The Right Stuff is an exhilarating flight into the death-defying lives of the Mercury Seven, America’s first astronauts. This Folio edition of Tom Wolfe’s classic features superb retro-styled colour illustrations by Tavis Coburn.
Pandaemonium
The Coming of the Machine as Seen by Contemporary Observers
Introduction and image selection by Christopher Frayling
Gathering hundreds of voices, Pandaemonium is Humphrey Jennings's eyewitness account of the rise of the machine age – a superb, illustrated Folio Society edition of the book that inspired the London Olympics Opening Ceremony.
£110.00
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‘The most gorgeous, gorgeous thing…beautiful,’
- Dominic Sandbrook
Opening with an excerpt from Milton’s Paradise Lost – the founding of Pandaemonium, the capital city of Hell – this is a social history unlike any other. Humphrey Jennings collects more than 370 texts, written between 1660 and 1886, to create a vivid ‘imaginative history’ of the Industrial Revolution. With a master film-maker’s eye, he cuts together poems and literary works, letters and diaries, scientific journals and eyewitness reports into a sweeping, cinematic narrative of the machine age. Jennings's vision weaves together the thrill of technological progress and its dehumanising consequences, from the development of steam traction and Darwin’s evolutionary insights to child labour in a Derbyshire silk mill and the excitement of a balloon flight over London.
Pandaemonium gained fresh prominence in 2012 as the inspiration behind Danny Boyle’s astonishing Opening Ceremony for the London Olympics. Handsomely bound, the Folio Society edition contains more than 120 black & white and colour illustrations, selected by cultural historian Sir Christopher Frayling, who contributes the introduction. Today, as artificial intelligence promises – and threatens – a new technological revolution, Pandaemonium stands not only as a singular artistic achievement but a book of great prescience and relevance.
Bound in cloth blocked with a design by Jamie Keenan
Set in Adobe Caslon Pro
624 pages
Over 100 integrated colour and black & white illustrations
Printed endpapers
Ribbon marker
Printed slipcase
10˝ x 6 ¾˝
Printed in Italy
‘Stimulating to mind and imagination ... a monument to one of the unique artists of our time, a visionary poet ... you will be illuminated and enriched’
- Spectator
Pandaemonium was a labour of love for Humphrey Jennings, a pioneering documentary film-maker described by his contemporary Lindsay Anderson as ‘the only real poet that British cinema has yet produced’. For more than a decade before his untimely death in 1950, he collected the excerpts (or in his word, ‘images’) intended for the book. His notebooks were edited by his daughter, Mary-Lou Jennings, and sociologist friend Charles Madge, who published Pandaemonium to great acclaim in 1985. For this superlative Folio Society edition, the original 28 illustrations have been vastly expanded to over 100 images. All were chosen by Sir Christopher Frayling, one of Britain’s most eminent historians of film and popular culture. As he explains in his new introduction, only pictures available during Jennings’s lifetime have been used, from famous artworks by William Blake, J. M. W. Turner and Ford Madox Brown to ephemera, book covers, newspaper engravings, satirical prints, scientific diagrams and early photographs. The Folio edition retains the original prefaces from the author and his editors, making for the most complete and faithful realisation of Humphrey Jennings’s vision ever to appear in print.
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