Biography

Softcover. Salisbury VT, Vermont Society of Colonial Dames, 1st, 1905, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 48 pages, bound in green card wrappers with gilt lettering, b&w plates. Inscribed by a member of the Vermont Society of Dames, Sarah Clement on the front fly leaf.

Softcover. Chicago, Chicago Review Press, reprint, 2011, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 430 pages, b&w photos. This first major biography of the most romanticized icon in jazz thrillingly recounts his wild ride. From his emergence in the 1950s--when an uncannily beautiful young man from Oklahoma appeared on the West Coast to become, seemingly overnight, the prince of "cool" jazz--until his violent, drug-related death in Amsterdam in 1988, Chet Baker lived a life that has become an American myth. Here, drawing on hundreds of interviews and previously untapped sources, James Gavin gives a hair-raising account of the trumpeter's dark journey. Clean copy.

Hardcover. University Press of Mississippi,, 1st, 2018, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket. 260 pages, b&w illustrations. Former New York Times correspondent John N. Herbers (1923-2017), who covered the civil rights movement for more than a decade, has produced Deep South Dispatch: Memoir of a Civil Rights Journalist, a compelling story of national and historical significance. Born in the South during a time of entrenched racial segregation, Herbers witnessed a succession of landmark civil rights uprisings that rocked the country, the world, and his own conscience. Herbers's retrospective is a timely and critical illumination on America's current racial dilemmas and ongoing quest for justice.Herbers's reporting began in 1951, when he covered the brutal execution of Willie McGee, a black man convicted for the rape of a white housewife, and the 1955 trial for the murder of Emmett Till, a black teenager killed for allegedly whistling at a white woman. Clean copy.

Hardcover. NY, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 1st, 2020, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket. 597 pages, b&w illustrations. Demagogue is a masterful portrait of a human being capable of immense evil, yet beguiling charm. McCarthy was a tireless worker and a genuine war hero. His ambitions knew few limits. Neither did his socializing, his drinking, nor his gambling. When he finally made it to the Senate, he flailed around in search of an agenda and angered many with his sharp elbows and lack of integrity. Finally, after three years, he hit upon anti-communism. By recklessly charging treason against everyone from George Marshall to much of the State Department, he became the most influential and controversial man in America. His chaotic, meteoric rise is a gripping and terrifying object lesson for us all. Yet his equally sudden fall from fame offers reason for hope that, given the rope, most American demagogues eventually hang themselves.

Hardcover. NY, Charles Scribner's Sons, 1st, 1973, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket, 432 pages, b&w illustrations. A moving account of Theodore Roosevelt's post-presidential years. Name on front fly leaf, otherwise clean.

Hardcover. New York, E. P. Dutton & Co., 1st US, 1941, Book: Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, 352 pages. Translated from Russian by Malcolm Burr. Cloth covers, blue stamped titles, 3 b&w illustrated maps, blue top edge stain. Rubbing and light soiling to covers, spine lightly cocked, previous owner's bookplate and signature to front endpapers, light foxing and discoloration to endpapers, discoloration to page block ends; otherwise, a neat, tight copy of a scare book.

Hardcover. London, Oxford University Press, 1st, 1995, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Near Fine, 499 pages. Hardcover. B/w illustrations throughout. Black cover boards, gilt title on spine. Dust jacket unclipped, excellent. Beautiful, like new condition. This is the first intellectual biography of Descartes in English; it offers a fundamental reassessment of all aspects of his life and work.

Hardcover. San Juan, P.R., Fundacion El Nuevo Dia, 1st, 1996, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover, 375 pages, Spanish text with copious photographs throughout. Volume 1 only. Light dust jacket edge wear, otherwise, very clean and tight copy.

