Barometers £3.50
Anita McConnell ISBN 978 0 7478 0240 2 (Album 220) 32 pages, 48 b/w illustrations

Many people consult a barometer before going out, to see what the weather is likely to be. Barometers measure the general pressure of the atmosphere, which changes with the weather. The simple mercury barometer originated in seventeenth-century Italy and was soon copied in France and Britain. In the nineteenth century demand increased for domestic and scientific barometers. Since 1850 mercury barometers have been gradually ousted by aneroids, which are smaller and more robust but nowadays equally accurate.

Anita McConnell is a historian of the earth sciences with a particular interest in the instruments and apparatus used to explore and survey land, sea and air.

Longcase Clocks £4.50
Joanna Greenlaw ISBN 978 0 7478 0417 8 (Album 370) 40 pages, 43 colour illlustrations, 36 b/w illustrations.

This book provides a concise survey of the devleopment of the longcase clock in Britain. It explains how time is measured, how a pendulum regulates a clock and what keeps it swinging. The manufacture and characteristics of clock dials, hands and cases are described in a manner designed to help the reader identify and date clocks. The book concludes with useful advice on the care of clocks, transporting them, and buying and selling.

Joanna Greenlaw is a member of the Antiquarian Horological Society. She restores clocks, their cases and their dials.

Kevin McElhone (Album 333) 978 0 7478 0578 6, 48 pp, 107 colour and 7 b/w ills.

The sound of a street ‘barrel organ‘ or a fairground organ may revive distant memories for older people or stir an interest in younger folk. Wealthier families may have possessed their own automatic music machines in the form of a player piano, a Polyphon or cylinder musical box. If well treated, these instruments may still be in working order. This book covers the history, development, use and fall from favour of many types of exotic instruments, from pocket-sized musical boxes to roll-playing pipe organs. It describes pianolas, organettes, roller organs, orchestrions, nickelodeons, carillons and many more.

Kevin McElhone is archivist of the Musical Box Society of Great Britain, which caters for all kinds of automatic musical instruments.

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Old Radio Sets £3.50
Jonathan Hill 978 0 7478 0219 8 (Album 295) 32 pp, 61 ills.

Currently out of print - reprinting Spring 2008

The radio has been part of home entertainment for over 75 years. This book describes the development of the radio from the late Victorian era until the late 1960s, showing many rare and unusual sets once so familiar to listeners.

Jonathan Hill is a freelance writer and photographer who has been interested in the history of radio since his art school days. he was a founder member of the British Vintage Wireless Society.

Old Television £3.50

Andrew Emmerson 978 0 7478 0367 6 (Album 337) 32 pp, 53 b/w ills.

Television, the most immediate and up-to-date of the communications media, has nonetheless reached a ripe old age. This tradition embraces more than seventy years of progress, from the crude experiments of John Logie Baird in 1925, through the pioneering 405-line days at Alexandra Palace just before the Second World War, to the era when television entered most homes in the 1950s and the growing sophistication of the 1960s with the introduction of 625-line colour transmissions. This book explores, without sentimentality, the whole heritage of the black and white era of television. In it you will find receivers from imposing sets built like furniture to the first transistor portables, the story of the development of television broadcasting, and the whole culture of the television generation from the coming of commercials on ITV to today’s rediscovery of cult programmes.

Andrew Emmerson is a writer and researcher on technological subjects. When he is not writing and broadcasting on the subject of today’s high-tech wizardry, he enjoys discovering the history of the inventions which came before this, also restoring and reviving equipment based on these older technologies. Other titles for Shire by this author are: