essays

Hardcover. Philadelphia, Benjamin Warner, 1st thus, 1817, Book: Good, Hardcover, 477 pages. Lithographed portrait frontispiece of Hamilton, two other plates with portraits of Madison and Jay, all portraits have tissue overlays. NOTE: This copy has a 1817 date on the title page, and a total of 477 pages while other books listed are dated 1818 with 504 pages. So this is the first single-volume edition minus the Appendix which was added to the 1818 edition. This is an ex-lib from Columbia University, with several stamps and thie bookplate on inside front cover. The book has been rebound in brown buckram with gilt title on spine and call numbers at bottom. The frontispiece plate has a crease through the center and all 3 plates have light foxing and an embossed stamp. Overall Good Plus with about 12 pages having some light pencil marks in margins. Binding is solid. More pictures available on request.

Hardcover. University of Chicago Press, 1st, 1991, Book: Good, Dust Jacket: Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket, 307 pages. This book analyzes the thought behind practices of government and argues that criticism represents a true force for change in attitudes and actions, and that extending the limits of some practices allows the invention of others. This unique and extraordinarily useful collection of articles and primary materials will open the way for a whole new set of discussions of the work of Michel Foucault as well as the status of liberalism, social policy, and insurance. Some yellow high-lighting in the first 50 pages.

Lawrence, KS, Spencer Museum of Art, 1st, 1984, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, 158 pages. Black & white illustrations throughout. No dust jacket.

Softcover. Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1st, 2014, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 223 pages. Over the course of a fifty-year career, Donald E. Westlake published nearly one hundred books, including not one but two long-running series, starring the hard-hitting Parker and the hapless John Dortmunder. In the six years since his death, Westlake's reputation has only grown, with fans continuing to marvel at his tightly constructed plots, no-nonsense prose, and keen, even unsettling, insights into human behavior. With The Getaway Car, we get our first glimpse of another side of Westlake the writer: what he did when he wasn't busy making stuff up. And it's fascinating. Setting previously published pieces, many little seen, alongside never-before-published material found in Westlake's working files, the book offers a clear picture of the man behind the books-including his thoughts on his own work and that of his peers, mentors, and influences. The book opens with revealing (and funny) fragments from an unpublished autobiography, then goes on to offer an extended history of private eye fiction, a conversation among Westlake's numerous pen names, letters to friends and colleagues, interviews, appreciations of fellow writers, and much, much more. There's even a recipe for Sloth a la Dortmunder. Really. Rounded out with a foreword by Westlake's longtime friend Lawrence Block, The Getaway Car is a fitting capstone to a storied career and a wonderful opportunity to revel anew in the voice and sensibility of a master craftsman.

Hardcover. NY, Grosset and Dunlap, 1st, 1967, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket. A collection of essays, most previously appearing in Pageant, The New York Time, The New Republic and other publications in the 1960s. Subjects include Madison Avenue Foreign Policy, The Strange Case of Negro Superiority, Margaret Mead for President, A Solution for Leisure, among many others.

Hardcover. London, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1st, 1953, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Good, Hardcover in a lightly worn dust jacket, 596 pages. Pieces originally published in the magazine Horizon including contributions by Dylan Thomas, Octavio Paz, Randall Jarrell, Bertrand Russell, Paul Eluard, Edith Sitwell, Kenneth Rexroth, Hermann Hesse and many others. A 21 year history attempting to reveal the best of this publication. Clean copy.

Hardcover. NY, Doubleday and Co., 1st, 1965, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Good, Hardcover in a lightly worn, chipped dust jacket, $4.95 on the flap. 315 pages with b&w illustrations. Informal profiles by this former sportswriter of some of the stars of the "Golden Decade" of the 1920s - in boxing, tennis, baseball, football, golf - including Bobby Jones, Babe Ruth, Gertrude Ederle, Gene Tunney, Helen Wills, Ty Cobb, Jack Dempsey, Knute Rockne and many more. Clean copy.

