culture

Hardcover. NY, powerHouse Books, 1st, 1996, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover, 256 pages. Sylvia Plachy, a photographer for the Village Voice, and James Ridgeway, a reporter for the same publication, have delved into the depths of the pornography trade to explore and explain both its allure and its vulgarity. There is a sense of shock value in exposing the most lurid of fantasies--a man who has his dominatrix mummify him in concrete--that is tempered with theories as to how such an industry could have evolved. We also get to meet for ourselves those in the trade, providing a walk on the wild side within the safe confines of photographs and words.

Hardcover. London, Tate Publishing, 1st, 2012, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover, pictorial boards with an acetate dust wrapper, 304 pages. Warhol brought to the art world a unique awareness of the relationship that art might have with popular consumer culture and tabloid news, with celebrity, and with sexuality. Each of these themes is explored through visual dialogues between warhol and some sixty artists, among them John Baldessari, Vija Celmins, Gilbert & George, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Robert Gober, Nan Goldin, Damien Hirst, Alfredo Jaar, Deborah Kass, Alex Katz, Jeff Koons, Barbara Kruger, Glenn Ligon, Robert Mapplethorpe, Vik Muniz, Takashi Murakami, Bruce Nauman, Cady Noland, Elizabeth Peyton, Sigmar Polke, Richard Prince, Gerhard Richter, Ed Ruscha, Cindy Sherman and Luc Tuymans. Clean copy. DOMESTIC SHIPPING ONLY.

Hardcover. London, Macmillan, 1st, 1968, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, green cloth stamped in gilt, 407 pages. Chapters include: Myth and Ritual, Religion and Healing, Witchcraft and Sorcery, 20th Century Theories of Religion, The Science of Religion and others. Owner's small sticker inside front cover otherwise clean.

Hardcover. Hampton, VA, Hampton Institute Press, 1st, 1927, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Poor, Hardcover, dark blue cloth with gilt lettering on front cover and spine, 236 pages plus appendix. A scarce collection of traditional hymns, gospel, folk songs and "Songs of Tribulation" of the American Negro. An historical document of African-American culture and the history of slavery. Songs in musical score with lyrics. A tight, generally unmarked and clean volume with nice cloth and clear gilt, In a poor dust jacket with chipping and tape repairs. Name on front fly leaf otherwise clean.

Hardcover. Tokyo, Sophia University, 1st, 1970, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, 210 pages, b&w illustrations. Beige cloth spine with patterned boards and a bright dust jacket with a glassine wrapper.

Hardcover. NY, Alfred A. Knopf, 1st, 2001, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket, 356 pages, b&w illustrations. INSCRIBED BY THE EDITOR EMILY BERNARD on the title page. Langston Hughes is widely remembered as a celebrated star of the Harlem Renaissance -- a writer whose bluesy, lyrical poems and novels still have broad appeal. What's less well known about Hughes is that for much of his life he maintained a friendship with Carl Van Vechten, a flamboyant white critic, writer, and photographer whose ardent support of black artists was peerless.Despite their differences a Van Vechten was forty-four to Hughes twenty-two when they met. Hughes and Van Vechten's shared interest in black culture lead to a deeply-felt, if unconventional friendship that would span some forty years. Between them they knew everyone from Zora Neale Hurston to Richard Wright, and their letters, lovingly and expertly collected here for the first time, are filled with gossip about the antics of the great and the forgotten, as well as with talk that ranged from race relations to blues lyrics to the nightspots of Harlem, which they both loved to prowl. Clean copy.

Hardcover. Orangeburg SC, Sandlapper Publishing, 2nd pr., 1987, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Good, Hardcover, 120 pages, b&w illustrations. The author documents the customs and lifestyles of a proud group of Sea Island blacks. Beginning with the first freedmen and their descendents, he reveals a colorful and provocative story, told in words of island natives and illustrated with photographs taken around the turn of the century. INSCRIBED BY DAISE on the half-title page. Clean copy with color fading to dust jacket spine and part of front cover.

Hardcover. Cambridge MA, MIT Press, 2nd Pr., 1994, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover, 251 pages, with her photo-illustrated dust jacket. Who speaks? Who is silent? Who is seen? Who is absent? These questions focus on how cultures are constructed through pictures and words, how we are seduced into a world of appearances: into a pose of who we are and aren't. On both an emotional and an economic level, images and texts have the power to make us rich or poor. In these essays and reviews, written over the last decade, Barbara Kruger addresses that power with intelligence and wit, in the hope of engaging both our criticality and our dreams of affirmation.Barbara Kruger is an artist whose pictures and words engage issues of power, sex, money, difference, and death. Her work has appeared throughout America, Europe, and Japan in galleries, newspapers, magazines, and museums and on billboards, matchbooks, TV programs, t-shirts, postcards, and shopping bags. She has written about television, film, and cultures for Artforum, Esquire, the New York Times, and the Village Voice.

