Softcover. Iowa City, University of Iowa Press, 1st, 1993, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 325 pages with index, b&w illustrations. Sarah Gillespie Huftalen led an unconventional life for a rural midwestern woman of her time. Born in 1865 near Manchester, Iowa, she was a farm girl who became a highly regarded country school and college teacher; she married a man older than either of her parents, received a college degree later in life, and was committed to both family and career. A gifted writer, she crafted essays, teacher-training guides, and poetry while continuing to write lengthy, introspective entries in her diary, which spans the years from 1873 to 1952. In addition, she gathered extensive information about the quietly tragic life of her mother, Emily, and worked to preserve Emily's own detailed diary. Taken together, Emily's and Sarah's extraordinary diaries span nearly a century and thus form a unique mother/daughter chronicle of daily work and thoughts, interactions with neighbors and friends and colleagues, and the destructive family dynamics that dominated the Gillespies. Sarah's consciousness of the abusive relationship between her mother and father haunts her diary, and this dramatic relationship is duplicated in Sarah's relationship with her brother, Henry, Suzanne Bunkers' skillful editing and analysis of Sarah's diary reveal the legacy of a caring, loving mother reflected in her daughter's work as family member, teacher, and citizen. Clean, bright copy.
Hardcover. NY, Atheneum, 3rd pr., 1999, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket. In a clear, straightforward style, Katz describes the settlement of the Ohio and Mississippi Valleys (covering Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, Wisconsin, Minnesota, Iowa, Kansas, and Missouri) by African Americans seeking freedom, including biographical sketches of men and women who formed churches, started schools, or were politically active in their region. Some of these settlers were fugitive slaves; several set up stations on the Underground Railroad with the aid of the Quakers; others were farmers, poets, and soldiers. In several states, they helped form black regiments in the Civil War. Chronologically arranged, the book introduces many lesser-known personages not found in most collective biographies and places them in a broader context of U.S. history as a whole.
Hardcover. NY, Atheneum, 3rd pr., 1999, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket. In a clear, straightforward style, Katz describes the settlement of the Ohio and Mississippi Valleys (covering Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, Wisconsin, Minnesota, Iowa, Kansas, and Missouri) by African Americans seeking freedom, including biographical sketches of men and women who formed churches, started schools, or were politically active in their region. Some of these settlers were fugitive slaves; several set up stations on the Underground Railroad with the aid of the Quakers; others were farmers, poets, and soldiers. In several states, they helped form black regiments in the Civil War. Chronologically arranged, the book introduces many lesser-known personages not found in most collective biographies and places them in a broader context of U.S. history as a whole.
Softcover. Chapel Hill NC, University of North Carolina Press, 1st, 1998, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 235 pages, b&w illustrations. Focusing on the porkpacking industry in Iowa, Fink investigates the experience of the rural working class and highlights its significance in shaping the state's economic, political, and social contours. Fink draws both on interviews and on her own firsthand experience working on the production floor of a pork-processing plant. She weaves a fascinating account of the meatpacking industry's history in Iowa--a history, she notes, that has been experienced differently by male and female, immigrant and native-born, white and black workers. Like new.
Hardcover. Des Moines, Iowa, Wallace Homestead Book Company, 1st, 1971, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, pictorial cloth, 123 pages. Illustrated throughout with wonderful black and white photographs, period advertisements, floorplans, houses, furniture, dinnerware and room designs. Small inscription on front fly leaf otherwise pages white and clean.
Hardcover. Ames IA, Iowa State University, 1ST, 2003, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket, The author of aviation books and the "Flying Carpet" column in AOPA Flight Training magazine entertainingly shares "some lessons a pilot never forgets." Illustrations include maps of US destinations and b&w photos of his planes and family.
Hardcover. Ames IA, Iowa State University Press, 1st, 1985, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover, 254 pages. A very clean hardcover edition in dust jacket and INSCRIBED BY HARNACK on the title page. The book 'focuses on the formation in the 1880s of a colony of upper-class British immigrants who viewed Iowa pioneering as a way of perpetuating the Victorian gentleman's code. It covers a broad range of social history of the latter part of the 19th century, from London drawing rooms to Iowa pig farms, and includes a careful scrutiny of Walter and James Cowan, brothers who were typical of Victorian gentlemen in this special venture'.
Hardcover. University Of Iowa Press, 1st, 2001, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket, 168 pages. Using jazz as the key metaphor, Porter refocuses old interpretations of Ellison by placing jazz in the foreground and by emphasizing, especially as revealed in his essays, the power of Ellison's thought and cultural perception. Clean copy.
