Softcover. NY, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, reprint, 1986, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 192 pages. Roman Vishniac's A Vanished World is an extraordinary record of the lives of German and Eastern European Jews in the years immediately preceding the Holocaust. Vishniac, a Russian Jew, began to take photographs of village life during World War I, when Russian Jews who lived near the front were accused of being German spies and were deported to Siberia. He later moved to Germany, where he witnessed the horrible events of Kristallnacht and the anti-Jewish legislation that allowed Hitler to declare his enemies stateless and therefore unworthy of international protection. As we study Vishniac's photographs--a surviving fraction of the more than 16,000 he took--we are aware that we are seeing the faces of those soon to die, witnessing a world that has all but perished. Yet that world, of shops and schools, of busy streets and quiet farms, remains with us if only as a ghostly memory, thanks in part to Vishniac's compassionate eye.
Hardcover. New York, Norton, 1st, 2005, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, A monograph focusing for the first time exclusively on Kertesz's early Hungarian prints; selected from more than 1,000 contact prints in the artist's estate and reproduced actual size. Photographs by Andre Kertesz; introduction by Bruce Silverstein; essay by Robert Gurbo. 160 pages; 66 duo-toned b&w plates + 11 text illustrations; 5.25 x 5.25 inches.
Softcover. NY, Aperture Foundation, 1998, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 80 pages. A large, beautifully designed photography publication with many full page photographs in black and white and color. Glossy wraps. A new generation of Czech and Slovak photographers--heirs to the legacy of such modern masters as Josef Sudek and Frantisek Driktol--will be the subject of the August 1998 issue of Aperture, featuring images never before published in the West. In the Aperture tradition of investigating the contemporary photography of individual nations, Crossing Borders probes the cultural, social, and emotional climate of the post-Communist era as experienced by twenty-three photographers.
Hardcover. London, Macmillan & Co., reprint, 1942, Book: Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcovers, two-volume set, green cloth with gilt lettering on spine. Rebecca West, 1892-1983, wrote Black Lamb & Grey Falcon after spending 6 weeks in Yugoslavia. Publication occurred at the same time as the Nazi invasion of the state. West pays tribute in the book's epigram to the thousands of civilians who lost their lives in the horrific events that followed; "To my friends in Yugoslavia, who are now all dead or enslaved." 32 black and white photographic plates, map endpapers to both volumes. Clean, tight bindings. Tattered dust jackets laid in. No markings. DUE TO WEIGHT, DOMESTIC SHIPPING ONLY.
Hardcover. NY, Russell Sage Foundation, 1st, 1994, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover, 400 pages, b&w illustrations. Little over a century ago, New York and Budapest were both flourishing cities engaging in spectacular modernization. By 1930, New York had emerged as an innovating cosmopolitan metropolis, while Budapest languished under the conditions that would foster fascism. Budapest and New York explores the increasingly divergent trajectories of these once-similar cities through the perspectives of both Hungarian and American experts in the fields of political, cultural, social and art history. Their original essays illuminate key aspects of urban life that most reveal the turn-of-the-century evolution of New York and Budapest: democratic participation, use of public space, neighborhood ethnicity, and culture high and low. What comes across most strikingly in these essays is New York's cultivation of social and political pluralism, a trend not found in Budapest. Nationalist ideology exerted tremendous pressure on Budapest's ethnic groups to assimilate to a single Hungarian language and culture. In contrast, New York's ethnic diversity was transmitted through a mass culture that celebrated ethnicity while muting distinct ethnic traditions, making them accessible to a national audience. Mild fade to spine of dust jacket, otherwise clean.
Hardcover. Canada, Deutscher Kunstverlag, 1st, 2012, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, 159 pages. Like new in publisher's shrink-wrap. The material that was saved from Warsaw in 1939 included more than ten color slides. These slides are the only color photo documents showing that historic moment from the perspective of city residents. The slides were found only in recent years by the photographer's son, Sam Bryan. In addition to color slides this album also includes photographs recorded by Julien Bryan on black-and-white film at that time and iater subjected to a complicated process of colorizing. The colorizing took piace after Bryan's return to the United States in 1939.
Hardcover. Vilnius, Baltos Lankos, 1st, 1995, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, 69 duotone plates, images taken by the Lithuanian photographer Jozef Chechowicz (1819-1888). Mostly landscapes of the city and it's buildings, some with people. Beautifully produced volume, limited to 2000 copies. Light edgewear to dust jacket.
