New & Notable Books All Books
Art and Photography
Music
First pressing. Ruscha designed the cover art for a 1968 Mason Williams album with the plainspoken title Music. Ruscha and Williams were close friends from childhood in Oklahoma City and this utterly generic-looking cover was typical of the sense of humor Ruscha and Williams shared. Both went to Chouinard Art Institute, which later became CalArts.
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Architecture, Graphics, Design and Fashion
B-Car
First edition. Chris Burden created this book to document one of his most characteristic works, a project he explains on the introductory page.
$1,000
Art and Photography
Living Well is the Best Revenge
First edition. On Gerald and Sara Murphy, the wealthy American expatriates whose home in Antibes, on the French Riviera, was a gathering-place for artists and writers. F. Scott Fitzgerald's characters Dick and Nicole Diver (in Tender is the Night) were based on the couple. Gerald Murphy’s cubist-influenced paintings anticipate the imagery of Pop art.
$100
Architecture, Graphics, Design and Fashion
The Fashion Makers: An Inside Look at America’s Leading Designers
An inside look at the leading fashion designers of the 1970s.
$75
Art and Photography
Jean Cocteau: Erotic Drawings
First edition. Collection of mainly erotic, homosexual art by Cocteau, with English introduction by Margaret Crosland.
$60
Art and Photography
The Face of Love
First edition. A beautiful copy of a scarce book. Sanne Sannes was already approaching the status of legend in 1967 when, having just turned 30, he was killed in a car crash. Only one small book, Oog om oog, (Amsterdam, 1964) had been published in his lifetime, with his next book, Sex a gogo, appearing posthumously (Amsterdam, 1969).
$1,200
Art and Photography
In the American West
First edition. Front endpaper: signed: Avedon 9.14.85. One of his most famous publications, Avedon went on location to Oaklahoma, Nevada and Nebraska to shoot working-class society, using a backdrop to enhance the formal aesthetic.
$1,500
Art and Photography
Worlds in a Small Room
First edition. Perhaps Penn’s most successful book. The photographs are taken from his "ambulant studio" on location at the edge of the Sahara, New Guinea, and the mountains of Nepal.
$450
Art and Photography
J.H. Boyhood Photos of J.H.Lartigue. The Family Album of a Gilded Age.
Inscribed by Lartigue on half-title page. Beautifully constructed book in the style of a home-made family album.
$1,250
Music, Film, Pop Culture, Politics and Society
Collecting Modern First Editions
First printing. A classic reference book spanning twentieth century American and British writers that is still useful relevant, though the guide to book prices circa 1977 can be either entertaining or agonizing, depending on how you look at it.
$100
Architecture, Graphics, Design and Fashion
Chanel
First American edition.By the choice and sequence of its illustrations, this book on the legendary fashion designer proposes an overview of her creative work in relation to the art world of her time.
$250
Architecture, Graphics, Design and Fashion
Utility Furniture
First edition. A clean copy of an important publication, the first to describe and depict the utility furniture made to conserve resources and manufacturing capacity during World War II. It includes an introduction by Hugh Dalton, President of the Board of Trade, and sets forth the aim of the regulations as being furniture that was “sound in construction, agreeable in design and reasonable in price.
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Art and Photography
Fine Art, Wine & Spirits
Oversized softcover catalogue of wines and spirits. A lively production, unusual for a series of Picasso linoleum prints, and an article of Picasso's graphic art by Dr. Albert Frankfurter. Picasso began his foray into linoleum-block prints around the age of eighty; these are among his first published efforts.
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Art and Photography
The Philosophy of Andy Warhol (From A to B & Back Again.)
First edition. Signed on the half-title page by Warhol with a drawing of a can of Campbell’s soup. The Philosophy of Andy Warhol was written with Pat Hackett and compiles Warhol’s thoughts written on love, money, sex, business, beauty, work, success and fame.
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Architecture, Graphics, Design and Fashion
Theaters and Motion Picture Houses
First edition of 2,000 copies. A practical treatise on the proper planning and construction of such buildings containing useful suggestions, rules and data for the benefit of architects, prospective owners, etc. It was an influential publication in an era when the first of the country’s grand old movie theaters were being built.
$650
Art and Photography
Immediate Family
First edition. Mann is perhaps best known for Immediate Family, her third collection, published in 1992. The NY Times said, “Probably no photographer in history has enjoyed such a burst of success in the art world.” The book consists of 65 black and white photographs of her three children, all under the age of 10.
$200
Music, Film, Pop Culture, Politics and Society
The Autobiography of a Brown Buffalo
First edition. Before his mysterious disappearance and probable death in 1971, Oscar Zeta Acosta was famous as a Robin Hood Chicano layer and notorious as the real-life model for Hunter S. Thompson's "Dr. Gonzo," a fat, pugnacious attorney with a gargantuan appetite for food, drugs, and life on the edge.
$250
Architecture, Graphics, Design and Fashion
Stanley Morison
First U.S. edition of the definitive work on the influential typographer.
$125
Art and Photography
Goodbye Baby & Amen. A Saraband for the Sixties
First American edition. Rare copy in this condition of the work of photographer David Bailey. Bailey is said to be the inspiration for Antonioni’s film Blow-Up.
$800
Art and Photography
Donald Judd: Catalogue Raisonne of Paintings, Objects, and Wood-Blocks, 1960-1974
First edition. Donald Judd listed the qualities he thought were characteristic of his work: a non-European look; three dimensions; unmodulated color; new materials; and “singleness.” In one of his fundamental statements, the essay “Specific Objects” Judd explained that his work is in no way minimal, reductive, “anti-art,” “ABC art,” or any of the other terms that had been applied to it.
$3,500
Gastronomy, Earth Sciences and Gardening
Serve It Forth
First edition of Sontag’s first book. Fisher stakes out what was to be her territory for he next 60+ years: the history of food and food preparation obviously, but not so obviously human wants and needs, hungers and satisfactions.
$1,250
Art and Photography
New Topographics: Photographs of a Man-altered Landscape
First edition. For the exhibition that came to define an important photographic tendency, curator William Jenkins selected ten photographers Robert Adams, Lewis Baltz, Bernd and Hilla Becher, Joe Deal, Frank Gohlke, Nicholas Nixon, John Schott, Stephen Shore, and Henry Wessel, jr.
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