Hardcover. Milwaukee OR, Dark Horse Books, 3rd pr., 1999, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, oblong pictorial boards, 88 pages in color. Writer-artist Frank Miller and colorist Lynn Varley retell the battle of Thermopylae in the exciting and moving graphic novel 300. They focus on King Leonidas, the young foot soldier Stelios, and the storyteller Dilios to highlight the Spartans' awe-inspiring toughness and valor. Miller and Varley's art is terrific, as always; the combat scenes are especially powerful.The armies of Persia--a vast horde greater than any the world has ever known--are poised to crush Greece, an island of reason and freedom in a sea of madness and tyranny. Standing between Greece and this tidal wave of destruction are a tiny detachment of but three hundred warriors. Frank Miller's epic retelling of history's supreme moment of battlefield valor is finally collected in its intended format--each two-page spread from the original comics is presented as a single undivided page. Clean copy.
Softcover. Los Angeles, Augustan Reprint Society, reprint, 1982, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 48 pages with a fold-out plan, 2 other b&w plates. A facsimile reproduction of the 1745 publication. Introduction by Morris R. Brownell. Clean copy.
Hardcover. NY, Knopf, 1st, 1969, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket. This collection of twenty-seven stories of Frank O'Connor, written between 1957 and his death in 1966, presents us with a stifling petitbourgeois society which seems deliberately organized to starve the mind and the emotions. Young people, crippled by poverty and sexual timidity, wait for their parents to die in order to marry; illegitimate children dream and mourn over families they never know; middle-aged bachelors nest with their mothers; priests live and die in terrible loneliness. Through all the stories runs the ubiquitous influence of the Church--like drink, a curse of the Irish. And yet somehow, this depressing material is turned in O'Connor's stories to charm. Clean copy.
Softcover. Los Angeles, Augustan Reprint Society, reprint, 1984, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 96 pages. Introduction by David R. Anderson before a facsimile reprint of the 1728 printing. Clean copy.
Hardcover. NY, G.P. Putnam's Sons, 1st, 1959, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket with minor wear. 532 pages. An essential guide to the life and work of one of America's most controversial writers, Advertisements for Myself is a comprehensive collection of the best of Norman Mailer's essays, stories, interviews and journalism from the Forties and Fifties, linked by anarchic and riotous autobiographical commentary. Laying bare the heart of a witty, belligerent and vigorous writer, this manifesto of Mailer's key beliefs contains pieces on his war experiences in the Philippines (the basis for his famous first novel The Naked and the Dead), tributes to fellow novelists William Styron, Saul Bellow, Truman Capote and Gore Vidal and magnificent polemics against pornography, advertising, drugs and politics.
Hardcover. NY, Skira, 1st, 2008, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover, 240 pages. Winner of the 1990 Pritzker Architecture Prize, Italian architect and theorist Aldo Rossi (1931-1997) gained international renown for his imaginative and starkly beautiful designs. Rossi's writings, drawings and buildings have distinguished him as one of the great architects of our time. They are unique for their simple forms such as cones, cylinders, prisms, and cubes. His work is at once bold yet ordinary, original without being novel, refreshingly simple in appearance but extremely complex in content and meaning. Rossi has been able to follow the lessons of classical architecture without copying them. In a period of diverse styles and influences, Aldo Rossi has eschewed the fashionable and popular to create an architecture singularly all his own. Sketches, drawings, concepts, watercolors, and collages from the early 1960s through to 1998 help us to understand Aldo Rossi the artist and architect, as well as his mindset and how he elaborated his projects. The volume is complete with a register of the Aldo Rossi Foundation's works. This is truly a valuable tool for scholars.
Hardcover. NY, Grossman, 2nd Ed., 1969, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover, revised and enlarged, this is the 2nd American edition. A fine copy in a near fine dust wrapper. With stills from several of Frank's earliest films. With an introduction by Jack Kerouac.
