Biography

Hardcover. NY, W. W. Norton & Company, 1st, 2024, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a lightly rubbed dust jacket, 560 pages, b&w illustrations. In this first major biography since Fitzgerald's death, music historian Judith Tick draws on deep archival research, family interviews and newly available recordings and concert footage to show how Fitzgerald fused a Black vocal aesthetic with mainstream popular repertoire to revolutionise American music. From Fitzgerald's first audition at the Apollo Theatre to swing-era success at the Savoy, Tick shows how this 'girl singer' broke new ground: as a female bandleader, as a ground-breaking bebop improviser and as the arbiter of the American canon with her Song Book recordings. Yet even as she electrified concert halls and sold millions of records, jazz critics belittled her as 'naive'. Tick reveals instead an ambitious risk-taker with a stunningly diverse repertoire, whose exceptional musical spontaneity (often radically different on stage than in the studio) made her a transformational artist. Remainder dot to top edge otherwise a clean copy.

Hardcover. NY, Abbeville Press, 1st, 1991, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket, 397 pages, illustrated in b&w and color. In this thoughtful and thought-provoking art historical study, Peters first traces strands of Art Nouveau and Symbolist theory in the art of Georgia O'Keeffe. She then discusses other influences, from Arthur Dow as teacher to Paul Strand as photographer and friend. But by far the most sustained study in the text is the relationship between O'Keeffe's painting and the photography and philosophy of her husband, Alfred Stieglitz. Peters argues lucidly and always in accessible language for O'Keeffe's emergence as a great and deeply individual artist while illuminating these many influences and illustrating her points with lavish use of excellent reproductions. Clean copy.

Softcover. Berkeley CA, University of California Press, 1st, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 232 pages. "Professor DeNora's achievement in placing Beethoven, and the reception of Beethoven's music, in social context is all the more impressive because it goes so much against the grain of conventional habits of thought. In illuminating how changing social institutions created opportunities for Beethoven to gain contemporary and posthumous recognition, and, in so doing, created new forms for thinking and talking about musical achievement-the author at once provides fresh insights into the institutional origins of 'classical' music and offers an exemplary contribution to the sociological study of the arts." Clean copy.

Hardcover. Westport, CT, Greenwood Press, 1st, May 30, 2001, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, 271 pages, several b&w photographs and illustrations. Small stain on bottom edge. Else a very clean, tight copy.

Softcover. Gloucestershire UK, History Press, 1st pbk, 2019, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 237 pages. Before Marilyn tells the story of Marilyn Monroe's modeling career, during which time she was signed to the famous Blue Book Agency in Hollywood. The head of the agency, Miss Emmeline Snively, saw potential in the young woman and kept detailed records and correspondence throughout their professional relationship and beyond. On the day of Monroe's funeral, Snively gave an interview from her office, talking about the girl she had discovered, before announcing, rather dramatically, that she was closing the lid on her Marilyn Monroe archive that day - to 'lock it away forever'. This archive was purchased by Astrid Franse, and together with bestselling Marilyn Monroe biographer Michelle Morgan they draw on this collection of never-before-seen documents, letters and much, much more. Before Marilyn explores an aspect of Monroe's life that has never been fully revealed - by charting every modelling job she did, and illustrating the text with rare and unpublished photographs of the young model and her mentor.

Hardcover. New York , Hyperion Press, 1st, 1996, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover, 209 pages, illustrated throughout in color and b&w. Light shelf-wear to dust jacket, else a clean, tight copy. Animation historian John Canemaker chronicles the lives and work of sketch artists at Disney from the 1930s to the present.

Hardcover. NY, Norton, 1st, 1990, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover, pages. As both star and director of the acclaimed film Henry V, young Branagh has had his career compared to that of Lawrence Olivier. Full of charm, humor, and insight into an actor's craft, Branagh's intriguing autobiography tells of his childhood in Belfast, his training at the Royal Academy of Drama, and his work with the Royal Shakespeare Company.INSCRIBED BY BRANAGH on front fly leaf.

Hardcover. New York, Hudson Hills Press, 1st, 1980, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Good, 187 pages. Hardcover with dust jacket. green star sticker on front cover, otherwise clean, tight copy.

Hardcover. New York , Belwin Mills Publishing , 1st U.S., 1972, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Good, 260 pages. Black cloth cover, very little wear. Dust jacket is worn on edges and corners. Many b&w photographs, and reproductions of documents, throughout.

