singers

Hardcover. Lunenburg VT, Stinehour Press, 1st, 1979, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, green cloth with gilt lettering and color label on front cover. 165 pages, b&w photos. Hildegarde Lasell was a concert singer. "Miss Lasell sang with refinement and cultivation," commented a reviewer in 1936, "she is obviously a serious student of the meaning and values of the music she interprets." She appeared in her husband's two short avant-garde films. She played Madeline Usher in the silent horror film The Fall of the House of Usher (1928),and Lot's wife in the Biblical adaptation Lot in Sodom (1933).In the 1950s, she persuaded composer Alec Wilder to write an original soundtrack for the 1928 film. Watson was vice-president of the Rochester (NY)Historical Society, and wrote the history of the society's Woodside mansion in 1962. She received a medal from the Rochester Museum and Science Center in 1972, alongside fellow recipients including Robert Jastrow, Roger Tory Peterson, and Yousuf Karsh. Her memoir, The Edge of the Woods: A Memoir (1979) was published posthumously. Some of her correspondence with poet Marianne Moore was also published posthumously. Limited to 1,000 copies. Clean.

Hardcover. NY, Mason/Charter, 1st, 1976, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket, 181 pages, b&w photos. The life story of the 1930's Hollywood superstar, who is still popular today. Clean copy.

Hardcover. NY, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1st, 2015, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket. Paris, the City of Light, the city of fine dining and seductive couture and intellectual hauteur, was until fairly recently always accompanied by its shadow: the city of the poor, the outcast, the criminal, the eccentric, the willfully nonconforming. In The Other Paris, Luc Sante gives us a panoramic view of that second metropolis, which has nearly vanished but whose traces are in the bricks and stones of the contemporary city, in the culture of France itself, and, by extension, throughout the world.Drawing on testimony from a great range of witnesses-from Balzac and Hugo to assorted boulevardiers, rabble-rousers, and tramps-Sante, whose thorough research is matched only by the vividness of his narration, takes the reader on a whirlwind tour. Richly illustrated with more than three hundred images, The Other Paris scuttles through the knotted streets of pre-Haussmann Paris, through the improvised accommodations of the original bohemians, through the whorehouses and dance halls and hobo shelters of the old city. A lively survey of labor conditions, prostitution, drinking, crime, and popular entertainment, and of the reporters, realiste singers, pamphleteers, and poets who chronicled their evolution, The Other Paris is a book meant to upend the story of the French capital, to reclaim the city from the bons vivants and the speculators, and to hold a light to the works and lives of those expunged from its center by the forces of profit.

Hardcover. Boston, David R. Godine, 1st, 2009, Hardcover, 192 pages. The photography of Angus McBean encompasses more than three decades of the history of British theater. His work includes most of the memorable productions of the Old Vic Company and of what is now the Royal Shakespeare Company; opera productions at Glyndebourne and the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden; ballet and operetta at Sadler's Wells; and West End productions of plays and musicals both old and new -- hundreds of productions in all. He was the favorite photographer of Vivien Leigh, Laurence Olivier, and Edith Evans, and he photographed countless plays starring John Gielgud, Ralph Richardson, and Alec Guinness, not to mention younger stars such as Audrey Hepburn, Richard Burton, and Elizabeth Taylor. In fact, McBean photographed virtually every great actor of his era, perhaps the most brilliant years in the annals of British theater.His studio was active and eclectic; among his patrons were not only actors, singers, and dancers, but also playwrights, producers, composers, artists, and writers. In his early career, McBean had been a pioneer of surrealist photography, with a highly popular series of "surrealized" portraits that appeared in The Sketch, and, later, of montage and multiple-exposure photography in a long-running series for The Tatler.In 1969, McBean approached Harvard University to initiate the sale of his collection, and in the following year his archive of glass plate negatives, index prints, and programs, together with the copyrights, became a part of the Harvard Theatre Collection, where it remains the most often-requested collection of visual material. The photographs in this book, selected and captioned by the archive's curator, Fredric Woodbridge Wilson, have been carefully reproduced from the original negatives.

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, 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. NY, Macmillan, 1st, 1968, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket. 300 pages, 136 b&w photographs by Werner Forman, 12 in color. "Vienna, as everyone knows, is the city of music, and Joseph Wechsberg's lively book evokes the music of the city, the popular music of the Strauss family and of the Heuringer-singers, the great music of the Classical masters, the soft sound of Viennese speech and the harmony of the baroque city set in the unspoiled beauty of the Vienna Woods...[Wechsberg] reveals the Vienna of the Viennese, not always glamorous, sometimes a little shabby, but a city of living people to whom the past is a reality, who have bred or entertained many of the greatest masters of European music and poetry." Clean copy.

Hardcover. NY, Random House, 1st, 1999, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, The photographs by Annie Leibovitz in Women, taken especially for the book, encompass a broad spectrum of subjects: a rap artist, an astronaut, two Supreme Court justices, farmers, coal miners, movie stars, showgirls, rodeo riders, socialites, reporters, dancers, a maid, a general, a surgeon, the First Lady of the United States, the secretary of state, a senator, rock stars, prostitutes, teachers, singers, athletes, poets, writers, painters, musicians, theater directors, political activists, performance artists, and businesswomen. "Each of these pictures must stand on its own," Susan Sontag writes in the essay that accompanies the portraits. "But the ensemble says, So this what women are now -- as different, as varied, as heroic, as forlorn, as conventional, as unconventional as this."

Hardcover. NY, Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1st, 1965, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover, 612 pages, b&w photos. Excellent copy in a bright, unclipped dust jacket. The memoir chronicles Davis Jr.'s rise to fame, overcoming the obstacles of racism and the loss of one eye, and ends shortly after his marriage to Swedish-born actress May Britt and the birth of their daughter Tracey.