Volcanoes, coffee, talking trees, pigs on trial, painted smiles, lost Edens, the social life of geometry, a cat called Jeoffry, lepidopterous spying, monkey-eating poets, imaginary museums, a woman pregnant with rabbits, an invented language drowning in umlauts, a disgruntled Proust, frustrated Flaubert… and much much more. Spread across six themed chapters – Animals, Bodies, Words, Worlds, Encounters and Networks – the book includes a stellar line up of contributors, including Jack Zipes, Frank Delaney, Arika Okrent, Noga Arikha, and Julian Barnes.

Adam Green
Introduction

Animals
Nicholas Humphrey
Bugs and Beasts Before the Law

Niki Russell
Mary Toft and Her Extraordinary Delivery of Rabbits

Frank Key
Christopher Smart’s Jubilate Agno

Mark Kaufman
Robert Baden-Powell’s Entomological Intrigues

Bodies
Nicholas Jeeves
The Serious and the Smirk

Noga Arikha
As a Lute out of Tune: Robert Burton’s Melancholy

George Prochnik
American Kaleidoscope: Morton Prince and the Boston Revolution in Psychotherapy

Marri Lynn
Vesalius and the Body Metaphor

Alicia Puglionesi
Proving it: The American Provers’ Union Documents Certain Ill Effects

Richard Lines
The Erotic Dreams of Emanuel Swedenborg

Andrew McConnell Stott
The Memoirs of Joseph Grimaldi

Words
William C. Carter
Lost in Translation: Proust and Scott Moncrieff

Michael Erard
The Polyglot of Bologna

Arika Okrent
Trüth, Beaüty, and Volapük

Daniel Stolzenberg
Athanasius Kircher and the Hieroglyphic Sphinx

Richard Hamblyn
The Krakatoa Sunsets

Frank Delaney
Seeing Joyce

Worlds
Brook Wilensky-Lanford
The Last Great Explorer: William F. Warren and the Search for Eden

Max Adams
John Martin and the Theatre of Subversion

Peter Fitting
Stories of a Hollow Earth

Ian Stewart
Aspiring to a Higher Plane

Claire Preston
Lost Libraries

John Glassie
Athanasius, Underground

Colin Dickey
The Redemption of Saint Anthony

Encounters
Julian Barnes
An Unlikely Lunch: When Maupassant met Swinburne

Edward Duyker
Labillardière and his Relation

Ray Davis
Tales from Tahiti

Brian Murray
Henry Morton Stanley and the Pygmies of “Darkest Africa”

Robert C. Davis
Slavery in North Africa — The Famous Story of Captain James Riley

Networks
Matthew Green
The Lost World of the London Coffeehouse

Jonathan Lamb
The Implacability of Things

Robin Jarvis
Still Booking on De Quincey’s Mail-Coach

Anca Pusca
On Benjamin’s Public (Oeuvre)

Jack Zipes
The Forgotten Tales of the Brothers Grimm