With ten mini editions inside, this collection is the perfect gift for any preschooler who loves machines. From airplanes to rockets to tractors, these critically acclaimed picture books are full of fun rhyming text, bright artwork, and wacky animal characters that will engage and delight young children as they learn about machines. Each book includes a helpful illustrated glossary of technical words to help build vocabulary.

    

    Hiding his teddy bear in the guitar is a comforting idea until George discovers that someone has hidden stolen jewels in the stuffing of the beloved bear. First published in 1967.

    Born into an eccentric Ohio clan of modern hunter-gatherers, he grew up hearing voices in his head. Over a dizzying two decades, he was many things—teenage faith healer, world traveler, smuggler, liberation theologian, ladder-maker, squatter, halibut hanger, grifter, environmental warrior, and circus manager—all the while wrestling with schizophrenia and self-medication. From Baby Doc’s Haiti to the Czech Velvet Revolution, and from sex, drugs, and a stabbing to public humiliation by the leader of the free world, Monroe-Kane burns through his twenties and several bridges of youthful idealism before finally saying: enough. In a memoir that blends engaging charm with unflinching frankness, Monroe-Kane gives his testimony of mental illness, drug abuse, faith, and love. By the end of Lithium Jesus there may be a voice in your head, too, saying “Do more, be more, live more. And fear less.”

    Many of the most highly regarded citizens leaped from windows or jumped into the Rhone, screaming that their heads were made of copper, their bodies wrapped in snakes, their limbs swollen to gigantic size or shrunken to tiny appendages. Others ran through the streets, claiming to be chased by "bandits with donkey ears", by tigers, lions & other terrifying apparitions. Animals went berserk. Dogs ripped bark from trees until their teeth fell out. Cats dragged themselves along the floor in grotesque contortions. Ducks strutted like penguins. Villagers & animals died right & left. Bit by bit, the story behind the tragedy in Pont-St-Esprit--a tiny Provencial village of twisted streets that looks much today as it did in the Middle Ages--unfolded to doctors & toxcologists. That story, one of the most bizarre in modern medical history, is movingly recounted in The Day of St. Anthony's Fire. Throughout the Middle Ages & during other times in history, similar hallucinatory outbreaks occurred. They were called St. Anthony's Fire because it was believed that only prayers to the saint could hold the disease in check. Even modern medicine could find no way to check the disease. Drugs failed to bring even temporary relief. Hundreds in the village suffered for weeks, with total agonizing insomnia, never knowing when they might once more suddenly go berserk. The cause of St. Anthony's Fire was known since early history to be ergot, a mold found on rye grain that at rare times inexplicably became posionous enough to create monstrous hallucinations & death. In '51 little significance was attached to the fact that the base of ergot was lysergic acid, also the base for LSD, a drug just coming to the attention of scientists at the time--a drug so powerful that one eye-dropperful could cause as many as 5000 people to hallucinate for hours. At this point, the story becomes a vividly absorbing medical detective story demonstrating the possibility that a strange, spontaneous form of LSD might have caused the human tragedy that came to the hapless villagers of Pont-St-Esprit.

    DickIn late January 2006, a young robotocist on the way to Google headquarters lost an overnight bag on a flight somewhere between Dallas and Las Vegas. In it was a fully functional head of the android replica of Philip K. Dick, cult science-fiction writer and counterculture guru. It has never been recovered.In a story that echoes some of the most paranoid fantasies of a Dick novel, readers get a fascinating inside look at the scientists and technology that made this amazing android possible. The author, who was a fellow researcher at the University of Memphis Institute of Intelligent Systems while the android was being built, introduces readers to the cutting-edge technology in robotics, artificial intelligence, and sculpture that came together in this remarkable machine and captured the imagination of scientists, artists, and science-fiction fans alike. And there are great stories about Dick himself his inspired yet deeply pessimistic worldview, his bizarre lifestyle, and his enduring creative legacy. In the tradition of popular science classics like "Packing for Mars" and "The Disappearing Spoon," "How to Build an Android" is entertaining and informative popular science at its best."

