Photographs 1947-1977

[New York]: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, [1978]

"Avedon gravitates to those moments in which the oscillation between pretense and revelation is most intense. The subject of any of his photographs is likely to show in part isolation or grotesquerie, courage to the point of madness, isolation-and-defiance or sly amusement, desolation and wit, pride and sterility, pride and triumph. Victories, defeats mingle in the same moment sometimes or on adjoining pages..." –Harold Brodkey (from the Introductory Essay)

FIRST EDITION. A spectacular production illustrated with Avedon's photographs of Lauren Bacall, Joan Baez, Bridget Bardot, Audrey Hepburn, Anjelica Houston, Janis Joplin, Sophia Loren, Marilyn Monroe, Yves Saint Laurent, Elizabeth Taylor, Diana Vreeland and many more. A near fine copy with the original acetate jacket in very good condition with wear and chip at the top of the spine. An excellent copy signed and inscribed by Avedon.

SOLD.

$650

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Orlando

SIGNED LIMITED FIRST EDITION, one of 800 copies signed by Woolf. “Virginia Woolf’s novel about Vita Sackville-West represented a turn from the kind of experimentation in life in which she could not wholly let herself go to the kind of venture in art where she could be wholeheartedly involved” (Ralph Freedman, Virginia Woolf: Revaluation and Continuity, A Collection of Essays). Orlando came as a great departure from Woolf’s other novels—less carefully written, and “in some ways foolish—a novelist’s holiday rather than a novel” (ibid.). It was, indeed, less of a novel, than “the longest and most charming love letter in literature” (Nigel Nicholson). Precedes the first UK edition. Krikpatrick A11a. Signed on verso of half-title. Octavo, original elaborately gilt-decorated cloth; custom cloth box. Fading to cloth (about an inch in from the edges on the front board, less on rear) and fraying to edges. A very good copy.

$2,400

Howl

FIRST EDITION, one of only 100 copies, SIGNED AND INSCRIBED BY GINSBERG. Signed and inscribed on title: "for Michael Rumaker / Allen Ginsberg / this historic particular copy of Howl which his eyes read for / Black Mt Review #7 / Signed White Plains N.Y. / March 12, 1976". Ginsberg also added 20 "ah"'s along the bottom of the page. With large flower and sun drawing by Ginsberg across title. Rumaker's ownership signature at top of page. WITH: The original issue of The Black Mountain Review #7 in which Rumaker's review of "Howl" appears. "In October 1955 Ginsberg read the first part of his new poem ['Howl'] in public for the first time to tumultuous applause at the Six Gallery reading in San Francisco with the local poets Kenneth Rexroth, Gary Snyder, Michael McClure, Philip Whalen, and Philip LaMantia. Journalists were quick to herald the reading as a landmark event in American poetry, the birth of what they labeled the San Francisco Poetry Renaissance. Lawrence Ferlinghetti, who ran the City Lights Book Store and the City Lights publishing house in North Beach, sent Ginsberg a telegram echoing Ralph Waldo Emerson's response to Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass: 'I greet you at the beginning of a great career. When do I get the manuscript?' Later Ginsberg wrote that 'in publishing 'Howl,' I was curious to leave behind after my generation an emotional time bomb that would continue exploding in U.S. consciousness in case our military-industrial-nationalist complex solidified into a repressive police bureaucracy' (Original Draft Facsimile Howl, p. xii). "Early in the following year Howl and Other Poems was published with an introduction by William Carlos Williams as number four in the City Lights Pocket Poets Series. In May 1956 copies of the small black-and-white stapled paperback were seized by the San Francisco police, who arrested Ferlinghetti and Shigeyoshi Murao, his shop manager, and charged them with publishing and selling an obscene and indecent book. The American Civil Liberties Union took up the defense of Ginsberg's poem in a highly publicized obscenity trial in San Francisco, which concluded in October 1957 when Judge Clayton Horn ruled that Howl had redeeming social value" (American National Biography). Introduction by William Carlos Williams. The Pocket Poets Series: Number Four. Small quarto, original printed wrappers; custom cloth box. Small quarto, original wrappers; custom box housing both Howl and The Black Mountain Review. A little toning to spine (as usual) and a small abrasion to rear cover. Overall an exceptionally fresh, clean beautiful copy.

