american culture

Hardcover. London, Laurence King, 1st, 2011, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover, 428 pages. This is the first book to be published on one of the greatest American designers of the 20th Century, who was as famous for his work in film as for his corporate identity and graphic work. With more than 1,400 illustrations, many of them never published before and written by the leading design historian Pat Kirkham, this is the definitive study that design and film enthusiasts have been eagerly anticipating. Saul Bass (1920-1996) created some of the most compelling images of American post-war visual culture. Having extended the remit of graphic design to include film titles, he went on to transform the genre. His best known works include a series of unforgettable posters and title sequences for films such as Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo and Otto Preminger's The Man With The Golden Arm and Anatomy of a Murder. He also created some of the most famous logos and corporate identity campaigns of the century, including those for major companies such as AT&T, Quaker Oats, United Airlines and Minolta. His wife and collaborator, Elaine, joined the Bass office in the late 1950s. Together they created an impressive series of award-winning short films, including the Oscar-winning Why Man Creates, as well as an equally impressive series of film titles, ranging from Stanley Kubrick s Spartacus in the early 1960s to Martin Scorsese s Cape Fear and Casino in the 1990s. Designed by Jennifer Bass, Saul Bass's daughter and written by distinguished design historian Pat Kirkham who knew Saul Bass personally, this book is full of images from the Bass archive, providing an in depth account of one of the leading graphic artists of the 20th century.

Hardcover. New York, Broadway Books, 1st, 2011, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, 304 pages. Hardcover with dust jacket. Minor foxing to top edge of text block. A very clean, unmarked copy with only minor wear to dust jacket edges. A tight copy.

Hardcover. New York, Harper, 1st, 2007, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, 672 pages. Hardcover with dust jacket. Clean, unmarked copy with only minor wear to dust jacket.

Hardcover. New York, Viking Press, 1st, 1973, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, 276 pages. Hardcover in a bright dust jacket. Clean, tight copy.

Hardcover. Athens GA, University of Georgia Press, 1st, 2001, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket, 168 pages. This work tells how the first generation of Protestant fundamentalists embraced the modern business and entertainment techniques of marketing, advertising, drama, film, radio, and publishing to spread the gospel. Clean copy.

Hardcover. Baltimore, Johns Hopkins University Press, 1st, 2002, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket, 430 pages. This book uncovers a persistent struggle between moral authority and the widespread expression of popular customs and individual urges. It details a fundamental shift in sexual culture and the acceptance of a more individualistic concept of sexual desire and fulfillment. Sex, marriage, was it "sinful". What was the influence of the Puritans? What was the power of the Planters of the South had over their Slaves? 75 pages of notes and an Index. This is both very interesting and scholarly. Clean copy.

Hardcover. NY, Harry N. Abrams, 1st, 1981, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket, 240 pages. More than 500 illustrations with 67 in full color. Here are countless examples of fabled but long-unseen American Sherlockian art: story illustrations, comic strips and cartoons, motion picture advertisements, and business advertisements incorporating the Holmes image. Stories are included also - hilarious American burlesques of Arthur Conan Doyle's Great Detective; and there are critics' reviews of old and new Holmes stage productions and of the many Holmes films. Clean copy.

Hardcover. NY, W. W. Norton, 1st, 1992, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket. This stimulating and comprehensive collection of original essays on twentieth-century Japan's history and culture provides a unique mix of American and Japanese perspectives on Showa. With an important, substantial Introduction by Carol Gluck, the volume explores the strengths of the Japanese economy, the issue of democracy and Japan's political culture, Japan's achievements in technology and the arts, and its relations with other Asian nations and the United States. Name on front fly leaf, otherwise clean.

