sexuality

Hardcover. Hatje Cantz, 1st, 2013, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover with illustrated boards, 212 pages. Since the late 1970s, as a pioneer of Southern California underground culture, Raymond Pettibon has blurred the boundaries of "high" and "low," from the deviations of marginal youth to art history, literature, sports, religion, politics and sexuality. Rich in detail, his obsessively worked drawings pull freely from myriad sources spanning the cultural spectrum. The resulting, highly poetic constructions function as acute reflections of contemporary society. Throughout the years, his subjects have included political figures and historical events, with particular intensity since the events of September 11, 2001. Seen here are images of Ronald and Nancy Reagan, J. Edgar Hoover, both Bush presidents, the Kennedys, Hitler, scenes from the Vietnam War and protest movements, wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the prisoner abuse of Abu Ghraib, President Obama and Osama bin Laden. Raymond Pettibon (born 1957) studied economics at UCLA around the same time he joined his brother in the punk band Black Flag. He soon began to contribute artwork to album covers, flyers and t-shirts, for the band and its label, SST Records, and exhibited his work in group shows in galleries in the 1980s. Since the 1990s his work has been the subject of numerous major solo exhibitions.

Hardcover. London, Tate Publishing, 1st, 2012, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover, pictorial boards with an acetate dust wrapper, 304 pages. Warhol brought to the art world a unique awareness of the relationship that art might have with popular consumer culture and tabloid news, with celebrity, and with sexuality. Each of these themes is explored through visual dialogues between warhol and some sixty artists, among them John Baldessari, Vija Celmins, Gilbert & George, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Robert Gober, Nan Goldin, Damien Hirst, Alfredo Jaar, Deborah Kass, Alex Katz, Jeff Koons, Barbara Kruger, Glenn Ligon, Robert Mapplethorpe, Vik Muniz, Takashi Murakami, Bruce Nauman, Cady Noland, Elizabeth Peyton, Sigmar Polke, Richard Prince, Gerhard Richter, Ed Ruscha, Cindy Sherman and Luc Tuymans. Clean copy. DOMESTIC SHIPPING ONLY.

Hardcover. Lexington KY, University Press of Kentucky, 1st, 2014, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover, 328 pages, in a bright unclipped dust jacket, b&w illustrations. Noted for his charisma, talent, and striking good looks, director Rex Ingram (18931950) is ranked alongside D. W. Griffith, Marshall Neilan, and Erich von Stroheim as one of the greatest artists of the silent cinema. Ingram briefly studied sculpture at the Yale University School of Art after emigrating from Ireland to the United States in 1911; but he was soon seduced by the new medium of moving pictures and abandoned his studies for a series of jobs in the film industry. Over the next decade, he became one of the most popular directors in Hollywood, directing smash hits such as The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse (1921), The Prisoner of Zenda (1922), and Scaramouche (1923). n Rex Ingram, Ruth Barton explores the life and legacy of the pioneering filmmaker, following him from his childhood in Dublin to his life at the top of early Hollywood's A-list and his eventual self-imposed exile on the French Riviera. Ingram excelled in bringing visions of adventure and fantasy to eager audiences, and his films made stars of actors like Rudolph Valentino, Ramon Novarro, and Alice Terry-his second wife and leading lady. With his name a virtual guarantee of box office success, Ingram's career flourished in the 1920s despite the constraints of an increasingly regulated industry and the hostility of Louis B. Mayer, who regarded him as a dangerous maverick.Barton examines the virtuoso director's career and controversial personal life-including his conversion to Islam, the rumors surrounding his ambiguous sexuality, and the circumstances of his untimely death. This definitive biography not only restores the visionary filmmaker to the spotlight but also provides an absorbing look at the daring and exhilarating days of silent-era Hollywood.

Hardcover. NY, W. W. Norton, 1st, 2000, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket, 464 pages, b&w illustrations. Johnson's exquisitely researched and beautifully written book starts with the premise that the Southern mines during the early years of the California Gold Rush (1948-1852) were "a grand field for human interaction and connectedness." They were a kind of experiment in human relations, and Johnson points the spot light on the dynamic and flexible quality of race, gender, and sexuality. She argues that the social world of the gold rush - the organization of domestic labor, the leisure pursuits, and gaming activities (both mining and gambling) - reflected a topsy-turvy world not at all comfortable with itself. Johnson tells a story whereby the gold rush, particularly the relationships that developed in the more diverse and less wealthy Southern mines, created a crisis of racial and gender representation that only sorted itself out with the collusion of Anglo miners and the authority of the state. Johnson notes that Anglo miners, "Conflated their daily lives with a project of national expansion and economic growth infused with notions of progress and 'manifest destiny.'" In this way, Johnson explains the messy and not uncontested work of colonization and racial dominance, and she does so with an eye to the function of gender and sexuality. Clean copy.

