Hardcover. Taschen, 1st, 2023, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, 142 pages. In the late 1910s, in a Europe ravaged by World War I, Danish illustrator Kay Nielsen put the finishing touches on his illustrations of A Thousand and One Nights. The results are considered masterpieces of early 20th-century illustration: bursting with sumptuous colors of deep blues, reds, and gold leaf, and evoking all the magic of this legendary collection of Indo-Persian and Arabic folktales, compiled between the 8th and 13th centuries. However, publishers retreated from Nielsen's project in the financially strapped postwar climate, and the publication never happened. A rising star, Nielsen moved on to other work. This world heritage classic's spectacular pen, ink, and watercolor images remained under lock and key for 40 years. Published just once in the 1970s, the illustrations were rescued from oblivion after Nielsen's death in 1957 and are now held by the UCLA Grunwald Center for the Graphic Arts at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles, the Art Institute of Chicago, and in two private collections. This publication is a unique compilation of fine art prints and stunning illustrations reproduced directly from Nielsen's original watercolors--the only complete set of his extraordinary drawings to have survived. The book features descriptions of all of the images and three generously illustrated essays on the making of this series, the origin of Nielsen's unique imagery, and a history of the tales. In addition, it shows many unpublished or rarely seen artworks by Nielsen and intricate black-and-white drawings Nielsen created for the original publication. Text in English, German and French. PLEASE NOTE: DUE TO WEIGHT, DOMESTIC SHIPPING ONLY.
Hardcover. London, Book Palace Books, 1st, 2022, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, pictorial boards, 160 pages. In August 1914 much of Europe was pitched into a war that would eclipse all others in terms of its industrial ferocity. In an era when photography and film recording were still in their infancy, much of the news was relayed through the work of reportage artists. Pre-eminent amongst such artists was Fortunino Matania who was The Sphere's artist-on-the-spot for events ranging from coronations to colliery disasters. Sent to a variety of Fronts to cover the conflict, his illustrations created a gripping and, at times, life-affirming testimony to those traumatic times, drawn from the personal visits he made and interviews he conducted with survivors. For the first time ever, this book collects those images in large format so that they can be viewed as they were intended. OVER 150 paintings and drawings on the World War 1 conflict, depicting all its horrors and special moments. His work inspired many contemporary artists: Annigoni and Russell Flint both visited his studio, and many comic strip artists collected his work including Al Williamson, Roy Krenkel, Frank Frazetta, John Bolton, Bernie Wrightson as well as film directors such as Cecil B DeMille and Alfred Hitchcock.
Hardcover. Lannoo, 1st, 2010, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover, 240 pages. 365 images at the western front of World War One give the reader a unique view on the battlefield and the daily life in and around the trenches.
Hardcover. NY, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1st, 1992, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket. Translated from the Hungarian by Imre Goldstein. 394 pages. The rich, poetic story of a man, a family, and a country. David Kobra's enchanted childhood in a small town in the heart of Central Europe comes to an abrupt end. As the Jews of the town are being put on trains to concentration camps, young Kobra escapes to Budapest. He survives the war years in a 'protected house,' grows up with death and violence, witnesses Soviet liberation, lives under Soviet oppression. David Kobra is a writer; he remembers, and he creates. Sharp images of the past alternate with the confused present. Clean copy.
Hardcover. Boston, MA, Houghton Mifflin Company, 1st, 1922, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Domestic shipping only. 8 Volumes. Hardcovers. Autograph edition is limited to five hundred signed and numbered copies printed at the Riverside Press, Cambridge, U.S.A. Number 187. SIGNED BY BUCHAN in volume 1, reverse of title page.2268 total pages within 8 volumes:Color frontispieces in each volume and b/w illustrations throughout with tissue page guards and fold-out maps. Blue cover boards, navy blue quarter cloths with gilt title on blue paste downs on spines. Covers show very light shelf wear with some slight tanning and a touch of rubbing to bottom of spines (Vol. 3 has small spot on front cover board). Pages offset, some tanning to pages and edges from age. Binding very good. Spines straight. Pages and edges have a touch of tanning from age. Beautiful, historical set perfect for the WWI enthusiast.
Hardcover. Boston, Faber and Faber, 1st, 1994, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket, pages. "I write of peoples and of a struggle." So begins A New World, an ambitious and extraordinary book that challenges conventional historical narrative by presenting episodes in North America's history through the eyes and voices of the Europeans who established the first colonial outposts here. Beginning with the swaggering John Smith at Jamestown and ending with the beleaguered Montcalm at Quebec, Arthur Quinn allows towering historical figures to emerge from an often beautiful, sometimes forbidding early American landscape and speak. An elderly William Bradford looks back with growing despair at the early promise of the Pilgrim colony at Plymouth. Governor John Winthrop tries to administer a dose of practicality to the Puritans of Massachusetts. Jesuit missionaries bring Christianity and disaster to the Huron Confederacy. A blustering Peter Stuyvesant watches Manhattan slip from Dutch grasp. William Penn's Holy Experiment in Pennsylvania goes increasingly awry. And, finally, the British and the French fight history's first world war for supremacy in the New World. Telling each story using the literary conventions of the day, Quinn casts North America's colonial beginnings as a multicultural epic, gripping the reader throughout with his uncanny eye and storytelling skill. Clean copy.
