1st Edition Hard Covers Signed by Simon Winchester

	The Meaning of Everything - Signed Copy
	A Crack in the Edge of the World - Signed Copy
	Krakatoa: The Day the World Exploded - Signed Copy
	The Man Who Loved China - Signed Hard Cover

All too infrequently, during these recession months, am I allowed to travel in the very front of an aircraft. But whenever I do, I take great pleasure when one of the flight attendants delivers the food and drink in a curious zig-zag manner: handing the champagne to the lady in 1A, then the kir royale to the man in 2C, then the gin-and-tonic to 2A, the hot tea to 3C, and so on back and forth all the way down until she reached the curtain. The first attendant I spotted doing this told me, brightly, that her technique was based on a writing and ploughing technique known to the Ancient Greeks as boustrophedon - the word derives from ox and turning - and which is defined as written alternately from left to right and from right to left, like the course of a plough in successive furrows.

All fine and dandy, and fantastically interesting to Classicists maybe. But I wonder: what about the poor guy in 1C. He  seems to lose out, and probably wonders why he ever paid to sit in the front of the plane in the first place.

I miss Scotland, and so when I came across the word soum, my heart promptly melted. This ancient word means

the amount of pasturage which will support one cow or a proportional number of sheep or other stock.

Would that it were so simple.  Dear Scotland having a charmingly perverse side, it also means its very opposite. It also stands for

the number of sheep that can be maintained on a certain amount of pasture. "A soum of sheep" varies, depending on the quality of land, between four and ten.

If that is unclear, then ask a Highlander to explain, especially if he's just had a wee dram...

The Atlantic book tour kicks off in Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane, Auckland, Wellington and Christchurch during the first fortnight in September. British publication is 11th October and the American pub date is 2nd November. Canada following shortly thereafter. More precise dates when my various publishers let me know.

This is the former name for the bird we now known as the thrush, the song-thrush or (an even less familiar term), the mavis. But unattractive the word throstle may be, it seems a positive joy compared to the Latin name owned by the poor creature: Turdus musicus, which sounds like something one might find in a Jonathan Franzen novel. This Latin also gives us turdine, which means thrush-like - and that still meaning the bird, not the infection.

There is moret

haiti-project

By a curious chance of history the islands at both the northern and southern ends of the eight-thousand-mile long Mid-Atlantic Ridge are possessions of the Kingdom of Norway. Jan Mayen Island, at 71 degrees N, is distinguished mainly for having a spectacular mountain, the 8,000 foot Beerenberg.  By contrast Bouvet Island, at 54 degrees S,  although volcanic also, has no peak worthy of mention and is so amply covered with ice that Captain Cook derided its original discoverer - wrongly - for merely having found a stray iceberg. No-one lives on Bouvet, though an automatic weather station there chatters its data incessantly. On Jan Mayen as many as 35 people are to be found there in summer,  half that number of hardy souls who endure the bitter northern winter.