Hardcover. NY, Library of America, 1st, 1995, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket, 1199 pages, ribbon marker. In Raymond Chandler's hands, the pulp crime story became a haunting mystery of power and corruption, set against a modern cityscape both lyrical and violent. Now Chandler joins the authoritative Library of America series in a comprehensive two-volume set displaying all the facets of his brilliant talent. In his first novel, The Big Sleep (1939), the classic private eye finds his full-fledged form as Philip Marlowe: at once tough, independent, brash, disillusioned, and sensitive--and man of weary honor threading his way (in Chandler's phrase) "down these mean streets" among blackmailers, pornographers, and murderers for hire.In Farewell, My Lovely (1940), Chandler's personal favorite among his novels, Marlowe's search for a missing woman leads him from shanties and honky-tonks to the highest reaches of power, encountering an array of richly drawn characters. The High Window (1942), about a rare coin that becomes a catalyst by which a hushed-up crime comes back to haunt a wealthy family, is partly a humorous burlesque of pulp fiction. All three novels show Chandler at a peak of verbal inventiveness and storytelling drive. Stories and Early Novels also includes every classic noir story from the 1930s that Chandler did not later incorporate into a novel--thirteen in all, among them such classics as "Red Wind," "Finger Man," The King in Yellow," and "Trouble Is My Business." Drawn from the pages of Black Mask and Dime Detective, these stories show how Chandler adapted the violent conventions of the pulp magazine--with their brisk exposition and rapid-fire dialogue--to his own emerging vision of twentieth-century America. Clean copy.
Hardcover. NY, NYRB, 1st, 2025, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover in pictorial boards, 166 pages, color throughout. Rea Irvin was The New Yorker's first art editor and creator of the magazine's iconic mascot, the butterfly enthusiast Eustace Tilley. In 1930, he ventured into new territory with the comic strip The Smythes. The Smythes--comprised of John, Margie, and their two forgettable children, Willie and Maudie--are a nice-ish suburban family, restless in their social stature, and eager to climb a sometimes wobbly social ladder. Irvin's distinct, graceful line renders the Smythes in all their glory and hilarity as they navigate ill-fated dinner parties with pompous socialites, fend off robbers dressed as Santa, and get chased out of restaurants by cleaver-wielding chefs. The Smythes drolly captures the joys, heartbreaks, and humiliations of being in a family. Handpicked by acclaimed cartoonists R. Kikuo Johnson and Dash Shaw--who also penned the introduction together--this new selection of Smythes strips also includes an enlightening afterword by comics historian Caitlin McGurk. An unsung masterpiece of cartooning, The Smythes is finally available to a new generation of readers ready to marvel at the full reach of Irvin's artistic abilities. Clean copy.
Hardcover. Seattle, Fantagraphics Books, 1st, 2016, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, 159 pages. Hardcover with laminated boards. Clean, tight copy with color illustrations throughout. Inspired by magazines like Mad and traditional superhero comics, Real Deal magazine was a self-published,independent comic book created in the 1990s by Lawrence Hubbard (a.k.a "RawDog") and H.P. McElwee (a.k.a. "R.D. Bone"). Peopled with a cast out of a blaxploitation movie - convicts, hustlers, drug addicts,crack whores, car thieves,and murderers - these cult-classic comics straddle the line between satirizing and showing the harsh realities of urban life.
Hardcover. Seattle, WA, Fantagraphics, 1st, 2016, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, 256 pages. Hardcover with dust jacket. Clean, unmarked copy with only minor wear to dust jacket. Black and white pictures throughout. Founded by Paul Krassner, "The Realist" was a satirical magazine that took aim at American culture during the period of 1958 to 2001. Paul Krassner collaborates with Fantagraphics to create a collection of the best of "The Realist" drawings with contributions by R. Crumb, Art Spiegelman, S. Clay Wilson, Jay Lynch, Wallace Wood and others. Illustrated front board, 291 pages plus annotations, black/white and 2-color images. Volume numbers and year published accompanies each cartoon.
Softcover. Washington,DC, U.S. War & Navy Dept., 1st, 1944, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Issues for May-Aug. Dec. 1944. A magazine devoted to identifying war planes and ships. Many photos and drawings. 50 pages each. Allied & enemy planes covered. Light wear otherwise solid & clean.
Hardcover. Boston, Houghton Mifflin, 1st, 1954, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Good, Hardcover, 272 pages, b&w illustrations. Kirkland was a photographer for Life magazine when it started in 1937. Dust jacket with edge wear, chipping.
