{"title":"Malcolm Thick","description":null,"products":[{"product_id":"neat-house-gardens-book-malcolm-thick-9780907325789","title":"The Neat House Gardens","description":"Market gardening is the Cinderella of garden history, yet was an important source of food for many in England and deserves greater study. This book gives an outline of market gardening around London before 1800, and considers the role of commercial vegetable production in stimulating kitchen gardening generally, and its influence on the wider agricultural scene. As focus to its theme, it narrates the story of one small area of early market gardening, the Neat House Gardens in Westminster; drawing on MSS from the Grosvenor estate for new and arresting information.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ VERY_GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":49545248735505,"sku":"GOR003936677","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"GB \/ LIKE_NEW \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":50423789814033,"sku":"GOR010538800","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":53560786321681,"sku":"NIN9780907325789","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0907325785.jpg?v=1779530380"},{"product_id":"william-ellis-book-malcolm-thick-9781912260492","title":"William Ellis","description":"William Ellis, who lived and farmed at Little Gaddesden in Hertfordshire in the first half of the eighteenth century (d. 1759), is an important figure in English agricultural history. In his time the most prolific writer on agriculture in England, his many works were read not only at home but also in the American colonies and continental Europe. Ellis was essentially an agricultural journalist, then a relatively new occupation. He wrote about his own life as well as those of the ordinary people of Little Gaddesden and further afield – he travelled extensively throughout the southern half of England. Most of his copy was derived from conversations he had had with farmers, their wives and other rural folk, the sheer immediacy of his books outshining those of his rivals. Ellis’s style was discursive, particularly so in The Country Housewife’s Family Companion (1750). As well as providing a compendium of household management, cookery and medicine, Ellis delighted in relaying gossip. He included the activities of farmers, wives and maids, labourers, travellers and beggars, as well as the gentry and aristocracy, rich pickings for social historians.  Ellis also used his books to advertise his business as a supplier of agricultural instruments, seeds, plants, trees and fowls, an innovative approach. The Swedish botanist Pehr Kalm visited Little Gaddesden in 1748 to inspect Ellis’s farming and the various farm implements he advertised for sale. The two men didn’t warm to each other, but Kalm’s independent observations add to what we know about Ellis. Piecing together the scant facts about Ellis’s early life, Malcolm Thick has uncovered new information on his time before he commenced farming, and  unravelled some of the complexities of his two marriages. The book’s central focus is on Ellis’s agricultural writings, which provide a fascinating picture of rural life in the period and shed light on the evolution of English farming. This is the first book about Ellis for over sixty years and the first to consider him fully in the round – as a farmer, an active member of his community, an innovative salesman and a wonderfully curious mind.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ GARDNERS","offer_id":49743265464593,"sku":"NGR9781912260492","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/1912260492.jpg?v=1751155513"},{"product_id":"sir-hugh-plat-book-malcolm-thick-9781903018651","title":"Sir Hugh Plat","description":"This book advances our knowledge of the scientific and proto-scientific community of Elizabethan and Jacobean London by means of an investigation of the life and work of Sir Hugh Plat (1552-1611), an author, alchemist, speculator and inventor whose career touched on the fields of alchemy, general scientific curiosity, cookery and sugar work, cosmetics, gardening and agriculture, food manufacture, victualling, supplies and marketing. Unlike many of his colleagues and correspondents, much manuscript material, in the form of notebooks and workings, has survived. Plat has such a wide range of interests that modern scholars have tended to concentrate on that aspect of his work which most affects their own research. By devoting a whole book to his multifarious interests MalcolmThick can show him in the round, as a gentlemen of varied interests, as a man of his time and place. With chapters on military inventions, famine relief, and medicine, the book highlights two important aspects of Plat's research - alchemy and enquiries about the current technology of various trades. While his alchemical writings are (naturally) the most esoteric and complex of his surviving manuscripts, much of his work had a practical end in view - to develop powerful, effective medicines. His work on the technology of trades was by no means disinterested - in more than one instance he developed better ways of carrying out industrial processes than were then practiced and tried, by patents or other means, to make money. One example of this entrepreneurial spirit was evidenced in 1596, (a poor year for harvests and consequent food shortages) when he proposed a solution to the provisioning problems of the Royal Navy: pasta. This was also a time when longer voyages made victualling British ships more difficult than in the past. In fact, Plat himself owned one of the first pasta machines in London and he eventually did succeed in gaining orders for dry pasta from Sir Francis Drake for at least one of his voyages.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ VERY_GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":52102196363537,"sku":"GOR014480068","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/9781903018651.jpg?v=1757095927"}],"url":"https:\/\/www.worldofbooks.com\/collections\/author-books-by-malcolm-thick.oembed","provider":"World of Books ","version":"1.0","type":"link"}