culture

Hardcover. NY, Atlantic Monthly Press , 1st, 2020, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket. In 1911, famed cartoonist Winsor McCay debuted one of the first animated cartoons, based on his sophisticated newspaper strip "Little Nemo in Slumberland," itself inspired by Freud's recent research on dreams. McCay is largely forgotten today, but he unleashed an art form, and the creative energy of artists from Otto Messmer and Max Fleischer to Walt Disney and Warner Bros.' Chuck Jones. Their origin stories, rivalries, and sheer genius, as Reid Mitenbuler skillfully relates, were as colorful and subversive as their creations-from Felix the Cat to Bugs Bunny to feature films such as Fantasia-which became an integral part and reflection of American culture over the next five decades. Pre-television, animated cartoons were aimed squarely at adults; comic preludes to movies, they were often "little hand grenades of social and political satire." Early Betty Boop cartoons included nudity; Popeye stories contained sly references to the injustices of unchecked capitalism. "During its first half-century," Mitenbuler writes, "animation was an important part of the culture wars about free speech, censorship, the appropriate boundaries of humor, and the influence of art and media on society." During WWII it also played a significant role in propaganda. The Golden Age of animation ended with the advent of television, when cartoons were sanitized to appeal to children and help advertisers sell sugary breakfast cereals.

Hardcover. Boston, Ticknor and Fields, 1st, 1860, Book: Good, Dust Jacket: None, 283 pages. Hardcover. Stated Author's Edition. Brick colored end papers scarred & chipped. Small discard stamp on title-page - ex-library with few markings. Short tear to page 7 of preface. Original embossed brown cloth, gilt lettering on spine faded. Uncommon book detailing the hunting of Indian animals, including man-eaters, panthers, bears, buffalo and wild elephants.

Hardcover. NY, Oxford University Press, 1st, 2013, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket. In 1628, the English physician William Harvey published his revolutionary theory of blood circulation. Offering a radical conception of the workings of the human body and the function of the heart, Harvey's theory overthrew centuries of anatomical and physiological orthodoxy and had profound consequences for the history of science. It also had an enormous impact on culture more generally, influencing economists, poets and political thinkers, for whom the theory triumphed not as empirical fact but as a remarkable philosophical idea. In the first major biographical study of Harvey in 50 years, Thomas Wright charts the meteoric rise of a yeoman's son to the elevated position of King Charles I's physician, taking the reader from farmlands of Kent to England's royal palaces, and paints a vivid portrait of an extraordinary mind formed at a fertile time in England's intellectual history. Clean copy.

Hardcover. NY, Abrams, 1st, 2016, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover in pictorial boards, 175 pages in color. William Wegman's postcard paintings reflect a lifetime of engagement with narrative, perspective, art history, architecture, popular culture, humor, and philosophy in art. Starting with one or more vintage postcards, Wegman constructs scenes that range from intimate interiors to cosmic vistas, filling audaciously complex spaces with intriguing incident. Collected together, the paintings possess the universal, encyclopedic, and mysterious qualities of their source materials. In addition to Martin Filler's introduction, a stellar group of contributors responds to the work.

Hardcover. Middletown CT, Wesleyan University Press, 1st, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket, 204 pages. Composer John Luther Adams makes his home in the boreal forest near Fairbanks, Alaska, where he has created a unique musical world grounded in the elemental landscapes and indigenous cultures of the North. Winter Music, a collection of Adams's essays, journal entries, and other writings is poetic and inspirational and delves into the environmental and cultural awareness that creates his reflective, almost spiritual, approach to music. The accompanying audio CD includes two previously unrecorded works by Adams. Adams's music explores natural phenomena from the songs of birds, to the complex nature of chaos, fractal geometry, and elemental noise. Similarly, his writings explore "that region between place and culture, between environment and imagination," reflecting a philosophy of deep awareness that makes him one of the most original composers working today. Clean copy.

Hardcover. NY, Peter H. Wyden, 1st, 1973, Book: Good, Dust Jacket: Fair, Hardcover in a dust jacket that has a water stain to rear panel. Mild ripple to rear cloth, but book, text pages not affected. There is some foxing/tanning to top edge of text block. No markings. Walter Kaufmann in defining the conflicts in Germany that put Hitler in power, are very similar to our challenges today. A good read for people who want to understand underlying impulses in our culture.

