essays

Hardcover. New York, PowerHouse Books, 1st, 2004, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, 160 pages. Hardcover with dust jacket. Very clean, unmarked copy still in publishers shrink-wrap. For his second powerHouse Books monograph, Juvenile, photographer Joseph Rodriguez spent several years following several youths, from arrest, counseling, trial adjudication, and incarceration, to release, probation, house arrest, group homes, and the search for employment and meaning in their lives. Through the power of his photographs, Rodriguez shows us how these kids struggle and how they fight to change their lives.

Softcover. Cambridge UK, Cambridge University Press, 1st, 1987, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 482 pages. Previous owner's signature on front end paper, else a clean, unmarked copy with only minor wear to wrappers.

Softcover. New Haven CT, Yale University Press, reprint, 1998, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 426 pages. How do we evaluate the power and utility of language when it has been made to articulate falsehoods in certain totalitarian regimes or has been charged with vulgarity and imprecision in a mass-consumer democracy? How will language react to the increasingly urgent claims of more exact speech such as mathematics and symbolic notation? These are some of the questions Steiner addresses in this elegantly written book, first published in 1967 to international acclaim. Clean, bright copy.

Softcover. La Salle, Ill., Open Court, reprint, 1999, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 214 pages. Minor wear to edges of cover. Previous owner's inscription on front flyleaf. A bright and clean copy.

Softcover. New York, Princeton Architectural Press, 1st, 2006, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, 192 pages. Softcover. A very clean, unmarked copy with only minor wear to edges. Black and white portraits of citizens of Indiana, taken over 4 decades.

Hardcover. Los Angeles, Art Issues Press, 1st, 1995, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket, 420 pages with index. Christopher Knight is the unprecedented five-time winner of the Chemical Bank Award for Distinguished Newspaper Art Criticism, and was a finalist for the 1990 Pulitzer Prize in criticism. Writing first for the Los Angeles Herald Examiner and now for the Los Angeles Times, Knight has developed a new journalistic approach to American art and culture, in which a radical defense of images stands alongside an incisive critique of cultural institutions. Among the 129 essays and reviews collected here are individual writings on internationally important historical figures, such as Rembrandt van Rijn, Tung Ch'i Ch'ang, and douard Manet; contemporary American masters like Edward Ruscha and Mike Kelley; and significant artists virtually forgotten today, such as California's Henrietta Shore and Mexico's Hermenegildo Bustos. Clean copy.

Hardcover. Boston, Gould and Lincoln, 1st ed., 1859, Book: Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, 718 pages. Vol 1 only. Gilt top edge. Light pencil markings throughout. Previous owner's signature on front fly leaf. Light shelf wear to boards. Otherwise, tight, clean copy.

Hardcover. London, Macmillan & Co., reprint, 1950, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, red cloth with gilt lettering on spine. 362 pages with index. Name on front fly leaf, spine cloth faded, otherwise clean, very good.

Hardcover. Carbondale IL, Southern Illinois University Press, reprint, 1965, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcovers in dust jackets, two volume set reproducing the 1783 first edition. Edited and introduced by Harold F. Harding. "The Lectures went through at least 130 editions between 1783 and 1911. Because of its size and cost, the two-volume work invariably was abridged or issued as cheap one-volume reprints. No other edition available today combines the readability and beauty of the first Edinburgh edition, which is here faithfully and completely reproduced, so that scholars may have access to it again." (dust jacket copy). 496, 550 pages plus index. Clean set, some toning to dust jackets.

Softcover. Evanston IL, Northwestern University Press, 1st, 2010, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 390 pages. INSCRIBED BY AUTHOR on title page. A swing note is, to the listener of the rhythm, an unexpected note, and it is the spark of life in jazz and its relatives. Whether playing the standards or the most experimental piece, it is how a musician handles these notes--fearlessly or safely--that determines the fate of the performance. Howard Reich's critical writing is similarly unexpected and fearless, and Let Freedom Swing is a collection of the articles from the past three decades that best capture this spirit. Each section of Let Freedom Swing composes a suite, focusing on either a person, place, or scene. Reich gives new life to the standards with his profiles and elegies for such giants as Gershwin, Ellington, and Sinatra. A profile of Louis Armstrong brings out the often angry side of Satchmo but also reveals a more remarkable musician and human being. His open-mindedness makes Reich a particularly astute observer of the experimental and new, from Ornette Coleman to Chicago experimentalist Ken Vandermark. And his observations about street music open our ears to the songs of everyday life. Reich's fearlessness is evident in his writing about daunting subjects, such as the New Orleans music scene after Katrina, the lost legacy of jazz in Panama, and the complicated legacy of "race music" in America. Clean copy.

Hardcover. London, George Allen & Unwin LTD, 2nd, 1948, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Good, 216 pages. Hardcover with dust jacket. Light soil, tape repair to dust jacket. Light soil on cover boards, tight copy.

Hardcover. New York, Da Capo Press, Reprint, 1970, Book: Near Fine, Dust Jacket: None,

Hardcover. New York , Clarkson N. Potter, Inc, 1st, 1982, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover, 216 pages, b&w illustrations. Dust jacket with slightly faded spine and small tear to uper edge of front cover. Previous owner's bookplate on front end paper. Clean, tight copy. "This collection of fifteen original essays, written especially for this occasion by distinguished Carrollian authorities from around the world, including Morton Cohen, Roger Henkle, Donald Rackin, Jean Gattegno, and Edward Guiliano, celebrates the many aspects of Carroll's life and art."

