Hardcover. NY, Museum of the City of New York, 1st, 2016, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, pictorial boards, 327 pages, illustrated in color and b&w. In the early decades of the twentieth century, a vibrant theatrical culture took shape on New York City's Lower East Side. Original dramas, comedies, musicals, and vaudeville, along with sophisticated productions of Shakespeare, Ibsen, and Chekhov, were innovatively staged for crowds that rivaled the audiences on Broadway. Though these productions were in Yiddish and catered to Eastern European, Jewish audiences (the largest immigrant group in the city at the time), their artistic innovations, energetic style, and engagement with politics and the world around them came to influence all facets of the American stage. Vividly illustrated and with essays from leading historians and critics, this book recounts the heyday of "Yiddish Broadway" and its vital contribution to American Jewish life and crossover to the broader American culture. Clean copy.
Softcover. Toronto, Between the Lines, 1st, 2006, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 134 pages, b&w illustrations. SIGNED BY PIETROPAOLO on the title page and also INSCRIBED on the front fly leaf. This collection of stunning photographs and inspired commentary documents the lives of Italian immigrants to Toronto. Award-winning photographer and cultural historian Vincenzo Pietropaolo has spent much of his life taking pictures inside the tightly knit Italian-Canadian community. While the images in this book are part of the fabric of life in Toronto, they transcend the specificity of place to evoke the lives of immigrants in cities around the world. Clean copy.
Hardcover. Oak Knoll Press, 1st, 1999, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover, 244 pages. Ottmar Mergenthaler is considered one of America's greatest inventors. The German immigrant revolutionized the printing and publishing industry with the invention of an automatic typesetting machine which became known as the Linotype. This remarkable machine made it possible to eliminate the laborious hand setting of lead type by allowing one Linotype operator to do the work of a half-dozen typographers.This compelling work chronicles Mergenthaler's struggles to get his invention accepted, and his battles with the typographical unions and with his financiers.
Hardcover. NY, Assouline, 1st, 1999, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover, 160 pages. This is the first comprehensive survey of the work of Paul Himmel (b.1914) and the first publication about his work in 40 years. The son of immigrant Bohemian intellectuals, Himmel took up photography as a teenager and studied graphic journalism under art director Alexey Brodovitch. He worked from 1947 to 1969 as a professional photographer for such clients as Vogue and Harper's Bazaar, and several of his photos were included in Edward Steichen's "Family of Man" exhibition. By 1969, he had become disenchanted with photography and retrained as a psychotherapist. An exhibit of his photographs in New York City in 1996 brought him back to public attention. Himmel's photographs are genuinely fresh and unusual. Many are high-contrast, emphasizing the design and patterns contained in an image; subjects range from New York City scenes to nudes reduced to grainy vestiges to color abstractions. This monograph richly reproduces Himmel's engaging pictures of humanity in all its variations and is recommended for all fine art and photography collections.
Softcover. Notre Dame, University of Notre Dame Press, First Thus, 1986, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, 344 pages. Softcover. Black & white illustrations throughout including maps, photographs. Bright front cover, sunfade to rear cover. Clean, unmarked copy.
Hardcover. Washinton DC, Smithsonian Institution Press, 1st, 1992, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover, 192 pages, b&w photos. Light shelf-wear to dust jacket, else a clean, tight copy. Hine became famous for his photographs of immigrants at Ellis Island, child laborers and European war refugees, and for his later celebrations of industrial workers.
Hardcover. Chicago, The Lakeside Press, 1st, 1918, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, dark green cloth stamped in gilt, top edge gilt, 186 pages. Tight, attractive copy of this early "Lakeside Classic," the annual keepsake presented by this printer/publisher to friends and clients starting in 1903. This volume contains Morris Birkbeck's "Observations of an English Immigrant in 1817," William Newnham Blake's "A Tour in Southern Illinois in 1822" and Henry R. Schoolcraft's "A Journey Up the Illinois River in 1821." includes an index and a 23 page historical introduction by the renowned historian Dr. Milo Milton Quaife. There is a tissue guarded captioned frontispiece entitled "Moris Birkbeck" by courtesy of H. W. Fay of DeKalb. Clean copy.