Hardcover. Schirmer/Mosel, reprint, 2010, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover, 108 pages. A classic, indeed perhaps the best of the Mapplethorpe books. And for many most certainly the most typical Mapplethorpe, now available once again thanks to this re-edition. The Black Book, first published in 1986, presents 96 formally stringent and highly erotic nudes, all of them photographs of black men, either as full figures, or staged as details, as fragments of their bodies. Stylized as classical statues or provocatively in all their presence and sensuous radiance. Black-and-white photography was Mapplethorpe's preferred medium. And his obsessive aesthetics was based on completely mastering it, as this enabled him to visualize any number of tonal gradations and penetrate deep into the very pores of the gleaming black skin. It is a method that reached a climax in these images. The Black Book, Mapplethorpe s homage to the black male body, has always been one of the most important visual contributions to the discussion on beauty, sensuality, and sexuality in photography.

Hardcover. NY, Columbia University Press, 1st, 1989, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket. INSCRIBED BY THE AUTHOR on the red front fly leaf. With penetrating insight Combs-Schilling illuminates the remarkable survival of one of the world's oldest monarchies, still ruling after 1200 years. The author unravels the paradox of this ancient yet progressive institution that has weathered invasion, economic collapse, and colonial assault. The pillars of stability for which political analysts typically search -- military strength, bureaucratic control, and commercial prosperity -- have often been absent in Morocco, sometimes for centuries. How then has the monarchy stood firm? In this remarkable book, Combs-Schilling argues that the answer is to be found in the distinctive forms of ritual practice developed during times of great crises. Unique among Islamic governments, the Moroccan monarchy became cnetral to the popular celebrations of the most sacred rituals of Islam, cloaking itself in their sanctity. Combs-Schilling breaks new ground in thinking about ritual. The author explores the consequences of the replication and reinforcement of Morocco's national ceremonies in villages and homes and the metaphorical equivalence thereby built. The author outlines how ritual metaphors simultaneously fuse the monarchy with the hallowed prophets of Islam and the mundane structures of family life.

Hardcover. Phildelphia, W.B. Saunders Company, 1st, 1953, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, red cloth binding with spine labeling in black and gilt. Clean text; 842 pages, indexed; with bibliography and appendices. Title page with 1953 and no other printings indicated so assumed first printing. Based on data collected from 8,000 females, this book covers all aspects of sexuality as it relates to the human female. Owner's small embossed stamp on front fly leaf, otherwise clean. No dust jacket.

Hardcover. Philadelphia, J.B. Lippincott, 1st, 1951, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, red and blue cloth with black stamping, 334 pages. Clean copy. Portraying the dark, authoritarian side of the utopian dream, this classic novel tells the story of the Reverend Harmston, a man devoted to building a microsociety in which there is a balance between the order that is necessary to produce livelihood and the freedom to fully explore sexuality. Setting up a commune in the remote Guyanese forest with the creed, "Hard work, frank love, and wholesome play," the reverend attempts to construct an ideal society that opens up cross-cultural dialogue between the spirit of European enlightenment and the culture of the native Amerindians. Underneath its generally comic tone, however, there are notes of a darker spirit at play--such as Harmston's unquestioned authority and the brutal punishments he hands out--that eerily foreshadow the actual 1978 Jonestown Massacre, a violent event that occurred 27 years after the novel's initial publication.

Hardcover. NY, Thames & Hudson, 1st, 2013, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket, still in publisher's shrink wrap. Celebrates the height of Weimar cinema through images and commentaries on more than seventy of its finest filmsBetween the First and Second World Wars, Germany under the Weimar Republic was the scene of one of the most creative periods in film history. Through the silent era to the early years of sound, the visual flair and technical innovation of its filmmakers set an international standard for the powerful possibilities of cinema as an art form, with movies such as The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, Nosferatu, Metropolis, and M building a legacy that shaped the world of film.Here is a showcase of more than seventy films, selected to give a wide-ranging overview of Weimar cinema at its finest. Every genre is represented, from escapist comedies and musicals to gritty depictions of contemporary city life, from period dramas to fantastical visions of the future, with themes such as sexuality and social issues tackled by iconic stars like Marlene Dietrich and Louise Brooks. A wealth of film stills captures the bold vision of great directors like Fritz Lang and Ernst Lubitsch, while the text sets the historical scene and gives intriguing insights into what the films meant to the society that created them.