Hardcover. NY, Dial Books, 1st, 1995, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, price-clipped dust jacket. Color art by Max Ginsburg. A biography of the fifteen-year-old Iowa teenager who helped avert a train disaster in 1881 and became a national heroine. Clean copy.
Hardcover. New York, Atheneum , 1st, 2003, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, In the early 1950s, Katie Takeshima and her family live in Iowa, where her parents own a Japanese supermarket. When the store goes out of business in 1956, the family moves from Iowa to an apartment in Georgia, where Katie's parents work at a chicken hatchery with other Japanese families. Hardcover, 244 pages. Newbery Award winner. Very good pictorial dust jacket without award medal present, unclipped. SIGNED NEWBERY AWARD BOOKMARK ENCLOSED signed "Cynthia".
Hardcover. NY, Basic Books, 1st, 2004, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket, unclipped. INSCRIBED BY AUTHOR on the title page. Throughout the nineteenth century, swarms of locusts regularly swept across the continent, turning noon into dusk, demolishing farm communities, and bringing trains to a halt as the crushed bodies of insects greased the rails. In 1876, the U.S. Congress declared the locust "the single greatest impediment to the settlement of the country." From the Dakotas to Texas, from California to Iowa, the swarms pushed thousands of settlers to the brink of starvation, prompting the federal government to enlist some of the greatest scientific minds of the day and thereby jumpstarting the fledgling science of entomology. Over the next few decades, the Rocky Mountain locust suddenly--and mysteriously--vanished.A century later, Jeffrey Lockwood set out to discover why. Unconvinced by the reigning theories, he searched for new evidence in musty books, crumbling maps, and crevassed glaciers, eventually piecing together the elusive answer: A group of early settlers unwittingly destroyed the locust's sanctuaries just as the insect was experiencing a natural population crash. Drawing on historical accounts and modern science, Locust brings to life the cultural, economic, and political forces at work in America in the late-nineteenth century, even as it solves one of the greatest ecological mysteries of our time. 294 pages, clean copy.
Hardcover. Iowa City, University Of Iowa Press, 1st, 1993, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket, INSCRIBED BY THE AUTHOR on the half-title page. 268 pages. In this vigorous challenge to dominant literary criticism, Jerome Loving extends the traditional period of American literary rebirth to the end of the 19th century and argues for the intrinsic value of literature in the face of new historicist and deconstructionist readings. Bucking the trend for revisionist interpretations, Loving discusses the major work of the 19th century's canonized writers as restorative adventures with the self and society. Clean copy.
Softcover. Iowa City, University of Iowa, 1st, 1999, Book: Near Fine, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 115 pages, b&w illustrations. Paper wraps. Table of contents with black and white copies of Malevich's sketches and art work. Partial quote from the forward by Stephen Prokopoff "As the work of the principal theoretician of the extraordinary modernist development that occurred in Russia during the first quarter of the twentieth century, Malevich's writings provide an important entry to the understanding of its artistic production and to the thought that animated it."
Softcover. Iowa City, University of Iowa, 1st, 1999, Book: Near Fine, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 115 pages, b&w illustrations. Paper wraps. Table of contents with black and white copies of Malevich's sketches and art work. Partial quote from the forward by Stephen Prokopoff "As the work of the principal theoretician of the extraordinary modernist development that occurred in Russia during the first quarter of the twentieth century, Malevich's writings provide an important entry to the understanding of its artistic production and to the thought that animated it."
Hardcover. Ames IA, Iowa State University Press, 1st, 1982, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Good, Hardcover in a lightly worn dust jacket, 180 pages. The author wrote a column for a Des Moines newspaper for 25 years. Collected here is a wide selection of her writings along with a narrative account of her life in rural Iowa. Light soil to dust jacket.
Paperback. New York, Welcome Books, 1st, 2008, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, 287 pages. Hardcover with no dust jacket. A very clean, unmarked copy with only minor edgewear. Holographic photograph on front cover. In 1984, photographer Peter Feldstein set out to photograph every single resident of his town, Oxford, Iowa (pop. 676). He converted an abandoned storefront on Main Street into a makeshift studio and posted fliers inviting people to stop by. At first they trickled in slowly, but in the end, nearly all of Oxford stood before Feldstein's lens. Twenty years later, Feldstein decided to do it again. Only this time he invited writer Stephen G. Bloom to join him, and together they went in search of the same Oxford residents Feldstein had originally shot two decades earlier. Some had moved. Most had stayed. Others had passed away. All were marked by the passage of time.
