Miscellaneous

Liberator Black Label – any
Le Corbusier LC4 chaise longue in white leather
iPod earbud earphones
Bose noise cancelling earphones (second hand is acceptable)
iPod Nano or Mac compatible MP3 player, 8 Gb
animal skulls
black silk socks, size 6
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Books

any single volume Shakespeare plays (ideally not the Arden editions)
any Greek tragedy
The Spread of London’s Underground by Tim Demuth
The Ten Commandments of Typography/Type Heresy: Breaking the Ten Commandments of Typography by Paul Felton
The Art of Looking Sideways by Alan Fletcher
Tony Harrison, poetry or plays
Mr. Beck’s Underground Map by Ken Garland
Spend Your Alphabets Lavishly! by Jerry Kelly and David Pankow
Christopher Logue’s adaptation of Homer
The Thames & Hudson Manual of Typography by Rauri McLean
Underground Maps After Beck by Maxwell J. Roberts
London Underground: Diagrammatic History by Douglas Rose
Getting it Right with Type: The Do’s and Don’ts of Typography by Victoria Squire
Derek Walcott, poetry

Ideally, spend your money at an independent local bookshop. Amazon, together with its subsidiary abebooks, overwhelmingly dominate the online market, as do chains on the high street. If you can’t buy locally, alternatives are
bookshop.blackwell.co.uk/ (Family owned since 1879, still rooted in the academic tradition of its initial Oxford location with university-based outlets across the country; 5000 titles can be printed on demand from the Espresso Book Machine at 100 Charing Cross Road).
www.foyles.co.uk (Established by failed civil servants in the Charing Cross Road in 1903 – possibly the only bookshop in the world that also has a piranha tank – with branches in the Royal Festival Hall and St Pancras International)
www.housmans.com (Small and principled, who can do things the old fashioned way at their real, physical, interact with human beings bookshop near Kings Cross 5 Caledonian Road London N1 9DX t: 020 7837 4473)
or the purely virtual clearing house for new and used books, music, and film www.alibris.co.uk

I like books that are (good condition) secondhand possibly more than new.
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DVDs – TV

Battlestar Galactica, Buffy, Dexter, The Sopranos, State of Play, 24, The Wire
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DVDs – Shakespeare

Any and all the BBC Shakespeare adaptations; Branagh’s Hamlet, Love’s Labour’s Lost, and Much Ado About Nothing; Peter Brook’s King Lear; Philip Casson’s MacBeth (1978, with Judi Dench and Ian McKellen); George Cukor’s Romeo and Juliet; Konsintsev’s Hamlet and King Lear; Trevor Nunn’s Twelfth Night (1996, with Helena Bonham Carter and Richard E. Grant); Olivier’s Hamlet , Henry V and Richard III; Al Pacino’s Looking for Richard; Oliver Parker’s Othello (1995, with Kenneth Branagh, Laurence Fishburne and Irene Jacob), Michael Radford’s The Merchant of Venice (2004, with Jeremy Irons and Al Pacino) Orson Welles’ MacBeth and Othello
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DVDs – movies

Bergman: After The Rehearsal, All These Women, Autumn Sonata, Cries And Whispers, Crisis, Dreams, Farodokument 79, From The Life Of The Marionettes, A Lesson In Love, The Magician, Music In Darkness, Persona, Port Of Call, Prison, The Rite, Saraband, Scenes From A Marriage, The Seventh Seal, The Silence, Smiles Of A Summer Night, Summer Interlude, Summer With Monika, Three Strange loves, Through A Glass Darkly, Torment, To Joy, The Virgin Spring, Waiting Women, Wild Strawberries, Winter Light

Eisenstein: Alexander Nevsky, Battleship Potemkin, Ivan the Terrible, October, Strike

Kurosawa: Dersu Uzala, Dreams, The Hidden Fortress, High and Low, Ikiru, Kagemusha, Ran, Rashomon, Red Beard, Rhapsody in August, Seven Samurai, Stray Dog, The Bad Sleep Well, Throne of Blood, Yojimbo

Ringo Lam: City on Fire, Prison on Fire, Full Contact

Lau Kar Leung: Executioners from Shaolin, The 36th Chamber of Shaolin, Legendary Weapons of China

Tsui Hark: as director or producer; Hong Kong, not Hollywood, productions

John Woo: as director; Hong Kong, not Hollywood, productions

40s Hollywood: almost any film noir, Alan Ladd, Bogart (mega bonus points for the 1945 pre-release version of The Big Sleep), Veronica Lake, Nick & Nora Charles (The Thin Man series)
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DVDs – smut

pretty much anything listed at www.blowfish.com (though not necessarily bought there)
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Food & drink

good red wine (European, not New World)
mead
whisky – I’m happy with blended Scotch, but if you have a preferred single malt (or a taste for bourbon or Irish whiskey), I’m happy to see if our tastes coincide. I’d also be interested to try Japanese whisky. Bonus points for organic.
vodka – again, I’m no afficionado, happy with Smirnoff as a mixer, but remember with yearning the vodkas I drank neat and ice, ice cold in Kiev – a gift of your favourite to try or
Utkins UK5 Organic (www.vinceremos.co.uk and a range of other suppliers) will be warmly received and put straight in the freezer.
Seggiano Raw Basil Pesto – try it for yourself, too!
good quality olive oil – cold pressed, extra virgin (taste the irony), French, Greek, Italian or Spanish
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More personal

an interesting story or anecdote: a time in your life of strong emotion, an unusual experience, something that made you really happy, a moment that changed your life
a postcard of a place or a work of art that means a lot to you
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