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Hardcover. Germany, Steidl, 1st, 2010, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, 224 pages. Like new in publisher's shrink-wrap. Nowhere is the breezy and urbane romance of Paris conjured as memorably as in the photography of Robert Doisneau (1912-1994). A gentle minstrel of visual anecdote, Doisneau interpreted the city's charms in an iconography that both natives and Francophiles instantly recognize: the young hip couple stealing a spontaneous kiss at a busy intersection, the gendarme chatting with a mother while her kid tiptoes along a riverbank bench, the sweetly melancholic abandoned merry-go-round in the rain and the entire pageant of Parisian life mingling at cafes, bus shelters and on the banks of the Seine. Doisneau was possessed of both lightness of touch and spontaneity, as a result of which he has been sometimes championed as a photographer of the "pure" moment. But his ocular touch is even lighter than that suggests-his images are not so much "seized" as "netted." Accompanying the Fondation Cartier-Bresson's exhibition of around 100 prints from the Doisneau estate, From Craft to Art presents these treasures alongside a new version of Jean-Francois Chevrier's classic 1983 essay on the photographer, which describes Doisneau's knack for capturing "the shining melancholy that separates an individual from the crowd.

Hardcover. Bennington VT, Images from the Past, 1st, 1997, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket. Rudyard Kipling in Vermont tells the story of the dynamic years 1892-1896 with Kipling's own letters and memoirs, selected excerpts from his poetry, and the words of those who knew and admired him. More than thirty illustrations illustrate the little-known tale of a time he said "would be blessed to me for all my life." Kipling was born in Bombay, India, and was a prolific writer. He received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1907. He married an American wife and moved to the village of Brattleboro, VT. He only lived in Vermont for four years. But during that time he wrote his famous "Jungle Book" series. Family troubles forced him to move and the large estate he lived in over looking town fell into disrepair. Clean copy.

Hardcover. NY, John Day/Reynal & Hitchcock, 1st, 1937, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, light tan cloth, 119 pages. B&w line illustrations by Bernadine Custer. Rudyard Kipling lived with his wife on a small estate in Dummerston, Vermont, in a house they built called Naulakha, from 1892 to 1896. It was while he was here that he wrote both "The Jungle Book" and "Captains Courageous". Kipling would have been content to live out his life there but in 1896, a dispute arose between the Kiplings an a neighbor led to a court case and the Kiplings left Vermont never to return. This volume, written by a Dummerston native and historian, tells the story of that dispute. Lacks dust jacket, otherwise clean, very good.

Hardcover. Albuquerque, University of New Mexico Press, 1st, 1999, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket, 307 pages. In all North America you cannot get much lower than the Imperial Valley of southern California, where one town, 186 feet below sea level, calls itself the Lowest Down City in the Western Hemisphere, and where the waters of the Colorado River sustain a billion-dollar agricultural industry. The consequences of that industry drain from the valley into the accidentally man-made Salton Sea, California's largest lake and a vital stopping place for migratory waterfowl. Today the Salton Sea is in desperate environmental trouble. A second river also ends in the Salton Sea. It is a river of dreams, the remains of which may be seen in the failed real estate developments that sprawl beside the sea. As the ending point of both the real Colorado and this river of dreams, the Salton Sea has become emblematic of much of the history of the American West. Its troubling story is masterfully told here in William deBuys's narrative and Joan Myers's austerely beautiful photographs. Mild wear, ereasure to front fly leaf, otherwise clean.

Chicago, Ivan Dee, 1st US, 1991, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover, 239 pages, in a bright, unclipped dust jacket. Author of The Moonstone and The Woman in White, Wilkie Collins has been hailed as "the father of the detective story." His own life story has a similar mysterious ring to it. When Collins died in 1899 he shocked Victorians by dividing his estate equally between two mistresses. He also acknowledged the three children of one of the mistresses as his own. In The Secret Life of Wilkie Collins, William Clarke has pieced together the truth behind this menage a trois, uncovering and exploring, with insight and sympathy, the private relationships of a fascinating writer who was a contemporary of Dickens, Constable, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Blake, and Rossetti. "A literary coup ... casts a fresh beam of light on the great, dark seam of Victorian sexual mores."--The Observer.

