Hardcover. NY, Biblioasis, 1st, 2011, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket, 290 pages. Bruce Jay Friedman has done it all, charming the glitziest industries of American golden-age culture for more than half a century. Lucky Bruce is his long-awaited memoir, and it's everything we'd expect and more: here is Friedman at his best, waltzing from Madison Avenue to Hollywood and back again, and reilluminating with brilliant clarity the dazzle of post-war American life. Cameos by Joseph Heller, Philip Roth, Mario Puzo, Lillian Hellman, Warren Beatty, Marlene Dietrich, Brian Grazer, Candida Donadio, Crazy Joe Gallo, Joyce Carol Oates, Jack Richardson, Isaac Bashevis Singer, Kurt Vonnegut, and the irreplaceable Elaine. Clean copy.
Hardcover. NY, The Free Press, 2nd pr., 1990, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket, 654 pages, b&w illustrations. A portrait of one of the twentieth-century's most influential philosophers draws on previously unpublished letters and writings to describe Wittgenstein's youth, education, private life, and major works. Clean copy.
Hardcover. NY, Simon & Schuster, 1st, 1972, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover, 283 pages. Black & white drawings by Richard Amundsen. Light soil to rear of dust jacket..
Hardcover. NY, W. W. Norton , 2nd pr., 2020, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright unclipped dust jacket. Explores John Steinbeck's long apprenticeship as a writer struggling through the depths of the Great Depression, and his rise to greatness with masterpieces such as The Red Pony, Of Mice and Men and The Grapes of Wrath. His most poignant and evocative writing emerged in his sympathy for the Okies fleeing the dust storms of the Midwest, the migrant workers toiling in California's fields and the labourers on Cannery Row, reflecting a social engagement-paradoxical for all of his natural misanthropy-radically different from the writers of the so-called Lost Generation. 446 pages, remainder dot on top edge otherwise clean.
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, Doubleday, 1st, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket, 553 pages. The compulsively readable and sometimes jaw-dropping story of the life of a notorious madam who played hostess to every gangster, politician, writer, sports star and Cafe Society swell worth knowing, and who as much as any single figure helped make the twenties roar--from the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Most Famous Man in America. Simply put: Everybody came to Polly's. Pearl "Polly" Adler (1900-1962) was a diminutive dynamo whose Manhattan brothels in the Roaring Twenties became places not just for men to have the company of women but were key gathering places where the culturati and celebrity elite mingled with high society and with violent figures of the underworld--and had a good time doing it. B&w illustrations, clean copy.
Softcover. New York, Grossman Publishers, 1st, 1970, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, 124 pages. Softcover with moderate wear to spine and paper wrappers. Creasing to spine. Previous owner's writing on front fly leaf, remainder mark.
Philadelpia, Vertex Book/Auerbach Publishers, 1st, 1971, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Good, Hardcover in a worn, lightly soiled dust jacket, 243 pages. Map endpapers One man's story of being arrested on trumped up charges as an enemy of the Soviet State and being sent to Siberia for eight years. Inscription on dedication page (by book jacket designer).
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, Ludion/ D.A.P., 1st, 2005, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover, 167 pages with color and b&w photographs & illustrations. Red cloth boards. Dustjacket. A nice crisp copy. Translated from the French by Mark Polizzotti. Includes notes and acknowledgements. Rene Magritte, the Surrealist artist, began experimenting with photography at any early age. This book studies the ways in which the photographic medium played a constant role in Magritte's social and artistic life.
Softcover. Wilkes-Barre PA, Etruscan Press, 1st, 2021, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 304 pages. This book of essays by Norman Mailer's biographer, Dr. J. Michael Lennon, collect personal and literary reminiscences, insights, and investigations from the last half century. Through the rising action of his life in literature, Lennon's remembrances track the influence not only of his literary pater familias, Norman Mailer, but his actual father, a booze-bitten blue-collar bibliophile with his own reputation for genius, and how together these mentors forged and focused the 20/20 literary vision Lennon takes to the work of some of the greatest writers of the Twentieth Century, from Baldwin and Bishop to Didion and DeLillo and, not least, Mailer himself.
Hardcover. Baltimore, MD, Butternut & Blue, 1st, 2000, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, 335 pages. Hardcover. b/w illustrations throughout. Blue cover boards, black title and design on spine and covers. Dust jacket is unclipped, some scratches/rubbing to back cover, otherwise excellent.
Hardcover. NY, Random House Studio , 1st, 2023, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket. Color illustrations throughout by Claire Keane. SIGNED BY KUNKEL on the title page. In the beginning, there was a boy named Robert McCloskey, growing up in Ohio, his hands always moving, always creating. Many years later, after attending art school in Boston, he would reflect on his days wandering through Boston Garden and write the classic picture book Make Way for Ducklings. In the beginning, there was also a girl named Nancy Sch n. She grew up in Newton, Massachusetts, working in her father's greenhouse, twisting wire and boughs into wreaths. Many years later, Nancy would look at Robert's drawings in Make Way for Ducklings and get the seed of an idea. That seed became the beloved bronze sculptures of Mrs. Mallard and her eight ducklings that stand in Boston Garden today. This stunning and clever picture book biography intertwines the lives of two phenomenal artists--who were contemporaries and friends--and reveals the extraordinary impact they've had on generations of children.
