Softcover. NY, Pantheon, reprint, 1986, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover. With an introduction by Jack Kerouac. Robert Frank's The Americans changed the course of twentieth-century photography. In 83 photographs, Frank looked beneath the surface of American life to reveal a people plagued by racism, ill-served by their politicians and rendered numb by a rapidly expanding culture of consumption. Yet he also found novel areas of beauty in simple, overlooked corners of American life. And it was not just Frank's subject matter--cars, jukeboxes and even the road itself that redefined the icons of America; it was also his seemingly intuitive, immediate, off-kilter style, as well as his method of brilliantly linking his photographs together thematically, conceptually, formally and linguistically, that made The Americans so innovative. More of an ode or a poem than a literal document, the book is as powerful and provocative today as it was 75 years ago. This edition was printed in Switzerland by Jean Genoud under the direst supervision of Robert Frank. Clean, bright copy.
Hardcover. NY, Pantheon, 1st, 2016, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket. 320 pages illustrated in color by Liew. "Liew's graphic novel is a fascinating look at a cartoonist's growth over time and how his creative output reflects the culture around him, and Liew tells Chye's story in a way that only comic books can....A beautifully multidimensional portrait of the cartoonist, beginning with Chye's personal interpretation o the past before showing comics and sketches that provide further insight....The color palettes, the paper quality, the incorporation of photographs and sketches, they all combine with the text to provide a complex view of Charlie Chan Hock Chye that has a strong sense of history behind it." A 2017 Eisner Award Winner for Best Writer/Artist, Best US Edition of International Material--Asia, and Best Publication DesignWinner of the Singapore Literature Prize 2016A New York Times bestsellerAn Economist Book of the Year 2016An NPR Graphic Novel Pick for 2016A Washington Post Best Graphic Novel of 2016A New York Post Best Books of 2016A Publishers Weekly Best Book of 2016
Hardcover. NY, Abrams, 1st, 2009, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover, 256 pages. Harvey Kurtzman discovered Robert Crumb and gave Gloria Steinem her first job in publishing when he hired her as his assistant. Terry Gilliam also started at his side, met an unknown John Cleese in the process, and the genesis of Monty Python was formed. Art Spiegelman has stated on record that he owes his career to him. And he's one of Playboy publisher Hugh Hefner's favorite artists.Harvey Kurtzman had a Midas touch for talent, but was himself an astonishingly talented and influential artist, writer, editor, and satirist. The creator of MAD and Playboy's "Little Annie Fanny" was called, "One of the most important figures in postwar America" by the New York Times. Kurtzman's groundbreaking "realistic" war comics of the early '50s and various satirical publications (MAD, Trump, Humbug, and Help!) had an immense impact on popular culture, inspiring a generation of underground cartoonists. Without Kurtzman, it's unlikely we'd have had Airplane, SNL, or National Lampoon.The Art of Harvey Kurtzman is the first and only authorized celebration of this "Master of American Comics." This definitive book includes hundreds of never-before-seen illustrations, paintings, pencil sketches, newly discovered lost E.C. Comics layouts, color compositions, illustrated correspondence, and vintage photos from the rich Kurtzman archives
Softcover. Chicago, University of Chicago Press, reprint, 1978, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 400 pages. A landmark work by English historian Frances A. Yates (1899-1981); an examination of the mnemonic systems developed by the ancient Greeks, and their impact on the Renaissance thought of Giordano Bruno and others. Named one of the top 100 nonfiction books of the century by the Modern Library in 1999. One large fold-out plate, clean copy.
Hardcover. Hermes Press, 1st, 2024, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, pictorial boards, 190 pages. When cartoonist Elzie Segar created Popeye, as a minor character ten years into the run of the Thimble Theatre strip in 1929, little did he know that the world's most famous sailor would still be around over ninety years later and still being offered as a Sunday feature.To celebrate Popeye, the character, the comic strip and his universe, a feature cartoonist Charles M. Schulz described as "perfect... consistent in drawing and humor," Hermes Press is publishing the definitive art monograph on the subject.This book features a comprehensive essay written by pop culture historian R.C. Harvey accompanied by over 350 illustrations of original strip and comic book art, animation art, illustrations, advertising art, products, the Robert Altman film, and everything Popeye. Every aspect of Popeye is explored, from Olive Oyl and Eugene the Jeep to Wimpy and Bluto. Clean, bright copy.