Hardcover. New York, W W Norton & Co Inc, 1st, 1989, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover, 568 pages. Clean, unmarked copy in excellent condition. Profiles the enigmatic soldier, statesman, and man of letters, offering a wealth of never-before-published missives that shed light on his role in the Arab revolt, his sexuality, and his retreat into obscurity.

Hardcover. New Jersey, Princeton University Press, 1st, 1999, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, 302 pages. Hardcover. B/w illustrations throughout. Red endpapers. Decorated cover boards, black quarter cloth, gilt title on spine. An innovative exploration of the place of the erotic in Renaissance art and culture, focusing on a notorious set of images created by the young Italian master Giulio Romano. Clean copy.

Hardcover. NY, W. W. Norton, 1st, 2014, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket, 765 pages, b&w illustrations. John Lahr has produced a theater biography like no other. Tennessee Williams: Mad Pilgrimage of the Flesh gives intimate access to the mind of one of the most brilliant dramatists of his century, whose plays reshaped the American theater and the nation's sense of itself. This astute, deeply researched biography sheds a light on Tennessee Williams's warring family, his guilt, his creative triumphs and failures, his sexuality and numerous affairs, his misreported death, even the shenanigans surrounding his estate. With vivid cameos of the formative influences in Williams's life-his fierce, belittling father Cornelius; his puritanical, domineering mother Edwina; his demented sister Rose, who was lobotomized at the age of thirty-three; his beloved grandfather, the Reverend Walter Dakin-Tennessee Williams: Mad Pilgrimage of the Flesh is as much a biography of the man who created A Streetcar Named Desire, The Glass Menagerie, and Cat on a Hot Tin Roof as it is a trenchant exploration of Williams's plays and the tortured process of bringing them to stage and screen. The portrait of Williams himself is unforgettable: a virgin until he was twenty-six, he had serial homosexual affairs thereafter as well as long-time, bruising relationships with Pancho Gonzalez and Frank Merlo. With compassion and verve, Lahr explores how Williams's relationships informed his work and how the resulting success brought turmoil to his personal life. Lahr captures not just Williams's tempestuous public persona but also his backstage life, where his agent Audrey Wood and the director Elia Kazan play major roles, and Marlon Brando, Anna Magnani, Bette Davis, Maureen Stapleton, Diana Barrymore, and Tallulah Bankhead have scintillating walk-on parts. This is a biography of the highest order: a book about the major American playwright of his time written by the major American drama critic of his time.

Softcover. Philadelphia, University of Pennsylvania Press, 1st pbk, 1998, Book: Very Good, Softcover, 330 pages. Twelve literary scholars and historians investigate the ways in which space and place are politically, religiously, and culturally inflected. Exploring medieval texts as diverse as Icelandic sagas, Ptolemy's Geography, and Mandeville's Travels, the contributors illustrate the intimate connection between geographical conceptions and the mastery of land, the assertion of doctrine, and the performance of sexuality. Clean copy.

Softcover. Berkeley CA, University of California Press, reprint, 1987, Book: Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 242 pages. Scholars have only recently discovered that the human body itself has a history. Not only has it been perceived, interpreted, and represented differently in different epochs, but it has also been lived differently, brought into being within widely dissimilar material cultures, subjected to various technologies and means of control, and incorporated into different rhythms of production and consumption, pleasure and pain. The eight articles in this volume support, supplement, and explore the significance of these insights. They belong to a new historical endeavor that derives partly from the crossing of historical with anthropological investigations, partly from social historians' deepening interest in culture, partly from the thematization of the body in modern philosophy (especially phenomenology), and partly from the emphasis on gender, sexuality, and women's history that large numbers of feminist scholars have brought to all disciplines. Lightly worn copy, clean, solid binding.