Softcover. Los Angeles, Augustan Reprint Society, reprint, 1980, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, facsimile reprint of a 1673 pamphlet. Introduction by Paula L. Babour, 56 pages. Early feminist tract. Name on front cover, otherwise a clean copy.
Softcover. Los Angeles, The Augustan Reprint Society, reprint, 1989, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 67 pages, Introduction by H.T. Dickinson. A facsimile reprint of Lord Hervey's 1734 political pamphlet. Name on front cover, otherwise clean.
Hardcover. NY, Grossman Publishers, 1st, 1972, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover, 224 pages. 218 b&w gravure plates. Dust jacket with minor wear, price-clipped. "This book is a retrospective of Andre Kertesz's long career and contains all of his best known works: Hungarian scenes, classic photographs of Mondrian's staircase, portraits of his artist and writer friends, as well as his famous Surrealist distortions." Clean copy.
Softcover. NY, Aperture, 1st, 1985, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 99 pages. Summer 1985. Introduction by Mark Haworth-Booth and an essay by David Mellor. An entire issue on the work of Bill Brandt that was done for an exhibition at the Philadelphia Museum of Art from June 8 -September 21, 1985. Clean copy.
Hardcover. NY, Random House, 1st, 1978, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover, 127 pages. Features 100 B&W and color automobile ads from 1905-1976. Clean copy.
Hardcover. NY, St. Martin's, 1st, 2013, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover, 333 pages. Now, in the first ever full-scale investigation of the artist, reporter Will Ellsworth-Jones pieces together the story of Banksy, building up a picture of the man and the world in which he operates. He talks to his friends and enemies, those who knew him in his early, unnoticed days, and those who have watched him try to come to terms with his newfound fame and success. And he explores the contradictions of a champion of renegade art going to greater and greater lengths to control his image and his work.
Softcover. Los Angeles, Augustan Reprint Society, reprint, 1986, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, Facsimile reprint of 18th century edition; stapled wraps; 64 clean, umarked pages, with 10 page introduction by Simon Varey. Fictional letters by an 18th century romance writer. Clean copy.
Softcover. NY, Watson-Guptill, 1st pbk, 2001, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 292 pages. A detailed resource on the comics and collectibles inspired by the classic character provides close-up photography and information on everything Batman, from the history of the character's graphic design to sixteen new pages of obscure memorabilia. Chip Kidd, who also wrote a neat "Batman Animated" coffee able book on the well-loved and critically acclaimed "Batman: The Animated Series" that debuted in 1992, turns here to the hobby (and serious business, for some) of collecting. He includes his own childhood remembrances of Bat-items, as well as wonderfully quirky photography. This book, full-color throughout, is not a "guide" to the collectibles, as it does not include price values or manufacturers (it does give the year and dimensions for each piece pictured). Plus, there is an editorial comment on the Andy Warhol Batman piece that's got a bit of an attitude. Clean copy.
Softcover. NY, DC Comics, 1st pbk, 2002, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 248 pages in color. The Dark Knight Strikes Again is Frank Miller's follow-up to his hugely successful Batman: the Dark Knight Returns, one of the few comics that is widely recognized as not only reinventing the genre but also bringing it to a wider audience.Set three years after the events of The Dark Knight Returns, The Dark Knight Strikes Again follows a similar structure: once again, Batman hauls himself out of his self-imposed retirement in order to set things right. However, where DKR was about him cleaning up his home city, Gotham, DKSA has him casting his net much wider: he's out to save the world. The thing is, most of the world doesn't realize that it needs to be saved--least of all Superman and Wonder Woman, who have become little more than superpowered enforcers of the status quo. So, the notoriously solitary Batman is forced to recruit some different superpowered allies. Clean, bright copy.
