Count Vittorio Alfieri (1749–1803) was an Italian dramatist, considered by many to be the founder of modern Italian drama. His successors have regarded his bold, austere and rapid manner as the genuine model of tragic composition. Alfieri was a fervent adversary of political tyranny. His defense of freedom, the keystone of all his works, made him the idol of Italian patriots. Many see Alfieri as the inspiration for the great Italian independence movement, Risorgimento.

Description: Complete in 6 volumes (1820 & 1821) illustrated with an engraved frontispiece, one to each volume. The complete tragedies of the father of Italian drama. Lovely leather bindings, signed & stamped “J. Wright, 1853″. Marbled boards & end pages. Raised bands & gilt details on spine edges. Some wear to the leather with several hinges tender but holding. Overall very nice set that presents well.

Bookseller Inventory #

$450

Tragedie Di Vittorio Alfieri
Alfieri, Vittorio

Publisher: Presso Leonardo Ciardetti
Binding: Hard Bound
Book Condition: Very Good
Dust Jacket Condition: No Jacket, As Issued

· Category: Antiquarian & Leather Bound ·

Domenichino ( Domenico Zampieri 1581–1641), was a prominent Italian Baroque era painter of the Bolognese School of painters. He was born in Bologna the son of a shoemaker, and because of his small stature, he was nicknamed Domenichino, “little Domenico.” He left Bologna for Rome in 1602 and became one of the most talented apprentices to emerge from Annibale Carracci’s supervision there. The most classical Bolognese painter of his era, Domenichino sought the ideal form and grandeur known as disegno. By 1614 he had become Rome’s leading painter. In 1621 he began working as architect for Pope Gregory XV

“That he might devote his whole powers to the art, Domenichino shunned all society; or, if he occasionally sought it in the public theaters and walks, this was in order better to observe the play of the passions in the features of the people — those of joy, anger, grief, terror and every affection of the mind — and to commit them vividly to his tablets” -Gian Pietro Bellori

Description: Hard bound catalogue raisonne in 2 volumes (text and plates) A systematic complete study of the artist’s life and work. All known paintings, drawings, lost & rejected works of this master Baroque artist. Previous owners name to front free endpage, otherwise very good. Evelina Borea and Richard Spear have in their well researched catalogue raisonné resurrected the artist from the Victorian graveyard and re-established his place among the most important and influential painters of seventeenth-century Italy. In 1996 the first major exhibition of his work was held at the Palazzo Venezia in Rome.

Bookseller Inventory # 19121

SOLD

· Category: Recently Sold ·

Steve Wheeler was an American abstract painter who in part founded the movement known as the “Indian Space Painters”. The movement began in the 1930’s by a small group of painters living in New York, Steve Wheeler, Robert Barrell and Peter Busa, were among it’s earliest members. Steve Wheeler would go on to be the group’s most famous member. Influenced by Native American art and spirituality, much of his work is totally abstract with puzzle-like compositions and wild animation. In many ways the Indian Space Painters may be considered the forerunners of Abstract Expressionism.

Description:
INSCRIBED AND SIGNED BY STEVE WHEELER to the Russian born painter, teacher and poet NAHUM TSCHACBASOV  “TO - NAHUM TSCHACBASOV : IN APPRECIATION OF OUR MUTUAL INTRESTS AND LONG FRIENDSHIP - STEVE WHEELER” Quarter-bound in blue/brown paper covered boards with red cloth spine. No jacket, in publishers slipcase, as issued. Front panel has multi-coloured silk screen decoration and gilt stamped titles. Gilt stamped titles on spine. Frontispiece and 13 photo-silk screen print & silk screened end papers. Glassine tissue guards. Preface by the artist. A work of prose by John Storck, and an essay by Adam Gates. #21 in a limited edition of 513 copies. Spectacular with rich photo silk-screen printing on heavy stock paper. A entirely beautiful edition! Rare!

Bookseller Inventory # 20947

$2500

Hello Steve
Wheeler, Steve

Publisher: Press Eight, New York
Publication Date: 1947
Binding: Hard Bound
Book Condition: Near Fine
Dust Jacket Condition: No Jacket, As Issued
Edition:

· Category: Art, Featured Items ·

Description: This title has reached a sort of iconic status among interior decorators and designers. Hard bound first printing with dust jacket. Introduction by Diana Vreeland (probably the most important editor Vogue has ever had). Houses, furniture, collections, gardens and the daily lives of the social elite in America and Europe, all captured in over 200 photographs by Horst P. Horst. A very private look at the “beautiful people” with their homes and gardens arranged to perfection especially for Vogue. This copy shows some minor edge wear and one small close tear to dust jacket. Very minor sunning to spine edge of dust jacket, otherwise very good. Interior clean and binding tight. Scarce!.