Hardcover. Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1st, 2017, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket, 541 pages. b&w illustrations. As Joel Dinerstein reveals in this book, cool began as a stylish defiance of racism, a challenge to suppressed sexuality, a philosophy of individual rebellion, and a youthful search for social change. Through portraits of iconic figures, Dinerstein illuminates the cultural connections and artistic innovations among Lester Young, Humphrey Bogart, Robert Mitchum, Billie Holiday, Frank Sinatra, Jack Kerouac, Albert Camus, Marlon Brando, and James Dean, among others. We eavesdrop on conversations among John-Paul Sartre, Simone De Beauvoir, and Miles Davis, and on a forgotten debate between Lorraine Hansberry and Norman Mailer over the 'white negro' and Black cool. We come to understand how the cool worlds of Beat writers and Method actors emerged from the intersections of film noir, jazz, and existentialism. Clean copy.

Hardcover. Astra House, 1st, 2022, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket. 288 pages. In these confessional pages, women control their own bodies and desires, work toward healing their painful pasts, and learn to assert their sexual power. Weaving a rich tapestry of experiences with a sex positive outlook, The Sex Lives of African Women is an empowering, subversive book that celebrates the liberation, individuality, and joy of African women's multifaceted sexuality. From a queer community in Egypt, to polyamorous life in Senegal, and a reflection on the intersection of religion and pleasure in Cameroon, feminist author Nana Darkoa Sekyiamah explores the many layers of love and desire, its expression, and how it defines who we are.

Hardcover. Philadelphia, David McKay, reprint, 1889, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, terra cotta cloth stamped in black and gilt, 362 pages including index. Originally published in 1878, this is the 1889 New Edition with final corrections and additions. A Victorian era study of male sexuality. Clean copy.

Hardcover. Seattle, Fantagraphics, 1st, 2023, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, pictorial boards. In 1972, underground cartoonists Joyce Farmer and Lyn Chevli produced Tits & Clits - a funny, rowdy, raucous underground comix series about female sexuality that one reviewer described as "the ultimate in vaginal politics" - and became the first American women ever credited with writing, drawing, and publishing their own comic books. A feminist answer to Zap, Tits & Clits quickly became an anthology showcase for other women cartoonists, featuring the work of Mary Fleener, Roberta Gregory, Krystine Kryttre, Lee Marrs, Carel Moiseiwitsch, Trina Robbins, Dori Seda, among others. Like other underground comix, Tits & Clits leaned into being lewd in order to satirize women's experiences with so-called sexual liberation. Featuring stories about birth control, abortion, menstruation, masturbation, and more, Tits & Clits featured intimate politics which occasionally clashed with contemporaneous feminist concepts about sex and sexuality. As Chevli put it: their work had something to offend everyone. (In 1973, conservative legal authorities in Orange County deemed their work pornographic and even threatened the two editors with arrest on obscenity charges.)Now, for the first time in half a century, a new generation of readers will be shocked, entertained, enlightened, and scandalized by the bold satirical cartoonists that comprised the band of sisters in Tits & Clits. In addition to reprinting the seven-issue run of the Tits & Clits series, this collection also includes in their entirety two classic solo comics from 1972 written and drawn by Farmer and Chevli - Abortion Eve and Pandora's Box. Also included is an introductory essay providing context to Tits & Clits' place in the history of women's cartooning by the book's editor, Samantha Meie

Hardcover. NY, Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1st US, 2012, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket. Full number line down to and including 1. In grey boards with blue type to spine. Searching for an inn, the enigmatic traveler Hans stops in a small city on the border between Saxony and Prussia. The next morning, Hans meets an old organ-grinder in the market square and immediately finds himself enmeshed in an intense debate-on identity and what it is that defines us-from which he cannot break free. Indefinitely stuck in Wandernburg until his debate with the organ-grinder is concluded, he begins to meet the various characters who populate the town, including a young freethinker named Sophie. Though she is engaged to be married, Sophie and Hans begin a relationship that defies contemporary mores about female sexuality and what can and cannot be said about it. Traveler of the Century is a deeply intellectual novel, chock-full of discussions about philosophy, history, literature, love, and translation. It is a book that looks to the past in order to have us reconsider the conflicts of our present. The winner of Spain's prestigious Alfaguara Prize and the National Critics Prize, Traveler of the Century marks the English-language debut of Andres Neuman, a writer described by Roberto Bolano as being "touched by grace." Clean copy.

