europe

Hardcover. London, Macmillan Co., 2nd pr., 1898, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, 604 pages, 3 fold-out color maps in rear of book. Red coth covers, hinges tender, spine with fading. An account of the landscape, vegetation and wildlife of southern Africa precedes an historical survey of the non-European inhabitants and the arrival and spread of the European settlers.

Hardcover. NY, E.P. Dutton, 1st, 1947, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Poor, Hardcover in a very worn dust jacket with tape repairs. Black cloth with gilt lettering to spine. Vidal's second novel, a work with some gay aspects but one in which the author felt he played things a bit too safely. "Robert Holton has just returned from the torment and strife of war in Europe and settled in a solitary existence working for a New York stockbroking business The haunting memories of nights of love spent in Florence are suppressed as he struggles to succeed in an arid city." Book is tight and clean.

Hardcover. NY, E.P. Dutton, 1st, 1947, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Good, Hardcover in a lightly worn dust jacket with tape repairs. Black cloth with gilt lettering to spine. Vidal's second novel, a work with some gay aspects but one in which the author felt he played things a bit too safely. "Robert Holton has just returned from the torment and strife of war in Europe and settled in a solitary existence working for a New York stockbroking business The haunting memories of nights of love spent in Florence are suppressed as he struggles to succeed in an arid city." Book is tight and clean. There is some light soil, foxing to the dust jacket.

Hardcover. NY, Alfred A. Knopf, 1st, 1953, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Good, Hardcover in a worn, chipped dust jacket, 411 pages plus index. This book was written between 1946 and 1952, and first published in 1953. It is now widely regarded as the standard portrait of the European and American theater in the turbulent and seminal years following World War II. Name on front fly leaf, otherwise clean.

Hardcover. Zurich, Edition Olms, 1st, 2012, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover, 208 pages, with dust jacket. Like new in publisher's shrink-wrap. Delving into the photo archives of French magazine, Paris Match, where Chaigneau is an editor, and accompanied by several of the interviews and articles the magazine published, the author offers a glimpse into the working processes and personal lives of some of the 20th century's canonical visual artists . Focused mostly on European masters such as Pablo Picasso, Bernard Buffet, Rene Magritte, Marc Chagall, and Joan Miro, the book's highly accessible, if minimal, commentary and anecdotes allow the photos to take center stage. Georg Baselitz, for example, is pictured perched on a chair with his head in his arms, as if "haunted by invisible demons," with several large scale paintings in the background. In contrast, Salvador Dali, ever the "wily publicist," seems to relish the camera's presence: in one shot dressed as a Spanish nobleman with an expression of faux-seriousness. Elsewhere, as a testament to his creative drive, Henri Matisse is pictured in 1954, bedridden but still painting with a specially devised long brush mere months before his death. Moving beyond the studio, some attention is given to the private lives of the artists, adding a human element to these creative giants. Photographer Willy Rizzo captures Picasso in a rare candid and intimate moment, reading the comics of a newspaper while his boxer, Yan, looks on. But perhaps the most illuminating moments are when the artists, in interviews, talk about their creative process; there is something humble and brave, for instance, in Jacques Villon's quip, "I don't know what I've discovered... but I know that I'm still looking". Color and b&w photos.

Hardcover. New York, Holt Rinehart Winston, 1st, 1971, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Good, Hardcover, 535 pages. Black & white illustrations. Dust jacket has edgewear.

Softcover. Yonkers NY, Fordham University Press , 1st, 2013, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 175 pages illustrated in color. It was not until the first decade of the twentieth century, as artists like Robert Henri and John Sloan turned their attention to the urban scene, that American art shifted its focus from bucolic landscapes to the cities, the towns, the crowds, especially the raucous urban scene of Manhattan--by then the nation's most important metropolis. This movement away from painting the land to painting the life on the street is often seen as a clean break with the depiction of the landscape, and with landscape painting generally as a mainstay of American art in the face of European Modernism. However, artists continued to paint the Hudson River, as well as its tributaries, the Harlem and East rivers, and the great harbor of New York City into which they flowed. What was different was their approach. Having jettisoned the romantic ideals of their forebears, artists like Henri and Sloan, and later, Georgia O'Keeffe, George Ault, Edward Hopper, and Preston Dickinson, celebrated the changing way of life along the city's waterfront. As the century progressed, they did so with sharper focus and with ideals borrowed from the Machine Age. Instead of majestic mountain ranges, their subjects were the arching bridges, swinging cranes, and streamlined ocean liners resting in the harbor. These artists took the elements of the Sublime, combined them with Modernism's interest in structure and form, and applied them to the manmade industrial one--thereby creating a new visual vocabulary for the twentieth century: the Industrial Sublime. Clean copy.