Hardcover. Salt Lake City, University of Utah Press, 1st, 1988, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket, 188 pages. 141 color and black and white photographs by Milton Rogovin, Tony Maine, Ron Kelley, the essayists, and Yemeni workers. "What did the American astronauts find when the first landed on the moon?" "Yemenis, looking for work." High wages and easy work - these are the myths that lure Yemeni workers abroad, and especially to the United States, which has seen generations of migrant laborers. But the realities of migrant labor are something else. In Sojourners and Settlers, leading scholars of history, anthropology, folklore, sociology, and political science have joined with photographers and critics to present an interdisciplinary look at the phenomenon of labor migration. They reveal drastically changing rural and urban environments in Yemen, and in the United States, strenuous work weeks, bleak farm work camp conditions, plant shut downs, culture shock, and cautious assimilation. Under Friedlander's editorship, these reports of the ordinary events of Yemeni workers' lives become studies in courage, persistence, and dignity. Clean copy.

Hardcover. Cambridge MA, Harvard University Press, 1st, 1995, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket, 266 pages. In these eloquent essays on recent American, British, and Irish poetry, Helen Vendler shows us contemporary life and culture captured in lyric form by some of our most celebrated poets. An incomparable reader of poetry, Vendler explains its power; it is, she says, more often the voice of the soul than the socially marked self, speaking directly to us through the stylization of verse. 'Souls Says,' the title of a poem by Jorie Graham, is thus the name of this collection. In essays on Seamus Heaney, Donald Davie, Allen Ginsberg, John Ashbery, Rita Dove, Jorie Graham, and others, Vendler makes difficult poetry accessible and explores the force and beauty of contemporary lyric verse. Clean copy.

Hardcover. Norman, OK, University of Oklahoma Press, 1st Edition, 1939, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, 274 pages. Hardcover. Tan cloth cover boards, brown title on spine. Some tanning from age to covers, pages and edges. Top edge dyed red. Clear plastic mylar included. Good clean, tight copy. Social statement and opinion about those who live happily below the poverty line in the southern United States.

Hardcover. NY, powerHouse Books, 1st, 2019, Book: Very Good, Hardcover in pictorial boards. Back in 1961 it was still possible to know a few of America's original country musicians from the '20s and '30s. Renowned and celebrated musician and artist John Cohen came of age at the confluence of Old Time and early Bluegrass music, the historic intersection of traditional and folk music. Cohen travelled the country playing music, recording, and documenting what was to be a generation of musicians who would influence American music and culture for decades to come. Travelling between the Union Grove Fiddlers' Convention to the Grand Old Opry to a Coal Celebration in Hazard, Kentucky, Cohen made historic photographs of performers like Bill Monroe and Doc Watson, the country's very first all bluegrass show, and a bluegrass bar in Baltimore, among much more. Still in publisher's shrinkwrap.

Hardcover. NY, Quadrangle/New York Times Book Co., 1st, 1975, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket, 292 pages. Tough and witty, SportsWorld is a well-known commentator's overview of the most significant form of mass culture in America n sports. It's a sweaty Oz that has grown in a century from a crucible for character to a complex of capitalism, a place where young people can find both self-fulfillment and cruel exploitation, where families can huddle in a sanctuary of entertainment and be force fed values and where cities and countries can be pillaged by greedy team owners and their paid-for politicians. But this book is not just a screed, it's a guided visit with such heroes of sports as Muhammad Ali, Billie Jean King, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, and Joe Namath, who the author knew well, and with some he met in passing, like Richard Nixon, who seemed never to have gotten over missing the cut in college varsity football, a major mark of manhood. We see how SportsWorld sensibilities help elect our politicians, judge our children, fight our wars, and oppress our minorities. Clean copy.

Hardcover. New Haven CT, Yale University Press, 1st, 2020, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket, 179 pages. From the prizewinning Jewish Lives series, a meditation on the deeply Jewish and surprisingly spiritual roots of Stan Lee and Marvel Comics Few artists have had as much of an impact on American popular culture as Stan Lee. The characters he created--Spider-Man and Iron Man, the X-Men and the Fantastic Four--occupy Hollywood's imagination and production schedules, generate billions at the box office, and come as close as anything we have to a shared American mythology. This illuminating biography focuses as much on Lee's ideas as it does on his unlikely rise to stardom. It surveys his cultural and religious upbringing and draws surprising connections between celebrated comic book heroes and the ancient tales of the Bible, the Talmud, and Jewish mysticism. Clean copy.

