Now here is a jacket to bring back memories. Photo-art covers on Pan books. I know little, as usual, about Towards Zero, except it has a very sci-fi name for a Christie. What does this cover tell me about the book. Next to nothing, except there may b[…]

Alicia in Terra Mirabili
Aliciae Per Speculum Transitus (Quaeque Ibi Invenit)
Cattus Petasatus
Ferdinandus Taurus
Harrius Potter et Philosophi Lapis
Ieremia Piscatore
Maria Poppina
Pinoculus
Quomodo Invidiosulus Nomine Grinchus Christi Natalem Abroga[…]

After last weeks high concept high art piece, lets go back a bit to a time when book jackets were not all airbrushed wasps and TV-Tie-ins. This cover to The Body In The Library is still pretty high concept, and designed nicely without a computer in s[…]

A brand new series in the grand tradition of the Top 100 Singles, the Periodic Table Of Pop and the Top 25 Brands. But this one doesn’t require much in the way of writing, and a pace of one a week should be simple. And we should be able to rust[…]

As heard on last weeks FTLoP, amongst the fantasy gamebook boom of the mid eighties, was an unusual threesome known as the Cretan Chronicles. Not the first linked set of gamebooks, it nevertheless followed quite swiftly on the heels of Steve Jackson&[…]

as her xmas present, doctrah becky took the younger of her two little godsons (he’s seven) to this dramatisation of catherine storr’s puffin-club children’s classic, a book she and i grew up on — and i got to tag along (i&#821[…]

Holidays seem to be a time when I curl up with fantasy or sci-fi books: in August in France I read Larry Niven’s Protector, and over New Years I read R Scott Bakker’s The Darkness That Comes Before. (GOTH ALERT – this is part one of[…]

Two coffins of the way through The Three Coffins(aka The Hollow Man) the author, John Dickson Carr, breaks into the narrative through the words of his serial detective Dr Gideon Fell. Fell responds to a question:
“Because … we’re in[…]

For the past few months I’ve been reading The Hobbit aloud to my wife – it’s relaxing for both of us and good practise for future readings to a probably more restless audience. I think it’s the first time I’ve read the b[…]

The seeds of the detective fiction genre were planted with Poe’s 1841 publication of The Murders in the Rue Morgue, but it was The Moonstone by Wilkie Collins (1868) that introduced many of the now classic features of the genre – viz &#82[…]