100 books like Elizabethan Instrument Makers

I have always been fascinated with stargazing, bird-watching, photography, and microscopy, and consequently vintage telescopes, binoculars, cameras, microscopes, and optical and scientific instruments in general. I began my career in an optics laboratory at the Royal Aircraft Establishment, Farnborough, and went on to become a Chartered Engineer. After a successful career in science and engineering, spanning more than three decades, I left the corporate world to make stringed instruments and write fiction and non-fiction. Brass and Glass: Optical Instruments and Their Makers is my first non-fiction book. My novels include An Accident of Birth, and Galactic Alliance: Betrayal. I live in Kent, England with my wife, Margo, and our cat.

I have always been fascinated with stargazing, bird-watching, photography, and microscopy, and consequently vintage telescopes, binoculars, cameras, microscopes, and optical and scientific instruments in general. I began my career in an optics laboratory at the Royal Aircraft Establishment, Farnborough, and went on to become a Chartered Engineer. After a successful career in science and engineering, spanning more than three decades, I left the corporate world to make stringed instruments and write fiction and non-fiction. Brass and Glass: Optical Instruments and Their Makers is my first non-fiction book. My novels include An Accident of Birth, and Galactic Alliance: Betrayal. I live in Kent, England with my wife, Margo, and our cat.

I have always been fascinated with stargazing, bird-watching, photography, and microscopy, and consequently vintage telescopes, binoculars, cameras, microscopes, and optical and scientific instruments in general. I began my career in an optics laboratory at the Royal Aircraft Establishment, Farnborough, and went on to become a Chartered Engineer. After a successful career in science and engineering, spanning more than three decades, I left the corporate world to make stringed instruments and write fiction and non-fiction. Brass and Glass: Optical Instruments and Their Makers is my first non-fiction book. My novels include An Accident of Birth, and Galactic Alliance: Betrayal. I live in Kent, England with my wife, Margo, and our cat.

I have always been fascinated with stargazing, bird-watching, photography, and microscopy, and consequently vintage telescopes, binoculars, cameras, microscopes, and optical and scientific instruments in general. I began my career in an optics laboratory at the Royal Aircraft Establishment, Farnborough, and went on to become a Chartered Engineer. After a successful career in science and engineering, spanning more than three decades, I left the corporate world to make stringed instruments and write fiction and non-fiction. Brass and Glass: Optical Instruments and Their Makers is my first non-fiction book. My novels include An Accident of Birth, and Galactic Alliance: Betrayal. I live in Kent, England with my wife, Margo, and our cat.

Mark Ovenden is a broadcaster, lecturer and author who specialises in the design of public transport. His books include ’Transit Maps of The World’ - an Amazon Top 100 best-seller - and a dozen others covering cartography, architecture, typography, way finding and history of urban transit systems, airline routes and railway maps. He has spoken on these subjects across the World and is a regular on the UK's Arts Society lecture circuit. His television and radio programmes for the BBC have helped to explain the joys of good design and urban architecture. He is a Fellow of the Royal Geographic Society and after many years living in cities like London, Paris, New York and Manchester…now enjoys a more rural life on the Isle of Wight.

For as long as I can remember I have been absolutely gripped by the stories that old clothes can tell. From visiting fashion museums as a child to collecting books on the subject, I was drawn to the shapes, the fabrics, and the tales. I can remember a curator once telling me that clothes are the closest we can get to people in the past. They are the ghostly outlines of our ancestors and that has stayed with me. We give so much away about ourselves through the clothes we choose to wear and so they really do matter.

When I first saw Shakespearean text, I could not get how anyone related to things written so many centuries ago. It took me several years before my soul awakened to these words that now felt fresh, like they could have been whispered to me that very day by a best friend who understood all the pain and all the laughter of my life. Very little is known about the man himself leaving writers a lot of room to create their own version of Shakespeare. I know my Shakespeare is just that: my magical, enigmatic, wise Shakespeare. It’s exciting to see how others give him life in their own stories.

I’m a literary historian who works on the history of women’s reproductive bodies in the early modern era. I am also a debut novelist who has used my many years of researching the seventeenth century to bring to life the story of a seventeenth-century midwife. My own novel is not a bio fiction in the strictest sense of the term (novels with a named protagonist who was a historical figure) but it is based on the published works of two contemporary midwives, Jane Sharp (fl. 1671) and Sarah Stone who worked in the early part of the eighteenth century. I love reading works where other authors have brought to life figures I both research and teach.

Major league baseball stadiums have always enthralled me—their architectures, their atmospheres, their surroundings. Each has a unique story to tell. So I decided to tell the story of how perhaps the greatest of all American ballparks, Dodger Stadium in Los Angeles, came to be. As an urban historian, I also wished to tell a broader story of how the argument between 1957 and 1962 over whether, where, and how to build the stadium helped make Los Angeles into the modern city we know today. So writing City of Dreams allowed me to combine my passions for baseball, for stadiums, and for the history of American cities.

As the authors of 27 hand-illustrated books, we are acutely aware of the time and skill required for good rendering. We are old-schoolers ourselves, having cut our teeth on “how-to” books before computers came into vogue. Our readers often tell us that a computer drawing does not have the same appeal and clarity as hand drawing. We are able to ‘talk’ a reader through the process of building something with our drawings. We have also found that the best illustrated books often have the best content!