Hardcover. NY, Summit Books, 1st, 1982, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket. Remainder mark on bottom edge, otherwise clean. Marge Piercy, whose earlier novels have chronicled the female experience in the turbulent '60s and 70s, now turns her considerable skill and passion to the 1950s in this portrait of women in transition from repression to freedom. Through the intense friendship between Jill and her cousin, Donna, we see and feel what it was like to grow up in Detroit in the '50s and go to college when the first seeds of freedom were sown. Through Jill's childhood friend Howie, and her relationships with Mike and Peter, we come to understand the danger that sex posed when abortions were illegal, making the outcome of a chance encounter of a night of love a matter of life and death. And, through Marge Piercy's brilliant, thought-provoking novel, our lives are illuminated.
Hardcover. London, Conway, 1st, 2010, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, 96 pages. During World War II, the British government issued a series of public warnings in the form of witty posters by the brilliant cartoonist Fougasse, a.k.a. Cyril Kenneth Bird. ("Don't forget that walls have ears!" a fashionable woman whispers to a friend, as Hitler's face peers ominously out of the wallpaper.) This illustrated tribute to one of Britain's most popular artists begins with his celebrated WWII posters and continues with his later work for Punch magazine and elsewhere. An important contribution to the history of both cartooning and propaganda, it compares the relative effectiveness of hard-hitting American wartime designs versus Fougasse's light touch.
Hardcover. Cambridge MA, Wexner Center and MIT Press, 1sr, 2007, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, oblong pictorial boards, Any new film and any new book by French filmmaker Chris Marker is an event. Marker gave film lovers one of their most memorable experiences with La Jetee (1962)-a time-travel montage set after a nuclear war that inspired Terry Gilliam's Twelve Monkeys (1995). His still camerawork is not as well known, but Marker has been taking photographs as long as he has been making films. Staring Back presents 200 black-and-white photographs from Marker's personal archives, taken from 1952 to 2006. Some of the photographs are related to his classic films (which include Le Jetee, Sans Soleil, Cuba Si!, and The Case of the Grinning Cat), others are portraits of famous faces (Simone Signoret, Akira Kurosawa), but most are pictures of people Marker has encountered as he has traveled the world (an extra who appeared in Kurosawa's Ran, a woman seen on a street in Siberia). The central section of the book contains a series of photographs documenting political protests Marker has witnessed, including the march on the Pentagon in 1967, the events of May 1968 in Paris, and the tumultuous 2006 demonstrations protesting the French government's proposed employment policies. Still in publisher's shrinkwrap.
Softcover. NY, Aperture, 1st, 1973, Softcover, 136 pages. First Edition. Introduction by Jonathan Williams. Stories by Lafcadio Hearn. Captions, and a Statement, by Laughlin. Glossy illustrated wrappers. The Aperture Monograph issued in connection with the Laughlin exhibition at the Philadelphia Museum of Art in 1973. Clean, bright copy.
Softcover. NY, Aperture, 1st, 1973, Softcover, 136 pages. First Edition. Introduction by Jonathan Williams. Stories by Lafcadio Hearn. Captions, and a Statement, by Laughlin. Glossy illustrated wrappers. The Aperture Monograph issued in connection with the Laughlin exhibition at the Philadelphia Museum of Art in 1973. Clean, bright copy.
Hardcover. Boston, Roberts Brothers, 1st, 1888, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, mustard cloth stamped with gilt lettering and flower blossoms on front cover. 304 pages plus publisher's ads in rear. B&w illustrations by Jessie McDermot, frontis with tissue guard. Small price sticker to front fly leaf, otherwise bright and clean.
Softcover. Los Angeles, Augustan Reprint Society, reprint, 1990, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 23 and 27 pages, introduction by Claudis Johnson. Facsimile reprints of two pamphlets written to benefit priests who were expelled by the revolutionary French Government. Both authors championed causes to relieve their plight. Clean copy.
Hardcover. NY, W.W. Norton & Company, 1st, 1975, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket. Provides fresh insight into the age old tale of a woman who grows as an individual and literally explodes out of her marriage. May Sarton describes the burgeoning artist confined by a social contract. Light fading to spine. Clean copy.