Hardcover. Hartford, CT, American Publishing Company, 1st Edition, 1870, Book: Good, Dust Jacket: None, 651 pages plus publisher's ads. Hardcover. Front and back hinges cracked, binding tight otherwise. Frontispieces with tissue guard. Tanning to edges. Pages clean with just a touch of tanning. Spine straight. Cover boards bound in black cloth, gilt title on spine and design on front cover board. Borders and decoration blind-stamped to front and back cover boards. Some agewear to boards: fraying/chipping at top and bottom of spine and corners, rubbing. "Being some account of the steamship Quaker City's pleasure excursion to Europe and the Holy Land; with descriptions of countries, nations, incidents and adventures, as they appeared to the author." Perfect for any collector's bookshelf.

Softcover. Florence, Italy, Qua D'Arno, 1st, 1987, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 156 pages, bilingual texts in English and Spanish, b&w plates and text throughout. Illustrates and describes numerous torture devices including breast rippers, the ever popular rack and iron maiden, heretics fork and many more. Clean copy.

Hardcover. London, Arthur Barker Ltd., 1st, 1966, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket. 640 pages 16 plates (including portraits, facsimiles). Clean copy.

Hardcover. Lausanne, Clairefontaine, 1st , 1956, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover, 128 pages. Black & white photos by Schuh printed in gravure. Documentary images of people in the Cartier-Bresson style. FRENCH TEXT by Fouchet. Nice condition. Schuh's early work as freelance photojournalist for several magazines, including "Paris Match" and "Life," led him throughout Europe and as far as Indonesia. In this work, Schuh presents the realities of daily life through a selection of his early photographs, including his two most famous: "Enfant javanais jouant" (a boy stretched out playing a game), and "Danseuses sacrees de Bali" (temple dancer), both taken in Indonesia in 1938-39.

Hardcover. New York, Oceana Publications, 1st, 1953, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, 192 pages, salmon colored cloth, spine with light fading. One sentence in introduction with ink underlining, otherwise clean and tight.

Softcover. Boston, David R. Godine, reprint, 2004, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover in pictorial wrappers, 368 pages. Eagerly exchanging an existence of idle privilege and social intrigue for one of hard work and literary distinction, Origo led a life characterized by vitality and commitment. Born in 1902 into a wealthy American family, she and her British mother permanently left the U.S. after the untimely death of her father in 1910. Traveling extensively throughout Europe, they eventually settled outside of Florence, becoming prominent members of the stuffy Anglo-Florentine community of expatriates. Asserting her trademark independence, she married Antonio Origo, the illegitimate son of a cavalry officer-sculptor. Together Antonio and Iris purchased and totally revitalized an arid Tuscan valley and renovated a crumbling estate. With virtually no experience and few practical skills, they transformed themselves into agrarian pioneers and their extensive acreage into a prosperous working community supporting more than 200 people. During the war years, they quietly supported the Allies, offering refuge to countless numbers of partisans and prisoners of war. In addition to these accomplishments, Iris also buried one child and raised two more, conducted several heart-wrenching extramarital affairs, and distinguished herself as both a biographer and a literary critic. Clean copy.

