Lucinda Lambton

Few inventions have done as much to ease the human lot as the indispensable but taken-for-granted lavatory. Bearing such proud names as "Unitas," "Eureka," "Excelsior," and "Optimus," and adorned with elegant patterns such as writhing convolvulus, classical temples, or swimming fish - some were even made in the shape of dolphins - the gleaming beauties in Temples of Convenience help celebrate the rich, full history of this sanitary wonder. In this expanded edition of her classic book, Lucinda Lambton explores the development of the lavatory from the latrine and the garderobe to the sophisticated and exquisitely decorated piece of sanitary engineering - designed by Bramah, Jennings, Twyford, and Shanks - that turned a foul necessity into an aesthetic delight.
Over 150 jewels of sanitation have been described and photographed by Lucinda Lambton, all of them eagerly nosed out in both private houses and gentleman's clubs, as well as in public houses and department stores. There are privies, toilets and chamber pots galore, not to mention baths and richly wrought washstands; indeed, anything that symbolizes the glories and splendors of sanitation.

Heavy Hardcover (2 to 4 lbs)

New York

Temples of Convenience

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Jerry Langton

Light Hardcover (1 lb or less)

How the World's Most Notorious Rodent Clawed Its Way to the Top

Examines the characteristics, physiology, habits, behavior, evolution, history, myth, and psyche of one of the world's most successful animals, in a study that explores the reasons why the ever-adaptable rat has risen to the top of the animal kingdom.

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David Grossman

Alisa McGowen

Paperback (1 to 2 lbs)

For more than three decades, award-winning leadership and communication expert David Grossman has helped scores of leaders become great leader communicators who drive impressive results for their organizations. Naturally, the global pandemic and mounting racial unrest of 2020 handed leaders one of their biggest challenges yet, with a level of social and economic tumult not seen in more than a century.Despite the upheaval, many leaders rose to the occasion, and often by drawing not just from experience and wise counsel, but from being human as they led - what Grossman calls Heart First leadership. In Heart First, Grossman explores the many aspects of being more authentic in leadership and how that can profoundly inspire a team and move them to achieve remarkable things, especially in times of change or crisis.Heart First also features interviews with CEOs and guest columns from senior leaders inside a variety of organizations, each of whom share extraordinarily candid insights and unique lessons learned from a year that changed everything.

Heart First: Lasting Leader Lessons from a Year That Changed Everything

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Alvin Jesephy

Moisture damage around edges, torn pages in rear (index)

Heavy Paperback (2 to 4 lbs)

An Illustrated History

The Native American

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Ring Lardner

Hardcover (1 to 2 lbs)

The early 20th century's undisputed comic genius writes about the War to End All Wars.

Lardner on War

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Clayton E. Cramer

The Story of How and Why Guns Became as American as Apple Pie

"For many Americans, guns seem to be a fundamental part of the American experience―and always have been." Grand in scope, rigorous in research, and elegant in presenting the formative years of our country, "Armed America" traces the winding historical trail of United States citizens' passion for firearms. Author and historial Clayton E. Cramer goes back to the source, unearthing first-hand accounts from the colonial times, through the Revolutionary War period, and into the early years of the American Republic. In "Armed America," Cramer depicts a budding nation dependent on its firearms not only for food and protection, but also for recreation and enjoyment. Through newspaper clippings, official documents, and personal diaries, he shows that recent grandiose theories claiming that guns were scarce in early America are shaky at best, and downright false at worst. Above all, Cramer allows readers a priceless glimpse of a country literally fighting for its identity. For those who think that our citizens' attraction to firearms is a recent phenomenon, it's time to think again. "Armed America" proves that the right to bear arms is as American as apple pie.