    Or just weirder. Misty Gordon, whose antique-dealing parents drive a van that says “D.E.A.D.” on the side (for “Deceased’s Estate and Antique Dealer”), is accustomed to weird.One day, when accompanying her father to the estate of a recently departed clairvoyant, Misty discovers a notebook and a pair of eyeglasses that enable her to see ghosts! And solve mysteries. With the help of her new powers and her best friend, Yoshi, Misty learns that her hometown was settled not by respectable colonists but by pirates! And the ghosts of the pirates are returning to reclaim a dangerous, powerful treasure they lost centuries ago. Who will find it first, Misty or the pirates?

    With Brian Blomerth’s Bicycle Day, the artist has produced his most ambitious work to date: a historical account of the events of April 19, 1943, when Swiss chemist Albert Hofmann ingested an experimental dose of a new compound known as lysergic acid diethylamide and embarked on the world’s first acid trip. Featuring an introduction from renowned ethnopharmacologist, Dennis McKenna, Brian Blomerth’s Bicycle Day combines an extraordinary true story told in journalistic detail with the artist’s gritty, timelessly Technicolor comix style that is a testament to mind expansion, and a stunningly original visual history.

    

    

    These are the pictures of the dead: family portraits, mementos of the treasured, now unrecognizable, and others. The roots of Halloween lie in the ancient pre-Christian Celtic festival of Samhain, a feast to mark the death of the old year and the birth of the new. It was believed that on this night the veil separating the worlds of the living and the dead grew thin and ruptured, allowing spirits to pass through and walk unseen but not unheard amongst men. The advent of Christianity saw the pagan festival subsumed in All Souls' Day, when across Europe the dead were mourned and venerated. Children and the poor, often masked or in outlandish costume, wandered the night begging "soul cakes" in exchange for prayers, and fires burned to keep malevolent phantoms at bay. From Europe, the haunted tradition would quickly take root and flourish in the fertile soil of the New World. Feeding hungrily on fresh lore, consuming half-remembered tales of its own shadowy origins and rituals, Halloween was reborn in America. The pumpkin supplanted the carved turnip; costumes grew ever stranger, and celebrants both rural and urban seized gleefully on the festival's intoxicating, lawless spirit. For one wild night, the dead stared into the faces of the living, and the living, ghoulishly masked and clad in tattered backwoods baroque, stared back.

    But duckling has never seen an egg before. Could there really be a baby duck inside? And could it be that he started that way too? As the days pass, Duckling learns a lot about eggs and birth - and just what all the quacking's about! Age 2+.

    The chapters are: "Striped Shirts and Busted Hearts" (new)"Mountain Man""Meet Cap'n Kidd" (new)"Guns of the Mountains""A Gent from Bear Creek""The Feud Buster""The Road to Bear Creek""The Scalp Hunter""Cupid from Bear Creek""The Haunted Mountain""Educate or Bust" (new)"War on Bear Creek""When Bear Creek Came to Chawed Ear" (new).

    It is the autumn of 1945 and identical twins Joy and Gillian Lawrence are on their way home to Liverpool, having been evacuated to Devonshire five years earlier.Their mother has been killed in the blitz but the girls hope that with their beloved father's help they will be able to manage without assistance.All goes well until there is a terrible accident and Joy loses her sight.At first she is bitter and resentful whilst Gillian is racked with guilt.However, as time passes Joy gains confidence, hopeful that her sight will return since life is not easy when you can't see the face of the boy you think you love.Then there is a chance meeting on a train and once more the girls lives are in turmoil...

    This paperback boxed set includes the four adventures in the New York Times bestselling series: The Mysterious Benedict Society, The Mysterious Benedict Society and the Perilous Journey, The Mysterious Benedict Society and the Prisoner's Dilemma, and The Extraordinary Education of Nicholas Benedict.Filled with page-turning action and mind-bending brain teasers, these wildly inventive journeys are sure to delight.