art history

Hardcover. Baton Rouge LA, Louisiana State University Press, 1st, 1988, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket. 360 pages, b&w illustrations. Following the American Civil War, many former Confederates fled their southern homeland. Some left the United States, some moved to the western territories. Still others moved north to northeastern and midwestern towns and cities, believing that northern economic and educational opportunities offered the quickest means of rebuilding shattered fortunes and lives. Sutherland provides a detailed and illuminating account of the contributions these displaced southerners made to the financial, literary, artistic, and political life of the nation. Very nice copy.

Softcover. Syracuse NY, Gustav Stickley, 1st, 1905, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, approx. 200 pages, b&w illustrations, ads. Gustav Stickley showed his designs and ideas through his magazine The Craftsman. Published monthly between Oct 1901 and Dec 1916, The Craftsman was "the bible" of the Arts and Crafts Movement in the United States, which emphasized spare design, hand-crafting, and the importance of the individual craftsman. This issue features his article "Ornament: Its Use and Its Abuse". Also articles on The Development of the Public Library, The Future of Ceramics in America, Old Pewter Plate, The Modern House Beautiful, others. Clean, bright copy.

Softcover. Stanford CA, Stanford University Press, 1st pbk, 2004, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 271 pages, b&w illustrations. The Cult of Art in Nazi Germany presents a new interpretation of National Socialism, arguing that art in the Third Reich was not simply an instrument of the regime, but actually became a source of the racist politics upon which its ideology was founded. Through the myth of the "Aryan race," a race pronounced superior because it alone creates culture, Nazism asserted art as the sole raison d'etre of a regime defined by Hitler as the "dictatorship of genius." Michaud shows the important link between the religious nature of Nazi art and the political movement, revealing that in Nazi Germany art was considered to be less a witness of history than a force capable of producing future, the actor capable of accelerating the coming of a reality immanent to art itself. Light sticker residue to rear cover otherwise clean, very good.

Hardcover. University Park PA, Pennsylvania State University Press, 1st, 2010, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket, 295 pages illustrated in b&w and color. Beginning in the 1730s, Heather Minor tells us, Rome "began to resemble one huge construction site," with a series of ambitious and expensive new building campaigns that transformed the face and substance of the city. From renovations of the Santa Maria Maggiore and San Giovanni in Laterano and the restoration of the Arch of Constantine to the creation of the Capitoline Museum and the establishment of the papacy's Calcografia, the push for reform not only renewed papal and Church identity but also revived Italian culture as a whole. Based on extensive archival research and full of fascinating stories about the often stormy theological and intellectual debates central to the attempts at reform, The Culture of Architecture in Enlightenment Rome brings to life the personalities of architects, theologians, and intellectuals and links the extensive architectural programs with powerful shifts in the intellectual climate of the time. Clean, bright copy.

Hardcover. Franklin Center PA, The Franklin Library, 1st, 1987, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, rich maroon leather boards with decorations in gold on front and rear boards. Title in gold on spine between raised leather bands. All edges are gilt. Text is clean and crisp. Satin ribbon marker. SIGNED BY PLIMPTON on a blank prelim page. In April 1985, Sports Illustrated published an article that stunned the sports community. George Plimpton's 13-page profile of Sidd Finch, a mysterious pitcher who had been signed by the New York Mets and reportedly threw 168 mph, came complete with photos from spring training, scouting reports, and interviews with Mets players and management. A week later, SI apologized to readers around the world for their role in what is generally regarded as the greatest hoax in the history of sports journalism. The magazine had teamed up with the legendary author and Paris Review bon vivant for an April Fool's Day prank of unprecedented proportions. After the success of the article, Plimpton decided to turn the story into a novel -- a rousing baseball fairy tale that is considered one of the most memorable sports novels of the last half-century.

Hardcover. NY, Macmillan, 1st, 1987, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket, 275 pages. In April 1985, Sports Illustrated published an article that stunned the sports community. George Plimpton's 13-page profile of Sidd Finch, a mysterious pitcher who had been signed by the New York Mets and reportedly threw 168 mph, came complete with photos from spring training, scouting reports, and interviews with Mets players and management. A week later, SI apologized to readers around the world for their role in what is generally regarded as the greatest hoax in the history of sports journalism. The magazine had teamed up with the legendary author and Paris Review bon vivant for an April Fool's Day prank of unprecedented proportions. After the success of the article, Plimpton decided to turn the story into a novel -- a rousing baseball fairy tale that is considered one of the most memorable sports novels of the last half-century. Clean copy.

