culture

Softcover. London, Tate Gallery, 1st, 2007, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 216 pages. A key figure in the history of British Pop Art, Blake is one of the most influential and original artists working in Britain today. Central to Blake's work since the 1950s has been his fascination with popular culture, ranging from music to Hollywood icons and wrestling stars. Perhaps his most famous engagement with Pop came with his design for the cover of The Beatles' album Sgt Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band. With this and other works he helped create a specifically British pop aesthetic that defined an era. A prolific artist, he has utilised a variety of media including painting, drawing, collage, sculpture and printmaking; this study focuses principally on his two-dimensional works and provides the first thorough survey of his paintings from the 1950s through to the present. It will include major icons of twentieth-century art, such as Self-Portrait with badges (1961), and Have a Nice Day, Mr Hockney (1981-3), but will also feature many lesser-known works including his recent, major work The Marcel Duchamp World Series.

Hardcover. London, B. T. Batsford Ltd., 1st, 1949, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Good, 169 pages. Hardcover. Red cloth edition. Top edge stained red. Illustrated with 126 black & white photographs and a few in color. Previous owners name embossed at top of rear interior dust jacket flap. Dust jacket with darkening to spine, minor smudges at upper left corner - jacket now protected with clear plastic cover. Clean, tight copy.

Hardcover. Manchester UK, Manchester University Press, 1st, 1985, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket. 312 pages. Clean, tight copy.

Hardcover. Santa Fe, Twin Palms Pub, 1st, 2008, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, 60 pages. Clean, unmarked copy with only minor wear to dust jacket. Close to 30 full-page color portraits of phone sex "operators" in the intimate setting of their own homes with comments from each on their work.

Hardcover. Santa Fe, Twin Palms Pub, 1st, 2008-12-03, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, 60 pages. Clean, unmarked copy with only minor wear to dust jacket. Close to 30 full-page color portraits of phone sex "operators" in the intimate setting of their own homes with comments from each on their work.

Hardcover. Cambridge MA, The MIT Press, 1st, 1990, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, 362 pages, hardcover in a bright dust jacket. Generously illustrated account [435 b/w photo reproductions] of the photogrphy produced by various well-known Bauhaus associates such as Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, Lucia Moholy, T. Lux Feininger, Florence Henri, Herbert Bayer, and others during the mid-1920s and early 1930s. An invaluable compilation of images and information about the work of this dynamic group of artists, designers, photographers and their students who had such an important impact on Western aesthetics and culture throughout the subsequent decades of the 20th century.

Hardcover. New York, Pace Wildenstein, 1st, 2007, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover, 188 pages. Illustrated in full color and black & white. Clean, bright copy.

Softcover. New Haven CT, Yale University Press, 1st, 2005, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 144 pages. Comics, graphic novels, and single panel cartoons have long flourished as an alternative medium. In recent years these forms of narrative illustration-artwork that tells its own story rather than supporting a text-have increasingly crossed over into mainstream popular culture. Pictorial storytelling now reaches the public through animated films (Spirited Away) and films with animated sequences (Kill Bill), while graphic novels win literary prizes and comic art hangs in art galleries. This delightful book explores the various uses of images with and without text in the work of over thirty artists from around the world.

Hardcover. University Park PA, Penn State Press, 1st, 2014, Book: Very Good, Hardcover. Dogs are as ubiquitous in American culture as white picket fences and apple pie, embracing all the meanings of wholesome domestic life--family, fidelity, comfort, protection, nurturance, and love--as well as symbolizing some of the less palatable connotations of home and family, including domination, subservience, and violence. In Picturing Dogs, Seeing Ourselves, Ann-Janine Morey presents a collection of antique photographs of dogs and their owners in order to investigate the meanings associated with the canine body. Included are reproductions of 115 postcards, cabinet cards, and cartes de visite that feature dogs in family and childhood snapshots, images of hunting, posed studio portraits, and many other settings between 1860 and 1950. These photographs offer poignant testimony to the American romance with dogs and show how the dog has become part of cultural expressions of race, class, and gender. Still in publisher's shrink wrap.

