Humphrey Jennings

Pandaemonium

£110

Gathering hundreds of voices, Pandaemonium is Humphrey Jennings's eyewitness account of the rise of the machine age – a superb, illustrated Folio Society edition of the book that inspired the London Olympics Opening Ceremony.

Pandaemonium

£110
Book Details
 
Presentation Box & BindingBound in cloth blocked with a design by Jamie Keenan
Printed slipcase
Printed endpapers
Ribbon marker
Dimensions10 inches x 6 ¾ inches 
FontSet in Adobe Caslon Pro
Pages624 pages
AuthorHumphrey Jennings
IllustrationOver 100 integrated colour and black & white illustrations
Publication Date07/05/2024
Editor's Notes
 
Opening with an excerpt from Milton’s Paradise Lost – the founding of Pandaemonium, the capital city of Hell – this is a social history unlike any other. Humphrey Jennings collects more than 370 texts, written between 1660 and 1886, to create a vivid ‘imaginative history’ of the Industrial Revolution. With a master film-maker’s eye, he cuts together poems and literary works, letters and diaries, scientific journals and eyewitness reports into a sweeping, cinematic narrative of the machine age. Jennings's vision weaves together the thrill of technological progress and its dehumanising consequences, from the development of steam traction and Darwin’s evolutionary insights to child labour in a Derbyshire silk mill and the excitement of a balloon flight over London.

Pandaemonium gained fresh prominence in 2012 as the inspiration behind Danny Boyle’s astonishing Opening Ceremony for the London Olympics. Handsomely bound, the Folio Society edition contains more than 120 black & white and colour illustrations, selected by cultural historian Sir Christopher Frayling, who contributes the introduction. Today, as artificial intelligence promises – and threatens – a new technological revolution, Pandaemonium stands not only as a singular artistic achievement but a book of great prescience and relevance.

ABOUT THE ILLUSTRATIONS

A UNIQUE IMAGINATIVE VISION

Pandaemonium was a labour of love for Humphrey Jennings, a pioneering documentary film-maker described by his contemporary Lindsay Anderson as ‘the only real poet that British cinema has yet produced’. For more than a decade before his untimely death in 1950, he collected the excerpts (or in his word, ‘images’) intended for the book. His notebooks were edited by his daughter, Mary-Lou Jennings, and sociologist friend Charles Madge, who published Pandaemonium to great acclaim in 1985.

For this superlative Folio Society edition, the original 28 illustrations have been vastly expanded to over 100 images. All were chosen by Sir Christopher Frayling, one of Britain’s most eminent historians of film and popular culture. As he explains in his new introduction, only pictures available during Jennings’s lifetime have been used, from famous artworks by William Blake, J. M. W. Turner and Ford Madox Brown to ephemera, book covers, newspaper engravings, satirical prints, scientific diagrams and early photographs. The Folio edition retains the original prefaces from the author and his editors, making for the most complete and faithful realisation of Humphrey Jennings’s vision ever to appear in print.

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ABOUT THE ILLUSTRATIONS

A UNIQUE IMAGINATIVE VISION

Pandaemonium was a labour of love for Humphrey Jennings, a pioneering documentary film-maker described by his contemporary Lindsay Anderson as ‘the only real poet that British cinema has yet produced’. For more than a decade before his untimely death in 1950, he collected the excerpts (or in his word, ‘images’) intended for the book. His notebooks were edited by his daughter, Mary-Lou Jennings, and sociologist friend Charles Madge, who published Pandaemonium to great acclaim in 1985.

For this superlative Folio Society edition, the original 28 illustrations have been vastly expanded to over 100 images. All were chosen by Sir Christopher Frayling, one of Britain’s most eminent historians of film and popular culture. As he explains in his new introduction, only pictures available during Jennings’s lifetime have been used, from famous artworks by William Blake, J. M. W. Turner and Ford Madox Brown to ephemera, book covers, newspaper engravings, satirical prints, scientific diagrams and early photographs. The Folio edition retains the original prefaces from the author and his editors, making for the most complete and faithful realisation of Humphrey Jennings’s vision ever to appear in print.

