Louisa Buck

Judith C. Greer

This sharp, practical look at the contemporary art market declares its irreverence early with a full-page, large print citation of Jenny Holzer's truism, "Money creates taste." Louisa Buck and Judith Greer's analyses of buyers' interests and responsibilities (including a section on how artists see the market and how collectors should treat them) make Owning Art a guidebook of interest to armchair travellers as well as its ostensible target market--it's not just collectors who seek to understand more about dealers, auction houses, art fairs, selection, pricing and conservation. The authors are equally comfortable going over the pitfalls of caring for contemporary media (they quote Agnes Gund on rescuing Christo's "Nine Packed Bottles" from a well-intentioned trip to the recycling bin), and tackling more serious questions like, who makes a good collector? What should you be looking for? Who gets offered the best work? What role do institutions play in the market? Hb in grey cloth with black and white titling, no dw, as issued. Virtually as new.

Hardcover (1 to 2 lbs)

Delaware

Contemporary Art Collectors Handbook

Owning Art offers an informative, authoritative and richly anecdotal route through the minefield of the contemporary art world. This entertaining and easy-to-use handbook is set to become every collector's indispensable companion.

Owning Art

6ce88b16-cf1f-402c-aae4-ef193cf8c3f4-0

Light Hardcover (1 lb or less)

On the Humanity of Abstract Painting

Mondrian

Janet Malcolm


Two Lives is Janet Malcolm's stunning portrait of a legendary couple: Gertrude Stein, the modernist master, and Alice B Toklas, the 'worker bee' who ministered to Stein's needs throughout their forty-year expatriate 'marriage'. As Malcolm pursues the truth of the couple's charmed life in a village in Vichy France her subject becomes the larger question of biographical truth. 'The instability of human knowledge is one of our few certainties,' she writes. The portrait of their relationship that emerges is unexpectedly charged. The two world wars Stein and Toklas lived through together are paralleled by the private war that went on between them. This war, as Malcolm learned, sometimes flared into bitter combat. Janet Malcolm is at her finest in this extraordinary work of literary biography and investigative journalism.

Gertrude and Alice

Presents an investigation of the lives and works of Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas.

Two Lives

799ccbda-b30f-452f-a5d4-6c22d8a0a62e-1

Sidra Stich

Paperback (1 to 2 lbs)

Art-Architecture-Design

Includes museums, galleries, exhibition spaces, public art, architecture, parks, book shops etc.

Art-SITES Paris

bc1edde3-d888-4c19-abb0-2f469459f711-0

Mary S. Lovell

Their marriage was both improbable and inevitable. Isabel Arundell was a schoolgirl, the scion of England's most distinguished Catholic family. When she first saw him while walking at a seaside resort, Richard Burton had already made his mark as a linguist (he was fluent in twenty-nine languages), scholar, soldier, and explorer--at once a symbol of Victorian England's vision of empire and an avowed rebel against its mores. When she turned and saw him staring after her, she decided that she would marry him. By their next meeting, Burton had become the first infidel to infiltrate Mecca as one of the faithful, and, in an expedition to discover the source of the Nile, would soon be the first white man to see Lake Tanganyika. After being married, the Burtons traveled and experienced the world, from diplomatic postings in Brazil and Africa to hair-raising adventures in the Syrian desert. In later life Richard courted further controversy as a self-proclaimed erotologist and the translator of The Kama Sutra. Based on previously unavailable archives, Mary Lovell has written a compelling joint biography that sets Isabel in her proper place as Burton's equal in daring and endurance, a fascinating figure in her own right. 

Heavy Hardcover (2 to 4 lbs)

A Biography of Richard and Isabel Burton

An illustrated biography of one of Victorian England's most extraordinary pairs, based on previously closed archives, reveals Isabel Burton as equal in daring and intelligence to the linguist, explorer, and rebel she married. 12,500 first printing.

A Rage to Live

b688b64b-73ee-42c1-b100-e5fe0e23419f-1

Roger Kimball

The Challenge of Tradition in an Age of Celebrity

This book illuminates some of the chief spiritual itineraries of modern art.

