Antiquities & Oddities

//Antiquities & Oddities
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  • In this volume: The Family Streak andThe Old Fault, Shirley Grey; Hiking On Horseback, Cora Gordon; The Scotch Society, Constance Savery; The Monster Of Loch Shee, Dorita Fairlie Bruce; 'For The Best Disguise', Evelyn Simms; The Three Workers, Frances Joyce; Mr Stewart's Nuggets, Wallace Carr, The Fairies' Gift: A Welsh Story, Ann Vaughan; The Parrot That Did Not Talk, Elizabeth Whitely; Caroline And The Smuggler, Jocelyn Oliver; Good Aunt Earle, M.A. Peart; Camping Out, A.G. Holman; Jill Repays, Anne Page; Pamela's Piebald, Gunby Hadath; The Wanderer, Thora Stowell; How To Dive, W.J. Howcroft; Sally's Sunday, Alice Massie; The Poison Cupboard, Frances Joyce.
  • This book contains the sort of things one might expect to come up on QI...Such as... the worst computer ever invented, the shortest-lived newspaper, the least successful round the world cyclist and the shortest period of marital bliss. Great fun to dip into at random.
  • Seven more rounds of sparring, as Fletch and his fellow cons of Slade nick continue their struggle against the authority of Messrws MacKay and Barrowclough.  Cover features the late great Ronnie Barker as Fletch.
  • Never again will you be short of a good tale at a dinner party. Amuse your friends, embarrass your maiden aunt and shock your stockbroker with stories of the inept, the improbable and the downright impossible. Read about the sanctuary for alcoholic donkeys; the would-be mugger who was rendered unconscious by an octogenarian armed with an onion (and who subsequently ate the evidence for lunch); the battle between a mother and son over the division of a lottery prize; the thief who stole skimpy ladies' clothing from washing lines in the belief he was protecting them from baring too much flesh -   and many other true and bizarre stories.
  • Covers a wide selection of well-known and lesser-known mysteries:  The Moving Coffins of Barbados; The Bermuda Triangle; The Disappearance of Agatha Christie; The Devil's Footprints; Was Dillinger Shot? The Mystery of Eilean Mor (The Island Of Disappearing Men); Joan of Arc - Did She Return From The Dead? The Loch Ness Monster; The Mystery of the Mary Celeste; Where Is Mona Lisa? Orffyreus and the Perpetual Motion Machine; Psychometry - A Telescope Into The Past; Did Robin Hood Really Exist? Synchronicity or Mere Coincidence? Spontaneous Human Combustion; The Great Tunguska Explosion;  Velikovsky's Comet; The Most Mysterious Manuscript In The World - The Voynich Manuscript; Crop Circles - Whirlwinds, UFO's or Hoaxers?
  • Those of us of a certain age will remember the Ladybird children's book series which, through use of simple vocabulary and images, informed children of the world around them and how it worked. Like everything else, the Ladybird books underwent a political correctness change but are still in print. However, this offering is for grown-ups...This delightful book is the latest in the series of Ladybird books which have been specially planned to help grown-ups with the world about them.The large clear script, the careful choice of words, the frequent repetition and the thoughtful matching of text with pictures all enable grown-ups to think they have taught themselves to cope.  This entry in the series informs grown-ups how to plan and execute the perfect 'sickie'.  
  • The word freak can easily conjure up the image of a squalid Victorian side show exhibit; yet behind the peep-show curtains, the medical textbooks and screaming headlines, these are people who were thrust into a prying, probing limelight because they were different.  In this volume: John Merrick, the Elephant Man; Tony Albarran, the Elephant Boy; Maurice Tillet; David Lopez, the 'Devil Boy'; Alice, The Faceless Child; Helen Keller, who possessed the ability of 'eyeless sight'; Matthew Manning, who progressed from bending cutlery and automatic writing to psychic healing; Greta and Freda Chaplin, who spent 20 years in pursuit of the love of a lorry driver;  Louise, the Four Legged Woman; Siamese twins Daisy and Violet Hilton, who married and lived with their husbands successfully, as well as featuring in Tod Browning's famous film Freaks; Norman Green, the Human Mole who lived beneath his family's home for eight years unbeknownst to all except his wife; wild children and many more.  Black and white photographs.
  • TV Script writer Larry Baker is hired to pen a new horror series. On location at an old castle he crashes through walls with the ease of Superman - and somehow usually lands plunk in the middle of a lovely lady's bed. But Larry isn;t really a sex maniac. Not quite. Even though the black-haired babe calls him seducer and the gamin-type blonde screams bloody murder... When you're up against real live vampires, disappearing corpses, things that go bump in the night... plus a couple of gorgeously undressed gals guaranteed to drive you up the wall - something's got to give - and it does - with plenty of happy horrible hilarity...
