culture

Hardcover. NY, Harper Design, 1st, 2023, Hardcover in pictorial boards, 223 pages illustrated in color. From longtime fashion director, consultant, media personality, and author, Hal Rubenstein, comes a lush, full color, illustrated guide to the most influential fashion on television from the 1950s to today, revealing the surprising ways our favorite shows have significantly reflected and often shaped the way we dress. From Mary Tyler Moore's capri pants on The Dick van Dyke Show and Emma Peel's dominatrix jumpsuit on The Avengers to Olivia Pope's trademark white trench on Scandal and Don Drapers' grey sharkskin suits on Mad Men Dressing the Part is a rich history of popular American fashion and culture in the modern age. In this gorgeous compendium, the longtime fashion director and expert identifies the most stylish television shows of the past 70 years, highlighting the ways they have affected and often inspired ordinary Americans' wardrobes. Combining his decades of fashion expertise and insider knowledge with lush photographs, archival sketches, fascinating interviews with over two dozen of television's best costume designers, commentary from showrunners and co-stars, and little-known backstories, Rubenstein reveals with insight and wit how television has shaped everyday fashion, guiding and often elevating how we dress. Clean copy.

Hardcover. NY, Abrams, 1st, 2010, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket. From its first issue in April, 1970, the National Lampoon blazed like a comet, defining comedy as we know it today. To create Drunk Stoned Brilliant Dead, former Lampoon illustrator Rick Meyerowitz selected the funniest material from the magazine and sought out the survivors of its first electrifying decade to gather their most revealing and outrageous stories. The result is a mind-boggling tour through the early days of an institution whose alumni left their fingerprints all over popular culture: Animal House, Caddyshack, Saturday Night Live, Ghostbusters, SCTV, Spinal Tap, In Living Color, Ren & Stimpy, The Simpsons--even Sesame Street counts a few Lampooners among its ranks. 320 pages, mostly color.

Hardcover. NY, Abrams, 1st, 2010, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover, 320 pages. From its first issue in April, 1970, the National Lampoon blazed like a comet, defining comedy as we know it today. To create Drunk Stoned Brilliant Dead, former Lampoon illustrator Rick Meyerowitz selected the funniest material from the magazine and sought out the survivors of its first electrifying decade to gather their most revealing and outrageous stories. The result is a mind-boggling tour through the early days of an institution whose alumni left their fingerprints all over popular culture: Animal House, Caddyshack, Saturday Night Live, Ghostbusters, SCTV, Spinal Tap, In Living Color, Ren & Stimpy, The Simpsons--even Sesame Street counts a few Lampooners among its ranks. Long before there was The Onion and Comedy Central news shows, there was the National Lampoon, setting the bar in comedy impossibly high!

Hardcover. Princeton NJ, Princeton University Press, 1st, 1994, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket, 268 pages. The question of what it takes "to be a man" comes under scrutiny in this sharp, often playful, cultural critique of the German duel--the deadliest type of one-on-one combat in fin-de-siecle Europe. At a time when dueling was generally restricted to swords or had been abolished altogether in other nations, the custom of fighting to the death with pistols flourished among Germany's upper-class males, who took perverse comfort in defying their country's weakly enforced laws. From initial provocation to final death agony, Kevin McAleer describes with ironic humor the complex protocol of the German duel, inviting his reader into the disturbing mindset of its practitioners and the society that valued this socially important but ultimately absurd pastime. Clean copy.

Hardcover. New York, Abrams, 1st, 1981, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover, 200 pages, color illustrations throughout, illustrated end papers. Light edge wear to dust jacket. Light foxing to end papers. Else a very clean, tight copy. Rien Poorvliet was a Dutch artist and writer of incomparable talent. He was rightly considered a national treasure in the Netherlands, and his death was a national tragedy. Most of his books are free-ranging collections of his superior drawings and paintings interspersed with cursive text narrative about the subject at hand. This book happens to be an account of his life, family, pets, love of animals, culture and country as he experienced it - past, and (at the time) present in the Netherlands. His artwork is extremely expressive and entertaining - he was a master draftsman, and the work ranges from very spontaneous pencil, charcoal, and conte drawings, along with watercolor, and well-finished oil paintings which provide a wonderful visual story of the man's life.