Softcover. University of Chicago Press, 1st, 2021, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, pictorial wrappers, 112 pages. It's hard to imagine a place more central to American mythology today than Silicon Valley. To outsiders, the region glitters with the promise of extraordinary wealth and innovation. But behind this image lies another Silicon Valley, one segregated by race, class, and nationality in complex and contradictory ways. Its beautiful landscape lies atop underground streams of pollutants left behind by decades of technological innovation, and while its billionaires live in compounds, surrounded by redwood trees and security fences, its service workers live in their cars.With arresting photography and intimate stories, Seeing Silicon Valley makes this hidden world visible. Instead of young entrepreneurs striving for efficiency in minimalist corporate campuses, we see portraits of struggle--families displaced by an impossible real estate market, workers striving for a living wage, and communities harmed by environmental degradation. If the fate of Silicon Valley is the fate of America--as so many of its boosters claim--then this book gives us an unvarnished look into the future. Clean copy.

Softcover. NY, Archipelago Books, 1st, 2016, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover in pictorial wrappers, 273 pages. Ikonomou's stories convey the plight of those worst affected by the Greek economic crisis--laid-off workers, hungry children. In the urban sprawl between Athens and Piraeus, the narratives roam restlessly through the impoverished working-class quarters located off the tourist routes. Everyone is dreaming of escape: to the mountains, to an island or a palatial estate, into a Hans Christian Andersen story world. What are they fleeing? The old woes--gossip, watchful neighbors, the oppression and indifference of the rich--now made infinitely worse. In Ikonomou's concrete streets, the rain is always looming, the politicians' slogans are ignored, and the police remain a violent, threatening presence offstage. Clean copy.

Softcover. Wooster, College of Wooster Art Museum, The, 1st, 2000, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, 55 pages. Softcover. Minor wear to cover edges. Full page black & white photographs throughout. Clean unmarked text.

Hardcover. Santa Fe, Twin Palms Publishers, 1st, 2005, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover, 148 pages, b&w plates. Like new in publisher's shrink-wrap. During 1945 Andre de Dienes (1913-1985) photographed a young model named Norma Jean. His subsequent five-year working relationship with the woman who became Marilyn Monroe is the beginning of de Dienes's career in Hollywood. He photographed celebrities, and his documentary work took him from Muscle Beach in Venice to sharecroppers working the cotton fields of the deep South. But his first love in photography was the female nude, and in his lifetime he photographed and published thousands of these pictures. Selected from the archives of his estate are seventy-five of the finest images printed by the artist. Reproduced actual size these prints are a time capsule of half-century old interpretations of female beauty.

Hardcover. NY, W. W. Norton, 1st, 2014, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket, 765 pages, b&w illustrations. John Lahr has produced a theater biography like no other. Tennessee Williams: Mad Pilgrimage of the Flesh gives intimate access to the mind of one of the most brilliant dramatists of his century, whose plays reshaped the American theater and the nation's sense of itself. This astute, deeply researched biography sheds a light on Tennessee Williams's warring family, his guilt, his creative triumphs and failures, his sexuality and numerous affairs, his misreported death, even the shenanigans surrounding his estate. With vivid cameos of the formative influences in Williams's life-his fierce, belittling father Cornelius; his puritanical, domineering mother Edwina; his demented sister Rose, who was lobotomized at the age of thirty-three; his beloved grandfather, the Reverend Walter Dakin-Tennessee Williams: Mad Pilgrimage of the Flesh is as much a biography of the man who created A Streetcar Named Desire, The Glass Menagerie, and Cat on a Hot Tin Roof as it is a trenchant exploration of Williams's plays and the tortured process of bringing them to stage and screen. The portrait of Williams himself is unforgettable: a virgin until he was twenty-six, he had serial homosexual affairs thereafter as well as long-time, bruising relationships with Pancho Gonzalez and Frank Merlo. With compassion and verve, Lahr explores how Williams's relationships informed his work and how the resulting success brought turmoil to his personal life. Lahr captures not just Williams's tempestuous public persona but also his backstage life, where his agent Audrey Wood and the director Elia Kazan play major roles, and Marlon Brando, Anna Magnani, Bette Davis, Maureen Stapleton, Diana Barrymore, and Tallulah Bankhead have scintillating walk-on parts. This is a biography of the highest order: a book about the major American playwright of his time written by the major American drama critic of his time.

Hardcover. NY/London, Sotheby's Parke Bernet, Revised Ed., 1985, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover, 376 pages. 26 illustrations in color, and 420 in black and white. Originally published in 1979. John Harris was one of England's leading Architectural Historians at the time this book was written. He was curator of the Drawing Collection for RIBA. (Royal Institute of British Architects). Each section introduces a period such as: the Age of Estate Cartographers and the Garden Converstations, The Country House and Sporting Art: John Wootton, Peter Tillemans and Others, Caneletto and the Architectural Topographers, Gainsborough and the Picturesque, The Art of Turner and Constable. Harris comments on the artists , their style and pictures.

