literature

Softcover. New York, Aperture, 1st, 1984, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 176 pages. Illustrated with black & white photographs by Diane Arbus. Arbus's commercial photography and articles are less well known than her other works. Her assignments for 'Esquire', 'Harper's Bazaar' and the 'Sunday Times Magazine' in London covered the leaders of theater, fashion, show business and literature. Here are over 100 portraits and feature profiles which originally accompanied them. Remainder stamp to bottom edge, otherwise a clean, tight copy.

Hardcover. New York, Aperture, 1st, 1984, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover, 176 pages. Illustrated with black & white photographs by Diane Arbus. Arbus's commercial photography and articles are less well known than her other works. Her assignments for 'Esquire', 'Harper's Bazaar' and the 'Sunday Times Magazine' in London covered the leaders of theater, fashion, show business and literature. Here are over 100 portraits and feature profiles which originally accompanied them. Bottom right corners of covers lightly bumped. Clean, tight copy.

Hardcover. Millerton NY, Aperture, 1st, 1972, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover, 80 b& plates by Arbus. True first with Two Girls in Identical Raincoats plate, later supressed. Very good in very good dust jacket that's unclipped. When Diane Arbus committed suicide in 1971, only a relatively small number of her most important pictures were widely known. The publication of Diane Arbus: An Aperture Monograph in 1972--along with the concurrent retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art--offered the general public its first encounter with the breadth and power of her work. Now considered a classic of photographic literature, it is probably the best selling photography book of all time.

Hardcover. Ithaca NY, Cornell University Press, 1st, 2006, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket, 835 pages. Sergey Prokofiev, a compulsive diarist and gifted and idiosyncratic writer, possessed an incorrigibly sardonic curiosity about individuals and events. When he left Russia after the 1917 Revolution, his diaries were recovered from the family flat in Petrograd and later hidden at considerable personal risk by the composer Nikolai Myaskovsky. Prokofiev himself smuggled them out of the country after his first return to the Soviet Union in 1927. The later diaries, written in the West, were brought back by legal decree after the composer's death in 1953, to be kept in an inaccessible section of the Soviet State Archive. Eventually Prokofiev's son Sviatoslav was allowed to transcribe the voluminous contents. When he and his son Sergei eventually emigrated to Paris, they undertook the gigantic task of reproducing the partially encoded manuscript in an intelligible form.Diaries, 1907-1914, the first of three volumes that extend to 1933, covers Prokofiev's years at the St. Petersburg Conservatoire. Simultaneously attached to and exasperated by the tradition exemplified by composers such as Rimsky-Korsakov, Glazunov, and Tcherepnin, the brash young genius relishes the power of his talent to irritate, challenge, and finally overcome the establishment. Clean copy.

Hardcover. Cambridge, MA, Harvard Univ Press, 1st, 1946, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Good, Hardcover, 351 pages including index. A list of writing relating to Charles Dickens and his works 1836-1944. A very useful bibliographic reference for Dickensiana.

Hardcover. Boston, L. C. Page & Company, 1st US, 1903, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, gilt-stamped light gray cloth with Dickens' escutcheon in red & gold on cover, top edge gilt, frontispiece photographic profile of Dickens & 18 B&W photographic illustrations. Nice retrospective of London in reference to Charles Dickens life, book provides a brief look at Dickens' literary life, manner and customs, history of the area and more. 300 pages including index,

Hardcover. NY, Rinehart & Co., 1st, 1958, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover, 241 pages. The author Cook was an English professor at Middlebury College for many years, and involved with Bread Loaf Writer's Conference almost from its inception, as Robert Frost was. INSCRIBED by Robert Frost (the subject) to Cook (the author).

Softcover. Los Angeles, CA, William Andrews Clark Memorial Library, Reprint, 1970, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, 77 pages. Softcover. Augustan Reprint Society. Pamphlet with staple binding. Light tanning to cover, cover is becoming detached from bound pages. No pages missing or ripped. Very good condition. Previous owner's name written on front cover. Some underlining and brief notes written inside (pencil)."The most satisfactory of Collins' many pamphlets and books..."

Softcover. Berkeley CA, Counterpoint, 1st, 2015, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 288 pages. In 1969 Gary Snyder returned from a long residence in Japan to northern California, to a homestead in the Sierra foothills where he intended to build a house and settle on the land with his wife and young sons. He had just published his first book of essays, Earth House Hold. A few years before, after a long absence, Wendell Berry left New York City to return to land near his grandfather's farm in Port Royal, Kentucky, where he built a small studio and lived there with his wife as they restored an old house on their newly acquired homestead. In 1969 Berry had just published Long-Legged House. These two founding members of the counterculture and of the new environmental movement had yet to meet, but they knew each other's work, and soon they began a correspondence. Neither man could have imagined the impact their work would have on American political and literary culture, nor could they have appreciated the impact they would have on one another. Clean copy.

Softcover. NY, MInerva Press, reprint, 1975, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 489 pages. Bright, clean copy.

Hardcover. Barcelona Spain, Galaxia Gutenberg, 1st thus, 2004, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Two hardcover volumes in bright dust jackets, housed in a cardboard slipcase. ALL TEXT IN SPANISH. 1.368 and 1.454 pages. Clean set. DUE TO WEIGHT, DOMESTIC SHIPPING ONLY.

Hardcover. Wakefield RI, Moyer Bell, 2nd pr., 1993, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket. INSCRIBED BY O'CONNOR on the half-title page. O'Connor, who has had a career as an editor at Washington Square Press, Pinnacle and Popular Library, and as a cultural critic for Variety and on radio and TV (he's now a ski instructor in Vermont), originally broadcast these essays on WBAI Radio in New York City.