Bookseller Inventory # 22089

$300

Vogue’s Book of Houses, Gardens, People
Lawford, Valentine

“…the houses and rooms, furniture and collections, gardens and daily lives of some of the most interesting people in America and Europe are here presented in over two hundred beautiful color photographs by Horst…this book provides an opportunity to see how a number of well-known and less well-known people live during their private hours, among the possessions they love and in the surroundings they have planned or improved or cultivated.. for anyone curious about the personalities and habits of some of the most attractive and creative people of our time.”

Publisher: Viking
Publication Date:1968
Binding:Hard Bound
Book Condition: Very Good
Dust Jacket Condition:Very Good
Edition: First Edition

· Category: Recently Sold ·

Henry Miller was an American novelist and painter known for breaking with existing literary forms and developing a new sort of ‘novel’ that is a mixture of autobiography, social criticism, philosophical reflection, surrealist free association. Tropic of Capricorn continues the autobiographical exploration of the self Miller began in Tropic of Cancer, recounting, in his characteristically brutal and forthright style. Banned on grounds of obscenity, copies of Tropic of Capricorn were smuggled into his native country, building Miller an underground reputation.

“I believe that today more than ever a book should be sought after even if it has only one great page in it: we must search for fragments, splinters, toenails, anything that has ore in it, anything that is capable of resuscitating the body and soul. It may be that we are doomed, that there is no hope for us, any of us, but if that is so then let us set up a last agonizing, bloodcurdling howl, a screech of defiance, a war whoop! Away with lamentation! Away with elegies and dirges! Away with biographies and histories, and libraries and museums! Let the dead eat the dead. Let us living ones dance about the rim of the crater, a last expiring dance. But a dance!” - Henry Miller

Description: Paris: Obelisk Press, 1939. Octavo, original wrappers. Now in custom red cloth clam shell box. First Edition, First issue, with 60 FR price and errata slip. Original wrappers; one of only 1000 copies printed. Some wear and minor chipping to wrappers, otherwise very good. RARE!

Bookseller Inventory # 21756

$1450

Tropic of Capricorn
Miller, Henry

Publisher: Obelisk Press, Paris
Publication Date: 1939
Binding: Paperback
Book Condition: Very Good
Edition: First edition

· Category: Featured Items, Literary First Editions ·

Jessica Tan Gudnason studied photography at the International Center of Photography. Her abstract photographs in platinum-palladium and color have been featured in solo and group exhibitions. She lives in New York.

Description: A collection of beautiful close-up portraits of performers in the opera house during rarefied, private moments. SIGNED BY JESSICA TAN GUDNASON on the limitation page. Hard bound in red Japanese linen with gilt titles. Gilt to all page edges. Special hand numbered edition in publishers red linen clam shell box. #353 in a limited edition of 500 printed copies. Essay by Charles A. Riley II.

Bookseller Inventory # 21123

$350

Jessica Tan Gunderson: Opera Portraits
Riley II, Charles A.

Bibliographic Details

Publisher:  North 8 Editions
Publication Date:  2008
Binding:  Hard Bound
Book Condition:  As New
Dust Jacket Condition:  No Jacket, As Issued
Signed:  Signed by Photographer

· Category: Featured Items, Photography ·

Paul Ickovic was born in Czechoslovakia in 1944. He has traveled the world extensively; recording his story through the photographs he takes. Ickovic returned to his homeland as a boy, only to leave again for Canada and Latin America before finally moving to the United States, where he acquired his education and found his calling as a photographer.  His photographs are included in many prestigious collections including the Museum of Modern Art and International Center of Photography in New York, the Biblioteque Nationale in Paris, and the National Gallery in Prague.

Description: Boldy signed by Ickovic on the titlepage. Lavishly illustrated with full page (14 1/2” x 10”) photographs. Foreword by David Mamet. Photographs in the tradition of Josef Koudelka and Henri Cartier - Bresson.  This copy as new still in publishers box, as issued.

