art mideast

Hardcover.. Germany, Steidl, 1st, 2013, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, MAY REQUIRE ADDITIONAL POSTAGE. 2 volume set. Oversize hardcover and softcover in slipcase. Very clean, unmarked copies. Very minor soiling to slipcase. Beautiful color photographs throughout.

Hardcover. NY, Dragonfly Books, 1st, 2010, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover, 32 pages. The inspiring story of an Iraqi librarian's courageous fight to save books from the Basra Central Library before it was destroyed in the war.It is 2003 and Alia Muhammad Baker, the chief librarian of the Central Library in Basra, Iraq, has grown worried given the increased likelihood of war in her country. Determined to preserve the irreplacable records of the culture and history of the land on which she lives from the destruction of the war, Alia undertakes a courageous and extremely dangerous task of spiriting away 30,000 books from the library to a safe place.Told in dramatic graphic-novel panels by acclaimed cartoonist Mark Alan Stamaty, Alia's Mission celebrates the importance of books and the freedom to read, while examining the impact of war on a country and its people.

Hardcover. NY, Dragonfly Books, 1st, 2010, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, hardcover, 32 pages. The inspiring story of an Iraqi librarian's courageous fight to save books from the Basra Central Library before it was destroyed in the war.It is 2003 and Alia Muhammad Baker, the chief librarian of the Central Library in Basra, Iraq, has grown worried given the increased likelihood of war in her country. Determined to preserve the irreplacable records of the culture and history of the land on which she lives from the destruction of the war, Alia undertakes a courageous and extremely dangerous task of spiriting away 30,000 books from the library to a safe place.Told in dramatic graphic-novel panels by acclaimed cartoonist Mark Alan Stamaty, Alia's Mission celebrates the importance of books and the freedom to read, while examining the impact of war on a country and its people.

Softcover. London, Penguin Books, 2rd Ed., 1992, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 547 pages, b&w illustrations. Newly revised and containing information from recent excavations and discovered artifacts, Ancient Iraq covers the political, cultural, and socio-economic history from Mesopotamia days of prehistory to the Christian era. Clean copy.

Hardcover. Woodbury, NY, Barron's, 1st, 1980, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, 81 pages. Hardcover with dust jacket. A very clean, unmarked copy with only minor wear to dust jacket edges. Color photographs throughout.

Hardcover. Montreal, Drawn and Quarterly, 1st, 2005, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover, 250 pages, color illustrations by Mumford. Light bump to top of spine. Bright dust jacket. Not overtly political, Bagdad Journal presents portraits of life from all sides of the polarizing conflict. With sketch pad and notebook in hand, Mumford illuminates the routine activities of a nation in turmoil-from the individual soldiers of American platoons to Baghdad residents going about their daily lives amid the chaos surrounding them.

Hardcover. New York, Aperture, 1st, 1998, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket. 96 pages, color photographs, Like new in publisher's shrinkwrap. Doors of the Kingdom is a unique collection of photographs depicting the ancient and disappearing craft of doormaking in Arabia. The Islamic concept of hurma, or sanctity of a place of dwelling or worship, is recurrent throughout Arabic poetry and literature. The door (bab), preserver of sanctity, becomes symbolic of the boundary between public and private space, and between the profane and the sacred. In 1995, Haajar Gouverneur traveled throughout the Arabian Peninsula photographing each region's distinctive doorways and the remaining artisans who make them. The doors of Arabia, painstakingly hand-carved from the wood of the Al-Athel trees, last in their exquisite variety for hundreds of years. This ancient craft, passed down from generation to generation in the central and northern regions of Saudi Arabia, is now nearly extinct. Modern materials, technology, and changing priorities threaten the continuity of the sacred and artisanal tradition of doormaking.

Softcover. London/NY, Routledge , 1st, 1996, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 288 pages, illustrated in b&w. Empire Building is a study of how and why Western architecture was exported to the Middle East and how Islamic and Byzantine architectural ideas and styles impacted on the West.The book explores how far racial theory and political and religious agendas guided British architects (and how such ideas were resisted when applied), and how Eastern ideas came to influence the West, through writers such as Ruskin and buildings such as the Crystal Palace.Beautifully written and lavishly illustrated, Empire Building takes the reader on an extraordinary postcolonial journey, backwards and forwards, into the heart and to the edge of empire.

Hardcover. US, Hachette, 1st, 1980-01-01, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, 98 pages. Clean, unmarked copy with only minor wear to dust jacket. In French language. Includes white cardboard mailer sleeve

Hardcover. Boston, Houghton Mifflin, 1st, 2003, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, 96 pages. Hardcover with dust jacket. SIGNED BY AUTHOR ON HALF TITLE PAGE. An author and artist who has continually stripped away the mystique of architectural structures that have long fascinated modern people, David Macaulay here reveals the methods and materials used to design and construct a mosque in late-sixteenth- century Turkey. Clean, tight copy with minor rubbing to edges.