Hardcover. Madison WI, University of Wisconsin Press, 1st, 1989, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Good, Hardcover in a lightly worn dust jacket with fading to the spine. "Cary Nelson performs an invaluable service to the reader by recovering the work of dozens of forgotten poets, especially women, blacks, and writers on the left, while making it clear that the texts we recover inevitably gain new meaning from their positioning within contemporary culture." Nicely illustrated in b&w and some color, mostly book jackets and title pages of books discussed. Some light pencil marking in margins.

Hardcover. NY, Simon & Schuster, 1st, 2002, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket. A thoughtful history of the legendary New York City neighborhood chronicles the Village's role as a bohemian enclave that became the home of and transformed the lives of such individuals as Edna St. Vincent Millay, Emma Goldman, Eugene O'Neill, Margaret Sanger, and Thomas Wolfe, who came to the neighborhood to pursue individual artistic, personal, and political dreams. Clean copy.

Hardcover. NY, Knopf, 1st, 1980, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket. 227 pages. Previous owner's signature on front fly leaf, else a clean, tight copy. Naipaul presents here four essays about the "half-made" societies, those still suffering from the profound deprivations of colonialism and prey to corruption." He examines the role of Eva Peron as the catalyst for violence in Argentina, with its yearning for a European culture and the physical, historical, cultural reality of the land in which the native Indians were wiped out and the colonialists took over. He writes of the infamous Michael X in Trinidad whose pretensions to power and destiny led to the man's insanity and execution following two pointless murders. Shorter essays address nihilism in the Congo and Naipaul's take on Joseph Conrad and the Heart of Darkness.

Hardcover. Chicago, Art Institute of Chicago, 1st, 2017, Book: Very Good, Hardcover,324 pages. Published on the centenary of the Russian Revolution, this landmark book gathers information from the forefront of current research in early Soviet art, providing a new understanding of where art was presented, who saw it, and how the images incorporated and conveyed Soviet values. More than 350 works are grouped into areas of critical importance for the production, reception, and circulation of early Soviet art: battlegrounds, schools, the press, theaters, homes and storefronts, factories, festivals, and exhibitions. Paintings by El Lissitzky and Liubov Popova are joined by sculptures, costumes and textiles, decorative arts, architectural models, books, magazines, films, and more. Also included are rare and important artifacts, among them a selection of illustrated children's notes by Joseph Stalin's daughter, Svetlana Allilueva, as well as reproductions of key exhibition spaces such as the legendary Obmokhu (Constructivist) exhibition in 1921; Aleksandr Rodchenko's 'Workers' Club in 1925; and a Radio-Orator kiosk for live, projected, and printed propaganda designed by Gustav Klutsis in 1922. Bountifully illustrated, this book offers an unprecedented, cross-disciplinary analysis of two momentous decades of Soviet visual culture.

Hardcover. Chicago, Art Institute of Chicago, 1st, 2017, Book: Very Good, Hardcover,324 pages. Published on the centenary of the Russian Revolution, this landmark book gathers information from the forefront of current research in early Soviet art, providing a new understanding of where art was presented, who saw it, and how the images incorporated and conveyed Soviet values. More than 350 works are grouped into areas of critical importance for the production, reception, and circulation of early Soviet art: battlegrounds, schools, the press, theaters, homes and storefronts, factories, festivals, and exhibitions. Paintings by El Lissitzky and Liubov Popova are joined by sculptures, costumes and textiles, decorative arts, architectural models, books, magazines, films, and more. Also included are rare and important artifacts, among them a selection of illustrated children's notes by Joseph Stalin's daughter, Svetlana Allilueva, as well as reproductions of key exhibition spaces such as the legendary Obmokhu (Constructivist) exhibition in 1921; Aleksandr Rodchenko's 'Workers' Club in 1925; and a Radio-Orator kiosk for live, projected, and printed propaganda designed by Gustav Klutsis in 1922. Bountifully illustrated, this book offers an unprecedented, cross-disciplinary analysis of two momentous decades of Soviet visual culture.

