Hardcover. Ames IA, Iowa State University Press, 1st, 1982, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Good, Hardcover in a lightly worn dust jacket, 180 pages. The author wrote a column for a Des Moines newspaper for 25 years. Collected here is a wide selection of her writings along with a narrative account of her life in rural Iowa. Light soil to dust jacket.

Hardcover. NY, Doubleday, 1st, 1983, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket. Clean. "Once in a while a great book appears which through the author's strength of vision and freshness of language, allows is to see the world anew, OUT OF MY DEPTH--mixing memoir, sport, metaphysics, and playful contemption--is just a book. Several years ago noted author Paul West took a look at himself and saw a man who loved the water but couldn't swim." - dust jacket copy.

Hardcover. NY, Pegasus Books, 1st, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, price-clipped dust jacket. Inspired by the twenty-three 'tales', Matthew Dennison takes a selection of quotations from Potter's stories and uses them to explore her multi-faceted life and character: repressed Victorian daughter; thwarted lover; artistic genius; formidable countrywoman. They chart her transformation from a young girl with a love of animals and fairy tales into a bestselling author and canny businesswoman, so deeply unusual for the Victorian era in which she grew up. Embellished with photographs of Potter's life and her own illustrations, this biography will delight anyone who has been touched by Beatrix Potter's work. Clean copy.

Hardcover. University of Washington Press, 1st, 2001, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket, 285 pages. Over the Line: The Art and Life of Jacob Lawrence includes essays by eight distinguished art historians examining the ways in which Jacob Lawrence's art speaks so powerfully to different audiences. It is the first multi-author, in-depth probe of the artist's entire career: the nature of his work, his education, the critical climate in which he worked, and his use of materials and techniques. It reproduces, in full color, more than 200 works, most of which have not been published in color, or at all, in other books on the artist.

Hardcover. Lathem, New York, British American Publishing, 1st, 2004, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, 269 pages. Hardcover with dust jacket. Clean, unmarked copy with only minor wear to dust jacket.

Hardcover. NY, Clarkson N. Potter, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a lightly worn, price-clipped dust jacket, 300 pages, b&w illustrations by Earl Thollander. Willard Espy's memoir is delightful, filled with memorable characters, with no celebrities, from his family trove of people over the centuries, from witches in Salem, Massachusetts, to pioneer oystermen on the Pacific coast of Washington state. Drawing on conversations with aged relations and friends, on historic letters and documents, Willard Espy reconstructs his own personal past to provide an account of his family that was born, grew up, and died, as the United States was being born, shaped, formed, explored, expanded.

Hardcover. NY, Thomas Y Crowell, 1st, 1974, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Good, Hardcover in a lightly worn dust jacket, 193 pages including index, illustrated with 34 reproductions, some in color. George Caleb Bingham (1811-1879) who painted his world as it really was, everyday people in their everyday lives. His family was one of the early pioneer settlers, moving to the frontier in 1819. George began is art career painting tavern signs, later graduating to portraits, views of everyday life and "river paintings". He also was a Missouri politician, holding several important offices. Clean copy.

Hardcover. London, Jonathan Cape, 1st, 2014, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Like new in publisher's shrink-wrap. 274 pages 210 illustrations in color. David Dawson"s photographs create an intimate portrait of the man. The final images are of the hanging of Preud"s work in his posthumous London exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery.

Hardcover. NY, Knopf, 1st, 2009, Hardcover, 384 pages. Ronsequist writes about growing up in a tight-knit community of Scandinavian farmers in North Dakota and Minnesota in the late 1930s and early 1940s; about his mother, who was not only an amateur painter but, along with his father, a passionate aviator; and about leaving that flat midwestern landscape in 1955 for New York, where he had won a scholarship to the Art Students League. George Grosz, Edwin Dickinson, and Robert Beverly Hale were among his teachers, but his early life was a struggle until he discovered sign painting. He describes days suspended on scaffolding high over Broadway, painting movie or theater billboards, and nights at the Cedar Tavern with Willem de Kooning, Franz Kline, and the poet LeRoi Jones. His first major studio, on Coenties Slip, was in the thick of the new art world. Among his neighbors were Ellsworth Kelly, Robert Indiana, Agnes Martin, and Jack Youngerman, and his mentors Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns.

