biography

Hardcover. New York, Knopf, 1st, 2014, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover, 272 pages. Like new in publisher's shrink-wrap. David Dawson was Lucian Freud's assistant, companion, and model. Freud moved in rarefied, powerful circles and was tenacious about protecting his privacy. Dawson, however, was in a unique position, and as Freud became comfortable in the presence of his camera, photographing became part of the daily ritual of the studio. These photographs reveal in a most intimate way the subjects and the stages of paintings in progress. Few artists, if any, have had their lives and their work recorded over such a length of time.

Softcover. UK, Watford Borough Council, 1st, 1982, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover. Original card covers. 12 b/w plates, essays, biography. Sir Hubert von Herkomer was a Bavarian-born British painter, pioneering film-director, and composer. Though a very successful portrait artist, especially of men, he is mainly remembered for his earlier works that took a realistic approach to the conditions of life of the poor. Clean copy.

Hardcover. NY, Holiday House, 1st, 2009, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket. Color illustrations by Ronald Himler. This picture-book biography focuses mainly on the War of 1812, but also mentions Madison's contributions to the Constitution and the creation of the three branches of government. Although this is a biography of the couple, there is more specific information on James Madison than on Dolley. Still, readers do learn some interesting facts about her, such as how she rescued a portrait of George Washington while the Executive Mansion burned. Adler's writing is clear yet not oversimplified, and is without fictionalization.

Hardcover. NY, Harcourt, Brace & Co., 1st, 1959, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, black cloth with gilt lettering to spine. 307 pages, b&w photos. No dust jacket. The biography of actor Leslie Howard, star of great movies such as "Of Human Bondage" and "The Scarlet Pimpernel". En route from Lisbon to London, Howard was shot down by German fighters. Clean, tight copy.

Hardcover. Hoboken NJ, Wiley, 1st, 2009, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket, 508 pages.Take a dazzling journey through the Gilded Age, the period from roughly the 1870s to 1914, when bluebloods from older, established families met the nouveau riche headlong-railway barons, steel magnates, and Wall Street speculators-and forged an uneasy and glittering new society in New York City. The best of the best were Caroline Astor's 400 families, and she shaped and ruled this high society with steel. A Season of Splendor is a panoramic sweep across this sumptuous landscape, presenting the families, the wealth, the balls, the clothing, and the mansions in vivid detail-as well as the shocking end of the era with the sinking of the Titanic. Clean copy.

Hardcover. NY, Simon & Schuster, 1st, 2012, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket, 531 pages, b&w illustrations. Larry Hart and Richard Rodgers wrote approximately thirty Broadway musicals and dozens of songs for Hollywood films. At least four of their musicals--On Your Toes, Babes in Arms, The Boys from Syracuse, and Pal Joey-- have become classics. But despite their prodigious collaboration, Rodgers and Hart were an odd couple. Rodgers was precise, punctual, heterosexual, handsome, and eager to be accepted by Society. Hart was barely five feet tall, alcoholic, homosexual, and more comfortable in a bar or restaurant than anywhere else. Terrified of solitude, he invariably threw the party and picked up the check. His lyrics are all the more remarkable considering that he never sustained a romantic relationship, living his entire life with his mother, who died only months before he died at age forty-eight. Remainder mark to top edge otherwise clean.

London/NY, Faber & Faber, 1st, 1993, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Good, Hardcover in a bright, edgeworn dust jacket that has a closed 2" tear along spine. 500 pages, b&w illustrations. Don Siegel was one of Hollywood's most controversial directors. Invasion of the Body Snatchers is one of the very few acknowledged science-fiction classics, and Magnum Force - with its catch-phrase 'Make my day' - has become part of our modern consciousness. Siegel's five-film collaboration with Clint Eastwood created a body of films that are as distinctive as they are different, and enriched the reputation of both of them. This autobiography has all the fun and energy one would expect from Don Siegel. From his first days as an assistant editor in the Warner Brothers cutting rooms, Siegel charts his rich and varied career. This is a wonderful book of reminiscences, told in a lively and vivid style, whose cast of characters includes John Wayne, Lee Marvin, Steve McQueen, Bogart and Bacall, studio head Jack Warner and other luminaries of the golden age of the Hollywood studios (including a fading film star called Ronald Reagan, whose last film, The Killers, was directed by Siegel).At the centre of the book is Siegel's relationship with Clint Eastwood, whose directing career was encouraged by Siegel, and who supplies an amusing and appreciative foreword to the book. No markings.

Hardcover. Boston, Garden Press, 1st, 1910, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, 143 pages, b&w frontispiece. INSCRIBED BY BAYLEY on front fly leaf. Maroon and gray cloth with gilt lettering on front cover.

