history

Hardcover. NY, Abrams, 1st, 2023, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket, 265 pages illustrated in b&w. From Bill Griffith, creator of Zippy the Pinhead and Nobody's Fool, comes Three Rocks, a biography of cartoonist Ernie Bushmiller, creator of the iconic comic strip Nancy. But this graphic novel is about more than a single comic book artist. It is the story of this American art form, tracing its inception to 1895 with the Yellow Kid, the creation of Nancy in 1933, and all the strips that followed, including Peanuts and The Far Side. When Bushmiller died in 1982, Nancy was running in almost 900 daily newspapers--a number few syndicated cartoonists ever achieve. Nancy is hailed as the "perfect" comic strip by fans and cartoonists alike. The title Three Rocks refers to the trope of three hemispherical rocks often seen in a Bushmiller landscape--just enough to communicate environment to the reader. This distillation is exemplary of the iconic, diagrammatic look of Nancy, a comic strip about the nature of what it means to be a comic strip--the perfect avatar for Griffith to expand upon his philosophy of creating comics. Clean, bright copy.

Hardcover. New York , Charles Scribner's sons, rep, 1894, Book: Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, 726 pages, illustrated throughout in b&w with fold-out map in rear. Light edgewear, rubbing and soil to blue, gilt decorated boards. Small stain to lower corner of frontis piece portrait. Internally very good.

Hardcover. Boston, Isaiah Thomas & Company, 1st, 1813, Book: Good, Dust Jacket: None, 282 pages. Hardcover leather binding. Moderate shelf wear, Front hinge starting to separate. Pages heavily foxed and tanned. Previous owner's name and markings throughout.

Hardcover. Cambridge, Mass., Charlotte C. Coates, 1st, 1988, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, 250 pages. Ex-library stamp on title page. Ex-library residue and envelope on back endpaper. Otherwise, a very clean and tight copy.

Softcover. Washington DC, Giles, 1st, 2015, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 80 pages. Beautiful and poignant photographs by African American and other photographers (selected from the large and growing photography collection of the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture), accompanied by three short, insightful essays, reveal the rich and significant contributions African Americans have made to to our great American heritage.

Hardcover. Princeton NJ, Princeton University Press, 1st, 2012, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket, 759 pages, b&w illustrations. A sweeping intellectual history of the role of wealth in the church in the last days of the Roman EmpireJesus taught his followers that it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter heaven. Yet by the fall of Rome, the church was becoming rich beyond measure. Through the Eye of a Needle is a sweeping intellectual and social history of the vexing problem of wealth in Christianity in the waning days of the Roman Empire, written by the world's foremost scholar of late antiquity.Peter Brown examines the rise of the church through the lens of money and the challenges it posed to an institution that espoused the virtue of poverty and called avarice the root of all evil. Drawing on the writings of major Christian thinkers such as Augustine, Ambrose, and Jerome, Brown examines the controversies and changing attitudes toward money caused by the influx of new wealth into church coffers, and describes the spectacular acts of divestment by rich donors and their growing influence in an empire beset with crisis. He shows how the use of wealth for the care of the poor competed with older forms of philanthropy deeply rooted in the Roman world, and sheds light on the ordinary people who gave away their money in hopes of treasure in heaven. Clean copy.

Hardcover. Utica NY, North Country Books , 1st, 1997, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket, 291 pages, b&w illustrations. Clean, unmarked copy with only minor wear to dust jacket.

Hardcover. NY, Oxford University Press, 1st, 2008, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket, 323 pages. Although Buddhism is often depicted as a religion of meditators and philosophers, some of the earliest writings extant in India offer a very different portrait of the Buddhist practitioner. In Indian Buddhist narratives from the early centuries of the Common Era, most lay religious practice consists not of reading, praying, or meditating, but of visually engaging with certain kinds of objects. These visual practices, moreover, are represented as the primary means of cultivating faith, a necessary precondition for proceeding along the Buddhist spiritual path. In Thus Have I Seen: Visualizing Faith in Early Indian Buddhism, Andy Rotman examines these visual practices and how they function as a kind of skeleton key for opening up Buddhist conceptualizations about the world and the ways it should be navigated. Clean copy.

Hardcover. NY, Knopf, 1st US, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket, 288 pages, color & b/w plates, sources, index.

