culture

Hardcover. NY, Jonathan Cape /Harrison Smith, 1st, 1929, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, 295 pages. Decorated cloth with black cloth spine, bright gilt lettering on spine. A French doctor's account of Chinese life & civilization, based on his twenty years of life, work & travel there; he was Director of the Imperial School of Medicine at Chengtufu. Typically patronizing and moralistic; the author credits China with having been great in the past, but now in the grip of a profound lassitude, only to be helped by Europeans. Translated from the French by Elsie Martin Jones. Previous owner's name, date on front fly leaf otherwise a clean, bright copy.

Hardcover. New Haven CT, Yale University Press, 1st, 2020, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, Original black lettered cloth quarter laid on pictorial boards, 184 pages. A fascinating exploration of how photography, graphic design, and popular magazines converged to transform American visual culture at mid-century. This dynamic study examines the intersection of modernist photography and American commercial graphic design between 1930 and 1960. Avant-garde strategies in photography and design reached the United States via European emigres, including Bauhaus artists forced out of Nazi Germany. The unmistakable aesthetic made popular by such magazines as Harper's Bazaar and Vogue--whose art directors, Alexey Brodovitch and Alexander Liberman, were both immigrants and accomplished photographers--emerged from a distinctly American combination of innovation, inclusiveness, and pragmatism. Beautifully illustrated with more than 150 revolutionary photographs, layouts, and cover designs, Modern Look considers the connections and mutual influences of such designers and photographers as Richard Avedon, Lillian Bassman, Herbert Bayer, Robert Frank, Lisette Model, Gordon Parks, Irving Penn, Cipe Pineles, and Paul Rand. Essays draw a lineage from European experimental design to innovative work in American magazine design at mid-century and offer insights into the role of gender in fashion photography and political activism in the mass media.

Softcover. NY, Columbia University Press, 1st pbk, 2002, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 410 pages. Collection of essays on the impact of global modernity in the region. Between the 1890s and 1920s, cities in the vast region stretching from the Mediterranean Sea to the Indian Ocean were experiencing political, social, economic, and cultural changes that had been set in motion at least since the early nineteenth century. As the age of pre-colonial empires gave way to colonial and national states, there was a sense that a particular liberalism of culture and economy had been irretrievably lost to a more intolerant age. The book provides a comparative analysis of contested versions of the concept of modernity. The book examines not only the "high" culture of scholars and the literati, but also popular music, the visual arts, and journalism. Clean.

Hardcover. Cambridge MA, MIT Press , 1st, 2023, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket, 192 pages, color and b&w illustrations. An extraordinary look at how the style of Piet Mondrian's abstract paintings was posthumously appropriated by 1960s fashion, Pop art, and consumer culture. Yves Saint Laurent's 1965 Mondrian dresses are among the twentieth century's most celebrated and recognizable fashions, but the context of their creation involves much more than meets the eye. In Mondrian's Dress, Nancy J. Troy and Ann Marguerite Tartsinis offer a fresh approach to the coupling of Piet Mondrian's interwar paintings with Saint Laurent's couture designs by exposing the rampant merchandising and commodification that these works experienced in the 1960s. The authors situate the consolidation of Saint Laurent's fashion brand alongside the work of such Pop artists as Roy Lichtenstein, Andy Warhol, and Tom Wesselmann, and show how conventional understandings of Mondrian's avant-garde abstractions were transformed by the mass circulation of his signature style. Beyond its attention to 1960s fashion, Pop art, and consumer culture, Mondrian's Dress offers critical assessments of Saint Laurent's so-called dialogue with art, the remarkable art collection that he built with his partner Pierre Berge, and the crucial role that photography plays in the marketing of couture.

Softcover. New York , Ruth Orkin Photo Archive, 1st, 1999, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, 46 pages, softcover. Interview of Engel by Julia Van Haaften. Includes numerous black and white images. Like the other great photographers who made so-called "street photography" the most important genre of the medium, Morris Engel's snapshots of life on the streets have endured and outlasted all hyped-up, media-culture fads. Morris Engel was a prominent member of The Photo League, and was Navy photographer during the Second World War.

