Hardcover. Raleigh NC, TwoMorrows Publishing, 1st, 2014, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, pictorial boards, 191 pages. Don Heck remains one of the legendary names in comics, considered an "artist's artist," respected by peers, and beloved by fans as the co-creator of Marvel Comics characters Iron Man, Hawkeye, and Black Widow, and for his long stint on Marvel Comics' team book The Avengers. In Don Heck: A Work of Art, author John Coates has meticulously researched and chronicled information on Don's storied 40-year career, including his time at DC, Dell, Gold Key, and as "ghost" artist on Lee Falk's The Phantom newspaper strip. From personal recollections from Don's surviving family, long-time friends, and industry legends, to rare interviews with Heck himself (where he discusses his career, artistic technique, triumphs, frustrations, and love of drawing), this book is full of insight into - and first-hand anecdotes from - the early days of Marvel Comics. It also features an unbiased analysis of sales on Don's DC Comics titles, an extensive art gallery (including published, unpublished, and pencil artwork), a Foreword by Stan Lee, and an Afterword by Beau Smith. Clean copy.
Hardcover. NY, Simon & Schuster, 1st, 1960, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Good, Hardcover in an unclipped dust jacket with spine faded. The author's first book. The book describes the experiences that "Gael Greene, girl reporter," encountered in writing her features for the New York Post. Clean copy.
Hardcover. New York, Hyperion Books, 1st, 2006, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover, 304 pages, illustrated in color and b&w. A complete visual history of the rock group. The Doors are rock royalty. Jim Morrison, Ray Manzarek, Robby Krieger, and John Densmore reinvented rock 'n' roll in the 60s, and their influence can be felt even today. Now, for the first time, the living members of the band are opening up their personal archives to their fans, telling their story in their own words. This book is filled with untold anecdotes and never-before-seen photos from their private collections. Fans can learn first-hand what really went on in America's most enigmatic and mythical band.
Softcover. NY, St. Martin's Press, reprint, 1997, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 398 pages. Mystery writer Dorothy Sayers is loved and remembered, most notably, for the creation of sleuths Lord Peter Wimsey and Harriet Vane. As this biography attests, Sayers was also one of the first women to be awarded a degree from Oxford, a playwright, and an essayist--but also a woman with personal joys and tragedies. Here, Reynolds, a close friend of Sayers, presents a convincing and balanced portrait of one of the 20th century's most brilliant, creative women. 30 b&w photos. Clean, bright copy.
Hardcover. Westport CT, Greenwood Press, 1st, 1993, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover in glossy boards, 174 pages. B&w frontispiece portrait. Dorothy Parker (1893-1967) had something to say about virtually all her contemporaries among the literati, and they returned the favor in full measure. This well articulated primary and secondary bibliography covers the complete canon and its critical reaction, with illuminating annotations complemented by a biographical sketch. Included also are three personal views of Parker-- by Joseph Bryan, III, Richard Lauterbach, and Wyatt Cooper. The accumulated evidence suggests that Parker should be considered a major figure in American letters not just America's wittiest woman who happened to write. Clean copy.
Softcover. Princeton NJ, Princeton University Press, reprint, 1996, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 521 pages. The fourth volume in Frank's monumental five part biography of the great Russian writer. Covers the six most remarkably productive years in the novelist's entire career. It was in this short span of time that Dostoevsky produced three of his greatest novels--Crime and Punishment, The Idiot, and The Devils--and two of his best novellas, The Gambler and The Eternal Husband. All these masterpieces were written in the midst of harrowing practical and economic circumstances, as Dostoevsky moved from place to place, frequently giving way to his passion for roulette. Having remarried and fled from Russia to escape importuning creditors and grasping dependents, he could not return for fear of being thrown into debtor's prison. He and his young bride, who twice made him a father, lived obscurely and penuriously in Switzerland, Germany, and Italy, as he toiled away at his writing, their only source of income. Clean copy.
Hardcover. Princeton NJ, Princeton University Press, reprint, 1976, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Good, Hardcover in a lightly worn dust jacket, 401 pages. The first volume in Frank's monumental five part biography of the great Russian writer. No date on copyright page. Clean copy.
Softcover. Princeton NJ, Princeton University Press, reprint, 1988, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover 395 pages. The third volume in Frank's monumental five part biography of the great Russian writer. This volume begins with the writer's return to Saint Petersburg after a ten-year Siberian exile and traces how his engagement in the cultural and social ferment of Russia in the early 1860s led to his discovery of the themes that would underlie his mature masterpieces. Clean copy.
Softcover. Princeton NJ, Princeton University Press, reprint, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover 320 pages. The second volume in Frank's monumental five part biography of the great Russian writer. No date on copyright page. Clean copy.