Hardcover. Los Angeles, Rare Bird Books, 1st, 2022, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket, 312 pages. The highlight of Desolation Peak is the journal Kerouac kept, starkly revealing the depth of his poverty, the extremity of his mood swings, and the ongoing arguments with himself over the future direction of his life, his writing, and faith. Along with the journal, he worked on a series of projects, including "Ozone Park," another installment of the Duluoz Legend beginning in 1943, after his discharge from the Navy; "The Martin Family," an intended sequel to The Town and the City, and "Desolation Adventure," a series of sketches that became part 1 of Desolation Angels. In writing it, Kerouac was re-committing himself to his more experimental, then-unpublishable style, declaring in the journal that "the form of the future is no-form." Also included in Collected Writings is "The Diamondcutter of Perfect Knowing," Kerouac's "transliteration" of the Diamond Sutra, his "Desolation Blues" and "Desolation Pops" poems, and assorted prose sketches and dreams. Clean copy.

Hardcover. Boston, Little, Brown and Company, First Edition, 2000, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, 266 pages. Hardcover. Black cloth boards with silver titles to spine. Black and white illustrations. Dust jacket in cream & white with photograph & only light marginal wear. Clean & unmarked. A biography of the controversial fighter follows Liston from the mean streets, where he was a petty criminal, to the heavyweight championship and his life as a pawn of organized crime. By the author of Power on Earth.

Hardcover. New York, Rizzoli, 1st, 2015, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover, 256 pages with 250 color and b&w images. Like new in publisher's shrink-wrap. The first Vreeland book to focus on her three decades at Harper's Bazaar, where the legendary editor honed her singular take on fashion.

Softcover. NY, Harper Design, reprint, 2011, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 308 pages. Eleanor Dwight delivers the definitive biography of Diana Vreeland, the twentieth century's most influential fashion editor. Lavishly illustrated with exclusive photographs and personal materials from the legendary style maker's private collection, and featuring a new preface from Vogue's Andre LeonTalley, Diana Vreeland is an indispensible look at a grand dame of great couture. Lavishly illustrated with more than three hundred drawings and photographs, many by the best fashion photographers of the time: Louise Dahl-Wolfe, Irving Penn, Cecil Beaton, and Brassai. Here, too, are the trendsetters, artists, models, and celebrities with whom Vreeland worked and played, including Coco Chanel, Yves Saint Laurent, Hubert de Givenchy, Oscar de la Renta, Elsie de Wolfe, Andy Warhol, Truman Capote, and Jacqueline Kennedy.

NY, Knopf, 1st, 1984, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover, 369 pages, b&w illustrations. in a very good, unclipped dust jacket. Examines the life behind the eerie, mesmerizing photographs: Diane"s pampered childhood; her passionate marriage to Allan Arbus and their work together as fashion photographers during the fifties; the emotional upheaval surrounding the end of that marriage; and the radically dark, liberating, and ultimately tragic turn Diane"s art took during the sixties. Bosworth"s engrossing book is a compassionate portrait of the woman behind some of the most powerful photographs of our time.

Hardcover. New York, Ecco, 2nd pr., 2016, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover, 734 pages, b&w illustrations. The definitive biography of the beguiling Diane Arbus, one of the most influential and important photographers of the twentieth century, a brilliant and absorbing exposition that links the extraordinary arc of her life to her iconic photographs. It is impossible to understand the transfixing power of Arbus's photographs without exploring her life. Lubow draws on exclusive interviews with Arbus's friends, lovers, and colleagues; on previously unknown letters; and on his own profound critical insights into photography to explore Arbus's unique perspective and to reveal important aspects of her life that were previously unknown or unsubstantiated. He deftly traces Arbus's development from a wealthy, sexually precocious free spirit into first, a successful New York fashion photographer and then, a singular artist who coaxed secrets from her subjects. Lubow reveals that Arbus's profound need not only to see her subjects but to be seen by them drove her to forge unusually close bonds with these people, helping her discover the fantasies, pain, and heroism within each of them, and leading her to create a new kind of photographic portraiture charged with an unnerving complicity between the subject and the viewer.

Hardcover. New York, Ecco, 2016, 2016, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, 734 pages. Hardcover. B&w photographs throughout. Clean, unmarked copy with only minor wear to dust jacket.

Hardcover. NY, Random House, 1st, 2003, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a btight dust jacket. 352 pages. Monograph published in conjunction with a major exhibition. Essays by by Sandra S. Phillips and Neil Selkirk and an over 100 page chronolgy by Doon Arbus and Elisabeth Sussman. Also features an afterword by Doon Arbus and biographies by Jeff L. Rosenheim. Includes 200 full page duotones, many that have never been published before and numerous other smaller images. Clean copy. DOMESTIC SHIPPING ONLY.