Hardcover. NY, Princeton Architectural Press, 1st, 2015, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket, 224 pages. The Dakota is arguably the best-known residential address in the world, home to dozens of New York City's most famous artists, performers, and successful executives. The rare sale of an apartment there, usually at jaw-dropping prices, is newsworthy, as is the financial and architectural health of the building itself, a landmark in every sense of the word.The first true luxury apartment house built in New York City, more than 130 years ago, the Dakota is still the gold standard against which all other apartment buildings are weighed. Historian Andrew Alpern tells the fascinating story of how the Dakota came to be, how Singer sewing magnate Edward Clark dared to build an apartment building luxurious enough to coax the city's wealthy from their mansions downtown for ultra-modern living on what was then the swamplands of the Upper West Side. Redrawn plans of the entire building, published here for the first time, show how Clark created apartments glamorous enough that they made living under a shared roof as acceptable in Manhattan as it already was in Europe's grand capitals, forever revolutionizing apartment life in New York City.

Hardcover. NY, DK, 1st, 2021, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, pictorial boards, 224 pages. Meticulously researched and expertly written, The DC Book is packed with stunning, painstakingly selected artwork, illuminating infographics, and incisive, specially curated essays that shed new light on the ever-evolving DC Multiverse. From the world's finest Super Heroes such as Superman, Batman, and Wonder Woman, to iconic villains like the Joker, Lex Luthor, and Darkseid, to mythic realms like Apokolips and Themyscira, to cosmic energies like The Source and The Speed Force, The DC Book explores the key concepts, characters, and events that have defined and shaped DC Comics over the past 80 years. Clean copy.

Hardcover. Princeton NJ, Princeton University Press, 1st, 1979, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Two volume set. Matching gold cloth boards with titles in gold on spine, in bright dust jackets. Transcribed and with Introduction by Lilian M.C. Randall. B&w illustrations of the sculptures, paintings, drawings and etchings that Lucas dealt with while in Europe. Double-column English text. Provides an extraordinary archive for historians and dealers. Provides a hugely empirical database for prices paid and commissions issued to artists, dealers, and craftsmen. George A. Lucas's acquaintances include Daumier, Cassatt, Whistler and Barye, among many, many others. Volume Two is given over wholly to Lucas's daily diary, which ran for an extraordinary length of time. Volume 1: xv [2], 3-148 pages.; Volume 2: iv [ii], 3-965 pages. DUE TO WEIGHT, DOMESTIC SHIPPING ONLY.

Hardcover. Chicago, Chicago Review Press, 1st, 2022, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket, 322 pages, b&w photos. An essential piece of Disney history has been largely unreported for eighty years. Soon after the birth of Mickey Mouse, one animator raised the Disney Studio far beyond Walt's expectations. That animator also led a union war that almost destroyed it. Art Babbitt animated for the Disney studio throughout the 1930s and through 1941, years in which he and Walt were jointly driven to elevate animation as an art form, up through Snow White, Pinocchio, and Fantasia. But as America prepared for World War II, labor unions spread across Hollywood. Disney fought the unions while Babbitt embraced them. Soon, angry Disney cartoon characters graced picket signs as hundreds of animation artists went out on strike. Adding fuel to the fire was Willie Bioff, one of Al Capone's wiseguys who was seizing control of Hollywood workers and vied for the animators' union. Using never-before-seen research from previously lost records, including conversation transcriptions from within the studio walls, author and historian Jake S. Friedman reveals the details behind the labor dispute that changed animation and Hollywood forever. Clean copy.

Softcover. Chicago, Chicago Review Press, 1st, 2022, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 322 pages, b&w illustrations. An essential piece of Disney history has been unreported for eighty years.Soon after the birth of Mickey Mouse, one animator raised the Disney Studio far beyond Walts expectations. That animator also led a union war that almost destroyed it. Art Babbitt animated for the Disney studio throughout the 1930s and through 1941, years in which he and Walt were jointly driven to elevate animation as an art form, up through Snow White, Pinocchio, and Fantasia.But as America prepared for World War II, labour unions spread across Hollywood. Disney fought the unions while Babbitt embraced them. Soon, angry Disney cartoon characters graced picket signs as hundreds of animation artists went out on strike. Adding fuel to the fire was Willie Bioff, one of Al Capones wiseguys who was seizing control of Hollywood workers and vied for the animators union.Using never-before-seen research from previously lost records, including conversation transcriptions from within the studio walls, author and historian Jake S. Friedman reveals the details behind the labour dispute that changed animation and Hollywood forever. Clean copy.

