biography

Hardcover. NY, Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1st, 1978, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a lightly worn, chipped dust jacket. 302 pages, many b&w illustrations. Clean copy.

Hardcover. New Haven CT, Yale University Press, 1st, 2019, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket, 245 pages, b&w illustrations, index. He was, according to Pauline Kael, "the greatest American screenwriter." Jean-Luc Godard called him "a genius" who "invented 80 percent of what is used in Hollywood movies today." Besides tossing off dozens of now-classic scripts--including Scarface,Twentieth Century, and Notorious--Ben Hecht was known in his day as ace reporter, celebrated playwright, taboo-busting novelist, and the most quick-witted of provocateurs. During World War II, he also emerged as an outspoken crusader for the imperiled Jews of Europe, and later he became a fierce propagandist for pre-1948 Palestine's Jewish terrorist underground. Whatever the outrage he stirred, this self-declared "child of the century" came to embody much that defined America--especially Jewish America--in his time. Hecht's fame has dimmed with the decades, but Adina Hoffman's vivid portrait brings this charismatic and contradictory figure back to life on the page. Hecht was a renaissance man of dazzling sorts, and Hoffman--critically acclaimed biographer, former film critic, and eloquent commentator on Middle Eastern culture and politics--is uniquely suited to capture him in all his modes.

Hardcover. New York, Vanguard Press, 1st, 1932, Book: Good, Dust Jacket: None, 306 pages. Hardcover. B/w illustrated frontispiece. Some age wear to covers. Bound in gray fabric. Previous owner's bookplate on front endpaper. Deckled edges. Some age yellowing to pages and edges. In good condition for its age.

Hardcover. Indianapolis/NY, Bobbs-Merrill, 1st, 1971, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Good, Hardcover in a worn dust jacket, 490 pages, b&w frontis. Rush, the Philadelphia doctor who signed the Declaration of Independence, was an energetic, ambitious man given to devising reforms and, as the author puts it, meddling in politics. He studied medicine in Edinburgh and London, meeting Hume, Goldsmith, Samuel Johnson, et al. and, Hawke thinks, solidifying his republican disposition. Back in Pennsylvania he agitated for independence, made friends with John Adams, urged Paine to write Common Sense, and entered Congress. Apart from the recurrent epidemics of the age, the practice of military medicine and propaganda for resuming debt payments occupied Rush during the war; afterwards he turned to progressive education, speculated in land, fought paper money, equivocally supported the abolition of slavery, declared that tobacco is unhealthful, and boosted the Constitution before it was even written. Dust jacket chipped, faded in parts, clean internally.

Hardcover. Cambridge MA, MIT Press, 1st, 1979, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a mildly worn dust jacket. 361 pages, index, b&w illustrations. Benjamin Thompson, later Count Rumford, was one of the most fascinating and complex men of his period (1753~1814). Soldier of fortune, spy, womanizer, brilliant scientist, intriguer, autocrat, inventor, adventurer, an American expatriated to England who did his most productive scientific work in Munich and who died in France, a man devoted to relieving the suffering of the poor, Rumford was all this and more, and Sanborn Brown's biography makes clear that all these aspects merge into a whole human being. The man who conducted experiments on the caloric theory of heat and the ladies' man are one and the same. Clean copy

Hardcover. Boston Ma., Houghton Mifflin Co., 1st, 1978, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, 525 pages, b&w illustrations. Green cloth, gilt titles to front and spine. Light wear and rubbing to edges and spine of pictorial dust jacket, else a very nice, tight copy.

Hardcover. Boston, MA, Houghton Mifflin Company, 1st, 1978, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover, 525 pages, b&w illustrations. The first full-length biography of one of the fathers of American art. Light green cloth, gilt titles to spine and front cover. Blue pictorial dust jacket with minor wear to spine and edges. Overall a very nice, clean copy.

Hardcover. Boston, MA, Houghton Mifflin Company, 1st, 1978, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover, 525 pages, b&w illustrations. The first full-length biography of one of the fathers of American art. Light green cloth, gilt titles to spine and front cover. Blue pictorial dust jacket with minor wear to spine and edges. Overall a very nice, clean copy.

