Marginalian Editions presents a trailblazing Quaker scientist's slender masterwork of moral courage, penned at the height of the Cold War, envisioning a transformation of the human spirit and our politics that might enable the triumph of peace.

Kathleen Lonsdale was a groundbreaking chemist who was instrumental in developing the science of crystallography. She was also a midlife convert to Quakerism who campaigned for peace and prison reform. Horrified by the dropping of the first atomic bombs, Lonsdale felt that the entire scientific community was now tainted by the violence it had enabled. Published in 1957, Is Peace Possible? was her attempt to make amends for this communal guilt by demonstrating that science can bring peace as well as war, and can address the big questions generally left to the humanities.

In crystalline language and logic honed from a lifetime of relying on the sharpness of her mind to cut through barriers of class and gender, and refusing to be bullied by received wisdom about war's inevitability, Kathleen Lonsdale's Is Peace Possible? is a work of quiet, elegant sanity. It is a snapshot of a particular moment in history, but its themes are eternally relevant, and perhaps even more necessary now than when it was written.

Marginalian Editions presents a groundbreaking poet's biography of the forgotten scientist who founded physical chemistry, shaping much of the 20th century--and an ingenious, expansive treatise on American creativity, character, and remembrance.

Josiah Willard Gibbs (1839-1903) was an American visionary whose work shaped a century of science by bridging classical mechanics and quantum physics. A kindly and shy bachelor who lectured at Yale in relative obscurity for more than thirty years, he single-handedly created the field of physical chemistry without ever completing a single experiment. Gibbs's visionary work enabled future scientists to predict what states a substance can assume and under what conditions--the implications for industry, agriculture, and warfare were vast. Hailed by Einstein as the greatest mind in American history, Gibbs remained essentially unknown.

To acclaimed poet Muriel Rukeyser, Gibbs lived closer than any inventor, any poet, any scientific worker in pure imagination to the life of the inventive and organizing spirit in America. Rukeyser's thoroughly researched and lyrical tribute to Gibbs is much more than a biography: it is an alchemical compound of philosophy, history, ethics, and literature writ large. It is the story of a country, a century, a global epoch of scientific creativity that would color every realm of human imagination and aspiration, from poetry to politics.

From Marginalian Editions: a far-seeing essay collection by the iconoclastic historian Jane Ellen Harrison--heroine to generations of writers from Virginia Woolf to Mary Beard--that explores the invisible tendrils between science and the sacred, the psychology of bias, the fulcrum of progress, and the countercultural courage of changing our minds in light of new understanding.

Alpha and Omega is the culminating work of Jane Ellen Harrison, the maverick Cambridge classicist who reshaped our understanding of ancient Greek culture and pioneered a radical vision of faith, imagination, and progress. Declaring herself a deeply religious atheist, Harrison rejected the confines of dogma to explore faith as the human capacity to transcend the known and imagine the possible. This collection of essays--published at the dawn of World War I--unpacks the invisible connections between science and spirituality, individual belief and collective consciousness, and reason and love as forces for societal transformation. With wit and daring, Harrison dismantles the binaries that divide us--young and old, feminine and masculine, sacred and profane--revealing how these tensions, when reconciled, can catalyze change.

As Maria Popova writes in her introduction, Harrison's essays are an act of faith toward the future and an act of heresy toward the status quo, challenging us to rethink our biases, beliefs, and most deeply held assumptions. From the influence of Darwinism on religion to the psychology of conversion, from the evolution of gender roles to the ethics of pacifism, Alpha and Omega is a timeless guide to the imagination and courage required to live through an age of division and uncertainty.

A Marginalian Editions rediscovery: Goodnight Moon author Margaret Wise Brown's little-known, philosophical children's book about love and loss, lushly illustrated by Ofra Amit.

In 1950, when the love of her life fell mortally ill, Margaret Wise Brown turned to the solace of storytelling, writing a love letter in the form of a children's book. The Dark Wood of the Golden Birds brings us into a hushed and numinous world, illuminated with elegiac prose. The story begins:

It happened in the woods


a long time ago.


In the dark woods


where the golden birds


sang all through the night


and the day.

This magic forest grows behind the house of an old man with white hair and green eyes, who is never a year older or a day younger, and who keeps honeybees and grows asparagus for a living. No one who visits him dares to venture past the edge of the wood of the golden birds, believing it to be magic: the unknown from which there is no return. The old man himself never goes into the dark wood, but sometimes--at night, or early in the morning--he can hear laughter and singing, and the songs his mother sang to him long ago: the song of the golden birds.

One day, a brother and a sister whose parents have died wander to the old man's house, and he gives them a home. The children ask again and again about the magic forest, but the old man simply tells them that on the other side of the dark wood is the land that no one knows. When the old man falls ill, the boy decides to brave the wood in search of the birds, who he's convinced will heal him. What secret knowledge will he find there?

Written with her signature poetic prose that enchanted the world with Goodnight Moon and other stories, Margaret Wise Brown's The Dark Wood of the Golden Birds is a work of uncommon beauty and tenderness that lights a path through love and loss for readers of all ages.