Hardcover. NY, Scribner, 1st, 2024, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket, 405 pages, b&w illustrations. The McLaughlin twins were trailblazing female photographers, celebrated in their time as stars in their respective fields, but have largely been forgotten since. Here, in Double Click, Carol Kino brings these two brilliant women and their remarkable accomplishments to vivid life. Frances was the only female photographer on staff in Conde Nast's photo studio, hired just after Irving Penn, and became known for streetwise, cinema verite-style work, which appeared in the pages of Glamour and Vogue. Her sister Kathryn's surrealistic portraits filled the era's new "career girl" magazines, including Charm and Mademoiselle. Both twins married Harper's Bazaar photographers and socialized with a glittering crowd that included the supermodel Lisa Fonssagrives and the photographer Richard Avedon. Kino uses their careers to illuminate the lives of young women during this time, an early 20th-century moment marked by proto-feminist thinking, excitement about photography's burgeoning creative potential, and the ferment of wartime New York.
Hardcover. NY, Farrar, Straus And Giroux, 1st, 2024, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket, 464 pages. A personal exploration of the American West and the work of one of America's greatest photographers. Timothy O'Sullivan is America's most famous war photographer. You know his work even if you don't know his name: A Harvest of Death, taken at Gettysburg, is an icon of the Civil War. He was also among the first photographers to elevate what was then a trade to the status of fine art. The images of the American West he made after the war, while traveling with the surveys led by Clarence King and George Wheeler, display a prescient awareness of what photography would become; years later, Ansel Adams would declare his work 'surrealistic and disturbing.' At the same time, we know very little about O'Sullivan himself. Nor do we know-really know-much more about the landscapes he captured. Robert Sullivan's Double Exposure sets off in pursuit of these two enigmas. This book documents the author's own road trip across the West in search of the places, many long forgotten or paved over, that O'Sullivan pictured. It also stages a reckoning with how the changes wrought on the land were already under way in the 1860s and '70s, and how these changes were a continuation of the Civil War by other means.
Hardcover. NY, Wynwood Press, 1st, 1989, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover, 256 pages, b&w photos. In a bright, unclipped dust jacket. Rozsa was both a classical composer and extremely successful Hollywood film composer. Hence the title. He scored such films as Ben Hur, El Cid and Lust for Life and many others.
Hardcover. Berkeley CA, University of California Press, 1st, 2008, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket, illustrated with 237 b&w photos. Much has already been written about early motion picture pioneers like D.W. Griffith, Mary Pickford and Charlie Chaplin, but their invaluable partner, Douglas Fairbanks, Sr has been overlooked and neglected - until now. With this very attractive and professional book, author Jeffrey Vance has given due credit to one of early cinema's most brilliant stars and dynamic personalities who not only had true star power but was a driving force behind the scenes as well. Often remembered these days only for his successful 1920s costume adventure dramas such as "The Mark of Zorro", "Robin Hood" and "The Three Musketeers" to name a few, Douglas Fairbanks had a varied, interesting and successful career well before this period, and also contributed greatly to the development of Hollywood. He was one of the founders of United Artists, he and wife Mary Pickford were the first `golden couple' of Hollywood who established Beverley Hills as the suburb of movie stars;
Hardcover. NY/Chicago, Revell, 1st, 1911, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, light green cloth stamped in white and black, 229 pages plus publisher's ads in rear. 12 b&w plates. Frontis photo portrait of Grenfell on his ship with tissue guard. Sir Wilfred Thomason Grenfell (1865 -1940) was a medical missionary to Newfoundland and Labrador. Beginning with Vikings of To-day (1895), he published between 1905 and 1938 a succession of books about Labrador, which was at the time a British colony. Owner's name and date on front fly leaf, mild soil to cover.
Hardcover. NY/Chicago, Revell, 1st, 1910, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, light green cloth stamped in white and black, 226 pages, 12 photographic plates. Sir Wilfred Thomason Grenfell (1865 -1940) was a medical missionary to Newfoundland and Labrador. Beginning with Vikings of To-day (1895), he published between 1905 and 1938 a succession of books about Labrador, which was at the time a British colony. Frontis photo shows Grenfell and Perry (back from the N. Pole) on the deck of the 'Roosevelt'. This is a collection from six periodicals of 14 sketches by the 'Labrador Doctor.' He has fascinating stories to tell about the natives, the sailors, fishermen, the climate and his doctoring. Small tan stain affecting 10 pages, only in margin. Otherwise clean.
Hardcover. NY, Harcourt, Brace & World, 1st US, 1967, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Good, Hardcover in a lightly worn, chipped dust jacket, 259 pages, photographic frontispiece, 4 leaves of plates; original blue cloth over blue boards, gilt lettering on spine, Autobiography of the English writer and founder of the Hogarth Press with his wife Virginia Woolf. The fourth volume of the autobiography. Remainder line to edge, otherwise clean.