Hardcover. Nevada City CA, Carl Mautz Publishung, 1st, 1999, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Oblong hardcover. 111 pages. Researched and edited by Susan Herzig and Paul Hertzman. Essay by Peter Palmquist. Includes 60 illustrations with 47 color and duotone plates.
Hardcover. AU, Lannoo, 1st, 2010, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover, 184 pages. A glimpse into the private world of an interior designer.
Hardcover. NY, Epic Comics, 1st, 1990, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardccover, 76 pages. color art by Frank Miller. The conclusion of Elektra by the master craftsman, Frank Miller, at the top of his game. No comic book collection is complete without it. This may be the best single work that Miller has done for Marvel. Written and with all line art by Miller, and with exquisite colors by Lynn Varley - Elektra Lives Again takes us back to the damaged life of Matt Murdock/Daredevil. Haunted now by the ghost (or is it?) of the woman he loves. Ballet level battles. Elegant panel work. Sharp story telling. Another textbook amalgam of American/European/Asian comics. Full number line, no dust jacket, clean copy.
Hardcover. NY, Frederick A. Stokes , 1st, 1900, Hardcover, red cloth with bright gilt stamping, 150 pages. Top edge gilt. Ribbon marker, photographic frontispiece portrait of actress Terry, as well as numerous photographs of her in various dramatic productions. Clean copy.
Softcover. Los Angeles, The Augustan Reprint Society , reprint, 1984, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 56 pages. Introduction by Frank Ellis. A facsimile reprint.
Hardcover. NY, Doubleday, 1st, 1977, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover, 144 pages. B&w photos by Freesman. Dust jacket with mild edgewear. Beautiful copy of a scarce book. A photo essay on the experiences of firemen.
Hardcover. New Haven CT, Yale University Press, 1st, 2010, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover, 272 pages. In a lightly worn dust jacket with mild fading to spine.The image of the untamed American West persists as one of our country's most enduring cultural myths, and few photographers have captured more compelling images of the frontier than Timothy H. O'Sullivan. Trained under Mathew Brady, O'Sullivan accompanied several government expeditions to the West--most notably with geologist Clarence King in 1867 and cartographer George M. Wheeler in 1871. Along these journeys, O'Sullivan produced many beautiful photographs that exhibit a forthright and rigorous style formed in response to the landscapes he encountered. Faced with challenging terrain and lacking previous photographic examples on which to rely, O'Sullivan created a body of work that was without precedent in its visual and emotional complexities. The first major publication on O'Sullivan in more than thirty years, Framing the West offers a new aesthetic and formal interpretation of O'Sullivan's photographs and assesses his influence on the larger photographic canon. The book features previously unpublished and rarely seen images and serves as a field guide for O'Sullivan's original prints, presenting them for the first time in sequence with the chronology of their production.
Hardcover. New Haven CT, Yale University Press, 1st, 2010, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover, 272 pages. The image of the untamed American West persists as one of our country's most enduring cultural myths, and few photographers have captured more compelling images of the frontier than Timothy H. O'Sullivan. Trained under Mathew Brady, O'Sullivan accompanied several government expeditions to the West--most notably with geologist Clarence King in 1867 and cartographer George M. Wheeler in 1871. Along these journeys, O'Sullivan produced many beautiful photographs that exhibit a forthright and rigorous style formed in response to the landscapes he encountered. Faced with challenging terrain and lacking previous photographic examples on which to rely, O'Sullivan created a body of work that was without precedent in its visual and emotional complexities. The first major publication on O'Sullivan in more than thirty years, Framing the West offers a new aesthetic and formal interpretation of O'Sullivan's photographs and assesses his influence on the larger photographic canon. The book features previously unpublished and rarely seen images and serves as a field guide for O'Sullivan's original prints, presenting them for the first time in sequence with the chronology of their production.
