art literature

Hardcover. Jackson, FL, San Marco Bookstore, rep., 1987, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, 98 pages. Hardcover with dust jacket. Clean, tight copy. Dist jacket faded and sunned on spine and partly rear.

Hardcover. NY, Charles Scribner's Sons, 1st, 1931, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, black cloth with spine label, 319 pages. First printing with 1931 on title page and Scribner's "A" on copyright page. Edmund Wilson's first book of literary criticism - a landmark book that explores the evolution of the French Symbolist movement and considers its influence on six major twentieth-century writers: William Butler Yeats, Paul Valery, T. S. Eliot, Marcel Proust, James Joyce, and Gertrude Stein. As Alfred Kazin later wrote, "Wilson was an original, an extraordinary literary artist . . . He could turn any literary subject back into the personal drama it had been for the writer." Light tanning to spine label, clean, tight copy.

Hardcover. University Park, Pa., Penn State University Press, 1st, 1992, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, 348 pages. Hardcover with dust jacket. Baudelaire's illustrations throughout. Minor dust jacket edge wear, otherwise, very clean, bright and tight copy.

Hardcover. London, Peter Owen , 1st, 2003, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket, 256 pages. An acclaimed and most unusual biography of Baudelaire, showing him ensnared by his passions for poetry, prostitutes, and drugs.A crucial link between romanticism and modernism, Charles Baudelaire is a pivotal figure in European literature and thought. His influence on modern poetry is immense. In the English language, where his literary reputation is less well known, it is his link with drug culture that gives him contemporary resonance. It is commonly known that Baudelaire used opium. Many writers have described him as being addicted to the drug, but none of his biographers, Frank Hilton argues, has fully understood the effect of opiate addiction on the personality and, in the case of Baudelaire, the extent to which it damaged his life and work. In this original contribution to Baudelaire studies Hilton contends that the drug is at the root of all Baudelaire's problems and in particular--something that constantly tormented him--his chronic inability to apply himself to any prolonged creative work. Unquestionably, there is significantly more to Baudelaire than his opium addiction. But a proper awareness of what it did to the poet helps to illuminate those puzzling aspects of his life and behavior that were not previously understood. Written with the general reader in mind, Baudelaire in Chains will give those who know little or nothing about him a comprehensive picture of his life. To those who know a great deal it will present him in an unexpected light.

Hardcover. NY, Scala, 1st, 2007, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover, 208 pages. Jack Kerouac's novel On the Road was a touchstone for a generation and the centrepiece of the Beat movement in literature and art. This new book examines Kerouac's life and career, and accompanies a major exhibition at The New York Public Library to celebrate the 50th anniversary of On the Road's publication in 1957. Kerouac's achievement as both a literary and cultural figure is traced, including his innovations in narrative techniques and in character development. His counterculture vision is explored, showing his image as a seer and sage who wanted to save America from its obsession with consumerism, the inhibition of sexuality and other conventional bourgeois pieties. The author also explores Kerouac's relationships with Allen Ginsberg, William S. Burroughs and other Beats, as well as the Beat movement in general. The book is heavily illustrated, with material from the extensive Kerouac literary archive owned by The New York Public Library, including typescript drafts of On the Road.

Hardcover. Liverpool, Caxton Press, 1st, 1820, Book: Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, 1527 pages, b&w frontispiece. Half-leather covers w/ faded gilt lettering on spine. Edge wear, soiling to boards. Previous owner's signature and markings on front fly leaf. Light staining, yellowing to pages. Else a nice, tight copy.

Hardcover. Boston, Houghton Mifflin, 1st, March 27, 1989, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, 190 pages, b&w illustrations throughout. Light edge wear to dust jacket; small tear on rear cover. Light foxing on top edge. Else a clean, tight copy.

Hardcover. Providence RI, Brown University Press, 1st, 1963, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Original gray boards, large format. Non-paginated (43 pages). William Blake's illustrations for Robert Blair's 'The Grave'. Some rubbing and lightly bumped corners on covers. Spine/hinge paper with narrow paper separation on upper 4". Clean, tight copy.

Hardcover. New York, W. W. Norton & Company, 1st US, 1990, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Non-paginated. Hardcover. Illustrated with full color photographs. Price clipped dust jacket with light wear to edges. Clean, tight copy.

Hardcover. Oxford UK, Clarendon Press, 1st, 1981, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket, 313 pages. The Consolations of Philosophy by Boethius, whose English translators include King Alfred, Geoffrey Chaucer, and Queen Elizabeth I, ranks among the most remarkable books to be written by a prisoner awaiting the execution of a tyrannical death sentence. Its interpretation is bound up with his other writings on mathematics and music, on Aristotelian and propositional logic, and on central themes of Christian dogma. Chadwick begins by tracing the career of Boethius, a Roman rising to high office under the Gothic King Theoderic the Great, and suggests that his death may be seen as a cruel by-product of Byzantine ambitions to restore Roman imperial rule after its elimination in the West in AD 476. Subsequent chapters examine in detail his educational programme in the liberal arts designed to avert a threatened collapse of culture and his ambition to translate into Latin everything he could find on Plato and Aristotle. Name on front fly leaf, otherwise bright and clean.