Hardcover. New York, Norton, 1st, 2018, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover, 634 pages, b&w illustrations. In a bright, unclipped dj. In Berenice Abbott: A Life in Photography, author, archivist, and curator Julia Van Haaften brings this iconic public figure to life alongside outlandish, familiar characters from artist Man Ray to cybernetics founder Norbert Wiener. A teenage rebel from Ohio, Abbott escaped first to Greenwich Village and then to Paris-photographing, in Sylvia Beach's words, "everyone who was anyone." As the Roaring Twenties ended, Abbott returned to New York, where she soon fell in love with art critic Elizabeth McCausland, with whom she would spend thirty years. In the 1930s, Abbott began her best-known work, Changing New York, in which she fearlessly documented the city's metamorphosis. When warned by an older male supervisor that "nice girls" avoid the Bowery-then Manhattan's skid row-Abbott shot back, "I'm not a nice girl. I'm a photographer...I go anywhere." This bold, feminist attitude would characterize all Abbott's accomplishments, including imaging techniques she invented in her influential, space race-era science photography and her tenure as The New School's first photography teacher.With more than ninety stunning photos, this sweeping, cinematic biography secures Berenice Abbott's place in the histories of photography and modern art, while framing her incredible accomplishments as a female artist and entrepreneur.

University Park PA, Pennsylvania State University Press , 1st, 1986, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket. Weintraub's compilation of Shaw's diaries reveal the day to day life of one of Britain's most famous playwrights. 558 pages. Vol. 1 only of a two volume set. Clean.

Hardcover. 5 Continents Editions , 1st, 2006, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover, 304 pages. Plain cloth boards with B/W Photographic DJ, 12" x 9.75, page bibliography, 1-page biography of Bernatzik, 3 pages listing Bernatzik's published works. 2 maps. 145 Black & White Photos by Hugo A. Bernatzik (1897-1953), Many of the photos are presented on 2-Pages, and the balance on 1-Page.. An 18-Page Section at the end with 145 thumbnail photos of the principle illustrations accompanied by descriptions. Photographs by Hugo A. Beratzik. Preface by Ian C. Glover. Acknowledgements by Kevin Conru, Essays by Jacques Ivanoff, Alison Nordstrom, Christina Angela Thomas.

Hardcover. NY, Hudson Hills Press, 1st, 1987, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover, 228 pages, 123 color plates. Morisot was a gutsy pioneer among the French impressionists. As a standard-bearer of the avant-garde, she created a scandal by helping to organize a public auction of their works, something very few artists had dared to do. Defying the advice of her parents and Manet, she remained in Paris when Prussian troops besieged the city. In her artistic technique she was no less daring. Around 1874, in pictures of tourists and yacht-filled rivers, she broke through to an abbreviated, shorthand style ahead of her contemporaries. Disregarding her own view that Monet had taken landscape painting to its farthest limits, her late oils of gardens are brilliant fireworks of color. This catalogue of a retrospective exhibition that is to tour the country stands on its own as a valuable study.

Hardcover. NY, Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1st, 2006, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket. 375 pages. B&W photographs and illustrations. Pictorial dust jacket. Green cloth with gilt title to spine. Erratum laid-in. Overall, a clean, tight copy. ohn Betjeman was by far the most popular poet of the twentieth century; his collected poems sold more than two million copies. As poet laureate of England, he became a national icon, but behind the public man were doubts and demons. The poet best known for writing hymns of praise to athletic middle-class girls on the tennis courts led a tempestuous emotional life. For much of his fifty-year marriage to Penelope Chetwode, the daughter of a field marshal, Betjeman had a relationship with Elizabeth Cavendish, the daughter of the Duke of Devonshire and lady-in-waiting to Princess Margaret. Betjeman, a devout Anglican, was tormented by guilt about the storms this emotional triangle caused. Betjeman, published to coincide with the hundredth anniversary of the poet's birth, is the first to use fully the vast archive of personal material relating to his private life, including literally hundreds of letters written by his wife about their life together and apart. Here too are chronicled his many friendships, ranging from "Bosie" Douglas to the young satirists of Private Eye, from the Mitford sisters to the Crazy Gang. This is a celebration of a much-loved poet, a brave campaigner for architecture at risk, and a highly popular public performer. Betjeman was the classic example of the melancholy clown, whose sadness found its perfect mood music in the hymns of a poignant Anglicanism. Clean copy.