Art's Prospect

b6e95a1f-2de1-48a6-b222-a1fa95a76a71-0

Harold Norse

James Baldwin

Light Paperback (1 lb or less)

A fifty-year literary and erotic odyssey

Harold Norse has spent half a century simultaneously at the center and in the vanguard of literary and homosexual subcultures. His career began in 1939, when W. H. Auden seduced and "married" Norse's college lover, Chester Kallman. In Greenwich Village Norse became an intimate of James Baldwin (then working on his first novel) and in Provincetown lived with Tennessee Williams, who was completing The Glass Menagerie. In 1952, William Carlos Williams presented Norse at his reading debut calling Norse "the best poet of your generation." Other admirers included Anais Nin, Dylan Thomas, Christopher Isherwood, and e.e. Cummings. In the 1960s in Paris, Norse codeveloped the innovative Cut-up method while living in the Beat Hotel with William Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg, and Gregory Corso. In North Africa, Greece, and Spain Norse befriended Robert Graves, Leonard Cohen, and Paul and Jane Bowles. Repatriating to Venice, California, in 1968, Norse formed a literary alliance with Charles Bukowski (who called him "one of the great ones") and lifted weights with Arnold Schwarzenegger. Under any circumstances this book would be a major social document, but because he is a superb, evocative stylist, Harold Norse's candid autobiography is an engrossing classic of its kind. "Harold Norse's beautiful Memoirs (are) going to be right by my bedside with Flaubert and Marquez. It's an exalted work!"--Andrei Codrescu, "All Things Considered," National Public Radio "Magically evocative and visual, Memoirs of a Bastard Angel literally reads itself. "--William Burroughs "Harold Norse has lived a life beyond my powers of imagination."--Armistead Maupin

Memoirs of a Bastard Angel

f023957e-4167-4100-aa45-870b151343fe-1

Gabriel García Márquez

Calvin Trillin

Colm Toibin

Barbara Kingsolver

Heavy Paperback (2 to 4 lbs)

True Stories

It's winter. The holidays are over. For those living in areas where it's still snowing, and even where it's just cold or rainy, it's the time of year when magazines, newspapers, radio, and television are tantalizing us with ads of warm beaches, sunshine, relaxation, water sports, and foo-foo drinks with little umbrellas sticking out of them.Many of us would love to be able to travel to someplace warm, or to a far away place for a new adventure. However, we may not have the time or the resources to do so. Fortunately, Travelers' Tales has just the armchair adventure travel anyone can experience -- the beaches of Thailand, dining on the banks of the Seine, running with the bulls of Pamplona, purchasing a suit in Hong Kong, climbing the Himalayas -- all for only $17.95 (no shots or visa required).O'Reilly and Travelers' Tales have created a national campaign to help you promote Travelers' Tales titles as the "great getaway -- for cheap". We'll provide you with marketing materials (signage, T-shirts, buttons, postcards, special discount for inventory order, ad slick, and book displays) to create a window or in-store display during the month of May 1997. The store with the best display wins an overstuffed armchair fully equipped with an airline style seat belt.We'll also provide you with shelftalker coupon books with space on the front for you to stamp your store name and address. The coupon is redeemable for 10% off the purchase of a Travelers' Tales book. Your customer simply tears off the coupon from the shelftalker, completes the information (name and address) on the back, and gives it to the cashier when they're ready to purchase a book. At the end of each month you send us thecoupons used by your customers, and we'll credit your account. We understand that you

Spain

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Truman Capote

The Letters of Truman Capote

Truman Capote was hailed as one the most meticulous writers in American letters–a part of the Capote mystique is that his precise writing seemed to exist apart from his chaotic life. While the measure of Capote as a writer is best taken through his work, Capote the person is best understood in his personal correspondence with friends, colleagues, lovers, and rivals. In Too Brief a Treat, the acclaimed biographer Gerald Clarke brings together for the first time the private letters of Truman Capote. Encompassing more than four decades, these letters reveal the inner life of one of the twentieth century’s most intriguing personalities. As Clarke notes in his Introduction, Capote was an inveterate letter writer who both loved and craved love without inhibition. He wrote letters as he spoke: emphatically, spontaneously, and without reservation. He also wrote them at a breakneck pace, unconcerned with posterity. Thus, in this volume we have perhaps the closest thing possible to an elusive treasure: a Capote autobiography. Through his letters to the likes of William Styron, Gloria Vanderbilt, his publishers and editors, his longtime companion and lover Jack Dunphy, and others, we see Capote in all his life’s phases–the uncannily self-possessed na•f who jumped headlong into the dynamic post—World War Two New York literary scene and the more mature, established Capote of the 1950s. Then there is the Capote of the early 1960s, immersed in the research and writing of his masterpiece, In Cold Blood. Capote’s correspondence with Kansas detective Alvin Dewey, and with Perry Smith, one of the killers profiled in that work, demonstrates Capote’s intense devotion to his craft, while his letters to friends like Cecil Beaton show Capote giddy with his emergence as a flamboyant mass media celebrity after that book’s publication. Finally, we see Capote later in his life, as things seemed to be unraveling: when he is disillusioned, isolated by his substance abuse and by personal rivalries. (Ever effusive with praise and affection, Capote could nevertheless carry a grudge like few others). Too Brief a Treat is that uncommon book that gives us a literary titan’s unvarnished thoughts. It is both Gerald Clarke’s labor of love and a surpassing work of literary history.