Armed America

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Peter Firstbrook

Prince Philip

John Cabot and the Discovery of North America

An account of the journey made by the author and his crew in an attempt to recreate John Cabot's historic voyage to the North American mainland

The Voyage of the Matthew

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Anka Muhlstein

Willard Wood

Light Paperback (1 lb or less)

Explorer of the North American Frontier

Seventeenth-century North America was a dangerous, untamed land, a vast wilderness where settlers, fur traders, and missionaries all struggled to eke out an existence. But the New World was also a place that attracted a special breed - men with a thirst for adventure and discovery. Robert Cavelier de La Salle, whose energy and single-minded ambition made him one of the greatest explorers of the time, was such a man. Born in 1643 to a family of wealthy linen merchants in Rouen, France, La Salle joined the Jesuits in hopes of becoming a missionary and traveling to distant lands. The hotheaded Robert soon found himself unable to conform. Sedentary teaching appointments ill suited his passionate nature, and, at the age of twenty-four, he left the Society of Jesus and crossed the Atlantic to America. Like Columbus before him, he was obsessed with finding a western passage to China. But the New World so intrigued him and inflamed his imagination that he abandoned the Far East for the mysteries of the still uncharted regions of North America. La Salle's explorations took him from Quebec and Montreal down the Saint Lawrence River to the Great Lakes; south along the Ohio and Illinois rivers; and finally, in 1682, down the Mississippi River to the Gulf of Mexico, where he claimed the territory he had traveled through for France, and named it Louisiana in honor of the Sun King, Louis XIV. La Salle spent twenty years in North America, returning three times to France to enlist support for his further explorations and to gather funds to pursue them. Throughout those years he never lost sight of his grand strategic goal, which was to link the Great Lakes to warm water ports on the Gulf of Mexico. Nordid he waver in his integrity and determination to succeed, or lose his exceptional physical endurance. A man of such quality inevitably attracted lifelong friends, as well as mortal enemies who would assassinate him just as his triumph was nearly complete. The author combines impeccable scholarship with a novelist's narrative power and eye for stunning detail. She brings to life not only La Salle but the period and place: the vast cold of the north; the seething, insect-infested heat of the south; endlessly warring Indian tribes; intrigues on both sides of the Atlantic; and the constant, daily battles with nature itself. Muhlstein's masterly analysis of the political and economic significance of La Salle's great feat in linking the Saint Lawrence Seaway to the mouth of the Mississippi illuminates an event that shaped the development of this continent. Her depiction of life among the natives - La Salle, an accomplished linguist who spoke many Indian languages, arrived not as master or conqueror but as friend and equal, and in most of his travels he was accompanied by his devoted Shawnee guide, Nika - gives us vivid new insights into daily life in North America three hundred years ago.

La Salle

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J. D. Robb

When a pair of young lovers, employees of a prestigious accounting firm, are brutally murdered, mid-twenty-first-century lieutenant Eve Dallas finds the case complicated by the suspicious disappearance of a pregnant woman. By the author of Memory in Death. 500,000 first printing.

Born in Death

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Barbara Kingsolver

A Novel

In her most accomplished novel, Barbara Kingsolver takes us on an epic journey from the Mexico City of artists Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo to the America of Pearl Harbor, FDR, and J. Edgar Hoover. The Lacuna is a poignant story of a man pulled between two nations as they invent their modern identities. Born in the United States, reared in a series of provisional households in Mexico—from a coastal island jungle to 1930s Mexico City—Harrison Shepherd finds precarious shelter but no sense of home on his thrilling odyssey. Life is whatever he learns from housekeepers who put him to work in the kitchen, errands he runs in the streets, and one fateful day, by mixing plaster for famed Mexican muralist Diego Rivera. He discovers a passion for Aztec history and meets the exotic, imperious artist Frida Kahlo, who will become his lifelong friend. When he goes to work for Lev Trotsky, an exiled political leader fighting for his life, Shepherd inadvertently casts his lot with art and revolution, newspaper headlines and howling gossip, and a risk of terrible violence. Meanwhile, to the north, the United States will soon be caught up in the internationalist goodwill of World War II. There in the land of his birth, Shepherd believes he might remake himself in America's hopeful image and claim a voice of his own. He finds support from an unlikely kindred soul, his stenographer, Mrs. Brown, who will be far more valuable to her employer than he could ever know. Through darkening years, political winds continue to toss him between north and south in a plot that turns many times on the unspeakable breach—the lacuna—between truth and public presumption. With deeply compelling characters, a vivid sense of place, and a clear grasp of how history and public opinion can shape a life, Barbara Kingsolver has created an unforgettable portrait of the artist—and of art itself. The Lacuna is a rich and daring work of literature, establishing its author as one of the most provocative and important of her time.

