An industrious journalist and editor of periodicals, Peter Lund Simmonds (1814 97) wrote across a range of subjects, including natural history and applied science. An active member of the Royal Society of Arts, he first published this dictionary in 1858. Reissued here in its revised and enlarged edition of 1867, it contains more than 22,000 entries. The curious can discover within that a calcar is a furnace in a glassworks, or that the best kind of Cuban tobacco is known as calidad. Readers will also learn that the hautboy can be either eaten or played, being the name for both a wild strawberry and a form of oboe. Testifying to the proliferation of manufactured goods in the nineteenth century, and the contemporary desire to diffuse 'sound and useful knowledge among the masses', this work will appeal to readers interested in the history and lexicon of trade and technology."

In May 1845, the famous Arctic explorer John Franklin (1786-1847) embarked on another attempt to find the elusive North-West Passage. He never returned from this voyage, and was last seen by whalers in Baffin Bay in July 1845. Some thirty rescue missions were launched between 1847 and 1859 to find the missing men. Franklin was not the first explorer to make the dangerous voyage to find the route connecting the Atlantic and Pacific, and journalist Peter Lund Simmonds (1814-97) draws from a wide range of reports and publications about these expeditions in his history of the search for the North-West Passage, published in 1851. The detailed account also includes descriptions of the many missions to find Franklin, and this second edition was published later in the same year as the first in order to include updated reports on the progress of his rescue.