Hardcover. North Clarendon VT, Tuttle Publishing, 1st, 2006, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket, gorgeous color paintings on every page by Lak-Khee Tay-Audouard. Adventures of the Treasure Fleet is the amazing story of seven epic voyages and their larger-than-life commander, Admiral Zheng He.Beginning in 1405, Admiral Zheng He led more than 300 gigantic, brightly-painted ships across the South China Sea to the Indian Ocean and all the way to the distant coast of Africa. The admiral and his crew battled pirates and raging storms, and were amazed by the people and ways of life in distant lands. At each port, Chinese goods were traded for pearls, precious stones, herbs and medicines which were given as tribute to China's powerful emperor when the ships' returned home. Clean copy.
Hardcover. NY, Vantage Press, 1st, 1990, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket, 312 pages. B&w photos in center section. Frontispiece map. A Canadian professor returns to visit the Tanzania village in the Southern Highlands which he left 40 years ago. Clean copy.
Hardcover. Westport CT, Negro Universities Press , reprint, 1970, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, brown cloth with gilt lettering on the spine. Originally published in 1852 this is an in depth study of the African people , both in Africa and in America. A great deal of material on slavery and the South, as well as early material on Liberia. Presented in a series of "conversations", this is an in-depth history of the African continent's peoples, the colonization of Africa, and subsequent African American slavery in the United States. Clean copy.
Softcover. NY, Scala Arts Publishers/Cornell, 1st, 2020, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 112 pages illustrated in color. Featuring African textiles, clothing, headwear, and jewelery, this book celebrates African dress as a product of global interactions, generational conflict and continuity, and expressions of gender. Featuring African textiles, clothing, headwear, and jewelery, this book celebrates African dress as a product of global interactions, generational conflict and continuity, and expressions of gender. The book highlights the strength and resilience of long-standing practices that characterize African dress; the wide variety of cultural, religious, and political motivations for adorning oneself; and the varying identities reflected in analyzing African material culture of the last century and a half. Textile selections include hand-woven and dyed examples alongside factory-woven and machine-printed cloth. Items of adornment include amber and silver jewelery from North Africa, beadwork-embellished clothing from South Africa, and various headdresses from across the continent, to name a few examples. From formal European colonization, to independence for African countries, to the liberalization of African economies, this book will demonstrate how dress practices reveal personal and group identities, cultural traditions, religious associations, political affiliations, and aspirations. Clean copy.
Hardcover. NY, Africana Publishing , 1st US, 1974, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket, 268 pages, b&w illustrations. In 1929 the author was awarded a Rhodes Trust Travelling Fellowship witha vague commission to study problems of race and colour. This book contains a section of her diary, essentially as she wrote it, devoted to Southern Africa including the Rhodesias and the Congo. She addressed a huge night time meeting of African workers called by Zulu union organizer, George Champion. In Bechuanaland she met the young and capable regent; in Basutoland she accompanied an Assistant Commissioner on a long trek on horseback into the interior. Thoroughly entertaining it also sets the scene for much of what was to follow in the subsequent history of the territories she visited. Clean copy.
Hardcover. NY, Africana Publishing , 1st US, 1974, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket, 268 pages, b&w illustrations. In 1929 the author was awarded a Rhodes Trust Travelling Fellowship witha vague commission to study problems of race and colour. This book contains a section of her diary, essentially as she wrote it, devoted to Southern Africa including the Rhodesias and the Congo. She addressed a huge night time meeting of African workers called by Zulu union organizer, George Champion. In Bechuanaland she met the young and capable regent; in Basutoland she accompanied an Assistant Commissioner on a long trek on horseback into the interior. Thoroughly entertaining it also sets the scene for much of what was to follow in the subsequent history of the territories she visited. Clean copy.
Softcover. Boston, Beacon Press, reprint, 2005, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 289 pages. For centuries, the story of the Atlantic slave trade has been filtered through the eyes and records of white Europeans. In this watershed book, historian Anne C. Bailey focuses on memories of the trade from the African perspective. African chiefs and other elders in an area of southeastern Ghana-once famously called 'the Old Slave Coast'-share stories that reveal that Africans were traders as well as victims of the trade. Bailey argues that, like victims of trauma, many African societies now experience a fragmented view of their past that partially explains the blanket of silence and shame around the slave trade. Clean copy.
