Biography

Hardcover. France, Editions Artlys, 1st, 2005, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, 256 pages. Hardcover no dust jacket. Like new in publisher's shrink-wrap. At once Dior scrapbook, survey and autobiography, this magnificent compendium offers a panorama of the life and art of one of the twentieth century's most influential fashion designers. It reprints Dior's 1956 autobiography Christian Dior et moi--in which the designer contrasted his reputation as both an individual and as a company with his own sense of himself--alongside eight articles by Dior first published in Elle magazine in 1951, which were then collected as Je suis couturier. Throughout, the volume takes as its thematic anchor the designer's beautiful childhood home in Granville, elaborating his lifelong attachment to the house (now the Christian Dior Museum) and its gardens, and showing how his work was influenced by these resplendent environs--a theme that especially preoccupied Dior himself, who once affirmed his "tender and wonderful memories of my childhood home," declaring that "my life and my style owe everything to its location and architecture." Many of the copious illustrations that accompany these writings are supplied by the Christian Dior Museum collection, and reproduce family albums and archival photographs, fashion sketches and formal presentations of classic Dior dresses, hats, shoes and jewelry. Dior scholar Jean-Luc Dufresne conducts a tour of the Dior house and garden, narrating its long and fascinating history.

Hardcover. Berkeley CA, University of California, 1st, 1992, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover, 525 pages, in a bright unclipped dust jacket.

Hardcover. NY, Charles Scribner's Sons, 1st, 1922, Book: Fair, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, brown cloth stamped with gilt lettering, 366 pages. The memoir of Elizabeth Waties Allston Pringle describes her life on a South Carolina coastal rice plantation from the plantation days through the Civil War and into the difficult post-war period. 8 b&w plates. This is a very worn ex-lib copy with tape repair and stamping but all there, clean inside.

Hardcover. London, George Routledge and Sons, Reprint, 1867, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Two hardcover volumes. Translated by Thomas Johnes. 102 engravings. 3/4 blue leather & patterned paper on boards, Spine with gilt & raised bands. All edges gilt. Previous owner's name stamp on front end paper. Volume 1 - 640 pages. Light wear. Clean, unmarked text. Volume 2 - 552 pages. Light wear. Clean, unmarked pages.

Hardcover. NY, Hachette, 1st, 2022, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket, 415 pages, b&w illustrations. In Chuck Berry, biographer RJ Smith crafts a comprehensive portrait of one of the great American entertainers, guitarists, and lyricists of the 20th century, bringing Chuck Berry to life in vivid detail. Based on interviews, archival research, legal documents, and a deep understanding of Berry's St. Louis (his birthplace, and the place where he died in March 2017), Smith sheds new light on a man few have ever really understood. By placing his life within the context of the American culture he made and eventually withdrew from, we understand how Berry became such a groundbreaking figure in music, erasing racial boundaries, crafting subtle political commentary, and paying a great price for his success. While celebrating his accomplishments, the book also does not shy away from troubling aspects of his public and private life, asking profound questions about how and why we separate the art from the artist. Clean copy.

Hardcover. New York, Harmony Books, 1st, 1987, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, 346 pages. Hardcover with dust jacket. Clean, tight copy. Black and white pictures throughout.

Hardcover. NY, Abrams, 1st, 2022, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket. The director Michael Cimino (1939-2016) is famous for two films: the intense, powerful, and enduring Vietnam movie The Deer Hunter, which won Best Picture at the Academy Awards in 1979 and also won Cimino Best Director, and Heaven's Gate, the most notorious bomb of all time. Originally budgeted at $11 million, Cimino's sprawling western went off the rails in Montana. The picture grew longer and longer, and the budget ballooned to over $40 million. When it was finally released, Heaven's Gate failed so completely with reviewers and at the box office that it put legendary studio United Artists out of business and marked the end of Hollywood's auteur era.Or so the conventional wisdom goes. Charles Elton delves deeply into the making and aftermath of the movie and presents a surprisingly different view to that of Steven Bach, one of the executives responsible for Heaven's Gate, who wrote a scathing book about the film and solidified the widely held view that Cimino wounded the movie industry beyond repair. Elton's Cimino is a richly detailed biography that offers a revisionist history of a lightning rod filmmaker. Based on extensive interviews with Cimino's peers and collaborators and enemies and friends, most of whom have never spoken before, it unravels the enigmas and falsehoods, many perpetrated by the director himself, which surround his life, and sheds new light on his extraordinary career. This is a story of the making of art, the business of Hollywood, and the costs of ambition, both financial and personal.

