My Dear Mr Rose: Letters to the Honorary Secretary of the Authors’ Club, 1908–34
Authors’ Club, May 2023
In 2022, the Authors’ Club of London received an email from a member of the public who had inherited a collection of letters addressed to Algernon Rose, its Secretary from 1908 to 1934, offering to donate them to the Club. The signatories included Thomas Hardy, Rudyard Kipling, J. M. Barrie, Arthur Conan Doyle, Rider Haggard, John Galsworthy, Arnold Bennett, H. G. Wells and other notable writers of the period. Often candid and informal, they offer a fascinating glimpse of the personal and professional connections among writers in early 20th-century London.
Many of the letters are illustrated in this 80-page limited edition hardback, which includes a full catalogue and a narrative text explaining the circumstances of their composition and relating the extraordinary life and career of Algernon Rose, musician, author, journalist, world traveller and consummate networker. The Foreword is by the literary journalist and Authors’ Club President John Walsh.
The Wood That Built London
Sandstone Press, October 2021
‘Timely and informative’ Literary Review
‘A complete, elegant portrait of the old forest’ The Tablet
‘Ambitious, wide-ranging… packed with anecdote and incident’ Caught by the River
‘The Wood that Built London will be the defining work on the Great North Wood for a long time to come.’ woodlands.co.uk
Drawing on a wealth of documents, historic maps and environmental evidence, this compelling narrative history charts the fortunes of the great wood that once covered much of South London, from the earliest times: its ecology, its ownership, its management, and its gradual encroachment by the expanding metropolis.
Along the Amber Route:
St Petersburg to Venice
Sandstone Press, 27 February 2020
Shortlisted for the Stanford Dolman Travel Book of the Year 2021
Longlisted for the Jewish Quarterly Wingate Prize 2021
Shortlisted for the Bookmark Book of the Year 2020
‘Timely and powerful…’ Sue Gaisford, Financial Times
‘A rich and rewarding read, providing a kaleidoscopic multi-layered view of Central Europe – then and now.’ BookBlast
‘Crisp, quirky dialogue and incisive scene-sketching […] full of incident and anecdote and the oddest facts imaginable. Pure pleasure.’ Ian Thomson, author of The Dead Yard: Tales of Modern Jamaica
Following the Amber Route from the Baltic to the Mediterranean, C. J. Schüler charts the origins of amber, the myths and legends that have grown around it, and the dazzling artefacts crafted from it and traded along the way. Schüler reflects on the route’s violent history through the centuries, not least his own family’s experience of persecution and flight.
Writers, Lovers, Soldiers, Spies: A History of the Authors’ Club of London, 1891–2016
Authors’ Club, 2016
‘Twinkling and captivating’ Roger Lewis, Daily Mail
‘Packed with anecdotes… reads like a roll call of the greatest British literati’ – Danuta Kean, The Guardian
‘The personal shenanigans of the club’s members… bring this deft little history alive’ – Kathryn Hughes, Mail on Sunday
Where did Oscar Wilde indignantly denounce the censorship of his play Salomé? Where did Arthur Conan Doyle and Jerome K. Jerome read from their unpublished manuscripts? Where did Ford Madox Ford’s lover Violet Hunt leave his clothes after he left her for another woman? Where did Graham Greene drink with Kim Philby and Malcolm Muggeridge? Rarely has such an array of writers gathered under one roof, yet the eventful history of the Authors’ Club has never been written… until now.
Mapping the Sea and Stars
Editions Place des Victoires/Frechmann, 2014
Beyond sight of the coast, there are no landmarks – only the stars above. In order to chart the oceans, it was first necessary to map the heavens. Drawing on the rich map collections of the Royal Geographical Society in London, this illustrated cartographic history traces the intertwined development of astronomy and celestial navigation over the centuries, from the seafarers of the ancient world to today’s GPS systems.
Mapping the City
Editions Place des Victoires/Frechmann, 2012
‘Map porn’ – Claire Armitstead, The Guardian
Eternal, imperial, industrial, provincial… Since its emergence 10,000 years ago the city has had many faces, and today houses half of humanity. Illustrated with 200 of the most significant and beautiful maps in the RGS, this book chronicles a crescendo of expansion and a growing understanding of the urban environment, from Jerusalem to Jakarta, Istanbul to New York.
Mapping the World
Editions Place des Victoires/Frechmann, 2010
‘Beautiful, glorious… extraordinary and very, very collectible’ – Annie Quigley, Bibliophilebooks.com
With 400 historic maps from the RGS collection, explanatory essays and timeline, this lavish book charts our growing knowledge of our planet from the C15th, when seafarers first ventured beyond the known world, to 1914, when few reaches of the globe remained unknown to geographers. More than 13,000 copies sold worldwide.
As contributor:
The Traveller’s Atlas: A global guide to the places you must see in your lifetime
with Nigel Rodgers, John Man et al.
Barron, US/UK eds 1999, 2004, 2007
‘Just the thing to hand a prospective gap-year traveller’ –Daily Telegraph
‘Impressive’ – Glasgow Herald
‘It could make you drop everything and go somewhere that could change your life in an instant…’ – Newsday (New York)
The Settling of North America: The Atlas of the Great Migrations into North America from the Ice Age to the Present
ed. Helen H. Tanner
Macmillan, New York 1995
C. J. Schüler 
“Along the Amber Route” is a super book. Entertaining and informative. Erudite and well researched. An extensive lexicon, too.
I was quite surprised, however, no mention of the “Seven Bridges of Königsburg” because the only real knowledge I ever had of Kaliningrad (Königsburg) is the well-known “Seven Bridges” problem.
Wikipedia: The Seven Bridges of Königsberg is a historically notable problem in mathematics. Its negative resolution by Leonhard Euler in 1736[1] laid the foundations of graph theory and prefigured the idea of topology.[2]
Don Yancey, Chiangmai, Thailand
Hello, I listened to an ABC interview with Philip Adams and would like to order “Along the Amber Route”and “Mapping the Sea and Stars” for a dear and kind friend.
I live in New Zealand and would like to know when the first book will be released and if there is a distributor here that I can order both books from.
Many thanks
Jane