Hardcover. London, Jupiter Books, First Edition, 1978, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Good, 31 pages text followed by 130 plates. Hardcover. Blue cloth boards with gilt titles to spine. Frontis photograph of the artist, L. S. Lowry, Stockport, Winter 1962. Full page, full color & bw plates throughout. Dust jacket with wear & toning to edges. Clean, unmarked copy.

Hardcover. US, University of Arizona Press, 1st, 1984, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover, 252 pages. Light shelf-wear to price clipped dust jacket, else a clean, tight copy.

Hardcover. Italy, Massimiliano Boni, 1st, 1974, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Good, 128 pages, plus plates. ITALIAN TEXT. INSCRIBED. Color frontispiece, B/w illustrations/plates throughout. Dust jacket unclipped, has some age wear. Covers good, bound in blue fabric. Foxing on edges and endpapers, but pages clean. In very good condition.

Hardcover. NY, Knopf, 1st, 2002, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover, 364 pages, in a bright dust jacket. Henry Petroski has been called 'the poet laureate of technology.' He is one of the most eloquent and inquisitive science and engineering writers of our time, illuminating with new clarity such familiar objects as pencils, books, and bridges. In Paperboy, he turns his intellectual curiosity inward, on his own past. Petroski grew up in the Cambria Heights section of New York City's borough of Queens during the 1950s, in the midst of a close and loving family. Educated at local Catholic schools, he worked as a delivery boy for the Long Island Press. The job taught him lessons about diligence, labor, commitment, and community-mindedness, lessons that this successful student could not learn at school. From his vantage point as a professor, engineer, and writer, Petroski reflects fondly on these lessons, and on his near-idyllic boyhood.

Hardcover. Washington, Smithsonian Institution Press, 1st, 1972, Book: Good, Dust Jacket: Good, Hardcover. Volume I only. 496 pages, several b&w illustrations. Light edgewearm soiling to dust jacket, small closed tear on front cover. Foxing, soiling to top and bottom edge. Else clean and tight.

Hardcover. NY, Doubleday, 1st, 2019, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket, 347 pages. In 1971 Deirdre Bair was a journalist and recently minted Ph.D. who managed to secure access to Nobel Prize-winning author Samuel Beckett. He agreed that she could be his biographer despite her never having written--or even read--a biography before. The next seven years comprised of intimate conversations, intercontinental research, and peculiar cat-and-mouse games. Battling an elusive Beckett and a string of jealous, misogynistic male writers, Bair persevered. She wrote Samuel Beckett: A Biography, which went on to win the National Book Award and propel Deirdre to her next subject: Simone de Beauvoir. The catch? De Beauvoir and Beckett despised each other--and lived essentially on the same street. Bair learned that what works in terms of process for one biography rarely applies to the next. Her seven-year relationship with the domineering and difficult de Beauvoir required a radical change in approach, yielding another groundbreaking literary profile and influencing Bair's own feminist beliefs.Parisian Lives draws on Bair's extensive notes from the period, including never-before-told anecdotes. This gripping memoir is full of personality and warmth and gives us an entirely new window on the all-too-human side of these legendary thinkers.

Hardcover. NY, Philosophical Library, 1st US, 1952, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a lightly worn dust jacket. 208 pages, bibliography. Introduction by Ronald Knox, b&w frontispiece portrait of Pascal. Clean copy.

Softcover. University of Washington Press, 2004, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 335 pages. "Known for his blending of philosophy, spirituality, humor, and a rollicking good story, Charles Johnson is one of the most important novelists writing today. From his magical first novel, Faith and the Good Thing, to his decidedly philosophical Oxherding Tale; from his swashbuckling indictment of the slave trade in the National Book Award-winning Middle Passage, to his more recent imaginative treatment of Martin Luther King Jr. in Dreamer, Johnson has continually surprised, instructed, and entertained his many avid readers. As this collection of interviews suggests, the novelist is as multifaceted and complex as his novels. Trained in cartooning and philosophy, martial arts and meditation, and producing teleplays, photobiographies, and literary criticism in addition to fiction, Charles Johnson represents a model of what he calls "life as art." Clean copy.

Hardcover. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1st ed., 1985, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Good, 292 pages. Blue cloth boards. Pictorial dust jacket is tinted with light fading to spine. Otherwise, tight clean copy.

