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Hardcover. London/NY, Springer , 1st, 2013, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover in glossy boards, 315 pages. This book is a study of the scientific revolution as a movement of amateur science. It describes the ideology of the amateur scientific societies as the philosophy of the Enlightenment Movement and their social structure and the way they made modern science such a magnificent institution. It also shows what was missing in the scientific organization of science and why it gave way to professional science in stages. In particular the book studies the contributions of Sir Francis Bacon and of the Hon. Robert Boyle to the rise of modern science. The philosophy of induction is notoriously problematic, yet its great asset is that it expressed the view of the Enlightenment Movement about science. This explains the ambivalence that we still exhibit towards Sir Francis Bacon whose radicalism and vision of pure and applied science still a major aspect of the fabric of society. Finally, the book discusses Boyle's philosophy, his agreement with and dissent from Bacon and the way he single-handedly trained a crowd of poorly educated English aristocrats and rendered them into an army of able amateur researchers. Clean, bright.

Hardcover. New York, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1st, 1993, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover, 249 pages. Orange cloth cover, minor wear to cover and dust jacket. Inside is clean and bright. A very tight copy. The Virgin Suicides announced the arrival of a major new American novelist. In a quiet suburb of Detroit, the five Lisbon sisters-beautiful, eccentric, and obsessively watched by the neighborhood boys-commit suicide one by one over the course of a single year. As the boys observe them from afar, transfixed, they piece together the mystery of the family's fatal melancholy, in this hypnotic and unforgettable novel of adolescent love, disquiet, and death. Jeffrey Eugenides evokes the emotions of youth with haunting sensitivity and dark humor and creates a coming-of-age story unlike any of our time. Adapted into a critically acclaimed film by Sofia Coppola, The Virgin Suicides is a modern classic, a lyrical and timeless tale of sex and suicide that transforms and mythologizes suburban middle-American life.

Hardcover. Lincoln NE, University of Nebraska Press, 1st, 2020, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket. Is there life after baseball? Starting from this simple question, The Wax Pack ends up with something much bigger and unexpected--a meditation on the loss of innocence and the gift of impermanence, for both Brad Balukjian and the former ballplayers he tracked down. To get a truly random sample of players, Balukjian followed this wildly absurd but fun-as-hell premise: he took a single pack of baseball cards from 1986 (the first year he collected cards), opened it, chewed the nearly thirty-year-old gum inside, gagged, and then embarked on a quest to find all the players in the pack. Clean copy.

Hardcover. North South Books, reprint, 2015, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, red cloth with cover label, gilt title on spine. The appeal of The Wizard of Oz is universal. Published in every major language, it has been enjoyed by children the world over. Now the inter-nationally acclaimed Viennese illustrator Lisbeth Zwerger brings her exceptional artistry and singular vision to a new edition of The Wizard of Oz. Her unique perspective, her blend of whimsy and grace, charm and imagination offer readers a view of Oz that is fantastic yet familiar, startling yet strangely satisfying. Her vision of Baum's timeless classic is sure to be treasured by young and old alike. Still in publisher's shrinkwrap.

Hardcover. Berkeley CA, Ten Speed Press, 1st, 2018, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, pictorial boards. An illustrated tour of the planet exploring ecosystems large and small, from reefs, deserts, and rainforests to a single drop of water. Making earth science accessible and entertaining through art, maps, and infographics, The Wondrous Workings of Planet Earth explains how our planet works-and how we can protect it-from its diverse ecosystems and their inhabitants, to the levels of ecology, the importance of biodiversity, the cycles of nature, and more. Clean copy.

Hardcover. NY, Edward W. Sweetman, reprint, 1963, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, tan cloth covers, 124 pages. First published in 1808, this is a facsimile reprint of the Second Edition from 1819 . The Young Sea Officer's Sheet Anchor became a standard guide throughout the 19th century in both England and the United States. Author Darcy Lever compiled the text for "a young gentleman whose inclinations at that time led him to the choice of a sea-faring life," and he later expanded its contents for the general use of young officers in the Royal Navy and East India Company. Starting with a precise explanation of the principles of rigging, the text proceeds to a well-defined account of a ship's operation through the effect of the wind on its sails. Tacking, use of a compass, the art of swinging a ship at single anchor, casting, and numerous other aspects of seamanship receive close attention and clear definitions. Detailed drawings accompany the ample directions for splicing ropes, making sails, and other practical measures; indeed, every other page of this book features clear, well-drawn illustrations of the procedure under discussion and its execution. Clean copy.

