Publishers of books on social history and film studies Chaplin Books is a new independent publishing house launched in 2010, specialising in books on social history and film studies. You can buy our titles direct from this website or order them from any UK bookshop or internet retailer. We are always looking to expand our lists, and welcome approaches from authors. New titles for 2012 include Interviews with Eric Rohmer edited by Bert Cardullo (February), Dear Miss Landau by James Christie (March) and Hair - A Social History by Patricia Malcolmson (October). In addition to its mainstream publishing business, Chaplin Books also offers a fully managed, bespoke publishing service for businesses or organisations who want to produce short-print-run books for a specific target market, such as customers or members. Current projects include Toothie, a history of the Royal Naval Dentistry Service, and Thank You for the Music, a profile of the Voxpop choir.

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Dear Miss Landau...

Every morning James Christie puts on a blue rugby shirt and jeans. His wardrobe is full of identical outfits. Every day he eats the same meal and drinks from the same mug. These are not ingrained habits, but survival strategies. For James, coping with new experiences feels like smashing his head through a plate glass window. The only relief comes from belting the heavy bag at the boxing club or watching Buffy the Vampire Slayer. He’s an autistic man lost in a neuro-typical world. Differently wired. Alien. Despite a high IQ, it seems he’ll spend the next 20 years cleaning toilets. But then his life takes an amazing turn – from a Glasgow tenement to a rendezvous with a Hollywood star on Sunset Boulevard. On that road trip across America, the man who feels he lacks a soul will find it. Eight time zones and 5,000 miles away, he has a date with the actress who played Drusilla, the kooky vampire who changed his life when he saw her in a Buffy episode. Drusilla has no soul either. And maybe that’s the attraction. But Drusilla is fictional. The lady he’ll see on Sunset is Juliet Landau. She’s real, and that’s a very different proposition...

Illustrated paperback, 234 pages, £8.99
ISBN 978-0-9565595-6-2

This book will be published on March 14 2012

Interviews with Eric Rohmer

In a career that spanned six decades, Eric Rohmer (1920-2010) earned a reputation as one of France’s most incisive, eloquent, and free-spirited film directors. A leading light of the French New Wave, he crafted films of immense beauty and poetry: throughout his career, his work demonstrated a consistency of style and theme, yet retained a freshness and youthful vigour. Rohmer’s own words, preserved in these interviews which span the years 1970 to 2009, and which are drawn from a wide range of international media (including Cahiers du cinéma, Sight and Sound, Village Voice and Film Comment) reveal a critical, reflective sensibility that thoroughly complements the authorial one visualised in his films. Interviews with Eric Rohmer includes a critical introduction, filmography, chronology and comprehensive bibliography, and is illustrated with 57 black and white, and 18 colour, stills from the films.

Illustrated paperback, 264 pages, £14.99
ISBN 978-0-9565595-5-5

This book will be published on February 23 2012

Elbow Grease

Show any woman born before 1939 a dead rabbit, a basket of plums and a pail of dandelions and she will probably know exactly what to do with them to produce a decent meal, a pan of stock, a bottle of polish and a glass of wine. Elbow Grease uncovers the vast range of housekeeping skills with which our grandmothers and great-grandmothers were familiar. A world in which women scrubbed the front step......blacked the range......did the mangling......spat on the iron to test its temperature..... cleaned their saucepans out with sand......washed their clothes in petrol.......and made their own soap. With fascinating illustrations from old household advice manuals, this is the perfect book for those who remember how it was - or for those who have only known an era of spray-polish, automatic washing machines and 24-hour supermarkets

Illustrated paperback, 160 pages, £9.99
ISBN 978-0-9565595-3-1

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The Smile on the Face of the Pig

Murder, lurid courtroom dramas, gypsy horse fairs, eccentric admirals, child brides, and falling in love - it's all in a day's work for cub reporter John Bull. Meet a cast of characters - from the parish clerk who dresses like a French resistance fighter, complete with rifle over her shoulder, to the medium whose spirit guide (her soldier boyfriend killed in World War II) gets in touch by pinging her suspender belt. The Smile on the Face of the Pig is a cheeky exposé of life in the 1950s: crazy nights at the theatre with the old-time music-hall stars, skinny-dipping by starlight, drinking with the freebooting river-folk, and riding through the freezing night on a BSA motorbike chasing the Big Scoop that will carry him to Fleet Street, fame and fortune....

