california

Hardcover. Cambridge MA, Harvard University Press, 1st, 2007, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket. 457 pages, b&w illustrations. Few of us question the slips of green paper that come and go in our purses, pockets, and wallets. Yet confidence in the money supply is a recent phenomenon: prior to the Civil War, the United States did not have a single, national currency. Instead, countless banks issued paper money in a bewildering variety of denominations and designs - more than ten thousand different kinds by 1860. Counterfeiters flourished amid this anarchy, putting vast quantities of bogus bills into circulation. Their success, Stephen Mihm reveals, is more than an entertaining tale of criminal enterprise: it is the story of the rise of a country defined by a freewheeling brand of capitalism over which the federal government exercised little control. It was an era when responsibility for the country's currency remained in the hands of capitalists for whom "making money" was as much a literal as a figurative undertaking. Mihm's witty tale brims with colorful characters: shady bankers, corrupt cops, charismatic criminals, and brilliant engravers. Based on prodigious research, it ranges far and wide, from New York City's criminal underworld to the gold fields of California and the battlefields of the Civil War. Clean copy.

Hardcover. Berkeley/Los Angeles, University of California Press, 1st, 2013, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, pictorial boards, 270 pages in color and b&w. The first major book to consider the life and work of Robert Arneson, A Troublesome Subject tells the fascinating story of how a high school art teacher transformed himself into an artist of international stature and ambition. Representing the full scope of Arneson's career in a rich survey of color reproductions, this book is at once a study of the trajectory of contemporary culture, the work of Robert Arneson, and the relationship between the two. It shows how Arneson's work articulated the crisis of narcissism that has defined American culture since 1970. Jonathan Fineberg develops his ongoing work toward a psychosocial history of art as he proceeds through Arneson's career-chronicling his early life, the formation of a personal style, and finding a unique subject matter in his famous post-1970 turn to self-portraiture. Clean, bright copy.

Softcover. Berkeley CA, University of California Press, 1st, 1995, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 381 pages, b&w illustrations. Filled with insight, provocative in its conclusions, A'aisa's Gifts is a groundbreaking ethnography of the Mekeo of Papua New Guinea and a valuable contribution to anthropological theory. Based on twenty years' fieldwork, this richly detailed study of Mekeo esoteric knowledge, cosmology, and self-conceptualizations recasts accepted notions about magic and selfhood. Drawing on accounts by Mekeo ritual experts and laypersons, this is the first book to demonstrate magic's profound role in creating the self. It also argues convincingly that dream reporting provides a natural context for self-reflection. In presenting its data, the book develops the concept of "autonomous imagination" into a new theoretical framework for exploring subjective imagery processes across cultures.

Softcover. Newport, California, Newport Harbor Art Museum, 1st, 1984, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 159 pages. Exhibition catalog featuring the work of Norman Bluhm, Michael Goldberg, Grace Hartigan, Al Held, Alfred Leslie and Joan MItchell. Color illustrated covers with white titles, foreword by Kevin E. Consey, acknowledgments by Paul Schimmel, essays by Paul Schimmel, B.H. Friedman, John Bernard Myers, and Robert Rosenblum, b&w frontispiece, 36 full page color plates, numerous b&w figures throughout, biographical notes. Light rubbing to covers; a very clean, tight copy in great condition.

Hardcover. Berkeley, University of California Press, Revised 2nd, 1975, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Good, 201 pages. Hardcover. Black & white illustrations. Dust jacket with moderate wear, closed tear. Previous owners name on front endpaper. Clean, tight copy.

Hardcover. Berkeley, University of California Press, reprint, 1991, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket, 617 pages. An enlarged and revised edition of the 1974 book. This biography begins not with one of the universally known incidents of Alexander's life, but with an account of his father, Philip of Macedonia, whose many-territoried empire was the first on the continent of Europe to have an effectively centralized government and military. What Philip and Macedonia had to offer, Alexander made his own, but Philip and Macedonia also made Alexander form an important context for understanding Alexander himself. Yet his origins and training do not fully explain the man. For the general reader, the book, redolent with gritty details and fully aware of Alexander's darker side, offers a gripping tale of Alexander's career. Full backnotes, fourteen maps, and chronological and genealogical tables serve readers with more specialized interests. Mild foxing to text block, clean copy.