Softcover. NY, Archipelago Books, reprint, 2008, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover in pictorial wrappers, 115 pages, color illustrations. All One Horse is a marvel-filled journey through Breyten Breytenbach's kaleidoscopic imagination. The electrifying colors and penetrating images of his paintings converse with his lyrical and satirical dream-fables. These visions and parables emerge from a melange of cultures and traditions: African and Eastern thought, the spirit world, and the spheres of visual art, philosophy, history and politics. Breytenbach's watercolors communicate in hieroglyphs, where private conversation embraces myth and dream. These reflections and images - clear and complex at once - are cries for human dignity and justice, are truth disguised as play. An outspoken human rights activist, Breyten Breytenbach is a poet, painter, memoirist, essayist and novelist. His paintings and drawings have been exhibited around the world. Born in South Africa, he emigrated to Paris in the late '60s and became deeply involved in the anti-Apartheid movement. Clean Copy.
Softcover. Rio de Janeiro, Liberia Francisco Alves, 1st, 1977, Softcover in pictorial wraps, 108 pages. Scholarly book on African-Brazilian religious cults in South America and Mexico. Clean copy
Hardcover. Cambridge UK, W. Heffer & Sons, 1st, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Good, Hardcover in a lightly worn and soiled dust jacket. 395 pages, b&w illustrations, charts. Alur Society became a classic for a number of reasons. Being much more than a descriptive account of an African society, it was the first intensive ethnography to adopt the ideas of Max Weber. It pioneered the idea that religion and ritual could be the basis of political action. It also showed how state systems could evolve not just on the basis of conquest but as a result of societies without kings inviting those with kings to govern them. Southall's theory of the segmentary state was adopted by many political anthropologists and political scientists, being applied not just to Africa but also to India and other parts of the world. Previous owner's signature inside front cover otherwise clean.
Hardcover. NY, Simon and Schuster, 3rd pr., 1967, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a lightly worn dust jacket, 223 pages. A young American's experience in a district school in Tanganyika and traveling in Rhodesia and South Africa as a member of the Peace Corps. Clean copy.
Hardcover. London, Macdonald, 1st, 1966, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, black cloth covers with gilt lettering on spine, 109 pages with color photos, b&w illustrations. Small name on front fly leaf, otherwise clean.
Hardcover. NY, Abrams, 1st, 2016, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover in pictorial boards. Gray Malin is the artist of the moment for the Hollywood and fashion elite. His awe-inspiring aerial photographs of beaches around the world are shot from doorless helicopters, creating playful and stunning celebrations of light, shape, and perspective, as well as summer bliss. Beaches features more than twenty cities across six continents: Australia: Sydney/North America: Santa Monica, Miami, San Francisco, Kaua'i, Chicago, the Hamptons, and Cancun / South America: Rio de Janeiro / Europe: Capri, Rimini, Forte dei Marmi, Viareggio, Amalfi Coast, Barcelona, Lisbon, and Saint-Tropez / Africa: Cape Town / Asia: Dubai. Clean, bright copy.
Hardcover. Five Continents, 1st, 2018, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover in pictorial boards. Born into slavery around 1853-4 on a cotton plantation in Benton, Alabama, Traylor has become one of the most important self-taught artists of the twentieth century, and certainly one of the most celebrated African-American artists, along with Thorton Dial and William Edmondson. The story of Bill Traylor's life and work is a remarkable one. It is a story that deserves attention both nationally and internationally. This publication, generously illustrated with full-page high-quality reproductions, provides a close examination of Traylor's recurrent themes, composition schemes, favored iconography, and contextual information related to the artist's biography, creative process and tools, visual environment, and artistic mindset. Each artwork is considered in a context beyond that of an isolated image and in response to one another, forming a series of intricate and consistent narratives, intriguingly cinematic in its development. The elements of Traylor's biography are the anchors of an individual mythology. Instead of merely being a basic depiction, the subject becomes a visual statement structuring Traylor's mind, bringing together hidden symbols from Kongo Vodou, Hoodoo, Southern Baptist, Freemasonry, and Blues sources, as well as layers of references: slavery, uncensored violence in the Jim Crow era, and turbulence within the black enclave known as 'Dark Town' in Montgomery, Alabama. Bilingual edition in French and English. Still in publisher's shrinkwrap.
