Icon News & Events
Announcing The Pinnacle of Parnassus – the erudite and brilliantly funny new book from Mark Forsyth
Posted on 2013/02/25 in General, tagged as
Icon Books is extremely excited to announce the new book from Mark Forsyth, the author of The Etymologicon and The Horologicon. The Pinnacle of Parnassus: An Entirely Successful Attempt to Write Three Perfect Sentences is Mark Forsyth’s wry quest to write nothing less than the three most perfect sentences that the English language has ever seen. Readers will be treated to a guided literary clamber up Mount Parnassus, home of the Greek Muses. Alon… Read more »
A pocketful of sunshine arrives in Icon Books HQ!
Posted on 2013/02/22 in General, tagged as
If you have enormous, energy-saving pockets, that is. Project Sunshine: How science can use the sun to fuel and feed the world, by Steve McKevitt and Tony Ryan, has arrived in the office and is all packed up and ready to be sent out to press! ‘This is an important, much needed book. It shows that things can’t go on as they have done: population growth, fossil-fuel burning, greenhouse-gas pollution. But it also explains that they don’t need to. Te… Read more »
Mark Forsyth explains the origins of Valentine’s Day
Posted on 2013/02/14 in General, tagged as
Mark Forsyth explains the Chaucerian origins of Valentine’s Day in the video below, and why love is literally in the air… The Horologicon is full of surprising and amusing #lostwords for every situation. Here’s a particularly appropriate one for today: The Horologicon is available now from all good bookshops. Find out more about the book here and read an extract here. Follow our Tumblr to discover more #lostwords.
Mark Forsyth interviewed on Jazz FM for Waterstones Book Hour
Posted on 2013/02/13 in General, tagged as
Mark Forsyth is the latest guest to appear on Jazz FM for Waterstones Book Hour with Rosemary Laryea. Listen to Mark Forsyth talk about #lostwords and The Horologicon below. The Horologicon is available now from all good bookshops. Find out more about the book here and read an extract here. Follow our Tumblr to discover more #lostwords.
Win an Introducing Graphic Guide of your choice!
Posted on 2013/02/08 in General, tagged as
Head over to facebook.com/introducingbooks find out how to take part in the beta version of our Introducing Graphic Guides survey and win a Graphic Guide of your choice. We’d love to hear what you thought of the survey – whether it was too long/too short, interesting, too intrusive, enjoyable, and so on – so please provide us with feedback by commenting on the Facebook post by 5pm, 15th February 2013. We will randomly pick 10 people who complete… Read more »
The Nature Magpie – exclusive sampler
Posted on 2013/02/08 in General, tagged as
Daniel Allen’s The Nature Magpie – a brilliant miscellany of the natural world – is published by Icon in May. Here’s an exclusive taster – read and enjoy and let us know what you think! See more about the book here.
Calling all popular science reviewers, booksellers and librarians – Project Sunshine is now available on NetGalley!
Posted on 2013/01/31 in General, tagged as
Project Sunshine: How science can use the sun to fuel and feed the world, by Steve McKevitt & Tony Ryan is now available to download from NetGalley. It’s astonishing that capturing all the energy in just one hour’s worth of sunlight would enable us to meet the planet’s food and energy needs for an entire year. Project Sunshine tells the story of how scientists are working to reconnect us to the ‘solar economy’, harnessing the power of the sun… Read more »
Brian Clegg’s 20 fascinating facts about the human body
Posted on 2013/01/31 in General, tagged as
Brian Clegg, popular science author of The Universe Inside You, Inflight Science and Introducing Infinity: A Graphic Guide, has written a brilliant piece for the Guardian on 20 amazing facts about the human body. You might be surprised to discover that an adult is made up of around 7,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 (7 octillion) atoms and that the atoms mostly empty space. Read Brian Clegg’s piece over on the Guardian website. Read more about… Read more »
30-Second series now available on Google Play!
Posted on 2013/01/29 in General, tagged as
The bestselling 30-Second series is now available to download in eBook format via Google Play! 30-Second books enable you to brush up on your knowledge of humanity’s most challenging theories, accompanied by lavish illustrations and concise facts. Read about the most thought-provoking, mind-expanding theories in Maths, Economics, Politics, Philosophies, Theories and Psychology in less than a minute. Download the eBooks to view on your e-reader or… Read more »
Shakespeare’s Sonnets and DNA
Posted on 2013/01/24 in General, tagged as
The Guardian posted a thought-provoking article today explaining how a device enabled Shakespeare’s sonnets to be encoded onto a strand of DNA. The experiment was conducted in order to demonstrate the storage capacity of DNA – one gram, for example, can hold as much information as a million CDs. The speck of DNA was then fed back into a gene sequencing machine and sonnets were able to be read again. Read about more the experiment here. If you fee… Read more »
