essays

Softcover. La Salle IL, Open Court, reprint, 1990, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 448 pages. In this 1710 treatise, Gottfried Liebniz's only book-length work, he applies the idea of philosophical 'optimism'- that we live in the best of all possible worlds-to the 'problem of evil'- If a benevolent God exists, why do terrible things happen? He explores the possibility that humanity's happiness is not necessarily part of God's plan.Much of Leibniz's thinking in the realm of the sciences flowed from his philosophy-he believed the universe to operate under simple, intelligible, interconnected rules. Understanding how he approached the metaphysical world and humanity's place in it is vital to understanding his contributions to modern science. The impact of the work of this German mathematician (1646-1716) on modern science and technology is all but incalculable. His notation for infinitesimal calculus-which he developed independently of Newton-remains in use today, and his invention of binary counting is the basis for modern computing. He was a powerfully influential philosopher as well, and is still considered, alongside Descartes and Spinoza, one of the great 17th-century rationalists.

Hardcover. Baton Rouge, Louisiana State University Press, 1st, 1970, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a dust jacket with mild fading to spine, 294 pages. Essays that examine seven disputes which Roosevelt created, fell into or searched out during his White House years. Clean copy.

Hardcover. New York, Harper and Brothers, reprint, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Good, Hardcover, 331 pages, putty color cloth covers with black lettering on spine. Dust jacket with edgewear, chipping. Previous owner's signature on front fly leaf.

Hardcover. San Francisco, CA, Chronicle Books, 1st, 2016, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, 208 pages. Hardcover with dust jacket. A very clean, unmarked copy like new in publishers shrink-wrap. The 1940s ushered in an era of musical experimentation and innovation at the Walt Disney Studios. For this volume, author Didier Ghez has unearthed hundreds of enchanting images--from early sketches to polished concepts for iconic features--by five exceptional artists who shaped the style of the Studio's animation during this period of unbridled creativity. With evocative descriptions and excerpts from the artists' journals and autobiographies, this magnificent collection offers a rare look at the visionaries who breathed life into some of the most beloved films of our time.

Hardcover. NY, Golden Press, 1st, 1967, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, pictorial boards, A book of essays and cartoons given out by Volkswagen dealers to their customers. Contributions by artists and writers such as Charles Addams, Harry Golden, William Steig, Jean Shepherd, Virgil Partch, George Price, Roger Price, Charles Saxon and others. Photos of a number of the contributors. Clean copy.

Hardcover. NY, Doubleday, 1st, 2015, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket, 298 pages. Roger Angell, the acclaimed New Yorker writer and editor, steps up with a selection of writings that celebrate a view from the tenth decade of an engaged, vibrant life. Whether it's a Fourth of July in rural Maine, the opening game of the 2015 World Series, editorial exchanges with John Updike, a letter to a son, or his award-winning essay on aging, 'This Old Man,' what links the pieces is Angell's unique perceptions and humor, his utter absence of self-pity, and his appreciation of friends and colleagues encountered over a fruitful career unlike any other. Includes essays about E.B. White, Harold Ross, Mark Twain, John Hersey, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Donald Barthelme, Vladimir Nabokov, V.S. Pritchett, William Maxwell, William Steig, John Updike, and others. Clean copy.

Hardcover. NY, Random House, 1st, 1982, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket, 305 pages. In an age when much American writing was either glacially noncommittal or heremetically personal, William Styron persisted in addressing great moral issues with incendiary passion. Seriousness and ardor characterize all the essays in This Quiet Dust, the first book of nonfiction by the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Lie Down in Darkness and Sophie's Choice. Clean copy.

Softcover. Atlanta, High Museum of Art, 1st, 1992, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover. Like new in publisher's shrink-wrap. The catalogue of a traveling exhibition organized by the High Museum of Art, Atlanta, examining the significant interrelationships between sports, photography, and culture in the US, Europe, and Russia since the late 19th century. The 141 works featured (32 color, 109 duotone) by 120 photographers (including such masters as Stieglitz, Adams, Cartier-Bresson, and Arbus) are drawn from American and European public and private collections and the archives of Life and Sports Illustrated . Includes essays by Harvey Green, John M. Hoberman, and Peter Schjeldahl.

