Perhaps our most sensuous volume yet, this third offering in our selected essays series is positively bursting with goodness, including chocolate highs, scorbutic visions, wonky badgers, sexy flora, deadly fogs, mathematical fish, coloured cubes of hyperspace, a very naughty Aristotle, and pianos comprised of yelping cats.

Adorned with illustrations from the likes of Ernst Haeckel, J. J. Grandville, Gustave Doré, and William Hogarth, the book is a full-colour visual feast, all printed on sumptuous 70lb paper.

Adam Green
Introduction

Eugene Thacker
Black on Black

Christine Jones
When Chocolate was Medicine: Colmenero, Wadsworth and Dufour

Hugh Aldersey-Williams
A Bestiary of Sir Thomas Browne

Deirdre Loughridge and Thomas Patteson
Cat Pianos, Sound-Houses, and Other Imaginary Musical Instruments

Jonathan Lamb
Scurvy and the Terra Incognita

Mary Fissel
When the Birds and the Bees Were Not Enough: Aristotle’s Masterpiece

Matthew Beaumont
The Nightwalker and the Nocturnal Picaresque

Martin Kemp
Sex and Science in Robert Thornton’s Temple of Flora

Kevin Dann
Dr Mitchill and the Mathematical Tetrodon

Caroline Wazer
The Eternal Guffaw: John Leech and The Comic History of Rome

Brett Beasley
Bad Air: Pollution, Sin, and Science Fiction in William Delisle Hay’s The Doom of the Great City

Elaine Ayers
Richard Spruce and the Trials of Victorian Bryology

Jon Crabb
Notes on the Fourth Dimension

Abigail Walthausen
Tribal Life in Old Lyme: Canada’s Colorblind Chronicler and his Connecticut Exile