england

Softcover. London, Cassell, 1st, 2002, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 336 pages. This book unravels the secrets and workings of the English parish and its effect on English society. There are 13,000 parishes in England, each with its parish church, covering the country in a network which gives identities to local communities. Two-thirds of English parishes are ancient, probably a thousand years old; one-third have been founded in the last 150 years, largely to meet the enormously increased numbers of people in big towns. One of the major themes of the book is the changing social fabric. Clean copy.

Hardcover. New York , Coward McCann, Inc., 1st, 1940, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover, 159 pages, illustrated in B&W by Forrest Orr. Dust jacket with edgewear, light chipping, otherwise very good.

Hardcover. New York , The Citadel Press, 1st, 1968, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Fair, Harcover, 167 pages, b&w frontispiece and plates. Edge wear, tears to dust jacket. Orange top edge decorative stain. A clean, tight copy.

Hardcover. Chicago, The Lakeside Press, 1st, 1919, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, dark green cloth stamped in gilt, top edge gilt, 137 pages. Tight, attractive copy of this early "Lakeside Classic," the annual keepsake presented by this printer/publisher to friends and clients starting in 1903. Illustrated with two portraits of the author. So many pioneer stories were written at the request of a child or grandchild. What makes Christiana Tillson's humorous memoir different was her background. Tillson's story records the reactions produced upon a refined New England woman by an environment at once predominantly southern and wholly frontier. Her youth in 1822 and her parting from all that she had known in the East were common of many later Western migrants. But when she and her husband went out to try their fortunes, the "West" was what we today call the Midwest. It was still a wild, dangerous, and uncertain place to try to make a future. Clean, bright copy.

NY, Beaufort Books, 1st, 1981, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket. Enroute to his grandparents in Vermont in search of some answers, a lonely teenage hitchiker meets Hannah who claims she is a witch. Hannah is dying and searching for her own special cure. They join forces, and Joey is suddenly swept into a dangerous and fantastic world of magic and miracles as they comb the silent New England countryside. 140 pages, clean copy.

Hardcover. London, England, Gret Western Railway, 1st edition, 1925, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, 154 pages. Hardcover. Color illustrated frontispiece, color and b/w illustrations, including several fold out blueprint diagrams, throughout. Previous owner's ID stamp on front flyleaf. Red cover boards (some fading), black quarter cloth, gilt title on spine and front cover board. Pages unmarked, some light tanning from age. Binding good, spine straight. With additional chapter on "Monastic Life and Buildings" by A. Hamilton Thompson, M.A., D.LITT., F.S.A. Professor of Mediaeval History in the University of Leeds. With One Hundred Illustrations by Photographic Reproduction, fifty-six drawings, thirteen plans, seven color plates and map (in pocket on back endpapers).

Hardcover. NY, Mysterious Press , 1st, 1987, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket. This first American edition of collected true-crime pieces from the '50s and '60s by the master author of Epitaph for a Spy, Journey Into Fear, The Light of Day et al. belongs on every fan's bookshelves. Ambler's polite, leisurely stroll down memory lane is a delight. He deals with classic villains from England (Jack the Ripper), Scotland (William Burke and William Hare) and France (Marcel Petiot) along with more recent miscreants: England's James Hanratty (1961) and America's Raymond Finch and Carole Tregoff (1960). Ambler also turns his good-natured, sharp eye on film-writing and the pleasures of Maxim's, and there are lovely semifictional pieces on spies and spy-spotting. Especially delicious is the tale of "Annettee" in 1937 Tangier. There's nothing heavy here, and even Ambler's opposition to the death penalty is quietly posited. His new introduction has its share of graceful nuggets, too.

Hardcover. London, Frances Lincoln Limited, 1st, 2011, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover in pictorial boards, 125 pages. In a delightful photo essay, acclaimed photographer Eamonn J. McCabe captures some of what makes the English village of Firle in East Sussex come alive. Big open skies, small boys holding a colorful caterpillar, cabbages and tea cosies, bonfires, bikers, dogs and wellies. This is a book for all those who cherish English country life.

Hardcover. Philadelphia, The American Philosophical Society, reprint, 1968, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Good, Hardcover, 579 pages. B&w photographs. Previous owner's inscription on front flyleaf. Light foxing to top edge. Wear, chipping to dust jacket. A nice, clean copy.