Softcover. Atlanta, High Museum of Art, 1st, 1992, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover. Like new in publisher's shrink-wrap. The catalogue of a traveling exhibition organized by the High Museum of Art, Atlanta, examining the significant interrelationships between sports, photography, and culture in the US, Europe, and Russia since the late 19th century. The 141 works featured (32 color, 109 duotone) by 120 photographers (including such masters as Stieglitz, Adams, Cartier-Bresson, and Arbus) are drawn from American and European public and private collections and the archives of Life and Sports Illustrated . Includes essays by Harvey Green, John M. Hoberman, and Peter Schjeldahl.

Hardcover. Philadelphia, PA, Philadelphia Museum of Art, 1st, 2001, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, 488 pages. Hardcover with dust jacket. Very clean, unmarked copy still in publishers shrink-wrap. Lavishly illustrated with more than 250 of Eakins's most significant paintings, watercolors, drawings, photographs, and sculpture, the book features essays by prominent scholars who place his art in the context of the history and culture of late nineteenth-century Philadelphia, where he lived.

Softcover. Bloomington IN, Indiana University Press, 2nd pr., 2008, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 200 pages, color & BW illus., two fold-outs. Considers the art and the work that American artist Thomas Hart Benton (1889-1975) put into his series of Indiana murals for Chicago's "Century of Progress" World's Fair in 1933. Now these murals appear in an auditorium at Indiana University. With thematic illustrated essays by Kathleen A. Foster, Nanette Esseck Brewer, and Margaret Contompasis. Two fold-outs shows the murals; then the catalogue addresses each in detail, one by one. Clean, bright copy.

Hardcover. Oxford UK, Sandford Publications, 1st, 1980, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, limited to 750 copies, 182 pages, b&w illustrations, INSCRIBED BY DEWHURST on inside front cover, brown faux-leather. Thomas Willis (1621-1675) was an English doctor who played an important part in the history of anatomy, neurology and psychiatry, and was a founding member of the Royal Society.

Hardcover. Boston, MA, Phillips, Samson, and Company, 1st, 1859, Book: Good, Dust Jacket: None, Original 1859 publisher's cloth, 365 pages. Brown cover with gilt title to spine. Extensive sun-fading and some soiling. Soiled along edges. Slight foxing. Lacking front fly leaf. Overall, a tight copy.

Softcover. Brookville, NY, Hillwood Art Museum, 1st, 2007, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover. Side-stapled, 42 pages. Full-color catalog featuring essays and images of traditional and contemporary African textiles.

Softcover. Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1st Edition, 2000, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, 382 pages. Softcover in very good condition with full color photo of Isaiah Berlin to cover. Tight copy. Clean & unmarked text.

Softcover. Washington DC, Giles, 1st, 2015, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 80 pages. Beautiful and poignant photographs by African American and other photographers (selected from the large and growing photography collection of the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture), accompanied by three short, insightful essays, reveal the rich and significant contributions African Americans have made to to our great American heritage.

Hardcover. London, The Athlone Press, 1st, 1970, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Good, Hardcover in a lightly worn dust jacket, orange cloth covers, 287 pages. Anthropological essays by the author based on his 30 years of field work in Ghana. Clean copy.

Hardcover. Santa Fe, NM, Twin Palms Publishers, 1st, 1997, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, 96 pages. Hardcover with no dust jacket. Very clean. like new copy in publisher's shrink-wrap. 78 full-page, black and white photographs. Limited to 3000 copies. Tight copy. A look at the black experience in late-20th-century America with powerful documentary images that will remain with the viewer long after the books are closed. Mauskopf presents a quiet collection of images made in one part of the South, the most isolated black communities of the Mississippi Delta, where time seems to have stopped in midcentury. The photographs are full of love, joy, and religious faith and are richly reproduced here as sheet-fed gravures. Mauskopf portrays the poorest Americans, who are nonetheless rich in family, church, and community bonds. He documents the unifying and dominant role of religion as well as the joys and sustenance provided by music, dance, romance, family life, and the land itself. These images capture a sense of place so powerfully that captions aren't necessary, though a brief and poetic essay by novelist Kenan nicely complements the photographs.