Too Brief a Treat

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McSweeney's Issue 22 is a 2007 hardcover book by McSweeney's Books Staff that explores restriction in three parts: author, content, and form. 

Issue 22 is a three-part exercise in inspired restriction — of author, of content, and of form. In section one, poets (yes—poets!) including Mary Karr, Denis Johnson, Michael Ondaatje, and DC Berman initiate poet-chains, picking a poem of their own and one by another poet, who will then, thus inducted, do the same, and then again, and again, and so on until an appropriate moment. In section two, Fitzgerald (yes—F. Scott Fitzgerald!) provides a list of unused story premises first cataloged in The Crack-Up; his mission is completed by writers like Diane Williams, Nick Flynn, and Sam Lipsyte. In section three, finally, the president of France's (yes—France!) legendary Oulipians offers a rare glimpse into his group's current experiments with linguistic constraint. Freedom's just another word for nothing left to lose.

The issue includes a section where poets like Mary Karr, Denis Johnson, Michael Ondaatje, and DC Berman start poet-chains by selecting a poem of their own and another poet's poem. The poets then take turns selecting each other's poems in a chain until they feel it's time to stop.

Oversized Hardcover (4 to 6 lbs)

Three individual soft cover booklets bound by magnets into a leather like cover

McSweeney’s, Issue 22

Jeff Greenwald

A Global Odyssey - Once Around Without Leaving the Ground

A respected travel writer, who at the age of forty traveled around the world without ever flying, recounts his startling and moving experiences as he walked, bused, trained, and sailed through a twenty-five-thousand-mile, nine-month trip. IP.

The Size of the World (Author Signed)

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This is a most unusual book, aimed primarily at collectors. Published in 1895, it is a succinct account of the progress of the first Sino–Japanese War, which took place between August 1894 and April 1895. This conflict between the Empire of Japan and the Qing Dynasty of China was over control of Korea and influence in East Asia. The war ended with the Treaty of Shimonoseki, which resulted in significant territorial changes and marked a turning point in regional power dynamics. Color, double page map, eight full page black and white maps. Double page woodblock plate titled "Japanese Mounted Scouts at Kangwasai, Manchuria", 1 double page black and white plate, 7 full page black and white plates. Double page woodblock is very good and clean, full page plates and maps are heavily browned. Small chips and misplaced pages in several sections (more collectible?). Very attractively hand-bound in pictorial soft washi covers with cord ties, with a faded cover that includes a handwritten inscription from the early 1950s in Yokohama Japan. The wood block prints are sumptuous and the maps as well. Several of the pages are printed on a tissue like paper and are stuck together. This is a highly unusual collectors item. In truth, it is a work of art. Do not expect a perfectly bound commercially printed book like you may be used to. This is a handmade item. If you are a collector or someone interested in Asian history or know someone who is, this would make an ideal gift. It is priced elsewhere at over $500.

Published 1895

 A Concise History of the War Between Japan and China

by Stephen King

Firestarter

Original dust jacket protected in Plasti-Kleer book jacket cover. Non-smoking household. All
pages intact and tight. Previous owners ex-libris nameplate affixed.  You know what this is. Rare.

Stephen King

Pet Sematary              (1st Edition)

Alain de Botton

A wise and utterly original book of travel essays from an international bestselling author that will “give one an expansive sense of wonder” (The Baltimore Sun).

Any Baedeker will tell us where we ought to travel, but only Alain de Botton will tell us how and why. With the same intelligence and insouciant charm he brought to How Proust Can Save Your Life, de Botton considers the pleasures of anticipation; the allure of the exotic, and the value of noticing everything from a seascape in Barbados to the takeoffs at Heathrow.