Hardcover. NY, Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1st, 2024, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket, 256 pages illustrated in color. An exploration of late nineteenth-century American literary posters. a vibrant genre at the vanguard of modern commercial art and graphic design spurred by innovations in printing technology, the modern poster emerged in the 1890s as a popular form of visual culture in the United States. Created by some of the best-known illustrators and graphic designers of the period including Will H. Bradley, Florence Lundborg, Edward Penfield, and Ethel Reed these advertisements for books and high-tone periodicals such as Harper's and Lippincott's went beyond the realm of commercial art, incorporating bold, stylized imagery and striking typography. This book, based on the renowned Leonard A. Lauder Collection, explores the craze for literary posters, which became sought after collectibles even in their day. It offers new scholarly perspectives that address the aesthetic sophistication and modernity of the literary poster; the impact of early experiments in the field of advertising psychology; the expanded opportunities for women artists, who played an important role in advancing the so-called poster style; and the printmaking techniques that artists employed in this novel art form. A lively survey of a little-known but highly influential period in graphic design,
Hardcover. Princeton University Press, 1st, 2023, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket, 288 pages. Crow re-evaluates Conner and other key figures-from Catholic activist Corita Kent to Black Panther Emory Douglas to ecological witness Bonnie Ora Sherk-as part of a generational cohort galvanized by resistance to war, racial oppression, and environmental degradation. Younger practitioners of performance and installation carried the mindset of rebellion into the 1970s and 1980s, as previously excluded artists of color moved to the forefront in Los Angeles. Mike Kelley, their contemporary, remained unwaveringly true to the late countercultural flowering he had witnessed at the dawn of his career. The result is a major new account of the counterculture's enduring influence on modern art. Clean copy. Still in publisher's shrinkwrap.
Hardcover. Seattle, Fantagraphics Books, 1st, 2025, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover in pictorial boards, 397 pages illustrated in color. This new volume in Fantagraphics' and Marvel's collaborative Atlas Library presents Girl Comics #1-12, a long unseen subversion of romance comics beautifully designed for a new generation of readers!In 1950, Timely/Atlas/Marvel took a typical romance title called Girl Comics and turned it into a sister companion to its successful men's-adventure comics: an empowering girls'-adventure comic! Mystery, adventure and suspense was promised and delivered! At the hands of a stellar artistic line-up, including John Buscema, Mike Sekowsky, Bill Everett, Joe Maneely, Russ Heath, and Bernard Krigstein, Girl Comics evolved from heart-stricken love stories to hair-raising girl-power thrill rides like "The Death Plunge!," "The House of Shadows!," "I was a Murderer's Daughter!," "They Called me a Spy!," "The Dead Hands at the Controls," and "The Dark Hallway."This volume also features the story behind the stories, with editor Dr. Michael J. Vassallo's essays on Marvel publisher Martin Goodman's enthusiastic relationship with romance comics and magazines at a time when the art form was cementing itself into American youth culture! Clean copy. DOMESTIC SHIPPING ONLY.
Hardcover. Princeton NJ, Princeton University Press, 1st, 1999, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket, 335 pages. The Barbarians Speak re-creates the story of Europe's indigenous people who were nearly stricken from historical memory even as they adopted and transformed aspects of Roman culture. The Celts and Germans inhabiting temperate Europe before the arrival of the Romans left no written record of their lives and were often dismissed as "barbarians" by the Romans who conquered them. Accounts by Julius Caesar and a handful of other Roman and Greek writers would lead us to think that prior to contact with the Romans, European natives had much simpler political systems, smaller settlements, no evolving social identities, and that they practiced human sacrifice. A more accurate, sophisticated picture of the indigenous people emerges, however, from the archaeological remains of the Iron Age. Here Peter Wells brings together information that has belonged to the realm of specialists and enables the general reader to share in the excitement of rediscovering a "lost people." In so doing, he is the first to marshal material evidence in a broad-scale examination of the response by the Celts and Germans to the Roman presence in their lands.
