Eric Ravilious – illustratör

Silly season, spring chicken, Shrovetide, dog days, Halloween, wassail, Snowtober, Hogmanay and over 100 other words and phrases are brought together here to show how seasonal vocabulary has become one of the most productive areas of the English lexicon. Words associated with spring, summer, autumn – or fall – and winter, along with ‘season’ itself, have long been used creatively in such worlds as commerce, politics and the arts; music and painting especially provide famous cases of the popular appeal of the 'four seasons'. The entries in this book, alongside idioms, extracts from poetry and exquisite engravings by Eric Ravilious, demonstrate how these words and phrases have spread throughout the language.Each entry gives an account of historical origins, tracing the development of meaning over time, and concluding with examples of current usage in everyday situations, some of which are decidedly unexpected. Appendices provide etymologies for the months of the year and wonderfully evocative folklore names for moons. Few other lexical domains would bring together St Augustine, Antonio Vivaldi, James Joyce and Stormzy – just four of some 200 personalities that enliven the pages of this fascinating book.

Together with a newly commissioned introduction, this book includes a facsimile of one of Eric Ravilious’s finest illustrated works, first published by the Golden Cockerel Press in 1932 in a limited print run and now considered a masterpiece of typography and illustration. Artist and illustrator Eric Ravilious was fascinated with Elizabethan and Jacobean poetry and drama, both as literature and as visual inspiration. His playful wood engravings depict characters such as Viola, Sebastian, Sir Toby Belch and Malvolio in period costume on imaginary stages or in garden scenes. Decorative borders and vignettes enliven the pages. The Golden Cockerel Press, owned by Robert Gibbings, himself an engraver, was famous for limited-edition, hand-printed books that benefited from the revival of wood engraving after the First World War. The introduction by Alan Powers tells how this edition, growing out of a wider Shakespeare revival, was nearly derailed by the consequences of the economic Depression and how the resourcefulness and determination of those involved with the Press brought about this extraordinary version of Shakespeare’s much-loved comedy.

A century before Charles Darwin, decades before the French Revolution, Gilbert White began his lifelong habit of measuring and observing the world around his Hampshire home. Daily rainfall levels and temperature shifts were recorded with home-made instruments. Bird song and seasonal migrations were noted. The feeding habits of frogs, bats and mice were jotted into his diaries and nature journals, as were the simple delights he felt hearing a cricket in the meadow or a blackbird in the hedgerows. The extraordinary detail of the natural history he described has given us, two hundred years later, a glimpse into ecosystems untouched by industry and an account of how changes in global climate can affect local weather patterns. Gilbert White is now considered England's first ecologist. The Natural History of Selborne is one the most published books in the English language. Yet the most enduring quality of his writing is the spirit of curiosity that bounds across every page, inspiring us to explore the abundance of life at our doorsteps and around our parishes.