Hardcover. Ithaca NY, Cornell University Press, 1st, 2006, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket, 835 pages. Sergey Prokofiev, a compulsive diarist and gifted and idiosyncratic writer, possessed an incorrigibly sardonic curiosity about individuals and events. When he left Russia after the 1917 Revolution, his diaries were recovered from the family flat in Petrograd and later hidden at considerable personal risk by the composer Nikolai Myaskovsky. Prokofiev himself smuggled them out of the country after his first return to the Soviet Union in 1927. The later diaries, written in the West, were brought back by legal decree after the composer's death in 1953, to be kept in an inaccessible section of the Soviet State Archive. Eventually Prokofiev's son Sviatoslav was allowed to transcribe the voluminous contents. When he and his son Sergei eventually emigrated to Paris, they undertook the gigantic task of reproducing the partially encoded manuscript in an intelligible form.Diaries, 1907-1914, the first of three volumes that extend to 1933, covers Prokofiev's years at the St. Petersburg Conservatoire. Simultaneously attached to and exasperated by the tradition exemplified by composers such as Rimsky-Korsakov, Glazunov, and Tcherepnin, the brash young genius relishes the power of his talent to irritate, challenge, and finally overcome the establishment. Clean copy.

Softcover. Santa Barbara, McNally & Loftin, 1st, 1980, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 256 pages, b&w photos. Margaret Eaton and her husband Ira were well known to Santa Barbarans in the early part of this century as operators of the Pelican Bay Camp on Santa Cruz Island. Beginning humbly with small-scale commercial fishing, seal hunting and passenger charters, the Eatons gradually developed a unique resort that came to be popular among writers, film companies and people from all over the country. Working from her diary and her memories, Mrs. Eaton wrote this extraordinary story of her life over a period of many years, until her death in 1947. She is remembered by her daughter, Vera Eaton Amey, as a fearless and compassionate women. Mrs. Amey has done admirably well in sorting through mountains of letters, clippings and photographs to organize her mother's manuscript. She has also painstakingly consulted other sources to confirm, as much as possible, the accuracy of these recollections.

Hardcover. Oxford UK, Basil Blackwell, 1st thus, 1990, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover, 283 pages. "These intimately revealing diaries, now translated into English for the first time, date mainly from the 1880s and 1890s, when Wedekind was leading a bohemian life in Berlin, Munich and Paris, savoring the artistic and erotic delights of a 'decadent' environment." In a bright dust jacket.

Softcover. New York, Plume/Penguin Group, 1st, 1990, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 218 pages. Chester Gould's Dick Tracy, his adventures, his enemies, his allies, and his long-suffering sweetheart and eventual mate, Tess Truehart, live again in the one book that traces his entire crime-fighting career; enriched by a wealth of original classic strips in black-and-white, with 24 pages of color. Bright, clean copy.

Hardcover. Cambridge, MA, Harvard Univ Press, 1st, 1946, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Good, Hardcover, 351 pages including index. A list of writing relating to Charles Dickens and his works 1836-1944. A very useful bibliographic reference for Dickensiana.

Hardcover. England, Antiques Collectrors Club, reprint, 1981, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Good, 520 pages. Hardcover with dust jacket. Ex-Lib with usually stamps and markings on end papers, front fly leaf and spine. Faded dust jacket spine. Black and white illustrations throughout. Tight copy.

Hardcover. Yokohama, unknown, 1st, 1909, Book: Good, Dust Jacket: None, 842 pages, gray cloth covers worn, spine cloth loose from spine backing, hinges cracked. Inside very good,clean, lacks title page which may never have been printed. A detailed collection of names, places, events, throughout Japanese history. English text. From a library in Japan with card and envelope inside rear cover and sticker on spine. Uncommon.

Hardcover. NY, Alfred A. Knopf, 1st, 1939, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, blue boards with gilt designs and lettering on the spine, 420 pages. Binding is solid. Color frontispiece, many black and white photos and drawings. Stamping to front fly leaf, name on half title page, otherwise clean.