Price On Request

Atget Photgraphe de Paris

“For many among us Atget’s Paris is now no more than a memory whose delicacy is already mysterious. It is worth all the books written on the subject, and without doubt will inspire others.” –Pierre Mac Orlan“Whether or not, as some commentators have asserted, Atget is being distorted here, and a journeyman documentary photographer has been miscast as a modernist, one thing is quite clear: the selection was made with the best of intentions, out of respect for the old man’s work, and it show precisely how it spoke to a younger generation of photographers. By that criterion it is an excellent selection, containing many wonderful pictures and giving exquisite visual pleasure – the most striking images from more than thirty years spent documenting the streets, buildings, parks and gardens of Old Paris” (The Photobook, I. 127). Roth, 60.Original red moire cloth, cover and spine lettered in gilt with rare cardboard slipcase and custom leather bound slipcase. A fine copy.

$4,750

Sleeping by the Mississippi

Pre-publication edition, SIGNED by Soth. Number 26 or 30 numbered copies. With original Inkjet prints bound into cloth covers. Gilt stamped brown cloth with an original photograph mounted on front cover. Fine copy.

$12,000

On the Mechanical Performance of Logical Inference

FIRST EDITION of Jevons's explanation of his "logical piano"; a landmark in computer science.To the reader of the preceding paper it will be evident that mechanism is capable of replacing for the most part the action of thought required in the performance of logical deduction. Mental agency is required only in interpreting correctly the grammatical structure of the premises, and in gathering the purport of the reply... The machine is thus the embodiment of a true symbolic method or Calculus... Jevons invented a "logical piano" (so named because it resembled a small upright piano) that could perform, through a sequence of switches, various types of logical calculations. In doing so, he became "the first person to construct a machine with sufficient power to solve a complicated problem faster than the problem could be solved without the machine's aid" (Goldstine). "On the Mechanical Performance of Logical Inference," a paper Jevons read before the Royal Society on January 20, 1870, is his most detailed description of this early prototype of the modern computer. The logical piano now stands in the Museum of the History of Science in Oxford.In: Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London for the year 1870, pp. 497-518, Vol. 160, Part II (the complete volume). London: Taylor and Francis, 1870. Quarto, modern half-calf over marbled boards, with the original wrappers bound-in. A fine copy.

$1,500

Jazz

FIRST EDITION, SIGNED BY TONI MORRISON. Original gilt stamped cloth, original dust jacket. A fine copy signed by Nobel Laureate Toni Morrison.

$300

Cold Mountain

"What you have lost will not be returned to you; it always be lost. You’re left with only your scars to mark the void. All you can choose to do is go on, or not. But if you go on, it’s knowing you carry your scars with you."FIRST EDITION, SIGNED BY CHARLES FRAZIER. A superb copy.

$500

Tropic of Cancer

FIRST AMERICAN EDITION OF HENRY MILLER'S TROPIC OF CANCER, 1/100 COPIES SIGNED BY MILLER. Tropic of Cancer was banned from publication in the United States until the appearance of the present edition; it was first published in 1934 in Paris by the Obelisk Press. Octavo, original publisher's quarter morocco and marbled boards. Occasional trivial rubbing at extremities, generally a fine copy.

$2,000

Bend Sinister

FIRST EDITION, AN IMPORTANT ASSOCIATION COPY INSCRIBED BY NABOKOV TO MORRIS BISHOP, one of Nabokov's closest friends and mentors: "To THE [drawing of two chess bishops] / FROM THE author of S. [drawing of a chess knight] / Sept. 1948 / Cornell". With Morris Bishop's bookplate on front pastedown. Morris Bishop was a prolific author, poet, and literary scholar, who had a lifelong affiliation with Cornell. "Among Professor Bishop's other distinctions was his perception of the literary talent of Vladimir Nabokov whom he brought to Cornell in 1948 as a teacher at a time when the Russian-born novelist was just making his mark in this country. Mr. Nabokov considered Professor Bishop as one of his closest friends in the United States and as a sort of spiritual father. They shared a fondness for exactitude in language and for japery as well as a common commitment to literature" (New York Times, Nov 22, 1973). "Bend Sinister, the first novel Nabokov wrote after coming to America, can be seen as his most direct fictional response to both the new Russian government and the new Soviet realism. The most self-consciously artificial of his novels in English, Bend Sinister is an indictment of the common impulse Nabokov saw behind both political totalitarianism and the misguided tendency of writers or readers to inflict 'general ideas' on works of art." (Lucy Maddox, Nabokov's Novels in English). Octavo, original cloth, original dust jacket; custom cloth box. Book fine, dust jacket with crease in center and "VOLGA" written neatly in pencil alongside the bolt of lightning on front panel.