Hardcover. New York, Harry N. Abrams, 1st, 2003, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, 271 pages. Hardcover. Extensive color photographs throughout. Illustrated end papers and paste downs. Gilt titles on spine. Minor shelf wear to dust jacket, otherwise clean, tight copy. A collection of 250 glamorous images chronicle the simultaneous evolution of fashion photography and fine jewelry, featuring extraordinary photographs that range from Richard Avedon's portrait of Elizabeth Taylor bedecked in cultured pearls to Scavullo's photograph of Paloma Picasso wearing her own jewelry designs.

Hardcover. New York, Harry N. Abrams, 1st, 2003, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Good, 271 pages. Hardcover. Extensive color photographs throughout. Illustrated end papers and paste downs. Gilt titles on spine. Some shelf wear to dust jacket, otherwise clean, tight copy. A collection of 250 glamorous images chronicle the simultaneous evolution of fashion photography and fine jewelry, featuring extraordinary photographs that range from Richard Avedon's portrait of Elizabeth Taylor bedecked in cultured pearls to Scavullo's photograph of Paloma Picasso wearing her own jewelry designs.

Hardcover. NY, Knopf, 1st , 1990, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, 407 pages. Hardcover with dust jacket. Clean, tight copy with light edgewear and rubbing to dust jacket.

Softcover. Madison WI, University of Wisconsin Press, reprint, 1972, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 469 pages."One of the first histories to treat non-whites as active self conscious protagonists in twentieth-century South African affairs rather than as a dark acquiescent host before which the really important story of white South Africa unfolds. The new edition has been corrected and eight new chapters extend the coverage to the end of 1963. It is an important addition to the literature about South Africa."--The Historian. C;ean copy.

Hardcover. St. Ann's Press, 1st, 2002, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover, 172 pages. On May 25, 1961, Bruce Davison joined a group of Freedom Riders traveling by bus from Montgomery, Alabama to Jackson, Mississippi. The actions of these youths challenged and disobeyed federal laws allowing for integrated interstate bus travel. These historic episodes, which ended in violence and arrests, marked the beginning of Davidson's exploration into the heart and soul of the civil rights movement in the United States during the years 1961-1965. In 1962, Davidson received a Guggenheim Fellowship and continued documenting the era, including an early Malcolm X rally in Harlem, steel workers in Chicago, a Ku Klux Klan cross burning near Atlanta, farm migrant camps in South Carolina, cotton picking in Mississippi, protest demonstrations in Birmingham, and the heroic Selma March that led to the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which was instrumental in changing the political power base in the segregated Southern states. In the 140 photographs collected here, many of which have never before been published, we see intimate and revealing portraits of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., John Lewis, and other leaders made by Davidson during those turbulent times. These images describe the mood that prevailed during the civil rights movement with a lyrical imagery that is both poignant and profound. As Davidson bears witness to these historical events, and documents the degradation and segregation that were endured, he gives testimony to the struggle for freedom, equality, justice, and human dignity.

Hardcover. NY, E.P. Dutton , 1st, 1932, Book: Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, green cloth stamped in red, 235 pages. A masterpiece of humanism, Time Stood Still recounts Paul Cohen-Portheim's years of internment in England as an enemy alien during World War One. An artist and theatre designer, he at first viewed internment as a sort of holiday: 'Should I bring my bathing things and evening dress?' he asked the policeman taking him prisoner. Though confined in a 'gentleman's camp' near Wakefield, as Cohen-Portheim shows with grace, humor, and deep compassion, even under the best conditions, the simple act of being confined and placed in a sort of limbo is a form of torture: 'Where there is no aim, no object, no sense, there is no time.' Time Stood Still is a passionate but balanced argument against internment and its inherently dehumanizing effects. Paul Cohen-Portheim (1880-1932) was an Austrian artist, travel writer and linquist. When WWI broke out, he was painting in Devonshire, England and found himself interned for the length of the war. Flap copy pasted to front fly leaf, stamp to endpapers (Harvard Club of Boston), some light notations as well to endpapers.

Hardcover. NY, Skira, 1ST, 2006, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Like new in publisher's shrink-wrap. Hardcover, 224 pages. Insightful essays and gorgeous portraits by one of contemporary photography's most remarkable artists.

