From bottom-breathing turtles to fish that live in trees, set off with Edward Brooke-Hitching on a fact-packed safari to discover the strangest, silliest and down-right weirdest things our planet’s amazing animals has to offer.

Written by QI elf and author extraordinaire, the first book in Brooke-Hitching’s spectacular new series is extraordinarily enlightening and seriously shareable. Both information- and humour-rich, it is a glorious treasure trove of bite-sized facts for children to either snack on throughout the week or gobble up all in one go. And with a ‘Who’s the Smartest?’ quiz at the end of each section, this book is the perfect companion for children determined to know their barking piranhas from their purring rottweilers – and that’s a fact!

Also available in this series: What’s the Weirdest Thing About the World.

• What does the song of a black hole sound like?
• Which composition requires four helicopters and a string quartet with strong stomachs to play it correctly?
• How exactly would the ‘cat piano’ sound, and would it be any more pleasing to the ear than the ‘hog harmonium’?

Discover musical hoaxes, compositions relayed by ghosts, the code-writing of ‘musical cryptography’, the pop songs smuggled past Soviet censors using X-rays, the beauty of Renaissance ‘eye music’, compositions by the Devil, the supernatural instruments played by witches, and the experimental female scientist who created the ‘visible voice’.
 
Fascinating, funny, and at times barely believable, The Madman’s Orchestra  is a unique exploration of the history of music that will strike a chord with fans of beautiful books and bizarre history, and delight with a rich depth and variety of research that ultimately celebrates the boundless creativity of our musical imagination.

• Why is a cat technically a liquid and a solid?
• How did nineteenth-century scientists attempt to signal aliens?
• Why did the Dutch once eat their prime minister?    

 
Nowhere else will you find woven together the stories of the religious leader who attempted to build a robot messiah from a dining table, the anti-gravity ‘air-walkers’ of Victorian London, and the pirates who rode sheep; or practical advice for correctly exorcising a house and casting ancient love spells, along with recent scientific discoveries like the mould that can navigate a maze and that humans can glow in the dark.
 
A unique hybrid of encyclopaedia, trivia and drunken-bar raconteur, all stitched together in one colossal Frankenstein volume packed full of images and photographs – this is the ultimate must-read for anyone looking to tickle the cortex of their curiosity.  

From the author of the critically acclaimed The Phantom Atlas and?The Madman’s Library?(Sunday Times Literature Book of the Year) comes a magnificent new illustrated work. From prehistoric carvings and ancient Egyptian statues, to medieval spell books and Victorian code-writing, this unique collection gathers a wealth of curious objects and surprising stories to trace the story of love through the ages.  

Discover the royal marriage that crossed the boundary of death in 14th-century Portugal, the judicial duels between husbands and wives in Early Modern Europe, the love spells found in medieval manuscripts, and the romantic codes hidden in some of art’s greatest masterpieces. Meet the feared ancient Greek army regiment comprised entirely of male couples; the French pirate queen avenging her murdered husband; the first woman to sail around the world; and the quack sexologist who conned 18th-century London with his musical mechanical bed. Here are ancient gods, mythical monsters, the Elizabethan portraits of smiling men on fire and the erotic paintings hidden beneath the ash of Pompeii, as well as Nigerian wedding chains, Welsh love spoons, cryptic postcards and the centuries-old cartographic tradition of mapping the heart.  

A curiosity cabinet of romantic treasure, Love: A Curious History in 50 Objects draws on a wide range of sources to form a collection perfect for fans of beautiful illustrated works and curious history, while also forming the ideal romantic gift.  

‘In his new book, Edward Brooke-Hitching sets out to explore this mysterious emotion. Throughout this lusciously produced volume, he dissects a range of weird and wonderful objects that illustrate the diverse ways by which humans have expressed their loves and lusts.’
BBC History Magazine

‘A glorious cornucopia of a book, celebrating love from the hilarious to the divine – as always, Brooke-Hitching’s encyclopaedic knowledge shines through.’ Fern Riddell, author  Sex: Lessons From History

From the author of the bestseller The Madman’s Library (SundayTimes Literature Book of the Year 2020, Radio 4 Book of the Week) comes an extraordinary new illustrated collection. This unique exhibition gathers more than a hundred magnificent works, each chosen for their striking beauty, weirdness and captivating story behind their creation.

Obscure and forgotten treasures sit alongside famous masterpieces with secret stories to tell. Here are Doom paintings, screaming sculptures, magical manuscripts, impossible architecture, dog-headed saints, angel musketeers and the first portrait of a cannibal. Stolen art, outsider art, ghost art, revenge art, and art painted at the bottom of the sea take their place alongside scandalous art, forgeries and hoaxes, art of dreams and nightmares, and cryptic paintings yet to be decoded. Discover the remarkable Elizabethan portraits of men in flames, the mystery of the nude Mona Lisa, the gruesome ingredients of lost pigments, the werewolf legion of the Roman army, and the Italian monk who levitated so often he’s recognised as the patron saint of aeroplane passengers.

From prehistoric cave art to portraits painted by artificial intelligence, The Madman’s Gallery draws on a remarkable depth of research and variety of images to form a book that surprises at every turn, and ultimately serves to celebrate the endless power and creativity of human imagination.

‘?a feast of artistic curiosities’ -  The  Telegraph

‘What that last book did for bibliophiles, this  new, beautifully produced and elegantly written anthology  does for art lovers  ? The research that has gone into this is prodigious, but Brooke-Hitching loves storytelling even more than scholarship, and he has a gift for it.’ – The Spectator

‘Extraordinary’ -  Artists & Illustrators

Whether it’s the thirteen heavens of the Aztecs, the Chinese Taoist netherworld of ‘hungry ghosts’, or the ‘Hell of the Flaming Rooster’ of Japanese Buddhist mythology (in which sinners are tormented by an enormous fire-breathing cockerel),  The Devil’s Atlas  gathers together a wonderful variety of beliefs and representations of life after death. These afterworlds are illustrated with an unprecedented collection of images, ranging from the marvellous ‘infernal cartography’ of the European Renaissance artists attempting to map the structured Hell described by Dante and the decorative Islamic depictions of Paradise to the various efforts to map the Garden of Eden and the spiritual vision paintings of nineteenth-century mediums.

The Devil’s Atlas  accompanies beautiful images with a highly readable trove of surprising facts and narratives, from the more inventive torture methods awaiting sinners, to colourful eccentric catalogues of demons, angels and assorted death deities.  A traveller’s guide to worlds unseen,  The Devil’s Atlas  is a fascinating study of the boundless capacity of human invention, a visual chronicle of man’s hopes, fears and fantasies of what lies beyond.

From the author of the critically acclaimed and globally successful  The Phantom Atlas,  The Golden Atlas  and  The Sky Atlas  comes a stunning new work.  The Madman’s Library  is a unique, beautifully illustrated journey through the entire history of literature, delving into its darkest territories to hunt down the very strangest books ever written, and uncover the fascinating stories behind their creation.

This is a madman’s library of eccentric and extraordinary volumes from around the world, many of which have been completely forgotten. Books written in blood and books that kill, books of the insane and books that hoaxed the globe, books invisible to the naked eye and books so long they could destroy the Universe, books worn into battle, books of code and cypher whose secrets remain undiscovered? and a few others that are just plain weird.

From the 605-page  Qur’an written in the blood of Saddam Hussein, through the gorgeously decorated 15th-century lawsuit filed by the Devil against Jesus, to the lost art of binding books with human skin, every strand of strangeness imaginable (and many inconceivable) has been unearthed and bound together for  a unique and richly illustrated collection ideal for every book-lover.