Bauer and Dean, 1st, 2021, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, pictorial boards with black cloth spine. This alluring blend of art book and autobiography will capture the imagination. At its heart are hundreds of captivating 3 x 5-inch artworks? intricate collages and drawings created on old library checkout cards, each one representing a book that left an indelible mark on artist Barbara Page. She began creating these illustrated "book marks" as a colorful way to remember titles she was currently reading. Before long, Page embarked on a decade-long art project recreating her reading history, starting with picture books from early childhood. Every artwork serves as a bookmark for a moment in time connected to a specific title, and, as a collection, they present over seventy years of literature, politics, thought, and culture-as colored by one woman's reading choices. Some images may evoke your own memories of a story. Others may feel like little puzzles that require reading or rereading a title to interpret the artistic references.

Softcover. Wien, mumok/ICA/Dancing Foxes Press, 1st, 2014, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, 60 pages. Softcover. Previous owners name and date on title page. Illustrated with full color photography. Light wear. Clean, unmarked text. In the oeuvre of New York artist Moyra Davey (born 1958), literature and writing are as significant as photography, film and video. In her latest text, Burn the Diaries, Davey considers the work of French playwright and political activist Jean Genet, while examining fugitive moments from her own life. An essay by her childhood friend and reading companion Alison Strayer, written in response, reflects on Davey's themes. The publication is part of a group of new works--also including photographs, a film and an installation of her signature mailers, which Davey sends to family, friends and acquaintances--that illuminate the relationship between image and language. This volume can be read both as an artist's book and a catalogue to accompany the exhibition at Mumok, Vienna, and the ICA, Philadelphia, in 2014.

Hardcover. Hatje Cantz, 1st, 2008, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, 176 pages. In the 1980s, London-based Welsh artist Cerith Wyn Evans, born in 1958, worked as an assistant to filmmaker Derek Jarman, soon gaining a reputation for his own experimental shorts and his collaborations with the dancer Michael Clark. Since the 1990s, Wyn Evans has also been creating installations, often inspired by cinema history or literature, that incorporate elements like philosophical texts, mirrors, neon lights, fireworks, plants and Morse code to form a constellation of meanings that unravel into myriad poetic associations. Evans' desire to animate knowledge and reconceive the materials of the past make him analogous to Marcel Broodthaers, his erstwhile mentor Derek Jarman or even William Blake. This publication includes essays that delve into the artist's use of language and his experiments with time and perception. On the subject of Evans' purposeful inscrutability, critic Jens Asthoff has written, "Evans wants to go beyond that which we describe as understanding, to reach the untranslatable elements hidden in all experience. 'I hate the idea of being accessible,' he says." This volume includes nearly 200 images of the artist's installations, films, wall texts and sound works.

Softcover. San Jose CA, Permanent Press, 1st, 1994, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, glossy green paper wrappers, 272 pages plus ads in rear. Wilson and Michael Shea published a quarterly journal in the late eighties called TRAJECTORIES. It was a "newsletter of mind-blowing iconoclasm." This is a collection of the best articles from the first few issues. Contributors include Arlen Wilson, Scott Apel, Timothy Leary, Linus Pauling, George Carlin and Ed McMahon. Clean, bright copy.

Hardcover. Grand Rapids MI, Eerdmans Publishing , 1st, 1983, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover, 199 pages. A brief account of Williams' life and examination of his early poems, the criticism, biographies and plays, the novels, the Arthurian poems and his theological writings. Light edge wear to dust jacket. Else a very clean, tight copy.

Hardcover. NY, W. W. Norton & Company, 1st, 2017, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket, 606 pages. In this definitive biography of Chester B. Himes (1909-1984), Lawrence P. Jackson uses exclusive interviews and unrestricted access to Himes's full archives to portray a controversial American writer whose novels unflinchingly confront sex, racism, and black identity. Himes brutally rendered racial politics in the best-selling novel If He Hollers Let Him Go, but he became famous for his Harlem detective series, including Cotton Comes to Harlem. A serious literary tastemaker in his day, Himes had friendships-sometimes uneasy-with such luminaries as Ralph Ellison, Carl Van Vechten, and Richard Wright. Jackson's scholarship and astute commentary illuminates Himes's improbable life-his middle-class origins, his eight years in prison, his painful odyssey as a black World War II-era artist, and his escape to Europe for success. More than ten years in the writing, Jackson's biography restores the legacy of a fascinating maverick caught between his aspirations for commercial success and his disturbing, vivid portraits of the United States. Clean copy.