Softcover. UK, Cambridge University Press, 1st, 2005, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 317 pages, b&w illustrations. Translated from the Dutch by Diane Webb. "Rembrandt, Hals and Vermeer are still household names, even though they died over three hundred years ago. In their lifetimes they witnessed the extraordinary consolidation of the newly independent Dutch Republic and its emergence as one of the richest nations on earth. As one contemporary wrote in 1673: the Dutch were 'the envy of some, the fear of others, and the wonder of all their neighbours'. During the Dutch Golden Age, the arts blossomed and the country became a haven of religious tolerance. However, despite being self-proclaimed champions of freedom, the Dutch conquered communities in America, Africa and Asia and were heavily involved in both slavery and the slave trade on three continents." Clean copy.

Softcover. NY, Penguin Books, reprint, 1990, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 363 pages. Despite ceaseless conflict between different classes and cities, Holland's rise to power was almost miraculously rapid. In a few short years a tiny country gained control of territory from Indonesia to the West Indies, from South Africa to South America. In this marvelously evocative book Professor Boxer recaptures the scenes of adventure and dissipation in the four corners of the earth , the up surge in the arts and sciences, and the sad decoines from the ' Golden Century' to the 'Periwig Period'. Few stories could be as rich and colorful, yet it was largely inspired by the ' grave and sober people of Holland', the Calvinist merchants of Amsterdam who forged a nation based on ' gain and godliness'. Such were the people whom Rembrandt painted, who debated policies of apartheid or assimilation, who founded factories and forts. The Dutch Seaborne empire offers a portrait of them all, as they made their spectacular entrance into the modern world. Clean copy.

Hardcover. Cambridge MA, The MIT Press, 1st, 2016, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket. The daguerreotype, invented in France, came to America in 1839. By 1851, this early photographic method had been improved by American daguerreotypists to such a degree that it was often referred to as "the American process." The daguerreotype-now perhaps mostly associated with stiffly posed portraits of serious-visaged nineteenth-century personages-was an extremely detailed photographic image, produced though a complicated process involving a copper plate, light-sensitive chemicals, and mercury fumes. It was, as Sarah Kate Gillespie shows in this generously illustrated history, something wholly and remarkably new: a product of science and innovative technology that resulted in a visual object. It was a hybrid, with roots in both fine art and science, and it interacted in reciprocally formative ways with fine art, science, and technology. Gillespie maps the evolution of the daguerreotype, as medium and as profession, from its introduction to the ascendancy of the "American process," tracing its relationship to other fields and the professionalization of those fields. She does so by recounting the activities of a series of American daguerreotypists, including fine artists, scientists, and mechanical tinkerers. She describes, for example, experiments undertaken by Samuel F. B. Morse as he made the transition from artist to inventor; how artists made use of the daguerreotype, both borrowing conventions from fine art and establishing new ones for a new medium; the use of the daguerreotype in various sciences, particularly astronomy; and technological innovators who drew on their work in the mechanical arts.

Hardcover. UK, White Owl/Pen & Sword, 20231st, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket, 191 pages, b&w photos. Charlie Chaplin's career has been described, critiqued, and scrutinized. There are book-length studies on Chaplin's music hall career, his career at Keystone Studios and the Mutual Studios. Somehow, his tenure with First National studios, however, has been largely neglected, even though it was during this several-year contractual time period that Chaplin built and occupied his own studio for the first time, that he attempted and succeeded in filming a comedy feature (The Kid) and that he helped to set up United Artists, an organization that protected the salaries and creative freedom of actors in Hollywood. This period in Chaplin's story is especially interesting because such landmark moments are accompanied by Chaplin's first marriage and divorce, the death of his first child, his friendship with French silent film comedian Max Linder, World War I and the role he would play in it, and the production and release of several unsuccessful films that marked Chaplin's first creative blockage - one that threatened his future career. Clean copy.

Hardcover. NY, NBM, 1st, 2007, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover, 192 pages. Early b&w comic strips. Mutt and Jeff was the first successful daily comic strip; before it, the funnies were Sunday features. It debuted in 1907, however, as A. Mutt, limning the follies of lanky racetrack gambler Augustus Mutt. Diminutive sidekick Jeff appeared the following year to form a partnership that lasted until the strip's overdue demise in 1983. Mutt and Jeff was the first strip to essay weeks-long story lines, such as a trip to Mexico to join Pancho Villa's revolution. Compared to better-remembered strips of the era, Mutt and Jeff was crudely drawn, yet it captured the nation's fancy. Despite its significance in comics history, Mutt and Jeff is scantly regarded today. By the mid-1920s, Fisher handed creative duties over to ghosts to free up time for the playboy lifestyle that the strip's sizable revenues allowed him. Clean copy.