Hardcover. NY, Dutton, 1st US, 1969, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover, 80 pages of single and multiple panel humorous cartoons with sports and leisure themes.

Hardcover. NY, Dutton, 1st, 2014, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket. 399 pages, illustrations. SIGNED by actress Brooke Shields on a blank prelim page. A memoir of Shields life in modeling and acting through the prism of her complex relationship with her mother/manager. Brooke Shields never had what anyone would consider an ordinary life. She was raised by her Newark-tough single mom, Teri, a woman who loved the world of show business and was often a media sensation all by herself. Brooke's iconic modeling career began by chance when she was only eleven months old, and Teri's skills as both Brooke's mother and manager were formidable. But in private she was troubled and drinking heavily. As Brooke became an adult the pair made choices and sacrifices that would affect their relationship forever. And when Brooke's own daughters were born she found that her experience as a mother was shaped in every way by the woman who raised her. But despite the many ups and downs, Brooke was by Teri's side when she died in 2012, a loving daughter until the end. Clean copy.

Paperback. Fort Worth, TX, Amon Carter Mseum , 1st wraps, 1996, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 152 pages. 2l color, 83 B&W plates. Edited by Doreen Bolger and Sarah Cash. Clean, unmarked copy with only minor wear to wrappers. Examines a single painting that is now widely regarded as an American masterpiece: Swimming, completed in 1885 by the Philadelphia artist, Thomas Eakins (1844-1916).

Hardcover. NY, Abrams, 1st, 2023, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket, 265 pages illustrated in b&w. From Bill Griffith, creator of Zippy the Pinhead and Nobody's Fool, comes Three Rocks, a biography of cartoonist Ernie Bushmiller, creator of the iconic comic strip Nancy. But this graphic novel is about more than a single comic book artist. It is the story of this American art form, tracing its inception to 1895 with the Yellow Kid, the creation of Nancy in 1933, and all the strips that followed, including Peanuts and The Far Side. When Bushmiller died in 1982, Nancy was running in almost 900 daily newspapers--a number few syndicated cartoonists ever achieve. Nancy is hailed as the "perfect" comic strip by fans and cartoonists alike. The title Three Rocks refers to the trope of three hemispherical rocks often seen in a Bushmiller landscape--just enough to communicate environment to the reader. This distillation is exemplary of the iconic, diagrammatic look of Nancy, a comic strip about the nature of what it means to be a comic strip--the perfect avatar for Griffith to expand upon his philosophy of creating comics. Clean, bright copy.

Hardcover. NY, George H. Doran Company, 2nd pr., 1921, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, black cloth with orange lettering on the cover and spine, 433 pages. No colophon on title page or copyright page. Red top edge faded. This was Dos Passos' second book -- published when he was just 25 years old, and having spent the end of WWI as a volunteer with the ambulance corps in Spain and Italy during WWI. This is a profoundly anti-war book - and remains a high-water mark of realism in war writing. Second state with the correct "singing" on page 213. No dust jacket. Clean copy.

Hardcover. NY, powerHouse, 1st, 2002, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover, 112 pages. Time Frames, Michael Spano's long-awaited first monograph, catalogues the artist's exploration of spatial and temporal dimensions in photography. The book is divided into five chapters: Panoramas, Grids, Portraits, Multi-Exposures, and Diptychs; each employs a distinctive technical process to provide a new way of looking at life in New York City. Panoramas (1977-1983) show interacting urbanites moving through elongated frames as the lens of an extremely wide field camera pans during exposure. Grids (1980-1990) captures eight moments on a single negative as Spano moves through a sequence of events, pre-determinedly exposing a portion of the grid every four seconds. Portraits (1984-1990) focus on individual inhabitants transformed and etched out from their settings through the solarization and blurring forms into an atmospheric world. Multi-Exposures (1985-1998) combine solarizations with multiple perspectives. These single-negative layered compositions orchestrate and compress selected intervals of time and space into one image. Diptychs (1998-1999) fuse two distinct moments on one negative where scale, focal planes, and perspectives shift and comprise a dual image of urban spaces.

