Hardcover. NY, W. W. Norton, 1st, 2022, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket, 290 pages, color and b&w illustrations. Kiki was once the symbol of bohemian Paris. But if she is remembered today, it is only for posing for several now-celebrated male artists, including Amedeo Modigliani and Alexander Calder, and especially photographer Man Ray. Why has Man Ray's legacy endured while Kiki has become a footnote? Kiki and Man Ray met in 1921 during a chance encounter at a cafe. What followed was an explosive decade-long connection, both professional and romantic, during which the couple grew and experimented as artists, competed for fame, and created many of the shocking images that cemented Man Rays reputation as one of the great artists of the modern era. Remainder dot to top edge, otherwise clean.
Softcover. Paris, Jose Corti, 1st, 1996, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, 215 pages, b&w illustrations. INSCRIBED BY AUTHOR on half title page. French text. Wraparound red band with light wrinkle, wear. Otherwise very good.
Hardcover. London, Chapman & Hall, 1st, 1912, Book: Fair, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, 312 pages. 16 B&W illustrations. Brown cover with gilt title to spine. Sun-fading and spotting. Unfinished front edge. Heavy foxing to all edges. Ex-Lib sticker on front end page. Tissue-protected frontispiece. Soiling to end pages. Overall, a clean, tight copy. A biography of Agnes Sorel, known by the sobriquet Dame de beaute, was a favorite and chief mistress of King Charles VII of France, by whom she bore four daughters. She is considered the first officially recognized royal mistress of a French king.
Softcover. NY, John Wiley & Sons, 1st pbk, 2002, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover,452 pages, b&w illustrations. Harlow Unger's Lafayette is a remarkable and dramatic account of a life as fully lived as it is possible to imagine, that of Gilbert de Motier, marquis de Lafayette. To American readers Unger's biography will provide a stark reminder of just how near run a thing was our War of Independence and the degree to which our forefathers' victory hinged on the help of our French allies, marshaled for George Washington by his 'adopted' son, Lafayette. But even more absorbing and much less well known to the general reader will be Unger's account of Lafayette's idealistic but naive efforts to plant the fruits of the American democracy he so admired in the unreceptive soil of his homeland. Short inscription to half-title page, otherwise a clean, bright copy.
Hardcover. Boston, Houghton Mifflin, reprint, 1882, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcovers, two-volume set complete. Matching dark brown cloth covers stamped in black and gilt, top edge gilt. 639; vi, 653 pages; index, bibliography, frontispiece portrait in each volume - one a quite formal portrait of Voltaire in his prime, the other a sketch of him in old age. Covers show light wear, name on title pages. This is the second printing, the first published a year earlier. A comprehensive life of the great Enlightenment writer. PLEASE NOTE: DUE TO WEIGHT, DOMESTIC SHIPPING ONLY.
Hardcover. Cambridge UK, Cambridge University Press, 1st, 1953, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Good, Hardcover in a worn dust jacket with a chunk gone from rear panel, 309 pages. This book gives a complete account of all that Locke saw, did and heard during his four years in France. The entries vary from laconic jottings to detailed accounts - full of colour and wit - of life in Paris and the provinces. Locke's variety of interests presents a vivid and thorough account of France at that time. He observed and recorded the absolutism of Louis XIV and the poverty of the peasants, the growing persecution of the Protestants and the external manifestations of Catholicism, recent developments in science and technology - even agricultural methods and the system of taxes. So that this is a book for the general reader as well as for the student of Locke, the social historian and the historian of science. Three b&w plates including a map of his travels. Name on front fly leaf, rubber withdrawn stamp on copyright page, otherwise clean.
Hardcover. New York, WW Norton & Company, Inc, 1st Edition, 1968, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Good, 678 pages. Hardcover. B/w illustrations throughout. A few specs of foxing to front flyleaf and back page, otherwise pages clean. Dust jacket has some agewear with a touch of chipping and foxing, one small tear on back dj. Decorated endpapers. Red cloth cover boards, gilt title on spine, some spots to covers.
