Search Results: Titles starting with O from Ed Smith Books

New York: Stewart, Tabori, and Chang, 1989. First edition. A very good copy (evidence of small sticker removal from spine) in a very good dust jacket. 4to. With over 150 exquisite photographs displaying the works and techniques of 17 self-taught artists from the mountains between Virginia and Alabama. The sparse but well written text traces each artist's background and inspiration. Includes sculptors, painters, carvers, and basket weavers using materials from their environment. 256 pages.

London: Trigram Press, 1969. First edition. Hardcover. A near fine copy in a near fine jacket. Paul Vaughan. 4to. Bound in white cloth with dust jacket (a deluxe edition of 100 copies was bound in buckrum number and signed by the poet). These ten poems are published here for the first time. Those familiar with Nathaniel Tarn's three previous volumes will recognise a departure in style and language from the complex preoccupation with mythic and anthropological sources which distinguished his earlier work. These moving and passionate poems are a sustained personal statement of crisis, breakdown and renewal.

Verona: Edizioni Valdonega, 1980. One of 1500. Hardcover. A fine copy in cloth with spine label in red and gold stamping with the original cardboard slipcase. 4to. Mardersteig, 1892-1977, moved to Switzerland in 1922, founded a hand press, the Officina Bodoni, and began producing books. In 1927 he moved his press to Verona, Italy, partly in order to print a state-funded edition of the complete works of Gabriele D'Annunzio, which was completed in 1936. Mardersteig quickly developed a reputation for very fine typographical work, and for his scholarly approach to book design and production. He printed with a Dingler hand press on hand or mould-made papers or vellum and often had his books bound in quarter vellum or leather with a decorated paper on the boards, in the tradition of European private presses. Mardersteig was responsible for designing several typefaces for use at the press; Dante, Griffo and Zeno among them. All based on Humanist types of the early years of European printing. The punches… Read More

Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1965. First edition. Hardcover. A fine set in a very good original publishers slipcase with printed label on each side. Signed by the author in Vol 2. Grey cloth with spine stamped in black and gold. Even though Bard missed the California Gold Rush by a decade and a half, arriving towards the end of the Civil War, hard on the heels of the oil boom, he assured his participation in the rise of the California petroleum industry. Nearly 750 pages. Illustrated from photographs, maps, an index and bibliography.

Garden City: Dolphin/Doubleday, 1987. First trade edition. Hardcover. A fine copy in a near fine, clean, dust jacket. John Ranard. Illustrated with photographs by John Ranard. This is as fine a book as ever has been written on the subject. This book follows in the tradition of boxing-loving writers like Hemingway and Mailer. In a slim volume expanded from a New York Times Magazine article, Oates candidly assays "The Sweet Science" for its spectacle, aesthetic elements, and its history from ancient Greece and Rome to today's ring dominated by callous promoters, casinos, and TV. She concedes boxing's brutality and often seamy side but finds positive merits as tragic theater.

New York: St. Martin's, 1995. First edition. Hardcover. A near fine copy in a near fine dust jacket. Author's first book. Chronicles the 100 year odyssey of a Chinese-American family, in the tradition of Alex Haley's Roots, a multigenerational saga of power, ambition, romance, and race that tells the story of the immigrant experience in America. 394pp, illustrated from photographs.

Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2007. First edition. Hardcover. A fine copy in a fine dust jacket. Signed by Mosher on the title page. The story of a remarkable woman's struggle to preserve a unique and endangered place and her chance meeting with a smooth-talking Texas man searching for buried treasure.

New York: Basic Books, 1978. First edition. Hardcover. A near fine copy in a near fine dust jacket. Criticism with both eyes open, fearless, illuminating, proving that the concern of the critic is with art, that true art is moral and not trivial, that it and the discussion of it can give pleasure, of a sort that lasts and re-echoes. Gardner argues that current literature suffers most of all from a plain failure of morality. 214pp.

New York: Random House, 1983. Proof copy. Paperback. Fine copy. Early proof copy with title and publisher handwritten to red front cover.Tiny literary agency stamp to bottom of half-title page. Page numbers originally handwritten (but reproduced here). 21 pages printed on rectos only. Perfect bound in red wrappers.

New York: Pantheon, 2006. First edition. Hardcover. A very well produced book bound in slick beautifully decorated boards with dust jacket and ribbon marker.A near fine copy in a very good plus jacket with a few scratches to the lamination. "Autographed For" sticker to front cover. Signed with the author's trademark "Z" in green ink opposite the copyright page. Dated, also in green ink, '7.1.06'. A finalist for the National Book Award in the year of publication. The story alternates between two different narratives: Sam and Hailey, and Hailey and Sam, wild and wayward teenagers who never grow old. With an evolving stable of cars, the teenagers move through various places and moments in time as they try to outrace history. Sam has one side of the book, flip the book end to end and Hailey's narrative is found (this is the side the signature is on).

New York: Knopf, 1989. Uncorrected Proof. Paperback. A near fine copy. 4 pages, printed on rectos only stapled in following Preface but before the Contents page. 333 pages. Perfect bound in the original printed wrappers. When Opus Posthumous first appeared in 1957, it was an appropriate capstone to the career of one of the most important writers of the twentieth century. It included many poems missing from Stevens's Collected Poems, along with Stevens's characteristically inventive prose and pieces for the theater. Now Milton J. Bates, the author of the acclaimed Wallace Stevens: A Mythology of Self, has edited and revised Opus Posthumous to correct the previous edition's errors and to incorporate material that has come to light since original publication. A third of the poems and essays in this edition are new to the volume. The resulting book is an invaluable literary document whose language and insights are fresh, startling, and eloquent.

