art literature

Softcover. NY, New York Review Books, 1st US., 2005, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 488 pages. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, between the reign of Louis XIII and the Revolution, French aristocratic society developed an art of living based on a refined code of good manners. Conversation, which began as a way of passing time, eventually became the central ritual of social life. In the salons, freed from the rigidity of court life, it was women who dictated the rules and presided over exchanges among socialites, writers, theologians, and statesmen. They contributed decisively to the development of the modern French language, new literary forms, and debates over philosophical and scientific ideas. With a cast of characters both famous and unknown, ranging from the Marquise de Rambouillet to Madame De Stael was a, and including figures like Ninon de Lenclos, the Marquise de Sevigne, and Madame de Lafayette, as well as Pascal, La Rochefoucauld, Diderot, and Voltaire, Benedetta Craveri traces the history of this worldly society that carried the art of sociability to its supreme perfection-and ultimately helped bring on the Revolution that swept it all away. Clean copy.

Softcover. Motorbooks , 1st, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 156 pages illustrated in color and b&w. Ever since the automobile was made accessible to the masses, car dealerships have been special places where desires, sweaty palms, and that new-car smell are distilled into an intoxicating elixir of freedom and ownership. From Art Deco showrooms of the '30s to modern glass-walled superstores, this nostalgic road trip revisits the architecture, marketing, and business practices that have become inextricably associated with auto retailers. A fascinating text accompanies an equally compelling collection of archival photography recalling past and present car dealer phenomena like new model previews and grand openings (i.e., soaped showroom windows, veiled cars, search lights), promotions and giveaways (banners, literature, buttons, pens, pedal cars, ashtrays, and anything else dealers could use to help make a sale), business practices from early-century animal trade-ins to today's refreshing Saturn-style service, customer relations and service centers, and nontraditional automotive outlets like Sears-Roebuck and hardware stores. Sidebars highlight innovative dealerships and those that have been in business for decades. Bumpto bottom corner otherwise clean, very good.

Hardcover. NY, W. W. Norton, 4th pr., 2004, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket, 462 pages. Maria Tatar's The Annotated Brothers Grimm celebrates the powerful cultural legacy of the stories collected by Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm --tales that have enchanted children and adults alike for generations. The volume includes over forty of the Grimms' most beloved stories, including: Rapunzel * Hansel and Gretel * The Brave Little Tailor * Cinderella * Little Red Riding Hood * The Robber Bridegroom * Briar Rose * Snow White * Rumplestilskin * The Golden Goose * The Singing, Soaring Lark * The Frog King * The Juniper Tree * and Mother Holle. With over 150 paintings and drawings from the most celebrated fairy tale illustrators, including George Cruikshank, Paul Hey, Walter Crane, Warwick Goble, Kay Nielsen, and Arthur Rackham. Clean copy.

Hardcover. NY, W. W. Norton, 1st, 2002, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket, 445 pages. Through the woods with Hansel and Gretel, out to the ball with Cinderella and into the ocean with the Little Mermaid, this volume takes us down the familiar paths of our folklore heritage. Maria Tatar's Annotated Classic Fairy Tales celebrates the powerful cultural legacy of fairy tales and provides an invaluable storytelling archive for children and adults alike. The volume includes twenty-six stories, along with annotations and sumptuous images. Among them are: Cinderella, Hansel and Gretel, Snow White, Sleeping Beauty, Rapunzel, Rumpelstiltskin, The Story of the Three Little Pigs, Master Cat or Puss in Boots, The Story of the Three Bears, The Emperor's New Clothes, The Little Match Girl, The Princess and the Pea, The Ugly Duckling, The Little Mermaid. With over 300 paintings and drawings in full colour throughout by Ivan Bilibin, Edward Burne-Jones, Walter Crane, George Cruikshank, Gustave Dore, Edmund Dulac, Kay Nielsen, Maxfield Parrish and Arthur Rackham. Clean copy.

Hardcover. NY, Pantheon, 1st, 2016, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket. 320 pages illustrated in color by Liew. "Liew's graphic novel is a fascinating look at a cartoonist's growth over time and how his creative output reflects the culture around him, and Liew tells Chye's story in a way that only comic books can....A beautifully multidimensional portrait of the cartoonist, beginning with Chye's personal interpretation o the past before showing comics and sketches that provide further insight....The color palettes, the paper quality, the incorporation of photographs and sketches, they all combine with the text to provide a complex view of Charlie Chan Hock Chye that has a strong sense of history behind it." A 2017 Eisner Award Winner for Best Writer/Artist, Best US Edition of International Material--Asia, and Best Publication DesignWinner of the Singapore Literature Prize 2016A New York Times bestsellerAn Economist Book of the Year 2016An NPR Graphic Novel Pick for 2016A Washington Post Best Graphic Novel of 2016A New York Post Best Books of 2016A Publishers Weekly Best Book of 2016