Hardcover. Boston, Little, Brown, 1st, 1947, Book: Good, Hardcover, green cloth with black lettering. Frontis portrait. This text is an expansion of the author's 1937 article Black Hamlet : the mind of an African Negro revealed by psychoanalysis. "This is the true story of John Chavafambira. It is a unique, never-before-written account of a native African medicine man, his life experiences and inner conflicts, etched against the background of two worlds-- white and black -- in collision. It is an amazing study of seemingly irreconcilable elements, laid in South Africa where the clash of color is most violent". Clean copy but mild musty odor.
Hardcover. Boston, Little, Brown and Co,, reprint, 1947, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Good, Hardcover in a worn, chipped dust jacket. The true story of an African medicine man as he leaves his home to practice his medicine in the city. Wulf Sachs was born in Russia and trained at the Psychoneurological Institute in St. Petersburg. A citizen of South Africa who resided in Johannesburg, he was a practicing psychoanalyst and the author of many books on psychiatry and literary criticism. Classic account of a two and half year psychoanalysis of a South African witch doctor. This book was earlier published with the title Black Anger. Derived from a review posted on-line: Black Hamlet is at the same time a case study in psychoanalytic therapy, the report of a scientific investigation, a political polemic, a collection of ethnographic observations, and the biography of a common man whose remarkable features would otherwise have been overlooked. Clean copy.
Hardcover. El Paso, TX, Sweet Earth Flying Press, 1st, 2009, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, 115 pages. Hardcover with dust jacket. Clean, unmarked copy with only minor wear to dust jacket. Penned by two of the most famous African American writers of the 1930s, this never-before-published coming-of-age story chronicles the adventures of a 12-year-old Mexican boy, Miguel Del Monte, who joins his uncle in herding wild broncos from northern Mexico to Los Angeles. Set against the backdrop of the Mexican Revolution, this historic tale follows Miguel as he embarks on this unexpected trip across the American Southwest desert, determined to prove himself brave and smart enough to deal with the anticipated hardships. Along with a close encounter with roving bandits and the dangerous forces of nature, Miguel has bittersweet interactions with people of diverse racial and cultural groups, learning important lessons along the way. Separated into concise episodes and reflecting the beauty of various peoples, this collection depicts the power of tolerance and multicultural inclusion.
Hardcover. Seattle, Fantagraphics, 1st, 2025, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, pictorial boards, 327 pages, illustrated throughout in b&w by Crane. Ripped from the headlines of the day, these eleven stories propel ace troubleshooter Buz Sawyer from Africa to South America to the Arctic Circle, from the heart of a hurricane to a plague of ravenous locusts. Meanwhile, back home, a femme fatale seduces Buz's C.O. to steal military secrets. Then, it's every parent's worst nightmare - Buz and Christy's new baby is kidnapped right in the hospital! Roy Crane, dean of the golden age of adventure comic strips, peppers these rollicking tales with rapid-fire action, suspense, intrigue, humor, unforgettable characters, and brilliant art. Now, at last, you can enjoy these stories, unseen since the 1950s.
Hardcover. San Diego, Sunbelt Publications, Revised Ed., 1998, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover, 246 pages, color photographs and illustrations throughout, illustrated end paper. The Great Murals of Mexico's Baja California are one of the five greatest sites in the world for primitive rock art. They rank with those of southern France, northern Spain, northwest Africa, and outback Australia. These Great Murals, created by an unknown people, are without doubt the most distinctive trove of rock art in the Western Hemisphere. The site was unveiled to the modern world in the 1960s by adventure/mystery writer Erle Stanley Gardner who brought in UCLA archaeologist Clement Meighan to validate the importance of his find. But it was not until the 1970s, when author/photographer Harry W. Crosby undertook a systematic search for the largely unknown works hidden in the mountains of central Baja that the scope and significance of the find became known. He documented his search and discovery of over 200 previously unreported rock art sites leading to the original publication of The Cave Paintings of Baja California by Copley Books in 1975 which first introduced this cave art to the general public. Since that time, Baja California's Great Murals have been designated a United Nations Heritage Site. This lavishly illustrated full-color account is greatly revised and expanded from the original edition and offers Crosby's unique perspective on the painted sites and painting styles found in different parts of the Great Mural area. Light edge wear to dust jacket. Else a very clean, tight copy.
