Hardcover. NY, Harper & Row, 1st, 1966, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, turquoise cloth with gilt lettering on the spine, 272 pages, b&w illustrations. Bibliography. Index. The author considers the paradoxical period between the social and political revolutions of 1848 and the death of optimisn in 1914. Besides presenting a revealing and fascinating account of great social contrasts, the author introduces the reader into other aspects of life during this period, the relaxations and dissipations of both the rich and poor, from the showboat and the music hall to the lavish spectacles of the Nineties and the beginnings of jazz. Clean copy. No dust jacket.

Hardcover. Czech Republic, Kant, 1st, 2025, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, pictorial boards, 264 pages. Venturing across five decades of American culture, this landmark book explores how modern graphic design emerged in the United States and how it became an intrinsic feature of the country's identity. Author and design professor Christopher Long tells this story in a wholly new way, exposing many long-forgotten figures and movements and resurrecting the debates and conceptions that were integral to the new art. In a series of deeply involving portraits of American artists and innovators who helped shape the very look of the modern age, Modern Americanness offers a sweeping story of the country's visual culture and its distinctiveness across a variety of designed objects: magazine covers, food labels, event posters, chapbooks, advertisements, propaganda and much more. Still in publisher's shrinkwrap.

Softcover. NY, Columbia University Press, 1st pbk, 2002, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 410 pages. Collection of essays on the impact of global modernity in the region. Between the 1890s and 1920s, cities in the vast region stretching from the Mediterranean Sea to the Indian Ocean were experiencing political, social, economic, and cultural changes that had been set in motion at least since the early nineteenth century. As the age of pre-colonial empires gave way to colonial and national states, there was a sense that a particular liberalism of culture and economy had been irretrievably lost to a more intolerant age. The book provides a comparative analysis of contested versions of the concept of modernity. The book examines not only the "high" culture of scholars and the literati, but also popular music, the visual arts, and journalism. Clean.

Hardcover. London, Verso, 1st, 1995, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover, bright dust jacket. Seven pages with ink underlining in the text; Includes contemporary photographs. In January 1952, two young men from Buenos Aires set out to explore South America on an ancient Norton motorbike. The journey lasted six months and took them thousands of miles, all the way from Argentina to Venezuela. En route, there were disasters and discoveries, high drama, low comedy, fights, parties and a lot of serious drinking.

Softcover. Chicago, University of Chicago Press, reprint, 2009, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 448 pages. Tells the story of an early modern nation struggling to deal with diversity and multiculturalism while torn by the fanaticism of the Counter-Reformation on one side and the threat of Ottoman expansion on the other. Clean copy.

Hardcover. New York, St. Martin's Press, 1st US, 1986, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover, 233 pages, black cloth covers with gilt lettering on spine. Previous owner's signature on front fly leaf. Some light pencil marking to pages. Nihonjinron is a school of thought about Japanese persons exceptional uniqueness espoused by Japanese intellectuals in the early 20th century. The author attempts to prove that "nihonjinron" it is a kind of 'fictional mentality' supposedly based on ancient traditions.

Hardcover. NY, Acanthus Press , 1st, 2008, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover, 320 pages, color plates. Volume I, Inventors of Tradition, highlights the careers and showcases the work of the designers who translated and then transformed European period styles into a new vocabulary for America. In addition to the work of celebrated taste-makers Billy Baldwin, Mario Buatta, and Albert Hadley Gura uncovers the interiors of once-influential, now-obscure designers whose work played an important role in the development of the New York look. Among these practitioners are William Pahlmann, the pioneer of contemporary eclecticism; the glamorous Melanie Kahane, with a fondness for shocking pink and tasteful pizzaz; and the epitome of the southern civility, Joseph Braswell, who believed that a beautiful environment could make its occupants into better people.

Hardcover. NY, G.P. Putnam's Sons , reorint, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket. Officer Buckle knows more about safety than anyone else in Napville, but his dull presentations put his audiences to sleep. Enter Gloria, Napville's new police dog. Gloria knows just how to liven up the safety speeches--as long as Officer Buckle's back is turned! Full color illustrations by Rathmann. Caldecott Medal Book with gold sticker on front. Clean copy.

Hardcover. NY, Quadrangle/ NY Times, 1st, 1974, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket, 206 pages. Purple top-stain. An interesting account of what it's like to work erecting multi-story high rise buildings in a city like New York. Clean copy.

Hardcover. NY, Farrar, Straus and Cudahy, reprint, 1961, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Good, Hardcover in a worn and lightly soiled dust jacket, unclipped with $4.50 price. Essays on a wide range of topics, including the assassination of Gandhi, Vassar, anti-Semitism, the Communist party, Arthur Miller, Tennessee Williams, etc. No first printing indicated so assumed 2nd pr. No markings.

