Perri Knize

Hardcover (1 to 2 lbs)

Illinois

A Piano Odyssey

A fascinating, lyrical memoir about one woman's obsessive search for the perfect piano-and about finding and pursuing passion at any ageHow can a particular piano be so seductive that someone would turn her life upside down to answer its call? How does music change human consciousness and transport us to rapture? What makes it beautiful? In this elegantly written and heartfelt account, Perri Knize explores these questions with a music lover's ardor, a poet's inspiration, and a reporter's thirst for knowledge.The daughter of a professional musician, Knize was raised in a home saturated in classical music, but years have passed since she last played the instrument that mesmerized her most: the piano. Surprised by a sudden, belated realization that she is meant to devote her life to the instrument, she finds a teacher and soon decides to buy a piano of her own.What begins as a search for a modestly priced upright leads Knize through dozens of piano stores all over the country, and eventually ends in a New York City showroom where she falls madly in love with the sound of a rare and pricey German grand."At the touch of the keys, I am swept away by powerful waves of sound," Knize writes. "The middle section is smoky and mysterious, as if rising from the larynx of a great contralto. The treble is bell-like and sparkling, full of color, a shimmering northern lights. A soul seems to reside in the belly of this piano, and it reaches out to touch mine, igniting a spark of desire that quickly catches fire."The seduction is complete. But the piano far exceeds Knize's budget. After a long and painful dalliance, she refinances her house to purchase the instrument that has transfixed her. The dealer ships it to her home in Montana, and she counts the days until its arrival. When at last she sits down to play, almost delirious with anticipation, the magical sound is gone and the tone is dead and dull. Devastated, she calls in one piano technician after another to "fix" it, but no one can.So begins the author's epic quest to restore her piano to its rightful sound, and to understand its elusive power. This journey leads her into an international subculture of piano aficionados -- concert artists, passionate amateurs, dealers, technicians, composers, and builders -- intriguing characters all, whose lives have also been transformed by the spell of a piano. Along the way she plays hundreds of pianos, new and vintage, rare and common, always listening for the bewitching tone she once heard from her own grand, a sound she cannot forget.In New York, she visits the high-strung technician who prepared her piano for the showroom, and learns how a wire tightened just so, or an artfully softened hammer can transform an unremarkable instrument into one that touches listeners to their core. In Germany, she watches the workers who built her piano shape wood, iron, wool, and steel into musical instruments, and learns why each has its own unique voice. In Austria, she hikes the Alps to learn how trees are selected to build pianos, and how they are grown and harvested. With each step of her journey, Knize draws ever-closer to uncovering the reason her piano's sound vanished, how to get it back, and the deeper secret of how music leads us to a direct experience of the nature of reality.Beautifully composed, passionately performed,Grand Obsessionis itself a musical masterpiece.

Grand Obsession

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Marguerite Yourcenar

Grace Frick

Beautiful book by the incredible Marguerite Yourcenar

Paperback (1 to 2 lbs)

Both an exploration of character and a reflection on the meaning of history, Memoirs of Hadrian has received international acclaim since its first publication in France in 1951. In it, Marguerite Yourcenar reimagines the Emperor Hadrian's arduous boyhood, his triumphs and reversals, and finally, as emperor, his gradual reordering of a war-torn world, writing with the imaginative insight of a great writer of the twentieth century while crafting a prose style as elegant and precise as those of the Latin stylists of Hadrian's own era.

Memoirs of Hadrian

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Alberto Manguel

Excellent condition with protective plastic cover

Inspired by the process of creating a library for his fifteenth-century home near the Loire, in France, Alberto Manguel, the acclaimed writer on books and reading, has taken up the subject of libraries. “Libraries,” he says, “have always seemed to me pleasantly mad places, and for as long as I can remember I’ve been seduced by their labyrinthine logic.” In this personal, deliberately unsystematic, and wide-ranging book, he offers a captivating meditation on the meaning of libraries.

 

Manguel, a guide of irrepressible enthusiasm, conducts a unique library tour that extends from his childhood bookshelves to the “complete” libraries of the Internet, from Ancient Egypt and Greece to the Arab world, from China and Rome to Google. He ponders the doomed library of Alexandria as well as the personal libraries of Charles Dickens, Jorge Luis Borges, and others. He recounts stories of people who have struggled against tyranny to preserve freedom of thought—the Polish librarian who smuggled books to safety as the Nazis began their destruction of Jewish libraries; the Afghani bookseller who kept his store open through decades of unrest. Oral “memory libraries” kept alive by prisoners, libraries of banned books, the imaginary library of Count Dracula, the library of books never written—Manguel illuminates the mysteries of libraries as no other writer could. With scores of wonderful images throughout, The Library at Night is a fascinating voyage through Manguel’s mind, memory, and vast knowledge of books and civilizations.