Hardcover. London, Phaidon, 1st, 2005, Hardcover, 360 pages. A compelling insight into Gilbert & George's everyday enigma. The artists' unfailing politeness, consideration for others and open nature exert an irresistible charm. But it's Jonquet's walks with G & G around their home patch of Spitalfields that shed new light on the work, lavishly illustrated with accompanying personal photos.
Hardcover. New Haven CT, Yale University Press, 1st, 2019, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, brick red cloth with a color photo illustrations on the front board with gilded and black letters to the front boards and spine, 168 pages. A fresh, comprehensive, and critical look at the California gold rush through the lens of the daguerreotype camera.The California gold rush was the first major event in American history to be documented in depth by photography. This fascinating volume offers a fresh, comprehensive, and critical look at the people, places, and culture of that historical episode as seen through daguerreotypes and ambrotypes of the era. After gold was discovered at Sutter's Mill in 1848, thousands made the journey to California, including daguerreotypists who established studios in cities and towns and ventured into the gold fields in specially outfitted photographic wagons. Their images, including portraits, views of cities and gold towns, and miners at work in the field, provide an extraordinary glimpse into the evolution of mining culture and technology, the variety of nationalities and races involved in the mining industry, and the growth of cities such as San Francisco and Sacramento. Still in publisher's shrinkwrap.
Hardcover. NY, Harper & Brothers, 1st, 1949, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, black cloth covers with yellow lettering. No dust jacket. 161 pages illustrated with 72 striking black-and-white photogravures by Berenice Abbott. Having spent most of the 1920s in Paris photographing such famous literati as James Joyce, Jean Cocteau and Andre Gide, Abbott returned to New York with the intention "to do in Manhattan what Atget did in Paris. " Throughout the 30s she captured New York "with a straightforward style that nodded toward 19th-century classicism while signaling a new sort of stripped-down modernism" (Roth, 100). Included here are her images of such artists as Isamu Noguchi, Edward Hopper, John Sloan and William Auerbach-Levy, each in their studios, along with numerous glimpses into the buildings, people and life of Greenwich Village. Text by Henry W. Lanier, editor, writer and son of renowned southern poet Sydney Lanier. Bright, clean copy.
Hardcover. NY, Harper & Brothers, 1st, 1935, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Fair, Hardcover in a worn, chipped dust jacket with $2.50 on flap, 304 pages. Stated First Edition with M-I code on copyright page. Title-page printed in red and black. Original gray cloth lettered in black, backstrip decorated in red and lettered in black. "George Brush, a traveling textbook salesman, is a fervent religious convert who is determined to lead a good life. With sad and sometimes hilarious consequences, his travels take him through smoking cars, bawdy houses, banks, and campgrounds from Texas to Illinois and into the soul of America itself."
Softcover. Los Angeles, The Augustan Reprint Society, reprint, 1982, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 70 pages, a facsimile reprint of his fantastic tales first published in 1785. Horatio Walpole, also known as Horace Walpole, was an English art historian, man of letters, antiquarian and Whig politician. His literary reputation rests on his Gothic novel, The Castle of Otranto (1764) and his Letters, which are of significant social and political interest. "The Hieroglyphic Tales were undoubtedly written a little before the creation of the world, and have ever since been preserved, by oral tradition, in the mountains of Crampcraggiri, an uninhabited island, not yet discovered. Of these few facts we could have the most authentic attestations of several clergymen, who remember to have heard them repeated by old men long before they, the said clergymen, were born." (From Walpole's own ntroduction). Clean copy.
Hardcover. Boston, Roberts Brothers, 1st, 1891, Book: Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, red cloth stamped in black, gilt lettering on spine, 288 pages plus an illustrated catalog of the author's books in rear. Frontis with tissue guard plus b&w plates by Jessie McDermot. Susan Chauncey Woolsey was an American children's author who wrote under the pen name Susan Coolidge. Beginning in 1872, she wrote five children's novels about Katy and the fictional Carr family, with the family modeled after her own relations, and Katy based on the author herself. Red cloth with some discoloration, light soil. Overall, a tight, clean copy, good plus.