Illustrated paperback, 164 pages, £8.99
ISBN 978-0-9565595-4-8

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The Future Revisited: Jules Verne on Screen in 1950s America

THE FUTURE REVISITED offers a fresh perspective on film history, French literature, science fiction and America in the 1950s. It is a fascinating and authoritative account of how the stories of Jules Verne found particular resonance with US filmmakers in the 1950s. Françoise Schiltz looks at four of the most popular films - Around the World in 80 Days, 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, Journey to the Center of the Earth and Mysterious Island - and argues that there were many parallels between Verne’s technological adventures and postwar America, with its themeparks, shopping malls, Levittowns and plethora of consumer goods. Just as nineteenth-century readers of Verne’s books could experience travel from the comfort of their seats, viewers of these films could be swept away on an imaginary flight, a voyage in a submarine, or a trek to the earth’s core, all in spectacular widescreen and with ground-breaking special effects. Yet the pleasures offered were ambivalent: encounters with exotic places and cultures might have led the audience to question common assumptions such as gender roles; seeing futuristic domestic spaces could highlight the confusion of attitudes to private and public life in suburbia, and the films’ blending of nostalgia and progress might draw attention to society’s tug-of-war between innovation and conformity.

Illustrated paperback, 232 pages. £14.99
ISBN 9780956559524

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Danny Boyle Lust for Life

Danny Boyle is one of contemporary filmmaking's most exciting talents. Since the early 1990s he has steadily created a body of work that defies easy categorisation, from black humour (Shallow Grave), gritty realism (Trainspotting), screwball comedy (A Life Less Ordinary), cult adaptations (The Beach ), and horror (28 Days Later), to science fiction (Sunshine), children's drama (Millions), love stories (Slumdog Millionaire) and tales of personal redemption (127 Hours). Boyle's restless energy, vitality and drive find their expression in the celebratory tone of his films - their lust for life. In this book, Mark Browning analyses Boyle's work, discussing the processes by which he absorbs generic and literary influences, the way he gains powerful performances both from inexperienced casts and A-list stars, his portrayal of regional identity, his use of moral dilemmas as a narrative trigger, and the religious undercurrents that permeate his films.

Paperback, 200 pages. £12.99
ISBN 9780956559517

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The Night They Blitzed The Ritz

This is the Blitz story from a fresh new perspective - through the eyes of a small boy and his gang of streetwise Bomb Alley Kids. It was the worst of times for adults, thrust into the front line of the war by relentless night-bombing, with nowhere to run and nowhere to hide. It was maybe the best of times for children, with every bombsite, aeroplane and wailing siren holding a promise of pleasurable terror. In this personal memoir, John Bull - a former News of the World columnist - perfectly captures the tragicomic, often farcical, events of everyday survival and the tribal stubbornness that stopped the Brits from 'chucking it in'.

Paperback, 128 pages, with 20 black and white photographs. £8.99
ISBN 9780956559500

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The Wonder of Woolies

Do you remember Melba chocolate, spud guns, Embassy records, pick 'n' mix, broken biscuits, Homemaker china, Californian Poppy perfume, and Ladybird children’s clothes? Then you will love the book that brings these, and many other memories, flooding back. The Wonder of Woolies is a celebration of that great British store - Woolworth's - in the words of people who worked and shopped there. In addition to memories from every corner of Britain, the book describes the rise of the '3d and 6d store' king, Frank Winfield Woolworth, and some of the dramatic events that marked Woolworth's history, such as the tragic fire at the Manchester store in 1979 and the bombing of the Deptford store in 1944.

Paperback, 200 pages, with 50 black and white and 20 colour photographs. £8.99
ISBN 9780955333453

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England’s Secret Weapon

This authoritative study examines the way Hollywood used Sherlock Holmes in a series of fourteen films that spanned the years of World War II in Europe, from The Hound of the Baskervilles in 1939 to Dressed to Kill in 1946. Basil Rathbone’s portrayal of Holmes has influenced every actor who has subsequently played this popular character on film, TV, stage and radio, yet the film series has, until now, been neglected in terms of detailed critical analysis. Though the first two films were set in the detective’s ‘true’ Victorian period, Holmes was then ‘updated’ and recruited to fight the Nazis. The book looks at the way the studio steered a careful course between modernising the detective and making sure he was still recognisable as the ‘old Holmes’. It combines academic rigor with an approachable style, and draws on many previously unseen archive documents.

Paperback, 264 pages with 50 black and white photographs, originally published by Middlesex University Press. £10
ISBN 978-1-9047507-1-0

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