This collection is a look into the personal lives of some of the world’s most beloved poets, novelists, and playwrights. Take a peek into their correspondence, where you might be surprised what you learn. The letters contain wisdom and life lessons from the likes of John Keats and Oscar Wilde, as well as shared feelings of loneliness from Charlotte  Brontë, loss from Ovid, and love from George Eliot.

With one letter for every day of the year, you can start or end your day with words from some of the brightest minds that ever put pen to paper. This is a collection with emotional, historical and literary significance, helping us to understand some of our favourites even further.

This anthology spans the centuries from the classic to the contemporary, and includes Ignatius Sancho, Jane Austen, William Wordsworth, the Brontës, Frederick Douglass, Elizabeth Gaskell, Charles Dickens, Virginia Woolf, Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes, Maya Angelou, and many more.

Bedside Companion to Folklore and Magic contains a rich selection of prose and poetry, fiction and fact, with one entry to read every night of the year. Within the pages of this beautifully designed volume you’ll encounter dancing fairies, ferocious dragons, trickster gods, witches and wizards, enchanted islands, shape-shifting animals, and magic spells. Fantastical delights to peruse include:

Tales from global folklore: Anansi the spider, Little Tieke the Dancing Thief from Maori legend, and Louise Erdrich’s accounts of North American Ojibwe tradition.

Fiction ranging from classic fairy tales by the Brothers Grimm and Hans Christian Andersen to exciting modern fantasy such as Marlon James’s Black Leopard, Red Wolf, and poetry including Christina Rosetti’s peerless GoblinMarket.

The very best of magical children’s literature: excerpts from The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe, Peter Pan, His Dark Materials and, more recently, Katherine Rundell’s Impossible Creatures.

Non-fiction sources: extracts from 18th-century grimoires containing bloodthirsty revenge spells, lively accounts of enduring folk wisdom, and classic anthropological texts such as James George Fraser’s The Golden Bough.

If you’re in need of an escape into otherworldly realms, keep this book by your bedside and end every day with a fascinating flight of fantasy.

A rich collection of poetry that celebrates the beauty and symbolism of flowers.

This exquisite book  is a revised and updated edition of a classic collection which contains over 50 poems accompanied by beautiful illustrations of a range of different flowers. From verses celebrating the beginning of spring with the emergence of the snowdrops, daffodils, and bluebells to poems that honour the summer colour of asters, the heady scent of jasmine, and the brazen sunflower.

The classic poets are featured including Shakespeare, Alfred, Lord Tennyson, Thomas Hardy, Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson and Seamus Heaney. There’s also range of rich poetry from less-famous names which have stood the test of time and evoke nature’s beauty, as well as contemporary poets such as Lemn Sissay, Imtiaz Dharker, Wendy Cope and Ada Limón.

Virginia Woolf is considered by many to be one of the greatest British writers and one of the foremost modernists of the twentieth century. As well as writing her novels, Woolf was a tireless correspondent, penning as many as six letters a day.

This collection of Virginia Woolf’s letters offers a fascinating insight into her life, illuminating the complex personality of the novelist herself. The letters range from witty and irreverent to melancholy and introspective, with intimations of the bouts of mental illness that were to lead her to take her own life. She was a writer of genius; and through her correspondence we come close to one of the most brilliant and high-spirited minds of the twentieth century. ‘A true letter’, she insisted, ‘should be like a film of wax pressed close to the graving of the mind’.

The book contains  background information on Virginia Woolf’s life along with real samples of her handwriting. There are also biographical notes on the main recipients of the letters, together with a family tree for keeping track of names.

The letters are beautifully illustrated throughout with photographs, paintings and sketches of the people and places with which Virginia Woolf was most closely connected – many by members of the Bloomsbury Group, such as Woolf’s sister Vanessa Bell, Roger Fry and Duncan Grant.

Poems to celebrate summer.

Pour out a long drink, take a seat under a shady tree, and lose yourself in this sublime collection of nature poems for summer. From William Shakespeare to Emily Dickinson, John Keats to Isaac Rosenberg, some of the finest poets that ever put pen to paper describe the slow, langorous, glowing evenings of the season.

With one entry for every summer day, from 1 June to 31 August, this collection of 92 poems will provide the perfect backdrop to those balmy summer evenings in the garden, from Christina Rossetti’s ‘larks hang singing, singing singing over the wheat-fields wide’ to Eugene Lee-Hamilton’s ‘rich, hot scent of old fir forests heated by the sun’, Samuel Palmer’s evocative descriptions of summer twilight to Rachel Field’s whimsical musings on butterflies.

This beautiful and collectable anthology of poems derives from the popular A Nature Poem for Every Night of the Year and also features summery poems from Geoffrey Chaucer, Amy Lowell, Gerard Manley Hopkins, William Blake and many more.