The Library at Night

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Cipe Pineles

Second copy so basically unused. Love these recipes and cool illustrations 

Heavy Hardcover (2 to 4 lbs)

The Life, Art, and Cookbook of Cipe Pineles

Saveur “Best New Cookbooks of the Year" Finalist for the Gourmand Award for Cookbook Design The newly discovered illustrated recipes of wildly influential yet unsung designer Cipe Pineles, introducing her delectable work in food and art to a new generation. Not long ago, Sarah Rich and Wendy MacNaughton discovered a painted manuscript at an antiquarian book fair that drew them in like magnets: it displayed a vibrant painting of hot pink beets and a hand-lettered recipe for borscht written in script so full of life, it was hard to believe it was more than sixty-five years old. It was the work of one of the most influential graphic designers of the twentieth century--Cipe (pronounced “C. P.”) Pineles, the first female art director at Condé Nast, whose impact lives on in the work of Maira Kalman, Julia Rothman, and many others. Completed in 1945, it was a keepsake of her connection to her childhood’s Eastern European food--she called it Leave Me Alone with the Recipes. For Wendy and Sarah, it was a talisman of a woman they had not known was their idol: a strong, independent spirit whose rich archive--of drawings, recipes, diaries, and letters to family and friends--led them into a dazzling history of mid-century design, art, food, New York City society, and culture. They teamed up with Maria Popova of Brain Pickings and Debbie Millman of Design Matters, along with contributors Mimi Sheraton, Steven Heller, Paula Scher, and Maira Kalman, to present Cipe Pineles’s life and work as it should be presented--in glorious color. With Pineles’s illustrated cookbook and a section of updated recipes as its centerpiece, this gorgeous volume will delight foodies and design devotees alike.

Leave Me Alone with the Recipes

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Bevis Hillier

Bought new 1971. An excellent resource book 

Light Paperback (1 lb or less)

The Minneapolis Institute of Arts

The World of Art Deco

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Alice Walker

Meditation and Wandering As the Whole World Awakens to Being in Harm's Way

This gorgeous collection gathers Alice Walker’s wide-ranging meditations—many of them previously unpublished—on our intertwined personal, spiritual, and political destinies. For the millions of her devoted fans, and for readers of Walker’s bestselling 2006 book, We Are the Ones We Have Been Waiting For, here is a brand new "gift of words" that invites readers on a journey of political awakening and spiritual insight. The Cushion in the Road finds the Pulitzer Prize–winning novelist, poet, essayist, and activist at the height of her literary powers, sharing fresh vantages and a deepening engagement with our world. Walker writes that "we are beyond a rigid category of color, sex, or spirituality if we are truly alive," and the pieces in The Cushion in the Road illustrate this idea beautifully. Visiting themes she has addressed throughout her career—including racism, Africa, Palestinian solidarity, and Cuba—as well as addressing emergent issues, such as the presidency of Barack Obama on health care, Walker explores her conflicting impulses to retreat into inner contemplation and to remain deeply engaged with the world. Rich with humor and wisdom, and informed by Walker’s unique eye for the details of human and natural experience, The Cushion in the Road will please longtime Walker fans as well as those who are new to her work.

The Cushion in the Road

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A lovely book with one reader! Spine is tender with age-almost 60 years old! And a few middle pages shared a bug spot right in the edge of the page.
Great stories and great writers

The Family Treasury of Children’s Stories

Hannah Sigur

During America's Gilded Age (dates), the country was swept by a mania for all things Japanese. It spread from coast to coast, enticed everyone from robber barons to street vendors with its allure, and touched every aspect of life from patent medicines to wallpaper. Americans of the time found in Japanese art every design language: modernism or tradition, abstraction or realism, technical virtuosity or unfettered naturalism, craft or art, romance or functionalism. The art of Japan had a huge influence on American art and design. Title compares juxtapositions of American glass, silver and metal arts, ceramics, textiles, furniture, jewelry, advertising, and packaging with a spectrum of Japanese material ranging from expensive one-of-a-kind art crafts to mass-produced ephemera. Beginning in the Aesthetic movement, this book continues through the Arts & Crafts era and ends in Frank Lloyd Wright's vision, showing the reader how that model became transformed from Japanese to American in design and concept. Hannah Sigur is an art historian, writer, and editor with eight years' residence and study in East and Southeast Asia. She has a master's degree from the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University, and is completing a PhD in the arts of Japan. Her writings include co-authoring A Master Guide to the Art of Floral Design (Timber Press, 2002), which is listed in "The Best Books of 2002" by The Christian Science Monitor and is now in its second edition; and "The Golden Ideal: Chinese Landscape Themes in Japanese Art," in Lotus Leaves, A Master Guide to the Art of Floral Design (2001). She lives in Berkeley.