Softcover. London/NY, Verso, 1st, 1994, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 201 pages. Edward Thompson, perhaps the greatest post-war historian in the English-speaking world, died in 1993. In this readable and unabashedly appreciative survey of Thompson's histories and politics, Byran D. Palmer reviews include a passionate biographical account of the late-nineteenth-century Romantic William Morris, the hugely acclaimed The Making of the English Working Class, and a series of eighteenth-century studies that reach from customary culture to the antinomian poetics of William Blake. Clean copy.

Hardcover. Montipelier, VT, Norbert J. Towne/H.J. Dodge, 1st Edition, 1954, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, 98 pages. Hardcover. B/w illustrations throughout including frontispiece and foldout map. Black cloth cover boards, gilt title on spine and front cover board. Previous owner's inscribed bookplate on front endpaper and ID stamp on front flyleaf.

Hardcover. Boston, MA, Beacon Press, 1st, 2007, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, 276 pages. Hardcover with dust jacket. A very clean, unmarked copy with only minor wear to dust jacket edges. A tight copy. Foxing to top edge of dust jacket.

Hardcover. NY, powerHouse Books, 1st, 2019, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket. For some 70 years, Leo Goldstein's East Harlembodyof work remained mostly untouched and unseen.The silver gelatin prints were catalogued in 2016,and a selection is gathered here for the first time.The photographs were taken over a number of years,beginning in 1949 when Goldstein was a memberof the Photo League.The East Harlem corpus, edited by Regina Monfort,represents an important and unique addition to thephotographic history of New York City. Because thereare no negatives in existence, it was of particularimportance to preserve the images in book form andmake them available to the public.The selected images reflect the postwar years in theEast Harlem community, which would grow intoa center of Puerto Rican culture and life in the U.S.From the families portrayed gathering on stoops, tothe kids at their shoeshine stations, to youths playingball in the streets, to posters on neighborhood walls,Goldstein's images of East Harlem provide a windowinto the socio-economic, cultural, and politicallandscape of the time.

Softcover. NY, Columbia University Press, 1st, 1990, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 395 pages. The essays gathered here, in addition to those by editors Wm. Theodore de Bary and Irene Bloob, are written by leading scholars of Asian cultures--among them Donald Keene, Peter Awn, Barbara Stoler Miller, Ainslie Embree, Burton Watson, C.T. Hsia, Paul Anderer, and others. They introduce classics from the Islamic, Indian, Chinese, and Japanese traditions, providing entree to texts which have emerged as monuments of Asian thought and literature. Among the works discussed are the Qu'ran, the philosophy of history of Ibn Khaldun, the Upanishads, the epic Mahabarata, the philosopher Mencius, the Lotus Sutra, T'and Poetry, the Tale of Genji, and the poet Basho.

Hardcover. US, VH1 Press, 1st, 2006, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, 160 pages. Hardcover with no dust jacket. Clean, unmarked copy with only minor wear to boards.

Hardcover. Berkeley, University of California Press, 1st, 1990, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket, 480 pages. Although he is referred to as a "genius" more often than any other scholar of his period, Edward Sapir has received no full-scale biography since his death in 1939. At long last, Regna Darnell provides a comprehensive assessment of the life, ideas, and wide-ranging interests of this remarkable man. Sapir, the foremost linguist and anthropologist of his generation, contributed substantially to the professionalization of linguistics as an independent discipline. He was the first to apply comparative Indo-European methods to the study of American Indian languages, on which he conducted extensive fieldwork. His theoretical work on the relationship of the individual personality to culture remains fundamental to culture theory in anthropology, as does his insistence on the symbolic nature of culture and the importance of culture as understood by its members, in their own words.Sapir became the first professional anthropologist in Canada and teacher of a whole generation of linguists and anthropologists at Chicago and Yale. Holding to a humanistic view of anthropology (his own work included poetry and literary criticism), he was the most articulate spokesman for the interdisciplinary social science of the late 1920s and 1930s. In both linguistics and anthropology Sapir is a revered master whose ideas continue to inspire discussion and research. A sixteen-volume Collected Works is now in progress. Clean copy.

