Blackwell's is delighted to be welcoming legendary Randall Munroe to our bookshop for a lunchtime signing of the paperback of his much-celebrated 'Thing Explainer'.

From the No. 1 bestselling author of What If? - the man who created xkcd and explained the laws of science with cartoons - comes a series of brilliantly simple diagrams ('blueprints' if you want to be complicated about it) that show how important things work: from the nuclear bomb to the biro.

In Thing Explainer Randall Munroe explains things using only drawings and a vocabulary of just our 1,000 (or the ten hundred) most common words.

Many of the things we use every day - like our food-heating radio boxes ('microwaves'), our very tall roads ('bridges'), and our computer rooms ('datacentres') - are strange to us. So are the other worlds around our sun (the solar system), the big flat rocks we live on (tectonic plates), and even the stuff inside us (cells). Where do these things come from? How do they work? What do they look like if you open them up? And what would happen if we heated them up, cooled them down, pointed them in a different direction, or pressed this button?

In Thing Explainer, Munroe gives us the answers to these questions and many, many more. Funny, interesting, and always understandable, this book is for anyone -- age 5 to 105 -- who has ever wondered how things work, and why.

PLEASE NOTE:

Tickets for this exclusive event are free but limited.

Everyone who attends needs a ticket.

Any single individual can book a maximum of two tickets.

To attend this event your copy of the book must be purchased from our shop.

Once spaces have gone, there will not be a waiting list. However, if you would like to turn up on the day to see whether space has become available, you may do so, but Blackwell's cannot guarantee you will gain entrance to the signing.

We hope you can join us for this truly exciting event!