Search Results: Titles starting with K from Ed Smith Books

Toyo, New York & San Francisco: Kodansha International Ltd, 1983. 11th edition (1983). Hardcover. A clean very good plus copy bound in black cloth with silver decoration in a very good dust jacket with minor wear to the extremities. 4to. This copy signed by the translator Tsutomu Ohshima on the title page. Nineteen kata ("forms") of karate, the art of self-defense without weapons, are presented here in complete detail. They are the ones selected by the great master and teacher, Gichin Funakoshi, to give comprehensive training in Karate-do, the way of karate. Fully illustrated demonstrations by the translator cover not only every technique of the kata but also the fundamentals and applications: how to make a fist; the correct form of the open hand; preliminary training in blocking, striking and kicking; the seven stances; and sparring. The author presents, besides kata that he himself originated, beginning and advanced kata from both the Shorei school and the Shorin school, the former remarkable for… Read More

Boston: New York Graphic Society, 1979. Third edition. Hardcover. A fine copy in red cloth with a very good plus clean dust jacket. Signed on the front free endpaper by Karsh dated in the year of publication. 48 gravure illustrations. He is the classic portrait artist of the camera, photographer of the world's great. To be photographed by Karsh has been a sign of personal accomplishment for a third of a century. During that time his camera lens has repeatedly, and unforgettably, recorded the illuminating gesture, the unique attitude, the moment's reflection, to create a definitive picture of one celebrated personality after another.

New York: Abbeville Press, 1983. First edition. Hardcover. A near fine copy in a near fine dust jacket. 4to. With photographs and text by Kertesz. This combination of revealing, often charming text and sparkling duotone reproductions forms a unique, 120-page self-portrait of the man and artist-of his years in his native Hungary, in Paris in the 20s and 30s, and in New York from 1936.

New York: Liveright, 2014. First edition. Hardcover. A fine copy in a fine dust jacket. 4to. When three daunting dolls intersect with one hapless heroine and a hard-boiled private eye, deception, betrayal, and murder stalk every mean street in this piece of illustrated noir. 148 pages. Illustrated by a true master, adding to his legendary career that includes a Pulitzer Prize, an Academy Award, Obie Awards, and Lifetime Achievement Awards from the National Cartoonist Society and the Writers Guild of America. As the story begins, we meet Annie Hannigan, an out-of-control teenager, jitterbugging in the 1930s, Annie dreams of offing her mother, Elsie, whom she blames for abandoning her for a job soon after her father, a cop, was shot and killed.

London: Harvill Secker, 2017. First edition in English. A fine copy in a fine dust jacket. First published in Japan in two volumes; The Idea Made Visible & The Shifting Metaphor in 2017. The first edition in English, one volume, was published simultaneously by Knopf in the U.S. and in London by Harvill Secker in October of 2018. The protagonist is an unnamed portrait painter whose wife leaves him at the start of the book. Devastated, he quits portrait painting and goes on a long road trip. In the middle of his road trip he meets a nervous woman in a diner who seems to be running away from someone. The protagonist suspects that she is running away from a man who sits nearby while they eat. The protagonist nicknames this man as the man with the white Subaru Forester. The woman and the protagonist end up going to a love hotel and having violent sex. The next day, he wakes up and she is already gone. He goes back to the diner and sees the man with the white Subaru again and he feels as though the man… Read More

New York: Knopf, 1974. First edition. Hardcover. A near fine copy, light remainder mark to bottom edge (Random "house"), in a fine dust jacket. Herbert L Fink. Magic, madness, menace and romance are all woven together in this Gardner collection. Nine tales depict ministers and college students, strange medieval countries full of demented royalty, and whaling ships.

New York: Ecco, 2010. First edition. Hardcover. A near fine copy in white cloth in a near fine dust jacket with one tiny chip at the top of the spine front fold. From the author's photographs. With some thoughts on muses (especially Helga Testorf) transgender women, Kabuki Goddesses, porn queens, poets housewives, makeup artists, geishas, Valkyries and Venus figurines. A charming, evocative and piercing examination of an ancient Japanese tradition and the keys it holds to our modern understanding of beauty. 500 pages with a glossary, chronology, notes, bibliography, note on the illustrations, note on the orthography, and acknowledgments.

New York: Riverhead, 2007. First Illustrated edition. Hardcover. Bound in red cloth and decorated boards, a fine copy, in a fine crisp dust jacket. The story of the unlikely and inseparable friendship between two families caught in the tragic sweep of history, from the final days of Afghanistan's monarchy through the horrific rule of the Taliban. First published in 2003, now beautifully produced with unforgettable color and black and white photographs of the people of Afghanistan and their surroundings. 329pp.

New York: Knopf, 2021. First edition. Hardcover. A near fine copy in a near fine dust jacket. Sticker to front cover "The Good Morning America Book Club Pick". The author's first novel since winning the Nobel Prize in Literature. A tale of the wondrous, mysterious nature of the human heart. 303 pages.

New York: Harper & Row, 1988. First edition. Hardcover. A nearly fine copy (very light scratch or two to rear panel of the dust jacket) the book is fine. Signed by Harry Crews on the title page. Enter the seedy world of fighters and musclemen. Eugene Talmadge Biggs, ex-farmboy and ex-boxer (he won 13 fights and lost the next four by knockouts), knows an amazing trick he can knock himself out with one punch to the jaw. Abandoned by his manager, Crews's glass-jawed hero has to support himself by exhibiting his trick at parties. After 73 self-inflicted KO's, the routine gets a little wearing. Meanwhile, Eugene is taken up by Charity, a rich, all-but-the-dissertation Ph.D. candidate bent on constructing a thesis that relates every fact in the world to every other fact. She thinks Eugene and his prizefighting friends are a gold mine of information for this dubious project. A brilliant specialist in black humor, Crews delivers the goods once again. His deadpan prose style is uncannily effective in meshing… Read More