Hardcover. NY, Viking Press, 1st, 1948, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, red cloth with dark maroon stamping, 236 pages. Illustrated with sixteen full-page black and white drawings by Seredy. The dramatic and heart-warming tale is set first on an estate in Hungary near the end of WW II, and then on a farm in the Hudson Valley, New York. Young Michael of Hungary carries an acorn all the way from his castle home in Chestry Valley, Hungary, to the warm soil of the Hudson Valley farm where he makes a new home after the war. He is accepted into an American family who accept Michael as one of their own. A compelling character is Midnight, the black stallion that has been trained to perform before princes. Bright, tight copy. Lacks dust jacket.

Softcover. London, Hard Case Crime, 1st thus, 2005, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, colorful wraps with a retro-style illustration by Robert McGinnis. Johnny Hayden and Doug Rance had a scheme to take real estate entrepreneur Wallace Gunderman for all he was worth. But they needed a girl on the inside to make it work. Enter Evelyn Stone: Gunderman's secretary, his lover - and his worst enemy. Gunderman had promised to marry her, but never came through. Now she's ready to make him pay. Lawrence Block has won more awards for mystery writing than almost any other living author: 4 Edgar Awards, 4 Shamus Awards, 2 Maltese Falcon Awards, the Nero Wolfe Award, and more. Block was named a Grandmaster by the Mystery Writers of America, their highest honor. Like new.

Hardcover. NY, Grosset & Dunlap, reprint, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket. First published in 1940, The Disappearing Floor is the 19th book in the Hardy Boys series. This appears to be a 1950s reprint. Once again Frank and Joe Hardy take on a puzzling case when their famous detective father asks the boys to assist him in tracking down a notorious jewel thief and his accomplices. The trail leads to the outskirts of the Hardys' home town and to a weirdly guarded mansion on the old Perth estate. With their pal Chet Morton, the brothers must tackle the mystery of the mansion heir's sudden death. Clean copy, paper tanning.

Softcover. NY, Archipelago Books, 2nd pr., 2022, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover in pictorial wrappers, 305 pages. The Last Days of Terranova tells of Vicenzo Fontana, the elderly owner of the long-standing Terranova Bookstore, on the day it's set to close due to the greed of real-estate speculators. On this final day, Vincenzo spends the night in his beloved store filled with more than seventy years of fugitive histories. Jumping from the present to various points in the past, the novel ferries us back to Vicenzo's childhood, when his father opened the store in 1935, to the years that the store was run by his Uncle Eliseo, and to the years in the lead-up to the democratic transition, which Vicenzo spent as far away from the bookstore as possible, in Madrid. Clean copy.

Hardcover. Boston, Bulfinch Press, 1st, 2002, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket, 224 pages. Essays by leading authorities on the artist's work accompany a stunning collection of nearly two hundred photographs by modernist American photographer Charles Sheeler, offering a landmark retrospective of of the work of the influential master of twentieth-century photography. Sheeler visited Europe in 1929 and an important part of this trip was to photograph Chartres Cathedral, he called it "...one of the outstanding experiences of a lifetime". The book includes thirteen beautiful shots of the Cathedral and they look remarkably like his photos of the Ford Motor Rouge River blast furnaces and other exterior bits of the industrial plant which he took in 1927. After 1929 Sheeler concentrated on his paintings. The photos in the book for this period: 1929 to 1939, include house interiors and several for his Power series. One of these, the wheels of a Hudson steam loco was the basis of his famous super realist 1939 painting 'Rolling Power'. The images in the book are taken from Lane Collection, of the Museum of Fine Art, Boston, who own the Sheeler photographic estate and the book was originally published in conjunction with exhibitions in 2003/4. The 190 photos are printed as tritones with a 250 screen. Clean, bright copy. DOMESTIC SHIPPING ONLY.

Hardcover. NY, William Morrow, 1st US, 1980, Book: Very Good, Hardcover, 236 pages. When Richard inherits the family estate in Herefordshire, he finds it has been leased to a charitable organization which is not as it seems. Attempting to break the lease, he is endangered by a sinister intelligence organization. Clean, very good in a lightly rubbed dust jacket.

Hardcover. Chicago, Ivan R. Dee, 1st US, 1991, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, lightly edgeworn dust jacket. 239 pages including index. Author of The Moonstone and The Woman in White, Wilkie Collins is widely regarded as "the father of the detective story." How curious that his own life has puzzled investigators despite numerous attempts to unravel it. Collins lived a publicly Victorian existence as a contemporary of Dickens, Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Blake in mid-19th-century England. Yet upon his death he left a will dividing his estate equally -- between two mistresses.