Hardcover. New York, W. W. Norton & Company, 1st, 2008, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover, 288 pages, 242 photographs reproduced in four-color process. Like new in publishers shrink-wrap. Edward Steichen was already a famous painter and photographer in America and abroad when, in early 1923, he was offered the most prestigious position in photography's commercial domain: that of chief photographer for Vogue and Vanity Fair. Over the next fifteen years, he would produce a body of work of unequaled brilliance, dramatizing and glamorizing contemporary culture and its achievers. Here are icon images of Gloria Swanson, Gary Cooper, Greta Garbo, and Charles Chaplin, as well as numerous other celebrities drawn from an archive of more than 2,000 original prints. 

Hardcover. New York, W. W. Norton & Company, 1st, 2008, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover, 288 pages, 242 photographs reproduced in four-color process. Like new in publishers shrink-wrap. Edward Steichen was already a famous painter and photographer in America and abroad when, in early 1923, he was offered the most prestigious position in photography's commercial domain: that of chief photographer for Vogue and Vanity Fair. Over the next fifteen years, he would produce a body of work of unequaled brilliance, dramatizing and glamorizing contemporary culture and its achievers. Here are icon images of Gloria Swanson, Gary Cooper, Greta Garbo, and Charles Chaplin, as well as numerous other celebrities drawn from an archive of more than 2,000 original prints.

Hardcover. NY, Norton, 1st, 2008, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover, 288 pages. Edward Steichen was already a famous painter and photographer in America and abroad when, in early 1923, he was offered the most prestigious position in photography's commercial domain: that of chief photographer for Vogue and Vanity Fair. Over the next fifteen years, Steichen would produce a body of work of unequaled brilliance, dramatizing and glamorizing contemporary culture and its achievers in politics, literature, film, sport, dance, theater, opera, and the world of high fashion. Here are iconic images of Gloria Swanson, Gary Cooper, Greta Garbo, and Charlie Chaplin as well as numerous other celebrities drawn from an archive of more than two thousand original prints. Until now, no more than a handful have been exhibited or published in book form. The photographs of the 1920s and 1930s represent the high point in Steichen's career and are among the most striking creations of twentieth-century photography. 242 illustrations.

Hardcover. Berkeley CA, University of California Press, 1st, 1986, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket, 264 pages, photographs throughout. Egypt After the Pharoahs treats the period which witnessed the arrival of the Greeks and Hellenistic culture in Egypt, the reign of the Ptolemies from Ptolemy I to Cleopatra, the conquest by Rome, the scientific and cultural achievements of Alexandria, and the rise of Christianity. The rich social, cultural, and intellectual ferment of this period comes alive in Alan Bowman's narrative. Clean copy.

Softcover. Milwaukie OR, Dark Horse, 1st, 2005, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, 346 pages, trade paperback with french flaps. It would be hard to imagine any creators who have more greatly affected their chosen medium than Will Eisner and Frank Miller have influenced the world of comics and graphic novels. Often misunderstood, but enduringly enjoyed by people from all walks of life, the comic book has in recent years been recognized as a "legitimate" art form by cultural institutions ranging from Harvard University to the Smithsonian, from The New Yorker to the Art Institute of Chicago. Now, culture-curious readers and life-long fans of the comics medium are invited to read along as two of the medium's greatest contributors-legendary innovator and godfather of sequential art Will Eisner, and the modern master of cinematic comics storytelling, Frank Miller-discuss one on one in an intimate interview format, the ins-and-outs of this compelling and often controversial art form. Eisner/Miller is profusely illustrated and features rare, behind-the-scenes photos of Eisner, Miller, and other notable creators.

