Hardcover. NY, St. Martin's Press, 2nd pr., 2018, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket. 388 pages, b&w illustrations. A revealing biography of Florence Gould, fabulously wealthy socialite and patron of the arts, who hid a dark past as a Nazi collaborator in 1940's Paris. Born in turn-of-the-century San Francisco to French parents, Florence moved to Paris at the age of eleven. Believing that only money brought respectability and happiness, she became the third wife of Frank Jay Gould, son of the railway millionaire Jay Gould. She guided Frank's millions into hotels and casinos, creating a luxury hotel and casino empire. She entertained Zelda and Scott Fitzgerald, Pablo Picasso, Joseph Kennedy, and many Hollywood stars-like Charlie Chaplin, who became her lover. While the party ended for most Americans after the Crash of 1929, Frank and Florence stayed on, fearing retribution by the IRS. During the Occupation, Florence took several German lovers and hosted a controversial Nazi salon. As the Allies closed in, the unscrupulous Florence became embroiled in a notorious money laundering operation for Hermann Goring's Aerobank. Yet after the war, not only did she avoid prosecution, but her vast fortune bought her respectability as a significant contributor to the Metropolitan Museum and New York University, among many others. It also earned her friends like Estee Lauder who obligingly looked the other way. A seductive and utterly amoral woman who loved to say "money doesn't care who owns it," Florence's life proved a strong argument that perhaps money can buy happiness after all.
Hardcover. New York, Random House, 1st, 1991, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, 548 pages. Hardcover with dust jacket. Black and white pictures throughout. Previous owner's bookplate on front end paper. Light soil to dust jacket.
Hardcover. New Haven, Yale University Press, 1st, 1985, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, blue cloth, 262 pages. Illustrated with black & white photographs. Clean, tight copy. This portrait of Disderi and the carte de visite he patented in Paris in 1854 is far more than a biography. The c-d-v, or photographic calling card, was a relatively inexpensive product that made the photographic portrait available to the middle class . McCauley's carefully documented work explores Disderi's career and oeuvre , the impact of mass-produced celebrity cartes on the social and cultural life of mid-19th-century France, and aesthetics in c-d-v portraiture. The final third of the book is an art historical evaluation of the importance of the c-d-v for portrait painting of the period . The fine bibliography, generous illustrative matter, and detailed notes add to the value of this work for the avid student of photohistory or 19th-century studies.
Hardcover. New Havn CT, Yale University Press, 1st , 2001, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, 333 pages. Hardcover with dust jacket. Illustrated in color, B&W. Clean, tight copy. Few painters lived the intellectual adventures of the early twentieth century as intensely as Albert Gleizes. At the centre of the public scandal over Cubism that broke out in Paris in 1911, he was with Marcel Duchamp and Francis Picabia in New York during the war and was one of the first European avant-garde artists to respond to the scale and vigour of New York life. Gleizes was also one of the few French painters of the 1920s to recognise nonrepresentational painting as the logical development of Cubism. His work as a painter is accompanied by an immense body of theoretical work, addressing the question posed so starkly by Duchamp and Picabia: why should we paint? What is the justification for the work of art? Over his life he touches on many spheres of human activity - religious, political and cultural history, physics and the philosophy of work. This book follows Gleizes' argument as it evolves, drawing on painting, and both published and unpublished writings. It reveals Gleizes, not just as a significant historical personality, but as a man whose work and thinking remains surprisingly fresh and relevant to the needs of our own time.
Hardcover. Cambridge MA, The MIT Press, 1sr, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright gold foil dust wrapper, 476 pages. The artist Francis Picabia -- notorious dandy, bon vivant, painter, poet, filmmaker, and polemicist -- has emerged as the Dadaist with postmodern appeal, and one of the most enigmatic forces behind the enigma that was Dada. In this first book in English to focus on Picabia's work in Paris during the Dada years, art historian and critic George Baker reimagines Dada through Picabia's eyes. Such reimagining involves a new account of the readymade -- Marcel Duchamp's anti-art invention, which opened fine art to mass culture and the commodity. But in Picabia's hands, Baker argues, the Dada readymade aimed to reinvent art rather than destroy it. Picabia's readymade opened art not just to the commodity, but to the larger world from which the commodity stems: the fluid sea of capital and money that transforms all objects and experiences in its wake. The book thus tells the story of a set of newly transformed artistic practices, claiming them for art history -- and naming them -- for the first time: Dada Drawing, Dada Painting, Dada Photography, Dada Abstraction, Dada Cinema, Dada Montage.Along the way, Baker describes a series of nearly forgotten objects and events, from the almost lunatic range of the Paris Dada "manifestations" to Picabia's polemical writings. Clean copy.