Hardcover. Princeton NJ, Princeton University Press, 1st, 1999, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket, 335 pages with b&w illustrations. Re-creates the story of Europe's indigenous people who were nearly stricken from historical memory even as they adopted and transformed aspects of Roman culture. The Celts and Germans inhabiting temperate Europe before the arrival of the Romans left no written record of their lives and were often dismissed as "barbarians" by the Romans who conquered them. Accounts by Julius Caesar and a handful of other Roman and Greek writers would lead us to think that prior to contact with the Romans, European natives had much simpler political systems, smaller settlements, no evolving social identities, and that they practiced human sacrifice. A more accurate, sophisticated picture of the indigenous people emerges, however, from the archaeological remains of the Iron Age. Here Peter Wells brings together information that has belonged to the realm of specialists and enables the general reader to share in the excitement of rediscovering a "lost people." Clean copy.
Hardcover. Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1st, 2000, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket. In this daring reexamination of the connections between national politics and Hollywood movies, Lary May offers a fresh interpretation of American culture from the New Deal through the Cold War and one in which a populist, egalitarian ethos found itself eventually supplanted by a far different view of the nation. Clean copy.
Hardcover. NY, One World/Ballantine, 1st, 2000, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket. A fictional narrative base on the life of America's first black female millionaire. Born to former slaves on a Louisiana plantation in 1867, Madam C.J. Walker rose from poverty and indignity to become America's first black female millionaire, the head of a hugely successful company, and a leading philanthropist in African American causes. Renowned author Alex Haley became fascinated by the story of this extraordinary heroine, and before his death in 1992 he embarked on the research and outline of a major novel based on her life. Now with The Black Rose, critically acclaimed writer Tananarive Due brings the work to inspiring completion. "I got my start by giving myself a start," Madam C.J. was fond of saying as she recounted her transformation from the uneducated laundress Sarah Breedlove to a woman of wealth, culture, and celebrity. Madam C.J. was nearing forty and married to a maverick Denver newspaperman when the wonder-working hair care method she discovered changed her life. Seemingly overnight, she built a marketing empire that enlisted more than twenty thousand bright young African American women to demonstrate and sell her products door-to-door. By the time she died in 1919, Madam C.J. Walker had constructed her own factory from the ground up, established a training school, and built a twenty-room mansion at Irvington on the Hudson, New York, called Villa Lawaro.
Softcover. London, Routledge, reprint, 1996, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 325 pages with index, b&w illustrations. An outstanding piece of scholarship and a fascinating read, The Body Emblazoned is a compelling study of the culture of dissection the English Renaissance, which informed intellectual enquiry in Europe for nearly two hundred years. In this outstanding work, Jonathan Sawday explores the dark, morbid eroticism of the Renaissance anatomy theatre, and relates it to not only the great monuments of Renaissance art, but to the very foundation of the modern idea of knowledge.Though the dazzling displays of the exterior of the body in Renaissance literature and art have long been a subject of enquiry, The Body Emblazoned considers the interior of the body, and what it meant to men and women in early modern culture. Clean, bright copy.