Softcover. New Haven, Yale University Press, 1st, 2004, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 112 pages, color & b/w plates, text illustrations, notes, bibliography. This book looks closely at the whiz kid of graphic novelists whose 'Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth' (2000) inspired praise from critics & readers alike, and demonstrated that Ware's graphic novels challenged traditional definitions of literature. Here is the career, the work methods, and the graphic innovations, which include pullout, flip-up, and three-dimensional insertions, along with cut-out-and-assemble paper projects that require construction by readers.

Softcover. New Haven, Yale University Press, 1st, 2004, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 112 pages, color & b/w plates, text illustrations, notes, bibliography. This book looks closely at the whiz kid of graphic novelists whose 'Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth' (2000) inspired praise from critics & readers alike, and demonstrated that Ware's graphic novels challenged traditional definitions of literature. Here is the career, the work methods, and the graphic innovations, which include pullout, flip-up, and three-dimensional insertions, along with cut-out-and-assemble paper projects that require construction by readers.

Hardcover. New York, Colophon Press, 1st, 1930, Book: Good, Dust Jacket: None, Unpaginated. Hardcover with lightly tanned pages. Cover boards show light soil. Articles include: Colophons by Ruth S. Granniss; Firsts, Issues and Points by George H. Sargent; On Breaking Type by H.L. Mencken; Whitman and the War's Finale by Emory Holloway; Illustrating "Huckleberry Finn" by E.W. Kemble; Irving's Washington and an Episode in Courtesy by George S. Hellman; On Being Published by Sherwood Anderson; Chartreuse by A.R. Stavenitz; An Unrecorded "Pilgram's Progress" by Gilbert McCoy Troxell; The Bookplates of Bruce Rogers by William A. Kittredge; Getting Into Print by William McFee.

Hardcover. New York City, Blue Faun Publications, 1st, 1929, Book: Good, Dust Jacket: None, 203 pages. Hardcover. Illustrated pastedown on front cover designed by Mahlon Blaine. Illustrated endpapers by Heinrich Vogeler. "The entire edition of Colours is limited to 1950 copies; 1900 copies numbered and registered, for sale; and 50 copies, lettered A to XX, for review only. Type has been distributed, and Colours will not be reprinted. This copy is No. 386". Some foxing to front cover pastedown, and narrow chip missing from spine label. Spine slightly cocked. Clean, unmarked pages.

Hardcover. New York, Dodd, Mead and Company, 1st Edition, 1920, Book: Good, Dust Jacket: None, 370 pages. Hardcover. Green cloth covers with gilt titles to cover & spine. Fraying, scuffing to edges. Light sunfade to spine. As is, with light pencil marking throughout. Cracked rear hinge.

Hardcover. NY, Museum of Modern Art, 1st, 1966, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Good, Hardcover in a lightly soiled, edgeworn dust jacket with $4.95 on flap, 135 pages. Translated into 16 languages, this remarkable book has become an essential document of architectural literature. A "gentle manifesto for a nonstraightforward architecture," Venturi's Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture expresses in the most compelling and original terms the postmodern rebellion against the purism of modernism. Three hundred and fifty architectural illustrations serve as historical comparisons and illuminate the author's ideas on creating and experiencing architecture. Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture was the winner of the Classic Book Award at the AIA's Seventh Annual International Architecture Book Awards. Robert Charles Venturi Jr. (June 25, 1925-September 18, 2018) was an American architect, founding principal of the firm Venturi, Scott Brown and Associates. Together with his wife and partner, Denise Scott Brown, he helped shape the way that architects, planners and students experience and think about architecture and the built environment. Foreword by Arthur Drexler. Introduction by Vincent Scully. No markings.

Hardcover. Brooklyn NY, Melville House, 1st, 2013, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket. This is the original 30,000 word article Agee wrote for Fortune magazine in 1936 that was never published. Accompanied by 30 Walker Evans photos. Clean copy.

Hardcover. NY, Shoemaker and Hoard, 1st, 2005, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket, 222 pages. INSCRIBED BY CASTRONOVO on the title page. Edmund Wilson, 20th century America's most direct and readable critic of literature and society, was a man of many loves. In his half century as a major force in American letters he had an outsize romantic career that reflected the complex depths of his personality. Each woman whom he came to love was an alluring interpretative problem, an erotic and analytic challenge, a presence that fired his imagination. They came from the Greenwich Village of the 1920s, from his own upper middle class world of privilege, from New York's working class, from the high reaches of literary New York as well as from the workaday world of Talcottville in upper New York State. Who were they? Poet Edna St. Vincent Millay; actress Mary Blair; friends and drinking buddies Dorothy Parker, Louise Bogan, Dawn Powell, and Elinor Wylie; poet Leonie Adams; writer and intellectual Mary McCarthy; Mamaine Paget, later the wife of Arthur Koestler; and screenwriter and journalist Penelope Gilliatt were the best known. They appear here as personalities in their own right as well as in the roles they play in Wilson's biography. His Rabelaisian appetites, ardors and vulnerabilities, and conceptions of love and sex are a story in themselves. Clean copy.