Softcover. NY, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, reprint, 1986, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 192 pages. Roman Vishniac's A Vanished World is an extraordinary record of the lives of German and Eastern European Jews in the years immediately preceding the Holocaust. Vishniac, a Russian Jew, began to take photographs of village life during World War I, when Russian Jews who lived near the front were accused of being German spies and were deported to Siberia. He later moved to Germany, where he witnessed the horrible events of Kristallnacht and the anti-Jewish legislation that allowed Hitler to declare his enemies stateless and therefore unworthy of international protection. As we study Vishniac's photographs--a surviving fraction of the more than 16,000 he took--we are aware that we are seeing the faces of those soon to die, witnessing a world that has all but perished. Yet that world, of shops and schools, of busy streets and quiet farms, remains with us if only as a ghostly memory, thanks in part to Vishniac's compassionate eye.
Hardcover. NY, The Artist Book Foundation, 1st, 2017, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket. Adolf Dehn (1895-1968), an American lithographer and watercolorist, left his hometown in Minnesota after formal training at the Minneapolis Art Institute to study at the Art Students League in New York. In the early 1920s, he traveled to the cosmopolitan cities of Paris, Vienna, and Berlin, where he focused on lithography and printmaking, and soon found success as a magazine illustrator. As he toured Europe, Dehn quickly acclimated to the continental lifestyle and was adept at depicting its nuances and idiosyncrasies through his prolific lithographs and sketches. His critical and satirical renderings of the political movements, social conventions, and governmental policies in pre-World War II Europe gave the Midwestern artist ample material for his growing body of work. Returning to the United States in 1930, Dehn exhibited his prints in several solo shows at the Weyhe Gallery in New York, starting in 1935. As an artist during the era of the Great Depression, Dehn did commercial artwork and contributed to popular magazines such as The New Yorker, Vogue, and Vanity Fair. In fact, his clever drawings that reflected the culture and fashionable society during the Jazz Age, made Dehn a favourite of Frank Crowninshield, Vanity Fair's renowned editor. 182 pages, clean, still in publisher's shrinkwrap.
Hardcover. NY, Knopf, 1st, 2022, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket. A revelatory history of the transformational decade that followed World War II, when Germany raised itself put of the ashes of defeat, turned away from fascism, and reckoned with the corruption of its soul and the horrors of the Holocaust.
Hardcover. Pasadena CA, Pasadena Museum of California Art, 1st, 2005, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover, 149 pages, illustrated in color. Bright, clean copy in similar dust jacket. Catalog of an exhibition organised by the Pasadena Museum of Californian Art and held there and at the Gibbes Museum, Charleston, South Carolina, in 2005-6. The book presents 77 works, reproduced in excellent colour as half and full page plates, including nudes, figures and urban and rural landscapes. William Gerdts offers a scene-setting Introduction after which Solon provides an in-depth study of the artist's life and work. This includes his marriage, travels abroad including Europe, Panama and Mexico, experience as an aerial photographer in the Great War, return to Southern California and life in Pasadena, a region that was recommended for health reasons, and a final decade marked by ill-health that contributed to the general decline in his reputation outside of the local art community.
Hardcover. NY, Henry Holt and Company, 1st, 2002, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket. Stated First Edition. Illustrations. 18 maps. The liberation of Europe and the destruction of the Third Reich is a story of miscalculation and incomparable courage, of calamity and enduring triumph. In this first volume of the Liberation Trilogy, Rick Atkinson focuses on 1942 and 1943, showing how central the great drama that unfolded in North Africa was to the ultimate victory of the Allied powers and to America's understanding of itself.Opening with the daring amphibious invasion in November 1942, An Army at Dawn follows the American and British armies as they fight the French in Morocco and Algiers, and then take on the Germans and Italians in Tunisia.