Influence of Japanese Art on Design

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Beyond impressionism

Monet’s years at giverney 

Nancy Boas

A Painter's Life

In this beautifully illustrated biography, compiled from comprehensive and sweeping interviews, Nancy Boas traces Parks resolute search for a new kind of figuration, one that would penetrate abstract expressionisms thickly layered surfaces and infuse them with human presence.

David Park

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Pico Iyer

Light Hardcover (1 lb or less)

Adventures in Going Nowhere

A follow up to Pico Iyer's essay "The Joy of Quiet," The Art of Stillness considers the unexpected adventure of staying put and reveals a counterintuitive truth: The more ways we have to connect, the more we seem desperate to unplug.

Why might a lifelong traveler like Pico Iyer, who has journeyed from Easter Island to Ethiopia, Cuba to Kathmandu, think that sitting quietly in a room might be the ultimate adventure? Because in our madly accelerating world, our lives are crowded, chaotic and noisy. There's never been a greater need to slow down, tune out and give ourselves permission to be still.

In The Art of Stillness--a TED Books release--Iyer investigate the lives of people who have made a life seeking stillness: from Matthieu Ricard, a Frenchman with a PhD in molecular biology who left a promising scientific career to become a Tibetan monk, to revered singer-songwriter Leonard Cohen, who traded the pleasures of the senses for several years of living the near-silent life of meditation as a Zen monk. Iyer also draws on his own experiences as a travel writer to explore why advances in technology are making us more likely to retreat. He reflects that this is perhaps the reason why many people--even those with no religious commitment--seem to be turning to yoga, or meditation, or seeking silent retreats. These aren't New Age fads so much as ways to rediscover the wisdom of an earlier age. Growing trends like observing an "Internet Sabbath"--turning off online connections from Friday night to Monday morning--highlight how increasingly desperate many of us are to unplug and bring stillness into our lives.

The Art of Stillness paints a picture of why so many--from Marcel Proust to Mahatma Gandhi to Emily Dickinson--have found richness in stillness. Ultimately, Iyer shows that, in this age of constant movement and connectedness, perhaps staying in one place is a more exciting prospect, and a greater necessity than ever before.

In 2013, Pico Iyer gave a blockbuster TED Talk. This lyrical and inspiring book expands on a new idea, offering a way forward for all those feeling affected by the frenetic pace of our modern world.

The Art of Stillness

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Jenny March

Heavy Paperback (2 to 4 lbs)

Brief entries describe the characters, legends, and events of Greek and Roman mythology.

Cassell's Dictionary of Classical Mythology

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Francoise Gilot

Pages slightly discolored due to age no other flaws or markings

A long-time companion of Picasso describes the artistic and personal friendship between two giants of twentieth-century art, capturing the affection, rivalry, and creative interaction of the two geniuses, along with examples of their works

Matisse and Picasso

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Jane Hirshfield

"Hirshfield's current collection brings together . . . an astonishing array of women writers from the 22nd century BC poet Enheduanna to Nelly Sachs and Anna Akhmatova."--Library Journal

Women in Praise of the Sacred

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Calvin Tomkins

Slight page discoloration due to age of paper

Portraits of Ten Artists Whose Work and Lifestyles Embody the Future of Contemporary Art

"Brilliantly illuminating . . . This latter-day Vasari puts his dry wit and keen eye to work in fashioning enduring portraits of ten contemporary-art stars, tracing the fruits of creative genius back to their strange roots."—Vogue For more than four decades Calvin Tomkins's incisive profiles in The New Yorker have given readers the most satisfying reports on contemporary art and artists available in any language. In Lives of the Artists ten major artists are captured in Tomkins's cool and ironic style to record the new directions art is taking during these days of limitless freedom. With the decline of formal technique and rigorous training, art has become, among other things, an approach to living. As Tomkins says, "the lives of contemporary artists are today so integral to what they make that the two cannot be considered in isolation." Among the artists profiled are Jeff Koons and Damien Hirst, the reigning heirs of deliberately outrageous art; Matthew Barney of the pregenital obsessions; Cindy Sherman, who manages multiple transformations as she disappears into her own work; and Julian Schnabel, who has forged a second career as an award-winning film director. Whatever the choice, the making of art remains among the most demanding jobs on earth.

Lives of the Artists

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Mikhail Afanasevich Bulgakov

R. Pevear

Pages are slightly dark from age otherwise very good

"Moscow, 1929: a city that has lost its way amid corruption and fear, inhabited by people who have abandoned their morals and forsaken spirituality. But when a mysterious stranger arrives in town with a bizarre entourage that includes a giant talking cat and a fanged assassin, all hell breaks loose. Among those caught up in the strange and inexplicable events that transpire in the capital are the Master, a writer whose life has been destroyed by Soviet repression, and his beloved Margarita. Their adventures reveal a story that began two thousand years ago in ancient Jerusalem - and its resolution will decide their fate."--Publisher.