The Lacuna

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Robert McGhee

An Elizabethan Adventure

Under orders from Queen Elizabeth I, Gabriel's captain B privateer and adventurer Martin Frobisher B took up the search for a northwestern route to Asia. A few days after enduring the storm of 14 July 1576, Frobisher sighted the most easterly outlier of Arctic North America and for the first time England became aware of this vast northern region. Over the next three summers it would be the scene of an adventure involving the fruitless search for a northwest passage, the first attempt by the British to establish a settlement in the New World, and the first major gold-mining fraud in North American history. Over 1,200 tons of rock were mined from Baffin Island and shipped to England, where they were found to contain not an ounce of gold. Yet Frobisher's claim of possession established British interest in northern North America and was the first step in the eventual establishment of British sovereignty over the northern half of the American continent.

The Arctic Voyages of Martin Frobisher

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Nina Burleigh

James Smithson, John Quincy Adams, and the Making of America's Greatest Museum: The Smithsonian

A portrait of the naturalist who founded the Smithsonian Institute notes the fierce political and interpersonal battles that nearly prevented the museum's establishment and recounts the intervention of such individuals as John Quincy Adams that enabled its recovery. 35,000 first printing.

The Stranger and the Statesman

c22fac27-25b7-480f-8f7c-2e10a478b0aa-0

Kevin Krajick

Small water stain upper corner - does not interfere with text

An Epic Search for Diamonds in the North American Arctic

In the tradition of Sebastian' Junger's The Perfect Storm and Jon Krakauer's Into Thin Air, Barren Lands is the extraordinary tale of two small-time prospectors who risked their lives to discover $17 billion worth of diamonds in the desolate tundra of the far north. In the late 1970's, two men set out on a twenty-year search for a North American gem mine, along a fabled path that had defied 16th-century explorers, Wild West prospectors, and modern geologists. They are an unlikely pair: Chuck Fipke, a ragged, stuttering fellow with a singular talent for finding sand-size mineral grains, and Stew Blusson, an ultra-tough geologist and helicopter pilot. Inventive, eccentric and ruthless, they follow a trail of geologic clues left by predecessors all the way from backwoods Arkansas up the glaciated high Rockies into the vast and haunted "barren lands" of northern Canada. With a South African geochemist's "secret weapon," Fipke and Blusson outwit rivals, including the immense De Beers carte, and make one of the world's greatest diamond discoveries- setting off a stampede unseen since the Klondike gold rush. A story of obsession and scientific intrigue, Barren Lands is also an elegy to one of earth's last great wild places, a starkly beautiful and mysterious land strewn with pure lakes and alive with wolves and caribou. An endless variety of primeval glacial rock formations hide copper, zinc, and gold, in addition to diamonds. Now that the barrens are "open for business," what will happen to this great wilderness region? Barren Lands is an unforgettable journey for those who, in the words of a nineteenth-century trapper, "want to see that country before it is all gone."

Barren Lands

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W. J. Eccles

Peter Moogk

The Courtier Governor

Louis de Buade, Comte de Frontenac (1622?1698), was a towering figure in North American history. Appointed in 1672 as governor general of New France, he was credited with intimidating the Iroquois, defying British colonial military might, and promoting France?s imperial expansion to the west. W. J. Eccles masterfully debunks these myths, created in part by Francis Parkman, and reveals Frontenac as an anachronism who sought to maintain his privileged status through corruption, favors at court, and the illicit pursuit of commerce in the West. A deft analysis and reexamination of official administrative and military sources have made Frontenac the classic study of a complex and historically misrepresented governor.

Frontenac

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Michael Stephenson

How the War of Independence Was Fought

A study of the military aspects of the American Revolution covers eighteenth-century combat and the conflict's most significant contributors, and includes analyses of key battles, period weaponry and equipment, and the role played by weather and terrain.

Patriot Battles

69a60a46-2a6b-45a0-8710-dbd7c55d4b24-1

Eric Jay Dolin

The Epic History of the Fur Trade in America

As Henry Hudson sailed up the broad river that would one day bear his name, he grew concerned that his Dutch patrons would be disappointed in his failure to find the fabled route to the Orient. What became immediately apparent, however, from the Indians clad in deer skins and "good furs" was that Hudson had discovered something just as tantalizing.