Hardcover. New York, Aperture, 1st, 1998, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket. 96 pages, color photographs, Like new in publisher's shrinkwrap. Doors of the Kingdom is a unique collection of photographs depicting the ancient and disappearing craft of doormaking in Arabia. The Islamic concept of hurma, or sanctity of a place of dwelling or worship, is recurrent throughout Arabic poetry and literature. The door (bab), preserver of sanctity, becomes symbolic of the boundary between public and private space, and between the profane and the sacred. In 1995, Haajar Gouverneur traveled throughout the Arabian Peninsula photographing each region's distinctive doorways and the remaining artisans who make them. The doors of Arabia, painstakingly hand-carved from the wood of the Al-Athel trees, last in their exquisite variety for hundreds of years. This ancient craft, passed down from generation to generation in the central and northern regions of Saudi Arabia, is now nearly extinct. Modern materials, technology, and changing priorities threaten the continuity of the sacred and artisanal tradition of doormaking.

Softcover. NY, St. Martin's Press, reprint, 1997, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 398 pages. Mystery writer Dorothy Sayers is loved and remembered, most notably, for the creation of sleuths Lord Peter Wimsey and Harriet Vane. As this biography attests, Sayers was also one of the first women to be awarded a degree from Oxford, a playwright, and an essayist--but also a woman with personal joys and tragedies. Here, Reynolds, a close friend of Sayers, presents a convincing and balanced portrait of one of the 20th century's most brilliant, creative women. 30 b&w photos. Clean, bright copy.

Hardcover. Westport CT, Greenwood Press, 1st, 1993, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover in glossy boards, 174 pages. B&w frontispiece portrait. Dorothy Parker (1893-1967) had something to say about virtually all her contemporaries among the literati, and they returned the favor in full measure. This well articulated primary and secondary bibliography covers the complete canon and its critical reaction, with illuminating annotations complemented by a biographical sketch. Included also are three personal views of Parker-- by Joseph Bryan, III, Richard Lauterbach, and Wyatt Cooper. The accumulated evidence suggests that Parker should be considered a major figure in American letters not just America's wittiest woman who happened to write. Clean copy.

Softcover. Princeton NJ, Princeton University Press, reprint, 1996, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 521 pages. The fourth volume in Frank's monumental five part biography of the great Russian writer. Covers the six most remarkably productive years in the novelist's entire career. It was in this short span of time that Dostoevsky produced three of his greatest novels--Crime and Punishment, The Idiot, and The Devils--and two of his best novellas, The Gambler and The Eternal Husband. All these masterpieces were written in the midst of harrowing practical and economic circumstances, as Dostoevsky moved from place to place, frequently giving way to his passion for roulette. Having remarried and fled from Russia to escape importuning creditors and grasping dependents, he could not return for fear of being thrown into debtor's prison. He and his young bride, who twice made him a father, lived obscurely and penuriously in Switzerland, Germany, and Italy, as he toiled away at his writing, their only source of income. Clean copy.

Hardcover. Princeton NJ, Princeton University Press, reprint, 1976, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Good, Hardcover in a lightly worn dust jacket, 401 pages. The first volume in Frank's monumental five part biography of the great Russian writer. No date on copyright page. Clean copy.

Softcover. Princeton NJ, Princeton University Press, reprint, 1988, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover 395 pages. The third volume in Frank's monumental five part biography of the great Russian writer. This volume begins with the writer's return to Saint Petersburg after a ten-year Siberian exile and traces how his engagement in the cultural and social ferment of Russia in the early 1860s led to his discovery of the themes that would underlie his mature masterpieces. Clean copy.

Softcover. Princeton NJ, Princeton University Press, reprint, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover 320 pages. The second volume in Frank's monumental five part biography of the great Russian writer. No date on copyright page. Clean copy.

Hardcover. NY, Harcourt, Brace & World, 1st US, 1967, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Good, Hardcover in a lightly worn, chipped dust jacket, 259 pages, photographic frontispiece, 4 leaves of plates; original blue cloth over blue boards, gilt lettering on spine, Autobiography of the English writer and founder of the Hogarth Press with his wife Virginia Woolf. The fourth volume of the autobiography. Remainder line to edge, otherwise clean.

Hardcover. New Haven CT, Yale University Press, 1st, 2007, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover, 223 pages, 250 color illustrations. Betsy Beinecke Shirley, one of the great collectors of American children's literature, gathered a peerless collection of books, original illustrations, manuscripts, and ephemera. This gorgeously illustrated book presents over 200 selected original artworks from the enchanting collection she bequeathed to the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library of Yale University. Artists whose works are represented include many beloved favorites, among them Ludwig Bemelmans, Maurice Sendak, A. B. Frost, Wanda Gag, Peter Newell, N. C. Wyeth, Tony Sarg, Robert Lawson, and Johnny Gruelle. From variant illustrations for Goodnight Moon and Where the Wild Things Are to little-known sketches for nineteenth-century periodicals that delighted generations of children.

Hardcover. Washington DC, University Press of Washington D.C., 1st, 1953, Book: Good, Dust Jacket: Good,

Hardcover. New York, Seven Stories Press, 1st, 2008, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover, 127 pages, very clean and tight copy. With America ever under global scrutiny, Russell Banks contemplates the questions of our origins, values, heroes, conflicts, and contradictions. He writes with conversational ease and emotional insight, drawing on contemporary politics, literature, film, and his knowledge of American history.

NY, St. Martin's Press, 1st, 1981, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket. 227 pages. This second volume of the author's autobiography covers World War II and his stay at a Children's Home. Clean copy.