Hardcover. NY, Bloomsbury , 1st, 2016, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover, pictorial boards with wrap-around dust jacket band with title. 403 pages, color and b&w illustrations. Claude Monet's water lily paintings are among the most iconic and beloved works of art of the past century. Yet these entrancing images were created at a time of terrible private turmoil and sadness for the artist. The dramatic history behind these paintings is little known; Ross King's Mad Enchantment tells the full story for the first time and, in the process, presents a compelling and original portrait of one of our most popular and cherished artists. Clean, bright copy.
Hardcover. NY, St. Martin's Press, 1st, 2023, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket. 330 pages, b&w illustrations. Paris in the 1920s was bursting with talent in the worlds of art, design and literature. The city was at the forefront of everything new and exciting; there was no censorship; life and love were there for the taking. At its center was the gorgeous, seductive English socialite Nancy Cunard, scion of the famous shipping line. Her lovers were legion, but this book focuses on five of the most significant and a lifelong friendship. Her affairs with acclaimed writers Ezra Pound, Aldous Huxley, Michael Arlen and Louis Aragon were passionate and tempestuous, as was her romance with black jazz pianist Henry Crowder. Her friendship with the famous Irish novelist George Moore, her mother's lover and a man falsely rumored to be Nancy's father, was the longest-lasting of her life. Cunard's early years were ones of great wealth but also emotional deprivation. Her mother Lady Cunard, the American heiress Maud Alice Burke (who later changed her name to Emerald) became a reigning London hostess; Nancy, from an early age, was given to promiscuity and heavy drinking and preferred a life in the arts to one in the social sphere into which she had been born. Highly intelligent, a gifted poet and widely read, she founded a small press that published Samuel Beckett among others. A muse to many, she was also a courageous crusader against racism and fascism. She left Paris in 1933, at the end of its most glittering years and remained unafraid to live life on the edge until her death in 1965. Remainder dot top edge otherwise clean.
Hardcover. NY, William Morrow, 1st, 1970, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover, 350 pages, B&w frontispiece of Houssaye. A condensation of his six-volume Confessions. Entertaining observations of nineteenth century Parisian life, culture and government. Clean copy in a lightly worn dust jacket.
Hardcover. Paris, Huillery, reprint, 1868, Book: Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, bound in half red calf over marbled boards. Frontispiece portrait, b&w engraved illustrations. Eugene Vidocq (1775-1857) was a French police officer and adventurer who rose in rank to become chief of a small, specialized detective force in Paris (the Police de Surete). He later organized a daring robbery which he was ironically put in charge of investigating. Eventually found out, he was dismissed from the police force and died in poverty and obscurity. First published 1n 1828. FRENCH TEXT.
Hardcover. NY, D. Appleton & Company, 1st US, 1894, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcovers, Three volumes complete, blue cloth hardcovers with gilt titles and oval decorations on the front covers. Gilt titles and decorations on the spines. Top edges gilt. Volume I: 421 pages, [4] pages advertisements, Volume II: 484 pages, [8] pages advertisements, Volume III: 541 pages, [2] pages advertisements. Illustrated with frontispieces in the three volumes. Illustrations and folding facsimile autographs and manuscripts. Previous owner's inscriptions written on inside front cover of Vol. 1, Otherwise a bright, clean set. PLEASE NOTE: DUE TO WEIGHT, DOMESTIC SHIPPING ONLY.
Hardcover. Pittsburgh, Luke Loomis, 1st American, 1832, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, leather bound, 246 pages, marbled endpapers. The chronicles of a pastor in a small French village in the mid-to late 1700s. Leather with minor scarring, overall clean and tight copy. Red leather label with gilt title on spine.