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Antlitz der Zeit

FIRST EDITION of Sander’s classic, one of the most influential photobooks of the early twentieth-century. SIGNED AND INSCRIBED BY SANDER.August Sander “was part of a coterie of photographers who established the photographic book as an aesthetically and commercially viable art form in the 1920s. Though Sander had published one such book in 1924, Unsere Heimat, Hannover, it was the 1929 publication of Antlitz der Zeit (The Face of Our Time) that propelled him into enduring fame” (Warren, Encyclopedia of Twentieth-Century Photography). “Many of his classic images are included in this seminal photobook, and the essential qualities of Sander’s vision can be seen. He took typical examples of professions, trades and social classes in Weimar Germany, and photographed them in their familiar environments in order to build up, piece by piece, a dispassionate image of the ‘face’ of society… One of his work’s miracles is how, despite his nominal objectivity, his political view shines through… His work is not neutral. It is not just penetrating, but was seen as positively dangerous, a little too acute in its analysis of society and class, by those with certain vested interests. This is made clear by the fact that when the Nazis came to power in Germany in 1933, publisher’s copies of Antlitz der Zeit were seized, the plates destroyed, and the negatives confiscated by Hitler’s Ministry of Culture” (The Photobook, I.124). Roth 52. Quarto. Original yellow cloth, original dust jacket. Signed and inscribed by Sander. Scarce original dust jacket with small chips at spine ends and extremities, and significant tears with loss at bottom portion of spine and front cover and at top of dust jacket rear (1"x4").

Price On Request

The New Industrial Parks near Irvine, California. Das Neue Industriegelände in Der Nähe Von Irvine, Kalifornien

A PRESENTATION COPY OF THE FIRST EDITION OF BALTZ'S SEMINAL WORK. “Baltz's pictures are object-images, physical presences themselves, not representations of things. Although they are signs of real-world objects, they are also independent, archetypal forms...they have an inevitability, an inscrutability, a permanence, even a stateliness. His images demand more than contemplation and delectation: they demand reckoning.” - Adam D. Weinberg, Alice Pratt Brown Director, Whitney Museum of American ArtBaltz’s New Industrial Parks is one of the greatest and most influential works of landscape photography of the 20th century, and the key monograph of the New Topographics movement. New York: Leo Castelli, 1974. Quarto, original cloth, original dust jacket. Book fine, dust jacket near fine with tape repair to jacket verso. PROVENANCE: Peter C. Bunnell's ownership stamp on front free endpaper. Professor Bunnell is the McAlpin Professor of the History of Photography and Modern Art Emeritus at Princeton University. Includes presentation note from Baltz on Professor Bunnell's stationary.

$3,000

The Variation of Animals and Plants under Domestication

FIRST AMERICAN EDITION. In this work, Darwin first proposed his theory of pangenesis as the mechanism of heredity. The theory holds that body cells shed “gemmules” that collect in the reproductive organs, thus transmitting their characteristics to the next generation. Mendelʼs theory of genetics supplanted this theory in the early 1900s. Octavo, two volumes. Original green cloth. Light wear at head of both volumes; light spotting to spine of volume II. Cloth generally clean. An attractive set.

$450

Avedon, Richard; Brodkey, Harold (Introductory Essay)

Photographs 1947-1977

Orlando

Howl

Atget Photgraphe de Paris

Sleeping by the Mississippi

On the Mechanical Performance of Logical Inference

Jazz

Cold Mountain

Tropic of Cancer

Bend Sinister

Antlitz der Zeit

The New Industrial Parks near Irvine, California. Das Neue Industriegelände in Der Nähe Von Irvine, Kalifornien

The Variation of Animals and Plants under Domestication

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