I never knew my grandfather as he died the year before I was born. I used to play in the attic of my home. I played with grandfathers uniform and sword,his musket and many of his personal belongings. Seeing as how this is my grandfather it makes the book seem more real to me than if it were written about someone that I never heard of.

Hello.

I'm from Venezuela and I am a reader. I could see your web-site and I think it's so fine. I send you my special congratulations for you.

I would like to make a contact with you and get a lot of your books as soom as possible to me. Well, In this moment, I'm interested of a special book, its name's: General Aerodinamic Theory, by : FREDERICK W. DURAND.

It's possible for you send me this book by mail and I send you the money by Union Western? Please! if there are another way can you write to my e-mail: felmape@cantv.net. Thanks you very much.

I'll close this script with my best wishes in this Christmas and Happy New Year 2001.

Felix Peña.

There's much more to the type of Frederic Goudy than Goudy Oldstyle, and you'd be suprised at some of the familiar typefaces that came from his hand. He created over 100 types, including what is now known as Berkely and Copperplate. Most designers are lucky if ONE of their types finds its way into common use. Goudy has at least ten. This is a facsimile of a volume that appeared in Goudy's lifetime. My only complaint is that I wish it had been reproduced on letterpress -- printed pages produced by modern means do not carry the same authority, or produce the characteristic relief of the old printing methods. Nonetheless, we are fortunate to have it available.

In his poignant biography of the man whom many believe to be George Armstrong Custer's "Brutus", Mills paints a stirring portrait of an enigma of the Indian Wars, Frederick W. Benteen. If you're a follower of Custeriana or a whimsical student of Custer's Last Stand, you'll find this to be a fascinating character portrayal of a man maybe not so different from you and me. Benteen, a renowned cavalryman and survivor of the Battle of the Little Big Horn, rose to the rank of brevet colonel in the Union Army during the Civil War before joining the Seventh Cavalry at Fort Riley, Kansas in 1867. His story is one of life on America's frontier, a tapestry of the hardship and brotherhood common to the campaigning cavalryman on the Great Plains. "Harvest of Barren Regrets" is an epic tale of a forgotten warrior, one of the last of a lost breed of American frontiersmen, and a book well worth the time and investment.

The law of England underwent major changes under the energetic leadership of the Plantagenet kings. This scholarly work traces and outlines this most fascinating and actually entertaining period in legal history.

Before the acts chronicled here, the business of law enforcement in all its various forms, both civil and criminal, was a rather haphazard and local affair. Magical ordeals, often administered by the clergy, and probably fixed by them to reach what they thought the proper outcome, were a major method of trial. Noblemen could fend off charges by their inferiors by swearing they didn't do it, and finding enough people to swear that they believed 'em. Disputes between nobles were as often as not settled by the sword, in either actual battle or ritual combat.

The Plantagenet kings made this imperfect system obsolete, not by legislating it out of existence, but by offering a superior product. They introduced the grand and petit jury, whose ultimate origins are obscure, but which may trace back to the Scandinavian ancestors of the Normans. New forms of litigation were set up beside the old ones, only these led to the royally instituted jury rather than the old forms of trial by oaths, magic, or battle.

And, having this parallel system in place, attorneys were careful to frame their pleadings so as to bring their litigation within the ambit of the new trials, rather than the old ones. These basic legal reforms, helped along by certain legal fictions made necessary to achieve the desired result, became the foundation of a legal system more suited to a national state with a central royal government, rather than the patchwork jurisdictions of feudalism.

This fascinating story is told in all its detail in these old but still intriguing books.

Brendan Simms' "The Impact of Napoleon" is one of the best historical texts I have ever read. The author presents a cogent and persuasive argument that Prussian foreign policy from 1797-1806 was not influenced in any major way by domestic politics, correcting a mistake that German historians have been making since they began writing on the subject. He shows that there was no "Pro-French" lobby in the court, and that the ministers changed policies to suit the wishes of the king. Simms shows how foreign policy was firmly in the hands of the King, Frederick William III, and the ultimate decision rested with him. Simms shows how the Prussian system of government (put in place by Frederick the Great) led to disaster in the hands of a weak and timid king, when confronted by Napoleon.

The book is broken up into a section on the Prussian system, and to a section on how the system and the individuals in it reacted to events. There is an epilogue explaining how the horrible defeat at Jena led to a reevaluation of the system and its reform in favor of a more professional and independent governmental system and foreign ministry. For anyone who is interested in Napoleonic diplomatic history or in German history this is a must-have book.

A loving, meticulously researched, and critical biography of Frederick William "Peter" Twort by his son, Antony Twort. The elder Twort, working with George Ingram, was the first to publish (1912) a method for isolating and culturing the extremely fastidious Mycobacterium paratuberculosis, the bacterium that causes Johne's disease, or chronic dysentery of cattle. He was also the independent co-discoverer, along with Félix d'Hérelle, of bacteriophage (viruses that prey upon bacteria), and the first to publish a report (1915) on the subject. After these initial successes, which earned him a Fellowship in the Royal Society, he spent the rest of his increasingly unhappy professional life trying to find conditions under which viruses, which he thought to be a primitive life form, would grow independently of their host cells, and engaging in endless skirmishes with the bureaucracy that funded his research. He was forced into retirement after his laboratory was bombed during World War II. Supplemented with 25 pages of black-and-white photos, one drawing, a facsimile reproduction of the 1915 paper "An Investigation on the Nature of Ultra-Microscopic Viruses," and an excellent index. For a biography of Félix d'Hérelle see Félix d'Hérelle and the Origins of Molecular Biology by William C. Summers (Yale University Press, 1999).

This novel, written by Buffalo Bill himself, provides a clear, accurate, and interesting picture of his life. Packed full with his adventures, I couldn't put the book down until the end! Strongly recommended for anyone interested in the formation and history of the American Western Frontier.

The Wild West was an even more heroic epoch than is commonly understood. While Buffalo Bill became a self-promoter, basic facts are clear: he was a superior plains guide and scout and Indian fighter. He really was the master hunter of buffalo from horseback. He was a Pony Express rider, with all that entailed. He was friends with Wild Bill, Custer, and other notables. He was awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor for bravery on the battlefield (though sadly it was removed many years later because of a bureaucratic technicality of how he had been employed by the Army, not because of any change in the evaluation of the heroic deeds.

A most fascinating book. It gives one a different perspective to hear it from a participant.END

Too often local history is limited history: it is so concerned with the details of a particular time and place its fails to contextualise, to analysis, to grasp the bigger picture. Good local historians ought to "see the world in a grain of sand", as William Blake would have it. The Little General and the Rousay Crofter is my history book of the moment because it suceeds wonderfully in linking the local with capital 'H' History. Okay, I'm basis - I come from Orkney and am interested in the place. But I am sure that folk with no Orkney connection would find the story of the debt-ridden General with an empire career behind him and his struggle with the crofters and Free Kirk Minister on the Orkney island of Rousay compelling. Thomson never falls back on stereotypes of the bad landlord exploiting poor crofters, but instead picks through the evidence with great care. The result is a detailed and (I think) gripping study of the break-down of old bonds of patronage between the land-owning class and crofters, of the complex allegiances and tensions across a whole community this breakdown suddenly throws into sharp relief, of the politicisation of ordinary people such as the remarkable James Leonard, leader of the crofters. And there are one or two remarkable twists in the tale. Highly recommended, and I've never met William Thomson.