biography

Hardcover. NY, Philosophical Library, 1st US, 1952, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a lightly worn dust jacket. 208 pages, bibliography. Introduction by Ronald Knox, b&w frontispiece portrait of Pascal. Clean copy.

Softcover. University of Washington Press, 2004, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 335 pages. "Known for his blending of philosophy, spirituality, humor, and a rollicking good story, Charles Johnson is one of the most important novelists writing today. From his magical first novel, Faith and the Good Thing, to his decidedly philosophical Oxherding Tale; from his swashbuckling indictment of the slave trade in the National Book Award-winning Middle Passage, to his more recent imaginative treatment of Martin Luther King Jr. in Dreamer, Johnson has continually surprised, instructed, and entertained his many avid readers. As this collection of interviews suggests, the novelist is as multifaceted and complex as his novels. Trained in cartooning and philosophy, martial arts and meditation, and producing teleplays, photobiographies, and literary criticism in addition to fiction, Charles Johnson represents a model of what he calls "life as art." Clean copy.

Hardcover. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1st ed., 1985, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Good, 292 pages. Blue cloth boards. Pictorial dust jacket is tinted with light fading to spine. Otherwise, tight clean copy.

Hardcover. NY, Simon & Schuster, 1st, 2022, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket. Jim Thorpe rose to world fame as a mythic talent who excelled at every sport. He won gold medals in the decathlon and pentathlon at the 1912 Stockholm Olympics, was an All-American football player at the Carlisle Indian School, the star of the first class of the Pro Football Hall of Fame, and played major league baseball for John McGraw's New York Giants. Even in a golden age of sports celebrities, he was one of a kind. But despite his colossal skills, Thorpe's life was a struggle against the odds. As a member of the Sac and Fox Nation, he encountered duplicitous authorities who turned away from him when their reputations were at risk. At Carlisle, he dealt with the racist assimilationist philosophy "Kill the Indian, Save the Man." His gold medals were unfairly rescinded because he had played minor league baseball. His later life was troubled by alcohol, broken marriages, and financial distress. He roamed from state to state and took bit parts in Hollywood, but even the film of his own life failed to improve his fortunes. But for all his travails, Thorpe did not succumb. The man survived, complications and all, and so did the myth. Clean, like new.

Hardcover. NY, Liveright Publishing , 1st, 2021, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket. Published on the centenary of her birth, Patricia Highsmith's diaries "offer the most complete picture ever published" of the canonical author. Relegated during her lifetime to the pulpy genre of mystery, Patricia Highsmith has emerged since her death in 1995 as one of "our greatest modernist writers" (Gore Vidal). Presented for the first time, this one-volume assemblage of her diaries and notebooks -- posthumously discovered behind Highsmith's linens and culled from more than 8,000 pages by her devoted editor, Anna von Planta--traces the mesmerizing double-life of an artist who "[worked] like mad to be something." Beginning in 1941 during her junior year at Barnard, the diaries exhibit the intoxicating "atmosphere of nameless dread" (Boston Globe) that permeates classics such as Strangers on a Train and the Ripley series. In her skewering of McCarthy-era America, her prickly disparagement of contemporary art, her fixation on love and writing, and ever-percolating prejudices, the famously secretive Highsmith reveals the roots of her psychological angst and acuity. In one of the most compulsively readable literary diaries to publish in generations. Remainder dot to top edge, otherwise like new.

Hardcover. NY, Liveright Publishing , 1st, 2021, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket. Published on the centenary of her birth, Patricia Highsmith's diaries "offer the most complete picture ever published" of the canonical author. Relegated during her lifetime to the pulpy genre of mystery, Patricia Highsmith has emerged since her death in 1995 as one of "our greatest modernist writers" (Gore Vidal). Presented for the first time, this one-volume assemblage of her diaries and notebooks -- posthumously discovered behind Highsmith's linens and culled from more than 8,000 pages by her devoted editor, Anna von Planta -- traces the mesmerizing double-life of an artist who "[worked] like mad to be something." Beginning in 1941 during her junior year at Barnard, the diaries exhibit the intoxicating "atmosphere of nameless dread" (Boston Globe) that permeates classics such as Strangers on a Train and the Ripley series. In her skewering of McCarthy-era America, her prickly disparagement of contemporary art, her fixation on love and writing, and ever-percolating prejudices, the famously secretive Highsmith reveals the roots of her psychological angst and acuity. In one of the most compulsively readable literary diaries to publish in generations. Remainder dot to top edge, otherwise like new.