Hardcover. NY, Guggenheim Museum, 1st, 2003, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, 228 pages. During the late 1960s and 70s, a paradigm shift occurred within visual culture: photography and the moving image were absorbed into critical art practices. In particular, these mediums were used to record ephemeral or performative events and to render visible conceptual systems or to question the supposed objectivity of representation itself. This volume focuses primarily on artworks from the last decade and proposes that the extensive use of reproducible mediums in today's art has its roots in an earlier formative period. By the end of the 70s, many artists turned to photography as a vehicle through which to critique photographic representation and to subvert an art system premised on the notion of the original. While this practice came to define much of the 80s postmodern art, its legacy for the 90s was essentially the license to indulge in photographic fantasy, image construction, and cinematic narrative. Artists working today freely manipulate their representations of the empirical world or invent entirely new cosmologies. They process their subject matter through conceptual systems or use digital processes to alter their images. Some directly intervene in the environment, subtly shifting components of the found world and establishing their quiet presence in it; others fabricate entire architectural environments for the camera lens. This current state of the arts and its recent history are represented via more than 150 works by 55 artists, including Nam June Paik, Kara Walker, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Marina Abramovic, Vito Acconci, Ana Mendieta, Bruce Nauman, Robert Smithson, Christian Boltanski, Sophie Calle, Fischli & Weiss, Ann Hamilton, Robert Mapplethorpe, Annette Messager, Cindy Sherman, Bernd and Hilla Becher, Elger Esser, others.

Softcover. Lanham MD, Scarecrow Press, 2006, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 331 pages, b&w illustrations. Like most ground-breaking art forms, contemporary creative music is rarely understood or accepted in its own time, and for those reasons, can largely go unheard. Music and the Creative Spirit: Innovators in Jazz, Improvisation, and the Avant Garde aims to give today's brightest music innovators due recognition and respect, celebrating their work and creativity. Through personal interviews, artists such as Pat Metheny, Regina Carter, Joshua Redman, Fred Anderson, Dave Holland, Bill Frisell, David Murray, and John Zorn-to name just a few-offer clear, frank discussions about music, creativity, work, society, culture, current events, and more. Clean, bright copy.

Hardcover. Cambridge MA, Harvard University Press, 1st, 1970, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jscket, 224 pages. The influence of traditional and religious groups on modern politics. The author investigates the political role of religious organizations in the West African country of Senegal. Upon independence in 1960. Senegalese politicians adopted the pattern of cooperation established by the French. Behrman, examining the present role of the brotherhoods, analyzes their inter-relationships as well as their relations with political parties, government officials, the government reform program, and modern Muslim reform groups. She reveals that Senegalese officials often defer to the opinion of the strongest marabus and that, in times of crisis or uncertainty with in the government party, the Union Progressiste Senegalaise, they turn to the marabus for support. She also shows that, although the Muslim leaders occupy such a privileged position in Senegalese society, they do not actually control the government, which issecularand modern in form and is led by Western-educated men devoted to a program of industrialization and agricultural and social reform. Name on half-title page otherwise clean.

Hardcover. Boston, Little, Brown & Company, 1st, 1925, Book: Fair, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, maroon cloth with faded gilt lettering. 245 pages, b&w illustrations. Czech writer, Hans Coudenhove writes of a long stay in Nyasaland (now Malawi) and describes the African people, mongooses, monkeys, lions, ants, kites, ravens and snakes. So immersed in African culture is author Coudenhove that he had not slept in a bed, dined with a human, or seen any entertainment in decades of living there. Quoth he: I have not been in a theatre for twenty-eight years.and I have never seen any of the modern dances--'jazz' I think they are called. So this perspective might be considered unsullied by any 'modern' thinking, and it is pure African to the core--a unique perspective on the fauna of the continent Ex-lib with marking and residue to endpapers.

Hardcover. New York, Viking Studio, 1st US, 2007, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, 483 pages. Hardcover. Illustrated with full color photographs. Light wear. Clean, unmarked pages.