Cape Town SA, Koeberg, 1st, 1968, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Good, Hardcover. B&W photo essay on Cedarberg of the Western Cape of South Africa. Stated 369 of an unspecified number, edgeworn dust jacket. Endpaper map.
Hardcover. Berkeley CA, University of California Press, 1st, 2000, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket, 112 pages. Schell, Orville [Foreword]; Parks, Gordon [Commentary]; Stepto, Robert B. [Commentary]. Shortly before the end of the Second World War, Wayne Miller was awarded a grant from the Guggenheim Foundation to photograph 'The Way of Life of the Northern Negro'." This project documented the wartime migration of African Americans northward, specifically looking at the black community on the south side of Chicago, covering all the emotions in daily life. The people depicted are mostly ordinary people, but some celebrities appear, such as Lena Horne, Ella Fitzgerald, Duke Ellington and Paul Robeson. He was a contributor to Magnum Photos beginning in 1958. Stamped name on front fly leaf, otherwise clean copy.
Softcover. Lanham MD, Scarecrow Press, reprint, 2006, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 203 pages. Using over 90 original interviews, as well as his extensive research in a variety of New Orleans' archives, Dr. Kennedy deftly explores the role public school teachers had in the formative years of jazz, as well as the influence they continue to have on the musical life of one of America's foremost musical cities. As jazz and music mentors, these teachers employed creativity, innovation, and dedication in propelling some of the world's finest musicians forward into brilliant careers. Chord Changes on the Chalkboard includes a foreword by jazz legend Ellis Marsalis, Jr. and is a must for jazz fans and historians, music libraries, and for collections supporting the study of popular culture and African-American history. Bright, clean copy.
Hardcover. NY, Praeger Publishers, 1st US, 1970, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, price-clipped dust jacket, 331 pages. This is an eyewitness account of the The Anglo-Boer War of 1899-1902. In 1899 Reitz then 17 years old, enlisted in the Boer army to fight the British. After the Boer loss of Pretoria General Jan Smuts, who wrote the forward, decided to conduct guerrilla operations. The book is about Reitz's experiences in the guerrilla war. After the Boers lost the war, Reitz fought with the British in a South African unit in WWI. He later studied law and became a politician and ultimately the South African Deputy Prime Minister. Originally published in Britain in 1929. Clean copy.
Softcover. NY, Oxford University Press, 2nd pr., 1995, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket. George Schuyler, a renowned and controversial black journalist of the Harlem Renaissance, and Josephine Cogdell, a blond, blue-eyed Texas heiress and granddaughter of slave owners, believed that intermarriage would "invigorate" the races, thereby producing extraordinary offspring. Their daughter, Philippa Duke Schuyler, became the embodiment of this theory, and they hoped she would prove that interracial children represented the final solution to America's race problems. Able to read and write at the age of two and a half, a pianist at four, and a composer by five, Philippa was often compared to Mozart. During the 1930s and 40s she graced the pages of Time and Look magazines, the New York Herald Tribune, and The New Yorker. Philippa grew up under the adoring andinquisitive eyes of an entire nation and soon became the role model and inspiration for a generation of African-American children. But as an adult she mysteriously dropped out of sight, leaving America to wonder what had happened to the "little Harlem genius." Suffering the double sting of racismand gender bias, Philippa had been rejected by the elite classical music milieu in the United States and forced to find an audience abroad, where she flourished as a world-class performer and composer. She traveled throughout South America, Europe, Africa, and Asia performing for kings, queens, and presidents. By then Philippa had added a second career as an author and foreign correspondent reporting on events around the globe--from Albert Schweitzer's leper colony in Lamberene to the turbulent Asian theater of the 1960s. She would give a command performance for Queen Elisabeth of Belgium one day, and hide from the Viet Cong among the ancient graves of the Annam kings another.