Hardcover. Morton Grove IL, Albert Whitman & Co , 1st, 1993, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket. An adaptation of the author's biography, Land of Enchantment, describes her eventful 1852 journey with her mother and brother from Kansas to California over the Santa Fe trail in a large wagon train. Lovely detailed watercolors illustrate her narrative. Clean copy.

Hardcover. Berkeley CA, University of California Press, 1st, 1994, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket, 236 pages. The contradictory nature of the work of Benito Perez Galdos, Spain's greatest modern novelist, is brought to the fore in Catherine Jagoe's innovative and rigorous study. Revising commonly held views of his feminism, she explores the relation of Galdos's novels to the "woman question" in Spain, arguing that after 1892 the muted feminist discourse of his early work largely disappears. While his later novels have been interpreted as celebrations of the emancipated new woman, Jagoe contends that they actually reinforce the conservative, bourgeois model of frugal, virtuous womanhood-the angel of the house.

Chicago, Chicago Review Press, 1st, 2014, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket. The presidential election of 1844 was one of the two or three most momentous elections in American history. Had Henry Clay won instead of James K. Polk, we'd be living in a very different country today. Polk's victory cemented the westward expansion that brought Texas, California, and Oregon into the union. It also took place amid religious turmoil that included anti-Mormon and anti-Catholic violence, and the "Great Disappointment," in which thousands of followers of an obscure preacher named William Miller believed Christ would return to earth in October 1844.Author and journalist John Bicknell details even more compelling, interwoven events that occurred during this momentous year: the murder of Joseph Smith, the religious fermentation of the Second Great Awakening, John C. Fremont's exploration of the West, Charles Goodyear's patenting of vulcanized rubber, the near-death of President John Tyler in a freak naval explosion, and much more. All of these elements illustrate the competing visions of the American future--Democrats versus Whigs, Mormons versus Millerites, nativists versus Catholics, those who risked the venture westward versus those who stayed safely behind--and how Polk's election cemented the vision of a continental nation. Clean copy.

Hardcover. NY, HarperCollins, 1st, 2003, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket. SIGNED BY CHOI on the title page. On the lam for an act of violence against the American government, 25-year-old Jenny Shimada agrees to care for three younger fugitives whom a shadowy figure from her former radical life has spirited out of California. One of them, the kidnapped granddaughter of a wealthy newspaper magnate in San Francisco, has become a national celebrity for embracing her captors' ideology and joining their revolutionary cell. American Woman draws its plot from the Patty Hearst Kidnapping in 1974. It is more than a simple retelling of known facts. The author opens up her characters - their psychology, their background. She gives a sense of the times and of real people in those times. Clean copy.

Softcover. Berkeley, University of California Press, 1st pbk., 2006, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 373 pages, b&w illustrations. Clean, unmarked copy with only minor wear to wrappers. This engaging, deeply researched study provides the richest and most nuanced picture we have to date of cinema-both movies and movie-going-in the early 1910s. At the same time, it makes clear the profound relationship between early cinema and the construction of a national identity in this important transitional period in the United States. Richard Abel looks closely at sensational melodramas, including westerns (cowboy, cowboy-girl, and Indian pictures), Civil War films (especially girl-spy films), detective films, and animal pictures-all popular genres of the day that have received little critical attention. He simultaneously analyzes film distribution and exhibition practices in order to reconstruct a context for understanding moviegoing at a time when American cities were coming to grips with new groups of immigrants and women working outside the home. Drawing from a wealth of research in archive prints, the trade press, fan magazines, newspaper advertising, reviews, and syndicated columns-the latter of which highlight the importance of the emerging star system-Abel sheds new light on the history of the film industry, on working-class and immigrant culture at the turn of the century, and on the process of imaging a national community.