Hardcover. NY, Knopf, 1st, 2009, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover, 352 pages. In this chatty, self-absorbed memoir told with a hefty dose of name-dropping and a devout reverence for fame and fortune, British interior decorator Haslam proudly reveals his intimate connections with many members of British and American high society from the 1950s to the present, from his distant relation to Princess Diana to his brief but adoring encounters with Tallulah Bankhead, Mick Jagger, the Beatles, Joan Crawford, and many more. Indeed his busy social life started young; for most of the first hundred pages he is a fairly wide-eyed ingenue at Eton, followed by stints in London, New York, California, and back to London as a magazine editor, interior designer, and columnist. His has been a life where everyone and everything is darling and divine; in his world, elevator doors open to reveal Salvador Dali, and Andy Warhol is a frequent and amusing dinner companion. While claiming to be telling all, Haslam hides most of what makes many memoirs truly personal and affecting; in exchange readers get a chance to feel as if they are on a first-name basis with the stars. His superficial obsession with high society is, still, highly entertaining and refreshingly honest, and will delight those who travel in international circles of design and fashion.
Hardcover. NY, The Modern Library, 1st, 2004, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, price-clipped dust jacket. 344 pages. Food articles collected from Gourmet Magazine, dispatched from Paris over the last 60 years and published together in print for the first time. Clean copy.
Hardcover. Cambridge MA, MIT Press, 2nd Pr., 1994, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover, 251 pages, with her photo-illustrated dust jacket. Who speaks? Who is silent? Who is seen? Who is absent? These questions focus on how cultures are constructed through pictures and words, how we are seduced into a world of appearances: into a pose of who we are and aren't. On both an emotional and an economic level, images and texts have the power to make us rich or poor. In these essays and reviews, written over the last decade, Barbara Kruger addresses that power with intelligence and wit, in the hope of engaging both our criticality and our dreams of affirmation.Barbara Kruger is an artist whose pictures and words engage issues of power, sex, money, difference, and death. Her work has appeared throughout America, Europe, and Japan in galleries, newspapers, magazines, and museums and on billboards, matchbooks, TV programs, t-shirts, postcards, and shopping bags. She has written about television, film, and cultures for Artforum, Esquire, the New York Times, and the Village Voice.
Hardcover. Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1st, 2006, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in bright, unclipped dust jacket. 575 pages, b&w illustrations. Stephen Kercher here provides the first comprehensive look at the satiric humor that flourished in the United States during the 1950s and early 1960s. Focusing on an impressive range of comedy--not just standup comedians of the day but also satirical publications like MAD magazine, improvisational theater groups such as Second City, the motion picture Dr. Strangelove, and TV shows like That Was the Week That Was--Kercher reminds us that the postwar era saw varieties of comic expression that were more challenging and nonconformist than we commonly remember. His history of these comedic luminaries shows that for a sizeable audience of educated, middle-class Americans who shared such liberal views, the period's satire was a crucial mode of cultural dissent. For such individuals, satire was a vehicle through which concerns over the suppression of civil liberties, Cold War foreign policies, blind social conformity, and our heated racial crisis could be productively addressed. Clean copy.
Hardcover. Chicago, Art Institute of Chicago, 1st, 2017, Book: Very Good, Hardcover,324 pages. Published on the centenary of the Russian Revolution, this landmark book gathers information from the forefront of current research in early Soviet art, providing a new understanding of where art was presented, who saw it, and how the images incorporated and conveyed Soviet values. More than 350 works are grouped into areas of critical importance for the production, reception, and circulation of early Soviet art: battlegrounds, schools, the press, theaters, homes and storefronts, factories, festivals, and exhibitions. Paintings by El Lissitzky and Liubov Popova are joined by sculptures, costumes and textiles, decorative arts, architectural models, books, magazines, films, and more. Also included are rare and important artifacts, among them a selection of illustrated children's notes by Joseph Stalin's daughter, Svetlana Allilueva, as well as reproductions of key exhibition spaces such as the legendary Obmokhu (Constructivist) exhibition in 1921; Aleksandr Rodchenko's 'Workers' Club in 1925; and a Radio-Orator kiosk for live, projected, and printed propaganda designed by Gustav Klutsis in 1922. Bountifully illustrated, this book offers an unprecedented, cross-disciplinary analysis of two momentous decades of Soviet visual culture.
Hardcover. Chicago, Art Institute of Chicago, 1st, 2017, Book: Very Good, Hardcover,324 pages. Published on the centenary of the Russian Revolution, this landmark book gathers information from the forefront of current research in early Soviet art, providing a new understanding of where art was presented, who saw it, and how the images incorporated and conveyed Soviet values. More than 350 works are grouped into areas of critical importance for the production, reception, and circulation of early Soviet art: battlegrounds, schools, the press, theaters, homes and storefronts, factories, festivals, and exhibitions. Paintings by El Lissitzky and Liubov Popova are joined by sculptures, costumes and textiles, decorative arts, architectural models, books, magazines, films, and more. Also included are rare and important artifacts, among them a selection of illustrated children's notes by Joseph Stalin's daughter, Svetlana Allilueva, as well as reproductions of key exhibition spaces such as the legendary Obmokhu (Constructivist) exhibition in 1921; Aleksandr Rodchenko's 'Workers' Club in 1925; and a Radio-Orator kiosk for live, projected, and printed propaganda designed by Gustav Klutsis in 1922. Bountifully illustrated, this book offers an unprecedented, cross-disciplinary analysis of two momentous decades of Soviet visual culture.
