Palazzo Editions to Launch New Titles

In recognition of Bob Dylan's seventieth birthday next May and the fiftieth anniversary of his signing with Columbia Records the following autumn, Colin Webb at Palazzo Editions is unveiling a new edition of No Direction Home: The Life and Music of Bob Dylan, the long-awaited reissue of the acclaimed biography by Robert Shelton. Hailed as the definitive biography, it is the only one written with the subject's active cooperation - Shelton was the New York Times journalist whose 1961 review launched Dylan's career, and the two men remained friends.

The book is being revised by edited by Elizabeth Thomson and Patrick Humphries, friends and proteges of Shelton, who died in London in 1995. The new edition will include much previously unpublished material and is designed by the celebrated David Costa. The same team are also working on The Ghost of Electricity, formatted as 12 x 12 album-sized book which will revisit the classic 1960s albums that laid the foundation stones of Dylan's extraordinary achievement in an extraordinary decade.

Thomson is best known in the trade as Liz Thomson, founding editor of BookBrunch and former editor of Publishing News, but she is also the author of Conclusions on the Wall: New Essays on Bob Dylan and, with David Gutman, the Companion series of critical anthologies on John Lennon, Bob Dylan and David Bowie. Originally published in the 1980s and '90s by Macmillan, they remain in print with Da Capo.

Said Webb, who is showing early pages from the projects: "The jungle drums started at Bologna as I mentioned Dylan casually, and we have a full agenda with publishers clamouring to see the first presentation at the London Book Fair - volcano permitting."

Webb is also showing Mick Rock: Exposed, to which Chronicle has WEL rights. The definitive retrospective of the foremost rock photographer of his generation, the collection has a foreword by Tom Stoppard and exposes Rock's portfolio from Bowie, Iggy and Lou to Kate Moss, Lady Gaga.

Away from rock 'n' roll, there's also the La Famiglia Cookbook, the lifetime collection of Tuscan recipes by Alvaro Maccioni, and The Children of Dickens illustrated by Robert Ingpen, which celebrates many of the author's best loved children's characters. Scheduled for the bicentenary of Dickens's birth in 2012, royalties will go to the Great Ormond Street Hospital, of which Dickens was a founding patron. And to coincide with the bicentenary of first publication, The Bath Bicentenary Editions of Jane Austen will launch with Sense and Sensibility.

- By Elizabeth Thomson