NY, Viking, 4th pr., 2011, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket. 594 pages, b&w illustrations. Of the great figure in twentieth-century American history perhaps none is more complex and controversial than Malcolm X. Constantly rewriting his own story, he became a criminal, a minister, a leader, and an icon, all before being felled by assassins' bullets at age thirty-nine. Through his tireless work and countless speeches he empowered hundreds of thousands of black Americans to create better lives and stronger communities while establishing the template for the self-actualized, independent African American man. In death he became a broad symbol of both resistance and reconciliation for millions around the world. Manning Marable's new biography of Malcolm is a stunning achievement. Filled with new information and shocking revelations that go beyond the Autobiography, Malcolm X unfolds a sweeping story of race and class in America, from the rise of Marcus Garvey and the Ku Klux Klan to the struggles of the civil rights movement in the fifties and sixties. Reaching into Malcolm's troubled youth, it traces a path from his parents' activism through his own engagement with the Nation of Islam, charting his astronomical rise in the world of Black Nationalism and culminating in the never-before-told true story of his assassination.
Hardcover. Lexington KY, University Press of Kentucky, 1st, 2013, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket. An Armenian national raised in Russia, Rouben Mamoulian (1897--1987) studied in the influential Stanislavski studio, renowned as the source of the "method" acting technique. Shortly after immigrating to New York in 1926, he created a sensation with an all-black production of Porgy (1927). He then went on to direct the debut Broadway productions of three of the most popular shows in the history of American musical theater: Porgy and Bess (1935), Oklahoma! (1943), and Carousel (1945). Mamoulian began working in film just as the sound revolution was dramatically changing the technical capabilities of the medium, and he quickly established himself as an innovator. Not only did many of his unusual camera techniques become standard, but he also invented a device that eliminated the background noises created by cameras and dollies. Seen as a rebel earlier in his career, Mamoulian gradually gained respect in Hollywood, and the Directors Guild of America awarded him the prestigious D. W. Griffith Award for Lifetime Achievement in 1983. In this meticulously researched biography, David Luhrssen paints the influential director as a socially conscious artist who sought to successfully combine art and commercial entertainment. Luhrssen not only reveals the fascinating personal story of an important yet neglected figure, but he also offers a tantalizing glimpse into the extraordinarily vibrant American film and theater industries during the twenties, thirties, and forties.
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. New Brunswick NJ, Rutgers University Press,, 1st, 1997, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover, 243 pages, b&w photos. In a bright dust jacket. A much needed biography of the father of quality, live theatrical productions for television in the "golden age of television" in the 1950s is finally here. Fred Coe won multiple awards during his career, including the Emmy and Tony awards, among many others.
Hardcover. New York, Gotham, 1st, 2009, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover, 453 pages. SIGNED BY AUTHOR. Illustrated endpages and flyleaves. Gilt titles on spine. Clean, unmarked copy with only minor wear to dust jacket.
Hardcover. New York, Random House, First Edition, 2008, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, 354 pages. Hardcover. Black cloth boards with gilt titles to spine. Black & white illustrations throughout. Dust jacket with only light marginal wear. Clean & unmarked.
Softcover. NY, Da Capo Press, reprint, 2000, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 449 pages, b&w illustrations. Man Ray was the quintessential modernist figure - painter, sculptor, photographer, filmmaker, poet, and philosopher. One of the most fascinating of the Surrealists who transformed the Paris art world during the 1920s, Man Ray was an enigma - a Dadaist who revered the Old Masters, an anarchist pursued by wealthy patrons. Driven to make his mark in as many art forms as possible, he struggled bitterly to win acceptance as a painter even as his skill as a photographer brought him world wide fame. Remainder line to bottom edge, otherwise clean.
Softcover. Boston MA, Little, Brown and Company, reprint, 1999, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, 319 pages, paperback. Man Ray's extraordinary autobiography, which reveals the entertaining life and times of the remarkable artist. Color and black-and-white illustrations throughout. Mild rubbing and edgewear to wraps. Lower fore edge corner slightly creased. Light pen mark to front flyleaf. A bright and tight copy.
Hardcover. US, Getty Research Institute, 1st, 2016, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover with dust jacket. Like new still in publisher's shrink wrap.
Hardcover. London, Author Baker Limited, 1st, 1975, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Good, 186 pages. Hardcover with price-clipped dust jacket. Dust jacket shows heavy fraying on top and spine, protected with plastic sleeve. Previous owner's sticker and stamp on end papers, otherwise clean tight copy.