essays

Hardcover. NY, Knopf, 1st, 1978, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket, 341 pages. This is the first collection of essays in seven years by the author of Omensetter's Luck, In the Heart of the Heart of the Country, and Fiction and the Figures of Life. In it, one of America's most brilliant and eclectic minds examines literature, culture, writers (their lives and works), and the nature and uses of language and the written word. Clean copy.

Hardcover. NY, Knopf , 1st, 2002, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket, 524 pages. The finest shorter pieces of reflection and reportage by V.S. Naipaul - nearly all of them heretofore out of print - are collected in one volume spanning some forty years of travel and sustained meditations on our world. Clean copy.

Hardcover. Hartford CT, Edwin Hunt, 1st, 1847, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, 213 pages. 7.75 x 4.75", blind & gold stamped brown cloth. A collection of sermons: Elements of Power: spirit of enterprise, enthusiasm, courage, readiness to receive & propagate new truths; Sources of Danger: trifling pursuits, unworthy associates, improper pleasures & amusements, ball-room, intemperance, theatre, improper reading; Pleasure & the Judgment; Demands of Age: reforms, slavery, war, temperance; spurious reforms, capital punishment. Some light foxing, minor wear to covers, clean.

Softcover. Oxford UK, Blackwell, 1st, 1999, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 332 pages. The Zizek Reader - which includes a Foreword by Zizek and a new, previously unpublished essay on cyberspace - provides a comprehensive and accessible introduction to the flamboyant work of a figure who has been variously described as 'one of the most arresting, insightful and scandalous thinkers in recent memory' and 'the Giant of Ljubljana'. His work is an extraordinary mix of Hegel and Hitchcock, Schelling and science fiction, Kant and courtly love, Stalin and Stephen King, all of which is strongly seasoned with Lacanian psychoanalysis. Divided into three parts - Culture, Woman and Philosophy - the Reader not only provides careful explications of the individual extracts within each section but also connects these extracts in a general introduction, mapping the shiftings of Zizek's thought within the Lacanian framework. The essays on woman offer feminism ammunition from unexpected sources, within a reading of Lacan that goes counter to his ambiguous reception by feminists. In fact, at this collection dazzlingly demonstrates, Zizek provides us with one of the most limpid and persuasive readings so far produced of Lacan's difficult thought. Name on inside of front cover, otherwise clean.

Hardcover. New York, Harper and Brothers, reprint, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Good, Hardcover, 331 pages, putty color cloth covers with black lettering on spine. Dust jacket with edgewear, chipping. Previous owner's signature on front fly leaf.

Hardcover. San Francisco, CA, Chronicle Books, 1st, 2016, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, 208 pages. Hardcover with dust jacket. A very clean, unmarked copy like new in publishers shrink-wrap. The 1940s ushered in an era of musical experimentation and innovation at the Walt Disney Studios. For this volume, author Didier Ghez has unearthed hundreds of enchanting images--from early sketches to polished concepts for iconic features--by five exceptional artists who shaped the style of the Studio's animation during this period of unbridled creativity. With evocative descriptions and excerpts from the artists' journals and autobiographies, this magnificent collection offers a rare look at the visionaries who breathed life into some of the most beloved films of our time.

Hardcover. NY, Doubleday, 1st, 2015, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket, 298 pages. Roger Angell, the acclaimed New Yorker writer and editor, steps up with a selection of writings that celebrate a view from the tenth decade of an engaged, vibrant life. Whether it's a Fourth of July in rural Maine, the opening game of the 2015 World Series, editorial exchanges with John Updike, a letter to a son, or his award-winning essay on aging, 'This Old Man,' what links the pieces is Angell's unique perceptions and humor, his utter absence of self-pity, and his appreciation of friends and colleagues encountered over a fruitful career unlike any other. Includes essays about E.B. White, Harold Ross, Mark Twain, John Hersey, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Donald Barthelme, Vladimir Nabokov, V.S. Pritchett, William Maxwell, William Steig, John Updike, and others. Clean copy.

Hardcover. NY, Random House, 1st, 1982, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket, 305 pages. In an age when much American writing was either glacially noncommittal or heremetically personal, William Styron persisted in addressing great moral issues with incendiary passion. Seriousness and ardor characterize all the essays in This Quiet Dust, the first book of nonfiction by the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Lie Down in Darkness and Sophie's Choice. Clean copy.