Softcover. Taschen, 1st, 2013, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover in a pictorial slipcase. Inez van Lamsweerde and Vinoodh Matadin's work has graced the walls and pages of some of the world's finest galleries and fashion magazines, and if it is surprising that their photographs easily float between these worlds, it is by virtue of their ease in creating imagery that seeks homes in both culturally elite and mainstream outlets. For some of their photographs, such as their portrait of Bjork or campaign for Givenchy, van Lamsweerde and Matadin have worked in collaboration with the art directors M/M (Paris), who have also designed this retrospective that looks back at pretty much everything? that the photographers have been working on for over two decades and that has brought them to the forefront in the fields of both art and fashion. 702 pages. 11 x 11 inches.
Hardcover. New Haven CT, Yale University Press, 1st, 2015, Hardcover with a bright dust jacket, oblong format, 336 pages. 25 color, 375 duotone + 210 b/w illustrations. This important publication is the first comprehensive study and complete catalogue of Riis's world-famous images, and places him at the forefront of early-20th-century social reform photography. It is the culmination of more than two decades of research on Riis, assembling materials from five repositories (the Riis Collection at the Museum of the City of New York, the Library of Congress, the New-York Historical Society, the New York Public Library, and the Museum of South West Jutland, Denmark) as well as previously unpublished photographs and notes. In this handsome volume, Bonnie Yochelson proposes a novel thesis--that Riis was a radical publicist who utilized photographs to enhance his arguments, but had no great skill or ambition as a photographer. She also provides important context for understanding how Riis's work would be viewed in turn-of-the-century New York, whether presented in lantern slide lectures or newspapers. Still in publisher's shrinkwrap.
Hardcover. Berkeley CA, University of California Press, 1st, 2009, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover, 232 pages. James Rosenquist's paintings, with their billboard-sized images of commercial subjects, are utterly emblematic of 1960s Pop Art. Their provocative imagery also touches on some of the major political and historical events of that turbulent decade--from the Kennedy assassination to the war in Vietnam. In the first full-length scholarly examination of Rosenquist's art from that period, Michael Lobel weaves together close visual analysis, a wealth of archival research, and a consideration of the social and historical contexts in which these paintings were produced to offer bold new readings of a body of work that helped redefine art in the 1960s. Bringing together a range of approaches, James Rosenquist provides a compelling perspective on the artist and on the burgeoning consumer culture of postwar America.
Hardcover. NY, Library of America, 1st, 2019, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket, 970 pages. Joan Didion's influence on postwar American letters is undeniable. Whether writing fiction, memoir, or trailblazing journalism, her gifts for narrative and dialogue, and her intimate but detached authorial persona, have won her legions of readers and admirers. Now Library of America launches its multi-volume edition of Didion's collected writings, prepared in consultation with the author, that brings together her fiction and nonfiction for the first time. Collected in this first volume are Didion's five iconic books from the 1960s and 1970s: Run River, Slouching Towards Bethlehem, Play It As It Lays, A Book of Common Prayer, and The White Album. Whether writing about countercultural San Francisco, the Las Vegas wedding industry, Lucille Miller, Charles Manson, or the shopping mall, Didion achieves a wonderful negative sublimity without condemning her subjects or condescending to her readers. Chiefly about California, these books display Didion's genius for finding exactly the right language and tone to capture America's broken twilight landscape at a moment of headlong conflict and change. Remainder dot to bottom edge, otherwise clean.
Hardcover. NY, F.A. Stokes Company, 1st, 1900, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, red cloth with bright gilt stamping, 137 pages. Top edge gilt. Ribbon marker, photographic frontispiece portrait of actor John Drew, as well as numerous photographs of John Drew (and other actresses) in various dramatic productions. Clean copy.
