Books published by publisher Rupert Hart-Davis, George Allen

Dust jacket notes: "This, Stevenson's second book, was first published in 1879. Since then it has appeared in many editions, with and without illustrations, but never with any worthy of its text. Mr. Coburn, who is famous for his twenty-four frontispiece-photographs in the New York edition of Henry James's works, took most of his photographs of Edinburgh in 1905; always, he tells us, he tried 'to look at Edinburgh through Stevenson's eyes.' The result is not so much a series of illustrations to the Picturesque Notes as a re-creation in another medium of the town that Stevenson knew. Some of the places have now vanished, but live again in photographs taken in 1905. Others, like Greyfriars Churchyard, are still much as Stevenson saw them. All combine to give a memorable impression of that two-faced city, where the respectable suburbs and urbane New Town hold at their heart the unpredictable mysteries of the Old. The book is introduced by Janet Adam Smith who, by her compilation Henry James and Robert Louis Stevenson and her edition of Stevenson's Collected Poems, has established herself as a leading authority on Stevenson."

Soaked in the sunshine of Corfu, where the author lived as a boy, this delightful book tells of Gerald Durrell's early life with his 'family and other animals'.Brought vividly to life are the extraordinary members of the Durrell family and theirmany eccentric hangers-on, as well as the bizarre menagerie Gerry adopts for closer study. The procession of creatures he brings back to the strawberry-pink, the daffodil-yellow or the snow-white villa includes toads and tortoises, bats and butterflies, scorpions and geckos, ladybirds, glow-worms, octopuses and rose-beetles, Quasimodo the pigeon, the puppies Widdle and Puke and, of course, the Magenpies.