Softcover. Washington DC, National Gallery of Art , 2nd pr., 203, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 334 pages illustrated with 224 color plates, 86 black & white. One of America's most innovative artists, Romare Bearden (1911-1988) made colorful and passionate images that reflected his life in a time of creative ferment. His influences ranged from the old masters to African art, as well as the world around him: popular religion and ritual, jazz clubs and brothels, the history and literature of his time, and the places he lived (the rural South, Pittsburgh and Harlem, the Caribbean island of St. Martin). The resulting images are fresh and evocative, filled with quirky details and rhythmic forms. This authoritative and beautiful book, which accompanies a major retrospective opening at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., provides a provocative and absorbing look at a beloved artist. The Art of Romare Bearden showcases compelling examples of his pioneering work: complex collages and photostats; watercolors, gouaches, and oils; little-known landscapes; his only known sculpture; costume designs; and book illustrations. Mildwear to corners otherwise very good, clean copy.

Hardcover. Cambridge MA, Harvard University Press, 1st, 1940, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Poor, Hardcover, red cloth in a worn and chipped dust jacket with closed tears, 191 pages with index. Dr. Worcester presents a theory of satire, surveying the whole field since Dryden's Discourse of the Origin of Satire and drawing illustrations not only from English but from classical, French, German, and American literature. At the same time he makes a penetrating study of irony and its uses. Name on inside front cover otherwise clean.

Hardcover. London, Jonathan Cape, reprint, 1991, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket, 368 pages, 33 illustrations + frontispiece and self-caricature. Prologue and epilogue by the editor. The autobiography of the author of the "Swallows and Amazon" books. Clean copy.

Softcover. London, Routledge, reprint, 1996, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 325 pages with index, b&w illustrations. An outstanding piece of scholarship and a fascinating read, The Body Emblazoned is a compelling study of the culture of dissection the English Renaissance, which informed intellectual enquiry in Europe for nearly two hundred years. In this outstanding work, Jonathan Sawday explores the dark, morbid eroticism of the Renaissance anatomy theatre, and relates it to not only the great monuments of Renaissance art, but to the very foundation of the modern idea of knowledge.Though the dazzling displays of the exterior of the body in Renaissance literature and art have long been a subject of enquiry, The Body Emblazoned considers the interior of the body, and what it meant to men and women in early modern culture. Clean, bright copy.

Hardcover. NY, Farrar Straus & Giroux, 1st, 2017, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket. A groundbreaking new biography of Ezra Pound, one of the most controversial poets of the twentieth century, told through the stories of his illustrious visitors at St Elizabeths Hospital, Washington, DC. An extraordinary book of real passionate research. In 1945, Ezra Pound was due to stand trial for treason for his broadcasts in Fascist Italy during the Second World War. But before the trial could take place Pound was pronounced insane. Escaping a potential death sentence he was shipped off to St Elizabeths Hospital near Washington, DC, where he was held for over a decade. At the hospital, Pound was at his most contradictory and most controversial- a genius writer - 'The most important living poet in the English language' according to T. S. Eliot - but also a traitor and now, seemingly, a madman. But he remained a magnetic figure. Eliot, Elizabeth Bishop, Robert Lowell and John Berryman all went to visit him at what was perhaps the world's most unorthodox literary salon- convened by a fascist and held in a lunatic asylum. Told through the eyes of his illustrious visitors, The Bughouse captures the essence of Pound - the artistic flair, the profound human flaws - whilst telling the grand story of politics and art in the twentieth century. Clean copy.

Hardcover. London, Faber and Faber, 1st, 1939, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, green cloth with gilt lettering on spine, 292 pages, b&w plates. An affectionate and mostly literal account of the early years of Williamson's growing family, based in part on a series of articles called 'Tales of My Children' which he had contributed to 'Family' in 1935. With a frontispiece and sixteen photographs by the author. Mild shelf wear, clean copy.

Softcover. UK, Cambridge University Press, 1st pbk, 2008, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover in pictorial wrappers, 352 pages. A groundbreaking study of cultural life during a turbulent and formative decade in contemporary China, this book seeks to explode several myths about the Cultural Revolution (officially 1966-1976). Through national and local examination of the full range of cultural forms (film, operas, dance, other stage arts, music, fine arts, literature, and even architecture), Clark argues against characterizing this decade as one of chaos and destruction. Rather, he finds that innovation and creativity, promotion of participation in cultural production, and a vigorous promotion of the modern were all typical of the Cultural Revolution. Using a range of previously little-used materials, Clark forces us to fundamentally reassess our understanding of the Cultural Revolution, a period which he sees as the product of innovation in conflict with the effort by political leaders to enforce a top-down modernity. Clean copy.