  • Six adventures with Simon Templar - The Saint. This volume includes: The Helpful Pirate; The Bigger Game; The Cleaner Cure; The Intemperate Reformer; The Uncured Ham; The Convenient Monster.
  • Spike Milligan had published volumes of humorous and children's poetry before the 1970s, but Small Dreams of a Scorpion is the first volume to feature some of his most personal and painful musings: partly on his own bouts of clinical depression and hospitalisation; partly about some of his darkest moments as a soldier in World War II; and also about some of the terrible moments of post-war world history and his reactions to them - the Korean and Vietnam conflicts, the Aberfan school disaster and the assassination of Robert Kennedy. Illustrated by Spike and Laura Milligan.
  • A treasury of all things Australian. Chapters include:  Popular Sayings, Jests, Rhymes and Anecdotes: Game?!  He's as game as Ned Kelly! No more sense than a koala bear, an' not half as good-lookin'. Or: He's as mad as a gum tree full o' galahs! Heroes and Rebels: Ben Hall and Ned Kelly, of course - and Peter Lalor, The Man With The Donkey and Les Darcy; The Yarn-SpinnersSilent Australians, Casual Australians, Bullockies, Shearers, Station Cooks, Swaggies and yet more characters but also including: Soldier Yarns, Bush Directions, Bushmen's Dogs and of course, Dad and Dave; Superstitions and Fallacies: Craig's Dream, Snake-Fallacies, The Town That Lost and more; Place Lore: Place names including - naturally - Fisher's Ghost Creek, Bread and Dripping Valley, The Never-Never and some local anomalies - The Man  Who Rode The Bull Through Wagga, the Dog on the Tucker Box; The Man from Snowy River and humorous signs; Australianisms: The Larrikin, the Push, Buckley's Chance, Furphy, Wowsers, Sundowners, Bunyips, Diggers and Drongoes; Perspectives: Contemporary accounts of Convicts and Governors, The Gold Diggings, Squatters and Selectors, Immigrants, Early Trade Unionism and Republicanism and Nationalism.
  • A drama takes place in a small town in Northern England following the life of a young doctor who has returned from the Congo to take over his uncle's practice. Very likely to have been based on Wallace's own time in the Congo reporting on the brutality and violence of Belgian colonialism, this novel follows the young doctor as he fights the intolerance, ignorance and religious fanaticism of his local townsfolk.
  • Edward is the creation of an inventor, whose sudden death leaves Edward with metal shears for hands.  He lives on alone in the darkness of the great Gothic house until he is found by a kind lady and taken home to live with her family - in the pastel paradise called Suburbia. An early role for Johnny Depp and one of Vincent Price's last films.  By Tim Burton.
  • Inspired by real events. The story of the secret Israeli squad assigned to track down and assassinate the 11 Palestinians believed to have planned the 1972 Munich massacre of 11 Israeli athletes - and the personal toll on the team and the man who led it.
  • Quite a rollicking tale of corrupt soldiers and starving convicts, set in a South Pacific penal colony in 1790.  Into this alien world comes Corporal Phelim Halloran: Innocent and lover, poet and scholar and soldier-by-accident who attempts to make a world for himself in this non-conducive setting. First published in 1967.
  • Beginning in Victoria's England of the 1880s, the teenaged Peridot learns that Mr Cheke, the chemist, is not her real father. When he dies, she begins to make her own way in the world and searches for traces of her mother, who died not long after she was born. She becomes a paid companion to Geraldine, a temperamental and wealthy young invalid girl who is under the guardianship of her debonair bachelor uncle, Adrian Hope-Winter. When Adrian proposes marriage, Peridot accepts, never dreaming that she will become a star player in a celebrated and scandalous divorce case or that she will become a pioneer for women entering the workforce.  Rich with very visible and real characters and an accurate portrayal of life in the Victorian Age.  With charming end-chapter illustrations by Philip Gough.

  • Philip Kimberley, top ranking British intelligence officer rocks the international spy community by defecting to Russia. However, not trusting his new colleagues, Kimberly leaves behind a hidden dossier exposing the KGB's spy network as insurance.  Years later, drunk and broken, Kimberly is given one last assignment by his KGB superiors - to undergo extensive surgical alteration and re-enter the UK to retrieve the dossier.  With news of Kimberley's death leaked to the media the defector slips back into the U.K. unrecognisable as his former self. With documents in hand Kimberley begins a dangerous game of intrigue that plays MI6 against the KGB with deadly results.  But then Kimberley's nemesis Admiral Scaith brings the former spy's daughter into the game, the rules suddenly change as the final pieces fall into place.
