biography

Hardcover. Boston, A.J. Wright, 1st, 1848, Book: Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, 300 pages, illustrated with 6 b&w engravings from sketches done by the author. Interesting sailing, whaling adventures by a 14-year veteran seaman. Embossed brown cloth with gilt design on cover, gilt lettering and design on spine. Spine cloth chipped, worn at top and bottom. Previous owner's signature in pencil on front fly leaf. Corners show wear, internally very good with only minor foxing.

Hardcover. NY, Alfred A. Knopf, 1st, 1938, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, 370 pages. Index, illustrated with black and white plates. Has folding genealogical chart, bibliography and index. Declared as "the first complete biography in English" of the notorious French painter (1864-1901), with new material from letters, interviews with surviving contemporaries, etc. Clean copy.

Hardcover. NY, Alfred A. Knopf, 1st, 1966, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Good, Hardcover in an unclipped, lightly soiled dust jacket. Yellow cloth stamped in purple and black; 370 pages, illustrated with drawings by Leslie Saalburg. Here Gingrich, the publisher of Esquire, shares his feelings on food, automobiles, smoking pipes, violins, haberdashery and a litany of other esoteric subjects.

Hardcover. Camden NJ, International Marine, 1st, 2002, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket. 278 pages, b&w illustrations. Navigation at sea was a matter of guesswork until well into the 19th century. Changing that became the obsession of Matthew Fontaine Maury. While others built railroads, Maury mapped highways of wind and current over the seas. Hearn uses Maury's career as a window on America's maritime development in the 19th century, including the clipper-ship era of the 1850s, the rise of steam and steel, and the Civil War. Clean copy.

Hardcover. NY, Dey Street Books/Morrow, 1st, 2024, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket, 437 pages. Celebrated NPR music critic Ann Powers explores the life and career of Joni Mitchell in a lyrical style as fascinating and ethereal as the songs of the artist herself. In Traveling, Powers seeks to understand Mitchell through her myriad journeys. Through extensive interviews with Mitchell's peers and deep archival research, she takes readers to rural Canada, mapping the singer's childhood battle with polio. She charts the course of Mitchell's musical evolution, ranging from early folk to jazz fusion to experimentation with pop synthetics. She follows the winding road of Mitchell's collaborations with other greats, and the loves that emerged along the way, all the way through to the remarkable return of Mitchell to music-making after the 2015 aneurysm that nearly took her life. Clean copy.

Softcover. NY, Da Capo Press, reprint, 1978, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 245 pages, b&w photos. Sidney Bechet (1897-1959) was one of the most brilliant exponents of New Orleans jazz. A prodigy on the clarinet, he soloed with Bunk Johnson's orchestra at age eleven, was improvising cornet-clarinet duos with Buddy Petit at age fifteen. Leaving New Orleans in the 1920s, Bechet took his Creole sound and spirit to New York, where he adopted the soprano saxophone and soon developed the unique style that marked his special artistry.

Hardcover. New York, Blue Rider Press, First Edition, 2016, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, 267 pages. Hardcover. Full color illustrations throughout. Bright, crisp dust jacket with light, marginal wear to edges. Clean & unmarked. A nice copy.

Hardcover. New York, ATRIA BOOKS, 1st, 2015, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, 324 pages. Hardcover with dust jacket. Clean, unmarked copy with only minor wear to dust jacket. Some black and white pictures.

Hardcover. New York, Harry N. Abrams, 1st, 1976, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover, 220 pages. 176 b&w and color plates, fold outs. Biography of Ernst Trova, self-taught painter and contemporary sculpture artist, known especially for his series entitled Falling Man. White cloth, gilt lettering to spine, gilt design on front, Very nice, clean and well preserved copy. Looks as good as new.

Hardcover. NY, Crown, 2nd pr., 2021, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket with minor edgewear. 394 pages, color and b&w illustrations. Stan Lee was one of the most famous and beloved entertainers to emerge from the twentieth century. He served as head editor of Marvel Comics for three decades and, in that time, became known as the creator of more pieces of internationally recognizable intellectual property than nearly anyone: Spider-Man, the Avengers, the X-Men, Black Panther, the Incredible Hulk . . . the list goes on. His carnival-barker marketing prowess helped save the comic-book industry and superhero fiction. His cameos in Marvel movies have charmed billions. When he died in 2018, grief poured in from around the world, further cementing his legacy. But what if Stan Lee wasn't who he said he was? To craft the definitive biography of Lee, Abraham Riesman conducted more than 150 interviews and investigated thousands of pages of private documents, turning up never-before-published revelations about Lee's life and work. True Believer tackles tough questions: Did Lee actually create the characters he gained fame for creating? Was he complicit in millions of dollars' worth of fraud in his post-Marvel life? Which members of the cavalcade of grifters who surrounded him were most responsible for the misery of his final days?

Hardcover. New York, Farrar Straus Giroux, 1st, 1985, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, 396 pages. Hardcover with dust jacket. SIGNED BY AUTHOR on half-title page. Clean, tight copy with minor wear to covers and dust jacket.

Hardcover. New York, Charles Scribner's Sons, First Edition, 1961, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, 221 pages. Hardcover. Brown cloth covers with gilt decoration to cover, gilt titles to spine. Full page, full color & bw illustrations throughout. Clean, unmarked text. A nice copy.