Hardcover. Last Gasp, 1st, 2019, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, 288 pages. The Book of Weirdo is the definitive - and hugely entertaining- examination of Weirdo magazine, renowned underground comix cartoonist Robert Crumb's legendary humor comics anthology, which was originally published throughout the 1980s. A "low-brow" counterpoint to Art Spiegelman and Francoise Mouley's rather high-faluttin' RAW comix publication, Weirdo influenced an entire generation of alternative and neo-underground artists, as well as creative refuge for the underground comix veterans, and this book features the complete story of the well-recalled comics magazine, along with testimonials from over 130 of the publication's contributors, including interviews with Weirdo's three editors - R. "Keep on Truckin'" Crumb, Peter "Hate" Bagge, and Aline "The Bunch" Kominsky-Crumb - and publisher "Baba Ron" Turner. As much a history of the alternative comics scene of the 1980s - from New York City punk to Seattle grunge - this exhaustive retrospective includes rare and unseen artwork from that era, as well as new comics from modern-day artists celebrating their love for the great oddball magazine. In its time, the periodical featured the finest work of many artists, particularly the best material by Robert Crumb himself, Weirdo's founder and best known for ZAP Comix, Fritz the Cat, and Mr. Natural, and a man widely heralded as the greatest cartoonist of all time. We get photos of the various contributors, some samples of the work, more than a few brand-spanking-new artistic tributes to the magazine and the people who made it. And lots and lots of stories about what it was like to work for and with Robert Crumb.
Softcover. Durham NC, Duke University Press, 1st, 1998, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 156 pages. In the early 1940s as the conflict between the Axis and the Allies spread worldwide, the U.S. State Department turned its attention to Axis influence in Latin America. As head of the Office of Inter-American Affairs, Nelson Rockefeller was charged with cultivating the region's support for the Allies while portraying Brazil and its neighbors as dependable wartime partners. Genevieve Naylor, a photojournalist previously employed by the Associated Press and the WPA, was sent to Brazil in 1940 by Rockefeller's agency to provide photographs that would support its need for propaganda. Often balking at her mundane assignments, an independent-minded Naylor produced something far different and far more rich--a stunning collection of over a thousand photographs that document a rarely seen period in Brazilian history. Accompanied by analysis from Robert M. Levine, this selection of Naylor's photographs offers a unique view of everyday life during one of modern Brazil's least-examined decades. Clean copy.
Hardcover. New Haven CT, Yale University Press, 1st, 2009, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket. The colonists who settled the backcountry in eighteenth-century New England were recruited from the social fringe, people who were desperate for land, autonomy, and respectability and who were willing to make a hard living in a rugged environment. Mark Williams' microhistorical approach gives voice to the settlers, proprietors, and officials of the small colonial settlements that became Granby, Connecticut, and Ashfield, Massachusetts. These people-often disrespectful, disorderly, presumptuous, insistent, and defiant-were drawn to the ideology of the Revolution in the 1760s and 1770s that stressed equality, independence, and property rights. The backcountry settlers pushed the emerging nation's political culture in a more radical direction than many of their leaders or the Founding Fathers preferred and helped put a democratic imprint on the new nation. This accessibly written book will resonate with all those interested in the social and political relationships of early America.
Softcover. UK, Cambridge University Press, 4th pr., 2008, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 745 pages. Beginning with Homer and ending in late antiquity with Christian and pagan reflections on divine and human order, this volume is the first general and comprehensive treatment of Rome ever to be published in English. Its international team of distinguished scholars includes historians of law, politics, culture and religion, as well as philosophers. The volume will long remain an accessible and authoritative guide to Greek and Roman thinking about government and community. Remainder line on bottom edge otherwise clean.
Softcover. University of Chicago Press, 2nd pr., 1982, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 208 pages. The camel has stirred the imagination of people from all walks of life. In his Just So Stones, Rudyard Kipling offered a fanciful explanation for the origin of the animal's two most celebrated characteristics, its conspicuous hump and disagreeable temperament. When the world was created, the camel was a lazy animal who avoided his work by living in the middle of an inhospitable desert. While other animals toiled for the benefit of man, the camel remained idle, missing three days of work. A mythical being (the Djinn in Charge of All Deserts) gave the camel a hump with which to store his food. With this self-contained reserve, he could work for three days without eating and thus repay the time that he owed. But, according to Kipling, the camel has "never yet caught up with the three days that he missed at the beginning of the world, and he has never yet learned how to behave." In their recent book The Camel, biologists Hilde Gauthier-Pilters and Anne Innis Dagg provide us with a less colorful but decidedly more scientific view of this amazing ungulate. Clean copy.