Hardcover. NY, Charles Scribner's Sons, 1st thus, 1882, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, gray cloth with red, black, and gilt embossed spine title, cover title, and bright cover illustration and decoration. Boards have beveled edges. All edges gilt. 70 pages, tissue-guarded frontispiece, 30 full-page illustrations; artists include A.B. Frost. Howard Pyle. Fredericks, J. S. Davis and others. A ballad written in Paris in 1841 at the time of the second funeral of Napoleon and is a narrative of French military history. Slender piece of cloth chipped away on rear cover, otherwise clean, very good.

Hardcover. Washington DC, Counterpoint, 1999, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover, 642 pages. Hailed in 1849 as "a new department in the literature of civilization," the slave narrative forms the foundation of the African American literary tradition. From the late-eighteenth-century narratives by Africans who endured the harrowing Middle Passage, through the classic American fugitive slave narratives of the mid-nineteenth century, slave narratives have provided some of the most graphic and damning documentary evidence of the horrors of slavery. Riveting, passionate, and politically charged, the slave narrative blends personal memory and rhetorical attacks on slavery to create powerful literature and propaganda.The Civitas Anthology presents the seven classic antislavery narratives of the antebellum period in their entirety: The History of Mary Prince, a West Indian Slave , the first slave narrative published by a woman in the Americas; The Confessions of Nat Turner , written when Turner was asked to record his motivation for leading the bloodiest slave revolt in U.S. history; The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass , an international bestseller and the first narrative to fashion the male fugitive slave into an African American cultural hero; The Narrative of William W. Brown , an account that explored with unprecedented realism the slave's survival ethic and the art of the slave trickster; The Narrative of the Life of Henry Bibb , the story of the struggles of the most memorable family man among the classic slave narrators; Running a Thousand Miles for Freedom , a gripping chronicle of one of the most daring and celebrated slave escapes ever recorded; and Incidents in the Life of Slave Girl , a dramatic text that exposed the sexual abuse of female slaves and pioneered the image of the fugitive slave woman as an articulate resister and survivor.Born out of lives of unparalleled suffering, the slave narrative captures all the bravery, drama, and hope that characterized the African American struggle against slavery. From these beginnings came some of the most influential novels in American literature, for the works of writers such as Harriet Beecher Stowe, Mark Twain, and Toni Morrison owe much of their power and social resonance to the slave narrative tradition. The Civitas Anthology gathers the most important narratives in this tradition into one volume for the first time, an indispensable resource for scholars, students, and general readers. Clean copy.

Hardcover. NY, Grossman Publishers, 1st, 1976, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, lightly worn dust jacket, 272 pages. Discussion of Wilkie Collins, Arthur Conan Doyle, G.K. Chesterton, John Buchan, Eric Ambler, Graham Greene, Georges Simenon, Raymond Chandler and Alfred Hitchcock. Clean copy.

Softcover. Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press , 1st, 1993, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 305 pages. "In The Dark End of the Street, Maria Damon brings a new sensitivity to modern poetic criticism. She adds an important dimension to cultural theory, revealing the struggles of one group of artists as they address improtant questions about art, social life, and the oppression they encounter. Taking as her premise that the intensity of poetic language is an appropriate venue for representing the 'dark end of the street' of social pain, Damon foregrounds the work and lives of a number of modern American poets in order to argue that the American avant-garde is located in the experimental literary works of social 'outsiders."

Softcover. Cambridge MA, Harvard University Press, 1st, 1995, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 139 pages. How does a poet repeatedly make art over a lifetime out of an arbitrary assignment of fate? By asking this question of the work of four American poets--two men of the postwar generation, two young women writing today--Helen Vendler suggests a fruitful way of looking at a poet's career and a new way of understanding poetic strategies as both mastery of forms and forms of mastery. Fate hands every poet certain unavoidable "givens." Of the poets Vendler studies, Robert Lowell sprang from a family famous in American and especially New England history; John Berryman found himself an alcoholic manic-depressive; Rita Dove was born black; Jorie Graham grew up trilingual, with three words for every object. In Vendler's readings, we see how these poets return again and again to the problems set out by their givens, and how each invents complex ways, both thematic and formal, of making poetry out of fate. Clean copy.

Hardcover. NY, E.P. Dutton & Co., 1st, 1907, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, illustrated frontispiece etching of Blenheim. Burgundy cloth with gilt titles and decoration, top edge gilt. The memoirs of the author of "Land of Hope and Glory." Clean, bright copy.

