Full AspenCat Catalog

"The creation of the Oxford English Dictionary began in 1857, took seventy years to complete, drew from tens of thousands of brilliant minds, and organized the sprawling language into 414,825 precise definitions. But hidden within the rituals of its creation is a fascinating and mysterious story - a story of two remarkable men whose strange twenty-year relationship lies at the core of this historic undertaking." "Professor James Murray, an astonishingly...

A portrait of nineteenth-century actress Ellen Ternan, the woman who was the mistress of Charles Dickens, describing her secret relationship with the author.

"A twentieth-century intellectual of the first rank presents the case for the nineteenth-century aesthetician whose elegant subversions delivered us to modernism. Walter Pater (1839-1894) was an obscure Oxford don until 1873, when his first book, The Renaissance, exposed his argument favoring sensation over thought and, in doing so, ignited a hard, gem-like flame. "Say not what it is but what it makes you see - or feel" is not something Pater ever...

"In the early 1800s, poetry could land a person in jail. Those who tried to change the world through their poems risked notoriety, or courted it. Among the most subversive were a group of young writers known as the Romantics: Lord Byron, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, William Wordsworth and John Keats. These rebels believed poetry should express strong feelings in ordinary language. And they were barely out of their teens when their...

"A deliciously told group biography of the young, rich, American heiresses who married impoverished, British gentry at the turn of the twentieth century - the real women who inspired Downton Abbey. Towards the end of the nineteenth century and for the first few years of the twentieth, a strange invasion took place in Britain. The citadel of power, privilege and breeding in which the titled, land-owning governing class had barricaded itself for so...

An intimate portrait of the nineteenth-century literary master's relationships with definitive women in his life discusses the mysterious Ellen Ternan; creative muse Maria Beadnell; and his beloved late sister-in-law, Mary Scott Hogarth.

"A picture book biography of mathematician Ada Lovelace, the first computer programmer, by the award-winning author/illustrator Fiona Robinson"-- A picture book biography of mathematician Ada Lovelace, the first computer programmer.

Offers a look at the history of the making of this important book that has been in print for the last 150 years through profiles of the people involved, a review of the medical school where it was written, and a look at the entire process of its original publication in 1858.

" As a young medical student, Arthur Conan Doyle studied in Edinburgh under the vigilant eye of a diagnostic genius, Dr. Joseph Bell. Doyle often observed Bell identifying a patient's occupation, hometown, and ailments from the smallest details of dress, gait, and speech. Although Doyle was training to be a surgeon, he was meanwhile cultivating essential knowledge that would feed his literary dreams and help him develop the most iconic detective in...