Softcover. NY, Thunder's Mouth Press, reprint, 2005, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 259 pages. While the supremely popular Steal This Book is a guide to living outside the establishment, Revolution for the Hell of It is a chronicle of Abbie Hoffman's radical escapades that doubles as a guidebook for today's social and political activist. Hoffman pioneered the use of humour, theatre, and shock value to drive home his points, and in Revolution for the Hell of It he gives firsthand accounts of his legendary adventures, from the activism that led to the founding of the Youth International Party,or Yippies!, to the 1968 Democratic National Convention protests ("a Perfect Mess") that resulted in his conviction as part of the Chicago Seven. Clean. bright copy.

NY, Abrams Press, 1st, 2020, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket. 380 pqges, color and b&w photos. An action-packed memoir that takes readers on the road with rock and roll's hardest-working photographer. Bob Gruen is one of the most well-known and connected photographers in rock and roll. For almost 50 years, he has documented the music scene in pictures that have captured the world's attention. Right Place, Right Time is Gruen's first written account of his winding, adventure-filled journey. He takes us on visits to John and Yoko's apartment, on a cross-country road trip with the Ike and Tina Turner band, to Glasgow with Debbie Harry, backstage with KISS, inside CBGB, and on the bus as he swaps steel-toed boots with Sid Vicious. In wildly entertaining stories and iconic images, Gruen gives the reader a unique window into the evolution of American music culture over the last five decades.

Softcover. New York , Monacelli Press, 1st, 2000, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 224 pages, color illustrations throughout by Robert Risko. These celebrity caricatures are instantly recognizable -- recognizable both as unmistakable portraits of famous subjects and as examples of Risko's bold and fluid style. Risko's career was launched in 1978 when Andy Warhol gave him an assignment for Interview magazine. Since then he has drawn likenesses of hundreds of notables from the worlds of film, television, politics, and culture. In addition to countless images for Vanity Fair, Rolling Stone, The New Yorker, and other major magazines, Risko has illustrated book jackets, video covers, movie posters, and CD packages. Very good plus.

Softcover. New York , Monacelli Press, 1st, 2000, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 224 pages, color illustrations throughout by Robert Risko. These celebrity caricatures are instantly recognizable -- recognizable both as unmistakable portraits of famous subjects and as examples of Risko's bold and fluid style. Risko's career was launched in 1978 when Andy Warhol gave him an assignment for Interview magazine. Since then he has drawn likenesses of hundreds of notables from the worlds of film, television, politics, and culture. In addition to countless images for Vanity Fair, Rolling Stone, The New Yorker, and other major magazines, Risko has illustrated book jackets, video covers, movie posters, and CD packages. Very good plus.

Hardcover. Albuquerque, University of New Mexico Press, 1st, 1990, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket, 238 pages, b&w photography by Alex Harris. New Mexico's Sangre de Cristo mountains are a place where two cultures ? Hispanic and Anglo ? meet. They're also the place where three men meet: William deBuys, a young writer; Alex Harris, a young photographer; and Jacobo Romero, an old farmer. When Harris and deBuys move to New Mexico in the 1970s, Romero is the neighbor who befriends them and becomes their teacher. With the tools of simple labor ? shovel and axe, irony and humor ? he shows them how to survive, even flourish, in their isolated village. A remarkable look at modern life in the mountains, River of Traps also magically evokes the now-vanished world in which Romero tended flocks on frontier ranges and absorbed the values of a society untouched by cash or Anglo America. His memories and wisdom, shared without sentimentality, permeate this absorbing story of three men and the place that forever shaped their lives. Clean copy.

Hardcover. Berkeley CA, University of California Press, 1st, 1959, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Good, Hardcover in a lightly worn dust jacket. Foreword by Luella Cole Lowie. Illustrated with 24 b/w photographs. Chronological biography, bibliography. Lowie wrote this book to document ethnographic study in the early 20th century; to put his own professional life on record; to stress methods of field work and their application under very different circumstances.

Softcover. NY, Columbia University Press, 1st, 1995, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 310 pages. INSCRIBED BY EDITOR on the front fly leaf. Romantic Passion: A Universal Experience? shakes the Eurocentric foundations of our ideas about love in the far-flung corners of the world, showing that we've been looking for love in all the wrong places. Social observers from the West, the authors contend, have projected their own rigid ethnocentric notions of love and marriage onto cultures to which such a formula simply doesn't apply. The contributors find expressions of love almost everywhere they look, from the Inuit woman who went hunting and sealing with her husband because she could not bear to be apart from him for even an hour, to a Moroccan youth who reportedly said to his lover, "If I do not see you for just half a day I go crazy". The contributors to Romantic Passion look beyond each society's "official" institutions in their search for expressions of love. Clean copy.

