Pallas Athene Publishers

John Ruskin’s The King of the Golden River was the first literary fairy tale in English. Includes Richard Doyle’s original illustrations and Simon Cooke’s essay.John Ruskin wrote this fable for a teenage family friend, Effie, and later he married her. The marriage was famously disastrous, but before it fell apart the Ruskins allowed The King of the Golden River to be published. It became one of the most popular works for children of its time. Richard Doyle contributed over 25 full-page illustrations and vignettes. The King of the Golden River is the first literary fairy tale in English (as opposed to collected folk tales). Ruskin himself said it was ‘a fairly good imitation of Grimm and Dickens, mixed with some true Alpine feeling of my own’. Later he spoke of the capacity of the traditional tales ‘to fortify children against the glacial cold of selfish science’. It remains a powerful fable about humanity’s dual capacity for destructiveness and redeeming love, with as strange fairy-tale creatures as one could hope to meet. An essay by Simon Cooke explains the book’s importance.

Recollections of Oscar Wilde is one of the most evocative and charming texts ever written about Wilde and the circles he moved in.Charles Ricketts (1866-1931), painter, illustrator, theatrical designer and publisher, was one of Wilde’s closest friends; he also worked on stage productions and books with Wilde.He later set up his own, hugely influential presses. Shortly before he died he finally wrote this account of his friendship with Wilde, partly as an imagined conversation with a fictitious French writer, Jean Paul Raymond.The memoir was printed in 1932 at the Nonesuch Press by one of the great book designers of the following generation, Francis Meynell. Only 800 copies were published. This edition reproduces the original design exactly, including the spectacular gold and cream cover based by Ricketts on his work for Wilde’s Salomé.An afterword by Matthew Sturgis puts the work in the context of the 1880’s and 1890’s and Wilde’s astonishing life.

The first work of great French journalist Louis-Sébastien Mercier, this seminal work of travel writing remained unpublished for over 200 years.Mercier first travelled to London, and began recording his impressions, in 1780. An exemplar of a new form of journalistic, reflective literature, he presented emotive representations of the city as collections of experiences, habits and personalities. And differently from Dickens’s London or Baudelaire’s Paris, with their contrasts of opulence and misery, Mercier describes a less familiar urban environment – more optimistic, perhaps even utopian. His version of London is, in fact, a projection of his philosophical imagination – not simply a rounded portrait but also a reflection of what he hoped Paris could become.For this first publication in English, Laurent Turcot and Jonathan Conlin’s translation preserves the life and humour of Mercier’s text. It is illustrated with contemporary images, with an emphasis on Thomas Rowlandson and Gabriel-Jacques de Saint-Aubin, the first Parisian flâneur-artist.

The Battleship Yamato, of the Imperial Japanese Navy, was the most powerful warship of World War II and represented the climax, as it were, of the Japanese warrior traditions of the samurai – the ideals of honour, discipline and self-sacrifice that had immemorially ennobled the Japanese national consciousness. Stoically poised for battle in the spring of 1945 – when even Japan’s last desperate technique of arms, the kamikaze, was running short – Yamato arose as the last magnificent arrow in the imperial quiver of Emperor Hirohito.Here, Jan Morris not only tells the dramatic story of the magnificent ship itself – from secret wartime launch to futile sacrifice at Okinawa – but, more fundamentally, interprets the ship as an allegorical figure of war itself, in its splendour and its squalor, its heroism and its waste. Drawing on rich naval history and rhapsodic metaphors from international music and art, Battleship Yamato is a work of grand ironic elegy."The short, illustrated book Morris has written about the Yamato is what she calls ''a reverie'' on the varied emotions that war summons up…I think it''s safe to say that Morris has also written a reverie on accepting the inevitability of death… This book itself signals yet another end: Certainly, it will be one of the very last books written about World War II by an author who saw active service in that war. That sobering fact only adds to the elegiac resonance of this magnificent little book." ? Maureen Corrigan, NPR''s Fresh Air.Published to coincide with the 80th anniversary of the sinking of Yamato (7 April 2025).