Hardcover. NY, Oxford University Press, 1st, 2018, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket, 239 pages. The Harvard philosopher Donald C. Williams (1899-1983) was a key figure in the history of analytic philosophy. He played a crucial role in reviving metaphysics at a time when other philosophers ridiculed, criticized, and committed it to the flames. He constructed an explanatorily powerful and parsimonious ontology and cosmology founded on logic, science, and common sense. His most influential articles were on the metaphysics of properties ('The Elements of Being') and the meta-physics of time ('The Sea Fight Tomorrow', 'The Myth of Passage'). His ontology of abstract particulars or tropes and his four-dimensional manifold theory of time remain leading hypotheses in metaphysics. Because of his novel contributions and his defense of metaphysics he made a lasting impact on philosophers of the next generation who in turn believed in the substance of metaphysical inquiry. Name on front fly leaf, light pencil marking to first 30 pages. Otherwise clean, very good.

Hardcover. NY, Oxford University Press, 1st, 1991, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket, pages, profusely illustrated in color and b/w. Written by an international team of scientists, The Enchanted Loom offers a sweeping look at the history of neuroscience from the philosophy of Aristotle to the advent of Artificial Intelligence. This collection of accessible, intriguing essays is supplemented by over 350 spectacularillustrations, many in color, with thorough and informative captions written by the scientists themselves. The authors discuss Descartes's contributions to thought about the brain, alongside brilliant artistic studies of the central nervous system that he and masters like da Vinci executed. Theyshow how phrenology--the long discredited study of skull shape and mental faculties--actually represented a breakthrough in thinking about localized brain functions, and how the advent of the microscope and other equipment led to new discoveries. The contributors bring the story up to the present day, unfolding the emergence of the modern neurosciences, advances in molecular biology, and the debate over how infants learn language. In addition, the book offers a short history of computers and recent thought about whether the mind works like computer software. Noted contributors include; Larry Squire, writing on memory; Solomon Snyder, discussing psychopharmacology; and John Dowling on vision. Colorful, intelligent, informative, The Enchanted Loom offers an authoritative and enjoyable look at the history of a complex and fascinating science.

Softcover. London, Penguin Books , reprint, 2020, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 553 pages. The Europeans is richly enthralling, panoramic cultural history of nineteenth-century Europe, told through the intertwined lives of three remarkable people: a great singer, Pauline Viardot, a great writer, Ivan Turgenev, and a great connoisseur, Pauline's husband Louis. Their passionate, ambitious lives were bound up with an astonishing array of writers, composers and painters all trying to make their way through the exciting, prosperous and genuinely pan-European culture that came about as a result of huge economic and technological change. This culture - through trains, telegraphs and printing - allowed artists of all kinds to exchange ideas and make a living, shuttling back and forth across the whole continent from the British Isles to Imperial Russia, as they exploited a new cosmopolitan age. Clean copy.

Hardcover. Weldon Owen , 1st, 2012, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover, 320 pages. In 2012 Disney celebrated the 75th anniversary of the Snow White movie, a beloved classic and an important milestone in film history. This book, created with the Walt Disney Family Foundation, run by Walt's daughter, is an exploration of the making of the film that includes never-before-published facts and art. This book is the first to reconstruct that process in exacting detail, with the loving attention it deserves from an internationally noted film scholar. Author J.B. Kaufman spent years researching the film's history, interviewing participants, and studying the marvelous archival art that appears in these pages. The result is a work that can be appreciated equally as a piece of film history and as a collectable art book, a joy for anyone who loves film, animation, and the magical world that Walt Disney created.

Hardcover. NY, Random House, 1st, 1954, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Good, 403 pages. Hardcover. 65 illustrations, 40 in full color. Price clipped dust jacket worn with tape repairs, fading - jacket now protected with clear plastic cover. "An account of the life and death of an art, of the men who made it and of the lusty age in which they flourished. 65 illustrations, including 40 in full color." Index, glossary, bibliography, appendices, artist biographies, chronology. Clean, tight copy.

Hardcover. NY, Charles Scribner's Sons, 1st, 1983, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket. Illustrated in b&w and color. Clean copy.