Hardcover. US, Glitterati, 1st, 2015, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Like new in publisher's shrink-wrap. Hardcover, 272 pages. In his debut book of photography, with a foreword by one of the luminaries of NYC culture and entertainment, Adrian Buckmaster's monograph presents a staggeringly beautiful collection of portraits - a cross-section of humanity in all of its glorious diversity, from the ordinary to the extraordinary and everything in-between. Having spent his early years shooting commercial beauty and fashion, Buckmaster soon shifted focus to more personal projects, challenging conventional notions of beauty and celebrating the eccentricities of those whom society might classify as "misfits." Echoes of Buckmaster's early career remain, in the form of exquisite costuming, make-up, and scenic design. Despite an element of performance, there is an undeniable rawness to these portraits, in which subjects are both aware of the camera's gaze and sympathetically self-conscious, robing and disrobing, revealing and concealing. Buckmaster's photographic genius is encapsulated in his uncanny ability to fastidiously art direct while simultaneously stripping away layers of formality and convention. Arranged in three movements: Imposing, Revealing, and Inventing, this collection progresses from traditional portraiture to increasingly intimate portrayals, as subjects expose, create, and invent themselves. Included in this endlessly varied spectrum of characters are Burlesque performers, families, brides, lovers, and all manner of tattoos and body piercings. There are classical reclining nudes, reminiscent of Edouard Manet's Olympia or Titian's Sleeping Venus, dancers with incredible physical strength and dexterity, women costumed as peacocks and geishas, a contortionist inside a trunk, even a green-skinned man, bejewelled like an Indian deity.

Hardcover. Paris, Flammarion, 1st, 1977, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, 167 pages. Hardcover. Text in French only. Illustrated in full color and black & white. Dust jacket with wear to edges - jacket now protected with clear plastic cover. Clean, tight copy.

Hardcover. Seattle, University of Washington Press, 1st, 2019, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket, color illustrations; 7.2 X 0.9 X 10.3 inches; 272 pages. Tang dynasty (618-907) China hummed with cosmopolitan trends. Its capital at Chang'an was the most populous city in the world and was connected via the Silk Road with the critical markets and thriving cultures of Central Asia and the Middle East. In Empire of Style, BuYun Chen reveals a vibrant fashion system that emerged through the efforts of Tang artisans, wearers, and critics of clothing. Across the empire, elite men and women subverted regulations on dress to acquire majestic silks and au courant designs, as shifts in economic and social structures gave rise to what we now recognize as precursors of a modern fashion system: a new consciousness of time, a game of imitation and emulation, and a shift in modes of production. This first book on fashion in premodern China is informed by archaeological sources-paintings, figurines, and silk artifacts-and textual records such as dynastic annals, poetry, tax documents, economic treatises, and sumptuary laws. Tang fashion is shown to have flourished in response to a confluence of social, economic, and political changes that brought innovative weavers and chic court elites to the forefront of history. Still in publisher's shrinkwrap.

Hardcover. US, powerHouse Books, 1st, 2008-05-01, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, 175 pages, illustrated throughout in color and b&w. Light shelf-wear to boards, else a clean, tight copy. Text and color and black and white photographs by Corona. A collection of images about a little known subset of bullfighers - dwarfs and their families.

Hardcover. US, powerHouse Books, 1st, 2008-05-01, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, 175 pages, illustrated throughout in color and b&w. Light shelf-wear to boards, else a clean, tight copy. Text and color and black and white photographs by Corona. A collection of images about a little known subset of bullfighers - dwarfs and their families.

Softcover. Lisboa, Hugin, 1st, 2001, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, 529 pages. Softcover. Portuguese Text. Previous owners inscription on front endpaper. Illustrated with black & white photographs. Light wear. Clean, tight copy.

Hardcover. Duke University Press, 1st, 1998, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover, 352 pages, b/w illustrations throughout. Dust jacket unclipped, excellent. Black cover boards, gilt title on spine. Binding tight. Spine straight. In great shape. Claiming that our culture has yet to come to terms with the bungled legacy of Victorian sexuality, Kincaid examines how children and images of youth are idealized, fetishized, and eroticized in everyday culture.