Violet Moller

In 1506, a comet appears above Augsburg. As the astronomer Johann Virdung explains, it heralds conflict, the destruction of crops, and the death of kings. He concludes his theories with a poem. In 1680, Isaac Newton peers at a comet through a telescope for the first time. He calculates its orbit and distance from the Sun. Of its meaning, he...

Enter the mysterious world of sixteenth-century science, where astronomers and alchemists shared laboratories. There is magic in these pages. - Daisy Dunn, author of The Missing Thread In 1543, Nicolaus Copernicus declared the earth revolved around the Sun, overturning centuries of scholastic presumption. A new age was coming into view – one guided by observation, technology and logic. But omens...

Which is the smallest book in the Bodleian Library? Who complained when their secret pen name was revealed in the library's catalogue? How many miles of shelving are there in the Book Storage Facility? What is the story behind the library's refusal to lend a book to King Charles I? And, what is fasciculing? The answers to these questions and...

Published to mark the 200th anniversary of Dickens's birth, this book celebrates the greatest of English novelists by illustrating some of his abiding preoccupations. Prompted by quotations from the novels and other writings, each themed chapter explores contemporary images relating to salient topics of the Victorian age, such as the public entertainments of London and the domestic pastimes of its...

'An epic treasure hunt into the highways and byways of stored knowledge across faiths and continents.' John Agard, poet and playwright In The Map of Knowledge Violet Moller traces the journey taken by the ideas of three of the greatest scientists of antiquity - Euclid, Galen and Ptolemy - through seven cities and over a thousand years. In it, we...