Hardcover. Toronto, Trafalgar Press, 1st, 1986 , Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright "(Skillfully traces the causes of the Crimean War and sketches a vivid picture of an age which made possible 'the world's most curious and unneccesary struggle'. Troubetzkoy ingeniously weaves together the varied developments in diplomacy, trade, nationalistic expression and personality conflict in the decade which led to the hostilities. The armies of the belligerents are described (and the) reader is introduced to the principal personages of the drama - Napoleon III, Marshal St. Arnaud, Lord Raglan and the great Russian engineer, Todleben, who, apart from Florence Nightingale, was the only one to earn true distinction during the War. Vividly described are Nicholas I and the Russian Empire." Clean copy.
Hardcover. Cloverdale CA, Buti Publications, 1st, 1996, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket, 355 pages illustrated with b&w drawings, not credited. GENERIC INSCRIPTION & SIGNATURE BY AUTHOR on the front fly leaf. Bruno Buti, (pronounced "booty") born to immigrant Italian parents May 23, 1922, in San Bruno, California, the youngest of three children. Nursed to an age he can still remember, then weaned on wine for lack of a cow, he was raised in an era when milk pails runneth over with fresh made alcohol. Growing up underfoot of tough bootleggers, he spent his childhood experiencing unpleasant run-ins between them and crooked lawmen. Haunted by memories of the involvement that his father, relatives and colleagues had in bucking prohibition, their ups and downs in the struggle to make it in a society hostile to immigrant minorities, the author finally dares to unload the burden he carried for so long. His tale attempts to bring out the characteristics and qualities of this particular group of people by depicting them the way they were during those fabulous Twenties. Clean copy.
Hardcover. London, Andre Deutsch, 1st, 1954, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, blue cloth covers with gilt lettering on spine somewhat faded. 256 pages, b&w illustrations. INSCRIBED BY BILL HUGHES, Special Branch, New Scotland Yard, to John Isham, American serviceman who served there in the 1940s. Otherwise a clean, tight copy.
Hardcover. NY, HarperCollins, 1st, 2002, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket. 40 pages illustrated in color by Egielski. When a homeless rat named Slim is forced into a life of crime, he encounters a kind young mouse named Jim, who's willing to take him in and give him a chance. But when Slim's checkered past catches up to him, their friendship is put to the test. Together they must do battle with the evil villain Buster, relying upon their faith in one another -- and their yo-yos. In this Oliver Twist for tots, Richard Egielski tells a tale of true friendship and creates characters as memorable as Fagin, Bill Sikes, and the Artful Dodger.
Hardcover. NY, HarperCollins, 1st, 2002, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket. 40 pages illustrated in color by Egielski. When a homeless rat named Slim is forced into a life of crime, he encounters a kind young mouse named Jim, who's willing to take him in and give him a chance. But when Slim's checkered past catches up to him, their friendship is put to the test. Together they must do battle with the evil villain Buster, relying upon their faith in one another -- and their yo-yos. In this Oliver Twist for tots, Richard Egielski tells a tale of true friendship and creates characters as memorable as Fagin, Bill Sikes, and the Artful Dodger.
Hardcover. St. Paul MN, Borealis Books, 1st, 2004, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover, 224 pages. The photographs in this collection are taken from the files of the St. Paul Pioneer Press and the St. Paul Dispatch, and span a period from the nineteen-forties to the mid-sixties. Among the many records of long-forgotten civic functions are shocking crime-scene photographs, a reminder of an era when the country's newspaper photographers--an army of Weegees, equipped with oversized Speed Graphic flash cameras and radios tuned to the police scanners--regularly provided readers with lurid coverage of violent crimes and spectacular accidents. There is a harsh intimacy to these photographs, which bring us as close as possible to car-crash victims, suicides, and mass murderers confessing their crimes. But the welter of detail in the pictures--the seamed stockings of a murder victim, the huddle of bystanders after a bar shooting--provides a nuanced portrait of a Midwestern city and of American culture at mid-century.
Hardcover. NY, VIking, 1st, 2010, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket, 261 pages, illustrations. Philip Mould takes a wonderfully interesting look at how art restoration works. But, in looking at restoration of existing paintings, he also delves into how he, as a gallery owner, along with his team, find work that has remained under-valued or unvalued for centuries. And then how that piece, now restored by Mould's experts, ventures back into the art world in renewed glory. Mould takes five or so examples of "found" paintings - one from his "Antique Roadshow" - and writes how instinct and education about a painter, his other work, the painting's subject's history, and other "intangables' go into Mould and his staff taking on an often dirty and undistinguished painting on the chance that the painting is "the real thing" - a real Rembrandt, a real Homer Winslow, etc. Probably the most interesting story was that of a Norman Rockwell painting on display at the Rockwell Museum in Massachusetts that...wasn't. Wasn't the "real" Rockwell painting, but rather one done by a disciple of Rockwell, who copied the original for reasons sort of murky, and donated to the museum. The "real" Rockwell was found by the copier's sons after his death and turned over to the museum. Clean copy.