Hardcover. Berkeley CA, Bern Porter, 1st, 1945, Book: Fair, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover. No. 260 out of 750 copies bound for distribution. 157 pages. Tan boards with wear and soiling, gray cloth spine. Shelving information on spine. Front hinge cracked. Ex-library. Printed on various colored paper, with contributions by a lot of well known authors, including Williams, Patchen, Durrell, Lamantia, many others. Edges soiled. Interior very good.

Hardcover. np, Oscar Laighton, 1st, 1935, Hardcover, green cloth stamped in gilt, 177 pages. Many years ago Celia Thaxter wrote a poem adapted from one of the short stories of Count Tolstoy, she called it "The Heavenly Guest". It was later found by her granddaughter, Rosamond Thaxter, in a portfolio which had been loaned to the late Sara Orne Jewett, which was returned after her death. Also found were many unpublished papers of Celia Thaxter's. They are gathered here. This copy INSCRIBED BY ROSAMOND THAXTER on the front fly leaf, Clean copy.

Hardcover. NY, Doubleday and Co., 1st, 1953, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, beige cloth with titles in black and blue on spine, no dust jacket, 317 pages. These are the life and times of Col. John R. Stingo, fabulous figure of track and ring. The Colonel who Was a raconteur In The Grand Tradition; He shares his tales Oo rainmaking, horse racing, newspaper writing; and other exploits of his long and kaleidoscopic career. Paper tanning slightly but a clean copy.

Hardcover. Princeton NJ, Princeton University Press, 1st, 1969, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, decorated boards with green cloth spine with gilt lettering. 116 pages, clean, bright copy, no dj. This is a collection of excerpts from the public addresses of Robert F. Goheen during his twelve years as President of Princeton University. The emphasis is on the people whose responsibility it is to promote and defend the principles underlying the modern American university-students, faculty, administrators, trustees, alumni. Several fundamental themes emerge the theme of individual responsibility, and the ever-present need to join rational intelligence with moral commitment, for example. Dr. Goheen sees the university as a continuing institution with long range goals, responding conservatively (in its best sense) to the human needs of the times. He seeks to define its institutional relationships in the context of the university's tasks in educ1tion and research, which must be understood and kept in balance if universities are to serve their functions effectively. Laid in are two reprints of postcards from the 1890s featuring Princeton athletes.

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. London, Jonathan Cape, 1st, 1934, Book: Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, blue cloth faded on spine and cover edges, gilt lettering on spine. 315 pages, b&w photographic plates. Some fifty essays, reviews, studies and other short pieces, including a section devoted to Williamson's travels in North America and passages from 'The Sun in the Sands' which do not appear in the 1941 book of the same name. No markings.

Hardcover. NY, HarperCollins, 1st, 2002, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket. SIGNED BY PROSE on the title page. In a brilliant, wry, and provocative book, National Book Award finalist Francine Prose explores the complex relationship between the artist and his muse. In so doing, she illuminates with great sensitivity and intelligence the elusive emotional wellsprings of the creative process. Clean copy.

Hardcover. NY/London, G. P. Putnum's Sons, 1st illust. thus, 1933, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, green cloth with gilt stamping, 242 pages. 24 woodcuts and some decorations by Tunnicliffe. First Illustrated Edition which has been enlarged by the author and contains several new essays. No dust jacket.

Hardcover. University of Nebraska Press, 1st, 2017, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover, 592 pages. Ring Lardner's influence on American letters is arguably greater than that of any other American writer in the early part of the twentieth century. Lauded by critics and the public for his groundbreaking short stories, Lardner was also the country's best-known journalist in the 1920s and early 1930s, when his voice was all but inescapable in American newspapers and magazines. Lardner's trenchant, observant, sly, and cynical writing style, along with a deep understanding of human foibles, made his articles wonderfully readable and his words resonate to this day. Ron Rapoport has gathered the best of Lardner's journalism from his earliest days at the South Bend Times through his years at the Chicago Tribune and his weekly column for the Bell Syndicate, which appeared in 150 newspapers and reached eight million readers. In these columns Lardner not only covered the great sporting events of the era--from Jack Dempsey's fights to the World Series and even an America's Cup--he also wrote about politics, war, and Prohibition, as well as parodies, poems, and penetrating observations on American life.