Hardcover. NY, Harper, 1st, 2013, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket. 431 pages, b&w and color illustrations. For most of his life, Julius Erving has been two men in one. There is Julius, the bright, inquisitive son of a Long Island domestic worker who has always wanted to be respected for more than just his athletic ability, and there is Dr. J, the cool, acrobatic showman whose flamboyant dunks sent him to the Hall of Fame and turned the act of jamming a basketball through a hoop into an art form. In many ways, Erving's life has been about the push and pull of Julius and The Doctor. It is Dr. J who has stories to tell of the wild days and nights of the ABA in the 1970s, and of being the seminal figure who transformed basketball from an earthbound and rigid game into the creative, free-flowing aerial display it is today. He has a long list of signature plays - he's famous for winning the first dunk contest in 1976 with a jam on which he lifted off from the foul line, and he made a miraculous layup against the Lakers on which he soared behind the backboard before reaching back in to flip the ball in on the other side, with one hand. He inspired a generation of dunkers, including Michael Jordan, to express their improvisational talents. But Julius wasn't always as graceful and in control as Dr. J. Erving had a pristine image throughout his career and early retirement, but he was far from a perfect man. Here he gives detailed accounts of some of the personal problems he faced -- or created -- behind the scenes, including the adulterous affair with sports writer Samantha Stephenson, which led to the birth of his daughter, professional tennis player Alexandra Stephenson.Though his marriage survived that infidelity, the death of Erving's 20-year-old son Cory in 2000 in a tragic accident proved too much for the union to bear. Erving paints a raw, heartbreaking picture of the dissolution of his marriage, as his wife Turquoise began to blame him for his refusal to be paralyzed by grief for as long as she was. Their intense arguments came to a head when Erving stepped out of the shower one day to find his wife holding a lamp in one hand and a vase in the other, ready for a physical confrontation. "I knew somebody was going to get hurt, and it wasn't going to be me," he says. He packed a suitcase and he and Turquoise never lived under the same roof again.
Hardcover. NY, Alfred A. Knopf, 1st, 1992, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket, 601 pages, b&w photos. Light wear to edges and covers of pictorial dust jacket, else a very nice, tight copy. Our most vivid and reliable biography yet of the Dowager Empress Tzu Hsi, remembered through the exaggeration and falsehood of legend as the ruthless Manchu concubine who seduced and murdered her way to the Chinese throne in 1861.
Hardcover. NY, Harper, 1st, 2017, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket, 352 pages. Drawing Blood is Molly's personal memoir of her career so far, her struggles to be recognized as an artist, the people she's met and her political world view. It's unusual for a young artist (b. 1983) to write a memoir so young but her life has been crammed with experiences that make this a meaningful, thought provoking book. Some people will undoubtedly be horrified that Molly chose to work in the adult indiustry to fund her early career but in naughties NYC that was, perhaps, the only way a struggling, working class, female artist could maker her way without a wealthy patron. Molly gives vivid descriptions of strip clubs, burlesque dancers, artists, protests, and a lifestyle that many can only imagine. The characters leap off the page illustrated by a vivid written style that draws in words as well as Molly makes art. The book has been described as an unflattering mirror held up to conventional middle-class lives.
Hardcover. NY, Scholastic Press, 1st, 2011, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover, 64 pages. Allen Say's own story of his path to becoming the renowned artist he is today. Shunned by his father, who didn't understand his son's artistic leanings, Allen was embraced by Noro Shinpei, Japan's leading cartoonist and the man he came to love as his "spiritual father." As WWII raged, Allen was further inspired to consider questions of his own heritage and the motivations of those around him. He worked hard in rigorous drawing classes, studied, trained--and ultimately came to understand who he really is. Part memoir, part graphic novel, part narrative history, DRAWING FROM MEMORY presents a complex look at the real-life relationship between a mentor and his student. With watercolor paintings, original cartoons, vintage photographs, and maps, Allen Say has created a book that will inspire the artist in all of us.
Hardcover. NY, E.P. Dutton, 1st US, 1962, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, 217 pages. Black & white line drawings by Shepard. Black & white photo on frontispiece. Blue cloth binding with gold spine lettering. English artist Shepard's (1879-1976) life story from 1890 on, a sequel to Drawn from Memory. The famed illustrator of the Winnie-the-Poo stories tells his story, with many vignettes of Milne and his books. Clean, bright copy, no dust jacket.
Hardcover. NY, Lippincott , 1st, 1957, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover. Light edgewear to dust jacket. The illustrator of Winnie the Pooh recalls his London childhood.
Hardcover. New York, Williams Collins , 1st, 1979, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket. 95 pages. Generously illustrated in color and black and white. Yellow endpapers and chronological list of Tudor's books. Good tight copy. Loving portrait of her mother by the beloved children's book illustrator's daughter offered in words, intimate family photographs, paintings, illustrations, & drawings from across their lives together in the New England countryside.
Hardcover. New York, Williams Collins , 1st, 1979, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover. 95 pages. Generously illustrated in color and black and white. Yellow endpapers and chronological list of Tudor's books. Good tight copy. Loving portrait of her mother by the beloved children's book illustrator's daughter offered in words, intimate family photographs, paintings, illustrations, & drawings from across their lives together in the New England countryside.