Even as de Botton takes the reader along on his own peregrinations, he also cites such distinguished fellow-travelers as Baudelaire, Wordsworth, Van Gogh, the biologist Alexander von Humboldt, and the 18th-century eccentric Xavier de Maistre, who catalogued the wonders of his bedroom. The Art of Travel is a “refreshing and profoundly readable" book (The Philadelphia Inquirer). Don’t leave home without it.

An exploration of the human desire to travel presents a series of essays on airports, museums, landscapes, holiday romances, and hotel mini-bars, offering suggestions on how to render travel more fulfilling.

The Art of Travel

7675d089-8d21-42dd-abef-76449ab91232

George Plimpton

In Which Various Friends, Enemies, Acquaintances and Detractors Recall His Turbulent Career

He was the most social of writers, and at the height of his career he was the point where the glamorous worlds of the arts, society, and politics all met--a status perhaps best exemplified by his still-legendary Black and White Ball. Truman Capote truly knew everyone, and now the people who knew him best tell his remarkable story to bestselling author and literary lion George Plimpton. Using oral biography, a technique that perfectly matches the style of his subject, George Plimpton blends the voices of Capote's lovers, haters, acquaintances, and colleagues into a captivating and highly readable narrative. Here we are present for the entire span of Capote's life: his Southern childhood and his early days in New York; his first literary success with the publication of "Other Voices, Other Rooms; his highly active love life; the groundbreaking excitement of "In Cold Blood, the first "nonfiction novel"; his years as a jet-setter; and his final days of flagging inspiration, alcoholism, and isolation. All his famous friends and enemies are here: Katherine Graham, Lauren Bacall, Gore Vidal, Joan Didion, William Styron, Kurt Vonnegut, Norman Mailer, Lee Radziwill, John Huston, John Knowles, William F. Buckley, Jr., and dozens of others. Full of wonderful stories, startlingly intimate, and altogether fascinating, this is the most entertaining account of Truman Capote's life yet, as only the incomparable George Plimpton could write it.

Truman Capote (HC / First Ed.)

7ac4fb89-7454-4e31-91ec-c748617df03f-1

William Henry Williams

The First State

e9d4e4dd-724a-4dc7-a676-e139d558ce91-0

Robert Kahn

Novelist, artists, architects, curators, filmmakers, historians, and gourmets reveal their favorite discoveries in the ultimate insiders guide novelist, artists, architects, curators, filmmakers, historians, and gourmets reveal their favorite discoveries in the ultimate insiders guide

Novelists, artists, architects, curators, film-makers, historians, and gourmets reveal their favourite discoveries in the ultimate insider's guide to New York City

City Secrets - New York City

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This volume contains all the woodcuts Albrecht Dürer ever made. It offers complete one of the greatest artistic achievements of all time. Dürer is recognized as one of the masters of the woodcut, particularly on sacred occasions themes. This volume includes all of his religious works, as well as many other masterpieces. It also contains a biography of the artist and a descriptive index.  No dust jacket, otherwise in great shape. 

The Complete Woodcuts of Albrecht Dűrer

Two books of art nouveau posters, graphics and the illustrations, many suitable for framing. One book is all color, the other black-and-white book plates and wood cuts.  Includes description of art nouveau movement. 

TWO Books of Art Nouveau Illustrations

Iliya Troyanov

Troyanov recounts with gusto the three big adventures in Sir Richard Francis Burton’s oversized life: his career as officer and spy—which ended when he delivered a report on British soldiers frequenting a male brothel; his famous journey to Mecca in the guise of a doctor from India; and his exploration, with John Speke, of the great African lakes that feed the Nile. The most alluring adventure is the Indian one, which largely concerns itself with Burton’s affair with the luscious Kundalini, who ignites Burton’s interest in Eastern wisdom stories by commingling storytelling with sex. Burton’s haj to Mecca is fascinating for the details, and that Burton pulls it off. But the book’s most satisfying adventure is the African explorations; Troyanov captures the psychology of the two very different (and by the end of the trip, mutually hostile) explorers as well as he does the histories of the African peoples whose lands they pass through. Troyanov (Mumbai to Mecca ) is intimately acquainted with the Indian Ocean world, and this book has the cool virtuosity of one explorer saluting another.