Softcover. NY, W.W. Norton & Co., 1st pbk., 1962, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 205 pages. Clean, bright copy.

Hardcover. NY, George Braziller, 1st, 1966, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in slightly worn dust jacket, 230 pages illustrated with b&w photos. A series of articles by Francoise Choay, Herbert Read, Marcel Breuer, and others, on the role of man-made objects in 20th-Century society. Small owner's sticker on the front fly leaf, otherwise clean.

Hardcover. NY, Aperture, reprint, 1999, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket, 107 pages. Henri Cartier-Bresson's writings on photography and photographers have been published sporadically over the past 45 years. His essays--several of which have never before been translated into English--are collected here for the first time. The Mind's Eye features Cartier-Bresson's famous text on "the decisive moment" as well as his observations on Moscow, Cuba and China during turbulent times. These essays ring with the same immediacy and visual intensity that characterize his photography. Clean copy.

Hardcover. Chicago, The University of Chicago Press, 1st, 1952, Book: Good, Dust Jacket: Good, Hardcover, green cloth covers in a worn and chipped dust jacket. 438 pages, mild waviness to pages. A collection of his most important essays, selected by Kroeber himself.

Hardcover. Madison WI, University of Wisconsin Press, reprint, 1989, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, brown cloth with white lettering on spine. 276 pages. Between 1868 and 1897 Henry James wrote a number of short essays and reviews of artists and art collections; these essays were published in magazines such as "Atlantic Monthly" and "Harper's Weekly" and in newspapers such as the "New York Tribune". They included James' comments on Ruskin, Turner, Whistler, Sargent, and the Impressionists, among many others. Thirty of these essays were collected and first published in a modern edition in 1956, accompanied by John Sweeney's introduction which sketched James' interests in the visual arts over a period of years, focusing on the ways in which painting and painters entered his work as subjects. Susan Griffin's new foreword places James' observations in a contemporary context. Some of the novelist's judgements will seem wrong to today's readers: he was very critical of the Impressionists, for example, but all of these essays bear the stamp of James' critical intelligence, and they tell us a great deal about his development as a writer during those years. Bight, clean copy.

Hardcover. Rochester NY, University of Rochester Press, 1st, 1996, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket, 224 pages. 10 Essays, ranging from Locke, Berkeley, and Hume to Foucault's Critique of the Enlightenment, with an Introduction by Sylvana Tomaselli. Contributors include Richard H. Popkin, Peter Laslett, and Michael Ayers.

Hardcover. UK, Cambridge University Press, 1st, 2017, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, pictorial glossy boards, 514 pages. Following a long-term international collaboration between leaders in cosmology and the philosophy of science, this volume addresses foundational questions at the limit of science across these disciplines, questions raised by observational and theoretical progress in modern cosmology. Space missions have mapped the Universe up to its early instants, opening up questions on what came before the Big Bang, the nature of space and time, and the quantum origin of the Universe. As the foundational volume of an emerging academic discipline, experts from relevant fields lay out the fundamental problems of contemporary cosmology and explore the routes toward finding possible solutions. Written for graduates and researchers in physics and philosophy, particular efforts are made to inform academics from other fields, as well as the educated public, who wish to understand our modern vision of the Universe, related philosophical questions, and the significant impacts on scientific methodology. Clean, bright copy.

Softcover. Seattle, Wave Books, 1st, 2023, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 219 pages. A collection of essay/talks that the poet Rachel Zucker, expanded from lectures presented for the Bagley Wright Lecture Series in 2016. Devastating in their revelations, yet hopeful in their endurance, these are lectures of protest and reckoning. Zucker declares 'I write against. My poetics is a poetics of opposition and provocation that I never outgrew. Against the status quo or the powers that be, writing out of and into wrongness.' Thus, Zucker deftly dismantles the outdated paradigms of motherhood, aesthetics, feminism, poetics, and politics. Bringing Bernadette Mayer, Marina Abramovic, Alice Notley, Adrienne Rich, Audre Lorde-among many others-into the conversation, Zucker questions the categories that have been imposed on poetry, as well as a poet's need to speak, and the resulting responsibilities. Clean copy.