We present the new Ebury Press edition of the Sunday Times Top Ten best seller, Gwynne’s Grammar: The Ultimate Introduction to the Writing of Good English. Incorporating also Strunk’s Guide to Style, a lovely hardback.

Your copy of Gwynne’s Grammar will be despatched with a free Idler Academy pencil.

Order your copy now.
 

Book a Grammar lesson with the author of Gwynne’s Grammar Mr Gwynne here

Signed copies of Marcel Theroux’s brilliantly intelligent and funny new novel Strange Bodies can be pre-ordered from us now. The book will despatched the day after we launch the book at the Idler Academy on Thursday 16 May.

About Strange Bodies:

Nicholas Slopen has been dead for months. So when a man claiming to be Nicholas turns up to visit an old girlfriend, deception seems the only possible motive. Yet nothing can make him change his story.

From the secure unit of a notorious psychiatric hospital, he begins to tell his tale: an account of attempted forgery that draws the reader towards an extraordinary truth — a metaphysical conspiracy that lies on the other side of madness and death.

Strange Bodies takes the reader on a dizzying speculative journey that poses questions about identity, authenticity, and what it means to be truly human. Could technology make it possible to live on after death?

‘An absorbing and disturbing metaphysical tale, challenging everything we believe about what it means to be human,’ John Gray, bestselling author of Straw Dogs.

Marcel Theroux is a novelist and broadcaster. He has written four novels previously, including The Confessions of Mycroft Holmes, which won the Somerset Maugham Award. He has also written and presented documentaries on subjects as wide-ranging as Wabi-sabi, the Russian art boom and climate change.

This is the 2010 edition of the Idler. It is bound in fine cloth and printed on exceptionally high quality paper. It features a major interview with David Hockney about the historical shifts in control of images. There are essays on the land and politics by Simon Fairlie, Paul Kingsnorth, Harry Mount and many more.

Tom Hodgkinson has written the introduction where he writes on Roman farming guides. There are fine illustrations from Stanley Donwood, Alice Smith, Clifford Harper and more. The book has been lovingly typeset by Christian Brett.

Dispatched with a free Idler Academy pencil.

Tom Hodgkinson’s guide to country living, based on ten years living on a Devon smallholding.

Drawing on the wisdom of an eclectic range of thinkers and writers, on medieval calendars and manorial records, and, as ever, on Tom Hodgkinson’s own honestly recounted and frequently imperfect attempts to travel the road to self-sufficiency, Brave Old World is designed to give us all hope. Why, he asks, shouldn’t we return to the ideals of a pre-capitalist, pre-Puritan, pre-consumerist world of feasting, dancing, horse-riding, wood-chopping, fire-laying, poultry-rearing, bartering, bread-baking and bee-keeping?

From January to December, Brave Old World charts the progress of a year in pursuit of the pleasures of the past, taking seriously – though not without much incidental comedy – G.K. Chesterton’s exhortation, ‘We must go back to freedom or forward to slavery’.

‘A delightful read,’ James Delingpole, Mail on Sunday. ‘Hugely inspiring,’ Sarah Bakewell, New Statesman. ‘Bizarre yet always beguiling,’ Daily Mail.

Illustrated by Alice Smith and typeset by Christian Brett.

Order direct from the Idler Store and get a signed hardback first edition for less than the price of the paperback on Amazon.

 
It features the highlights of a brilliant careers guide talk given by Louis Theroux to the Idler Academy, plus inspiring meditatons from Bill Drummond and Penny Rimbaud. There’s also Mark Vernon on Plato, Joe Dunthorne on Occupy, plus John-Paul Flintoff, Ian Bone, David Bramwell, Boff Whalley, Hugh Warwick and Nicholas Lezard. There are beautiful photos and illustrations from Casey Orr, Alice Smith, Mireille Fauchon and many more. There’s also a dialogue with Oliver Bernard on fifties Soho.
 
It’s a really gorgeous hardback book, typeset by Christian Brett. Order now from the Idler shop.
 

Every order is despatched with a FREE Idler Academy pencil.

The 2011 issue of the Idler is devoted to the idea of small business as an alternative to the grind of the nine-to-five.

There is an introduction by editor Tom Hodgkinson who attempts to outline an idler’s business ethic. Tom also tells the story of how he and Victoria Hull set up the Idler Academy, and the inevitable anxieties that it produced.

In an inspiring interview, Bill Drummond calls on people to take responsibility for their lives. He even takes issue with the philosophy of the Idler, saying: ‘Idleness is the fastest route to depression.’

David Boyle of the New Economics Foundation resists the call fro endless growth and scale, and argues that ‘small is beautiful’.

Other contributors include Robert Wringham of the New Escapologist magazine, early retirement expert Jacob Lund Fisker, and Toby Young, who writes on how Eton old boys continue to dominate British politics.

There are fine illustrations from Alice Smith, Clifford Harper, Bronwen Jones and more, and the whole has been typeset and produced by the inky-fingered Mr Brett of Brackepress.

The book extends to 320 pages. It is bound in blue cloth and printed on paper of exceptional quality.