Hardcover. Austin TX, University of Texas Press, 1st, 1964, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Fair, Hardcover in a lightly soiled and tanned dust jacket with a $4.75 flap price. 205 pages. Translated by Ruth L.C. Simms with an introduction by James Irby. A remarkable book by one of the great writers of the twentieth century includes essays on a proposed universal language, a justification of suicide, a refutation of time, the nature of dreams, and the intricacies of linguistic forms. Borges comments on such literary figures as Pascal, Coleridge, Cervantes, Hawthorne, Whitman, Valery, Wilde, Shaw, and Kafka. With extraordinary grace and erudition, he ranges in time, place, and subject from Omar Khayyam to Joseph Conrad, from ancient China to modern England, from world revolution to contemporary slang. Small stamp to front fly leaf, half title page clipped otherwise interior is bright, clean.

Softcover. Seattle, Fantagraphics Books, 1st, 2012, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 188 pages illustrated in color and b&w. Out of the Shadows collects the best of Golden Age comics artist Mort Meskin's comic book stories from the '30s, '40s, and '50s. For decades Meskin's comics were relegated to the yellowing newsprint pages of collectors. Now finally Mort Meskin steps "out of the shadows." The variety of genres shows the breadth and versatility of Meskin's craft, from the noirish chiaroscuro of his crime work to the chiseled, gritty realism of his Westerns.

Hardcover. New York , Hyperion Books, 1st, 1993, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Color pictorial boards with saw tooth edges. Housed in a cardboard box. The small book is 18 pages, each with double-page color illustrations by Henrick Drescher, each with interactive parts. According to the story Beastie's fur is pulled, his pop-up eyes jiggled, his boot (removed from his pop up foot) is scratched & sniffed, his privacy intruded upon as his shower curtain pulled away, his boogers poked, his miniature book reveal beastie's fantasies of revenge, as finally Judy and Paul are swallowed up by poor beastie and a mirror reveals who may be the next naughty child to incur beastie's wrath. All of these interactive pull and poke activities can be performed by the reader. SIGNED on the front cover in silver ink, with his initials, by Henrick Drescher in the year of publication.

Hardcover. Amherst MA, University of Massachusetts Press, 1st, 1969, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Good, Hardcover in a lightly worn and tanned dust jacket, 215 pages. Clean copy.

Hardcover. NY, New Directions, 5th pr., Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a lightly worn, unclipped dust jacket ($5.00), 273 pages. If the invention of literary modernism is usually attributed to James Joyce, T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound, it was Pound alone who provided (in Hugh Kenner's words) "the synergetic presence" to convert individual experiment into an international movement. In 1926 Pound carefully sculpted his body of shorter poems into a definitive collection which would best show the concentration of force, the economy of means, and the habit of analysis that were, to him, the hallmarks of the new style. This collection, where Pound presented himself in a variety of characters or "masks," was called Personae. In 1926, Personae's publication gave solidity to a movement today the work stands as one of the classic texts of the twentieth century. Clean copy.

Hardcover. Kerber, 1st, 2004, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover, 176 pages. In 1953, Peter Keetman spent a week at the Volkswagen plant in Wolfsburg. The result was a series of exceptionally clear, almost abstractly detailed photographs that document the entire production process of the VW Beetle. Storage stacks of shiny metal bumpers look like so many Modernist sculptures; car bodies hovering above the assembly line retrospectively form a surreal Pop art montage. This oversize publication reproduces the Volkswagenwerk series in full, in their original size, together with texts that refer both to this series and to Keetman's greater oeuvre. Keetman was known throughout his career as photographer of systemically conceived picture series on themes that included close-ups of water and oil drops, a style of working he developed as a member of Fotoform. Fotoform, a German movement of the 1950s of which Keetman was a primary proponent, was critical in the development of German photography as it is today: the group's "subjective photography" combined scientific objectivity with abstraction. PLEASE NOTE: DUE TO SIZE & WEIGHT, DOMESTIC SHIPPING ONLY.

Hardcover. Seattle, Fantagraphics, 1st, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover in pictorial boards, 298 pages. Published for the first time in English -- and the first time in color -- the classic Petra Chérie by Italian master Attilio Micheluzzi follows the dramatic adventures of a mysterious heroine during the end of World War I. Originally published in serial format from 1977-1982, Petra Chérie follows the adventures of Petra De Karlowitz, 'Chérie' to creator Micheluzzi, who addresses her throughout the book. Born to a Polish businessman and the most beautiful woman in Paris, raised in Canton, China, and now based in neutral Holland, she is a spy who answers only to herself. Evoking but cleverly eschewing stereotypes of the femme fatale, Petra is equally at home in the cockpit of an airplane and behind the wheel of a motorcar. More than that, she is an endlessly fascinating enigma and one of the most iconic characters in Italian comics. In short, thrilling tales across sky, sea, and land, zipping from Northern Europe to Mitteleuropa, from the Balkans to the Bosphorus to the nascent Soviet Union, Micheluzzi grapples with an era when Europe's borders were in flux and battle lines were often blurred. Clean copy.