Hardcover. New York, Da Capo Press, Reprint, 1969, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None,

Hardcover. New York, Da Capo Press, Reprint, 1969, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None,

Hardcover. East Aurora, New York, The Roycrofters, 1st, 1906, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, 164 pages, portraits of the author and subjects in the book with tissue guards. Embossed Half leather binding and decorated pages. Gilt top edge. Author's signature (in plate) on frontispiece portrait. Number 18 in The Little Journeys Series. A very handsome book.

Hardcover. London, George Allen & Unwin Ltd., 2nd pr., 1947, Book: Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover in light tan cloth with red lettering to the spine, 361 pages. Although the life of London runs like a thread through the whole fabric of this book, it is not essentially a book about London. Life in Bloomsbury is but the center of a large circle, the point around which the rest of the book revolves, the origin of a disarming commentary on an infinite variety of topics - on Bloomsbury's squares, on the picturesqueness of London a generation ago, on what is true Cockney, on the differences of English and American humor, on the decay of English wit, on books and authors and publishers and the Press, on the literary lions of the past, on the religion of speed, on the charm of Americans, on how the Victorian age was neither so repressed nor so hidebound as most people today like to believe - and so on, one thing leading to another, like good conversation at a good luncheon overlooking the mellow squares of Bloomsbury. The book is full, too, of good stories and reminiscences, both humorous and pathetic, but there is shrewd comment besides on the deficiencies of contemporary society, not the less effective because the author knows how to soften the blow. Mild soil, sunning to covers, clean copy.

Hardcover. Lincoln NE, University of Nebraska Press, 1st, 2002, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket, 153 pages. SIGNED BY KOOSER on title page. Ted Kooser describes with exquisite detail and humor the place he calls home in the Bohemian Alps of southeastern Nebraska.

Hardcover. NY, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1st, 1971, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket, 378 pages. From dust jacket notes: "For most Americans, the Second World War started on December 7, 1941, and much of the fighting took place in strange, faraway places. For the British, the war started on September 3, 1939, and much of the action took place in the skies over England. In the spring of 1940, after months of uneasy calm, Germany invaded the Lowlands and conquered France within a few days, leaving England without her only meaningful ally on the Continent. A year would pass before the Soviet Union was drawn into the war, and eighteen months before the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor. The United Kingdom, with a land area about the size of Wyoming, was alone, all alone, with only the Straits of Dover separating the island from Hitler's war machine. For six years Mollie Panter-Downes covered the war for The New Yorker magazine from her native England. Even at the height of the air war over London, when 'all that is best in the good life of civilized effort appears to be slowly and painfully keeling over,' she continued to file her fortnightly reports in an understated but dramatic fashion that reflected the fortitude of her fellow countrymen: 'The announcements of the first air-raid deaths are beginning to appear in the obituary columns of the morning papers. No mention is made of the cause of death, but the conventional phrase "very suddenly" is always used.' William Shawn, editor of The New Yorker, has assembled Miss Panter-Downes' 'Letter from London' columns into a consecutive, on-the-spot chronicle of the war in England."

Softcover. Bennington VT, Bennington College, 1st, 1985, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover in green stapled wrappers. No. 628 of 1,000 numbered copies. Published in the Bennington Chapbooks in Literature series & in memory of William Trot. A speech delivered by Malamud at Bennington College as Lecture Seven in the Belitt Lectureship Series, October 30th, 1984. Introduction by Nicholas Delbanco. Illustrated with 3 full-page black & white photos of Malamud. Clean copy.

Hardcover. NY, MOMA, 2nd Pr., 1974, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover, 216 pages, 100 duotone plates. Szarkowski's classic work with critical essays on each picture. Bright, unclipped dust jacket. Mild shelf wear.

Softcover. London, Vintage, reprint, 1998, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 468 pages. Traces Klein's theories on childhood development, criminality and childhood psychosis, symbol formation, and the early development of conscience. Clean copy.

Hardcover. NY, Random House, 1st, 1974, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Good, Hardcover in a worn, chipped dust jacket with light tape repairs, 318 pages. Stated First Edition. No markings.

Hardcover. UK, Oxford University Press, 1st, 2013, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket, 326 pages. Lucretius' didactic masterpiece De Rerum Natura (On the Nature of Things) is one of the most brilliant and powerful poems in the Latin language, a passionate attempt at dispelling humanity's fear of death and its enslavement by false beliefs about the gods, and a detailed exposition of Epicurean atomist physics. For centuries, it has raised the question of whether it is primarily a poem or primarily a philosophical treatise, which also presents scientific doctrine. The current volume seeks to unite the three disciplinary aspects -- poetry, philosophy, and science -- in order to offer a holistic response to an important monument in cultural history. With ten original essays and an analytical introduction, the volume aims not only to combine different approaches within single covers, but to offer responses to the poem by experts from all three scholarly backgrounds. Philosophers and scholars of ancient science look closely at the artistic placement of individual words, while literary critics explore ethical matters and the contribution of Lucretius' poetry to the argument of the poem. Topics covered include death and grief, evolution and the cosmos, ethics and politics, perception, and epistemology.Name and date on front fly leaf, light pencil marking to about 25 pages.