Hardcover. NY, Harry N. Abrams, 1st, 2022, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket. The first biography of critically acclaimed then critically derided filmmaker Michael Cimino--and a reevaluation of the infamous film that destroyed his career. The director Michael Cimino (1939-2016) is famous for two films: the intense, powerful, and enduring Vietnam movie The Deer Hunter, which won Best Picture at the Academy Awards in 1979 and also won Cimino Best Director, and Heaven's Gate, the most notorious bomb of all time. Originally budgeted at $11 million, Cimino's sprawling western went off the rails in Montana. The picture grew longer and longer, and the budget ballooned to over $40 million. When it was finally released, Heaven's Gate failed so completely with reviewers and at the box office that it put legendary studio United Artists out of business and marked the end of Hollywood's auteur era. Or so the conventional wisdom goes. Charles Elton delves deeply into the making and aftermath of the movie and presents a surprisingly different view to that of Steven Bach, one of the executives responsible for Heaven's Gate, who wrote a scathing book about the film and solidified the widely held view that Cimino wounded the movie industry beyond repair. Elton's Cimino is a richly detailed biography that offers a revisionist history of a lightning rod filmmaker.

Softcover. Torino, Societa Editrice Internazionale, 1st Italian, 1975, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 296 pages, illustrated wrappers. An Italian journalist's memoir of a half century living in London. With a SiGNED letter laid in to the previous owner Cecil Roberts from the author. ITALIAN TEXT.

Hardcover. New York , Norton , 1st, 1999, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket. 190 pages, illustrated in color and b&w. Cipe Pineles was art director for leading fashion magazines between 1930 and 1960. Tracing Pineles's career from young immigrant to "ranking" female in the design world, Martha Scotford chronicles a time when few women were involved in design and assesses Cipe's brilliant contributions to graphic design and magazine design in particular.

Softcover. Rootstock Publishing, 1st, 2024, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 316 pages, b&w illustrations. Circle of Sawdust is a uniquely personal story of the wild characters, fascinating personalities, remarkable histories, and behind-the-scenes world of traditional traveling circuses. Here is a true-life tale about a boy's impulse to run off and join the circus and then-through doubt, failure, loss, and tragedy-pursue the implausible vision of starting his own circus! With humor and passion, founder of Circus Smirkus Rob Mermin writes about the precarious life of a creative artist, the ups and downs of taking risks, and the idealistic struggle to hold onto a dream. Clean copy.

Hardcover. NY, William Morrow, 1st, 2000, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket, pages. Citizen Coors is the riveting saga of an American dynasty. From the moment the destitute Prussian Adolph Coors stows away on a Baltimore-bound ship in 1868 to the worldwide expansion of the billion-dollar Coors Brewing Company, Citizen Coors is a headlong American tale of triumph over bare-knuckle competition. The Coors family does it the old-fashioned way, through fearsome devotion to product, rejection of modern marketing, and refusing to borrow so much as a nickel.But the family almost rides its principles into the ground. "Nobody will ever choose a beer on the basis of a thirty-second ad," Bill Coors is fond of saying at a time when his two main competitors, Anheuser-Busch and Miller, are spending upward of a billion dollars a year on ads. He won't even allow a ring-pull can. The brewery's decline and recovery are dizzying. But Citizen Coors is more than a business story. Here is Adolph, the founder,in 1929, distraught over Prohibition, hurling himself to his death from a hotel balcony. Here is Bill,ten years later, yearning for the wider world but forced back to the brewery by a single glance from his father. Here is Joe, Jr., raised to rule yet suddenly banished for marrying without permission. Here is Peter, prevented from rescuing the company precisely because he has been trained to do so. Here is kidnapping and murder. Here are generations of Coors men broken against the iron will of their fathers. Here is a second suicide, eerily similar to the first.

Hardcover. Lexington KY, University Press of Kentucky, 1st, 2018, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket, 448 pages. Greta Garbo proclaimed him as her favorite director. Actors, actresses, and even child stars were so at ease under his direction that they were able to deliver inspired and powerful performances. Academy-Award-nominated director Clarence Brown (1890-1987) worked with some of Hollywood's greatest stars, such as Clark Gable, Joan Crawford, Mickey Rooney, Katharine Hepburn, and Spencer Tracy. Known as the "star maker," he helped guide the acting career of child sensation Elizabeth Taylor (of whom he once said, "she has a face that is an act of God") and discovered Academy-Award-winning child star Claude Jarman Jr. for The Yearling (1946). He directed more than fifty films, including Possessed (1931), Anna Karenina (1935), National Velvet (1944), and Intruder in the Dust (1949), winning his audiences over with glamorous star vehicles, tales of families, communities, and slices of Americana, as well as hard-hitting dramas. Although Brown was admired by peers like Jean Renoir, Frank Capra, and John Ford, his illuminating work and contributions to classic cinema are rarely mentioned in the same breath as those of Hollywood's great directors. In this first full-length account of the life and career of the pioneering filmmaker, Gwenda Young discusses Brown's background to show how his hardworking parents and resilient grandparents inspired his entrepreneurial spirit. She reveals how the one-time engineer and World War I aviator established a thriving car dealership, the Brown Motor Car Company, in Alabama-only to give it all up to follow his dream of making movies. He would not only become a brilliant director but also a craftsman who was known for his innovative use of lighting and composition.

