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"The particular volume I’m looking for is nameless, lacking a cover, title page, or any other outward markings of identity. Over the centuries its leaves have known nothing but change. They have been removed, replaced, altered, lost. The nameless book has been bound, taken apart, and reassembled with the pieces of other dismembered volumes, until one could ask whether there is anything left of the original. Or if there ever was an original." So begins Thomas Wharton's book about books. What follows is a sequence of variations on the experience of reading and on the book a physical and imaginative object. One tale traces the origins of a fictional card game. Another tells of a duel between ...
Nicholas Flood, an unassuming eighteenth-century London printer, specializes in novelty books -- books that nestle into one another, books comprised of one spare sentence, books that emit the sounds of crashing waves. When his work captures the attention of an eccentric Slovakian count, Flood is summoned to a faraway castle -- a moving labyrinth that embodies the count's obsession with puzzles -- where he is commissioned to create the infinite book, the ultimate never-ending story. Probing the nature of books, the human thirst for knowledge, and the pursuit of immortality, Salamander careens through myth and metaphor as Flood travels the globe in search of materials for the elusive book without end.
When Will, a rebellious teen, stumbles from the present into the realm where stories come from, he learns he has a mission concerning the evil Malabron and, aided by some of the story folk, he faces a host of perils while seeking the gateless gate that will take him home.
Considered simply as a story, the narrative has intrinsic drama, with a complex protagonist, a vivid cast of historical characters, and enough conflict (including family conflicts) for several novels. The cast is headed by the redoubtable Wharton clan and by the party leaders, royal and non-royal, who dominated the period. The characters are usually vivid, often confused, sometimes psychotic, and (in the Restoration era) seldom pure. History is sometimes indistinguishable from gossip - some of it supplied by the Whartons. Political drama often becomes social drama.
ADENOGRAPHIA is one of a number of important Latin medical works that had not yet been translated, and no edition of it has been printed since 1730. It was the first systematic account of the glands of the human body. Thomas Wharton, the author, was a Fellow of the Royal College of Physiciansduring the middle years of the 17th century; in this period, many important advances in medical knowledge were made at the College,not least by Wharton himself. He discovered the duct which carries saliva from the sub-maxillary gland to the mouth, and studied the umbilical cord. He also made someimportant observations of the lacteal vessels of the thorax and the abdomen, and was the first to name the thyroid and jugular glands.
On an expedition in the Canadian Rockies at the end of the nineteenth century, Dr Edward Byrne slips and falls almost 60 feet into a crevasse on the Arcturus Glacier. While trapped, hanging upside down and wary that the slightest movement could send him plunging deeper into the abyss, Byrne notices a mysterious winged figure embedded in the ice wall. The vision shakes his sanity, and after his recovery continues to haunt him until he abandons his fiancee and his medical practice in England and returns to a lonely vigil in a shack near the spot on the ice where he almost lost his life. His spirit trapped, he seeks the truth by questioning closely the strange characters that cross his path and meticulously recording the advance and decline of the myths and legends of an early settlement and is transformed by the coming of the railroad into a thriving tourist centre - with an impact as far away as the battlefields for the First World War.
In this, the conclusion to the sweeping Perilous Realm trilogy, Will and Rowen journey through the Shadow Realm--a wasteland of deserted cities and abandoned belongings--to rescue Rowen's grandfather, the loremaster Nicholas Pendrake, and confront the evil Malabron once and for all. As they travel, they encounter blood-sucking harrowers and wraith-like fetches, and they must also confront the reality that their dear friend Shade is returning to his wolf-life state and will soon pose a grave threat to them both. And they have no time to waste, for war looms back in Fable, where the dastardly Ammon Brax has installed himself as Marshall and has plans to claim the city for himself. What will become of Shade, Pendrake, and the people of Fable? Will Rowen and Will be able to find Malabron at the Tree of Story and break his wicked spell before it's too late?