Softcover. New York , Monacelli Press, 1st, 2000, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 224 pages, color illustrations throughout by Robert Risko. These celebrity caricatures are instantly recognizable -- recognizable both as unmistakable portraits of famous subjects and as examples of Risko's bold and fluid style. Risko's career was launched in 1978 when Andy Warhol gave him an assignment for Interview magazine. Since then he has drawn likenesses of hundreds of notables from the worlds of film, television, politics, and culture. In addition to countless images for Vanity Fair, Rolling Stone, The New Yorker, and other major magazines, Risko has illustrated book jackets, video covers, movie posters, and CD packages. Very good plus.
Softcover. New York , Monacelli Press, 1st, 2000, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 224 pages, color illustrations throughout by Robert Risko. These celebrity caricatures are instantly recognizable -- recognizable both as unmistakable portraits of famous subjects and as examples of Risko's bold and fluid style. Risko's career was launched in 1978 when Andy Warhol gave him an assignment for Interview magazine. Since then he has drawn likenesses of hundreds of notables from the worlds of film, television, politics, and culture. In addition to countless images for Vanity Fair, Rolling Stone, The New Yorker, and other major magazines, Risko has illustrated book jackets, video covers, movie posters, and CD packages. Very good plus.
Hardcover. NY, Abrams, 1st, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover, 272 pages. Reproduces all 728 of the magazine's covers and includes behind-the-scenes stories and excerpts from articles and interviews with the idols of rock and rythym-and-blues.
Hardcover. Boston, Little Brown & Co, reprint, 1982, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Illustrated boards, 96 pages. A collection of Searle's cat cartoons,and caricatures. Some of these drawings were originally published as covers on the New Yorker magazine. Others in this anthology have been previously published in The Square Egg, More Cats, Searle's Zoodiac and the monograph Ronald Searle.
Hardcover. New York , Parents Magazine Press, 1st, 1969, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, 48 pages with b&w photos by Gloir Kitt Lindauer and Carmel Roth. Clean, bright copy with unclipped dust jacket, $3.95. Mild soil to jacket.
Hardcover. Boston, Houghton Mifflin, reprint, 1918, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Good, Hardcover, gray/green cloth stamped with a black and white design. In a dust jacket with two chunks gone from spine. A naturalist ruminates on birds (mostly) and woodchucks in these essays on wildlife. B&w illustrations by R. Bruce Horsfall,Most of these pieces were previously published in magazines.
Hardcover. NY, Parents' Magazine Press, 1st, 1970, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Pictorial boards. Non-Paginated. Full color illustrations by Friso Henstra. Clean, tight copy. No dust jacket. An enormously fat Sultan is told he will die in 40 days, so he frets his poundage away. Delightful story about losing weight, eat less & you'll do it!
Hardcover. London, PS publishers, 1st, 2015, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover with no dust jacket. Clean, unmarked copy with only minor wear to covers. Color and Black and white pictures throughout. Originally published in magazine form in All Top Comics 8-18, Tegra/Zegra Aug 1948 - Apr 1949, and Seven Seas Comics 1-6.
Hardcover. New York, Parent's Magazine Press, 1st, 1971, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Non-paginated. Hardcover with no dust jacket. Color illustrations by Edward Gorey. Clean, tight copy.
Hardcover. NY, Random House, 1st, 2000, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket. The New Yorker magazine named Matt Klam one of the twenty best young writers in America, and the seven stories that comprise Sam the Cat are all the proof we need. Knowing, perceptive, and wickedly funny, Matt Klam loves his characters but spares them nothing: the swaggering womanizer Sam falls in love with a woman across a crowded room who, upon closer inspection, turns out to be not quite what he expected; a self-doubting young professional attends the posh wedding of his successful friend and delivers a disastrous toast; the chicken one man's girlfriend is preparing for dinner comes to embody the darkly corrosive element in their relationship. These stories crackle with humor, intelligence and style and add up to an outrageously funny, unforgettable debut. Clean copy.
Softcover. London, Strange Attractor Press, 1st, 2012, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, oblong format, pictorial wrappers. B&w art. Collected together for the first time, these Trip or Squeek strips offer acerbic, lysergic and razor sharp observations on music, art and life. Featuring extensive notes, a discography and never-before-seen preparatory sketches by Savage Pencil, and an illustrated foreword by artist Gary Panter.Savage Pencil's Trip or Squeek strips have been appearing in music magazine The Wire since 2002.