The Master and Margarita

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Francis Paudras

A Portrait of Bud Powell

What Charlie Parker was to the saxophone, Bud Powell (1924-1966) was to the piano. But genius has its price, and Powell spent much of his life in electroshock therapy in psychiatric institutions. "Dance of the Infidels" tells Powell's compelling story. 191 photos.

Dance of the Infidels

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Andrea Zittel

David Levinthal

Judith Richards

Mel Bochner

Janine Antoni

Leon Golub

Vik Muniz

Fred Wilson

Two Decades of Talks with Artists in New York

Edited by Judith Olch Richards. FULL CONTRIBUTOR LIST (Group Survey Anthology): Judith Olch Richards, Richard Tuttle, Janine Antoni, David Levinthal, Louise Bourgeois, Leon Golub, Mel Bochner,

Inside the Studio

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Peter Vergo

Very good book, signature on first page (owner, not author)

Klimt, Kokoschka, Schiele, and Their Contemporaries

The artistic stagnation of Vienna at the end of the nineteenth century was rudely shaken by the artists of the Secession. Their works at first shocked a conservative public; but their successive exhibitions, their magazine "Ver Sacrum", and their application to the applied arts and architecture soon brought them an enthusiastic following and wealthy patronage. This book traces the course of this development, of the Wiener Werkstatte that followed, and the individual works of the artists concerned. Klimt, Olbrich, Loos and Hoffmann in architecture and applied arts. In other fields Mahler, Freud and Schnitzler were influencing the avant-garde. Peter Vergo quotes extensively from the writings of contemporary reviewers, critics and the artists themselves. He has eye-witness accounts of the exhibitions, the opening of the Secession building, the work in progress on the Palais Stoclet and Kabarett Fledermaus. The result is a documentary study of the successes and failures, hopes and fears of the members of an artistic movement which is still admired today.

Art in Vienna 1898-1918

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Maggi McCormick Gordon

Very mild wrinkling on edges of protective book flap. Book is like New

Oversized Hardcover (4 to 6 lbs)

The definitive book on quiltmaking traditions from around the world. Includes techniques for making sample blocks, also covers patchwork and applique traditions. More than 250 full-colour photographs of a full range of quilt designs.

Quilter's Resource Book

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Antal Szerb

Len Rix

Journey by Moonlight

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Elaine Sciolino

Life on the Rue des Martyrs

Elaine Sciolino, the former Paris bureau chief of the New York Times, invites us on a tour of her favorite Parisian street. “I can never be sad on the rue des Martyrs,” Sciolino explains, as she celebrates the neighborhood's rich history and vibrant lives. While many cities suffer from the leveling effects of globalization, the rue des Martyrs maintains its distinct allure. Sciolino reveals the charms and idiosyncrasies of this street and its longtime residents—the Tunisian greengrocer, the husband-and-wife cheesemongers, the showman who's been running a transvestite cabaret for more than half a century, the owner of a 100-year-old bookstore, the woman who repairs eighteenth-century mercury barometers—making Paris come alive in all its unique majesty. The Only Street in Paris will make readers hungry for Paris, for cheese and wine, and for the kind of street life that is all too quickly disappearing.

Browse by categories

Perri Knize

Grand Obsession

Marguerite Yourcenar; Grace Frick

Memoirs of Hadrian

Alberto Manguel

The Library at Night

Cipe Pineles

Leave Me Alone with the Recipes

Bevis Hillier

The World of Art Deco

Alice Walker

The Cushion in the Road

Pauline Rush Evans

The Family Treasury of Children’s Stories

Hannah Sigur

Influence of Japanese Art on Design

Daniel Wildenstein

Monet’s years at giverney

Nancy Boas

David Park

Pico Iyer

The Art of Stillness

Jenny March

Cassell's Dictionary of Classical Mythology

Francoise Gilot

Matisse and Picasso

Jane Hirshfield

Women in Praise of the Sacred

Calvin Tomkins

Lives of the Artists

Mikhail Afanasevich Bulgakov; R. Pevear

The Master and Margarita

Francis Paudras

Dance of the Infidels

Andrea Zittel; David Levinthal; Judith Richards; Mel Bochner; Janine Antoni; Leon Golub; Vik Muniz; Fred Wilson

Inside the Studio

Peter Vergo

Art in Vienna 1898-1918

Maggi McCormick Gordon

Quilter's Resource Book

Perri Knize

Grand Obsession

Alberto Manguel

The Library at Night

Antal Szerb; Len Rix

Journey by Moonlight

Elaine Sciolino

The Only Street in Paris

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