Hardcover. London, Heinemann, 1st, 1975, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket. 24 illustrations. Genealogical chart of Queen Victoria and Prince Albert of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha. These letters were only discovered in the 1970's at Broadlands, the home of Princess Victoria's younger son, the Earl Mountbatten of Burma. These letters bring new light to bear on major world and minor domestic events, from the crisis with the Prussian court in 1888 to the Queen's agonized concern for her haemophilic children and grandchildren, from the assassination of the Tsar of Russia to her stalwart but fruitless efforts to persuade Princess's Victoria's sister to marry the eldest son of the Prince of Wales. Lord Mountbatten's elder daughter, Lady Brabourne, has provided a fascinating introduction. Clean copy.

Hardcover. London, England, Macmillan and Co. , 2nd Edition, 1922, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, 503 pages. Hardcover. Previous owner's name on front flyleaf. Blue cloth cover boards, gilt title on spine, some chipping to edges of boards. Tanning to pages and edges from age. Binding very good. Spine straight. Benedetto Croce is one of the most influential philosophers of the twentieth century. His work in aesthetics and historiography has been controversial, but enduring.

Hardcover. NY, Pantheon Books, 1st, 1979, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Good, Hardcover in a lightly worn and soiled dust jacket. 233 pages. Set in New England at the outskirts of a small town. Terrorists seeking the return of their homeland hijack a school bus. Story told from the perspectives of a hostage, a terrorist, the Army General involved in the rescue and his son, recruited as a go-between. Author also of youth classics 'The Chocolate War' and 'I am the Cheese'. Remainder stamp to bottom edge. Otherwise clean.

Hardcover. NY, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1st, 2005, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket, 609 pages, b&w illustrations. Clean copy.

Hardcover. New York, Scribner, 1st, 2015, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, 384 pages. Hardcover with dust jacket. Very clean, unmarked copy with only minor wear to edges. Color and black & white images throughout. Tight copy.

Hardcover. Taschen, 1st, 2007, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover, 264 pages. Alison Jackson has photographed the Queen of England on the toilet, George Bush and Tony Blair chatting in the sauna, Mick Jagger doing gymnastics, and Monica Lewinsky lighting Bill Clinton's cigar. Or has she? The likenesses are uncanny, but of course, her subjects are look-alikes. Her photos demonstrate that while seeing is believing, the truth is another story entirely. In her work, Jackson says, "Likeness becomes real and fantasy touches on the believable. The viewer is suspended in disbelief. I try to highlight the psychological relationship between what we see and what we imagine. This is bound up in our need to look--our voyeurism--and our need to believe." Indeed, by showing "celebrities" ostensibly caught unawares, Jackson's pictures show us what we imagine might go on behind closed doors. Jackson's work causes controversy, because it threatens to cross the line between the private and public life of our contemporary icons. Because we unquestioningly accept the authenticity of the photograph, it would appear that we are being given a glimpse of something confidential, a private moment. It is only upon closer examination that we question the reality of the image, and hopefully this makes us question our unwitting tendency to believe everything we see in the media today.

Hardcover. NY, Metropolitan Museum of Art , 1st, 2004, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover, 304 pages. Roger Fenton (1819-1869) was England's most celebrated and influential photographer during the 1850s, the "golden age" of this radically new medium. Fenton's majestic pictures of cathedrals, country houses, and varied countryside were without peer in England--as were his views of the royal castles and Houses of Parliament that embodied Britain's power. But Fenton's choice of subjects ranged more widely still: he was among the first to photograph the Kremlin and other landmarks of Moscow and Kiev; he was commissioned in 1855 to document the Crimean War, producing early war photographs; and he created theatrical Orientalist costume pictures and a startling series of lush still lifes. Fenton had first studied law and painting, but soon after he took up the camera he was making photographs that were technically superb and highly original in their handling of composition, perspective, atmosphere, and light. Always he strove to demonstrate that photography could equal the art of painting and even surpass it. He was the force behind the founding of the Photographic Society (later the Royal Photographic Society), which worked to advance the profession and encouraged the exhibition of members' works throughout Britain. In a career of a single decade, Fenton did much to transform photography into a medium of powerful expression and visual delight. This exquisitely produced book--the first comprehensive publication on Fenton in almost twenty years--presents eighty-five of the artist's finest photographs and discusses every aspect of his work and his remarkable career.