Atgen PA, Schiffer, 1st, 2017, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket. 144 pages illustrated in color and b&w. In 1942, Ed Vebell landed with the US Army in North Africa and was recruited by Stars & Stripes, the US armed forces newspaper, as their official staff artist. Daily, he drew illustrations and reported on the progress of World War II throughout Europe. This book offers a selection of his sketches, drawings, paintings, and photographs from that time, and presents one artist's view of the war from North Africa, through the campaigns in Italy, France, and Germany. After the war, the author spent two weeks with the Russians in Berlin, and was then assigned as the courtroom artist during the Nuremberg War Crimes Trials. Along the way are Ed's reminiscences about such personalities as famed war correspondent and artist Bill Mauldin, singers Josephine Baker and Edith Piaf, Charles de Gaulle, Gen. Teddy Roosevelt Jr., and many others. Ed also reminisces about his two years photographing backstage at the Folies Bergere in Paris, as well as his time as an Olympic fencer. Clean copy.
Hardcover. Berkeley, University of California Press, 1st, 1993, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket, 231 pages. Aristocratic Experience and the Origins of Modern Culture explores a crucial moment in the history of European selfhood. During the seventeenth century, French nobles began to understand their lives in terms of personal histories and inner qualities, rather than as the products of tradition and inheritance. This preoccupation with the self accompanied a critical view of society, monarchy, and Christian teachings. It also shaped a new understanding of political realities and personal relations. Drawing from a combination of memoirs, literary works, and archival sources, Jonathan Dewald offers a new understanding of aristocratic sensibilities. In detailed fashion, he explores the nobles' experience of war, career, money, family, love, and friendship. In all of these areas, nobles felt a gap between social expectations and personal needs; in the seventeenth century this tension became increasingly oppressive. Clean copy.
Hardcover. NY, Quantuck Lane Press, 1st, 2005, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Good, 456 pages. Hardcover with dust jacket. Clean, unmarked copy with tear on front dust jacket and light wear to edges. Erich Lessing is a legend in photography. Born in 1923 in Vienna, he became a photo-reporter for Associated Press in 1947, and in 1951 he became one of the earliest members of the legendary Magnum photo cooperative. His remarkable 1950s images documenting post-World War Europe, and particularly his pictures of the 1956 Hungarian Revolution, garnered worldwide admiration. Lessing's works always revolve around the human condition at the moment when power and powerlessness come face to face, when the joy of living is suddnely overclouded with pain. His photographs seize the opportunity to recount an instant of history that will never be repeated. This monumental book is a tribute to Lessing's talent as a photojournalist and a visual record of a time of turmoil and great change. Lessing has received international honors, including the American Art Directors' Award, the Grand Austrian State Prize for Artistic Photography, and many others. 400 duotone photographs.
Softcover. NY, Atlantic Monthly, Uncorr. Proof wraps, 2002, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Paperback. Uncorrected proof. Like new.The book opens with the disappearance of a man named Franko Bradovich in Kosovo. Franko, a native Montanan posing as a local, was a spy of sorts, an operative who was helping the Lucani (a loose affiliation of DEA, FBI, CIA, etc. agents operating outside the law) bust a drug trafficking scheme from Bulgaria through Kosovo and Serbia to Europe. Franko was living with the family of a farmer named Daliljaj (and was in love with the farmer's daughter Fedima) and an apparently helpful American-raised Slav (Bozi Bazok), who's become part of the Serb army's shock troops, has warned Franko that the army was headed toward them with bloodshed in mind. Later, though, Franko, who's been posing as a drug trafficker, is brought in by local police for questioning and is beaten--making Bazok's helpfulness questionable at best. Either way, Franko can't really afford to stick around. Bazok agrees to help him and, reluctantly, Daliljaj, Fedima, and their relatives, escape the sweep, in exchange for the massive quantities of drugs he believes Franko is hiding. But Bazok betrays him and slaughters Daliljaj and all of Fedima's other family while they wait for Franko to return with transport. When Franko returns, Bazok has disappeared, taking Fedima with him.
Hardcover. New Haven CT, Yale University Press, 1st, 2019, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket, 245 pages, b&w illustrations, index. He was, according to Pauline Kael, "the greatest American screenwriter." Jean-Luc Godard called him "a genius" who "invented 80 percent of what is used in Hollywood movies today." Besides tossing off dozens of now-classic scripts--including Scarface,Twentieth Century, and Notorious--Ben Hecht was known in his day as ace reporter, celebrated playwright, taboo-busting novelist, and the most quick-witted of provocateurs. During World War II, he also emerged as an outspoken crusader for the imperiled Jews of Europe, and later he became a fierce propagandist for pre-1948 Palestine's Jewish terrorist underground. Whatever the outrage he stirred, this self-declared "child of the century" came to embody much that defined America--especially Jewish America--in his time. Hecht's fame has dimmed with the decades, but Adina Hoffman's vivid portrait brings this charismatic and contradictory figure back to life on the page. Hecht was a renaissance man of dazzling sorts, and Hoffman--critically acclaimed biographer, former film critic, and eloquent commentator on Middle Eastern culture and politics--is uniquely suited to capture him in all his modes.
