#bill wilson

[lincolnellsworth]

edward adrian wilson's Bullshit Spoon made from spoon

[getsloud]

you know what that means

📮(comms)📮

[evergreensounds]

Bill is like the sneet sniler of all time

[ourdailybill]

Wilson Books

TL;DR: Good books are good! Links!

Cheltenham in Antarctica – Biography of Edward A. Wilson, amply illustrated, correct in its quotations where Seaver took some editorial liberties. The paperback is only available used; a very very nice deluxe leatherbound edition in a slipcase can be ordered direct from the publisher.

Discovery Illustrated – A coffee-table sized treasure trove of the rarer or otherwise unavailable images depicting the whole of the Discovery Expedition (1901-04). The actual book is nicer than the image there, which is a promo leaflet and not the cover. Also available used.

Nimrod Illustrated – Same but for the Nimrod Expedition (1907-09)

Edward Wilson's Nature Notebooks – Same sort of big juicy edition, but of Wilson's sketches, paintings, and observations of natural subjects in more temperate climes.

Edward Wilson's Antarctic Notebooks are also a thing (a glorious thing) but they're not presently available on the publisher's site or on World of Books.

Terra Nova Illustrated – Keep reading ...

Nonfiction bookselling is an unforgiving place. If you want to publish your research, you either have to convince a publisher that there's a market for it and tailor your output to the lowest common denominator, or publish academically where maybe a few dozen people will see it at best. The middle ground is going with a tiny independent press – even a vanity press – and hoping your book finds the people who are into the subject enough to appreciate something detailed and esoteric, with no marketing budget. This is where the real nerd gold is, but it's hard to source, often our of print, and with no economies of scale, expensive.

David M. Wilson, great-nephew of Our Bill, has been putting together books on Antarctic history – most, but not all, having to do with his predecessor – and these are full of stuff you will not find anywhere else. In order not to compromise on content or depth, he's published through a one-person outfit in the West Country which, aside from the digital printing, operates in roughly 1998. Sales are slow; neither of them are on social media and the books are too esoteric for most bookshops to stock.

David is currently working on the latest in his Illustrated series, and it's the big one – Terra Nova. Because of his unique connections with institutions and expedition families worldwide, it's going to be an assemblage of images that you likely haven't seen before – the whole point of it is to fill the gaps in the visual record, and oh boy there's some good stuff in there. (I have been occasionally consulting on Guy IDs and I can vouch for this.) But his publisher is hemming and hawing about his previous Illustrated books not selling well. Obviously Terra Nova Illustrated is going to be the most successful of the bunch (at least until he comes out with Endurance) but in order to give his publisher a little more confidence it would be great to shift some of the backlist.

As I am on social media, I offered to signal boost a link to the online shop, but whoa the website is terrible and that may explain why they're not selling anything. I have now taken the trouble to take you to the shop pages for each individual book, and also link you to new and used copies on World Of Books, which is kind enough to kick a little back to the author even on used copies. They also have a slightly more modern website.

Shipping in A.D. 2025 is not making anything easier, but polar fandom is a cooperative bunch, and it may be possible for multiple people in one country to group their orders and divide the combined shipping. This ought to work out cheaper for everyone than each person individually paying full price to ship from the UK.

Let's make Terra Nova Illustrated look like more of a commercial prospect!

[cockroachesunite]

Silly commission I did for @antarcticlovebirds <3

(commissions info)

[kdayshauthor]

In a book full of emotional wreckage, I had to put it down and take a moment after reading this line 😭😭😭

[beausling]

some very good and very important AA + NA literature

also links to the AA website and to the NA website. for the folks that are uneducated; read up !!!

[sail-not-drift]

I choose to believe that if everyone from the Terra Nova had survived, instead of “Worst Journey in the World” we’d have a series of children’s books starting with “Cherry, Birdie, and Uncle Bill Take a Very Cold Stroll”