Hardcover. NY, Riverhead , 1st, 2004, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket. Aloft offers a reexamination of the American dream from the inside out, through the voice of Jerry Battle, a suburban middle-aged man who has lived his entire life on Long Island, New York. Battle's favorite diversion is to fly his small plane solo; slipping away for quick flights over the Island or to the coastal towns of New England, Jerry has been disappearing for years. Then a family crisis occurs, and Jerry finds he must face his disengagement in his relationships: with his deceased wife, the circumstances of whose death he has never fully accepted; with his former girlfriend, whom he still longs for; with his daughter, who refuses to address the disease that threatens her life; with his son, who is in danger of losing the family business; and with his father, whom he has placed in a nursing home. Clean copy.

Hardcover. London, The Fine Arts Society, 1st, 1907, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, 376 pages, hardcover. Decorated boards with gilted top text block. Illustrated by Elizabeth M. Chettle. Homes and memorials of the founders of Virginia, the New England states, and Pennsylvania. Also includes the universities of Harvard and Yale, the first president of the United States and other illustrious Americans. Fading and edgewear to spine. Light bumping to corners with mild fraying. Moderate spotting to text block edges. Weak spine at front endpapers. Unmarked. A clean copy.

Hardcover. Hanover NH, University Press of New England, 1st, 2005, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright duct jacket, 251 pages, b&w illustrations. For years, designers, educators, and community administrators have clamored for a book that will highlight the problems with contemporary playgrounds, tender sorely needed strategies with which to redress them, and stimulate national debate about today's crisis of undervalued public space. Susan Solomon's groundbreaking and marvelously illustrated American Playgrounds is that book. Since the 1970s, Solomon maintains, American playgrounds have degenerated into irrelevance as cultural artifacts and educational tools. Imbedded in Solomon's text is a frank indictment of American attitudes that are stunted by a heavy-handed emphasis on safety that limits the nature of play and the vitality of places for public assembly. During the past decade an elite few American architects, landscape architects, and sculptors, including Stanley Saitowitz, Walter Hood, and Mary Miss, have pioneered the restoration of aesthetic and developmental values to play areas for young people. Solomon appraises these success stories and proposes fresh and urgent remedies that blend excellent design principles, innovative planning, and affordability-a vision for the future of the playground in America. Supplementing her impeccable command of primary and secondary sources with hundreds of hours of interviews with designers and clients, the author confronts a seriously under-developed topic with powerful and complex arguments rich in social history, law, theories of play and childhood, and urbanism. Readers will be inspired-and equipped-to take up the gauntlet of advocacy for superior American playgrounds. Clean copy.

Softcover. New Haven, Yale University Press , 1st, 1970, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover set. Two volumes in a cardboard slipcase, 344, 300 pages. Illustrated with b&w photographs throughout. Vol. 1 covers New England, Vol. 2 - The Middle Colonies and the South. Clean, tight copies.

Hardcover. Boston, L.C. Page & Co., 1st, 1904, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, clean, square and tight in grey pictorial embossed buckram with no internal markings. Top page edges gilt. Little Pilgrimage Series. Illustrated throughout with 33 b&w photos, etchings and small b&w engravings. Tissue present between first illustration and title page. 1904 on title page in roman numerals. Clean copy.

Hardcover. Amsterdam, Theatrvm Orbis Terrarvm, reprint, 1972, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, 77 pages, red cloth binding with blue and gilt stamping. A facsimile reprint of the London 1613 printing. Tight, clean copy.

Softcover. Elibron Classics, reprint, 2003, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 472 pages plus 35 page Notes to the Mission. A facsimile reprint of a title first publishe in 1834 in London. VOLUME 1 ONLY.

Softcover. New York, I. Riley & Co./Hopkins and Seymour, 1st, 1806, Book: Good, Dust Jacket: None, 76 pages, original marbled paper wrappers with blue title label on cover. Second signature is bound upside-down (pages 9-16), but all there. Marbled pattern on outer wraps faded in spots. Mild foxing to pages, edgewear with light loss of paper to bottom corner.