Softcover. Cambridge MA, Harvard University Press, reprint, 2008, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 776 pages. "Iron Kingdom, Christopher Clark's stately, authoritative history of Prussia from its humble beginnings to its ignominious end, presents a much more complicated and compelling picture of the German state, which is too often reduced to a caricature of spiked helmets and polished boots. Prussia and its army were inseparable, but Prussia was also renowned for its efficient, incorruptible civil service; its innovative system of social services; its religious tolerance; and its unrivaled education system, a model for the rest of Germany and the world. This too was Prussia-a tormented kingdom that, like a tragic hero, was brought down by the very qualities that raised it up. Mr. Clark, a senior lecturer in modern European history at Cambridge University, does an exemplary job. A lively writer, he organizes masses of material in orderly fashion, clearly establishing his main themes and pausing at crucial junctures to recapitulate and reconsider. Prussia, a self-invented artifact right down to its name, demands the kind of careful demythologizing that it receives from Mr. Clark, who gently but insistently exposes the flaws in most of the received wisdom about his subject. A result is an illuminating, profoundly satisfying work of history, brightened by vivid character sketches of the principals in his drama." Clean copy.

Hardcover. NY, G.P. Putman's Sons, 1st, 1989, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a nice, unclipped dust jacket, 447 pages. B&w photos. Although he aspired to Princeton, Irwin Gilbert Shamforoff (aka Shaw) had to settle for local Brooklyn College, where he seems to have enjoyed football more than his studies. From his mid-20s, however, Shaw (1913-1984) was a highly regarded New Yorker short story writer ("The Girls in Their Summer Dresses") and left-wing playwright ( Bury the Dead ), and later became a successful Hollywood script writer and novelist ( The Young Lions ; Rich Man, Poor Man ). This sympathetic, objective biography, by a Vanity Fair contributing editor, convincingly shows how Shaw's career, character and fiction, influenced more by Hemingway's lifestyle than by his writing, were marked by incongruities. Far from abating with age, his romantic and alcoholic appetites overwhelmed him. Years of high living in Europe, surrounded by adoring friends, softened his self-judgment, and he took to writing "fluffy essays for swells." The New Yorker dropped him, and "serious" critics panned his novels. Shnayerson capably contrasts Shaw's inclinations and personality with his subject matter and literary output, and is especially astute at explaining the complications of being a commercially successful midcentury American writer. Clean copy.

Hardcover. Leiden, The Netherlands, Brill, 1st edition, 2012, Book: Near Fine, Dust Jacket: None, 352 pages. Hardcover. Decorated cover boards, excellent. Very clean pages, edges. Biding tight. Spine straight. Like new. most remembered for his biblical criticism, Vossius played a central role in the early modern European world of learning.

Softcover. Philadelphia, Temple University Press, 1st pbk, 1993, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 379 pages. A collection of ten essays covering topics ranging from the expansion of Islamic civilization to gender issues in the Industrial Revolution and European global expansion. Each essay provides an overview of the problems and themes relating to critical processes and periods in global history. Clean copy.

Hardcover. Boston, Little Brown, 1st, 1985, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, 287 pages, 442 b&w illustrations. The famous photojournalist presents, among other events, the abdication of Edward VIII; the Anschluss; the Warsaw ghetto, before and after its destruction; Tito's guerrilla war against the Nazis; and Isr'l's battle for independence. He recorded the fall of Hungary to the Communists; he was with Churchill at Teheran; and with Khrushchev at Belgrade. There are also exotic parties given by Cecil Beaton and Lady Juliet Duff. Portraits of the last glories of the English aristocracy and the old French Bourgeoisie; the industrialists and artists who made Italy's miraculous postwar recovery possible. In 60,000 words of text he captures the extraordinary adventures and bizarre characters that together made up the author's life. The combination of words and pictures provides a rich, powerful portrait of a fascinating career. Missing dust jacket.

Hardcover. NY, Philosophical Library, 1st US, 1948, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, green cloth covers, 265 pages. B&w frontis. portrait. Previous owner's long inscription on front fly-leaf, otherwise clean.

Hardcover. NY, Ten Speed Press, 1st, 2020, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover in pictorial boards, no dust jacket issued, 201 pages. This sweeping, full-color comic book biography tells the complete life story of Jack Kirby, co-creator of some of the most enduring superheroes and villains of the twentieth century for Marvel Comics, DC Comics, and more. Critically acclaimed graphic novelist Tom Scioli breathes visual life into Kirby's life story--from his days growing up in New York during the Great Depression and discovering a love for science fiction and cartoons to his time on the frontlines in the European theatre of World War II where he experienced the type of action and adventure he'd later imbue his comic pages with, and on to his world-changing collaborations at Marvel with Stan Lee, where the pair redefined comics as a part of pop culture.