Hardcover. Guilford, CT, Lyons Press, 1st, 2018, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, 144 pages. Hardcover with dust jacket. A very clean, unmarked copy with only minor wear to dust jacket edges. Hundreds of never before seen black & white photographs and private letters spanning 1949 - 2000.

Hardcover. NY, Knopf, 1st, 1997, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover, Illustrated with color, black & white plates. Clean, unmarked copy with only minor wear to dust jacket.

Hardcover. NY, Simon & Schuster, 1st, 1993, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket, 479 pages, b&w illustrations. A comprehensive biography of one of the century's premier musicians focuses on his accomplishments as a composer rather than his popularity as a bandleader.

Hardcover. NY, Viking Adult, 1st, 1996, Book: Good, Dust Jacket: Good, Hardcover, 282 pages, with photographs of the artist and her work. Slight foxing on top edge and small stain on fore edge, otherwise, very clean and tight copy. Twenty years after the publication of her autobiography, Through the Flower, the renowned artist and feminist continues the story of her life and takes a provocative look at late twentieth-century American culture and the allocation of our resources.

Hardcover. New York, Dutton Books, 1st, 1998, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, 304 pages. Hardcover with dust jacket. A very clean, unmarked copy with only minor wear to dust jacket edges. A tight copy.

Hardcover. Totowa, NJ, Rowman and Littlefield, reprint, 1973, Book: Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, 223 pages. Foreword by Walter Shewring. Blue cloth covers with gilt decoration. First edition published in 1953. Frontispiece portrait of Gill and numerous facsimiles of type, text, and illustration. Written by Eric Gill's brother.

Hardcover. New York, Crown Publishers, 1st, 2005, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover, 463 pages, b&w illustrations. What do you need to make money making movies? The answer, according to cult hero, creator of the sexploitation film, and the man the Wall Street Journal once dubbed the King Leer of Hollywood, Russ Meyer, is: "big bosoms and square jaws." In the first candid and fiendishly researched account of the late cinematic instigator's life, Jimmy McDonough shows us how Russ Meyer used that formula to turn his own crazed fantasies into movies that made him a millionaire and changed the face of American film forever.

Hardcover. NY, Prentice Hall, 2nd pr., 1967, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket, 258 pages, b&w photographs. The story of Edgar Rice Burroughs and Tarzan in the movies.

Hardcover. Stanford CA, Stanford University Press, 1st, 2004, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Good, Hardcover, 335 pages. Oversized. Black cloth cover, minor wear to edges. Dust jacket has some wear to corners and edges, small faint smudge. Inside is bright and clean. Many b&w photographs throughout. A nice, tight copy.

Softcover. NY, Norton, reprint, 2009, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 384 pages. A self-described "desert rat" who rocketed to fame at the age of twenty-two, Bill Mauldin used flashing black brush lines and sardonic captions to capture the world of the American combat soldier in World War II. His cartoon dogfaces, Willie and Joe, appeared in Stars and Stripes and hundreds of newspapers back home, bearing grim witness to life in the foxhole. We've never viewed war in the same way since. This lushly illustrated biography draws on private papers, correspondence, and thousands of original drawings to render a full portrait of a complex and quintessentially American genius.92 illustrations

Hardcover. NY, Norton, 1st, 2008, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover, 384 pages. The definitive biography of the greatest cartoonist of the Greatest Generation. "The real war," said Walt Whitman, "will never get in the books." During World War II, the truest glimpse most Americans got of the "real war" came through the flashing black lines of twenty-two-year-old infantry sergeant Bill Mauldin. Week after week, Mauldin defied army censors, German artillery, and Patton's pledge to "throw his ass in jail" to deliver his wildly popular cartoon, "Up Front," to the pages of Stars and Stripes. "Up Front" featured the wise-cracking Willie and Joe, whose stooped shoulders, mud-soaked uniforms, and pidgin of army slang and slum dialect bore eloquent witness to the world of combat and the men who lived-and died-in it. This taut, lushly illustrated biography-the first of two-time Pulitzer Prize winner Bill Mauldin-is illustrated with more than ninety classic Mauldin cartoons and rare photographs. It traces the improbable career and tumultuous private life of a charismatic genius who rose to fame on his motto: "If it's big, hit it."