biography

Hardcover. New York, Cambridge University Press, 1st, 1991, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, 222 pages, 125 b&w illustrations and 8 plates in full color. The first comprehensive study of Oscar Bluemner's life, art, and intellectual development. Cream cloth boards with gilt lettering to spine. Gray pictorial dust jacket with minor wear to edges, in protective brodart cover. Beautiful copy. Like new.

Hardcover. Oak Knoll Press, 1st, 1999, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover, 244 pages. Ottmar Mergenthaler is considered one of America's greatest inventors. The German immigrant revolutionized the printing and publishing industry with the invention of an automatic typesetting machine which became known as the Linotype. This remarkable machine made it possible to eliminate the laborious hand setting of lead type by allowing one Linotype operator to do the work of a half-dozen typographers.This compelling work chronicles Mergenthaler's struggles to get his invention accepted, and his battles with the typographical unions and with his financiers.

Hardcover. UK, Cambridge University Press, 1st, 1983, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover, 492 pages, b&w photos. In a lightly worn dust jacket, clean copy. Otto Klemperer was one of the great conductors of the century, best known in the last years of his life for his performances and recordings of the classical symphonic repertory from Mozart to Mahler. Volume 1 only.

Hardcover. Boston, Massacusetts, D. Lothrop & Co., 1st, 1879, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Unpaginated. Green cloth covers with black titles and gilt illustration, all edges gilt, beveled edges, multiple full page b&w tissue-protected plates, 12 chapters on different American artists. Very light foxing to tissue paper, mild wear to cover edges and spine; overall a very clean, tight copy in great condition.

Hardcover. New Haven CT, Yale University Press , 1st, 2020, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket. 438 pages, profusely illustrated in color and b&w. An intimate glimpse into the professional and romantic relationship between Harriet Pattison and the renowned architect Louis Kahn. On a winter day in 1953, a mysterious man in a sheepskin coat stood out to Harriet Pattison, then a theater student at Yale. She would later learn he was the architect Louis Kahn (1901-1974). This chance encounter served as preamble to a fifteen-year romance, with Pattison becoming the architect's closest confidante, his intellectual partner, and the mother of his only son. Here for the first time, Pattison recounts their passionate and sometimes searing relationship. Married and twenty-seven years her senior, Kahn sent her scores of letters--many from far-flung places--until his untimely death. This book weaves together Pattison's own story with letters, postcards, telegrams, drawings, and photographs that reveal Kahn's inner life and his architectural thought process, including new insight into some of his greatest works, both built and unbuilt. What emerges is at once a poignant love story and a vivid portrait of a young woman striving to raise a family while forging an artistic path in the shadow of her famous partner. Clean copy.

Hardcover. Ames IA, Iowa State University Press, 1st, 1982, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Good, Hardcover in a lightly worn dust jacket, 180 pages. The author wrote a column for a Des Moines newspaper for 25 years. Collected here is a wide selection of her writings along with a narrative account of her life in rural Iowa. Light soil to dust jacket.

Hardcover. Rutland VT, Chas. E. Tuttle Co., reprint, 1936, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Good, Hardcover in a lightly worn and chipped dust jacket. Fine green textured cover with gilt to front and spine. Foreword by Arthur Schomburg, Robinson biography by Mary Robinson Perkins. A collection of tales capturing the essence of 19th-century rural life, primarily set in Vermont. These stories explore themes of freedom, community, and the challenges of everyday existence with a distinct American voice. Robinson's vivid descriptions and engaging characters provide a window into a bygone era, making this collection a valuable contribution to American literature. Clean copy.

Hardcover. NY, Doubleday, 1st, 1983, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket. Clean. "Once in a while a great book appears which through the author's strength of vision and freshness of language, allows is to see the world anew, OUT OF MY DEPTH--mixing memoir, sport, metaphysics, and playful contemption--is just a book. Several years ago noted author Paul West took a look at himself and saw a man who loved the water but couldn't swim." - dust jacket copy.

Softcover. New York , Fireside Book/Simon & Schuster, 1st, 1987, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, 223 pages. Clean, unmarked copy with only minor wear to wrappers.

Softcover. Burlington VT, privately printed, 3rd pr., 1975, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 80 pages. Black and white photos, map, and acknowledgments. A biography of the author's mother and a record of life in central Vermont during the turn of the century. SIGNED BY FARNSWORTH on the front fly leaf. Previous owner's signature also on the front fly leaf, otherwise clean.

Hardcover. NY, Pegasus Books, 1st, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, price-clipped dust jacket. Inspired by the twenty-three 'tales', Matthew Dennison takes a selection of quotations from Potter's stories and uses them to explore her multi-faceted life and character: repressed Victorian daughter; thwarted lover; artistic genius; formidable countrywoman. They chart her transformation from a young girl with a love of animals and fairy tales into a bestselling author and canny businesswoman, so deeply unusual for the Victorian era in which she grew up. Embellished with photographs of Potter's life and her own illustrations, this biography will delight anyone who has been touched by Beatrix Potter's work. Clean copy.

Hardcover. University of Washington Press, 1st, 2001, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket, 285 pages. Over the Line: The Art and Life of Jacob Lawrence includes essays by eight distinguished art historians examining the ways in which Jacob Lawrence's art speaks so powerfully to different audiences. It is the first multi-author, in-depth probe of the artist's entire career: the nature of his work, his education, the critical climate in which he worked, and his use of materials and techniques. It reproduces, in full color, more than 200 works, most of which have not been published in color, or at all, in other books on the artist.