Hardcover. Montreal, Drawn & Quarterly, 1st, 2003, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, 140 pages. Hardcover NO dust jacket. Black and white comic. Clean, unmarked copy with minor wear to boards. Award-winning comix-journalist Joe Sacco goes behind the scene of war correspondence to reveal the anatomy of the big scoop. He begins by returning us to the dying days of Balkan conflict and introduces us to his own fixer; a man looking to squeeze the last bit of profit from Bosnia before the reconstruction begins. Thanks to a complex relationship with the fixer Joe discovers the crimes of opportunistic warlords and gangsters who run the countryside in times of war. But the west is interested in a different spin on the stories coming out of Bosnia. Almost ten years later, Joe meets up with his fixer and sees how the new Bosnian government has "dealt" with these criminals and Joe ponders who is holding the reins of power these days...
Hardcover. London, Hamish Hamilton, 1st, 2008, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover, 496 pages. SIGNED BY THEROUX on title page. In 1975 a young and ambitious writer named Paul Theroux made his literary mark by taking the 28,000-mile intercontinental journey via rail from London to Tokyo and back home again. Thirty years later, an older and wiser Theroux decided to retrace his steps. The result is Ghost Train to the Eastern Star, a fascinating account of the places you vaguely knew existed, yet definitely should know something about. Get on board Theroux's fast-moving travelogue, which features some of the most astute commentary on our distorted notions of time, space, and each other in the age of jet speed, broadband connections, and cultural extinction. A railway journey through Eastern Europe, India, and Asia. Clean copy
Nafziger Collection , reprint, 2007, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 214 pages. Large size 28cm x 21cm in soft card covers. Clean and sound. History of the Polish Revolution of 1830 by Joseph Hordynski - Major of the Late Tenth Regiment of Lithuanian Lancers (Originally pub. in 1833) .
Hardcover. NY, Paragon House, 1st, 1991, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket. 274 pages. Black cloth spine over brown boards. First published in 1925.
Hardcover. Cambridge MA, MIT Press, 1st, 1999, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, 420 pages, illustrated with mostly b&w plates, 8 color pages. Small remainder stamp on bottom edge. "Tiege was at one and the same time both an agent provocateur and seismograph, at once provoking action and debate and yet simultaneously reacting with the utmost sensitivity to the shifting political spectrum of his time."--from the introduction by Kenneth FramptonKarel Teige (1900-1951), a leading figure of the avant-garde of the 1920s and 1930s, participated in every important argument and controversy of those turbulent years. He edited the most influential avant-garde journals on Czech and international cultural affairs and wrote profoundly original essays and books on the theory and criticism of art and architecture. He also produced paintings, collages, photomontages, film scripts, book covers, and typefaces and participated in theatrical performances.
Hardcover. Prague, SNDK, 1st, 1957, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Good, Hardcover in a lightly worn dust jacket, 140 pages. A collection of Czech/Yugoslavian fables illustrated in color by Vladimir Brehovzsky. Clean.
Hardcover. Washington D.C., Smithsonian Institution Press , reprint, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, 171 pages. Hardcover with dust jacket. Extensive b&w photographs throughout. Silver gilt titles on spine. Clean, unmarked copy with only minor wear to dust jacket. In September 1939, the German invasion of Poland propelled the world into war. By the spring of 1946, Poland was beginning to recover from five years of cataclysmic destruction. Liberated from the occupation of the Third Reich, the nation celebrated a peace already overshadowed by the emerging Cold War.John Vachon was in Poland to witness this transformation of almost mythic proportions. Assigned to cover United Nations relief efforts, this American photographer documented in images and letters a nation at the crossroads of the postwar East and West. Taken with a keen yet sympathetic eye, Vachon's photographs, most of them never before published, reveal the destitution and unfounded optimism of Poles, many of them returning in boxcars from German labor camps and Siberian exile, ready to reclaim their burned-out cities and farms left fallow by war.Vachon's letters home to his wife provide a rare context for the images. He writes of the luxuries enjoyed by the foreign corps amid Warsaw's rubble, the equal measures of hospitality and anti-Semitism among ordinary Poles, and of the anti-Soviet sentiment in the countryside, where "they love Russian songs, but always apologize when they sing one." In one account of a village fire, he conveys the often conflicting emotions of the photojournalist, documenting scenes of suffering he feels powerless to assuage.