Hardcover. Wilmington, DE, Scholarly Resources Inc., 1st, 1984, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, 298 pages. Hardcover. Dust jacket unclipped. Cover boards bound in blue, gilt title on spine and front cover. Dust jacket has a touch of agewear, A little foxing on top edge. Clean inside, binding tight, in great shape.
Hardcover. New York, Alfred A. Knopf, 1st, 1949, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Good, 374 pages. Hardcover. Dust jacket with short tape repaired tears along edges, fading to spine. Clean, unmarked pages.
Hardcover. New York, Coward, McCann & Geoghegan, Inc., 1st US, 1975, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Good, Hardcover, 319 pages. Hardcover. Previous owners bookplate on preliminary pages. 16 pages of black & white illustrations. Foxing to top edge. Dust jacket with chipping along edges.
Hardcover. London, George Routledge and Sons, Reprint, 1867, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Two hardcover volumes. Translated by Thomas Johnes. 102 engravings. 3/4 blue leather & patterned paper on boards, Spine with gilt & raised bands. All edges gilt. Previous owner's name stamp on front end paper. Volume 1 - 640 pages. Light wear. Clean, unmarked text. Volume 2 - 552 pages. Light wear. Clean, unmarked pages.
Hardcover. NY, Knopf, 1st US, 1992, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket. pages. A portrait of one of key figures of the French Enlightenment provides a incisive study of Diderot's private life, public career, and his literary and philosophical works. Clean copy.
Hardcover. NY, Metropolitan Books, 2nd pr., 2008, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover, 701 pages, b&w illustratios. When Jean-Luc Godard, exemplary director of the French New Wave, wed the ideals of film-making to the realities of autobiography and current events, he changed the nature of cinema. In this study, the author has amassed hundreds of interviews with friends, family and collaborators to demystify the elusive director and paint the fullest picture yet of his life and work.
Hardcover. San Francisco, Harper & Row, 1st, 1987, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, 363 pages. Hardcover with dust jacket. A very clean, unmarked copy with only minor wear to dust jacket edges. A tight copy. Recounts the life of the prolific author, inveterate explorer, pioneer feminist, and world authority on Tibetan Buddhist tantric rites.
Softcover. US, Somogy Art Publishers , 1st, 2008, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, 320 pages. Softcover with little to no wear on edges. Still in publisher's shrinkwrap. Bringing the famed Parisian illustrator to light, this biography centers on Gabriel de Saint-Aubin, who studied at the prestigious Royal Academy but failed to win the coveted Prix de Rome. The study relates that the subject reacted to this disappointment by throwing aside all hopes of a traditional artistic career and hastening out into the thoroughfares of Paris to sketch everything in sight, living an errant, bohemian existence and succumbing increasingly to an obsession with drawing. Detailed and engaging, this recollection demonstrates that, despite his personal eccentricities, Saint-Aubin was employed as an artist all his life.
Hardcover. New Haven, Yale University Press, 1st, 2004, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover, 376 pages. Clean, unmarked copy with only minor wear to dust jacket. George Sand was the most famous and most scandalous woman in nineteenth-century France. As a writer, she was enormously prolific. She wrote more than ninety novels, thirty-five plays, and thousands of pages of autobiography. She inspired writers as diverse as Flaubert and Proust but is often remembered for her love affairs with such figures as Musset and Chopin. Her affair with Chopin is the most notorious: their nine-year relationship ended in 1847 when Sand began to suspect that the composer had fallen in love with her daughter, Solange.
Hardcover. New York, Arcade Publishing, 1st, 2005, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover, 440 pages, illustrations in color and b&w. Clean, unmarked copy with only minor wear to dust jacket. A pioneer of modern art and founder of Cubism, Georges Braque was a creative genius and tireless innovator, constantly pushing back the boundaries of the possible. In this magisterial work, Alex Danchev taps a wide range of new sources to reveal the heart and mind of one who helped usher in the greatest revolution in the ways of seeing since the Renaissance and changed the face of modern art. Chapters include: "Memories in anticipation:" The Confirmed Painter, "Mon vieux Wilbourg:" The Encounter with Picasso, "If I should Ide Out There:" The Great War, The prong of the rade" : Late Braque. And much more.
Hardcover. New York, Arcade Publishing, 1st, 2005, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover, 440 pages, illustrations in color and b&w. Clean, unmarked copy with only minor wear to dust jacket. A pioneer of modern art and founder of Cubism, Georges Braque was a creative genius and tireless innovator, constantly pushing back the boundaries of the possible. In this magisterial work, Alex Danchev taps a wide range of new sources to reveal the heart and mind of one who helped usher in the greatest revolution in the ways of seeing since the Renaissance and changed the face of modern art. Chapters include: "Memories in anticipation:" The Confirmed Painter, "Mon vieux Wilbourg:" The Encounter with Picasso, "If I should Ide Out There:" The Great War, The prong of the rade" : Late Braque. And much more.