Hardcover. NY, Oxford University Press, 1st, 2011, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket. 336 pages, b&w illustrations. Author Larry Hamberlin guides us through this large but oft-forgotten repertoire of operatic novelties, and brings to life the rich humor and keen social criticism of the era. In the early twentieth-century, when new social forces were undermining the view that our European heritage was intrinsically superior to our native vernacular culture, opera-that great inheritance from our European forebearers-functioned in popular discourse as a signifier for elite culture. Tin Pan Opera shows that these operatic novelty songs availed this connection to a humorous and critical end. Combining traditional, European operatic melodies with the new and American rhythmic verve of ragtime, these songs painted vivid images of immigrant Americans, liberated women, and upwardly striving African Americans, striking emblems of the profound transformations that shook the United States at the beginning of the American century. Clean copy.

Hardcover. NY, Dutton, 1st, 2023, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket. The mysterious true story of Connie Converse--a mid-century New York City songwriter, singer, and composer whose haunting music never found broad recognition--and one writer's quest to understand her life This is the mesmerizing story of an enigmatic life. When musician and New Yorker contributor Howard Fishman first heard Connie Converse's voice on a recording, he was convinced she could not be real. Her recordings were too good not to know, and too out of place for the 1950s to make sense--a singer who seemed to bridge the gap between traditional Americana (country, blues, folk, jazz, and gospel), the Great American Songbook, and the singer-songwriter movement that exploded a decade later with Bob Dylan and Joni Mitchell. And then there was the bizarre legend about Connie Converse that had become the prevailing narrative of her life: that in 1974, at the age of fifty, she simply drove off one day and was never heard from again. Could this have been true? Who was Connie Converse, really?

Hardcover. London, Souvenir Press, 1st UK, 1986, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket, 192 pages. First-person accounts of life in a Japanese POW camp are not common, and illustrated memoirs are rare indeed. Searle, a young British art student, was captured at the fall of Singapore and spent the next four years covertly sketching his captors and fellow prisoners. His work matured as the war progressed, growing from merely facile to totally captivating. He grew skilled at suggesting personality, and many of his drawings are unforgettable. A brief personal narrative accompanies the portfolio, placing the works into historic perspective. Artistically as as well as historically, this book is a treat.

Softcover. Berkeley CA, University of California Press, 1st pbk., 1990, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 273 pages, b&w illustrations. The first in-depth analysis of the rich spiritual and artistic traditions of the Carib-speaking Yekuana Indians of Venezuela, who live in the dense rain forest of the upper Orinoco. Within their homeland of Ihuruna, the Yekuana have succeeded in maintaining the integrity and unity of their culture, resisting the devastating effects of acculturation that have befallen so many neighboring groups. Yet their success must be attributed to more than natural barriers of rapids and waterfalls, to more than lack of "contact" with our "modern" world. The ethnographic history recounted here includes not only the Spanish discovery of the Yekuana but detailed indigenous accounts of the entire history of Yekuana contact with Western culture, revealing an adaptive technique of mythopoesis by which the symbols of a new and hostile European ideology have been consistently defused through their incorporation into traditional indigenous structures. Clean copy.

Hardcover. London, Angus and Robertson, 1st UK, 1967, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a lightly worn dust jacket. General, minister of war, prime minister, and unrepentant ultranationalist, Hideki Tojo was the most powerful leader in the Japanese government during World War II. This clear and compelling portrait of Tojo illuminates the spartan, single-minded, incorruptible personality of the man who chose war rather than succumb to U.S.-induced economic strangulation. 20 photos. 288 pages. Clean copy.