Hardcover. Pasadena CA, Pasadena Museum of California Art, 1st, 2005, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover, 149 pages, illustrated in color. Bright, clean copy in similar dust jacket. Catalog of an exhibition organised by the Pasadena Museum of Californian Art and held there and at the Gibbes Museum, Charleston, South Carolina, in 2005-6. The book presents 77 works, reproduced in excellent colour as half and full page plates, including nudes, figures and urban and rural landscapes. William Gerdts offers a scene-setting Introduction after which Solon provides an in-depth study of the artist's life and work. This includes his marriage, travels abroad including Europe, Panama and Mexico, experience as an aerial photographer in the Great War, return to Southern California and life in Pasadena, a region that was recommended for health reasons, and a final decade marked by ill-health that contributed to the general decline in his reputation outside of the local art community.

Softcover. privately printed, 1st, 1982, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 50 pages printed on one side only. Limited edition of 2000 copies, this being number 943. Signed by Cork. Semi-glossy paper, wonderful color photos of carousel horses. Clean, bright copy.

Hardcover. Berkeley CA, University of California, 1st, 2003, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover, 310 pages, b&w photos. In a bright, unclipped dust jacket.

Hardcover. Yale University Press, 1st, 2014, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover in pictorial boards, 143 pages. An unprecedented look at a moving photographic series that chronicles the gay communities of Los Angeles and San Francisco from 1969 to 1972. For more than forty years, American photographer Anthony Friedkin (b. 1949), creating full-frame black-and-white images, has documented people, cities, and landscapes primarily in his home state of California. During the culturally tumultuous years of 1969 and 1970, Friedkin made a series of photographs that together offer an eloquent and expressive visual chronicle of the gay communities of Los Angeles and San Francisco at the time. This is the first book to explore the series, titled The Gay Essay, in depth, within the broader historical context that gave rise to it. 1969 witnessed the Stonewall riots in New York City and was a turning point in the history of community building and organized political activism among homosexuals in the United States. The Gay Essay provides a singular, intimate record of this crucial moment. Friedkin's portraits, taken in streets, hotels, bars, and dancehalls, demonstrate a sensitivity and an understanding that has imbued the photographs with an enduring resonance. This handsome book features seventy-five full-page plates and is accompanied by engaging essays and a poem by Eileen Myles.

Hardcover. Yale University Press, 1st, 2014, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover in pictorial boards, 143 pages. An unprecedented look at a moving photographic series that chronicles the gay communities of Los Angeles and San Francisco from 1969 to 1972. For more than forty years, American photographer Anthony Friedkin (b. 1949), creating full-frame black-and-white images, has documented people, cities, and landscapes primarily in his home state of California. During the culturally tumultuous years of 1969 and 1970, Friedkin made a series of photographs that together offer an eloquent and expressive visual chronicle of the gay communities of Los Angeles and San Francisco at the time. This is the first book to explore the series, titled The Gay Essay, in depth, within the broader historical context that gave rise to it. 1969 witnessed the Stonewall riots in New York City and was a turning point in the history of community building and organized political activism among homosexuals in the United States. The Gay Essay provides a singular, intimate record of this crucial moment. Friedkin's portraits, taken in streets, hotels, bars, and dancehalls, demonstrate a sensitivity and an understanding that has imbued the photographs with an enduring resonance. This handsome book features seventy-five full-page plates and is accompanied by engaging essays and a poem by Eileen Myles.

Hardcover. New York, NY, Rizzoli International Publications, 1st, 2000, Book: Near Fine, Dust Jacket: Near Fine, Hardcover, 197 pages, color photographs throughout. Very clean and tight copy. This is the first book to put together all of the extraordinary houses designed by Antoine Predock. Each of the twelve remarkable private houses featured here--ten from Texas, Arizona, and New Mexico, and two from California--harmoniously blend with their landscape in ways for which Predock is now so renowned. Characterized by environmentally conscious design, the houses display both exquisite refinement and an ingenious level of invention.