Softcover. Buffalo NY, White Pine Press, 1st, 2003, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 181 pages. INSCRIBED BY AUTHOR on the title page. Immigrant writer Novakovich records his journeys to find his roots, some to his native Croatia, some no farther than Cleveland, where he searches for the grave of his grandmother, who refused to return to Croatia with the rest of her family. This moving collection reflects the joys and the difficulties in returning to a homeland left behind. Clean copy.
Hardcover. NY, Knopf, 1st, 2021, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket. Alongside more than 172 of his drawings, cartoons, and caricatures--and in prose as spirited and wickedly pointed as his artwork--Edward Sorel gives us an unforgettable self-portrait: his poor Depression-era childhood in the Bronx (surrounded by loving Romanian immigrant grandparents and a clan of mostly left-leaning aunts and uncles); his first stabs at drawing when pneumonia kept him out of school at age eight; his time as a student at New York's famed High School of Music and Art; the scrappy early days of Push Pin Studios, founded with fellow Cooper Union alums Milton Glaser and Seymour Chwast, which became the hottest design group of the 1960s; his two marriages and four children; and his many friends in New York's art and literary circles.
Hardcover. NY, St Martins Press, 1st, 1998, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket, 291 pages. It's a shame that Henry Roth died in 1995, because now readers will never know what happens to his fictional alter ego, Ira Stigman, once he leaves City College. For readers familiar with Roth's series of autobiographical novels, Requiem for Harlem is the last of four books chronicling the childhood and young adulthood of Stigman; for those who have not yet discovered Roth, consider reading the first three in the series to get a handle on the dark, complicated, and rich world Ira Stigman occupies. Set in 1920s Harlem, Roth's novels explore the life of Jewish immigrants. This last installment finds his alter ego about to leave childhood and Harlem forever behind as he begins an affair with Edith, a refined NYU English professor. Roth portrays his youthful self severely here, dwelling on the guilt and self-hatred resulting from an incestuous relationship with his sister and an affair with a young cousin. Clean copy.
Hardcover. Boston, Godine, 1st, 1988, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket with American Book Award sticker on front. Josephine Gattuso Hendin captures the New York Italian immigrant scene with startling precision, bringing to life the intricate web of a community's everyday transactions and exploring the multifaceted father-daughter relationship at the heart of the Italian American family.
Softcover. Madison WI, University of Wisconsin Press., reprint, 1999, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 254 pages. This is the life story of Rosa Cavalleri, an Italian woman who came to the United States in 1884, one of the peak years in the nineteenth-century wave of immigration. A vivid, richly detailed account, the narrative traces Rosa's life in an Italian peasant village and later in Chicago. Marie Hall Ets, a social worker and friend of Rosa&;s at the Chicago Commons settlement house during the years following World War I, meticulously wrote down her lively stories to create this book. Clean copy.
Hardcover. Cloverdale CA, Buti Publications, 1st, 1996, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket, 355 pages illustrated with b&w drawings, not credited. GENERIC INSCRIPTION & SIGNATURE BY AUTHOR on the front fly leaf. Bruno Buti, (pronounced "booty") born to immigrant Italian parents May 23, 1922, in San Bruno, California, the youngest of three children. Nursed to an age he can still remember, then weaned on wine for lack of a cow, he was raised in an era when milk pails runneth over with fresh made alcohol. Growing up underfoot of tough bootleggers, he spent his childhood experiencing unpleasant run-ins between them and crooked lawmen. Haunted by memories of the involvement that his father, relatives and colleagues had in bucking prohibition, their ups and downs in the struggle to make it in a society hostile to immigrant minorities, the author finally dares to unload the burden he carried for so long. His tale attempts to bring out the characteristics and qualities of this particular group of people by depicting them the way they were during those fabulous Twenties. Clean copy.
Hardcover. New Haven CT, Yale University Press;, 1st, 2006, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover, 288 pages. Saul Steinberg (1914-99) described himself as a "writer who draws," thus inspiring curator Smith to characterize Steinberg's brilliantly satiric drawings as "illuminations," thus linking his work to illuminated manuscripts and, given Steinberg's love of literature, to a particular favorite, Arthur Rimbaud's Illuminations. Smith also explores Steinberg's mission to illuminate the overlooked and the absurd. In the biographical sections of his beautifully crafted critique, Smith affectingly recounts Steinberg's life as a Jew in anti-Semitic Romania and an architecture student in Fascist Milan whose distinctive cartoons served as his ticket out of Nazi Europe and onto the pages of the New Yorker. Both Smith and renowned poet Charles Simic associate Steinberg's fascination with documents with his harrowing refugee experiences, while Simic, a fellow immigrant from the Balkans and a friend of Steinberg's, offers striking insights into the artist's comic sensibility. Both commentators reflect on the great change in Steinberg's work after 1960, as his images turned hallucinatory and nightmarish, his protest against tyranny more intense. As instantly recognizable as Steinberg's kinetic, punning, and slyly skewering art is, there hasn't been a comprehensive Steinberg book in years, making this outstanding volume invaluable in its reclamation of Steinberg's agile, philosophic, and category-defying art.