Hardcover. NY, Phaidon Press, 1st, 2014, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket. 192 pages, B&w and color illustrations. The Anatomy of an Actor series takes ten roles by a single actor, each studied in a dedicated chapter, and identifies the key elements that made the performances exceptional - carefully examining the actor's craft for both a professional audience and movie fans alike. This title looks at Hollywood icon Tom Cruise. First cast by Francis Ford Coppola in The Outsiders (1983), he gained international notoriety in the mid-1980s thanks to Tony Scott's Top Gun (1986). One of the most sought-after actors, Cruise has oriented his career to blockbusters, with a predilection for action and science fiction, starring in such movies as Michael Mann's Collateral (2004), Steven Spielberg's War of the Worlds (2005), the Mission: Impossible series (1996, 2000, 2006, 2011) and Joseph Kosinski's Oblivion (2013). Still in publisher'sshrinkwrap.

Hardcover. NY, Crown, 1st, 1995, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket, 644 pages, b&w illustrations. After a protracted squabble over private papers with the playwright's estate, Leverich delivers this hefty first volume of a projected two-volume life of Tennessee Williams (1911-1983). In it, Leverich, who produced several of Williams's plays and calls himself Williams's "chosen biographer", covers the years through 1945, when The Glass Menagerie opened on Broadway. Treated are Williams's youth in Mississippi and St. Louis; the college years at the universities of Missouri and Iowa; bumming around (but always writing) in New Orleans and Greenwich Village; the disaster of his first Broadway play (it closed in Boston); script writing, or avoiding it, at MGM's Hollywood mill; and, finally, the evolution of Menagerie, a wonderfully detailed and dramatic case history in itself. Leverich's overworked conceit, which he restates at intervals, is that this is the life of Tom Williams, a "repressed puritan" poet, who in time created a more flamboyant public persona called Tennessee. A few matters are set straight. Leverich maintains his subject's active homosexual life started in his late 20s, later than Williams stated in his memoirs, and that his sister's infamous lobotomy came later than his mother claimed. Although the accumulation of information is impressive, the lower Leverich keeps his own profile and editorial commentary the better his book is, which means it is at its best when it simply reproduces Williams's sporadically kept journal. If you believe that all the details of a life are but preparation for a single event, in this case, the opening of a remarkable play, this is an impressively argued biography.

Hardcover. NY, Harper & Row, 1st, 1971, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover, 32 pages. Black & white illustrations by William Pene du Bois. Dust jacket price-clipped with light soiling, HarperCrest label on spine.

Hardcover. NY, Norton, 1st, 2011, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket. In Sawgamet, a north woods boomtown gone bust, the cold of winter breaks the glass of the schoolhouse thermometer, and the dangers of working in the cuts are overshadowed by the mysteries and magic lurking in the woods. Stephen, a pastor, is at home on the eve of his mother's funeral, thirty years after the mythic summer his grandfather returned to the town in search of his beloved but long-dead wife. And like his grandfather, Stephen is forced to confront the losses of his past. Touch introduces you to a world where monsters and witches oppose singing dogs and golden caribou, where the living and the dead part and meet again in the crippling beauty of winter and the surreal haze of summer.

Hardcover. NY, Dey Street Books/Morrow, 1st, 2024, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket, 437 pages. Celebrated NPR music critic Ann Powers explores the life and career of Joni Mitchell in a lyrical style as fascinating and ethereal as the songs of the artist herself. In Traveling, Powers seeks to understand Mitchell through her myriad journeys. Through extensive interviews with Mitchell's peers and deep archival research, she takes readers to rural Canada, mapping the singer's childhood battle with polio. She charts the course of Mitchell's musical evolution, ranging from early folk to jazz fusion to experimentation with pop synthetics. She follows the winding road of Mitchell's collaborations with other greats, and the loves that emerged along the way, all the way through to the remarkable return of Mitchell to music-making after the 2015 aneurysm that nearly took her life. Clean copy.

Hardcover. Taipei, The International Culture Press, 1st, 1970, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover, large folio format, 224 pages. Mostly b&w illustrations, some color. Calligraphy and painting.

Hardcover. NY, Dodd, Mead & Co., reprint, 1902, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, green cloth covers with elaborate gilt decoration to front cover and spine, top edge gilt. Design by Alice Cordelia Morse. 317 pages with 48 b&w plates. Selections from Dickens, Hugo, Ruskin, and many others. Originally published in 1898. Hinges cracked, Small ownership sticker to front fly leaf, otherwise a clean, tight copy.