Hardcover. East Lothian, Scotland, Tuckwell Press , reprint, 1998, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket. 339 pages, 18 figures on 12 b/w plates, map, end notes, appendix, bibliography, index. James IV is the best-known of all the late medieval Scottish rulers. Widely praised by his contemporaries, he combined the qualities of successful medieval monarch with a wide interest in the arts and sciences, while remaining acutely conscious of the need to enhance the prestige of his dynasty throughout Europe. This excellent study examines all aspects of James IV's sovereignty, explains his popularity and his highly successful kingship and assesses reasons for the disastrous end to the reign when the king and a large population of the Scottish nobility were eliminated in a single afternoon in 1513 at Flodden. Clean copy.

Bologna, Damiani, 1st, 2017, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, 280 pages. American fashion photographer James Moore (1936-2006) was an influential voice in mid-20th-century fashion photography, working for Harper's Bazaar during its 1960s heyday under the leadership of legendary editor Carmel Snow. Shooting languid mod gamines and luxe bohemians in arresting, often surreal or cinematic compositions, Moore helped shape the visual vocabulary of '60s fashion alongside better-known colleagues such as art director Alexey Brodovitch (under whom Moore studied). Moore also directed television commercials and contributed photographs to European magazines in the 1980s and 1990s, and taught photography at the School of Visual Arts, New York, and the Rochester Institute of Technology.Every Moore photograph is an intricate exploration of space and beauty, with an attention to detail that betrays the photographer's peerless eye. Something of a "photographer's photographer," Moore influenced the next generation of great fashion photographers but has been somewhat neglected in histories of 1960s fashion and culture--until now. James Moore: Photographs 1962-2006 collects a half century of extraordinary photographs by Moore, the first time his work has been collected in a single monograph. Including texts from the leading editors, models, photographers and designers of the day, this volume takes stock of James Moore's astounding career and an extraordinary cultural moment.

Bologna, Damiani, 1st, 2017, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, 280 pages. American fashion photographer James Moore (1936-2006) was an influential voice in mid-20th-century fashion photography, working for Harper's Bazaar during its 1960s heyday under the leadership of legendary editor Carmel Snow. Shooting languid mod gamines and luxe bohemians in arresting, often surreal or cinematic compositions, Moore helped shape the visual vocabulary of '60s fashion alongside better-known colleagues such as art director Alexey Brodovitch (under whom Moore studied). Moore also directed television commercials and contributed photographs to European magazines in the 1980s and 1990s, and taught photography at the School of Visual Arts, New York, and the Rochester Institute of Technology.Every Moore photograph is an intricate exploration of space and beauty, with an attention to detail that betrays the photographer's peerless eye. Something of a "photographer's photographer," Moore influenced the next generation of great fashion photographers but has been somewhat neglected in histories of 1960s fashion and culture--until now. James Moore: Photographs 1962-2006 collects a half century of extraordinary photographs by Moore, the first time his work has been collected in a single monograph. Including texts from the leading editors, models, photographers and designers of the day, this volume takes stock of James Moore's astounding career and an extraordinary cultural moment.

Hardcover. NY, Harry N Abrams, 1st, 1989, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover, 248 pages. B&w photos throughout. Jean Howard was a small part Hollywood actress in the late 30s/early 40s whose marriage to super agent Charles Feldman gave her an entry into the top circles of Hollywood away from the studios. She carried her camera with her everywhere and thus we get hundreds of photographs of Hollywood royalty at play right up until the Sixties both at home and mixing with high society in Europe. Although not especially gifted as a photographer her access to the stars was unprecedented and her candid snaps are fascinating for students of Tinseltown at play. Thus we get the likes of Tyrone Power playing croquet with Howard Hawks and Daryl Zanuck and Jennifer Jones leading a conga line of party guests fully clothed into Joseph Cotten's swimming pool. The photographs in this coffee table sized book are accompanied by short but informative comments identifying the participants and giving snippets of fascinating gossip. Recommended for fans of Hollywood's studio era.