Short History Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson, Signed (2 results)

Hardcover. Condition: Near Fine. Dust Jacket Condition: Near Fine. Jacket and illustrations by Neil Gower (illustrator). 1st Edition. First edition, first impression with full number line. signed and inscribed by bill bryson, in black pen, on title page 'To Gregory, Good luck with your A- Levels! Bill Bryson'. Some slight edge wear to top and bottom of jacket and spine, corners slightly bruised, some yellowing to page block, not price clipped (£20.00), no other inscriptions, internally clean tight and square, overall a vg+ copy. 515pp, illustrated, illustrated endpapers. Bill Bryson describes himself as a reluctant traveller: but even when he stays safely in his own study at home, he can't contain his curiosity about the world around him. 'A Short History of Nearly Everything' is his quest to understand everything that has happened from the Big Bang to the rise of civilization, how we got from there, being nothing at all, to here, being us. Bill Bryson's challenge is to take subjects that normally bore the pants off most of us, like geology, chemistry and particle physics, and see if there isn't some way to render them comprehensible to people who have never thought they could be interested in science. It's not so much about what we know, as about how we know what we know. How do we know what is in the centre of the Earth, or what a black hole is, or where the continents were 600 million years ago? How did anyone ever figure these things out? On his travels through time and space, he encounters a splendid collection of astonishingly eccentric, competitive, obsessive and foolish scientists, like the painfully shy Henry Cavendish who worked out many conundrums like how much the Earth weighed, but never bothered to tell anybody about many of his findings. In the company of such extraordinary people, Bill Bryson takes us with him on the ultimate eye opening journey, and reveals the world in a way most of us have never seen it before. Scarce signed. Signed by Author(s).

Hardcover. Condition: Fine. Dust Jacket Condition: Fine. 1st Edition. First edition, first impression (Doubleday, 2003). Signed and inscribed by the author to the title page. Publisher's original black cloth with lettering to spine in gilt and pictorial endpapers and paste-downs. A fine copy, with mild toning to edges, in a fine dust jacket. Rare inscribed. Signed by Author(s).