american west

Hardcover. New York, PowerHouse Books, 1st, 2005, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover. Like new in publisher's shrink-wrap.

Hardcover. Fort Worth TX, Amon Carter Museum, 1st, 1998, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, 48 pages. Hardcover with dust jacket. Clean, unmarked copy. Like new in publisher's shrink-wrap. This beautifully made and designed collection of the turn-of-the-century photos by cowboy-photographer Erwin E. Smith covers everything you always wanted to know about cowboys and more. Worcester, who tells the story in Smith's voice, ties the pictures to details of the Wild West world--how cowboys came to be, the ins and outs of roping cattle, and more--and profiles colorful characters, from wranglers to cooks to broncobusters. The frequently overlooked African Americans and Hispanics who contributed greatly to cowboy culture are considered as well. Also included are atmospheric tidbits about the roguish and glorious cowboy life. However, it's Smith's authentic photos that steal the show: the day-to-day routine at camps, the excitement of rodeos, and the ambience of the sweeping dusty plains are a pleasure to behold.

Softcover. NY, Crown, 1st wraps, 1995, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, Black & white photos by Farley. 160 pages. "Farley has gathered these portraits of cowgirls - not showbiz cowgirls, but the real thing. Her subjects work in harsh, unpredictable climates, bring up families while they manage their ranches, and compete - and win - in rodeos alongside men. Her black-and-white photographs capture the spirit and energy of authentic working cowgirls and the raw beauty of the western landscape." Oblong format.

Softcover. Urbana IL, University of Illinois Press, 1st, 2015, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 295 pages, b&w illustrations. INSCRIBED BY BECK on the title page. A daughter of freed African American slaves, Daisy Turner became a living repository of history. The family narrative entrusted to her--"a well-polished artifact, an heirloom that had been carefully preserved"--began among the Yoruba in West Africa and continued with her own century and more of life. In 1983, folklorist Jane Beck began a series of interviews with Turner, then one hundred years old and still relating four generations of oral history. Beck uses Turner's storytelling to build the Turner family saga, using at its foundation the oft-repeated touchstone stories at the heart of their experiences: the abduction into slavery of Turner's African ancestors; Daisy's father Alec Turner learning to read; his return as a soldier to his former plantation to kill his former overseer; and Daisy's childhood stand against racism. Other stories re-create enslavement and her father's life in Vermont--in short, the range of life events large and small, transmitted by means so alive as to include voice inflections. Beck, at the same time, weaves in historical research and offers a folklorist's perspective on oral history and the hazards--and uses--of memory. Clean copy.

Hardcover. New York , Dodd Mead, 1st, 1907, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, light blue cloth with color label illustration pasted to front cover, title stamped in white. 346 pages, illustrations by B. Martin Justice. Minor shelf wear. This story set in the American West centers around the adopted daughter of the town marshall and the mystery surrounding her parentage.

Softcover. Chicago, Chicago Review Press, reprint, 2011, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 430 pages, b&w photos. This first major biography of the most romanticized icon in jazz thrillingly recounts his wild ride. From his emergence in the 1950s--when an uncannily beautiful young man from Oklahoma appeared on the West Coast to become, seemingly overnight, the prince of "cool" jazz--until his violent, drug-related death in Amsterdam in 1988, Chet Baker lived a life that has become an American myth. Here, drawing on hundreds of interviews and previously untapped sources, James Gavin gives a hair-raising account of the trumpeter's dark journey. Clean copy.

Softcover. Pittsfield MA, The Berkshire Museum, 1st, 1987, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 32 pages, sepia toned illustrations. Essay by Fels. Clean copy.

Hardcover. Wichita KS, Pr. Printed, 2nd Ed., n.d. (1930), Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover. Black & white frontispiece of author. Many black & white photo plates. 342 pages. No date. Nice tight copy. Green covers with bright cover decoration, spine lettering faded otherwise very good. One of the classic books on the policing, range-roving, & settlement of the Western plains.

Hardcover. Westport CT, Greenwood Press, 1st, 1993, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover in glossy boards, 174 pages. B&w frontispiece portrait. Dorothy Parker (1893-1967) had something to say about virtually all her contemporaries among the literati, and they returned the favor in full measure. This well articulated primary and secondary bibliography covers the complete canon and its critical reaction, with illuminating annotations complemented by a biographical sketch. Included also are three personal views of Parker-- by Joseph Bryan, III, Richard Lauterbach, and Wyatt Cooper. The accumulated evidence suggests that Parker should be considered a major figure in American letters not just America's wittiest woman who happened to write. Clean copy.