Hardcover. NY, Simon & Schuster, 1st, 2022, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket. Jim Thorpe rose to world fame as a mythic talent who excelled at every sport. He won gold medals in the decathlon and pentathlon at the 1912 Stockholm Olympics, was an All-American football player at the Carlisle Indian School, the star of the first class of the Pro Football Hall of Fame, and played major league baseball for John McGraw's New York Giants. Even in a golden age of sports celebrities, he was one of a kind. But despite his colossal skills, Thorpe's life was a struggle against the odds. As a member of the Sac and Fox Nation, he encountered duplicitous authorities who turned away from him when their reputations were at risk. At Carlisle, he dealt with the racist assimilationist philosophy "Kill the Indian, Save the Man." His gold medals were unfairly rescinded because he had played minor league baseball. His later life was troubled by alcohol, broken marriages, and financial distress. He roamed from state to state and took bit parts in Hollywood, but even the film of his own life failed to improve his fortunes. But for all his travails, Thorpe did not succumb. The man survived, complications and all, and so did the myth. Clean, like new.

Hardcover. NY, Liveright Publishing , 1st, 2021, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket. Published on the centenary of her birth, Patricia Highsmith's diaries "offer the most complete picture ever published" of the canonical author. Relegated during her lifetime to the pulpy genre of mystery, Patricia Highsmith has emerged since her death in 1995 as one of "our greatest modernist writers" (Gore Vidal). Presented for the first time, this one-volume assemblage of her diaries and notebooks -- posthumously discovered behind Highsmith's linens and culled from more than 8,000 pages by her devoted editor, Anna von Planta--traces the mesmerizing double-life of an artist who "[worked] like mad to be something." Beginning in 1941 during her junior year at Barnard, the diaries exhibit the intoxicating "atmosphere of nameless dread" (Boston Globe) that permeates classics such as Strangers on a Train and the Ripley series. In her skewering of McCarthy-era America, her prickly disparagement of contemporary art, her fixation on love and writing, and ever-percolating prejudices, the famously secretive Highsmith reveals the roots of her psychological angst and acuity. In one of the most compulsively readable literary diaries to publish in generations. Remainder dot to top edge, otherwise like new.

Hardcover. NY, Liveright Publishing , 1st, 2021, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket. Published on the centenary of her birth, Patricia Highsmith's diaries "offer the most complete picture ever published" of the canonical author. Relegated during her lifetime to the pulpy genre of mystery, Patricia Highsmith has emerged since her death in 1995 as one of "our greatest modernist writers" (Gore Vidal). Presented for the first time, this one-volume assemblage of her diaries and notebooks -- posthumously discovered behind Highsmith's linens and culled from more than 8,000 pages by her devoted editor, Anna von Planta -- traces the mesmerizing double-life of an artist who "[worked] like mad to be something." Beginning in 1941 during her junior year at Barnard, the diaries exhibit the intoxicating "atmosphere of nameless dread" (Boston Globe) that permeates classics such as Strangers on a Train and the Ripley series. In her skewering of McCarthy-era America, her prickly disparagement of contemporary art, her fixation on love and writing, and ever-percolating prejudices, the famously secretive Highsmith reveals the roots of her psychological angst and acuity. In one of the most compulsively readable literary diaries to publish in generations. Remainder dot to top edge, otherwise like new.

Hardcover. Syracuse University Press , 1st, 1991, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover, 493 pages. Remainder line and foxing to top edge, light edgewear to dust jacket, else a clean, tight copy.

Hardcover. New York, New York Review Books, 1st, 2012, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, 448 pages. Hardcover with dust jacket. SIGNED BY AUTHOR ON TITLE PAGE. Black and white photos in center. Two pages wrinkled and stuck together in the middle of picture pages. Otherwise tight.

Hardcover. Melbourne AU, F. W. Cheshire, reprint, 1967, Book: Good, Dust Jacket: Poor, Hardcover in a poor, chipped and worn dust jacket, 252 pages, illustrated with b/w photos, drawings, and two maps in the text. End-papers feature double-page maps of the Territory of Papua and New Guinea, index. The author was a Patrol Officer in New Guinea and later became a member of the Papua-New Guinea Legislative Council. The book covers three periods: 1927-1937; 1938-1942; and 1942-1962. There is pencil underlining to many pages. Still an attractive copy of a fairly scarce book.