Hardcover. Philadelphia, PA, Philadelphia Museum of Art, 1st, 2001, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, 488 pages. Hardcover with dust jacket. Very clean, unmarked copy still in publishers shrink-wrap. Lavishly illustrated with more than 250 of Eakins's most significant paintings, watercolors, drawings, photographs, and sculpture, the book features essays by prominent scholars who place his art in the context of the history and culture of late nineteenth-century Philadelphia, where he lived.

Hardcover. Oxford UK, Sandford Publications, 1st, 1980, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, limited to 750 copies, 182 pages, b&w illustrations, INSCRIBED BY DEWHURST on inside front cover, brown faux-leather. Thomas Willis (1621-1675) was an English doctor who played an important part in the history of anatomy, neurology and psychiatry, and was a founding member of the Royal Society.

Hardcover. Boston, MA, Phillips, Samson, and Company, 1st, 1859, Book: Good, Dust Jacket: None, Original 1859 publisher's cloth, 365 pages. Brown cover with gilt title to spine. Extensive sun-fading and some soiling. Soiled along edges. Slight foxing. Lacking front fly leaf. Overall, a tight copy.

Softcover. Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1st Edition, 2000, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, 382 pages. Softcover in very good condition with full color photo of Isaiah Berlin to cover. Tight copy. Clean & unmarked text.

Hardcover. London, The Athlone Press, 1st, 1970, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Good, Hardcover in a lightly worn dust jacket, orange cloth covers, 287 pages. Anthropological essays by the author based on his 30 years of field work in Ghana. Clean copy.

Hardcover. Santa Fe, NM, Twin Palms Publishers, 1st, 1997, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, 96 pages. Hardcover with no dust jacket. Very clean. like new copy in publisher's shrink-wrap. 78 full-page, black and white photographs. Limited to 3000 copies. Tight copy. A look at the black experience in late-20th-century America with powerful documentary images that will remain with the viewer long after the books are closed. Mauskopf presents a quiet collection of images made in one part of the South, the most isolated black communities of the Mississippi Delta, where time seems to have stopped in midcentury. The photographs are full of love, joy, and religious faith and are richly reproduced here as sheet-fed gravures. Mauskopf portrays the poorest Americans, who are nonetheless rich in family, church, and community bonds. He documents the unifying and dominant role of religion as well as the joys and sustenance provided by music, dance, romance, family life, and the land itself. These images capture a sense of place so powerfully that captions aren't necessary, though a brief and poetic essay by novelist Kenan nicely complements the photographs.

Hardcover. Seattle, WA, Fantagraphics, 1st, 2017, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, 380 pages. Hardcover with no dust jacket. A very clean, unmarked copy with only minor edgewear to dust jacket. To Laugh That We May Not Weep is a sweeping career retrospective, reprinting -often for the first time in 60 or 70 years- over 800 of Young's timeless, charming, and devastating cartoons and illustrations, many reproduced from original artwork, to create a fresh new portrait of this towering figure in the worlds of cartooning and politics.

Hardcover. New York, privately printed, reprint, 1906, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, 13 page essay, Franklin's famous essay on farting. Here printed and bound in a 64 page signature, most of the pages therefore blank. Three-quarter leather with marbled boards, gold lettering on spine. Limited to 250 copies, this being #90.

Hardcover. NY, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1st, 1986, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover, pages. In a bright dust jacket. Eco displays in these essays the same wit, learning, and lively intelligence that delighted readers of The Name of the Rose and Foucault's Pendulum. His range is wide, and his insights are acute, frequently ironic, and often downright funny. Translated by William Weaver.

Hardcover. New York, John Wiley & Sons, reprint, 1888, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, 452 pages. Blue cloth covers with gilt titles and black embossed illustration, b&w tissue-protected frontispiece of Ruskin's portrait, brown decorated endpapers, top edge gilt. Slight edgewear and rubbing to covers, previous owner's inscription on blank preview page, a few brown markings to right edge of page block, pages crisp and otherwise unmarked, stiff binding; overall, a very clean, tight copy.