Hardcover. NY, Farrar, Straus And Giroux, 1st, 2024, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket, 464 pages. A personal exploration of the American West and the work of one of America's greatest photographers. Timothy O'Sullivan is America's most famous war photographer. You know his work even if you don't know his name: A Harvest of Death, taken at Gettysburg, is an icon of the Civil War. He was also among the first photographers to elevate what was then a trade to the status of fine art. The images of the American West he made after the war, while traveling with the surveys led by Clarence King and George Wheeler, display a prescient awareness of what photography would become; years later, Ansel Adams would declare his work 'surrealistic and disturbing.' At the same time, we know very little about O'Sullivan himself. Nor do we know-really know-much more about the landscapes he captured. Robert Sullivan's Double Exposure sets off in pursuit of these two enigmas. This book documents the author's own road trip across the West in search of the places, many long forgotten or paved over, that O'Sullivan pictured. It also stages a reckoning with how the changes wrought on the land were already under way in the 1860s and '70s, and how these changes were a continuation of the Civil War by other means.

Hardcover. The New Press, 1st, 1997, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover, 207 pages. Historian Michael Lesy, author of Wisconsin Death Trip, has produced another haunting volume with Dreamland. The book chronicles a day in the life of America at the turn of the 20th century, an optimistic, peaceful time. Lesy chose 208 black-and-white pictures from the archive of the Detroit Publishing Company, the hugely successful postcard business. The images depict skyscrapers under construction, bustling urban streets, farmers and dusty country roads, and the glories of the newly charted American West, with its cowboys, miners, and distant prairie towns. The atmosphere of order and calm portrayed in the photographs is deceptive, as Lesy's thoughtful essays reveal.

Hardcover. NY, Merrell, 1st, 2017, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover, 160 pages. Over the course of his fifty-year career, American photographer Edward Weston (1886-1958) blazed a path into Photo-Modernism rendering portraits, landscapes, still-lifes and nudes. In 1902, a sixteen-year-old Weston took up photography in Highland Park, Illinois, where he worked as an amateur for five years. In 1907, at the age of twenty-one, Weston moved to Tropico, California, now the city of Glendale in Los Angeles County, where he constructed his first studio and set about with great purpose to become a photographic artist. Examining Weston's earliest sharp- and soft-focus photographs reveals that the young artist had already formed a perfect sense of composition that was to be the hallmark of his later work. Presenting Weston's earliest work from a recently discovered family album, Edward Weston: Portrait of the Young Man as an Artist compares the artist's naive first artistic efforts with his latest masterworks to show the persistence and evolution of his singular vision to find essential form in the vernacular with an ever-increasing intensity. As a young man deeply intuitive and original in his creative expression, Edward Weston demonstrates that his teenage work, beginning with his amateur snapshots, embrace the same significant form as the later work for which he is now considered a master.

Hardcover. NY, Newmarket Press, 1st, 1988, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a lightly worn dust jacket, 335 pages, b&w illustrations. This account of the intervention into the Korean war of the Chinese People's Liberation Army is told from the point of view of the Chinese. The author did much of his research inside China, interviewing participants, and presents vivid portraits of the soldiers and such figures as Mao Zedong and Douglas MacArthur. Korea was the focus of the first great East-West confrontation, and the war cost over 140,000 American lives. The crucial intervention of the Chinese and their near victory brought the super-powers to the brink of nuclear war. Written by a British newspaper reporter who covered the latter stages of the war, this book contains narrative from extensive interviews with participants in the Korean War, including many Chinese, which differentiates it from most other accounts. Name on front fly leaf, fading to dust jacket, otherwise clean.

Hardcover. Lawrence KS, Coronado Press, 1st, 1972, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, 217 pages, green cloth over boards. Limited to 400 copies. The author was a scholar on the banking business in the early American west, especially Kansas.

Hardcover. Christie's, 1987-1989, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Complete 7 volume set including index, bound handsomely in red cloth over boards with gilt lettering and insignia to front covers, gilt titles to spines. Part I, Eighteenth Century Books Including the Gutenberg Bible; Part II, Medieval and Renaissance Manuscripts; Part III, Printed Books and Manuscripts Including Western Americana; Part IV, Printed Books and Manuscripts Including Early Printing, Literature, and Fine Bindings; Part V, Printed Books and Manuscripts Including Americana, Literature, and Fine Bindings; Part VI, Printed Books and Manuscripts Concerning William Morris and His Circle; Index and Price Lists. (12" x 9"). 302pp, 125pp, 320pp, 344pp, 316pp, 102pp, 99pp. Color and b/w plates throughout.