Softcover. Costa Mesa CA, Mazda Publishers, 1st, 1999, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 134 pages. The history of Iran is a subject attracting increasing interest, and in it the history of the Qajar period, here dated 1796-1925, occupies a pivotal transitional place. The Qajar rulers reunited Iran after a century of weakness and division, and helped create modern Iran and its response to western power. Although the Qajars were not great reformers, their period saw the development of many new trends of thought, ranging from new religious ideas and groups to the adapting of modern ideas to Iranian circumstances. This book covers intellectual trends and equally it covers the political and socioeconomic history of Iran, including the growth of western incursions and control, which led to social, economic, and political disruptions and helped lead to a major revolution that gave Iran a modern constitution. Later developments culminated in a modernizing central government under the Pahlavi shahs. The period 1796-1925 saw a flowering of Iran's visual arts, politically oriented literature, popular culture, and crafts and carpets, and the beginnings of photography and film. The book interprets all these developments as part of a readable and comprehensible history of a period that helped bring Iran into the modern world while continuing its cultural greatness. Clean copy.

Hardcover. Berkeley, University of California Press, 1st, 2004, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket, 390 pages, b&w illustrations. From the stony desolation of Jordan's desert, it is but a step through a doorway into the bath house of the Qusayr 'Amra hunting lodge. Inside, multicolored frescoes depict scenes from courtly life and the hunt, along with musicians, dancing girls, and naked bathing women. The traveler is transported to the luxurious and erotic world of a mid-eighth-century Muslim Arab prince. For scholars, though, Qusayr 'Amra, probably painted in the 730s or 740s, has proved a mirage, its concreteness dissolved by doubts about date, patron, and meaning. This is the first book-length contextualization of the mysterious monument through a compelling analysis of its iconography and of the literary sources for the Umayyad period. It illuminates not only the way of life of the early Muslim elite but also the long afterglow of late antique Syria. Clean copy.

Hardcover. Seattle, WA, Fantagraphics, 1st, 2011, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, 272 pages. Hardcover with no dust jacket. Cloth 3/4 spine cover with gilt lettering, with silver foil decoration and illustration on front. Remainder mark on bottom page block, Clean, otherwise unmarked copy with only minor wear to corners.

Softcover. Beirut, Plan Bey, 1st, 2016, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 24 pages. Color plates. Limited to 300 copies. Lebanese artist, critic and poet Samir Sayegh is a pioneer of modernism in the Arab world. Often uniting ornamentation with calligraphic script, he has developed a distinctive practice. This catalog is printed in offset in three Pantone colors on special Fabriano Ingres laid finished drawing paper with Japanese hand binding. Clean copy.

Softcover. NY/Oxford, Osprey Publishing, 1st, 2005, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 64 pages illustrated in color and b&w. An unrivaled illustrated reference source on fighting men and commanders of the period. The Sassanians ruled the last great imperial Empire of Persia before the Arab conquests of the 7th century. Rome's only equal in the classical world, the Sassanian Empire had an enormous impact on the development of architecture, mythology, arts, music, military tactics and technology. Within the Sassanian military, the cavalry was the most influential element, and Sassanian cavalry tactics were adopted by the Romans, Arabs, and Turks. Clean copy.

Hardcover. Washington, DC, Smithsonian Freer Gallery of Art, 1st , 1947, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, folio, terra cotta cloth stamped in gilt. INSCRIBED BY GUEST on front fly leaf. 15 black & white illustrations in text. 69 pages + 50 pages of black & white plates. Guest was appointed Assistant Curator of the Freer Gallery in 1922, in 1938 the title was changed to Assistant Director; Guest authored numerous books in the area of Chinese Art.

Hardcover. London, Thames and Hudson, 1st, 2015, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket, 144 pages, Color photos by Ara Guller. Sinan was the greatest architect of the Ottoman Golden Age of the sixteenth century when the Ottoman Empire reached its zenith of power and magnificence. His style marks the apogee of Turkish art. Under Sleyman the Magnificent and his succcessor Selmi II, Sinan designed hundreds of buildings: mosques, palaces, tombs, mausolea, hospitals, schools, caravanserai, bridges, aqueducts and baths, many of them presented and analysed in this book. In his greatest works, he adapted Byzantine and Islamic styles to produce something quite new: a centralized organization of absolute space unhindered by pillars or columns and covered by a soaring dome. An architect of genius in a dynamic new empire expanding into both Asia and Europe, he was a true man of the Renaissance. Clean, bright copy.

Hardcover. Malden MA, Blackwell , 1st, 2005, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket, 311 pages, b&w illustrations. A succinct narrative of Iranian history from the time of Cyrus the Great in 558 BC to the present day. The book traces events from the rise of the Persian empire, through competition with Rome and conquest by the Arabs, through to the re-establishment of a Persian state in the sixteenth century, and finally the Islamic Revolution of 1979 and the establishment of the current Islamic Republic. For each period, the author utilizes the most recent scholarship in order to examine Iran's political, social, and cultural history. He presents this history within an analytical framework which focuses on rulership as the central theme of identity for Iranians. He also considers the part played in Iranian identity by land, political culture, religion, and the arts. Clean copy.