The news of Hudson's 1609 voyage to America ignited a fierce competition to lay claim to this uncharted continent, teeming with untapped natural resources.  The result was the creation of an American fur trade, which fostered economic rivalries and fueled wars among the European powers, and later between the United States and Great Britain, as North America became a battleground for colonization and imperial aspirations.



In Fur, Fortune, and Empire, best-selling author Eric Jay Dolin chronicles the rise and fall of the fur trade of old, when the rallying cry was "get the furs while they last." Beavers, sea otters, and buffalos were slaughtered, used for their precious pelts that were tailored into extravagant hats, coats, and sleigh blankets. To read Fur, Fortune, and Empire then is to understand how North America was explored, exploited, and settled, while its native Indians were alternately enriched and exploited by the trade.  As Dolin demonstrates, fur, both an economic elixir and an agent of destruction, became inextricably linked to many key events in American history, including the French and Indian War, the American Revolution, and the War of 1812, as well as to the relentless pull of Manifest Destiny and the opening of the West.



This work provides an international cast beyond the scope of any Hollywood epic, including Thomas Morton, the rabble-rouser who infuriated the Pilgrims by trading guns with the Indians; British explorer Captain James Cook, whose discovery in the Pacific Northwest helped launch America's China trade; Thomas Jefferson who dreamed of expanding the fur trade beyond the Mississippi; America's first multimillionaire John Jacob Astor, who built a fortune on a foundation of fur; and intrepid mountain men such as Kit Carson and Jedediah Smith, who sliced their way through an awe inspiring and unforgiving landscape, leaving behind a mythic legacy still resonates today.



Concluding with the virtual extinction of the buffalo in the late 1800s, Fur, Fortune, and Empire is an epic history that brings to vivid life three hundred years of the American experience, conclusively demonstrating that the fur trade played a seminal role in creating the nation we are today.

Fur Fortune and Empire

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Amy Butler Greenfield

Shelf wear, no markings, warping of jacket 

Empire, Espionage, and the Quest for the Color of Desire

A history of the red dye cochineal cites its role in building the empires of monopoly holders in ancient Mexico and sixteenth-century Spain, tracing the efforts of European pirates, explorers, alchemists, scientists, and spies to discover the dye's origins. 35,000 first printing.

A Perfect Red

5755c594-fbf1-4074-90f3-d40685788d16-1

David G. Fitz-Enz

Plattsburgh, the War of 1812's Most Decisive Battle

This is the only comprehensive account of the American victory at Plattsburgh, New York, on the shores of Lake Champlain in 1814, the first full history of one of the most decisive battles in American history.

The Final Invasion

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Robert Service

More Than 100 Of His Poems From The Yukon Ballads To Bohemian Paris And The World War.

The Best of Robert Service

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Stories that hide our patriotic past 

Founding Myths

Giles Milton

Signed by the author. Shelf wear, no markings

How England's Adventurers Gambled and Won the New World

In April 1586, Queen Elizabeth I acquired a new and exotic title. A tribe of North American Indians had made her their weroanza - 'big chief'. The news was received with great joy, both by the Queen and her favourite, Sir Walter Ralegh. His first American expedition had brought back a captive, Manteo, whose tattooed face had enthralled Elizabethan London. Now Manteo was returned to his homeland as Lord and Governor. Ralegh's gamble would result in the first English settlement in the New World, but it would also lead to a riddle whose solution lay hidden in the forests of Virginia. A tale of heroism and mystery, Big Chief Elizabeth is illuminated by first-hand accounts to reveal a remarkable and long-forgotten story.

Big Chief Elizabeth

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Peter L. Bernstein

The Erie Canal and the Making of a Great Nation

The building of the Erie Canal is one of the greatest and most riveting stories of American ingenuity. Now a bestselling author presents the story of the canal's construction against the larger tableau of America in the first quarter-century of the 1800s.

Wedding of the Waters

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James M. Acheson

An anthropologist describes the working world of Maine lobstermen, focusing on the intricate personal network that sustains them.

The Lobster Gangs of Maine

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Mark Kurlansky

Shelf wear, no markings , crease in dust jacket 

The Fate of the Atlantic and Survival in Gloucester, America's Oldest Fishing Port and Most Original Town

From the New York Times-bestselling author of Cod, Salt, and The Big Oyster comes the colorful story of a way of life that for hundreds of years has defined much of America's coastlines but is slowly disappearing. Illustrated.

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