Hardcover. NY, W. W. Norton & Company, 1st, 2021, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket, 898 pages, b&w illustrations. Appointed by Philip Roth and granted independence and complete access, Blake Bailey spent years poring over Roth's personal archive, interviewing his friends, lovers, and colleagues, and engaging Roth himself in breathtakingly candid conversations. The result is an indelible portrait of an American master and of the postwar literary scene. Bailey shows how Roth emerged from a lower-middle-class Jewish milieu to achieve the heights of literary fame, how his career was nearly derailed by his catastrophic first marriage, and how he championed the work of dissident novelists behind the Iron Curtain. Bailey examines Roth's rivalrous friendships with Saul Bellow, John Updike, and William Styron, and reveals the truths of his florid love life, culminating in his almost-twenty-year relationship with actress Claire Bloom, who pilloried Roth in her 1996 memoir, Leaving a Doll's House. Clean copy. (After sexual assault allegations about Bailey surfaced, Norton stopped shipping the book and pulverized the remaining copies.)

Hardcover. NY, The Macmillan Company, 6th pr., 1962, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, light tan cloth with dark green lettering, 464 pages with side-by-side German and English text. Wittgenstein's posthumous but influential tract, often cited as the most important book of philosophy of the 20th century; presented in the original German, with the English translation opposite. Some light pencil lines in margins, name on front fly leaf.

Hardcover. Springfield MA, Milton Bradley Co., 1st, 1929, Book: Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover in worn, frayed black cloth with yellow lettering. The best reason to buy this book are the 12 bright color plates by Riesenberg. They include The Explorers Lewis & Clarke, The Pioneer Daniel Boone, The Trapper Kit Carson, The Riverboat Pilot Mark Twain right up to The Aviator Charles Lindbergh. Internally clean, very good, the outside, not so much.

Softcover. London, Cornerhouse, 1st wraps, 1984, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 88 pages. Color photos of England in the 1980s by a Magnum photographer.

Hardcover. Berkeley, University of California Press, 1st, 2004, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket, 390 pages, b&w illustrations. From the stony desolation of Jordan's desert, it is but a step through a doorway into the bath house of the Qusayr 'Amra hunting lodge. Inside, multicolored frescoes depict scenes from courtly life and the hunt, along with musicians, dancing girls, and naked bathing women. The traveler is transported to the luxurious and erotic world of a mid-eighth-century Muslim Arab prince. For scholars, though, Qusayr 'Amra, probably painted in the 730s or 740s, has proved a mirage, its concreteness dissolved by doubts about date, patron, and meaning. This is the first book-length contextualization of the mysterious monument through a compelling analysis of its iconography and of the literary sources for the Umayyad period. It illuminates not only the way of life of the early Muslim elite but also the long afterglow of late antique Syria. Clean copy.

Hardcover. London, Korero Press, Revised Ed., 2024, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket, 479 pages in color. Science-fiction paperbacks exploded over the 1940s and '50s literary landscape with the force of an alien gamma bomb. Titles such as Rodent Mutation, The Human Bat vs. The Robot Gangster, Dawn of the Mutants and Mushroom Men from Mars appeared from fly-by-night publishers making the most of the end of post-war paper rationing. They were brash and seductive - for around a shilling the future was yours. Despite the tight deadlines and poor pay, the books' cover artists still managed to produce works of multi-hued, brain-bending brilliance, and collected here is an overview of their output during an unparalleled period of brash optimism and experimentation in publishing. This is the updated edition with 16 new pages. Clean copy.

Hardcover. NY, Twayne Publishers, 1st, 1996, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket, 162 pages. The first full-length critical treatment of this significant and neglected figure in American realism. Arguing that raw naturalism and subtle craftsmanship - seemingly incompatible qualities join to make Yates one of the most accomplished writers of the post - World War II period, the authors provide a comprehensive survey of his life and work. An introductory chapter outlines the historical, literary, and social contexts important to Yates's writings, comparing him, for example, with his contemporaries Philip Roth and Mary McCarthy and articulating strong lines of continuity between his themes and the ideas of the French historian Alexis de Tocqueville, the Marxist-oriented socialist C. Wright Mills, and the social theoretician Erving Goffman. Next a thorough biographical portrait illuminates Yates's obsession with the American middle class and its dislocated, disordered, and psychologically stifled populace, followed by sharp readings of the novels and story collections, including unfinished and minor works. Clean copy.