'Words connect the visible track to the invisible thing ...like a fragile makeshift bridge cast across the void' With imagination and wit, Italo Calvino sought to define the virtues of the great literature of the past in order to shape the values of the future. His effervescent last works, left unfinished at his death, were the Charles Eliot Norton lectures, which he was due to deliver at Harvard in 1985-86. These surviving drafts explore the literary concepts closest to his heart: Lightness, Quickness, Multiplicity, Exactitude and Visibility (Constancy was to be the sixth), in serious yet playful essays that reveal his debt to the comic strip and the folktale. This collection, now in a fluent and supple new translation, is a brilliant precis of a great writer whose legacy will endure through the millennium he addressed
Patrick Creagh Book order




- 2015
- 2008
How do we see the world around us? The Penguin on Design series includes the works of creative thinkers whose writings on art, design and the media have changed our vision forever. Bruno Munari was among the most inspirational designers of all time, described by Picasso as �the new Leonardo�. Munari insisted that design be beautiful, functional and accessible, and this enlightening and highly entertaining book sets out his ideas about visual, graphic and industrial design and the role it plays in the objects we use everyday. Lamps, road signs, typography, posters, children�s books, advertising, cars and chairs � these are just some of the subjects to which he turns his illuminating gaze.
- 1979
The World of Pleasure
- 168 pages
- 6 hours of reading
English, Italian (translation)
- 1971
Selected Poems
- 112 pages
- 4 hours of reading
A major new translation of one of Italy's greatest modern poets. Giuseppe Ungaretti (1888-1970) was a pioneer of the modernist movement in Italian poetry and is widely regarded as one of the leading Italian poets of the twentieth century. His verse is renowned and loved for its powerful insight and emotion, and its exquisite music.