Hardcover. US, Carpet Bombing Culture, 1st, 2013, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Unpaginated. Hardcover with no dust jacket. Clean, unmarked copy. If America is the Roman Empire of our time then New York City is Rome. The pulsating heart of the West pumps greenbacks through the veins of Manhattan, the richest place in the world. Power emanates from it's corporate brains and financial muscle across the whole surface of the globe. So how is it that even in the body of America, land of eternal youth, there is failure, death and decay hidden just beneath its glossy surfaces? A new breed of urban adventurers take a savage ride through the invisible story of the North Eastern USA. From NYC to the infamous Rust Belt, once home to America's heavy industry, States of Decay brings you a glimpse of the broken, the doomed, the entropic dreamlands on the flipside of the silver dollar coin. A unique exploration of everything from abandoned power plants, hospitals, asylums, schools, theatres, steel mills, prisons, factories, hotels, cathedrals, blast furnaces, convents to a boat graveyard. This extended photo-essay functions as a visual poem allowing the reader to draw their own experiences and conclusions from the images themselves. No interpretation necessary. This book will ask disturbing questions and inspire unexpected answers from anyone with an imagination and a heart. Sit back and let us take you on a walk around the Bad Apple.

Softcover. Wooster, College of Wooster Art Museum, The, 1st, 2000, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, 55 pages. Softcover. Minor wear to cover edges. Full page black & white photographs throughout. Clean unmarked text.

Hardcover. London, Chris Boot, 1st, 2011, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover, 95 pages, illustrated throughout in color. Clean, unmarked copy with only minor wear to dust jacket. Monograph of color portraits shot with a 5x4 camera at the Folsom Street Fair in SF and Easter weekend in Berlin, about 70 nude and semi-nude fetish gear photos of gay men, near fine limited first edition of 1200 copies.

Hardcover. New York, NY, Bulfinch, 1st, 2005, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, 271 pages. Hardcover. Color and B/w illustrations throughout. Dust jacket unclipped, excellent. Decorated cover boards, decorated endpapers. Binding tight, pages clean. Spine straight. In beautiful condition. A lavishly illustrated, fun, and informative look at more than 400 films of the decade of the 1970's. Features an interview with Peter Bogdanovich.

Hardcover. St. Paul MN, Borealis Books, 1st, 2004, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover, 224 pages. The photographs in this collection are taken from the files of the St. Paul Pioneer Press and the St. Paul Dispatch, and span a period from the nineteen-forties to the mid-sixties. Among the many records of long-forgotten civic functions are shocking crime-scene photographs, a reminder of an era when the country's newspaper photographers--an army of Weegees, equipped with oversized Speed Graphic flash cameras and radios tuned to the police scanners--regularly provided readers with lurid coverage of violent crimes and spectacular accidents. There is a harsh intimacy to these photographs, which bring us as close as possible to car-crash victims, suicides, and mass murderers confessing their crimes. But the welter of detail in the pictures--the seamed stockings of a murder victim, the huddle of bystanders after a bar shooting--provides a nuanced portrait of a Midwestern city and of American culture at mid-century.

Hardcover. New York, Harry N. Abrams, 1st, 2003, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, 175 pages. Hardcover with dust jacket. illustrated throughout. Very clean and tight copy. Striptease is the history of unapologetic fun aimed not at the head, not at the heart or even the stomach, but south of all three. Beginning with the birth of the striptease in the mid-19th century and culminating with its garish heyday in the 1950s, this book charts the evolution of the infamous bump and grind, which is, at its simplest, a pretty girl in a pretty dress ... and then not. The only fully illustrated book available on the subject, Striptease tells the history of this provocative form of stagecraft from its birth in vaudeville and burlesque through the "take it all off" attitude for which the term "striptease" was coined. Along the way, the book highlights such performers as Isadora Duncan, Loie Fuller, Maud Allen, Gypsy Rose Lee, Tempest Storm, and Blaze Starr. The witty and well-informed text is illustrated with an array of titillating images, including never-before-published ephemera and illicitly photographed performances in progress. Whether revealing ankles or breasts, playing peek-a-boo or going the full monty, Striptease pays tribute to the women who made a vocation of their sex appeal and shimmied their way into American culture.