Hardcover. Baltimore, Johns Hopkins University, 1st, 2002, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, An extraordinary work, unparalleled in its breadth and depth of detail, this three-volume set offers the first comprehensive history of architecture and town planning throughout colonial North America, from Russian Alaska to French Quebec, to Spanish Florida and California, to British, Dutch, and other settlements on the East Coast. Across this vast terrain, James Kornwolf conjures the outlines of the constructed environment as it emerged in settlements and communities, in structures and sites, and in the flourishes and idiosyncrasies of the families and individuals who erected and inhabited colonial buildings and towns. Here as never before readers can observe the impulses and principles of colonial design and planning as they are implemented in the buildings and streets, harbors and squares, gardens and landscapes of the New World. Incorporating more than 3,000 illustrations, Kornwolf's massive work conveys the full range of the colonial encounter with the continent's geography, from the high forms of architecture through formal landscape design and town planning. From these pages emerge the fine arts of environmental design, an understanding of the political and economic events that helped to determine settlement in North America, an appreciation of the various architectural and landscape forms that the settlers created, and an awareness of the diversity of the continent's geography and its peoples. Considering the humblest buildings along with the mansions of the wealthy and powerful, public buildings, forts, and churches, Kornwolf captures the true dynamism and diversity of colonial communities-their rivalries and frictions, their outlooks and attitudes-as they extended their hold on the land. His work conveys for the first time the full scale, from intimate to grand, of their enduring transformation of the natural landscape of North America. NOTE: DOMESTIC SHIPPING ONLY.

Hardcover. Salt Lake City, Gibbs Smith, Publisher, 1st, 2006, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, 160 pages. Hardcover with dust jacket. Extensive color photography throughout. Illustrated endpapers and fly leaves. Clean, unmarked copy with only minor wear to dust jacket.

Hardcover. Berkeley, University of California Press, 1st, 1968, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Good, Hardcover in a lightly worn and darkened dust jacket, 421 pages with frontispiece map, illustrations and 16 photographic plates. Important economic, religious, and social study of the ancient Jewish settlement on the island of Elephantine. During the 5th century B.C., the southern frontier of ancient Egypt was guarded by an Aramean garrison at Syene (modern Aswan) and a Jewish garrison on the adjacent island of Elephantine. This study is an interpretation of the well-known group of Aramaic papyrus texts found on the site at the beginning of the 20th century. Names on front fly leaf, otherwise clean.

Hardcover. Berkeley, University of California Press, 1st, 1993, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket, 231 pages. Aristocratic Experience and the Origins of Modern Culture explores a crucial moment in the history of European selfhood. During the seventeenth century, French nobles began to understand their lives in terms of personal histories and inner qualities, rather than as the products of tradition and inheritance. This preoccupation with the self accompanied a critical view of society, monarchy, and Christian teachings. It also shaped a new understanding of political realities and personal relations. Drawing from a combination of memoirs, literary works, and archival sources, Jonathan Dewald offers a new understanding of aristocratic sensibilities. In detailed fashion, he explores the nobles' experience of war, career, money, family, love, and friendship. In all of these areas, nobles felt a gap between social expectations and personal needs; in the seventeenth century this tension became increasingly oppressive. Clean copy.

Hardcover. Berkeley CA, University of California Press, 1st, 1980, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, 288 pages. Hardcover with dust jacket. Light soil on dust jacket covers. Clean, tight copy. Pictures throughout.

Softcover. Sacramento CA, Crocker Art Museum, 1st, 2007, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, 47 pages, illustrated throughout in color. SIGNED BY ARTIST on front end paper. Clean, unmarked copy with only minor wear to wrappers. Robert Cremean (1932 - Present) is a sculptor (and occasional painter) born in Ohio, now based in Tomales Bay, California. Cremean does superlative figurative work. However, he has largely isolated himself from the American art mainstream to the extent that any showing is a considerable rarity. He's developed, via a benefactor, an "arrangement" with the Fresno Art Museum whereby it displays most of his new work. This book is from a show at the Crocker Art Museum, Sacramento, in 2005. Now 88, Cremean was early--and unsurprisingly-- influenced by medieval art, particularly the illuminated Chaucer manuscript at the Huntington Library. "I was amazed at the way the words and pictures met one another on the page." Most of his painted words are transcribed from his own notebooks.

Softcover. Berkeley CA, University of California Press, 1st, 1958, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, tight, bright, clean and especially sharp-cornered. Physical description; 96 pages illustrations (some color), portrait. 23 color, 39 bw plates. The first significant look at the artwork of American modernist Arthur G. Dove (1880-1946). With a foreword by Duncan Phillips, and a lengthy illustrated essay by Wight. Includes a collections history, exhibitions history, and a sizable selected bibliography. Clean copy.