Hardcover. NY, Longmans, Green & Co., 1st, 1933, Book: Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardbound, 278 pages. Illustrated by John Gincano. Previous owner's signature front endpaper. Heavy soiling to spine and edges of covers. Fade marks. Book covers a bit warped. Corners a bit bumped. Small chunk missing from p. 117, and tears to surrounding pages, but no harm to text. The book tells of the author's family immigrating from England to New York and then to Iowa and their lives on the Iowa prairie.
Hardcover. NY, Enchanted Lion Books, 1st, 2018, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket. Drawn from life, Arthur Geisert's Pumpkin Island is the fantastical story of a real life town brought to a halt by a profusion of pumpkins. Elkader, Iowa, is the perfect picture of small town life that is, until the pumpkins arrive. One pumpkin? Fine. Two pumpkins? Okay. But with pumpkins growing around every street corner, and over every building, what's a town to do? Clean copy.
Hardcover. Chicago, Reilly & Britton, 1st, 1918, Illustrated boards, oblong 8 X 4 inches. 96 pages of b&w cartoons. The travails of Silas N. Dobbin Of Pickle Center, Iowa during his arrival and training at the Great Lakes Naval Training Center during World War I. The book is a compilation of cartoons that ran in the camp newspaper, and was drawn by 18-year-old Perce Pearce, who would go on to be a writer, director, and producer at Walt Disney Studios. Pearce was the model for Doc in the cartoon feature Snow White, which he co-directed. Pearce's credits also included the Disney pictures Bambi, Song of the South, Treasure Island, Rob Roy and The Story of Robin Hood. Light stains to covers otherwise clean and tight.
Hardcover. NY, Abrams, 1st, 1994, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket, 160 pages, b&w plates. An accomplished photographer of the American scene presents a unique artistic record that captures a vanishing part of our country, the main streets, barber shops, schoolhouses, and inhabitants of our small towns. In his 19th book on the American scene, Plowden has focused on what epitomizes small towns-before this endangered species disappears altogether. The well-produced images, arranged roughly by topic (e.g., schools, theaters, churches, home interiors, restaurants, stores, and grain elevators) and representing towns in many states (including Iowa, Kansas, West Virginia, New York, Minnesota, and Idaho), speak eloquently of small-town life. Even more so, they speak of change; by the time Plowden photographed these towns, most had been cut off from their rural heritages. Nevertheless, the photographs convey order, calm, and congeniality; the best of them evoke the work of Walker Evans, who, like Plowden, left scenes unaltered when he photographed them. Clean copy.
Hardcover. NY, Abrams, 1st, 1994, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket, 160 pages, b&w plates. An accomplished photographer of the American scene presents a unique artistic record that captures a vanishing part of our country, the main streets, barber shops, schoolhouses, and inhabitants of our small towns. In his 19th book on the American scene, Plowden has focused on what epitomizes small towns-before this endangered species disappears altogether. The well-produced images, arranged roughly by topic (e.g., schools, theaters, churches, home interiors, restaurants, stores, and grain elevators) and representing towns in many states (including Iowa, Kansas, West Virginia, New York, Minnesota, and Idaho), speak eloquently of small-town life. Even more so, they speak of change; by the time Plowden photographed these towns, most had been cut off from their rural heritages. Nevertheless, the photographs convey order, calm, and congeniality; the best of them evoke the work of Walker Evans, who, like Plowden, left scenes unaltered when he photographed them. Clean copy.
Softcover. Iowa City, University of Iowa Press, 1st, 1991, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 91 pages. INSCRIBED BY HULL on the title page. Previous owner's name on the front fly leaf. Clean, bright copy.
Hardcover. Iowa City, State Historical Society of Iowa, 1st, 1968, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Good, Hardcover, 575 pages. Illustrated with black & white photographs. Some numbered Stickers on front endpaper. Foxing along edges of dust jacket. Clean, tight copy.
Hardcover. MY, Harcourt Brace & Co., 2nd pr., 1939, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, orange cloth stamped in black, 267 pages, b&w illustrations by James MacDonald. A boy's novel about track and field competition. Jim Wellington, Harvard senior and Waterloo, Iowa native, already the U. S. collegiate record holder for the two-mile, heads to Berlin for the Olympics. Inscription on front fly leaf, otherwise a clean, bright copy. Lacks dust jacket.