Welcome

Since 1996 we have been buying and selling fine used books, from vintage collectibles to signed first editions. Search and browse our inventory online and follow "The Mouse" for updates.

Our Books

Click to Search
our inventory by Author, Title, Publisher, and Keyword at AbeBooks.com.

Click to Browse
our inventory at AbeBooks.com.

Contact

Phone: 631.725.8654

Mailing: PO Box 943,
Sag Harbor, NY 11963

blackcatbooks@yahoo.com

Archive for September, 2013

Jose de Rivera was an abstract-expressionist sculptor, who worked in metal. He grew up on a sugar plantation and refinery in Louisiana, where his father was an engineer. The experience he gained there as a blacksmith proved useful when he later began constructing sculpture in metal. In 1930 De Rivera produced his first sculptures. These figurative pieces carved from a single brass rod, are related to the streamlined, elegant designs of Art Deco.

Description: Hard bound with dust jacket. INSCRIBED, SIGNED AND DATED BY JOSE DE RIVERA on the half title page. 254 pages with 220 color and b&w illustrations. Introduction by Dore Ashton.  Edited by Manuel Padorno and William McWillie Chambers. Documentation by Grace Borgenicht Gallery Inc. Designed by Rodrigo Aleman. Very minor wear to corners and edges of dust jacket. Minor sunning to spine edge, otherwise fine.  A rare and sought after monograph on the life and sculptures of Jose De Rivera.

Bookseller Inventory # 24190

SOLD

Jose De Rivera Constructions
Ashton, Dore; Marter, Joan

Publisher: Taller Ediciones, Madrid
Publication Date: 1979
Binding: Hard Bound
Book Condition: Very Good
Dust Jacket Condition: Very Good
Signed: Inscribed by Artist
Edition: First Edition

Sarah Moon, who was born in Britain has worked as a model, film-maker, and lastly a fashion photographer. Her carefully staged images are mysterious, nostalgic, and surreal. Her photographs often utilize sepia tones or muted color, diffused by heavy grain. Her work evokes a fairy tale, encapsulated within a dream like softness.

Description: Hard bound first printing inscribed on the half title page by Sarah Moon to the photographer Paul Ickovic and his wife “To Paul and Sarah These IMPROBABLE MEMORIES as a souvonier. with love Sarah Moon”. Some very minor wear to dust jacket, otherwise very good. A nice association copy!

moon022

Bookseller Inventory # 13777

SOLD

Improbable Memories
Moon, Sarah

Publisher: Matrix
Publication Date: 1981
Binding: Hard Cover
Book Condition: Very Good
Dust Jacket Condition: Very Good
Edition: First U.S. Edition

H. L. Humes, Peter Matthiessen and George Plimpton founded The Paris Review in 1953. He studied writing with Archibald MacLeish at Harvard, graduating in 1954. A Scientist, novelist, activist, inventor, filmmaker, architect, prophet, healer, madman, Harold “Doc” Humes was, by all accounts, an exhilarating, infuriating and terrifyingly brilliant man. He participated in Leary’s LSD experiments and later continued his own experiments, guiding the first LSD experiences of several famous literary friends. He reinvented himself as a “guru on campus”, a self-appointed visiting professor, and spent the next 20-odd years living on or near-campus at Columbia, Princeton, Bennington, and Harvard.

Description: Hard bound with dust jacket. Meets points of issue – First Edition with “4/58” date code and $4.95 price on flap, no mention of any later books and no reviews. This is one of Random House’s known anomalies, with no statement of printing evident on the copyright page. Blue cloth boards with title in gilt to spine edge. Front board blind stamped with the image of the Eiffel tower. Red top stain. Some wear to spine edge of boards. Dust jacket with several large chips and a few small closed tears, now protected in removable clear dust jacket cover. 755 pages. Ownership book plate of the New York literary agency “McIntosh, McKee & Dodds” affixed to front free end page. The author’s elusive first novel, a tale of the French underground during the last years of WWII. Humes, along with Peter Matthiessen & George Plimpton, founded the Paris Review. For many years he slipped into obscurity; this novel has only recently been reissued to glowing acclaim. The true first edition, and a  scarce copy from a legendary forgotten novelist!

Bookseller Inventory # 29821

SOLD

The Underground City
Humes, H.L.