Hardcover. New York, Sully and Kleinteich, 3rd, 1918, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, blue cloth with gilt, red and white decoration, 342 pages, with frontispiece portrait of Belinda Melnotte by A. O. Scott. Previous owner's signature on front fly leaf, minor corner and edge wear, otherwise, very clean and tight copy.

Hardcover. NY, Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1st, 1978, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a lightly worn, chipped dust jacket. 302 pages, many b&w illustrations. Clean copy.

Hardcover. New Haven CT, Yale University Press, 1st, 2019, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket, 245 pages, b&w illustrations, index. He was, according to Pauline Kael, "the greatest American screenwriter." Jean-Luc Godard called him "a genius" who "invented 80 percent of what is used in Hollywood movies today." Besides tossing off dozens of now-classic scripts--including Scarface,Twentieth Century, and Notorious--Ben Hecht was known in his day as ace reporter, celebrated playwright, taboo-busting novelist, and the most quick-witted of provocateurs. During World War II, he also emerged as an outspoken crusader for the imperiled Jews of Europe, and later he became a fierce propagandist for pre-1948 Palestine's Jewish terrorist underground. Whatever the outrage he stirred, this self-declared "child of the century" came to embody much that defined America--especially Jewish America--in his time. Hecht's fame has dimmed with the decades, but Adina Hoffman's vivid portrait brings this charismatic and contradictory figure back to life on the page. Hecht was a renaissance man of dazzling sorts, and Hoffman--critically acclaimed biographer, former film critic, and eloquent commentator on Middle Eastern culture and politics--is uniquely suited to capture him in all his modes.

Hardcover. New York, Vanguard Press, 1st, 1932, Book: Good, Dust Jacket: None, 306 pages. Hardcover. B/w illustrated frontispiece. Some age wear to covers. Bound in gray fabric. Previous owner's bookplate on front endpaper. Deckled edges. Some age yellowing to pages and edges. In good condition for its age.

Hardcover. Indianapolis/NY, Bobbs-Merrill, 1st, 1971, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Good, Hardcover in a worn dust jacket, 490 pages, b&w frontis. Rush, the Philadelphia doctor who signed the Declaration of Independence, was an energetic, ambitious man given to devising reforms and, as the author puts it, meddling in politics. He studied medicine in Edinburgh and London, meeting Hume, Goldsmith, Samuel Johnson, et al. and, Hawke thinks, solidifying his republican disposition. Back in Pennsylvania he agitated for independence, made friends with John Adams, urged Paine to write Common Sense, and entered Congress. Apart from the recurrent epidemics of the age, the practice of military medicine and propaganda for resuming debt payments occupied Rush during the war; afterwards he turned to progressive education, speculated in land, fought paper money, equivocally supported the abolition of slavery, declared that tobacco is unhealthful, and boosted the Constitution before it was even written. Dust jacket chipped, faded in parts, clean internally.

Hardcover. Cambridge MA, MIT Press, 1st, 1979, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a mildly worn dust jacket. 361 pages, index, b&w illustrations. Benjamin Thompson, later Count Rumford, was one of the most fascinating and complex men of his period (1753~1814). Soldier of fortune, spy, womanizer, brilliant scientist, intriguer, autocrat, inventor, adventurer, an American expatriated to England who did his most productive scientific work in Munich and who died in France, a man devoted to relieving the suffering of the poor, Rumford was all this and more, and Sanborn Brown's biography makes clear that all these aspects merge into a whole human being. The man who conducted experiments on the caloric theory of heat and the ladies' man are one and the same. Clean copy

Hardcover. Boston Ma., Houghton Mifflin Co., 1st, 1978, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, 525 pages, b&w illustrations. Green cloth, gilt titles to front and spine. Light wear and rubbing to edges and spine of pictorial dust jacket, else a very nice, tight copy.

Hardcover. Boston, MA, Houghton Mifflin Company, 1st, 1978, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover, 525 pages, b&w illustrations. The first full-length biography of one of the fathers of American art. Light green cloth, gilt titles to spine and front cover. Blue pictorial dust jacket with minor wear to spine and edges. Overall a very nice, clean copy.