Softcover. NY, Vintage, reprint, 1984, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 256 pages, b&w photos. Clean copy. A provocative memoir from Luis Bunuel, the Academy Award winning creator of some of modern cinema's most important films, from Un Chien Andalou to The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie.Luis Bunuel's films have the power to shock, inspire, and reinvent our world. Now, in a memoir that carries all the surrealism and subversion of his cinema, Bunuel turns his artistic gaze inward. In swift and generous prose, Bunuel traces the surprising contours of his life, from the Good Friday drumbeats of his childhood to the dreams that inspired his most famous films to his turbulent friendships with Federico Garcia Lorca and Salvador Dali. His personal narratives also encompass the pressing political issues of his time, many of which still haunt us today--the specter of fascism, the culture wars, the nuclear bomb. Filled with film trivia, framed by Bunuel's intellect and wit, this is essential reading for fans of cinema and for anyone who has ever wanted to see the world through a surrealist's eyes.

Softcover. London, Creation Books, 1st, 1997, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 250 pages. Celebrating the celluloid expression of the Beat spirit--arguably the most sustained legacy in U.S. counterculture--Naked Lens is a comprehensive study of the most significant interfaces between the Beat writers, Beat culture, and cinema. Naked Lens features key Beat players and their collaborators, including William Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, Charles Bukowski, Brion Gysin, Antony Balch, Ron Rice, John Cassavetes, Andy Warhol, Bob Dylan, Klaus Maeck, and Gus van Sant. As well as examining clearly Beat-inspired films such as Pull My Daisy, Chappaqua, and The Flower Thief, Jack Sargeant discusses cinema verite and performance films (Shadows and Wholly Communion), B-movies (The Subterraneans and Roger Corman's Bucket of Blood), and Hollywood adaptations (Heart Beat and Barfly).The second half of the book is devoted to an extensive analysis of the films relating to William Burroughs, from Antony Balch's Towers Open Fire to David Cronenberg's Naked Lunch. This book also contains the last ever interview with writer Allen Ginsberg, recorded three months before his death in April 1997.

Softcover. Middlebury, VT, Middlebury College Museum of Art, 1st, 2015, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, 111 pages. Softcover with paper wrappers. Color pictures throughout. In 1899 Gustav Klimt's painting Nuda Veritas shook up the Austrian public with what many deem to be the painter's most political exploration of the nude female body. Klimt's provocative allegory challenged viewers to consider their own beliefs about the relationship between the nude (female) body and contemporary morality; this "naked truth" was shocking. Transcending accusations of pornography, Klimt's work paved the way for artistic examinations of the nude body as the site through which questions of freedom, desire, beauty, nature, culture, power, and their antonyms could be represented and negotiated. Taking these ideas as one critical point of departure, this volume and the accompanying exhibition feature selected prints, drawings, and watercolors by Klimt, Egon Schiele, Otto Dix, George Grosz, Max Beckmann and Kathe Kollwitz, among others. It explores the conceptions of the human body and the manner of its visualization in the period leading up to and following the First World War, which changed the world's notions of flesh and blood forever.

Hardcover. Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1st, 1935, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, 62 pages. Hardcover. Previous owners bookplate on inside front cover. Fading to spine and along left edge of front cover. Clean, tight copy.

Softcover. San Francisco, Mercury House , 1st, 2001, Book: Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, pictorial wraps, 289 pages. An extraordinary story of a woman's experience among the Athabaskan Indians where she learns to see the visible and invisible world around her. Bump to top outside corner created a light wave to pages. Otherwise clean.

Hardcover. US, Miramax Books, 1st, 2001, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, 254 pages. Clean, unmarked copy with only minor wear to dust jacket. Color photographs. The splashy photo spreads in The National Enquirer: Thirty Years of Unforgettable Images prove that the Enquirer has become what Life magazine was in its day: the image bank of American pop culture. They're all here, big as life--or, in the cases of Elvis, Ted Bundy, John Lennon, Grace Kelly, and River Phoenix, big news in their coffin close-ups. The photos are haunting: Columbine High killer Eric Harris at age 6 in a skeleton-with-bloody-skull-mask Halloween costume; Eric Clapton and his son just hours before the boy's window plunge. The book has lots of laughs, too: Bryant Gumbel and Matt Lauer getting a lap dance from three transsexual waitresses; Van Damme with his third and fourth wives on either arm (in identical dresses). Witty layouts predominate: weirdly well preserved Michelle Phillips and a mummy pose opposite a little girl and Michael Jackson (whose nose is disintegrating). The glimmer of glamour vies with the shock of decay--often in images of the same celeb. Watch Liza morph from tot to sot! A feast for inquiring minds.