A Novel of Sir Richard Francis Burton

"Iliya Troyanov has turnedBurton's unbelievable life into believable fiction, achieving a rounded and satisfying portrait that traditional biography could never match."

--New York Times Book Review



The Collector of Worlds is a fictionalized account of the infamous life and times of Sir Richard Francis Burton--the British colonial officer stationed inIndiawho made the Haj toMecca, discovered the source of theNile, spoke twenty-nine languages, and translatedA Thousand and One Arabian Nights and the Kama Sutra into English. The winner of the fiction prize of Germany's Leipzig Book Fair in 2006 and the Berlin Literary Award,The Collector of Worlds is a brilliant re-imagining of a richly eventful, truly incredible life.

The Collector of Worlds

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David Liss

THE HISTORICAL THRILLER OF THE YEAR Benjamin Weaver is an outsider in eighteenth-century London: a Jew among Christians; a ruffian among aristocrats; a retired pugilist who, hired by London's gentry, travels through the criminal underworld in pursuit of debtors and thieves. InA Conspiracy of Paper, Weaver investigates a crime of the most personal sort: the mysterious death of his estranged father, a notorious stockjobber. To find the answers, Weaver must contend with a desperate prostitute who knows too much about his past, relatives who remind him of his alienation from the Jewish faith, and a cabal of powerful men in the world of British finance who have hidden their business dealings behind an intricate web of deception and violence. Relying on brains and brawn, Weaver uncovers the beginnings of a strange new economic order based on stock speculation--a way of life that poses great risk for investors but real danger for Weaver and his family. In the tradition ofThe Alienistand written with scholarly attention to period detail,A Conspiracy of Paperis one of the wittiest and most suspenseful historical novels in recent memory, as well as a perceptive and beguiling depiction of the origin of today's financial markets. In Benjamin Weaver, author David Liss has created an irresistibly appealing protagonist, one who parlays his knowledge of the emerging stock market into a new kind of detective work.

A Conspiracy of Paper (Signed & inscribed First Edition)

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Lucinda Roy

A Novel

"The Hotel Alleluia" is the story of two half-sisters who are separated in childhood and raised continents apart. Joan, the white sister, grows up in North Carolina, while Ursuline, the African sister, is adopted by nuns in West Africa. Joan's quest to find Ursuline following their mother's death sets off a whirlwind of events in Africa as the sisters join forces with Gordon Delacroix, Joan's former lover, and Jeremy Scott, a troubled English writer. The days they spend together in the violence and bloodshed of a disintegrating nation change all four of them forever. Eventually Joan and Ursuline escape to America, where they are forced to reevaluate what is meant by love, faith, and racial identity.

Compelling and unforgettable, The Hotel Alleluia proves again that Lucinda Roy is one of the most original and lyrical voices in African-American fiction.

The Hotel Alleluia (Signed, 1st Ed.)

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Book in good shape. All pages mark-free. Spine solid and intact. Dust jacket chipped in a few spots. Former owner address label affixed on first blank page. 

Browse by categories

Louisa Buck; Judith C. Greer

Owning Art

Meyer Schapiro

Mondrian

Janet Malcolm

Two Lives

Sidra Stich

Art-SITES Paris

Mary S. Lovell

A Rage to Live

Roger Kimball

Art's Prospect

Harold Norse; James Baldwin

Memoirs of a Bastard Angel

Gabriel García Márquez; Calvin Trillin; Colm Toibin; Barbara Kingsolver

Spain

Truman Capote

Too Brief a Treat

Various

McSweeney’s, Issue 22

Jeff Greenwald

The Size of the World (Author Signed)

Jukichi Inouye

A Concise History of the War Between Japan and China

Stephen King

Firestarter

Stephen King

Pet Sematary (1st Edition)

Alain de Botton

The Art of Travel

George Plimpton

Truman Capote (HC / First Ed.)

William Henry Williams

Delaware

Robert Kahn

City Secrets - New York City

Dr. Willi Kurth

The Complete Woodcuts of Albrecht Dűrer

Otto Lorenz / Edmond V. Gillon

TWO Books of Art Nouveau Illustrations

Iliya Troyanov

The Collector of Worlds

David Liss

A Conspiracy of Paper (Signed & inscribed First Edition)

Lucinda Roy

The Hotel Alleluia (Signed, 1st Ed.)

Stephen King

Salem's Lot (1975 Book Club Edition)

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