Hardcover. Syracuse University Press , 1st, 1991, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover, 493 pages. Remainder line and foxing to top edge, light edgewear to dust jacket, else a clean, tight copy.

Hardcover. New York, New York Review Books, 1st, 2012, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, 448 pages. Hardcover with dust jacket. SIGNED BY AUTHOR ON TITLE PAGE. Black and white photos in center. Two pages wrinkled and stuck together in the middle of picture pages. Otherwise tight.

Hardcover. Melbourne AU, F. W. Cheshire, reprint, 1967, Book: Good, Dust Jacket: Poor, Hardcover in a poor, chipped and worn dust jacket, 252 pages, illustrated with b/w photos, drawings, and two maps in the text. End-papers feature double-page maps of the Territory of Papua and New Guinea, index. The author was a Patrol Officer in New Guinea and later became a member of the Papua-New Guinea Legislative Council. The book covers three periods: 1927-1937; 1938-1942; and 1942-1962. There is pencil underlining to many pages. Still an attractive copy of a fairly scarce book.

Hardcover. New York, Monacelli Press, 1st, 2009, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, 303 pages. Hardcover with laminated boards. Color illustrations throughout. Clean, tight copy with little to no wear on edges. Slight creasing on rear top corner.

Hardcover. Lanham MD, Derrydale Press, 1st, 2010, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, 149 pages. Hardcover. Extensive b&w and color illustrations throughout. Clean, unmarked copy with only minor wear to wrappers. The definitive book on an artist who is widely regarded as the preeminent American illustrator of equestrian subjects. Based on extensive interviews with Brown's family, friends, and artistic contemporaries, Paul Brown includes a biography of the man and contains a complete listing of all the published works that include Brown's art as well as listings of all of Brown's prints, items sometimes attributed to Brown, and methods of identifying first editions of Paul Brown's art. Although Brown is primarily known for his wonderful paintings, drawings and sketches of horses and equestrian sports, he is also well known for his elegant and prolific illustrations for Brooks Brothers catalogs over three decades.

Hardcover. NY, Albert & Charles Boni , 1st, 1931, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, original light gray cloth hardcover with gilt & green lettering on the spine and the front cover. 340 pages, 8 b&w plates including frontis self-portrait. No dust jacket, otherwise a clean, tight copy.

Softcover. Montreal , Drawn & Quarterly, 1st, 2003, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Non paginated. Softcover. Extensive b&w illustrations by Michel Rabagliati throughout. Clean, unmarked copy with only minor wear to wrappers. Rabagliati`s strip "Paul: Apprentice Typographer" was one of the highlights of 1999`s Drawn & Quarterly anthology, and his first comic book Paul in the Country won the 2000 Harvey award for Best New Talent. This, his first graphic novel, is a sweet, unsentimental story about being a teenager and Rabagliati's crisp retro-modern 1950s drawing style. Paul Has a Summer Job continues the story of Paul, a Quebecois teenager in the 1970s, as he experiences the first conflicts of responsibility with his desire to be free.

Softcover. New York, Museum of Modern Art, First Edition, 1987, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, 344 pages. Softcover published on occasion of the exhibition by the same title, touring various locations including the Museum of Modern Art, February 12 - May 5, 1987. Full page, full color and bw illustrations throughout. Frontis illustration, Twittering Machine, 1922. Light toning to spine. Otherwise clean, unmarked copy.