Softcover. Berkeley, University of California Press, 1st, 2011, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 272 pages. INSCRIBED BY AUTHOR on front fly leaf. Shadow Mothers shines new light on an aspect of contemporary motherhood often hidden from view: the need for paid childcare by women returning to the workforce, and the complex bonds mothers forge with the "shadow mothers" they hire. Cameron Lynne Macdonald illuminates both sides of an unequal and complicated relationship. Based on in-depth interviews with professional women and childcare providers- immigrant and American-born nannies as well as European au pairs-Shadow Mothers locates the roots of individual skirmishes between mothers and their childcare providers in broader cultural and social tensions. Macdonald argues that these conflicts arise from unrealistic ideals about mothering and inflexible career paths and work schedules, as well as from the devaluation of paid care work. Mild crease to cover, otherwise a clean, bright copy.
Softcover. Berkeley CA, University of California Press, 1st, 2011, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 272 pages. Shadow Mothers shines new light on an aspect of contemporary motherhood often hidden from view: the need for paid childcare by women returning to the workforce, and the complex bonds mothers forge with the "shadow mothers" they hire. Cameron Lynne Macdonald illuminates both sides of an unequal and complicated relationship. Based on in-depth interviews with professional women and childcare providers- immigrant and American-born nannies as well as European au pairs-Shadow Mothers locates the roots of individual skirmishes between mothers and their childcare providers in broader cultural and social tensions. Macdonald argues that these conflicts arise from unrealistic ideals about mothering and inflexible career paths and work schedules, as well as from the devaluation of paid care work. Clean copy.
Softcover. NY, American Italian Historical Assoc., 1st, 2010, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 248 pages. This volume consists of a selection of 14 scholarly works examining the urban experience of Italian Americans in small towns and big cities, out of the approximately 60 stimulating papers presented at the 41st annual Conference of the American Italian Historical Association, held in 2008. Clean copy.
Hardcover. Salt Lake City, University of Utah Press, 1st, 1988, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket, 188 pages. 141 color and black and white photographs by Milton Rogovin, Tony Maine, Ron Kelley, the essayists, and Yemeni workers. "What did the American astronauts find when the first landed on the moon?" "Yemenis, looking for work." High wages and easy work - these are the myths that lure Yemeni workers abroad, and especially to the United States, which has seen generations of migrant laborers. But the realities of migrant labor are something else. In Sojourners and Settlers, leading scholars of history, anthropology, folklore, sociology, and political science have joined with photographers and critics to present an interdisciplinary look at the phenomenon of labor migration. They reveal drastically changing rural and urban environments in Yemen, and in the United States, strenuous work weeks, bleak farm work camp conditions, plant shut downs, culture shock, and cautious assimilation. Under Friedlander's editorship, these reports of the ordinary events of Yemeni workers' lives become studies in courage, persistence, and dignity. Clean copy.
Hardcover. NY, The Grolier Club, 1st, 2012, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, cream colored boards with a red cloth spine, 195 pages. Limited to 500 copies. This excellent catalogue includes introductory essays by Martino Marazzi, Francesco Durante, and Robert Viscusi. It contains a bibliography of over 800 primary and secondary Italian-language works printed in America. Signed & inscribed by James Periconi to the previous owner on title page. Light fade to boards at top edge, Clean copy.
Softcover. NY, Bordighera Press , 1st, 2010, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 97 pages. Bilingual Edition in English and Italian. INSCRIBED BY THE TRANSLATOR, Laura Ruberto. "An immigrant woman's moving account of what one gains, but also what one loses, when emigrating to the U.S. from a village in rural Campania. All those who have been uprooted from their homes can identify with this Southern Italian woman's life story--marked by acceptance of hardship and the poetic memory of the village in which she was born and to which she could not bear to return". Clean, bright copy.