Hardcover. NY/Oxford UK, Berghahn Books, 1st, 2003, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, 232 pages, pictorial boards. Milena Jesenska, born in Prague in 1896, is most famous as one of Franz Kafka's great loves. Although their relationship lasted only a short time, it won the attention of the literary world with the 1952 publication of Kafka's letters to Milena. Her own letters did not survive. Later biographies showed her as a fascinating personality in her own right. In the Czech Republic, she is remembered as one of the most prominent journalists of the interwar period and as a brave one: in 1939 she was arrested for her work in the resistance after the German occupation of Bohemia and Moravia, and died in Ravensbruck concentration camp in 1944. It is estimated that Jesenska wrote well over 1,000 articles but only a handful have been translated into English. In this book her own writings provide a new perspective on her personality, as well as the changes in Central Europe between the two world wars as these were perceived by a woman of letters. The articles in this volume cover a wide range of topics, including her perceptions of Kafka, her understanding of social and cultural changes during this period, the threat of Nazism, and the plight of the Jews in the 1930s. Clean copy.

Hardcover. NY, Oxford University Press, 1st, 1988, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket, 512 pages. The second volume in this masterful biography finds Hughes rooting himself in Harlem, receiving stimulation from his rich cultural surroundings. Here he rethought his view of art and radicalism, and cultivated relationships with younger, more militant writers such as Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, James Baldwin, and Amiri Bakara. Illustrated with black & white photographs, a few by Roy DeCarava with whom Hughes published "The Sweet Flypaper of Life" and a portrait by Henri Cartier-Bresson. Clean copy.

Hardcover. NY, HarperCollins, 1st, 2002, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket. SIGNED BY PROSE on the title page. In a brilliant, wry, and provocative book, National Book Award finalist Francine Prose explores the complex relationship between the artist and his muse. In so doing, she illuminates with great sensitivity and intelligence the elusive emotional wellsprings of the creative process. Clean copy.

Hardcover. University of Nebraska Press, 1st, 2017, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover, 592 pages. Ring Lardner's influence on American letters is arguably greater than that of any other American writer in the early part of the twentieth century. Lauded by critics and the public for his groundbreaking short stories, Lardner was also the country's best-known journalist in the 1920s and early 1930s, when his voice was all but inescapable in American newspapers and magazines. Lardner's trenchant, observant, sly, and cynical writing style, along with a deep understanding of human foibles, made his articles wonderfully readable and his words resonate to this day. Ron Rapoport has gathered the best of Lardner's journalism from his earliest days at the South Bend Times through his years at the Chicago Tribune and his weekly column for the Bell Syndicate, which appeared in 150 newspapers and reached eight million readers. In these columns Lardner not only covered the great sporting events of the era--from Jack Dempsey's fights to the World Series and even an America's Cup--he also wrote about politics, war, and Prohibition, as well as parodies, poems, and penetrating observations on American life.

Lebanon NH, University of New Hampshire Press, 1st, 2005, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket. 294 pages, b&w illustrations. Presents a succinct, articulate examination of the work of the pioneering but controversial archaeologist Roland Wells Robbins (1908-1987) and the development of historical archaelogy in America. In 1945, the self-taught Robbins discovered the remains of Thoreau's cabin at Walden Pond. He excavated the site, documented his findings, and in 1947 published a short book, Discovery at Walden, about the experience. This project launched Robbins's career in archaeology, restoration, and reconstruction, and he went on to excavate at a number of New England iron works and other sites, including the Philipsburg Manor Upper Mills in New York, Stawbery Banke in New Hampshire, and Shadwell, Thomas Jefferson's Virginia birthplace. Although lacking academic training, Robbins quickly developed remarkably sophisticated techniques for the period. However, his "pick and shovel" methods were considered suspect and increasingly frowned upon by the emerging American historical archaeological establishment. Clean copy.

Hardcover. NY, Free Press, 1st, 1987, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket, 270 pages, b&w illustrations. Light edgewear to dust jacket, else a clean, tight copy. Recounts the life of the English poet who died during World War I, looks at the group of his friends and fellow poets known as the Neo-Pagans, and discusses the influence of homosexuality on his life. His sonnet "The Soldier" and early death in World War I made British poet Rupert Brooke a key figure in the nation's myth of patriotism and youthful valor. Biographer Delaney places him among the Neo-pagans, a small circle of writers, artists, and intellectuals who flourished from 1908 to 1912. The group honored youth, comradeship, and the simple life and aimed to set aside the constraints of Victorianism. Delany shows how the internal dynamics of the group, not shock of war, led to its disintegration.