Hardcover. New York, Fowler and Wells, reprint, 1852, Book: Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, 237 pages. Black cloth, gilt, embossed design. Minor wear to spine edge. Shelf wear. Pages are foxed and tanned throughout. Copyright page states 1849 so assumed reprint. (...A Complete and Authentic History of the Manners and Customs, Character and Condition of the Female Sex, in Civilized and Savage Countries, from the Earliest Ages to the Present Time)

Softcover. NY, Crown, 1st, 1993, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, oblong format. 158 pages. A book of quietly beautiful photographic portraits of Native-American women, accompanied by their own reflections on what it means to be a woman and an Indian in America. The result is a startlingly honest and often poetic work. The women within these pages defy stereotype: they are mothers, activists, artists, environmentalists, and community leaders. Whether living on reservations or in cities, they have struggled to preserve an ancient culture and a land under siege. 85 black-and-white photographs. Clean copy.

Softcover. South Royalton VT, Steerforth Press, reprint, 2001, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 187 pages plus b&w photos. With haunting photographs and piercing descriptions, Women of the Shadows depicts the secluded women of southern Italy and their passionate, painful, heartrending existence. Cornelisen, who lived among these women in the mountainous villages of Lucania after World War II, reveals their struggles during a time when most of their men had to leave for factories in the industrial north. The women remained behind to work the fields. There's Peppina, Ninetta, Teresa, Maria, Pinuccia, and Cettina, all women who "have done things of which they are not proud; they know it in their hearts, as one woman said, that nothing is private, they would also agree with her conclusion: That doesn't mean you get used to it." With an extraordinary understanding of the interior lives of these and other women, Cornelisen brings them out of the shadows to tell their heroic stories in a book which truly merits the label "classic." A new introduction by the author suggests that the more things change, the more, in essence, they remain the same. Wrappers sunned, otherwise tight and clean.

Softcover. Durham NC, Duke University Press, 1st, 1998, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 494 pages. Women's Camera Work explores how photographs have been and are used to construct versions of history and examines how photographic representations of otherness often tell stories about the self. In the process, Judith Fryer Davidov focuses on the lives and work of a particular network of artists linked by time, interaction, influence, and friendship--one that included Gertrude Kasebier, Imogen Cunningham, Dorothea Lange, and Laura Gilpin. Clean copy.

Softcover. Los Angeles, Deborah Caplan & Associates, 1st, 1985, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Non-paginated. Softcover. Black and white comics by Matt Groening. True first edition - stated first printing December 1985 0n copyright page. Measures 12" X 12". Bright, clean copy.

Hardcover. Washington DC, Smithsonian Institution Scholarly Press, 1st, 2002, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover, 144 pages. The tintype, patented in 1856, was a cheap, fast, easy-to-make, practically indestructible type of photograph that became enormously popular among the working class in the late nineteenth century. For common laborers and their families, the opportunity to join the ranks of those who owned pictures of family and friends--the upper classes--was momentous. This collection exhibits more than eighty examples of a specific kind of tintype: occupational portraits, photographs of working people with the tools of their trade. Michael L. Carlebach examines the historical significance of these tintypes and finds that they reveal a great deal about late nineteenth-century values. The subjects of these images are plumbers proudly holding their wrenches and pipe cutters, carpenters with their saws and lathing hatchets, textile workers with their spindles and yarn, icemen with their tongs. These people lived and worked at a time when a depersonalized factory system run by production and efficiency experts was beginning to dominate American industry and culture. Many of the men and women in these tintypes were part of a disappearing class of self-employed artisans and journeymen; their portraits proudly stress their individuality and the essential nobility of their work.

Hardcover. New York, Viking Press, 1st, 1967, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Good, 368 pages. Hardcover. Features: Louis-Ferdinand Celine, Norman Mailer, William S. Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg, Jean Cocteau, Harold Pinter, and more. Price clipped dust jacket with short closed tears along edges - jacket now protected with clear plastic cover. Clean, tight copy.