Bookseller Inventory # 007480

$650

Kafka’s Grave and Other Stories
Ickovic, Paul  &  Mamet, David

Bibliographic Details

Publisher:  Okapi Editions, New York
Publication Date:  1987
Binding:  Hard Cover
Book Condition:  As New
Dust Jacket Condition:  No Jacket, As Issued
Signed:  Signed by Author
Edition:  First Edition

· Category: Featured Items, Photography, Signed & Inscribed ·

As a designer for Tiffany, Jean Schlumberger captured the attention of celebrities and fashion icons worldwide. Schlumberger was born in Mulhouse, France. He began his career creating buttons for Elsa Schiaparelli in the 1930s. Schiaparelli later commissioned him to design costume jewelry for her firm. In 1956, the president of Tiffany & Co., Walter Hoving, asked Schlumberger to begin designing for the firm. He had his own workshop at the company until his retirement. Schlumberger’s designs at Tiffany & Co. were remarkable for their whimsical interpretations of natural forms. He quickly built an impressive client base that included John F. Kennedy, the Duchess of Windsor, Babe Paley, Greta Garbo, Rachel Lambert Mellon, C.Z. Guest, Gloria Guinness, Françoise de la Renta, Princess Marina, Duchess of Kent, Lyn Revson, Gloria Vanderbilt, Elizabeth Taylor and Audrey Hepburn & Jacqueline Kennedy. Schlumberger remains one of only four jewelers that Tiffany & Co. has allowed to sign their work.

Description: 2 hard bound volumes in publishers cloth slipcase. Black silk covered boards with decorative gilt titles. Pasted down illustration on the front panel of each volume. A lavish two volume set on the artistry of Jean Schlumberger which was edited by Franco Maria Ricci. #101 in a limited edition HAND SIGNED & NUMBERED BY SCHLUMBERGER. Text in French. Beautiful blue paper stock with numerous tipped in plates. Minor wear to slipcase, otherwise fine. RARE!.

Bookseller Inventory # 19997

$2500

Bijoux de Jean Schlumberger et Objets de Jean Schlumberger
Vreeland, Diana  &  d’Ormesson, Jean

Bibliographic Details:

Publisher: Franco Maria Ricci
Publication Date: 1976
Binding: Hard Bound
Book Condition: Near Fine
Dust Jacket Condition: No Jacket, As Issued
Edition: First Edition

· Category: Antiques & Collectibles, Design, Fashion, Featured Items ·

Anias Nin, feminist icon, diarist, model and dancer is probably one of the finest writers of female erotica of the last century. Known for her elegant and sensual style, she has the ability to convey the most intimate of thoughts in a way that we can almost feel. Here In this, the fifth and final instalment of Nin’s continuous novel project Cities of the Interior we she her at her lyrical and poetic best.

Description: INSCRIBED by Anais Nin ” For Alice - all the overtones you know to well the mysteries - Love Anais”. Some wear to price clipped dust jacket, otherwise very good.

Bookseller Inventory # 14709

SOLD

Seduction of the Minotaur
Anais Nin,

Publisher: Alan Swallow
Publication Date: 1961
Binding: Hardcover
Book Condition: Very Good
Dust Jacket Condition: Good
Signed: Signed by Author(s)
Edition: 1st Edition

· Category: Recently Sold ·

Alberto Giacometti was a Swiss sculptor, painter, draftsman and printmaker. In 1922 he moved to Paris to study under Auguste Rodin’s associate, the sculptor Antoine Bourdelle. It was there that Giacometti experimented with the cubist method. In 1927 his brother, Diego Giacometti, joined him as his assistant. Drawn to the surrealist movement, Alberto displayed his first surrealist sculptures at Salon des Tuileries, Paris, later that year. Before long, he was regarded as one of the leading surrealist sculptors of the day. Living in the creative community of Montparnasse, he associated with artists Joan Miro, Max Ernst, Pablo Picasso and Balthus, plus writers Samuel Beckett, Jean-Paul Sartre, Paul Eluard and Andre Breton. From 1935 to 1940 Giacometti concentrated his sculpting on the human head, focusing on the model’s gaze, followed by a unique artistic phase in which his statues became stretched out — their limbs elongated. Obsessed with creating his sculptures exactly as he envisioned through his unique view of reality, he often carved until they were as thin as nails and reduced to the size of a pack of cigarettes, much to his consternation. A friend of his once said that if Giacometti decided to sculpt you, he would make your head look like the blade of a knife. After his marriage his tiny sculptures became larger, but the larger they grew, the thinner they became. Giacometti was a key player in the Existentialist movement, but his work resists easy categorization. Some describe it as Formalist, others argue it is Expressionist. The intention of his sculpting was usually imitation, the end products were an expression of his emotional response to the subject. He attempted to create renditions of his models the way he saw them, and the way he thought they ought to be seen. Giacometti’s figures reflect the view of 20th century modernism and existentialism. Alberto Giacometti’s 1960 sculpture of a spindly man, “Walking Man I,” sold for £65 million ($104.3 million) in a Sotheby’s auction, shattering the record price for a work of art at auction to date!

