park rangers, zoo directors, and environmental activists: Turner's new book takes aim at these and all others who labor in the name of preservation. He argues for a new conservation ethic that focuses less on preserving things and more on preserving process and "leaving things be." He takes off after zoos and wilderness tourism with a vengeance, and he cautions us to resist language that calls a tree "a resource" and wilderness "a management unit." Eloquent and fast-paced, The Abstract Wild takes a long view to ask whether ecosystem management isn't "a bit of a sham" and the control of grizzlies and wolves "at best a travesty." Next, the author might bring his readers up-close for a look at pelicans, mountain lions, or Shamu the whale. From whatever angle, Turner stirs into his arguments the words of dozens of other American writers including Thoreau, Hemingway, Faulkner, and environmentalist Doug Peacock. We hunger for a kind of experience deep enough to change our selves, our form of life, writes Turner. Readers who take his words to heart will find, if not their selves, their perspectives on the natural world recast in ways that are hard to ignore and harder to forget.