Hardcover. Washington DC, Smithsonian, 1st, 2003, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover, 260 pages. Working for the government's Farm Security Administration in the 1930s, photographers set out across the country to capture the human face of the Depression. Walker Evans' portraits of sharecroppers and Dorothea Lange's images of migrant families today stand as the most popular images from the FSA's project. Yet, in their own time, the pictures functioned as urgent, powerful reminders that one-third of the nation was in a real crisis. Focusing on these and other well-known FSA photographs, Finnegan examines how popular magazines constructed complex and often contradictory messages about poverty. Picturing Poverty also explores a moment in American history when visual images took center stage as the nation struggled with economic, political, and social strife. By striving to understand the original context of the photographs, Finnegan shines new light on the meanings of poverty, the Depression, and the various roles of the media. At once a persuasive analysis of FSA images and a balanced commentary on the role of the media, Picturing Poverty is above all a look into the difficult issue of how the mass media presents social issues to Americans.

Hardcover. Berkeley CA, University of California Press, 1st, 2006, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket, 287 pages. Pieter Bruegel (ca. 1525-1569), generally considered the greatest Flemish painter of the sixteenth century, was described in 1604 by his earliest biographer as a supremely comic artist, few of whose works failed to elicit laughter. Today, however, we approach Bruegel's art as anything but a laughing matter. His paintings and drawings are thought to conceal profound allegories best illuminated with scholarly erudition. In this delightfully engaging book, Walter S. Gibson takes a new look at Bruegel, arguing that the artist was no erudite philosopher, but a man very much in the world, and that a significant part of his art is best appreciated in the context of humor. In his illuminating examination of the witty and amusing elements in Bruegel's paintings, prints, and drawings in relation to the sixteenth century European culture of laughter, Gibson reminds us exactly why Bruegel was one of the most original artists of his time. Clean copy.

Hardcover. Washington DC/Canberra, 1st, 1986, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a dust jacket with light edgewear, fading to spine. 334 pages, b&w illustrations. INSCRIBED BY MYERS on the front fly leaf. The Pintupi are a hunting-gathering people of Australia's Western Desert. They were among the last Aborigines to come into contact with white society. This book presents a comprehensive ethnographic interpretation of the ways in which Pintupi politics, cosmology, kinship systems, nomadic patterns and social values reinforce and sometimes contradict each other.

Hardcover. New York, D. Appleton and Company, 1st, 1916, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, 135 pages. Hardcover. Front cover and spine with black and white vertical stripes, and Black & white pastedown illustration. Features 6 black & white illustrations by E. W. Kemble. First edition with (1) at end of text. Dust jacket with light chipping, creasing along edges - jacket now protected with clear plastic cover. Clean, unmarked copy.

Softcover. Princeton Architectural Press, 1st, 2005, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 160 pages. The blue plate special, meatloaf, a cheeseburger deluxe, a milkshake in a frosty mixing canister, a hot cup of joe--all served by a friendly face in a well-lighted aluminum tube. Such are the special joys of the American diner. And it was just these pleasures that photographer Stephan Schacher set out to document when he left New York on a journey through North America that would test both his stomach and his resolve. Schacher's mission: to feed his hunger only at diners, and to photograph both his meal and his server every time. The result is a unique and deeply human story--quirky and nostalgic and generous--of one man's quest to discover North America's diner culture and his own place in it. Traveling from a Jersey diner to the Canadian Rockies to a shoreside clambake shack on the Pacific Ocean, Schacher's culinary adventure is documented here with a wealth of visual materials. The author's arresting photographs of succulent steaks and greasy fries, of smiling waitresses in uniforms or jeans, and brightly colored plastic dishes and table mats are supplemented by maps showing the photographer's route across the continent.

Softcover. New York, Princeton Architectural Press, 1st, 2005, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, 160 pages, color plates throughout. The blue plate special, meatloaf, a cheeseburger deluxe, a milkshake in a frosty mixing canister, a hot cup of joe--all served by a friendly face in a well-lighted aluminum tube. Such are the special joys of the American diner. And it was just these pleasures that photographer Stephan Schacher set out to document when he left New York on a journey through North America that would test both his stomach and his resolve. Schacher's mission: to feed his hunger only at diners, and to photograph both his meal and his server every time. The result is a unique and deeply human story--quirky and nostalgic and generous--of one man's quest to discover North America's diner culture and his own place in it. Traveling from a Jersey diner to the Canadian Rockies to a shoreside clambake shack on the Pacific Ocean, Schacher's culinary adventure is documented here with a wealth of visual materials. The author's arresting photographs of succulent steaks and greasy fries, of smiling waitresses in uniforms or jeans, and brightly colored plastic dishes and table mats are supplemented by maps showing the photographer's route across the continent.