Hardcover. Boston, Houghton Mifflin, 1st, 1917, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, blue cloth with gilt and red, white and blue decoration to front cover, gilt lettering on spine. 192 pages including index, frontis. portrait plus b&w pales including onr fold-out. Dr. Kimball was on the Yellowstone Expedition of 1873 with Generals Stanley and Custer and became quite a good friend of Custer. It was Dr. Kimball who attended to Lieutenant Charles Braden and may have saved his life, after Braden was shot through the left leg by Indians on August 4, 1873. The Battle of the Little Big Horn is also covered. Bright, clean copy.

Hardcover. NY, The Macmillan Company, 1st, 1917, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, black cloth boards with red lettering and gilt decoration; b&w plates, frontis. by Alice Barber Stephens. Small bookplate on inside front cover. A memoir of growing up on the Wisconsin frontier, Garland recalls individuals, their relationships, and the colorful drama that made up their daily lives offers a glimpse into pioneer life in 19th-century mid-America. Clean, bright copy.

Hardcover. NY, Harcourt, 1st, 2004, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket. Tragic, comic, and utterly honest, this extraordinary memoir is at once a great family saga and a magical self-portrait of a writer who witnessed the birth of a nation and lived through its turbulent history. It is the story of a boy growing up in the war-torn Jerusalem of the forties and fifties, in a small apartment crowded with books in twelve languages and relatives speaking nearly as many. His mother and father, both wonderful people, were ill-suited to each other. When Oz was twelve and a half years old, his mother committed suicide, a tragedy that was to change his life. He leaves the constraints of the family and the community of dreamers, scholars, and failed businessmen and joins a kibbutz, changes his name, marries, has children, and finally becomes a writer as well as an active participant in the political life of Israel. Clean copy.

Hardcover. NY, Knopf, 1st, 2002, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket, 592 pages, b&w illustrations. Samuel Fuller, independent director-producer extraordinaire, tells the story of his life, a life that spanned most of the twentieth century. His twenty-nine tough, gritty pictures made from 1949 to 1989 set out to capture the truth of war, racism, and human frailties, and incorporate some of his own experiences. He writes of his years in the newspaper business--selling papers as a boy on the streets of New York, working for Hearst's New York Journal American, first as a copyboy, then as personal runner for the famous Hearst editor in chief Arthur Brisbane. His film Park Row was inspired by his years as a reporter for the New York Evening Graphic, where his beat included murders, suicides, state executions, and race riots--he scooped every other New York paper with his coverage of the death by drug overdose of the legendary Jeanne Eagels. Fuller talks about directing his first picture (he also wrote the script), I Shot Jesse James . . . and how, as a result, he was sought after by every major studio, choosing to work for Darryl Zanuck of Twentieth Century Fox. We see him becoming one of the most prolific, independent-minded writer-directors, turning out seven pictures in six years, among them Pickup on South Street, House of Bamboo, and China Gate. He writes about making Underworld U.S.A., a movie that shows how gangsters in the 1960s were no longer seen as thugs but as "respected" tax-paying executives . . . about the making of the movie Shock Corridor--about a journalist trying to solve a murder in a lunatic asylum--which exposed the conditions in mental institutions . . . and about White Dog (written in collaboration with Curtis Hanson), a film so controversial that Paramount's then studio heads, Jeffrey Katzenberg and Michael Eisner, refused to release it. Clean copy.

Hardcover. NY, Thomas Y. Crowell, 1st, 1962, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a lightly worn dust jacket, 310 pages, 250 b&w illustrations. The life of one of America's major literary artists, Henry David Thoreau: , born on July 12, 1817, in Concord, Massachusetts: a schoolmaster, tutor, surveyor, mason, gardener, farmer, house painter, carpenter, day-laborer, abolitionist, pencil-maker. lecturer, naturtalist, writer. Small name on front fly leaf otherwise clean.

Hardcover. New York , The Citadel Press, 1st, 1968, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Fair, Harcover, 167 pages, b&w frontispiece and plates. Edge wear, tears to dust jacket. Orange top edge decorative stain. A clean, tight copy.

Hardcover. New York, D Appleton Century Company, 1st, 1937, Book: Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, 234 pages. Illustrated end pages, front cover and spine slightly soiled.

Softcover. NY, Oxford University Press, reprint, 1980, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Three softcover books in a pictorial cardboard slipcase. This is Molly Hughes' autobiographical account of her life in Victorian London. A London Child of the 1870s, A London Girl of the 1880s, and A London Home of the 1890s. The perceptive trilogy traces her early life through schooldays, studies, and travels abroad, to the closing years of the last century, when she was married and bringing up a family of her own, showing that Victorian children did not have such a dull time as is usually supposed. Clean, bright set.