Hardcover. Hanover NH, UPNE, 1st, 2013, Book: Near Fine, Dust Jacket: Near Fine, Hardcover, 132 pages. Like new in publisher's shrink-wrap. In an age of specialization it is amazing to find an artist who has mastered the complexities of painting both the urban landscape and the Maine wilderness. Joel Babb achieves all this with absolute clarity, attention to detail, and meticulous realism. His vision is very much of our time a contemporary dialogue between nature and culture. This first-ever overview of Joel Babb s work offers a full complement of his major paintings created over the past several decades and a compelling account of Babb s evolution as an artist by art critic Carl Little.

Softcover. New York, John Day Company, 1st Edition, 1933, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, 32 pages. Softcover pamphlet with French flaps. Tan wrapper with black title on front cover and text on back cover (see image). Staple bound. A couple of stray marks on front cover (see image). Some light tanning throughout from age. In amazing shape for its age.

Hardcover. San Francisco, Collins, 1st, 1993, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover, 157 pages. A pictorial record of farming families in northwest Illinois where the photographer lived. Extensive b/w photos throughout.

Hardcover. San Francisco, Collins, 1st, 1993, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover, 157 pages. A pictorial record of farming families in northwest Illinois where the photographer lived. B7w photos throughout.

Softcover. Boston, Museum of Fine Arts Boston , 1st, 1982, Book: Good, Dust Jacket: None, 3 Softcover Volumes. Volume 1 - 94 pages. Features:Introduction/Migration and Settlement. Many illustrations in black & white and 8 pages in full color. Covers show light/moderate wear with some soiling to rear cover. Clean, tight copy. Volume 2 - 260 pages. Features: Mentality and Environment. Many illustrations in black & white and 8 pages in full color. Light/moderate wear. Clean, tight copy. Volume 3 - 209 pages. Features: Style. Many illustrations in black & white and 16 pages in full color. Light/moderate wear. Clean, tight copy. All 3 Volumes: Good+ condition.

Softcover. US, Prestel, 1st, 2014, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, 128 pages. Softover. Clean, unmarked copy with only minor wear to wrappers. Like new in publisher's shrink-wrap. Photographer Iain McKell offers an extraordinary and breathtakingly beautiful glimpse into the lives of a real and raw group of present-day nomads whose culture is built around ideals of freedom, nature, and simplicity. Historically despised the new gypsies are there by choice, not heritage. Unrelated to the Roma, the movement began in 1986 when a group of Post-Punk Anti-Thatcher protesters headed out of London into the English countryside. McKell followed these New Age Travellers to the West Country and over the years he watched them become a hybrid tribe - the new gypsies - present-day rural anarchists, living the subversive lifestyle in elaborately decorated horse-drawn caravans. Known as 'Horse-drawn', the new gypsies share a desire for sustainability, a love of self-reliance and a disdain for the trappings of contemporary life. For more than a decade McKell has focused his lens on travellers of all ages: parents, children, couples and loners. With sensitivity and honesty he captures a way of life that seems at once romantic, strange, beautiful and simple. The result is a deeply insightful portrayal of a culture that eschews the traditional creature comforts of urban life in favour of the simplicity and freedom of the natural world.

Hardcover. Los Angeles, Taschen, 1st, 2006, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover. Never opened, still in original shrink wrap. 192 pages, 146 illustrations, 30 in color. Foreword by William Claxton. Foreword by Joachim E. Berendt. Text is in French, English and German.

Hardcover. Los Angeles, Taschen, 1st, 2006, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover. Never opened, still in original shrink wrap. 192 pages, 146 illustrations, 30 in color. Foreword by William Claxton. Foreword by Joachim E. Berendt. Text is in French, English and German.