Softcover. UK, Cambridge University Press, reprint, 1996, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 141 pages. This volume contains the essential points of Jean Bodin's theory of sovereignty, a landmark in legal theory and royalist ideology. The four chapters presented form the core of Bodin's classic work, Six Livres de la Republique. Bodin was primarily responsible for introducing the seductive but erroneous notion that sovereignty is indivisible, that the entire power of the state had to be vested in a single individual or group. This thesis, combined with the prevailing crisis of authority during the French religious wars, led Bodin to a systematically absolutist interpretation of the French and other European monarchies. This is the first complete translation of this material into English since 1606, and is accompanied by a lucid introduction, chronology, and bibliography. Clean copy.
Hardcover. US, British Library, 1st, 2008, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover, 176 pages, illustrated in color. Clean, unmarked copy in excellent condition. Breaking the Rules draws upon the British Library's unrivalled collection of artists' books, manifestos, little magazines, literary manuscripts, sound recordings, and posters from across Europe in order to explore the rapid exchange of ideas through printed matter that marked the avant-garde movement--and led to its presence in cities as diverse as London, Brussels, Munich, Zurich, Florence, Rome, Barcelona, Copenhagen, Warsaw, Prague, Tbilisi, Budapest, and Belgrade, among others.
Softcover. Chicago, Haymarket Books, 1st US, 2016, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 471 pages. Brings together leftist scholars from a variety of fields to explore the many different aspects of the origins, trajectories and consequences of the First World War. The collection seeks to visualise the conflict and all its immediate consequences (such as the Bolshevik Revolution and ascendency of US hegemony) as a defining moment in 20th century world politics, rupturing and reconstituting the 'modern' epoch in its many instantiations. Appeals to general readers and those focused on Marxian theory and strategy and leftist histories of the war.
Hardcover. New Haven CT, Yale University Press, 1st, 1998, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket, 436 pages, b&w illustrations. The humiliation of Russia by separatist rebels in the Chechen War marked a key moment in Russian - and perhaps world - history. In this new analysis Anatol Lieven offers a riveting account of the war as a means to explore the painful fate of the post-Soviet state. Lieven looks into the long, troubled history of Russian-Chechen relations, noting that each side despised the other for largely cultural reasons (the Chechens have long been involved in organized crime in major Russian cities, whereas Russians have long tried to strip Chechnya of its resources). He notes that Chechen society has historically been militarized (one Armenian said to Lieven, "The men are always fighting and the women are cooking for them, nursing their wounds, and bringing up their children"), making the mountain people a formidable foe. In the meanwhile, writes Lieven, the Russian military suffered from low morale and from corruption of various kinds: Russian field soldiers sold their guns to Chechen guerrillas for vodka and currency, while Russian officers stole their soldiers' pay and Russian politicians skimmed off the top. This is an extraordinary look at a little-known conflict. Clean copy.
Hardcover. NY, W. W. Norton & Company, 1st, 2017, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket, 606 pages. In this definitive biography of Chester B. Himes (1909-1984), Lawrence P. Jackson uses exclusive interviews and unrestricted access to Himes's full archives to portray a controversial American writer whose novels unflinchingly confront sex, racism, and black identity. Himes brutally rendered racial politics in the best-selling novel If He Hollers Let Him Go, but he became famous for his Harlem detective series, including Cotton Comes to Harlem. A serious literary tastemaker in his day, Himes had friendships-sometimes uneasy-with such luminaries as Ralph Ellison, Carl Van Vechten, and Richard Wright. Jackson's scholarship and astute commentary illuminates Himes's improbable life-his middle-class origins, his eight years in prison, his painful odyssey as a black World War II-era artist, and his escape to Europe for success. More than ten years in the writing, Jackson's biography restores the legacy of a fascinating maverick caught between his aspirations for commercial success and his disturbing, vivid portraits of the United States. Clean copy.
Hardcover. London, George Routledge and Sons, Reprint, 1867, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Two hardcover volumes. Translated by Thomas Johnes. 102 engravings. 3/4 blue leather & patterned paper on boards, Spine with gilt & raised bands. All edges gilt. Previous owner's name stamp on front end paper. Volume 1 - 640 pages. Light wear. Clean, unmarked text. Volume 2 - 552 pages. Light wear. Clean, unmarked pages.
Hardcover. Los Angeles, CA, Ward Ritchie Press, 1st, 1971, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Good, Hardcover. Published to accompany an exhibition at the Pasadena Art Museum. Features writings by the artist, including his proposals for monuments, as well as illustrations (mostly black/white, few color) of his sculptures and drawings. Also contains chronology of the artist's life and work. Cloth bound book is in very good condition. Dust jacket has some scratches/wear.