Hardcover. NY, E. P. Dutton , 1st, 1946, Book: Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, beige cloth covers stamped in red and gilt. 450 pages, b&w illustrations. Ione Robinson (1910 - 1989) was an American artist, writer and socialite. She is most known for her reporting of the Mexican muralist movement. in the 1920s and early 30s she worked on Diego Rivera's murals at the National Palace in Mexico City. The first 3 pages with small holes to pages, the rest of text is clean. Light shelf wear.

Hardcover. Moyer Bell, 1st thus, 1997, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket, 186 pages. BOOKPLATE SIGNED BY ELLIS on front fly leaf. For Alice Thomas Ellis, Wales was a magical place of unrestricted freedom and exploration. Through her recollections, the acclaimed novelist evokes the stark beauty of the Welsh landscape along with its history, legends, and people. Patrick Sutherland's 90 black-and-white images complement the text and make this shared journey even more compelling. Clean copy.

Hardcover. Chicago, The Lakeside Press, 1st, 1919, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, dark green cloth stamped in gilt, top edge gilt, 137 pages. Tight, attractive copy of this early "Lakeside Classic," the annual keepsake presented by this printer/publisher to friends and clients starting in 1903. Illustrated with two portraits of the author. So many pioneer stories were written at the request of a child or grandchild. What makes Christiana Tillson's humorous memoir different was her background. Tillson's story records the reactions produced upon a refined New England woman by an environment at once predominantly southern and wholly frontier. Her youth in 1822 and her parting from all that she had known in the East were common of many later Western migrants. But when she and her husband went out to try their fortunes, the "West" was what we today call the Midwest. It was still a wild, dangerous, and uncertain place to try to make a future. Clean, bright copy.

Hardcover. Denton TX, University of North Texas Press, 1st, 2019, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket, 861 pages. Roy B. Young, Gary L. Roberts, and Casey Tefertiller, all notable experts on Earp and the Wild West, have curated an anthology of the very best work on Earp--more than sixty articles and excerpts from books--from a wide array of authors, selecting only the best written and factually documented pieces and omitting those full of suppositions or false material. Nearly all of the selections come from the last twenty years, when a more critical eye was turned to sources of Earp history. Many articles derive from the five stellar western publications dedicated to preserving the history of the American West: True West, Wild West, WOLA Journal, NOLA Quarterly, and the Journal of the Wild West History Association. Earp's life is presented in chronological fashion, from his early years to Dodge City, Kansas; triumph and tragedy in Tombstone; and his later years throughout the West. Important figures in Earp's life, such as Bat Masterson, the Clantons, the McLaurys, Doc Holliday, and John Ringo, are also covered. Wyatt Earp's image in film and the myths surrounding his life, as well as controversies over interpretations and presentations of his life by various writers, also receive their due. Clean copy.

Hardcover. NY, Phaidon Press, 1st, 2003, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, translucent dust jacket, 240 pages. In late 1964 Andy Warhol commissioned young fashion photographer David McCabe to document his daily activities for one year. During the course of this project, whenever the artist called McCabe would come to meet him at The Factory, an opening, a party, a coffeeshop or any place where Warhol would decide that he wanted to be accompanied by the photographer and his camera. In the end, these images were never published, perhaps because they revealed more than the increasingly-famous Warhol was willing to share with the public. Hidden away for almost 40 years, the significant majority of these 400 duotone photos are now presented together for the first time to fulfill their original intention in an astounding tour de force of dynamic and often poignant realism: A Year in the Life of Andy Warhol. These images not only represent unique documentation of one of the most significant artists of the twentieth century, but also provide a rare behind-the-scenes look at the New York art world at a time when Pop art was at its peak. McCabe's photographs are accompanied by the entertaining descriptions and reminiscences of Factory insider David Dalton, one of Warhol's first assistants.

Hardcover. Holland MI, Hope College , 1st, 2006, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket, 554 pages. Memorial biography of a beloved teacher of literature at Hope College in Maryland.

Hardcover. New Haven, Yale University Press, 1st, 1985, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, blue cloth, 262 pages. Illustrated with black & white photographs. Clean, tight copy. This portrait of Disderi and the carte de visite he patented in Paris in 1854 is far more than a biography. The c-d-v, or photographic calling card, was a relatively inexpensive product that made the photographic portrait available to the middle class . McCauley's carefully documented work explores Disderi's career and oeuvre , the impact of mass-produced celebrity cartes on the social and cultural life of mid-19th-century France, and aesthetics in c-d-v portraiture. The final third of the book is an art historical evaluation of the importance of the c-d-v for portrait painting of the period . The fine bibliography, generous illustrative matter, and detailed notes add to the value of this work for the avid student of photohistory or 19th-century studies.

Hardcover. NY, Greenwillow, 1st, 1996, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, 198 pages. Hardcover with dust jacket. Autobiography by the award-winning children's book author. Black & white photos.Clean and tight copy.