Hardcover. Seattle, Fantagraphics, 1st, 2004, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, pictorial boards, 231 pages in color. Before focusing on tales of justice via superheroes under the Marvel banner, the publisher covered ground-level crime across a range of comics titles and true-crime magazines. Under the Timely imprint from 1947, and Atlas from 1951, up to eleven graphic series including Justice Comics, Official True Crime Cases, All-True Crime, Crime Cases, Crime Can't Win, Crime Must Lose, and Crime Exposed all muscled each other and competitors for space on the newsstands. For the first crime-themed volume in Fantagraphics' ongoing project to restore and resurrect pre-Marvel pulp classics, the Atlas Library has selected a book that debuted as the genre peaked, just before a Senate hearing and the institution of the Comics Code banned the use of the word "Crime" from even appearing in a comic's title. Escaping that fate, Police Action had a seven-issue run of violent and noir-ish morality plays, pitting the officers of the law against the forces of urban malevolence, and was produced by the cream of the Atlas freelance roster, including Joe Maneely, Robert Q. Sale, Gene Colan, Art Peddy, Mort Lawrence, Werner Roth and Bob Powell. Rounding the volume off, also presented is a post-Code one-shot, Police Badge #479, a snapshot of the industry's attempts to adapt to new strictures on the genre: here we view "our boys in blue" in the fight against rank corruption, highlighting the work of Don Heck and Joe Maneely. Clean, like new.
Hardcover. NY, Lyle Stuart, 1st, 1970, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in dust jacket with a faded spine, 320 pages. b&w illustrations. Biography of the famous white-collar criminal who became a multi-millionaire by manipulating financial markets. Clean copy.
Softcover. NY, International Polygonics, reprint, 1991, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 365 pages. Known for her hard-boiled mystery plots combined with screwball comedy, Georgiana 'Craig' Rice was the author of twenty-three novels, six of them posthumous, numerous short stories, and some true crime pieces. In the 1940s she rivaled Agatha Christie in sales and was featured on the cover of Time Magazine in 1946. However, over the past sixty years she has fallen into relative obscurity. This mystery was first published in 1942. The murder of a show biz midget whom everybody feared and hated brings lots of plot twists and goofy suspects. Lots of surprises. Great fun. Clean, like new.
Hardcover. London, Hard Case Crime, 1st thus, 2012, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover, colorful dustjacket with a retro-style illustration by Michael Koelsch. "Here, long after anyone would have expected it, is the voice of James M. Cain, as fresh and as relevant as ever. THE COCKTAIL WAITRESS will involve you, and then shock you with an ending you'll never forget. This is a true rarity: a reader's novel that's also a literary event."--STEPHEN KING "James M. Cain was one of the founders of American hard-boiled fiction, and it's not a stretch to say that it's his voice one hears echoed in most of the Gold Medal novels of the 1950s. That makes Hard Case Crime the ideal publisher for THE COCKTAIL WAITRESS. How considerate of the postman to ring a third time, delivering Cain's final gift to us thirty-five years after his death."--LAWRENCE BLOCK
Hardcover. NY, Knopf, 1st, 1997, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket. Since 1945 there have been more than one hundred biographies of Hitler, and countless other books on him and the Third Reich. What happens when so many people reinterpret the life of a single individual? Dangerously, the cumulative portrait that begins to emerge can suggest the face of a mythic antihero whose crimes and errors blur behind an aura of power and conquest. By reversing the process, by making Hitler's biographers--rather than Hitler himself--the subject of inquiry, Lukacs reveals the contradictions that take us back to the true Hitler of history. Like an attorney, Lukacs puts the biographies on trial. He gives a masterly account of all the major works and of the personalities, methods, and careers of the biographers (one cannot separate the historian from his history, particularly in this arena); he looks at what is still not known (and probably never will be) about Hitler; he considers various crucial aspects of the real Hitler; and he shows how different biographers have either advanced our understanding or gone off track. By singling out those who have been involved in, or co-opted into, an implicit "rehabilitation of Hitler," Lukacs draws powerful conclusions about Hitler's essential differences from other monsters of history, such as Napoleon, Mussolini, and Stalin, and--equally important--about Hitler's place in the history of this century and of the world.
Softcover. NY, Quill/ William Morrow, reprint, 1988, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 432 pages, b&w illustrations. Dotted with stunning disclosures of crimes and cover-ups, this is a startling narrative of the way Japan conducted World War II: from Nanking to Pearl Harbor to the attempted assassination of Stalin to their final surrender. Clean copy.