Hardcover. London, England, Hammond, Hammond & Co. Ltd., 1st Edition, 1953, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, 2 Volume Set, DOMESTIC SHIPPING ONLY. 1560 total pages. Hardcovers. Black cover boards, gilt title on spine. Light tanning from age to pages. Bindings good. Spines straight. A record of one of America's most distinguished diplomatic careers.

Hardcover. NY, Random House, 1st US, 1978, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket, 382 pages. A biography of Ivan Turgenev, 19th-century Russian writer. The book is not a critical examination of Turgenev's literary output, but, of the man himself - enigmatic and unknown - and the world in which he lived, and the people he knew and associated with. Clean copy.

Hardcover. NY, Viking, 1st, 1986, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket. 214 pages. A follow up of Truitt's journal "Daybook." The author continues the exploration of her life as an artist, a woman, and a mother, focusing on the constant interplay between daily activities and choices and the broader context of history and ideas. Clean copy.

Hardcover. Boston, Houghton Mifflin Company, 1st, 1928, Book: Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, 500 pages, with illustrations. Corner and edge wear and fade, scuff mark on spine, some red spots on back cover, two small watermarks on front cover and black ink stains on bottom edge. Overall in good condition with clean pages and tight binding.

Hardcover. NY, W. W. Norton, 1st, 1991, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket, 254 pages. Red phono disc of Tuvan throat singing still attached. As a stamp-collecting boy always fascinated by remote places, Nobel Prize-winning physicist Richard Feynman was particularly taken by the diamond-shaped stamps from a place called Tannu Tuva deep within Outer Mongolia. He hoped, someday, to travel there. In 1977, Feynman and his sidekick - fellow drummer and geography enthusiast Ralph Leighton - set out to make arrangements to visit Tuva, doing noble and hilarious battle with Soviet red tape, befriending quite a few Tuvans, and discovering the wonders of Tuvan throat-singing. Their Byzantine attempts to reach Tannu Tuva would span a decade, interrupted by Feynman's appointment to the committee investigating the Challenger disaster, and his tragic struggle with the cancer that finally killed him. Tuva or Bust! chronicles the deepening friendship of two zany, brilliant strategists whose love of the absurd will delight and instruct. Clean copy.

Softcover. Los Angeles, The Augustan Reprint Society , reprint, 1984, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 60 pages. A facsimile reprint from the pages of the author's Miscellaneous Works (pages 285-348) published in 1751. Clean, bright copy.

Hardcover. NY, Praeger Publishers, 1st, 1975, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket. 225 pages, b&w photos. Cobb is pictured as an explosive personality, a shrewd realist, and a great base stealer in this account of his life and career. Clean copy.

Hardcover. NY, Simon & Schuster, 1st, 2015, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket. 449 pages, b&w illustrations. Ty Cobb is baseball royalty, maybe even the greatest player who ever lived. His lifetime batting average is still the highest of all time, and when he retired in 1928, after twenty-one years with the Detroit Tigers and two with the Philadelphia Athletics, he held more than ninety records. But the numbers don't tell half of Cobb's tale. The Georgia Peach was by far the most thrilling player of the era: "Ty Cobb could cause more excitement with a base on balls than Babe Ruth could with a grand slam," one columnist wrote. When the Hall of Fame began in 1936, he was the first player voted in.But Cobb was also one of the game's most controversial characters. He got in a lot of fights, on and off the field, and was often accused of being overly aggressive. In his day, even his supporters acknowledged that he was a fierce and fiery competitor. Because his philosophy was to "create a mental hazard for the other man," he had his enemies, but he was also widely admired. After his death in 1961, however, something strange happened: his reputation morphed into that of a monster--a virulent racist who also hated children and women, and was in turn hated by his peers. Clean copy.

Hardcover. NY, Free Press, 1st, 1997, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket. 478 pages, b&w illustrations. When the young, insignificant scion of an unremarkable German principality first came to England to serve as consort to the youthful Queen Victoria, no one could have guessed that he would grow to become one of Britain's great--if uncrowned--kings. Albert's life could not have been an easy one; a man of great intelligence, pride, and ambition, he was forced to move behind the scenes, playing major roles in running the Crimean War and working to keep Britain out of the Civil War being waged in the United States. He was interested in industry and technology, and worked to stage the Crystal Palace exhibition--the first World's Fair. Yet, while his wife adored him, his adopted people scorned him for his German accent, his foreign ways, and his covert activities as a surrogate ruler. Clean copy.

Hardcover. Woodstock, NY, WoodstockArts, 2nd, 2012, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, 192 pages. Hardcover with dust jacket. Clean, unmarked copy with only minor wear to dust jacket. Color and black and white pictures throughout.

Hardcover. New York, Thomas Y. Crowell & Company, 1st Edition, 1895, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, 150 pages. Hardcover. B/w frontispiece with tissue guard. Fore and bottom edges rough cut, gilt top edge. Green decorated cover boards, gilt title on spine and front cover board. Binding very good. Spine straight. Pages have some tanning, but unmarked and clean. Tight first edition. A heartfelt reflection on life, family, and community beneath the towering elms of Newton, Massachusetts. Claflin's evocative prose paints a vivid picture of a bygone era, capturing moments of joy, sorrow, and timeless memories in the shade of ancient trees that stood as silent witnesses to generations of American history.

Softcover. NY, The Feminist Press, 1ST, 1999, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 400 pages, b&w illustrations. The memoir of a young Catholic women's affair with a pastor in Italy. INSCRIBED BY AUTHOR on the half-title page. A few pages with light pencil underlining., otherwise clean.