Hardcover. Minneapolis, Twenty-First Century Books, 1sy, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket, 96 pages illustrated in color. For most of human history, the garments women wore under their clothes were hidden. The earliest underwear provided warmth and protection. But eventually, women's undergarments became complex structures designed to shape their bodies to fit the fashion ideals of the time. In the modern era, undergarments are out in the open, from the designer corsets Madonna wore on stage to Beyonce's pregnancy announcement on Instagram. This feminist exploration of women's underwear reveals the intimate role lingerie plays in defining women's bodies, sexuality, gender identity, and body image. It is a story of control and restraint but also female empowerment and self-expression. You will never look at underwear the same way again. Clean copy.

Hardcover. Columbia OH, Ohio State University Press, 1st, 2008, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, 368 pages. Hardcover with no dust jacket. Clean, unmarked copy with only minor wear to corners. While "freaks" have captivated our imagination since well before the nineteenth century, the Victorians flocked to shows featuring dancing dwarves, bearded ladies, "missing links," and six-legged sheep. Indeed, this period has been described by Rosemarie Garland-Thomson as the epoch of "consolidation" for freakery: an era of social change, enormously popular freak shows, and taxonomic frenzy. Victorian Freaks: The Social Context of Freakery in Britain, edited by Marlene Tromp, turns to that rich nexus, examining the struggle over definitions of "freakery" and the unstable and sometimes conflicting ways in which freakery was understood and deployed. As the first study centralizing British culture, this collection discusses figures as varied as Joseph Merrick, "The Elephant Man"; Daniel Lambert, "King of the Fat Men"; Julia Pastrana, "The Bear Woman"; and Laloo "The Marvellous Indian Boy" and his embedded, parasitic twin. The Victorian Freaks contributors examine Victorian culture through the lens of freakery, reading the production of the freak against the landscape of capitalist consumption, the medical community, and the politics of empire, sexuality, and art. Collectively, these essays ask how freakery engaged with notions of normalcy and with its Victorian cultural context.

Hardcover. NY, Norton, 1st, 2020, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket. Effortlessly blending biography, criticism, and memoir, National Book Award-winning poet and best-selling memoirist Mark Doty explores his personal quest for Walt Whitman. Mark Doty has always felt haunted by Walt Whitman's bold, perennially new American voice, and by his equally radical claims about body and soul and what it means to be a self. In What Is the Grass, Doty--a poet, a New Yorker, and an American--keeps company with Whitman and his Leaves of Grass, tracing the resonances between his own experience and the legendary poet's life and work. What is it then between us? Whitman asks. In search of an answer, Doty explores spaces--both external and internal--where he finds the poet's ghost. He meditates on desire, love, and the mysterious wellsprings of the poet's enduring work: a radical experience of transformation and enlightenment, queer sexuality, and an obsession with death, as well as unabashed love for a great city and for the fresh, rowdy character of American speech. In riveting close readings threaded with personal memoir and illuminated by awe, Doty reveals the power of Whitman's persistent presence in his life and in the American imagination at large. Clean copy.

Hardcover. NY, Abrams, 1st, 2015, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, 220 pages. Will Eisner (1917-2005) is universally considered the master of comics storytelling, best known for The Spirit, his iconic newspaper comic strip, and A Contract With God, the first significant graphic novel. This seminal work from 1978 ushered in a new era of personal stories in comics form that touched every adult topic from mortality to religion and sexuality, forever changing the way writers and artists approached comics storytelling. Noted historian Paul Levitz celebrates Eisner by showcasing his most famous work along-side unpublished and rare materials from the family archives. Also included are original interviews with creators such as Jules Feiffer, Art Spiegelman, Scott McCloud, Jeff Smith, Denis Kitchen, and Neil Gaiman--all of whom knew Eisner and were inspired by his work to create their own graphic novels for a new generation of readers.

Softcover. Gloucester MA, Rockport Publishers, 1st, 2003, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 192 pages. Sex sells. It?s one of the oldest and most effective tricks in the book. The challenge for graphic designers, however, is to incorporate sexuality into their work in ways that are classy rather than coarse, sensual rather than smutty, provocative rather than pornographic. This arresting volume shows how top graphic designers have leveraged the universal notion of sex to create attention-grabbing yet high-quality artistic work. Covering every medium, from print to the Web, Sex Graphics showcases images that incorporate sex in ways that range from subtle to clever to shocking. Some images hint at the act of sex itself; others flirt with humorous stereotypes. Some exude romantic overtones, and others, erotic ones. Some speak to adults, others to teens.