Hardcover. NY, 1st, 2021, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket. When the French designer Christian Dior presented his first collection in Paris in 1947, he changed fashion forever. Dior's "New Look" created a striking, romantic vision of femininity, luxury, and grace, making him-and his last name-famous overnight. One woman informed Dior's vision more than any other: his sister, Catherine, a Resistance fighter, concentration camp survivor, and cultivator of rose gardens who inspired Dior's most beloved fragrance, Miss Dior. Yet the story of Catherine's remarkable life-so different from her famous brother's-has never been told, until now. Drawing on the Dior archives and extensive research, Justine Picardie's Miss Dior is the long-overdue restoration of Catherine Dior's life. The siblings' stories are profoundly intertwined: in Occupied France, as Christian honed his couture skills, Catherine dedicated herself to the Resistance, ultimately being captured by the Gestapo and sent to Ravensbruck, the only Nazi camp solely for women. Seeking to trace Catherine's story as well as her influence on her brother, Picardie traveled to the significant places of Catherine's life, including Les Rhumbs, the Dior family villa with its magnificent gardens; the House of Dior in Paris; and La Colle Noire, Christian's chateau that he bequeathed to his sister. Remainder dot top edge.
Hardcover. NY, Brewer & Warren, 1st US, 1930, Book: Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, marbled boards with green cloth spine, 494 pages. A scholarly biography of the great French dramatist, b&w illustrations. Light shelf wear. Top of spine has some fading/sunning, no markings.
Hardcover. London, Longman, Brown, Green, Longmans & Roberts, 1st, 1857, Book: Good, Dust Jacket: None, 286 pages. Hardcover with marbled covers and page block decoration, gilt lettering on spine. Previous owner's bookplate on front end paper. Previous owner's name on title page. Ex-Library with usual stamping and embossed seal on preliminary pages.
Hardcover. London, Arthur L Humphreys, 2nd pr., 1900, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, maroon cloth with gilt staping. 261 pages including index. 261 pages. Written almost 80 years after the Emperor's death, the author attempts to bring together all the contemporary biographies and memoirs relating to the sojourn on St Helena. Mild foxing, otherwise clean.
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, Farrar Straus & Giroux, 1st US, 2023, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket, 588 pages, several color plates. Before Picasso became Picasso-the iconic artist now celebrated as one of France's leading figures-he was constantly surveilled by the French police. Amid political tensions in the spring of 1901, he was flagged as an anarchist by the security services-the first of many entries in an extensive case file. Though he soon emerged as the leader of the cubist avant-garde, and became increasingly wealthy as his reputation grew worldwide, Picasso's art was largely excluded from public collections in France for the next four decades. The genius who conceived Guernica in 1937 as a visceral statement against fascism was even denied French citizenship three years later, on the eve of the Nazi occupation. In a country where the police and the conservative Academie des Beaux-Arts represented two major pillars of the establishment at the time, Picasso faced a triple stigma-as a foreigner, a political radical, and an avant-garde artist. Picasso the Foreigner approaches the artist's career and art from an entirely new angle, making extensive use of fascinating and long-overlooked archival sources. In this groundbreaking narrative, Picasso emerges as an artist ahead of his time not only aesthetically but politically, one who ignored national modes in favor of contemporary cosmopolitan forms. Remainder dot to top edge, otherwise a bright, clean copy.
Softcover. New York , Random House, 1st, 2011, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 279 pages, b&w photos. Clean, unmarked copy with only minor wear to wrappers. This book exposes Chanel's anti-Semitism and her long affair with 'Spatz' Baron von Dincklage, a Nazi spy who ran an intelligence ring and reported to Goebbels. It explains how she became a German intelligence operative, how she lived in exile, how Winston Churchill supported her and how she reinvented herself in the early 1950s.
Hardcover. Boston, Houghton Mifflin Company, 1st, 1925, Book: Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, purple cloth gilt lettering and decoration on spine, gilt medallion on front cover. 355 pages, color frontispiece. Illustrated with several B&W maps and reproductions. Mild fade to spine. Clean, tight copy.
Hardcover. London, Alcove Press , 1st, 1972, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Good, Hardcover in a lightly worn dust jacket with foxing, tanning. No markings.
Hardcover. Philadelphia , Hogan and Thompson, reprint, 1836, Book: Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, leather bound, 285 pages with index. Front fly leaf gone, book opens to title page. Hinges cracked, rear cover barely holding on. No markings.