Hardcover. NY, Atheneum, 1st, 1973, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket, 353 pages. This is the first book-length survey of the international illicit trade in antiquities, and of the worldwide destruction of what is left of our civilized past. Museums, dealers, tomb-robbers, police, and scholars form the cast of a story that moves from tropical jungles to Madison Avenue galleries, from a rifled temple to a collector's private museum. A centerpiece of the book is a detailed consideration of the Metropolitan Museum of Art's acquisition of the beautiful calyx krater by Euphronios, which the Italian authorities are claiming was taken illicitly from an Etruscan tomb in 1971. 24-page b/w photo section. Index. Extensive, 23 page Bibliography. Clean copy.
Softcover. Chicago, University of Chicago Press, reprint, 1956, Softcover, 257 pages. This monograph by a professional thief--with the aid of Edwin H. Sutherland's expert comments and analyses--is a revealing sociological document that goes far to explain the genesis, development, and patterns of criminal behavior. "Chic Conwell," as the author was known in the underworld, gives a candid and forthright account of the highly organized society in which the professional thief lives. He tells how he learned to steal, survive, succeed, and ultimately to pay his debt to society and prepare himself for full and useful citizenship. The Professional Thief presents in amazing detail the hard, cold facts about the private lives and professional habits of pickpockets, shoplifters, and conmen, and brings into focus the essential psychological and sociological situations that beget and support professional crime. Coversworn with small tape repair, name blacked out on title page. Otherwise clean.
Hardcover. NY, Farrar Straus Giroux, 1st, 1994, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket, 181 pages. "In the 1960's and 1970's, American professor Norton Dodge forayed on his own in the Soviet Union, bought the work of underground 'unofficial' artists, and brought it out himself or arranged to have it shipped illegally to the United States. John McPhee investigates Dodge's clandestine activities in the service of dissident Soviet art, his motives for his work, and the fates of several of the artists whose lives he touched. The Ransom of Russian Art is a suspenseful, chilling, and fascinating report on a covert operation like no other". Clean copy.
Hardcover. NY, Garden City Books, BC Ed., 1957, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket. Book Club edition, 215 pages. Bright, clean copy.
Hardcover. Cambridge MA, Harvard University Press, 1st, 1996, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket, 335 pages. In a society where trust is in short supply and democracy weak, the Mafia sells protection, a guarantee of safe conduct for parties to commercial transactions. Drawing on the confessions of eight Mafiosi, Diego Gambetta develops an elegant analysis of the economic and political role of the Sicilian Mafia. Clean copy.
Hardcover. NY, Simon & Schuster, 1st, 1978, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket, 414 pages, b&w illustrations. Explores the history of the Teamsters up through the 1970's by looking at the subject from the perspective of a number of the key players -- one at a time. A novel yet very effective approach to a large and complicated subject. The book proves to be both informative and entertaining. Remainder stamp to bottom edge, otherwise clean.
Hardcover. NY, John Day Publishers, 1st, 1966, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Good, Hardcover in a lightly worn. chipped dust jacket, 215 pages. Contains the first appearance of numerous letters from Ezra Pound and documents relating to the trial. Written by his lawyer, Julien Cornell. Clean copy.
Hardcover. London, William Hodge & Company, 1st, 1952, Book: Good, Harcover, red cloth with gilt lettering on spine. In 1902 the 'Veronica' set sail on her last voyage. An extraordinary outbreak of mutiny occurred, resulting in the deaths of all but five of the thirteen persons on board. The ship was set on fire and abandoned. The five men arrived on the island of Cajueri Tuoia on the north coast of Brazil. They were destitute and asked to board the S.S. Brunswick. Their stories of the events were doubted and two of the men decided to tell the truth. The other three were brought to trial in Liverpool charged with the murder of Captain Shaw and six other crew members. One of the harder to find editions in the series. 248 pages, b&w illustrations. Light tape marks on cover, rear hinge cracked, otherwise clean.
Hardcover. NY, E. P. Dutton, 2nd pr., 1931, Book: Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, red cloth covers with gilt lettering (now partially faded). 320 pages, b&w plates. Chapters include: The Scientific detective; Human Monsters; Famous bandits; Crimes of the insane; Political crime; Some famous women criminals; The case of a spy - Mata Hari; The Death Penalty. Spine faded, otherwise, clean copy.
Hardcover. NY, Icon/Marvel, 1st, 2012, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, pictorial boards. A graphic novel of of Eliot Ness's hunt for America's first serial killer-Cleveland's 1935 torso killer. B&w art by Bendis followed by pages of news clipping with photos of the actual crime scene and investigators at work. Clean copy.