Icon Books Advent Calendar Door #4

Posted on 2015/12/04 , tagged as

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Today’s Advent Calendar giveaway has been chosen by our intern of the past couple of weeks, Faye Harvey

She’s chosen a fabulous book which we published in late 2012 – Pandaemonium by Humphrey Jennings. The book, originally published in 1985, inspired Danny Boyle’s showstopping opening ceremony of the London Olympics of that year, though it was languishing out of print. Our editor spoke to the author’s daughter, Marie-Louise Jennings, who died herself recently, to secure the rights for Icon. Here’s what Faye had to say about it:

Have you seen the film ‘Listen to Britain’? Directed by Humphrey Jennings and Stewart McAllister in 1942, it presents a montage of sounds and images of Britain at war, from the monotonous tread of industrial factory noises, to the Mozart of a daytime concert at the National Gallery, to the ominous resounding of the nightly Blitz sirens.

This haunting construction of moving image montage led me to PANDAEMONIUM, a compendium of “images” by Jennings, in book form.

It is a collection of writings conveying a narrative of the Industrial Revolution, as experienced by contemporary writers between 1660–1886, such as Milton, Blake, Voltaire and Darwin, to name only a few.

The experience of reading this book is such that, in the words of Frank Cottrell Boyce: “you will feel the heat and velocity of the greatest revolution in the history of the world. You’ll hear the clank of machinery, the roar of furnaces, the bawling of orders…”

The excerpts are fascinating, poetic, insightful, in their own right.

However, this book is particularly unique in the way that it takes the reader through the works that resonated in Jennings’ mind, a remarkable artist himself. Brought together, each excerpt conveys a sense of Jennings’ visions and imagination of history through human experience.

To win a copy of  Pandaemonium, just retweet our tweet about it today and say tuned!