Hardcover. Lathem, New York, British American Publishing, 1st, 2004, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, 269 pages. Hardcover with dust jacket. Clean, unmarked copy with only minor wear to dust jacket.

Hardcover. NY, Clarkson N. Potter, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a lightly worn, price-clipped dust jacket, 300 pages, b&w illustrations by Earl Thollander. Willard Espy's memoir is delightful, filled with memorable characters, with no celebrities, from his family trove of people over the centuries, from witches in Salem, Massachusetts, to pioneer oystermen on the Pacific coast of Washington state. Drawing on conversations with aged relations and friends, on historic letters and documents, Willard Espy reconstructs his own personal past to provide an account of his family that was born, grew up, and died, as the United States was being born, shaped, formed, explored, expanded.

Hardcover. NY, Thomas Y Crowell, 1st, 1974, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Good, Hardcover in a lightly worn dust jacket, 193 pages including index, illustrated with 34 reproductions, some in color. George Caleb Bingham (1811-1879) who painted his world as it really was, everyday people in their everyday lives. His family was one of the early pioneer settlers, moving to the frontier in 1819. George began is art career painting tavern signs, later graduating to portraits, views of everyday life and "river paintings". He also was a Missouri politician, holding several important offices. Clean copy.

Hardcover. London, Jonathan Cape, 1st, 2014, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Like new in publisher's shrink-wrap. 274 pages 210 illustrations in color. David Dawson"s photographs create an intimate portrait of the man. The final images are of the hanging of Preud"s work in his posthumous London exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery.

Hardcover. NY, Knopf, 1st, 2009, Hardcover, 384 pages. Ronsequist writes about growing up in a tight-knit community of Scandinavian farmers in North Dakota and Minnesota in the late 1930s and early 1940s; about his mother, who was not only an amateur painter but, along with his father, a passionate aviator; and about leaving that flat midwestern landscape in 1955 for New York, where he had won a scholarship to the Art Students League. George Grosz, Edwin Dickinson, and Robert Beverly Hale were among his teachers, but his early life was a struggle until he discovered sign painting. He describes days suspended on scaffolding high over Broadway, painting movie or theater billboards, and nights at the Cedar Tavern with Willem de Kooning, Franz Kline, and the poet LeRoi Jones. His first major studio, on Coenties Slip, was in the thick of the new art world. Among his neighbors were Ellsworth Kelly, Robert Indiana, Agnes Martin, and Jack Youngerman, and his mentors Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns.

Hardcover. London, Jupiter Books, First Edition, 1978, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Good, 31 pages text followed by 130 plates. Hardcover. Blue cloth boards with gilt titles to spine. Frontis photograph of the artist, L. S. Lowry, Stockport, Winter 1962. Full page, full color & bw plates throughout. Dust jacket with wear & toning to edges. Clean, unmarked copy.

Hardcover. US, University of Arizona Press, 1st, 1984, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover, 252 pages. Light shelf-wear to price clipped dust jacket, else a clean, tight copy.

Hardcover. Italy, Massimiliano Boni, 1st, 1974, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Good, 128 pages, plus plates. ITALIAN TEXT. INSCRIBED. Color frontispiece, B/w illustrations/plates throughout. Dust jacket unclipped, has some age wear. Covers good, bound in blue fabric. Foxing on edges and endpapers, but pages clean. In very good condition.

Hardcover. NY, Knopf, 1st, 2002, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover, 364 pages, in a bright dust jacket. Henry Petroski has been called 'the poet laureate of technology.' He is one of the most eloquent and inquisitive science and engineering writers of our time, illuminating with new clarity such familiar objects as pencils, books, and bridges. In Paperboy, he turns his intellectual curiosity inward, on his own past. Petroski grew up in the Cambria Heights section of New York City's borough of Queens during the 1950s, in the midst of a close and loving family. Educated at local Catholic schools, he worked as a delivery boy for the Long Island Press. The job taught him lessons about diligence, labor, commitment, and community-mindedness, lessons that this successful student could not learn at school. From his vantage point as a professor, engineer, and writer, Petroski reflects fondly on these lessons, and on his near-idyllic boyhood.

Hardcover. Washington, Smithsonian Institution Press, 1st, 1972, Book: Good, Dust Jacket: Good, Hardcover. Volume I only. 496 pages, several b&w illustrations. Light edgewearm soiling to dust jacket, small closed tear on front cover. Foxing, soiling to top and bottom edge. Else clean and tight.

Hardcover. NY, Doubleday, 1st, 2019, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket, 347 pages. In 1971 Deirdre Bair was a journalist and recently minted Ph.D. who managed to secure access to Nobel Prize-winning author Samuel Beckett. He agreed that she could be his biographer despite her never having written--or even read--a biography before. The next seven years comprised of intimate conversations, intercontinental research, and peculiar cat-and-mouse games. Battling an elusive Beckett and a string of jealous, misogynistic male writers, Bair persevered. She wrote Samuel Beckett: A Biography, which went on to win the National Book Award and propel Deirdre to her next subject: Simone de Beauvoir. The catch? De Beauvoir and Beckett despised each other--and lived essentially on the same street. Bair learned that what works in terms of process for one biography rarely applies to the next. Her seven-year relationship with the domineering and difficult de Beauvoir required a radical change in approach, yielding another groundbreaking literary profile and influencing Bair's own feminist beliefs.Parisian Lives draws on Bair's extensive notes from the period, including never-before-told anecdotes. This gripping memoir is full of personality and warmth and gives us an entirely new window on the all-too-human side of these legendary thinkers.