Hardcover. Washington, Prestel, 1st, 2016, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, 288 pages. Softcover. Very clean, like new in publishers shrink-wrap. This book pays tribute to the mature work of Stuart Davis, a distinctly American artist who adapted European modernism to reflect the sights, sounds, and rhythms of popular culture. Beginning in 1921, a series of creative breakthroughs led Davis away from figurative painting and toward a more abstract expression of the world he inhabited. Drawing upon his admiration for Cezanne, Leger, Picasso, and Seurat, Davis developed a style that would evolve over the next four decades to become a dominant force in postwar art. His visionary responses to modern life and culture both high and low remain relevant more than 50 years after his death. Focusing on the images and motifs that became hallmarks of his career, this book features approximately 100 works-from his paintings of tobacco packages of the early 1920s, the abstract Egg Beater series, and the WPA murals of the 1930s, to the majestic works of his last two decades. The authors take a critical approach to the development of Davis's art and theory, paying special attention to the impact his earlier work had upon his later masterpieces. They also discuss Davis's unique ability to assimilate the lessons of Cubism as well as the imagery of popular culture, the aesthetics of advertising, and the sounds and rhythms of jazz-his great musical passion. Informed by previously unpublished primary documents, the detailed chronology is, in effect, the first Davis biography. Together, these elements create a vital portrait of an artist whose works hum with intelligence and energy.

Softcover. Zach Feuer Gallery, 1st, 2006, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 70 pages. Priya Bhatnagar in Flash Art has written "Threatening to unravel pop culture's abstractions, Hawkins's images call into question the socially coded nature of its identities, icons, meanings and values while contesting its homogenization of beauty and fashion. Joel Sternfeld's foreword calls this survey of recent work "an achievement of the first magnitude." Inviting friends and strangers in Nepal to pose for the camera, Blue Eyes includes three photographic series and three video projects that reveal the ubiquity of American media culture while underscoring certain behaviors as they pertain to global capitalism and race. Each image investigates the experience of cultural imperialism as seen through the eyes of those living in the developing world. Hawkins highlights the visual dialogue that comprises consumer and popular culture and asks the viewer to consider a world of differences increasingly veiled by surface similarities.

Softcover. Zach Feuer Gallery, 1st, 2006, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 70 pages. Priya Bhatnagar in Flash Art has written "Threatening to unravel pop culture's abstractions, Hawkins's images call into question the socially coded nature of its identities, icons, meanings and values while contesting its homogenization of beauty and fashion. Joel Sternfeld's foreword calls this survey of recent work "an achievement of the first magnitude." Inviting friends and strangers in Nepal to pose for the camera, Blue Eyes includes three photographic series and three video projects that reveal the ubiquity of American media culture while underscoring certain behaviors as they pertain to global capitalism and race. Each image investigates the experience of cultural imperialism as seen through the eyes of those living in the developing world. Hawkins highlights the visual dialogue that comprises consumer and popular culture and asks the viewer to consider a world of differences increasingly veiled by surface similarities.

Hardcover. New York, Cambridge University Press, 1st US, 1989, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket, 190 pages. Illustrated with black & white photographs. Clean, tight copy. The documentary style that dominates American photography had its origins in the social reform publicity campaigns of the turn of the century. This book traces the history of this genre and its main participants, including Jacob Riis, Lewis Hine, Walker Evans, Dorothea Lange, Ben Shahn, and Russell Lee. Clean copy.