Hardcover. NY, Oxford University Press, 1st, 2011, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket. 336 pages, b&w illustrations. Author Larry Hamberlin guides us through this large but oft-forgotten repertoire of operatic novelties, and brings to life the rich humor and keen social criticism of the era. In the early twentieth-century, when new social forces were undermining the view that our European heritage was intrinsically superior to our native vernacular culture, opera-that great inheritance from our European forebearers-functioned in popular discourse as a signifier for elite culture. Tin Pan Opera shows that these operatic novelty songs availed this connection to a humorous and critical end. Combining traditional, European operatic melodies with the new and American rhythmic verve of ragtime, these songs painted vivid images of immigrant Americans, liberated women, and upwardly striving African Americans, striking emblems of the profound transformations that shook the United States at the beginning of the American century. Clean copy.

Softcover. NY, HarperCollins, 1st pbk, 1995, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 296 pages, b&w illustrations. The apt subtitle of this award-winning biography, Photographer & Revolutionary, sums up the creative tensions that characterized Tina Modotti's life and brief photographic career. Active as a photographer for only nine years, Modotti was pulled between formal and social concerns. Producing striking modernist compositions of everyday objects, photojournalism of poverty and conflict, and portraits of celebrities and common people alike, Modotti balanced political concerns with formal rigor.First published in 1993 and long out of print, Tina Modotti: Photographer & Revolutionary is the definitive portrayal of Modotti's life and work. Few photographers are more deserving of a biographical treatment than Modotti, whose work as an actress and artist's model introduced her to Edward Weston, who was to become her lover. Soon after she arrived in Mexico City with Weston, Modotti became increasingly politicized, working for the communist newspaper El Machete and establishing herself as the go-to photographer for the Mexican Muralist movement. The book includes extensive archival material, interviews with Modotti's contemporaries and many rare photographs. Clean copy.

Hardcover. NY, Arno Press, reprint, 1976, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, red cloth. Black and gilt spine lettering. Well illustrated. 385 pages. Reprint of the 1885 edition. 14 pages of b/w plates, 178 b/w text illus. Bright, clean copy.

Hardcover. New York, Prestel Publishing, reprint, 1990, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, 452 pages. Hardcover with dust jacket. Color pictures throughout. Black covers with gilt lettering on spine. Previous owner's signature and bookplate on front flyleaf. Light wear and rubbing to dust jacket. This excellent catalog of the 1990-1991 exhibition in Venice and Washington is a work of permanent value. Featuring essays by 16 authorities, primarily Italian and American, on every aspect of the art of Titian (Tiziano Vecelli, c. 1490-1576), the quintessential Venetian artist of the high Renaissance, the work transcends the limits of spatial and temporal exhibition to summarize and extend current scholarship. At the same time, the text is accessible, well translated, and aimed at a broad audience. Many of the works in the exhibit were conserved or cleaned, so the book features fresh illustrations and a hefty amount of technical discussion of specialist interest.

Hardcover. London, Phaidon Press, 1st, 2007, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, 240 pages. Hardcover no dust jacket. Like new in publisher's shrink-wrap. Titian (Tlziano Vecellio, c. 1488/90-1576) was an outstanding painter of the Renaissance. An Ideal introduction to Titian's life and work for the general reader and scholar alike. Places Titian's career and work into the social and historical context of sixteenth-century Italy and explores his approach to a number of themes.

Softcover. Cambridge MA, Harvard University Press, reprint, 1998, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 311 pages. As the Civil War drew to a close, newly emancipated black women workers made their way to Atlanta-the economic hub of the newly emerging urban and industrial south-in order to build an independent and free life on the rubble of their enslaved past. In an original and dramatic work of scholarship, Tera Hunter traces their lives in the postbellum era and reveals the centrality of their labors to the African-American struggle for freedom and justice. Household laborers and washerwomen were constrained by their employers' domestic worlds but constructed their own world of work, play, negotiation, resistance, and community organization. Hunter follows African-American working women from their newfound optimism and hope at the end of the Civil War to their struggles as free domestic laborers in the homes of their former masters. We witness their drive as they build neighborhoods and networks and their energy as they enjoy leisure hours in dance halls and clubs. We learn of their militance and the way they resisted efforts to keep them economically depressed and medically victimized. Finally, we understand the despair and defeat provoked by Jim Crow laws and segregation and how they spurred large numbers of black laboring women to migrate north. Clean copy.