Softcover. NY, Vintage Crime/Black Lizard, reprint, 2005, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 263 pages. Larry Dolman is a rather literal minded ex-cop who now works private security. Eddie Miller is an airline pilot who's studying to get his real estate license. Don Luchessi is a silver salesman who's separated from his wife but too Catholic to get a divorce. Hank Norton is a drug company rep who gets four times as many dames as any of the other guys. They are all regular guys who like to drink, play cards, meet broads, and shoot a little pool. But when a friendly bet goes horribly awry, they find themselves with two dead bodies on their hands and a homicidal husband in the wings--and acting more like hardened criminals than upstanding citizens. Mild shelf wear, clean copy.

Hardcover. NY, Knopf, 1st, 2020, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket. This installment in the delightful, internationally acclaimed series featuring Chief of Police Bruno will take all of Bruno's resolve and quick thinking to untangle a mystery that will reach its deadly denouement at the chateau of an aging rock star. But in true Bruno fashion, at least lunchtime is never in danger. It's summer in the Dordogne and the heirs of a modest sheep farmer learn that they have been disinherited. Their father's estate has been sold to an insurance company in return for a policy that will place him in a five-star retirement home for the rest of his life. But the farmer dies before he can move in. Was it a natural death? Or was there foul play? Chief of Police Bruno Courreges is soon on the case, embarking on an investigation that will lead him to several shadowy insurance companies owned by a Russian oligarch with a Cypriot passport. Clean copy.

Softcover. NY, Carroll & Graf, Softcover, 500 pages. A twentieth-century photographer, artist, writer and designer for more than fifty years, Cecil Beaton was at the center of the worlds of fashion, society, theater and film. This book brings together for the first time the never-before-published diaries from 1970 to 1980 and, unlike the six slim volumes of diaries published during his lifetime, these have been left uniquely unedited. Hugo Vickers, the executor of Beaton's estate and the author of his acclaimed biography, has added extensive notes that are as lively as the diary entries themselves. Here is the photographer for British and American Vogue, designer of the sets and costumes for the play and film My Fair Lady and the film Gigi, with a cast of characters from many worlds, at shooting parties in the English countryside, on yachts, at garden parties at Buckingham Palace, at costume balls in Venice, Paris or London. Clean copy.

Softcover. NY, Carroll & Graf, Softcover, 500 pages. A twentieth-century photographer, artist, writer and designer for more than fifty years, Cecil Beaton was at the center of the worlds of fashion, society, theater and film. This book brings together for the first time the never-before-published diaries from 1970 to 1980 and, unlike the six slim volumes of diaries published during his lifetime, these have been left uniquely unedited. Hugo Vickers, the executor of Beaton's estate and the author of his acclaimed biography, has added extensive notes that are as lively as the diary entries themselves. Here is the photographer for British and American Vogue, designer of the sets and costumes for the play and film My Fair Lady and the film Gigi, with a cast of characters from many worlds, at shooting parties in the English countryside, on yachts, at garden parties at Buckingham Palace, at costume balls in Venice, Paris or London. Clean copy.

Hardcover. NY, St. Martin's Press, 1st, 1994, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket. Follows the lives of Frances and Hart Drummond, married nearly forty years, and their grown children, as they cope with communication problems, love, marriage, and Connecticut real estate. INSCRIBED BY AUTHOR on front fly leaf. Clean copy.

Hardcover. NY, Fordham University Press, 1st, 2006, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket, 309 pages. Barolini profiles six gifted women transformed by Italy's mythic appeal. Unlike Barolini herself, they were not daughters of the great Italian diaspora. Rather, they were drawn to an idea of "Italy" and its gifts-in whose welcome a new self could be created. Or discovered. Emily Dickinson traveled to Italy only in the imaginative genius of her verse. Margaret Fuller struggled alongside her Italian lover in the political revolutions that gave birth to the Italian Republic, while the novelist and short-story writer Constance Fennimore Woolson found her home in Venice and Florence. Here, too, is the flamboyant artist Mabel Dodge Luhan, entertaining at her villa near Florence; and Marguerite Chapin of Connecticut, who married an Italian prince and in Rome founded the premier literary review of the mid-century, Botteghe Oscure. Finally, here is Iris Cutting Origo, the Anglo-American heiress who, with her Italian nobleman husband, built a Tuscan estate, where she wrote acclaimed biographies-and created a refuge from Mussolini's fascism. Clean copy.