Hardcover. Gottingen GR, Steidl, 1st, 2006, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Non-paginated. Black & white photographs by Rosalind Solomon. Minor wear. Clean, tight copy .Rosalind Solomon made her first pictures in Poland in 1988 during a time of political change, and returned there in 2003, a time of increasing violence and inhumanity in the world. All of the images are of individuals, their relationships and environments and are observations and commentaries on Poland itself, as well as on the rest of the world.
Softcover. US, Top Shelf Productions, 1st, 2007, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover. 285 pages, illustrated throughout in b&w. Clean, unmarked copy with only minor wear to wrappers. As the NATO bombs fell on his hometown of Pancevo in 1999, Serbian cartoonist Aleksandar Zograf used his diary comics and e-mail to reach out to the world and offer a glimpse at the effects of the attacks. Over the weeks and months of the war, Zograf documented not only how the bombings shattered the lives of his friends and neighbors, but also how the routine of daily life remained unchanged. The most recent attacks on Pancevo's oil refinery are contrasted with the latest local soccer matches -- and American propaganda flyers are as likely to fall from the sky as American comics are to arrive in the mail.
Softcover. US, Top Shelf Productions, 1st, 2007, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover. 285 pages, illustrated throughout in b&w. Clean, unmarked copy with only minor wear to wrappers. As the NATO bombs fell on his hometown of Pancevo in 1999, Serbian cartoonist Aleksandar Zograf used his diary comics and e-mail to reach out to the world and offer a glimpse at the effects of the attacks. Over the weeks and months of the war, Zograf documented not only how the bombings shattered the lives of his friends and neighbors, but also how the routine of daily life remained unchanged. The most recent attacks on Pancevo's oil refinery are contrasted with the latest local soccer matches -- and American propaganda flyers are as likely to fall from the sky as American comics are to arrive in the mail.
Hardcover. New York, W. W. Norton & Company, 1st, 2003, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, 255 pages. Hardcover. Full color and black & white illustrations. Remainder marks on top edge at spine. Light wear. Clean, unmarked copy.
Hardcover. NY, Thames & Hudson, 1st, 2006, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover, 249 pages. Marking the fiftieth anniversary of the October 1956 Hungarian revolt against Soviet domination after World War II, this imposing volume contains powerful black-and-white photographs taken during the years preceding as well as the outbreak and crushing of the uprising by a German member of the international photojournalist cooperative Magnum. Introduced by Lessing's recollections and Hungarian French historian Francois Fejto's precis of the momentous events, the pictures appear in three chapters, "Communist Hungary," "The Revolution," and "The Failure." Hungarian novelist George Konrad's intense impressions of the time, during which he carried a rifle as a revolutionary young intellectual, follow the first chapter, and French political scientist Nicolas Bauquet's assessment of the revolt's impact on Western Europe's Communist parties, the USSR, and subsequent European history follows the third. Views of the cemetery in which the uprising's martyrs are now buried conclude the book elegiacally, and brief last words by Lessing and the director of Hungary's Institute 56 indicate who may forget what happened and why the rest of us should always remember. An extraordinary document.
Hardcover. NY, Aperture, 1st, 1998, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover, 168 pages. A native of Kazakhstan, Ljalja Kuznetsova traversed the expanses of the Central Asian steppe to photograph the gypsies, or Roma people, whose mysterious comings and goings have fascinated her since she was a child. Shaking the Dust of Ages: Gypsies and Wanderers of the Central Asian Steppe is the first book devoted to these pictures, for which Kuznetsova won the Mother Jones Leica Medal of Excellence and the Paris Grand Prix for Photography.Kuznetsova's photographs present rare, intimate portraits of gypsies-- whose freedom from the ties of civilization is reflected in the wild winds and unlimited vistas of the steppe landscape. As Kuznetsova traveled through Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, and the Ukraine, the gypsies continually inspired her. She found in them a people without frontiers, living independent of politics, religious dispute, or social class. Though their presence on the steppe is becoming a thing of the past, Kuznetsova's cast of characters and their world seem timeless in these images.
Hardcover. Prague, SNDK, 1st, 1958, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, SIGNED BY WENIG. Czech language. Black & white pen-line drawings in color by Mikolase Alse. Red cloth with gilt decoration.