Hardcover. NY, W. W. Norton & Company, 1st, 2016, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket, 580 pages, b&w illustrations. Los Angeles is a city founded on blood. Once a small Mexican pueblo teeming with Californios, Indians, and Americans, all armed with Bowie knives and Colt revolvers, it was among the most murderous locales in the Californian frontier. In Eternity Street: Violence and Justice in Frontier Los Angeles, "a vivid, disturbing portrait of early Los Angeles" (Publishers Weekly), John Mack Faragher weaves a riveting narrative of murder and mayhem, featuring a cast of colorful characters vying for their piece of the city. These include a newspaper editor advocating for lynch laws to enact a crude manner of racial justice and a mob of Latinos preparing to ransack a county jail and murder a Texan outlaw. In this "groundbreaking" (True West) look at American history, Faragher shows us how the City of Angels went from a lawless outpost to the sprawling metropolis it is today. A riveting popular history of Los Angeles's bloody beginnings. Clean copy.

Hardcover. NY, Dodd Mead, 1st, 1967, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover, 120 pages. Black & white Illustrations by author. Dust jacket with edgewear, chips, otherwise very good. A noted artist-illustrator presents a pictorial gallery of the men and women of the American frontier West in pencil drawings: the cowboy, rancher, stagecoach bandit, marshal, riverboat captain, vaquero, peddler, gunsmith, mountain man, wagon cook, missionary, etc.

Hardcover. New York, Simon & Schuster Books, 1st, 1995, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, 128 pages. Hardcover with dust jacket. Light abrasions on bottom corners. Light edgewaer to dust jacket. Clean, tight copy. Caldecott Honor Book with sticker on front. Handsomely illustrated with Brian Pinkney's color scratchboard drawings. Based on a West Indian folk-tale drawing on African, European and South American traditions.

Hardcover. Albuquerque, University of New Mexico, 1st, 1971, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Good, Hardcover in a lightly worn, chipped dust jacket. 253 pages, INSCRIBED BY TAYLOR on the title page. Previous owner's inscription on half-title page, otherwise clean. First Mail West recounts the colorful history of stagecoach lines on the Santa Fe Trail during the height of overland traffic from 1850 to 1879. Desert, rain, snow, wind, outlaws, Indians, buffalo stampedes, and business competitors challenged, and sometimes scuttled, the operation of stage lines between Missouri and New Mexico. The author describes the topography, roads, rolling stock, stations, accommodations, and natural and human dangers along the trail, and analyzes the fierce competition between independent lines for passenger traffic and federal mail contracts.

Hardcover. Baltimore, The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1st, 2001, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a dust jacket. 374 pages, b&w photos. Clean, unmarked copy with only minor wear to dust jacket. "At the dawn of the nineteenth century, Saratoga Springs hosted no more than a thousand hardy travelers yearly, Newport floundered in the midst of a fifty-year commercial decline, and Coney Island's beach resembled a wind-swept wilderness. A hundred years later, the number of summer visitors to Saratoga had increased a hundredfold, the antics of high society at Newport transfixed America, and at least five million pleasure seekers visited Coney annually. 'Those who talk of the mushroom growth of our Western cities,' declared an astounded writer for Harper's Weekly in 1878, 'might better spend their wonder and enthusiasm upon our Eastern watering-place.'" -- From the Introduction. Fifty-nine illustrations enliven Sterngass's unique study of the commodification of pleasure that occurred as capitalist values flourished, travel grew more accessible, and leisure time became democratized.

Hardcover. New York, Norton, 1st, 1992, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, 224 pages. Hardcover with dust jacket. A very clean, unmarked copy with only minor wear to dust jacket edges. A tight copy. Discusses the history and technology of the Erie Canal, examines some of the famous and infamous people involved with its construction, describes how other canals were built as a result of its success, and discusses how "Great Western" opened up the west.

Hardcover. NY, Alfred A. Knopf, 1st, 1964, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Good, Hardcover in a bright, price-clipped dust jacket. 414 pages, numerous b/w illustrations, owner's gift inscription on endpaper, slight foxing, text clean and sound. Small paper scar at bottom of spine where sticker was removed.

Softcover. Charleston, SC, Arcadia Publishing, 1st, 2004, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 128 pages, b&w photos throughout. At the foot of the Huachuca Mountains, the U.S. Army founded one of the most crucial military posts for American expansion into the southwest frontier. Soldiers had been stationed in the region for decades, but in 1877 Fort Huachuca became the symbolic cornerstone of America's western domain. The Native American word huachuca, meaning "place of thunder," described the sporadic but marvelous electrical storms in the area, but the skies would not be the only thing booming. During the tumultuous campaigns to resolve American and Indian disputes, the U.S. infantry and famed Buffalo Soldiers faced off with Geronimo and his Apache nation in both tense negotiations and bitter combat. As time marched on, the fort developed into a permanent installation with barracks, modern training grounds, and other facilities to accommodate troop rotations and eventually became the innovative Center for Military Intelligence. Clean copy.