Hardcover. Hatje Cantz, 1st, 2010, Book: Very Good, Hardcover, 208 pages. Between 1961 and 1968, at the height of the Pop art movement, Roy Lichtenstein (1923-1997) created about 50 large black-and-white drawings. Not only was their imagery, culled from consumer culture, entirely new--baked potatoes, ads for foot medication and BB Guns--but so was their treatment, which drew on the rudimentary character of cheaply printed commercial drawings. Conceived independently from Lichtenstein's paintings, these drawings recast illustrations from newspaper ads and comic books into works of keen visual intensity, curiously echoing the clean-edge aesthetic of 1960s geometric abstraction. "Drawing is the basis of my art," Lichtenstein later affirmed; "It is where my thinking takes place." Published for an exhibition at the Morgan Library in New York, this richly illustrated publication offers 120 color illustrations, plus essays on Lichtenstein's technique and on his little-known 1967 Aspen project, in which the artist transformed a room into a black-and-white cartoon drawing.

Softcover. Ithaca NY, Cornell University Press, reprint, 1990, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 309 pages. A major contribution to the cultural and literary history of the Victorian age, Rule of Darkness maps the complex relationship between Victorian literary forms, genres, and theories and imperialist, racist ideology. Critics and cultural historians have usually regarded the Empire as being of marginal importance to early and mid-Victorian writers. Patrick Brantlinger asserts that the Empire was central to British culture as a source of ideological and artistic energy, both supported by and lending support to widespread belief in racial superiority, the need to transform "savagery" into "civilization," and the urgency of promoting emigration.Rule of Darkness brings together material from public records, memoirs, popular culture, and canonical literature. Brantlinger explores the influence of the novels of Captain Frederick Marryat, pioneer of British adolescent adventure fiction, and shows the importance of William Makepeace Thackeray's experience of India to his novels. He treats a number of Victorian best sellers previously ignored by literary historians, including the Anglo-Indian writer Philip Meadows Taylor's Confessions of a Thug and Seeta. Brantlinger situates explorers' narratives and travelogues by such famous author-adventurers as David Livingstone and Sir Richard Burton in relation to other forms of Victorian and Edwardian prose. Through readings of works by Arthur Conan Doyle, Joseph Conrad, H. Rider Haggard, Rudyard Kipling, John Hobson, and many others, he considers representations of Africa, India, and other non-British parts of the world in both fiction and nonfiction. Clean, bright copy.

Hardcover. New York, Oxford University Press, 1st, 1990, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover, 239 pages. Minor edge wear to dust jacket. Else a very clean, tight copy. The dramatic events of the twentieth century have often led to the mass migration of intellectuals, professionals, writers, and artists. One of the first of these migrations occurred in the aftermath of the Russian Revolution, when more than a million Russians were forced into exile. With this book, Marc Raeff, one of the world's leading historians of Russia, offers the first comprehensive cultural history of the "Great Russian Emigration." He examines the social and institutional structure of the emigration and describes its rich cultural and intellectual life. He points out that what distinguishes this emigration from other such episodes in European history is the extent to which the emigres succeeded in reconstituting and preserving their cultural creativity in the West. The flourishing Russian communities of Paris, Berlin, Prague and Kharbin not only enriched Russian arts and letters, but also significantly influenced the culture of their Western hosts, and Raeff concludes with an assessment of their impact on the development of modern Western and Soviet culture.

Hardcover. NY, Aperture, 1st, 1991, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket. An acclaimed photographer's images and the words of Russia's foremost writers combine in an intimate record of the contemporary Russian experience: an intractable culture in the throes of irrevocable change. 30 color and 70 black-and-white photographs. This handsome photo album with Morath's own foreword and captions depicts a world to which many Russians in the grip of post-Soviet nostalgia long to return. Morath's Russia is devoid of Soviet excresence: no ugly concrete apartment blocks, Stalinist skyscrapers, or exhortative banners appear. Landscapes and street scenes are poetic and largely deserted. Sidetrips to Armenia, Georgia, Kyrgyzstan, Lithuania, and Uzbekistan are subsumed under "Russian culture." The people shown are mainly artists and intellectuals, and portraits of embattled dissident writers (Nadezhda Mandelstam and Joseph Brodsky) testify to the moral support Morath and her husband Arthur Miller offered them in the 1960s. The album includes fond letters from Mandelstam and poet Andrei Voznesensky, as well as Olga Andreyev Carlisle's reminiscence of her 1967 trip to the Soviet Union with Morath. Clean copy.