Hardcover. Cambridge MA, Harvard University Press, 1st, 2001, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a very good dust jacket with light fading to spine, 342 pages. The Platonic Theology is a visionary work and the philosophical masterpiece of Marsilio Ficino (1433-1499), the Florentine scholar-philosopher-magus who was largely responsible for the Renaissance revival of Plato. A student of the Neoplatonic schools of Plotinus and Proclus, he was committed to reconciling Platonism with Christianity, in the hope that such a reconciliation would initiate a spiritual revival and return of the golden age. His Platonic evangelizing was eminently successful and widely influential, and his Platonic Theology, translated into English for the first time in this edition, is one of the keys to understanding the art, thought, culture, and spirituality of the Renaissance.

Hardcover. Cambridge MA, Harvard University Press, 1st, 2002, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Good, Hardcover in a dust jacket with fading to spine and front cover, 397 pages. The Platonic Theology is a visionary work and the philosophical masterpiece of Marsilio Ficino (1433-1499), the Florentine scholar-philosopher-magus who was largely responsible for the Renaissance revival of Plato. A student of the Neoplatonic schools of Plotinus and Proclus, he was committed to reconciling Platonism with Christianity, in the hope that such a reconciliation would initiate a spiritual revival and return of the golden age. His Platonic evangelizing was eminently successful and widely influential, and his Platonic Theology, translated into English for the first time in this edition, is one of the keys to understanding the art, thought, culture, and spirituality of the Renaissance. Clean copy.

Hardcover. Bondi Digital Publishing, 1st, 2007, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Playboy Cover to Cover--the 50s brings the magazine's entire groundbreaking first decade--every issue, every page, cover to cover--into one searchable digital archive.This exclusive box set features the Bondi Reader, powerful MAC or PC browsing software that allows you to explore, search, save and arrange multiple reading lists. Every story, feature and interview, and of course every Playmate, can be located in seconds, and then compiled and cross-referenced however you choose. Playboy Cover to Cover--the 50s also comes with a 224? page companion coffee table book chronicling the behind-the- scenes history of Playboy and filled with never-before-published letters, photos, and contact sheets of Playboy?s amazing first decade. A collector's edition reissue of the extremely rare first issue--featuring Marilyn Monroe's breathtaking cover and pictorial--is included as a special bonus. This essential collection is a must for lifelong fans and subscribers of Playboy, nostalgia seekers, history and culture buffs, as well as all lovers of beautiful women.

Hardcover. New Haven, CT, Yale University Art Gallery, 1st, 2014, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, 207 pages. Hardcover with no dust jacket. Very clean, unmarked copy still in shrink wrap. Images of New Orleans and the city's jazz culture, performers, bands, and clubs between 1957 and 1982. Over 200 black and white photographs taken by Friedlander. Tight copy.

Hardcover. New Haven, CT, Yale University Art Gallery, 1st, 2014, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, 207 pages. Hardcover with no dust jacket. Very clean, unmarked copy still in shrink wrap. Images of New Orleans and the city's jazz culture, performers, bands, and clubs between 1957 and 1982. Over 200 black and white photographs taken by Friedlander. Tight copy.

Softcover. London, Cornerhouse, 1st wraps, 1984, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 88 pages. Color photos of England in the 1980s by a Magnum photographer.

Hardcover. NP, University of Alaska Press, 1st, 2009, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover, 204 pages, 192 b&w plates, map. This book is a window to the daily life and the environment of the Tikigaq, the Inupiaq people of Point Hope, Alaska, as seen in photographs taken by young Norwegian artist Berit Arnestad Foote from 1959 to 1962. In Berit Foote's days in Point Hope fifty years ago, the ice covered the sea in October and did not clear until July. In recent years, however, the Arctic ice has been changing rapidly, and so are the lives of people in Point Hope and across the North. This book--a call to action as well as a work of art--provides powerful documentation of how profoundly the entire fabric of a community's life and culture is affected by the ice that surrounds it.

Hardcover. Gottingen GR, Steidl, 1st, 2006, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Non-paginated. Black & white photographs by Rosalind Solomon. Minor wear. Clean, tight copy .Rosalind Solomon made her first pictures in Poland in 1988 during a time of political change, and returned there in 2003, a time of increasing violence and inhumanity in the world. All of the images are of individuals, their relationships and environments and are observations and commentaries on Poland itself, as well as on the rest of the world.