Hardcover. New York, Berghahn Books, 1st, 2006, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, 268 pages. Hardcover with no dust jacket. Very clean, unmarked copy with only minor wear to edges. Small corner bump on front top right corner. Otherwise tight copy. Black and white images throughout.
Hardcover. New York, Tim Duggan Books, 1st, 2017, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover, 248 pages, b&w illustrations. The first great portrait photographer, a pioneering balloonist, the first person to take an aerial photograph, and the prime mover behind the first airmail service, Nadar was one of the original celebrity artist-entrepreneurs. A kind of 19th-century Andy Warhol, he knew everyone worth knowing and photographed them all, conferring on posterity psychologically compelling portraits of Manet, Sarah Bernhardt, Delacroix, Daumier and countless others--a priceless panorama of Parisian celebrity. Born Gaspard-Felix Tournachon, he adopted the pseudonym Nadar as a young bohemian, when he was a budding writer and cartoonist. Later he affixed the name Nadar to the facade of his opulent photographic studio in giant script, the illuminated letters ten feet tall, the whole sign fifty feet long, a garish red beacon on the boulevard. Nadar became known to all of Europe and even across the Atlantic when he launched "The Giant," a gas balloon the size of a twelve-story building, the largest of its time. With his daring exploits aboard his humongous balloon (including a catastrophic crash that made headlines around the world), he gave his friend Jules Verne the model for one of his most dynamic heroes.
Hardcover. Baltimore, Johns Hopkins University Press, 1st US, 2012, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover, 394 pages, b&w illustrations. The adventures of Tintin and his dog, Snowy, have captivated people worldwide since they first appeared as an insert in the Belgian Catholic newspaper Le Vintieme Siecle in 1929. Available for the first time in English, this insightful biography delves deep into the psyche of Tintin creator Georges Remi and his public persona Herge. Author of the critically acclaimed Tintin and the World of Herge and the last person to interview Remi, Benoit Peeters tells the complete story behind Herge's origins and shows how and why the nom de plume grew into a larger-than-Remi personality as Tintin's popularity exploded. Drawing on interviews and using recently uncovered primary sources for the first time, Peeters reveals Remi as a neurotic man who sought to escape the troubles of his past by allowing Herge's identity to subsume his own. As Tintin adventured, Herge lived out a romanticized version of life for Remi.
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.
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. 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. 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. Garden City, Doubleday & Company, 1st, 1965, Book: Good, Dust Jacket: Good, 216 pages. Hardcover. Illustrated with 40 pages of black & white photographs. Rear endpaper has been removed. Darkening to top edge. Dust jacket with some areas of light soiling - jacket now protected with clear plastic cover. Clean, unmarked pages.
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.
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. New Haven CT, Yale University Press, 1st, 1997, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket, 354 pages, b&w illustrations. An illustrated study brings to life the atmosphere and personalities of pre-revolutionary Paris, traces their influence on the American envoy, and recounts his participation in the life of the city and its intrigues at court. Clean copy.
Hardcover. University AL, University of Alabama Press, 1st, 1981, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover, red cloth covers in a lightly worn dust jacket. Here are the passionate memoirs of the French Communard leader, a hero, saint and martyr to the socialists and anarchists battling the injustices of the Third Republic. 202 pages with a bibliography. Clean copy.
Hardcover. NY, Grove Press, 1st US, 2005, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket. In 1753, Voltaire -- playwright, poet, philosopher, and one of the most feted figures in Europe -- was forced by Louis XV into exile, where he remained for the last twenty-five years of his life. These years heralded a startling new beginning for this remarkable man. Voltaire carved out a new and vibrant world in his isolation, becoming a successful entrepreneur and writing his masterpiece Candide. In Voltaire in Exile, Ian Davidson re-creates this period in the life of one of the giants of the Enlightenment. By painstakingly translating the rich correspondence between Voltaire and his family, members of the Court at Versailles, and the French intellectual elite, Davidson allows us to discover Voltaire the artist, the campaigner, the aesthete, the lover, the humorist. The result is a wonderfully vivid portrait of this extraordinarily funny, iconoclastic, complex, and, above all, ferociously intelligent individual. Clean copy.
 "Man About Paris: the Confessions of Arsene Houssaye by: Knepler, Henry (Translated And Edited by)")