Publisher: Random House
Publication Date: 1958
Binding: Hard Bound
Book Condition: Good
Dust Jacket Condition: Good
Edition: First Edition

Antoni Tàpies gained worldwide fame in the 1950s for his “matter” paintings: relief-like works composed of dry pigments, sand and marble dust, and paint, which he scrapes, incises, and pierces. Tàpies helped co-found the first Post-War Movement in Spain known as Dau-al-Set which was connected to the Surrealist and Dadaist Movements. Tàpies early works were influenced by Paul Klee and Joan Miró; but statrted working in a style known as “Arte Povera”, in which non artistic materials are incorporated into the paintings such as clay, dust, paper, and string. Fundació Antoni Tàpies, a museum dedicated to the artist’s work, that he founded in Barcelona in 1984, has gone on to become one of that city’s most vital cultural institutions. In 2010, he was given the title of Marquess de Tàpies in the Spanish nobility. That same year, Fundació Antoni Tàpies reopened after a huge remodeling. In New York, Mr. Tàpies had one-person shows at Dia:Beacon in 2009 and at the Museum of Modern Art in 1992. Antoni Tàpies, the painter from Catalan who straddled both modernist and postmodernist aesthetics, has died this week according to Pace, the artist’s gallery in New York. He was 88.

Description: Hard bound art exhibition catalog published on the occasion of the landmark Jan. 27, 1999 exhibition organized by the Guggenheim Museum. Presents the essence of Tàpies’ monumental achievement “an original and extraordinary use of texture and materials coupled with an expression of strongly felt intellectual, political, and artistic beliefs.” This volume also includes an overview of the artist’s life by the famed art historian Dore Ashton, as well as translations of four of the artist’s principal writings on art.

Bookseller Inventory # 16509

SOLD

Tapies
Gimenez, Carmen

Publisher: Abrams, Boston, Massachusetts, U.S.A.
Publication Date: 1995
Binding: Hard Cover
Book Condition: Very Good
Dust Jacket Condition: Very Good
Edition: First Edition

Description: Commissioned by the Crown Prince of Morocco, the Scottish born photographer Albert Watson worked in Morocco from September 1997 through May of 1998. The result was a series of classic and  timeless portraits, landscapes and still lifes.  From Casablanca to remote villages, Watson captures the soul of Moroccans from all walks of life in his portraits and extraordinary photographs. 140 stunning duotone illustrations. Hard bound with white pictorial boards in matching dust jacket. BOLDLY SIGNED BY ALBERT WATSON ” For Wendy, Albert Watson – New York 1999″. A beautiful book produced by Fabio Fasolini in Milan, and designed by Giovanni C. Russo, New York. Some minor wear to corners and edges of dust jacket, otherwise fine. A RARE signed copy!

Bookseller Inventory # 32494

SOLD

Maroc
Watson, Albert

Publisher: Rizzoli, New York
Publication Date: 1998
Binding: Hard Bound
Book Condition: Very Good
Dust Jacket Condition: Very Good
Signed: Inscribed by Photographer
Edition: First Edition

Michel de Montaigne (1533 – 1592) the father of Modern Skepticism, was the most influential writer of the French Renaissance. He is primarily known for the creation of the essay as a literary genre, and his effortless ability to merge serious intellectual speculation with casual anecdotes. His massive volume Essais contains to this day some of the most widely influential essays ever written.

Description: THE 1910 EMERSON EDITION of the The Works of Michel De Montaigne, COMPLETE IN TEN VOLUMES. An out of sequence copy in a LIMITED EDITION of 1050 printed copies. Translated by Charles Cotton. Revised with a preface by William Carew Hazlett. Introductory essay by Ralph Waldo Emerson. All ten volumes are bound in 1/4 blue leather and French paper. Each spine edge has five raised bands, decorated with 4 gilt fleurs-de-lis, and gilt title. Top edges gilt. Red & black lettering on title pages. Each volume has both a b&w tissue-guarded frontispiece and then a hand colored tissue-guarded color frontispiece of the same engraving following it. There are many additional b&w tissue-guarded illustrative plates throughout each volume. Some minor chipping to heads of volume 1 and 10. Some minor rubbing to edges and corners. The front board of volume 1 disbound, but present. Hinges weak but holding well. Text blocks clean and square.

Bookseller Inventory # 25080

SOLD

The Works of Michel De Montaigne
Montaigne, Michel de; Emerson, Ralph Waldo

Publisher: Edwin C. Hill
Publication Date: 1910
Binding: 10 volumes bound in 1/4 Leather
Book Condition: Very Good
Edition: Limited Edition

©2008 Black Cat Books. Site designed by AndreMora.com.