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ABOUT THE ILLUSTRATIONS

A UNIQUE IMAGINATIVE VISION

Pandaemonium was a labour of love for Humphrey Jennings, a pioneering documentary film-maker described by his contemporary Lindsay Anderson as ‘the only real poet that British cinema has yet produced’. For more than a decade before his untimely death in 1950, he collected the excerpts (or in his word, ‘images’) intended for the book. His notebooks were edited by his daughter, Mary-Lou Jennings, and sociologist friend Charles Madge, who published Pandaemonium to great acclaim in 1985.

For this superlative Folio Society edition, the original 28 illustrations have been vastly expanded to over 100 images. All were chosen by Sir Christopher Frayling, one of Britain’s most eminent historians of film and popular culture. As he explains in his new introduction, only pictures available during Jennings’s lifetime have been used, from famous artworks by William Blake, J. M. W. Turner and Ford Madox Brown to ephemera, book covers, newspaper engravings, satirical prints, scientific diagrams and early photographs. The Folio edition retains the original prefaces from the author and his editors, making for the most complete and faithful realisation of Humphrey Jennings’s vision ever to appear in print.

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ABOUT THE ILLUSTRATIONS

A UNIQUE IMAGINATIVE VISION

Pandaemonium was a labour of love for Humphrey Jennings, a pioneering documentary film-maker described by his contemporary Lindsay Anderson as ‘the only real poet that British cinema has yet produced’. For more than a decade before his untimely death in 1950, he collected the excerpts (or in his word, ‘images’) intended for the book. His notebooks were edited by his daughter, Mary-Lou Jennings, and sociologist friend Charles Madge, who published Pandaemonium to great acclaim in 1985.

For this superlative Folio Society edition, the original 28 illustrations have been vastly expanded to over 100 images. All were chosen by Sir Christopher Frayling, one of Britain’s most eminent historians of film and popular culture. As he explains in his new introduction, only pictures available during Jennings’s lifetime have been used, from famous artworks by William Blake, J. M. W. Turner and Ford Madox Brown to ephemera, book covers, newspaper engravings, satirical prints, scientific diagrams and early photographs. The Folio edition retains the original prefaces from the author and his editors, making for the most complete and faithful realisation of Humphrey Jennings’s vision ever to appear in print.

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ABOUT THE ILLUSTRATIONS

A UNIQUE IMAGINATIVE VISION

Pandaemonium was a labour of love for Humphrey Jennings, a pioneering documentary film-maker described by his contemporary Lindsay Anderson as ‘the only real poet that British cinema has yet produced’. For more than a decade before his untimely death in 1950, he collected the excerpts (or in his word, ‘images’) intended for the book. His notebooks were edited by his daughter, Mary-Lou Jennings, and sociologist friend Charles Madge, who published Pandaemonium to great acclaim in 1985.

For this superlative Folio Society edition, the original 28 illustrations have been vastly expanded to over 100 images. All were chosen by Sir Christopher Frayling, one of Britain’s most eminent historians of film and popular culture. As he explains in his new introduction, only pictures available during Jennings’s lifetime have been used, from famous artworks by William Blake, J. M. W. Turner and Ford Madox Brown to ephemera, book covers, newspaper engravings, satirical prints, scientific diagrams and early photographs. The Folio edition retains the original prefaces from the author and his editors, making for the most complete and faithful realisation of Humphrey Jennings’s vision ever to appear in print.

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About the Author

Humphrey Jennings (1907–1950) was one of the great British film-makers of the 20th century, best remembered for propaganda films made for the Ministry of Information during the Second World War: works such as Listen to Britain, London Can Take It! and Fires Were Started are deeply patriotic but often experimental in technique and are still seen as classics of documentary film. Jennings was also one of the founders of the extraordinary Mass Observation project, which recorded everyday British life through the writings of hundreds of volunteer diarists, and helped to organise the landmark International Surrealist Exhibition in London in 1936. Earlier, having decided not to pursue his expected path as an academic in English literature, Jennings had also worked as a stage designer, painter and photographer. He was born in Suffolk and educated at Cambridge. He died, aged forty-three, in an accident while scouting film locations in Greece.