Description: Hard bound with dust jacket. 328 pages profusely illustrated.4 full color tipped in plates. An exhaustive monograph on the artist. Giacometti: A Biography In Pictures narrates an informal exploration of one of the twentieth century’s greatest sculptors. The text is interspersed with wonderful snapshots of the artist at work in the studio with reproductions of individual works. Some minor wear to dust jacket and some minor tanning to spine edge of dust jacket, otherwise very good. Interior clean and binding tight.

Bookseller Inventory # 17538

$250

Alberto Giacometti
Hohl, Reinhold

Bibliographic Details:

Publisher: H. N. Abrams, New York
Publication Date: 1972
Binding: Hard Cover
Book Condition: Very Good
Dust Jacket Condition: Very Good
Edition: First Edition

· Category: Art, Featured Items ·

Joan Miró was among the first artists to develop automatic drawing as a way to undo previous established techniques in painting, and thus, with Andre Masson represented the beginning of Surrealism as an art movement. However, Miró chose not to become an official member of the Surrealists in order to be free to experiment with other artistic styles without compromising his position within the group. He pursued his own interests in the art world, ranging from automatic drawing and surrealism, to expressionism and color field painting. Spanish painter, whose surrealist works, with their subject matter drawn from the realm of memory and imaginative fantasy, are some of the most original of the 20th century. Miró was born April 20, 1893, in Barcelona and studied at the Barcelona School of Fine Arts and the Academia Galí. His work before 1920 shows wide-ranging influences, including the bright colors of the Fauves, the broken forms of cubism, and the powerful, flat two-dimensionality of Catalan folk art and Romanesque church frescoes of his native Spain. He moved to Paris in 1920, where, under the influence of surrealist poets and writers, he evolved his mature style. Miró drew on memory, fantasy, and the irrational to create works of art that are visual analogues of surrealist poetry. These dreamlike visions, such as Harlequin’s Carnival or Dutch Interior, often have a whimsical or humorous quality, containing images of playfully distorted animal forms, twisted organic shapes, and odd geometric constructions. The forms of his paintings are organized against flat neutral backgrounds and are painted in a limited range of bright colors, especially blue, red, yellow, green, and black. Amorphous amoebic shapes alternate with sharply drawn lines, spots, and curlicues, all positioned on the canvas with seeming nonchalance. Miró later produced highly generalized, ethereal works in which his organic forms and figures are reduced to abstract spots, lines, and bursts of colors.

Description: Hard bound with dust jacket. First printing of the French edition with 11 ORIGINAL FULL COLOR LITHOGRAPHS, including 5 double page printed by Mourlot, Paris. 233 pages. Text in French. Cream cloth boards with title in black on spine edge. FOLD OUT LITHOGRAPH DUST JACKET in protective Brodart cover. RARE!.

Bookseller Inventory # 20795

$650

Joan Miro Lithographies
Leiris, Michel  &  Mourlot, Fernand

Bibliographic Details

Publisher: A. C. Mazo
Publication Date: 1972
Binding: Hard Bound
Book Condition: Near Fine
Dust Jacket Condition: Near Fine
Edition: First Edition

· Category: Art, Featured Items ·

Karl Blossfeldt (1865-1932) photographer & teacher, achieved international recognition for his almost 6,000 micro photographs of plants taken around 1890. His teacher, Moritz Meurer, assigned him to make a collection of natural forms as inspiration. He wanted to show that all forms in art have their beginning in the natural forms of nature. He considered his work as a teaching tool, not as independent work of art. Each photograph was taken with the same clinical manner to provide a clear and objective documentation of structure. The objectivity and lack of sentimentality in his work readily connect him to such New Objectivity photographers as August Sander, Albert Renger Patzsch, The Bechers, Andreas Gursky and others.

“The plant never lapses into mere arid functionalism;
it fashions and shapes according to logic and suitability,
and with its primeval force compels everything
to attain the highest artistic form.”
-Karl Blossfeldt

Description: Hard bound in green cloth with title stamped in gilt on front cover and spine and missing original dust jacket. The first edition published 1928 was in a smaller format, this 2nd edition is considered the most attractive. Photographs by Karl Blossfeldt. Introduction by Karl Nierendorf. Text in German. 148 pages, with 120 black and white plates printed in rich photogravure. Limited edition of 6000 hardbound copies. Blossfeldt’s photobook masterpiece(Archetypes of Art). Some wear and minor soiling to cloth boards. Foxing to endpages. Sunning to spine edge, otherwise very good. Interior clean and binding still strong.