Hardcover. Boston, MA, Houghton Mifflin Company, 1st, 1978, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover, 525 pages, b&w illustrations. The first full-length biography of one of the fathers of American art. Light green cloth, gilt titles to spine and front cover. Blue pictorial dust jacket with minor wear to spine and edges. Overall a very nice, clean copy.

Hardcover. New York, Norton, 1st, 2018, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover, 634 pages, b&w illustrations. In a bright, unclipped dj. In Berenice Abbott: A Life in Photography, author, archivist, and curator Julia Van Haaften brings this iconic public figure to life alongside outlandish, familiar characters from artist Man Ray to cybernetics founder Norbert Wiener. A teenage rebel from Ohio, Abbott escaped first to Greenwich Village and then to Paris-photographing, in Sylvia Beach's words, "everyone who was anyone." As the Roaring Twenties ended, Abbott returned to New York, where she soon fell in love with art critic Elizabeth McCausland, with whom she would spend thirty years. In the 1930s, Abbott began her best-known work, Changing New York, in which she fearlessly documented the city's metamorphosis. When warned by an older male supervisor that "nice girls" avoid the Bowery-then Manhattan's skid row-Abbott shot back, "I'm not a nice girl. I'm a photographer...I go anywhere." This bold, feminist attitude would characterize all Abbott's accomplishments, including imaging techniques she invented in her influential, space race-era science photography and her tenure as The New School's first photography teacher.With more than ninety stunning photos, this sweeping, cinematic biography secures Berenice Abbott's place in the histories of photography and modern art, while framing her incredible accomplishments as a female artist and entrepreneur.

University Park PA, Pennsylvania State University Press , 1st, 1986, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket. Weintraub's compilation of Shaw's diaries reveal the day to day life of one of Britain's most famous playwrights. 558 pages. Vol. 1 only of a two volume set. Clean.

Hardcover. NY, Hudson Hills Press, 1st, 1987, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover, 228 pages, 123 color plates. Morisot was a gutsy pioneer among the French impressionists. As a standard-bearer of the avant-garde, she created a scandal by helping to organize a public auction of their works, something very few artists had dared to do. Defying the advice of her parents and Manet, she remained in Paris when Prussian troops besieged the city. In her artistic technique she was no less daring. Around 1874, in pictures of tourists and yacht-filled rivers, she broke through to an abbreviated, shorthand style ahead of her contemporaries. Disregarding her own view that Monet had taken landscape painting to its farthest limits, her late oils of gardens are brilliant fireworks of color. This catalogue of a retrospective exhibition that is to tour the country stands on its own as a valuable study.

Hardcover. NY, Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1st, 2006, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket. 375 pages. B&W photographs and illustrations. Pictorial dust jacket. Green cloth with gilt title to spine. Erratum laid-in. Overall, a clean, tight copy. ohn Betjeman was by far the most popular poet of the twentieth century; his collected poems sold more than two million copies. As poet laureate of England, he became a national icon, but behind the public man were doubts and demons. The poet best known for writing hymns of praise to athletic middle-class girls on the tennis courts led a tempestuous emotional life. For much of his fifty-year marriage to Penelope Chetwode, the daughter of a field marshal, Betjeman had a relationship with Elizabeth Cavendish, the daughter of the Duke of Devonshire and lady-in-waiting to Princess Margaret. Betjeman, a devout Anglican, was tormented by guilt about the storms this emotional triangle caused. Betjeman, published to coincide with the hundredth anniversary of the poet's birth, is the first to use fully the vast archive of personal material relating to his private life, including literally hundreds of letters written by his wife about their life together and apart. Here too are chronicled his many friendships, ranging from "Bosie" Douglas to the young satirists of Private Eye, from the Mitford sisters to the Crazy Gang. This is a celebration of a much-loved poet, a brave campaigner for architecture at risk, and a highly popular public performer. Betjeman was the classic example of the melancholy clown, whose sadness found its perfect mood music in the hymns of a poignant Anglicanism. Clean copy.

Hardcover. Guilford, CT, Lyons Press, 1st, 2018, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, 144 pages. Hardcover with dust jacket. A very clean, unmarked copy with only minor wear to dust jacket edges. Hundreds of never before seen black & white photographs and private letters spanning 1949 - 2000.

Hardcover. NY, Knopf, 1st, 1997, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover, Illustrated with color, black & white plates. Clean, unmarked copy with only minor wear to dust jacket.