Hardcover. NY, Aperture, 1st, 2005, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover, 208 pages. Photographer Plachy proves you can go home again and again in this stunning photographic voyage to her native Hungary. Plachy weaves together contemporary and vintage photographs, mementos and pictures of movie sets (including several from her son Adrien Brody?s Oscar-winning turn in Roman Polanski?s The Pianist). Together, these pieces come together like a puzzle, recreating an Eastern Europe that has weathered dictatorships, two world wars and is now opening up, confusedly, to democracy. The images of stray shadows, apartment buildings studded with bullet holes, and eerie reflections are as evocative as they are subtle. They remind us that great photographs don?t have to rely on shock value to move or disturb. Plachy accents her work with memorable vignettes of her childhood in Communist Hungary as well as of her repeated journeys back east as an adult and an American citizen. One of the most touching of these small stories involves the photographer?s grief-stricken mother, inconsolable after the deaths of her parents in Auschwitz. One day, while her mother stared at a framed photo of her deceased parents, she saw a gold moth land on the glass. "From then on golden butterflies and moths were sacred," writes Plachy. As the book goes on, relative after relative surrounds herself with images to bring back lost loved ones. By the book?s end, we see Plachy herself doing the same thing and realize that through this book she has invited us on a private tour of a lost world, a journey that?s as poignant as it is unforgettable. 22 four-color and 98 duotone images.
Softcover. Bloomington IN, iUniverse, 1st, 2007, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 155 pages including epilogue. This is the story of Checiny, the author's hometown in southern Poland, and of the people who lived there between the two world wars of the 20th Century. Clean copy.
Softcover. Jerusalem, Gefen Publishing House, reprint, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover. Masha Greenbaum delivered an excellent history of the Jews of Lithuania, from the earliest years, beginning in the 9th Century through WWII. The author discusses the many kings, their courts, the Church, the various social strata and their relationships with the Jews throughout the centuries. Politics, religion, areas of livelihood and social standing are detailed in each time period. Clean, like new.
Hardcover. NY/Oxford UK, Berghahn Books, 1st, 2003, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, 232 pages, pictorial boards. Milena Jesenska, born in Prague in 1896, is most famous as one of Franz Kafka's great loves. Although their relationship lasted only a short time, it won the attention of the literary world with the 1952 publication of Kafka's letters to Milena. Her own letters did not survive. Later biographies showed her as a fascinating personality in her own right. In the Czech Republic, she is remembered as one of the most prominent journalists of the interwar period and as a brave one: in 1939 she was arrested for her work in the resistance after the German occupation of Bohemia and Moravia, and died in Ravensbruck concentration camp in 1944. It is estimated that Jesenska wrote well over 1,000 articles but only a handful have been translated into English. In this book her own writings provide a new perspective on her personality, as well as the changes in Central Europe between the two world wars as these were perceived by a woman of letters. The articles in this volume cover a wide range of topics, including her perceptions of Kafka, her understanding of social and cultural changes during this period, the threat of Nazism, and the plight of the Jews in the 1930s. Clean copy.
Hardcover. NY, Riverhead, 1st, 2004, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket, 349 pages. A heartwarming memoir describes growing up in Czechoslovakia during the 1970s as the child of dissidents involved with the failed Prague Spring uprising in a loving family--her mother, the disowned daughter of two Party elite parents; her inventor and cab driver father; her beautiful teenage sister; and her dog, a famed Czech TV star. Clean copy.
Hardcover. New York , Penguin Putnam Inc, 1st, 1993, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover, 158 pages, illustrated throughout with photos in b&w. Clean, unmarked copy with only minor wear to dust jacket. Elie Wiesel provides the preface to a master photographer's record of eastern Europe's Jewish communities in the years just before World War II with 160 photographs that capture the ordinary lives of Jews before the Holocaust.
Softcover. Paris, ACAER/GPC, 1st, 1994, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, 68 pages. Softcover. Exhibition catalog. French and English text. Black & white photographs. From the introduction: "This catalogue has been re-edited by advanced reading copy wraps en reve architecture centre with the Georges Pompidou Centre, for the presentation in France of the exhibition "Warchitecture-Sarajevo, a wounded city". The exhibition and the catalogue were prepared by the architects of the Sarajevo association, members of the associations of Architects of Bosnia-Herzegovina DAS-SABIH". Light rubbing to cover edges, minor creases at corners. Clean, unmarked text.