Princeton University Art Museum, 1st, 2017, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover, 408 pages. Clarence H. White (1871-1925) was one of the most influential art photographers and teachers of the early 20th century and a founding member of the Photo-Secession. This beautiful publication offers a new appraisal of White's contributions, including his groundbreaking aesthetic experiments, his commitment to the ideals of American socialism, and his embrace of the expanding fields of photographic book and fashion illustration, celebrity portraiture, and advertising. Based on extensive archival research, the book challenges the idea of an abrupt rupture between prewar, soft-focus idealizing photography and postwar "modernism" to paint a more nuanced picture of American culture in the Progressive era. The illustrations are well reproduced and comprehensive.

Hardcover. NY, Praeger Publishers, 1st, 1973, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket. Foreword by Wilfrid Sheed. IIlustrated with photographs. Statistics. 274 pages. Biography of one of the greatest baseball player in the game. Roberto Clemente was inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame in 1973. Clean copy.

Hardcover. NY, Simon & Schuster, 1st, 2006, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket. On New Year's Eve 1972, following eighteen magnificent seasons in the major leagues, Roberto Clemente died a hero's death, killed in a plane crash as he attempted to deliver food and medical supplies to Nicaragua after a devastating earthquake. David Maraniss brings the great baseball player brilliantly back to life in "Clemente", a book destined to become a modern classic. 401 pages, clean copy.

Hardcover. Brooklyn NY, powerHouse Books, 1st, 2007, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover, 112 pages. Photographer Henry Horenstein presents his earliest photographs, made from 1970 to 1973: a collection of portraits of family and friends, landscapes, and period imagery. These photographs describe a time familiar to everyone, when one moves from adolescence to adulthood-remaining a part of a family while beginning to create a network of one's own.

Hardcover. Brooklyn NY, powerHouse Books, 1st, 2007, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover, 112 pages. Photographer Henry Horenstein presents his earliest photographs, made from 1970 to 1973: a collection of portraits of family and friends, landscapes, and period imagery. These photographs describe a time familiar to everyone, when one moves from adolescence to adulthood-remaining a part of a family while beginning to create a network of one's own.

Hardcover. NY, Mariner Books, 1st, 2022, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket, 374 pages, b&w photos. Mike Krzyzewski, known worldwide as "Coach K," is a five-time national champion at Duke, the NCAA's all-time leader in victories with nearly 1,200, and the first man to lead Team USA to three Olympic basketball gold medals. Through unprecedented access to Krzyzewski's best friends, closest advisers, fiercest adversaries, and generations of his players and assistants, three-time New York Times bestselling author Ian O'Connor takes you behind the Blue Devil curtain with a penetrating examination of the great but flawed leader as he closes out his iconic career. Clean copy.

Hardcover. NY, Knopf, 1st, 1990, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dustjacket, 402 pages, b&w illustrations.The biography of a seminal figure in American public life, whose active career spanned the years from Theodore Roosevelt through the early Cold War. Stimson was an intimate friend of Theodore Roosevelt's, and was the crucial figure linking Roosevelt's imperialist expansionism to the world of Truman, Eisenhower, and Kennedy.

Softcover. Boston MA, Museum of Fine Arts, 1st, 1956, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, 98 pages, softcover with illustrated wrappers, 98 pages with 126 b&w photos. Essay by Kathryn Buhler.

Hardcover. Cleveland, Ohio, The Arthur H. Clark Company, reprint, 1910, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, blue cloth, 434 pages. Minor cover corner and spine edge wear. Gilt top edge and titles on spine. Tissue guard on frontispiece portrait of Commodore Rodgers. Very clean and tight copy.

Hardcover. New York, Appleton & Co., 1st, 1900, Book: Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, light green cloth with gilt and b&w decoration, 480 pages. Top edge gilt. Front and rear hinges tender. Cloth covers rubbed at corners and along edges. Clean copy.

Hardcover. University Park, Pennsylvania State University Press, 1st Edition, 2012, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, 346 pages. Hardcover. Dust jacket with only minor wear. Clean, unmarked and tight copy.