Hardcover. NY, Dodd, Mead & Co., reprint, 1902, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, green cloth covers with elaborate gilt decoration to front cover and spine, top edge gilt. Design by Alice Cordelia Morse. 317 pages with 48 b&w plates. Selections from Dickens, Hugo, Ruskin, and many others. Originally published in 1898. Hinges cracked, Small ownership sticker to front fly leaf, otherwise a clean, tight copy.

Hardcover. New York, Aperture, 1st US, 1997, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, 104 pages. Hardcover with dust jacket. Very clean, unmarked copy with only minor edgewear. Published in Italian in 1955, and now available for the first time in the English language, Un Paese captures in photographs and in spoken testimony the essential experience of daily life in Luzzara. It presents a series of intense portraits, graceful landscapes, and images of everyday objects. Paul Strand's photographs are carefully distilled, deeply powerful; they contain the flavors and the rhythms of an entire culture crystallized in a single village. Zavattini successfully synthesizes text and image, aligning with the new cinematic trend of the day, a movement known as Italian neorealism. Their Luzzara is an ordinary village, neither overly picturesque nor greatly unusual, yet it is a town sustained by a grounded humanity and a profound love for the land by its people.

Hardcover. NY, Forest & Stream Publishing, 5th Ed., 1891, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, pictorial gray cloth stamped in black and gold. 187 pages, floral decorative endpapers. Tales of Vermont life back in the day. Chapter headings include: The School Meeting in District 13; Uncle Lisha's Spring Gun; Concerning Owls, Uncle Lisha's Courting; A Rainy Day in the Shop; The Turkey Shoot at Hamner's; Sam Lovel's Bee-Hunting; In the Shop Again; The Fox Hunt; The Coon Hunt; In the Sugar Camp; Indians in Danvis; The Boy out West; Breaking Up; The Departure; The Wild Bees' Swarm, etc. Robinson (1833-1900) was a noted Quaker author from a well-respected and artistic Vermont family whose writings and art captured the dialect, culture and time of pre-Civil War Vermont, set in the imaginary town of Danvis, largely drawing from his the inhabitants and experiences of Ferrisburgh, VT. Name and date on a blank prelim page. Otherwise clean, tight copy.

Hardcover. NY, Farrar Straus Giroux, 1st, 1980, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket, 204 pages. This is a book of essays, including: On Paul Goodman, Approaching Artaud, Fascinating Fascism, Under the Sign of Saturn, Syberberg's Hitler, Remembering Barthes, and, Mind as Passion. This particular book was printed in a small initial run. 'Susan Sontag (January 16, 1933 - December 28, 2004) was an American writer, film-maker, teacher, and political activist. She published her first major work, the essay 'Notes on 'Camp'', in 1964. Her best-known works include On Photography, Against Interpretation, Styles of Radical Will, The Way We Live Now, Illness as Metaphor, Regarding the Pain of Others, The Volcano Lover, and In America. Remainder mark to top edge otherwise a tight, clean copy.

Hardcover. NY, Farrar Straus & Giroux, 1st, 1980, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket. A collection of seven essays. Clean copy.

Hardcover. New Haven, CT, Yale University Press, 1st, 2014, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, 232 pages. Hardcover with dust jacket. Very clean, unmarked copy still in shrink wrap. Black & white and color photographs throughout. City scenes have been chronicled in photographs since the early 1800s, but street photography as traditionally defined has captured a relatively narrow field of these images. Revolutionizing the history of street photography, Unfamiliar Streets explores the work of Richard Avedon (1923-2004), Charles Moore (1931-2010), Martha Rosler (b. 1943), and Philip-Lorca diCorcia (b. 1951), four American photographers whose careers in fashion, photojournalism, conceptual art, and contemporary art are not usually associated with the genre.Bussard's lively and engaging text, a timely response to a growing interest in urban photography, challenges the traditional understanding of street photography and makes original and important connections among urban culture, social history, and the visual arts, constructing a new historical model for understanding street photography. Illustrated with more than one hundred images, this book provides an interpretation of a compelling genre that is as fresh as its consideration of the city streets themselves, sites of commerce, dispossession, desire, demonstration, power, and spectacle.