Secondhand History & Culture Bargain Book Box SP2827

Secondhand History & Culture Bargain Book Box SP2827

Nineteen titles from the golden age of serious Penguin publishing, spanning art history, sociology, architecture, politics, physics, music, mythology, and more. This is the Pelican library in miniature: books that educated a generation between the 1950s and the 1980s, written by world authorities and designed to treat readers as intelligent adults capable of following a serious argument. A box for the kind of reader who still believes non-fiction can be as compelling as any novel.

1. Vedanta for Modern Man — ed. Christopher Isherwood — Isherwood's landmark anthology gathering sixty-one essays on Vedanta philosophy from contributors ranging from Aldous Huxley and Alan Watts to Jawaharlal Nehru and Rabindranath Tagore, a remarkable cross-section of mid-century spiritual searching.
2. The Meaning of Art — Herbert Read — Read's celebrated introduction to the appreciation of visual art, combining a survey of painting and sculpture across the centuries with a penetrating philosophical argument about what art is and why it matters.
3. The Profumo Affair: Aspects of Conservatism — Wayland Young — A Penguin Special published in the immediate aftermath of the scandal, examining not just the titillating details but the deeper political and cultural pathologies the Profumo affair exposed in British Conservatism.
4. The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life — Erving Goffman — One of sociology's most influential and readable books, in which Goffman develops his dramaturgical theory of social interaction, arguing that everyday life is a performance governed by impression management and the constant negotiation of identity.
5. How the Other Half Dies — Susan George — George's influential and meticulously documented indictment of the global food system, arguing that world hunger is not a natural phenomenon but a political one with identifiable causes and responsible parties.
6. Future Positive — Edward de Bono — De Bono at his most wide-ranging and optimistic, arguing that the tools of lateral thinking and constructive intelligence can be applied to humanity's largest and most intractable social and political problems.
7. The Greek Myths: 1 — Robert Graves — The first volume of Graves's comprehensive and characteristically idiosyncratic retelling, combining clear narration of the stories with his provocative theories about their origins, hidden meanings, and pre-Hellenic roots.
8. Encounter Groups — Carl R. Rogers — Rogers's account of the human potential movement's most characteristic invention, examining the theory and practice of group experiences designed to facilitate authentic self-disclosure and genuine human connection.
9. Relativity for the Layman — James A. Coleman — A clear and admirably concise introduction to Einstein's special and general theories, written for the curious non-scientist who wants to understand one of the great intellectual revolutions of the modern age.
10. An Introduction to Modern Architecture — J.M. Richards — Richards's authoritative Pelican survey of the modern movement, from its nineteenth-century origins through the major works of the twentieth century, written with the clarity of a practitioner turned educator.
11. A History of the U.S.S.R. — Andrew Rothstein — A survey of Soviet history from the revolution to the mid-twentieth century, offering a committed insider's perspective on the development of the world's first socialist state.
12. The Vocabulary of Politics — T.D. Weldon — Weldon's influential work in analytic philosophy, examining the language of political argument and demonstrating how much confusion in public debate stems from concepts that have never been properly clarified.
13. Inventing the Future — Dennis Gabor — The Nobel Prize-winning physicist and inventor of holography turns his analytical intelligence to the large questions of technological society, asking how humanity can take purposeful control of the future it is creating.
14. Victorian Cities — Asa Briggs — Briggs's landmark work of social and cultural history, examining the great Victorian cities as physical and cultural achievements and documents of the industrial age at its most energetic and self-confident.
15. The Nude — Kenneth Clark — Clark's magisterial study of the unclothed human figure as a central form in Western art, tracing how its representation has expressed the deepest values, ideals, and anxieties of European culture across five centuries.
16. Realism — Linda Nochlin — Part of the Penguin Style and Civilization series, Nochlin's authoritative examination of Realism situates the movement within its historical and social context with the freshness and rigour that made her one of the defining art historians of her generation.
17. Mental Maps — Peter Gould and Rodney White — A pioneering study of how people conceptualise geographic space, examining the mental maps that shape our preferences, movements, and assumptions about places we know and places we only imagine.
18. Going to a Concert — Lionel Salter — A warm and practical guide to classical music concert-going for the uninitiated, covering everything from what to expect in the hall to how to listen intelligently to what is being performed.
19. Mind the Stop: A Brief Guide to Punctuation — G.V. Carey — Carey's compact and enduringly useful guide to English punctuation, beloved of writers and editors for its clarity, precision, and the gentle wit with which it makes the full stop and the semicolon feel like matters of genuine consequence.