Hardcover. NY, Frederick A. Stokes, 1st thus, 1890, Hardcover, 3/4 decorated white cloth with gilt stamped decorative pattern. Vignette edition with engraved frontispiece and 100 illustrations by Thos. McIlvaine. An Oriental romance, originally published in 1817, consisting of four narrative poems connected by a prose section. Small blank label on inside front cover, otherwise a tight, clean copy.
Hardcover. NY, Thames & Hudson, 1st, 2014, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket, pages. Fact and fiction mix in this first truly international survey of a vibrant, burgeoning field, its masterful twenty-first-century practitioners, and their work. William A. Ewing, the eminent photography author and curator, has selected 240 photographs by over 100 photographers, ranging from renowned figures such as Andreas Gursky, Richard Misrach, Susan Derges and Edward Burtynsky, to younger rising stars, including Olaf Otto Becker, Pieter Hugo and Penelope Umbrico. Each represents an individual or original viewpoint of a shared concern for our rapidly changing environment. Organized into ten themes: Sublime; Pastoral; Artefacts; Rupture; Playground; Scar; Control; Enigma; Hallucination; and Reverie. Clean copy. DUE TO WEIGHT, DOMESTIC SHIPPING ONLY.
Softcover. St. Johnsbury VT, St. Johnsbury Republican, 1t, 1928, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 120 pages. A pictorial chronicle of the flood considered "the worst natural disaster to ever strike Vermont in modern times" covering the state with 8.71 inches of rain. According to the National Weather Service, "1285 bridges were lost as well as countless numbers of homes and buildings destroyed and hundreds of miles of roads and railroad tracks washed out." The book shows the results of the rainfall: rising water, destroyed railroad tracks, and leveled houses. Name on front fly leaf otherwise a clean copy in exceptional condition.
Hardcover. NY, Atheneum/Richard Jackson Books, 1st, 2013, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover, 64 pages. Floca proves himself masterful with this Caldecott Medal winner. The book's large format offers space for a robust story in a hefty package of information. Set in well-paced blank verse, the text begins with a quick sketch of "how this road was built" and moves abruptly to the passengers on the platform and the approaching train. The author smoothly integrates descriptions of the structure and mechanics of the locomotive, tasks of crew members, passing landscapes, and experiences of passengers. Simply sketched people and backgrounds, striking views of the locomotive, and broad scenes of unpopulated terrain are framed in small vignettes or sweep across the page. Though a bit technical in explaining engine parts, the travelogue scheme will read aloud nicely and also offers absorbing details for leisurely personal reading. Substantial introductory and concluding sections serve older readers. There's also a detailed explanation of the author's efforts and sources in exploring his subject. Train buffs and history fans of many ages will find much to savor in this gorgeously rendered and intelligent effort. True First Printing minus the stickers.
Hardcover. Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1st, 2009, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover, 132 pages. Sight is central to the medium of photography. But what happens when the subjects of photographic portraits cannot look back at the photographer or even see their own image? An in-depth pictorial study of blind schoolchildren in Mexico, Look at me draws attention to (and distinctions between) the activity of sight and the consciousness of form. Combining aspects of his earlier, acclaimed street work with an innovative approach to portraiture, Chicago-based photographer Jed Fielding has concentrated closely on these children's features and gestures, probing the enigmatic boundaries between surface and interior, innocence and knowing, beauty and grotesque. Design, composition, and the play of light and shadow are central elements in these photographs, but the images are much more than formal experiments; they confront disability in a way that affirms life. Fielding's sightless subjects project a vitality that seems to extend beyond the limits of self-consciousness. In collaborative, joyful participation with the children, he has made pictures that reveal essential gestures of absorption and the basic expressions of our creatureliness.
Softcover. Los Angeles, Augustan Reprint Society, reprint, 1987, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 40 pages. A facsimile reprint of a scandalous pamphlet published in 1772. Kendrick was a notorious literary libeler who had a grudge against David Garrick, manager of Drury Lane, imagining he sabotaged his theatrical career. Clean copy.