Hardcover. New York, Frances Foster Books/Farrar Straus and Giroux, 1st, 2007, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a very good dust jacket. Non-paginated. SIGNED WITH DRAWING BY PETER SIS ON COPYRIGHT PAGE. Full color illustrations. Clean, bright copy.
Hardcover. New York , Farrar Straus Giroux , 1st, 2007, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Non-paginated. Hardcover with dust jacket. Theft protection sticker on front fly leaf. Clean, tight copy otherwise. Color illustrations by Sis.
Hardcover. Barnsley UK, Pen & Sword Books, 1st, 2012, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover, 155 pages., b/w plates., maps, index, This remarkable account describes the open warfare Polish Underground fighters waged against the Nazi occupiers of their city-with a shortage of arms, ammunition, and medical support-in the expectation of Soviet assistance that came too late to help the precipitous uprising.
Hardcover. NY, Thames & Hudson, 1st, 2015, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, 208 pages, 174 color plates. Window-Shopping through the Iron Curtain presents a selection of more than 100 images of shop windows shot by David Hlynsky during four trips taken between 1986 and 1990 to Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Yugoslavia, Bulgaria, East Germany, and Moscow. Using a Hasselblad camera, Hlynsky captured the slow, routine moments of daily life on the streets and in the shop windows of crumbling Communist countries.The resulting images could be still-lifes representing the intersection of a Communist ideology and a consumerist, Capitalist tool-the shop window-with the consumer stuck in the middle. Devoid of overt branding or calculated seduction, the shop windows were typically adorned with traditional yet incongruous symbols of cheer: homey lace curtains, paper flowers, painted butterflies, and pictures of happy children. Some windows were humble in their simple offerings of loaves and tinned fishes; others were zanily artistic, as in the modular display of military shirts in a Moscow storefront; and some illustrated intense professional pride, such as a sign in a Prague beauty salon depicting a pedicurist smiling fiendishly over an imperfect sole. The photographs are accompanied by essays by art historian Martha Langford and cultural studies specialist Jody Berland, as well as Hlynsky's own account of his time as a flaneur in the shopping plazas of the collapsing Soviet empire-"a vast ad-hoc museum of a failing utopia" that in 1989 began to close forever. No dj issued.
Hardcover. NY, Thames & Hudson, 1st, 2015, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, 208 pages, 174 color plates. Window-Shopping through the Iron Curtain presents a selection of more than 100 images of shop windows shot by David Hlynsky during four trips taken between 1986 and 1990 to Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Yugoslavia, Bulgaria, East Germany, and Moscow. Using a Hasselblad camera, Hlynsky captured the slow, routine moments of daily life on the streets and in the shop windows of crumbling Communist countries.The resulting images could be still-lifes representing the intersection of a Communist ideology and a consumerist, Capitalist tool-the shop window-with the consumer stuck in the middle. Devoid of overt branding or calculated seduction, the shop windows were typically adorned with traditional yet incongruous symbols of cheer: homey lace curtains, paper flowers, painted butterflies, and pictures of happy children. Some windows were humble in their simple offerings of loaves and tinned fishes; others were zanily artistic, as in the modular display of military shirts in a Moscow storefront; and some illustrated intense professional pride, such as a sign in a Prague beauty salon depicting a pedicurist smiling fiendishly over an imperfect sole. The photographs are accompanied by essays by art historian Martha Langford and cultural studies specialist Jody Berland, as well as Hlynsky's own account of his time as a flaneur in the shopping plazas of the collapsing Soviet empire-"a vast ad-hoc museum of a failing utopia" that in 1989 began to close forever. No dj issued.
Hardcover. NY, Grosset & Dunlap, reprint, 1916, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, 385 pages, illustrated with b&w photos. Tan cloth stamped in red and dark green on front and spine. No D.J.
Softcover. Cambridge University Press, 1st paperback, 1996, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, 421 pages. Softcover. Wrapper very good, no rips or tears. B/w illustrations. Pages and edges have a touch of tanning from age, otherwise clean and unmarked. Binding tight. In very good shape. The first book to examine the bloody demise of the former Yugoslavia in the full light of its history and that of its ethnic mosaic.