Softcover. Norman OK, University of Oklahoma Press, 1st, 1997, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 656 pages. In mythic sagas of the American West, the wide western range offered boundless opportunity to a limited cast of white men. Buffalo roamed, deer and antelope played, and women's voices were never heard. Writing the Range allows us to hear many long-silenced women: Spanish-Mexican settlers and American Indians on New Spain's northern frontiers; Chinese, Basque, Japanese, Korean, Vietnamese, Slavic, and Irish immigrants; film stars Dolores del Rio and Lupe Velez; Navajos and African Americans who moved to western cities during World War II; and the activist Mothers of East Los Angeles, who organized to resist environmental dangers to their community. A valuable introduction to the rapidly changing field of western history, Writing the Range explains clearly how race, class, and culture are constructed and connected. The first section examines issues raised by more than a decade of multicultural western women's histories; following are six chronological sections spanning four centuries. Each section offers a short introduction connecting is essays and placing them in analytic and historical perspective. Clean copy.

Hardcover. UK, Liverpool University Press, 1st, 1996, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket, 328 pages. Focusing on a wide range of poetry written between 1941 and 1945, this work explores Soviet poets' response to World War II. It also traces the influence of Stalinist culture, and departures from literary norms. Clean copy.

Hardcover. Lewiston NY, Edwin Mellen Press, 1st, 1998, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, red cloth with b&w decoration to front cover, 295 pages. INSCRIBED BY AUTHOR on front fly leaf, possibly to the publisher Edwin Mellen. (the name has been corrected and is difficult to read.)

Hardcover. US, Tuttle Publishing, 1st, 2003-04-15, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket, 178 pages, illustrated throughout in color and b&w. Three scratches to fore-edge. Light shelf-wear to dust jacket. Previous owner's stamp on front end paper. Clean, tight copy.

Hardcover. NY, Da Capo, 2021, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket, 512 pages. Over the course of her career, Nico was an ever-evolving myth: art film house actress, highly coveted fashion model, Dietrich of Punk, Femme Fatale, Chelsea Girl, Garbo of Goth, The Last Bohemian, Heroin Junkie. Lester Bangs described her as 'a true enigma.' At age 27, Nico became Andy Warhol's newest Superstar, featuring in his one commercial break out hit film Chelsea Girls and garnering the position of chanteuse for the Velvet Underground. It wasn't Nico's musical chops which got her the gig; it was her striking beauty. Her seeming otherworldly and unattainable presence was further amplified by her reputation for dating rock stars (Brian Jones, Bob Dylan, Jim Morrison, among others). She became famous for being Nico.

Hardcover. Santa Fe, Center for American Places, 1st, 2004, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover, 108 pages. Full color photographs by Mike Smith. Clean, bright copy.

Hardcover. Owings Mills MD, Stemmer House, 1st, 1985, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a dust jacket with mild fading to spine. INSCRIBED BY THE ILLUSTRATOR on the front fly leaf. A collection of fifteen Brer Rabbit trickster tales from the Afro-American culture of Central and South America and the Caribbean. Color illustrations by Clinton Arrowood. Clean copy.

Hardcover. Chicago, Art Media Resources, Inc., 1st, 2008, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, 224 pages. Hardcover in a bright dust jacket. Illustrated with full color photographs. Bright, clean copy.

Hardcover. University of Chicago, 1st, 1978, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a nice dust jacket. 368 pages, index, bibliography, diagrams. Pigs, yams, women and valuables are items of exchange throughout Papua New Guinea. Ceremonial exchange does not arise from economic necessity, rather a social phenomenon reflecting interplay between kinship and marriage structures, the nature of political leadership and the religious and symbolic systems found in these cultures. This work copares 13 New Guinea societies focusing on these distinctive ceremonial exchanges. Clean copy.

Softcover. Cambridge University Press, 1st paperback, 1996, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, 421 pages. Softcover. Wrapper very good, no rips or tears. B/w illustrations. Pages and edges have a touch of tanning from age, otherwise clean and unmarked. Binding tight. In very good shape. The first book to examine the bloody demise of the former Yugoslavia in the full light of its history and that of its ethnic mosaic.

Softcover. Seattle, WA, Fantagraphics Books, 1st, 2001, Book: Good, Dust Jacket: None, 144 pages. Softcover with black/white and some color comic strips throughout. Wet soiling residue on bottom of first half of pages, and on bottom page block, otherwise minimal wear on paper wrappers.