New York: Knopf, 1965. First edition. Hardcover. Fine copy in a fine dust jacket. Author's second novel. Laid in is a card signed by Humphrey. Set in a small Texas town that is poised on the frontier where two myths meet, those of the South and those of the West. In following the Ordway clan through four generations, the author extends their vivid personal stories to define the importance of place in the formation of character and code of conduct.

New York: Norton, 2014. First edition. Hardcover. A fine copy in cloth over boards with slipcase. This copy, signed by Powers, is one of the 'indiespensable' copies done by Powell's Books in Portland, Oregon. Consisting of a hardcover first edition in gray cloth, in a slipcase, signed by Powers, issued without dust jacket with a small separate piece (this copy lacks). This novel tells the story of 70-year-old avant-garde composer Peter Els, whose home experiments in biohacking musical patterns into a bacterial human pathogen, Serratia marcescens, have attracted the worried hazmat-suit-level attention of Homeland Security.

New York: Norton, 2014. First edition. Hardcover. A fine, tight copy in a fine crisp jacket. This novel tells the tale of a man journeying into his past as he desperately flees the present.

St. Paul: Motorbooks, 2005. First edition. One ding to bottom of front board, otherwise near fine in a near fine dust jacket. In 1947 a fracas at a motorcycle race in Hollister, California, in which a small number of motorcyclists, members of a club called "The Boozefighters," got a little juiced up and engaged in some street racing, was blown out of proportion thanks to a staged photo and sensationalistic "reporting" that found its way into an article in Life magazine. The event, or rather the mythology surrounding the event, formed the basis for the film 'The Wild One' starring Marlon Brando. Together the Hollister "riot" and the film jump started the outlaw motorcycle club scene. Through interviews with founders and surviving members of the Boozefighters, current member Bill Hayes, with the help of researcher and club historian Jim "I.Q." Quattlebaum, tells the tale of the original Boozefighters club from the point of view of the members who were there from the beginning. The Original Wild Ones… Read More

First Edition. Photograph. Fine. An original black and white photograph, signed by Bristol on the mat "Horace Bristol '4" Image measures 7 x 8.75 inches, overall approx 17.25 x 21.25 inches matted and framed under glass, wood frame painted black (with a few rubs and nicks). A stunning image, close-up head shot, of a serious O'Neill (1888-1953), who was an Irish American playwright and Nobel laureate in Literature, and one of the first to introduce into American drama techniques of realism earlier associated with Russian playwright Anton Chekhov, Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen, and Swedish playwright August Strindberg. His best known plays include: Anna Christie (Pulitzer Prize 1922), Desire Under the Elms (1924), Strange Interlude (Pulitzer Prize 1928), Mourning Becomes Electra (1931), and his only well-known comedy Ah Wilderness. In 1936 he received the Nobel Prize for Literature. Horace Bristol, 1909-1997, was a giant of photo-journalism, a man whose images of Depression-era despair in the… Read More

New York: Harcourt, 2001. First edition. Hardcover. A fine copy in a near fine dust jacket. A wizard, a mender of pots, a king, a dragon, and a burnt girl face the power of the dead. The sorcerer Alder fears sleep. He dreams of the land of death of his wife who died young and longs to return to him so much that she kissed him across the low stone wall that separates our world from the Dry Land, where the grass is withered, the stars never move, and lovers pass without knowing each other. The dead are pulling Alder to them at night. Through him they may free themselves and invade Earthsea. 246 pages.

New York: Persea Books, 1982. First edition. Paperback. A very good copy. Proof of the author's first book first published by the small press Persea Books. Laid into this copy is an 8 page brochure from Persea Books for Spring 1983, which highlights this title. We have never seen another copy of this proof offered for sale (let alone the brochure). Bound in the original printed wrappers with a short split to front cover that is now encased in glassine. Uncommon proof of a first book.

New York: Persea, 1983. First edition. Hardcover. Fine/a near fine jacket with wear at the spine crown. First edition of the author's scarce first novel. "A wonderful charivari, full of life and new news. He has appropriated the vitality of two cultures to produce, in magical synthesis, a splendid, bitter, and loving work of the imagination."

New York: Penguin Press, 2019. First edition. Hardcover. A near fine copy in a nearly fine dust jacket. This copy is inscribed on the title page by Mark Morris. From the most brilliant and audacious choreographer of our time, the exuberant tale of a young dancer's rise to the pinnacle of the performing arts world, and the triumphs and perils of creating work on his own terms—and staying true to himself. Before Mark Morris became "the most successful and influential choreographer alive" (The New York Times), he was a six year-old in Seattle cramming his feet into Tupperware glasses so that he could practice walking on pointe. Often the only boy in the dance studio, he was called a sissy, a term he wore like a badge of honor. He was unlike anyone else, deeply gifted and spirited. Moving to New York at nineteen, he arrived to one of the great booms of dance in America. Audiences in 1976 had the luxury of Merce Cunningham's finest experiments with time and space, of Twyla Tharp's virtuosity, and… Read More