Hardcover. Chapel Hill NC, University of North Carolina Press, 1st, 1976, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket, 324 pages, b&w illustrations. Published for the Williamsburg, VA Institute of Early American History & Culture. Instead of recounting, in detail, the public events of John Adams's extraordinary career, Peter Shaw views as a whole Adams's character, thought, and acts, personalizing for the reader the most remote of our Founding Fathers. This compact but comprehensive biography brilliantly portrays the poignant revelations of John Adams's inner life implicit in the recently released Adams family manuscripts. The formal side of Adams is reconciled with his remarkably colorful private life by the author's penetrating grasp of the whole man. Adams's behavior appears less eccentric when viewed in the context of its origin in the village life of eighteenth~century Massachusetts; and his politics and ideas appear less abstractly motivated when viewed in the light of the evolution of his character. Name on front fly leaf, otherwise clean.
Softcover. McGill-Queen's University Press, reprint, 1987, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 913 pages, b&w illustrations, maps. Trigger's work integrates insights from archaeology, history, ethnology, linguistics, and geography. This wide knowledge allows him to show that, far from being a static prehistoric society quickly torn apart by European contact and the fur trade, almost every facet of Iroquoian culture had undergone significant change in the centuries preceding European contact. He argues convincingly that the European impact upon native cultures cannot be correctly assessed unless the nature and extent of precontact change is understood. His study not only stands Euro-American stereotypes and fictions on their heads, but forcefully and consistently interprets European and Indian actions, thoughts, and motives from the perspective of the Huron culture. The Children of Aataentsic revises widely accepted interpretations of Indian behaviour and challenges cherished myths about the actions of some celebrated Europeans during the "heroic age" of Canadian history. In a new preface, Trigger describes and evaluates contemporary controversies over the ethnohistory of eastern Canada.
Hardcover. Prion, 1st, 2009, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover, 230 pages. In terms of both words and images the world had never seen the like of the American comic book. They were bizarre, morbid, lurid, risque and bursting with subconscious desires of burgeoning youth culture. By the time 1954 arrived their were 500 different comics being published by 35 different companies, selling over 60 million copies a month between them. This is the history of the era and the art it produced. The book looks at the pioneers of the comic book and the comic's founding links with sleazy pulp magazines; the campaign for censorship; the fraught relationship between the comic book artists and their publishers; how what they did was rarely recognized as art at the time - and of course the comics themselves.
Softcover. Carbondale IL, Southern Illinois University Press , 1st, 1970, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, dark gray covers with some fading. 639 pages. A detailed documentary on the American Colonial Society, discussing culture, politics, religion, and much more. David Potter and Gordon L. Thomas have selected representative and important speeches and exhortations delivered by famous Americans from the beginning of the Massachusetts Bay Colony to the signing of the Declaration of Independence. The selections are arranged in five categories--those dealing with academic, legal, occasional, political, and religious matters. They are drawn from every stratum of colonial activity--from the classrooms, clerical studies, town meetings, provincial assemblies, and the bar. Great names abound in these pages, but, frequently, expounders of great ideas found here are unremembered figures whose works cannot be found easily elsewhere. The editors have carried out careful research on each speech to assure the authenticity of the text. They have added, for each selection, a note on the speaker and on the place where he delivered his address. Clean copy.
Hardcover. Cambridge MA, The MIT Press, 1st, 2012, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket In this book, 380 pages, illustrated in color. The award-winning historian Regina Lee Blaszczyk traces the relationship of color and commerce, from haute couture to automobile showrooms to interior design, describing the often unrecognized role of the color profession in consumer culture. Blaszczyk examines the evolution of the color progression from 1850 to 1970, telling the stories of innovators who managed the color cornucopia that modern artificial dyes and pigments made possible. These color stylists, color forecasters, and color engineers helped corporations understand the art of illusion and the psychology of color. Clean copy.