Hardcover. NY, Skira, 1ST, 2006, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Like new in publisher's shrink-wrap. Hardcover, 224 pages. Insightful essays and gorgeous portraits by one of contemporary photography's most remarkable artists.

Softcover. Boston, Museum of Fine Arts, 1st, 2009, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 315 pages. Color illustrations. For nearly four decades in the sixteenth century, the careers of Venice's three greatest painters-, Titan, Tintoretto and Veronese, overlapped, producing mutual influences and bitter rivalries that changed art history. Venice was then among Europe's richest cities, and its plentiful commissions fostered an exceptionally fertile and innovative climate. In it, the three artists, brilliant, ambitious and fiercely competitive, vied with one another for primacy, employing such new media as oil on canvas, with its unique expressive possibilities, and such new approaches as a personal and identifiable signature style. They also pioneered the use of easel painting, a newly portable format that led to unprecedented fame in their lifetimes. With more than 150 stunning examples by the three masters and their contemporaries, this volume elucidates the technical and aesthetic innovations that helped define the uniquely rich "Venetian style," as well as the social, political and economic context in which it flourished. Essays range from examinations of seminal new techniques to such crucial institutions as state commissions and the patronage system. Most of all, by concentrating on the lives and careers of Venice's three greatest painters, Titian, Tintoretto, Veronese paints a vibrant human portrait--one brimming with savage rivalry, one-upmanship, humor and passion. Clean copy. DOMESTIC SHIPPING ONLY.

Hardcover. New York, Prestel Publishing, reprint, 1990, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, 452 pages. Hardcover with dust jacket. Color pictures throughout. Black covers with gilt lettering on spine. Previous owner's signature and bookplate on front flyleaf. Light wear and rubbing to dust jacket. This excellent catalog of the 1990-1991 exhibition in Venice and Washington is a work of permanent value. Featuring essays by 16 authorities, primarily Italian and American, on every aspect of the art of Titian (Tiziano Vecelli, c. 1490-1576), the quintessential Venetian artist of the high Renaissance, the work transcends the limits of spatial and temporal exhibition to summarize and extend current scholarship. At the same time, the text is accessible, well translated, and aimed at a broad audience. Many of the works in the exhibit were conserved or cleaned, so the book features fresh illustrations and a hefty amount of technical discussion of specialist interest.

Hardcover. Seattle, WA, Fantagraphics, 1st, 2017, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, 380 pages. Hardcover with no dust jacket. A very clean, unmarked copy with only minor edgewear to dust jacket. To Laugh That We May Not Weep is a sweeping career retrospective, reprinting -often for the first time in 60 or 70 years- over 800 of Young's timeless, charming, and devastating cartoons and illustrations, many reproduced from original artwork, to create a fresh new portrait of this towering figure in the worlds of cartooning and politics.

Hardcover. New York, privately printed, reprint, 1906, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, 13 page essay, Franklin's famous essay on farting. Here printed and bound in a 64 page signature, most of the pages therefore blank. Three-quarter leather with marbled boards, gold lettering on spine. Limited to 250 copies, this being #90.

Softcover. NY, Museum of Modern Art, 1st, 1998, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, oblong format. Replete with photographs and reproductions of Tony Smith's work. 200 pages including 237 illustrations (108 in color), Chronology, Selected Bibliography, and Exhibition History. Tony Smith (1912-1980) was an American sculptor, architect, and painter best-known for his abstract, large-scale sculptures. As an architect, he worked with Frank Lloyd Wright and founded his own architectural firm during the 1940s. Clean copy.