Hardcover. Los Angeles, J. Paul Getty Museum, 1st, 2009, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover, 164 pages. "With assistant curator of photographs Paul Martineau's intriguing biographical essay (based, in part, on the Getty's archive of Outerbridge papers), 104 stunningly beautiful plates, a chronology, checklist, and index, this catalog offers a highly visual and seductive overview. A section featuring selected photographs from Outerbridge's California years, a period missing from earlier books, makes this publication of interest to specialists as well."--ARLIS/NA Reviews

Hardcover. Ostfildern GR, Hatje Cantz, 1st, 2004, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, illustrated paper-covered boards; no dust jacket as issued. Photographs by Paul Pfeiffer. 80 pages with 35 four-color plates and 2 black-and-white plates. Essays (in German and English) by Valeria Liebermann and Stefano Basilico. Conversation with the artist (in German and English) by Thomas Ruff. Includes a list of works, biography, list of awards, exhibition history and publications. Clean copy.

Softcover. Boston, The Paul Revere Memorial Association, 1st pbk, 1988, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, pictorial black wrappers, 191 pages. Issued in conjunction with a 1988-1989 exhibition featuring the silver work of Paul Revere (1735-1818). With illustrated essays by Patrick M. Leehey, Janine E. Skerry, Deborah A. Federhen, Edgard Moreno, and Edith J. Steblecki. Includes a bibliography and many views of Revere's silversmithing capabilities. 236 b&w illustrations. Clean copy.

Hardcover. New York, Harper & Row, 1st, 1974, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, 217 pages. Hardcover with price-clipped dust jacket. Clean, tight copy. Scarce biography of Robeson by Hamilton, a noted African-American children's book author.

NY, Knopf, 1st, 1988, Book: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket. Passionate and enormously talented, Paul Robeson lived one of the great lives of the twentieth century. Martin Duberman's classic biography is a monumental and powerfully affecting portrait of one of this century's most notable performers, political radicals, and champions of racial equality. Drawing on a vast archive of family papers and interviews with friends and relatives as well as FBI files, Paul Robeson charts the heroic and tragic course of Robeson's life: from his early days as the son of a former slave to his rise to unprecedented international acclaim as a stage actor and singer, and from his political awakening to his downfall as a victim of McCarthyism and the efforts of the U.S. government to destroy him. Clean copy.

Hardcover. NY, Harper Collins, 1st, 1995, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket. 233 pages. Authors, illustrators, and poets describe their childhoods, approaches to creating children's books, and career paths.

Hardcover. Boston, Little, Brown, 1st, 1931, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover, 259 pages. Illustrated with 16 black & white photographs. Previous owners signature at top of front endpaper. Dust jacket missing 3 small chunks at top and bottom of spine. Clean, tight copy.

Hardcover. Ann Arbor MI, Sports Media Group, 1st, 2005, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket. 200 pages illustrated with 150 rarely seen photographs. Although it has been more than 75 years since he last laced up his spikes, Ty Cobb remains arguably the greatest player in the long history of baseball. Certainly the Detroit Tigers outfielder remains the most controversial. He hit .367 over 24 seasons (1905-1928), won a dozen batting titles, and was the first man elected to baseball's Hall of Fame. "Peach: Ty Cobb in His Time and Ours" takes readers into the cauldron that was his life - the spikings and assaults, the rivalries and petty jealousies, the never-ending spring of battles on the diamond, in the stands, and at home. Clean copy.

Hardcover. London, British Library, 1st, 2014, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, 224 pages. Hardcover with dust jacket. Very clean, unmarked copy with only minor wear to dust jacket. Ernest Cromwell Peake arrived in the Hankow region of inland China in 1899, the first medical missionary to attempt to bring modern medicine to the rural Chinese. Black and white images throughout.

Softcover. Austin TX, University of Texas Press, reprint, 1982, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 260 pages, b&w photos. There have been very few directors in the history of Hollywood who have ever had as hard a time as Sam Peckinpah did. In a career that lasted only from 1961 to his death near the end of 1984, the man known (rather errantly) as Bloody Sam made only fourteen films--not exactly a large volume work. Despite this, however, and despite (or perhaps because of) his penchant for raising hell with studio heads and producers, Peckinpah was a never-a-dull-moment director. And when he wasn't doing that, he made himself a target for critics, both inside and outside of Hollywood, with his graphic and complex approaches to violence (his 1969 Western epic THE WILD BUNCH), while at the same time also numbering among his films two, largely non-violent gems in THE BALLAD OF CABLE HOGUE and JUNIOR BONNER that prove that the man was able to show sides of the human experience that didn't involve bullets or bloodshed.