RARE HARD BOUND FIRST PRINTING OF
A SOUGHT AFTER PHOTOGRAPHY CLASSIC!

“Urformen der Kunst” is one of the most influential photographic books ever to have been published!

$1500

Urformen Der Kunst
Blossfeldt, Karl

Publisher: Verlag Ernst Wasmuth, Berlin
Publication Date: 1929
Binding: Hard Bound
Book Condition: Good
Dust Jacket Condition: No Dust Jacket
Edition: First Printing of the Second Edition

· Category: Featured Items, Photography ·

Dorothy Parker’s first book appearance; her solo debut did not come until 1922. Numerous Illustrations by Anne Harriet Fish, a British-born cartoonist who emigrated to the United States around 1914 and began contributing regularly to Vanity Fair Magazine, from which the contents of this book were taken. A Pictorial Guide to Life in Our Upper Circles. The drawings and text comment satirically on the concerns of the upper classes: the Season, the Opera, Weekends, Divorce, Bridge, and the ordeals of finding a place in Society and keeping it.

Description: Illustrations by Anne Harriet Fish. Dorothy Parker’s first book appearance; her solo debut did not come until 1922.  Prose Precepts by Dorothy Parker, George S. Chappell, and Frank Crownshield. Hard bound with original Pictorial Boards, no dust jacket. Wear to boards with corners bumped. Interior clean. Binding loose, but holding.

Bookseller Inventory # 19190

$450

HIGH SOCIETY
Advice as to Social Campaigning, and Hints on the Management of Dowagers, Dinners, Debutantes, Dances, and the Thousand and One Diversions of Persons of Quality.

Parker, Dorothy

THE FIRST BOOK APPEARANCE OF DORTHY PARKER.

Bibliographic Details:

Publisher: G. P. Putnam’s Sons
Publication Date: 1920
Binding: Hard Bound
Book Condition: Good

· Category: Featured Items ·

An impressive documentation of original materials and unpublished projects provides the evidence for this architectural manifesto, which reads, in its insistent tracing of subconscious clues and themes, like a psychological thriller. Manhattan is the arena of the terminal stage of Western Civilization. Through the simultaneous explosion of human destiny and an invasion of new technologies, Manhattan became, from 1850, a mythical laboratory for the invention and testing of a revolutionary lifestyle: the ‘culture of congestion’. Delirious New York is a polemical investigation of that Manhattan; it documents the symbiotic relationship between its mutant metropolitan culture and the unique architecture to which it gave rise. Though this book argues that it often appears that the architectural generated the culture. Delirious New York proves above all, that Manhattan has been, from the beginning, devoted to the most rational, efficient and utilitarian pursuit of the irrational.

Description: Paperback copy with some wear to wrappers. Front free end page clipped, otherwise very good. Interior clean and binding tight. Scarce!

Bookseller Inventory# 21159

SOLD

Delirious New York
Koolhaas, Rem

Publisher: Oxford
Publication Date: 1978
Binding: Paperback
Book Condition: Very Good
Edition: First Paperback

· Category: Recently Sold ·

Swiss sculptor Jean Tinguely began experimenting with movement in space, and in 1944 he began equipping machine-like sculptures with electric motors and making them spin around at high speed. He moved to Paris in 1951, where he participated in Robert Rauschenberg’s international happenings and associated with the casual artist group ‘Nouveaux Réalistes’, exhibiting works in their exhibitions. He had his first one-man exhibition three years later, in 1954, at the Galerie Arnaux. Tinguely’s fantasy machines with pre-programmed elements of chance, the so-called ‘Métamatics’, are quite spectacular. His welded iron constructions represent ironic attacks on the purpose of the era of technology.

Description: Paperback published on the occasion of the opening of the 1987 art exhibition held by the Palazzo Grassi, Venice . Foldout from the exhibition in pocket affixed to inside of rear wrapper. Profusely illustrated, with many plates in full color. Some very minor wear to wrappers, otherwise very good.

Bookseller Inventory #12475

$200

A Magic Stronger Than Death
Pontus, Hulten and Tinguley, Jean

Publisher: Bompiani, Milano
Publication Date: 1987
Binding: Paperback
Book Condition: Very Good
Edition: First Edition

· Category: Art, Featured Items ·