  • Mr Gerald Hardcastle - successful, middle-aged banker and pillar of society - had discovered his wife's supply of birth control pills, even though their relationship has been platonic for fifteen years. So naturally, he switches the pills for aspirin tablets and waits to see what happens next...and what happens next is they find that their sixteen year old and sexually active daughter Geraldine  has been swapping what she thought were contraceptive pills for aspirins...Illustrated by Peter Edwards.
  • This is a screen adaptation of Orwell's Keep The Aspidistra Flying. Comstock's struggle in 1930s England - that's George Comstock, budding poet and suitably angry young man - to write poetry and be a free man means that he must throw up his job as a star copywriter at an illustrious advertising firm to work in a dingy book shop for far less money. It also means that he must sponge off his hard-working sister, girlfriend and wealthier friends, while calling every man 'comrade' and loudly deploring the 'God of Money' - not to mention loudly abhorring that eternal symbol of stodgy respectability, the dreaded aspidistra.  George has to descend into the squalid, bed bug-ridden depths of disreputable Lambeth to prove his point, while his patient and ever-practical girlfriend Rosemary stands by and waits for him to come to his senses. With many guest appearances by well-loved English character actors.
  • Deep in the Mariana Sea Trench, a corporate underwater mining complex has been built - an industrial Atlantis. When an accident in a dry-dock chamber kills several miners and investigator is sent to determine the cause and finds that it was no accident.  He is caught in a deadly conflict between the miners and the corporation and must fight to stay alive and uncover the truth.
  • In 404 B.C., the Spartans demolished the famous Long Walls of Athens, signalling the complete victory of the city of Lycurgus and the subordination of all Greece to the Spartan interest. Yet within forty years, the pride of Sparta had been humbled, their glory gone for ever.  Xenophon lived through this time; despite being Athenian he was intimate with some of the most influential people in Sparta, including King Agesilaus. Here is the on-the-spot documentation of the last years of the independent cities of Hellas, by someone who saw it all.  Translated by Rex Warner. https://cosmiccauldronbooks.com.au/p/imperial-caesar-rex-warner/

  • Persuaded by a beautiful Russian Countess to help her flee her loathsome fiancè, Captain Jonathan Clark sails from San Francisco to Alaska, evading cunning rival Captain Portugee - who will unite with Clark to defeat the Russian menace, Prince Semyon.
  • Book III of The Saint vs Crown Prince Rudolph. The Saint had decided to turn over a new leaf.  But he hadn't reckoned with Prince Rudolf - nor with his old adversary's hankering for diamonds! Why would a man as rich as Rudolph care about the comparatively small value of the Montenegrian Crown jewels?
  •  A fabulous collection of over two dozen of Joyce Grenfell's well-known sketches and song lyrics, including Stately As A Galleon, Shirley's Girlfriend, Thought For Today, At The Laundrette and I'm Going To See You Today.  Often cheeky, sometimes sly and satirical, often poking fun at the sacred cows of the English and all have a point to make.

  • Hiding under the witness protection programme, Rick Jarmin gets nervous when his old flame Marianne recognises him as her fiancè who vanished years ago. But before he can assume a new identity, the man he put in jail is released and comes to pay his respects. Rick and Marianne are thrown together on the run across the country, barely evading the police, gangsters and an amorous veterinarian. Also stars David Carradine, Joan Severance  and Bill Duke.
  • This novel spans 130 years and follows the line of women of the Wrotham family, beginning with Sabrina in 1806. The daughter of a socially disgraced, sadistic roué, she is sponsored into 'Society' by her step-aunt - after having had some good manners vigorously instilled in her and her tomboyish ways smoothed out. Her brother Prior's marriage and production of children play a part in keeping the Wrotham name going. The next Wrotham woman is Clare - her brother Anthony's marriage to Harriet brings Charlotte to the line and the last is Gillian Rose, known as 'Jill'. The diaries and letters of the women are fictitious but the times in which the story is set are not, and many historical characters and events of England are brought to the story. As the generations overlap, with the members of each generation subscribing to the beliefs of their day, there is little sentimental romance involved - just a very good story, tinted with gentle romance and enhanced by the backdrop of historic reality.
  • Peter Jackson (Lord of the Rings) brings it all to create a cinema spectacular of the classic tale of the legendary gorilla brought from a treacherous island to civilisation, where he faces the ultimate fight for survival. Also starring Adrien Brody, Colin Hanks and Andy Serkis as Kong.