MUSIC BOOKS
READING TO BE HEARD …
$40.00 - 10% hardcover
- “Who Shot Rock and Roll: A Photographic History, 1955-Present” contains more than 200 spectacular photographs—sensual, luminous, frenzied, true—that catch and define the energy, intoxication, rebellion, and magic of rock and roll. This book, compiled by Gail Buckland, is the first to explore the photographs and the photographers who captured rock’s message of freedom and personal reinvention, and to examine the effect of their pictures on the musicians, the fans, and the culture itself.
$40.00 - 10% hardcover
- “The Jazz Loft Project: Photographs and Tapes of W. Eugene Smith from 821 Sixth Avenue, 1957-1965” is a remarkable collection drawn from the more than 40,000 pictures taken by the renowned photojournalist to document the nocturnal jazz scene as well as life on the streets of New York’s flower district, as seen from his fourth-floor window. He wired the building like a surreptitious recording studio and made 1,740 reels of stereo and mono audiotapes, capturing more than 300 musicians, among them Roy Haynes, Sonny Rollins, Bill Evans, Roland Kirk, Alice Coltrane, Don Cherry, and Paul Bley. He recorded, as well, legends such as pianists Eddie Costa, and Sonny Clark, drummers Ronnie Free and Edgar Bateman, saxophonist Lin Halliday, bassist Henry Grimes, and multi-instrumentalist Eddie Listengart. Sam Stephenson discovered Smith’s jazz loft photographs and tape 11 years ago and spent the last seven years cataloging, archiving, selecting, and editing Smith’s materials for this book, as well as writing its introduction and the text interwoven throughout.
$39.95 - 10% hardcover
- The difficulties of writing cogently about jazz—of discerning musical regularities in a genre built around improvisatory jams, and a narrative thread that transcends haphazard biography—are admirably addressed in “Jazz,” a history by music critic Gary Giddins and historian Scott DeVeaux. The first half of this book traces jazz’s coalescence in New Orleans out of varied strands of black music, its shaping by Armstrong, Ellington and other giants, and its efflorescence in the big band era as the soundtrack of the American century. The tune grows unavoidably less catchy as postwar bebop and successor avant-garde tendencies transform jazz into a self-conscious art music epitomized by John Coltrane’s existential squawk.
$15.00 paperback
- In “The Jazz Ear: Conversations over Music,” in paperback, Bent Ratliff jazz critic for the New York Times, spent just over two years interviewing jazz greats for a recurring feature at the paper. Ratliff sat with the musicians as they listened to songs and picked out the qualities they found most artistically compelling. The approach brings some surprises, as his subjects pick everything from Ukrainian cantorial music to Ralph Vaughan Williams to the Fifth Dimension. But each chapter brings provocative insights and will have readers scurrying to track down various records. The book includes Ratliff’s listening guide for each of his interviewees.
$24.95 paperback
- “A Cultural Dictionary of Punk, 1974-1982,” in paperback by Nicholas Rombes, is an expansive, erudite, and hugely entertaining guide through the dark alleys and glittering byways of punk in music, film, literature, politics and fashion. One reviewer called this book “essential reading for anyone fascinated by one of the most influential artistic movements of our time.”
$26.95 - 10% hardcover
- Iconic figures in music are the subject of two recent biographies. “A Heartbeat and a Guitar” tells of the collaboration of two distinct yet connected musicians—Johnny Cash and pioneering folk artist Peter La Farge—and the album they created, Bitter Tears: Ballads of the American Indian. It also tells of the unique personal, political, and cultural struggles that informed this album, one that has influenced the likes of Bruce Springsteen and Bob Dylan. Antonio D’Ambrosio has interviewed dozens of Cash’s and La Farge’s friends, family, and collaborators, including surviving members of his band, his producers, and Pete Seeger and Kris Kristofferson, creating a dramatic picture of both an era of radical protest and the making of one of the most controversial and enduring works of political pop art of the 1960s.
$30.00 - 10% hardcover
- Louis Armstrong was the greatest jazz musician of the 20th century and a giant of modern American culture. He knocked the Beatles off the top of the charts, and his admirers included Johnny Cash, Jackson Pollock and Orson Welles. Offstage he was witty, introspective and unexpectedly complex, a beloved colleague with an explosive temper whose larger-than-life personality was tougher and more sharp-edged than his worshiping fans ever knew. Wall Street Journal arts columnist Terry Teachout has drawn on a cache of important new sources unavailable to previous Armstrong biographers for “Pops: A Life of Louis Armstrong.”
$19.99 paperback
- “John Lennon: The Life,” new in paperback, was generally praised by reviewers some of whom seemed shocked at how much hate and violence could be found in one of the 20th century’s most famous proponents of peace and love. Some were also taken aback by the book’s length—over 800 pages for a figure who famously lived only to age 40. But most reviewers concluded that the bulk of this biography was appropriate, not only because Philip Norman was the first author to investigate Lennon in such detail but because his sense for which details are interesting.
ART BOOKS
It’s Not Too Early …
… to start thinking about those special books for the holidays, some of them big and heavy (and maybe pricey) that require examination and due consideration. Art books are in that category, and here’s a sampling of some new ones, with a nod to literature in the end.
$200.00 - 10% - 2 vol hardcover slipcased & silk-bound
- “Interaction of Color” may well be one of the most influential books on the subject ever published. Originally issued in 1963 as a limited-edition set of commentary and 150 silkscreened color plates, the book introduced generations of students, artists, designers, and collectors to Josef Albers’ unique approach to complex principles. Lavishly produced as a two-volume slip-cased set, this book replicates Albers’ revolutionary exercises, explaining concepts such as color relativity and vibrating and vanishing boundaries through the use of color, shape, die-cut forms, and movable flaps that illustrate his astonishing demonstrations of the changing and relative nature of color.
$65.00 - 10% hardcover
- Published to commemorate the 40th anniversary of the original installation, “Marcel Duchamp: Etant donnes” accompanies the first major exhibition on the artwork and its studies, at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Right after World War II, Duchamp convinced everyone that he had abandoned making art in favor of playing chess. But from 1946 to 1966, he was secretly at work in his studio on West 14th Street in New York City. There he produced his final masterpiece, composed of a battered wood door through which one views a prone, nude female, holding aloft an antique gas lamp against a landscape of trees, waterfall, and sky. Unveiled as a permanent installation at the Philadelphia Museum of Art in July 1969, the year after Duchamp’s death, it startled the art world with its explicit eroticism and voyeurism, as well as its trompe l’oeil realism.
$40.00 - 10% hardcover
- Published separately, Duchamp’s “Manual of Instructions” was prepared by the artist for the disassembly of Étant donnés in his New York studio and its reassembly at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. This facsimile edition is illustrated with 116 black-and-white Polaroids taken by the artist and contains 35 pages of his handwritten notes and sketches. Both were assembled with text by Michael R. Taylor, the Muriel and Philip Berman Curator of Modern Art at the Philadelphia Museum.
$95.00 - 10% hardcover
- Anish Kapoor is one of the world’s most prominent artists, as the creator of popular public sculptures around the globe, including “Mirror” installed in Rockefeller Center in 2006. Now we have “Anish Kapoor,” the most extensive monograph ever published on the artist, covering more than 30 years of work and illustrated with hundreds of full-color images of sketches and technical diagrams from his most ambitious projects. It’s the work of art historian and critic David Anfam, Johanna Burton, who teaches in the graduate program in curatorial studies at Bard College, and Donna De Salvo, chief curator at the Whitney Museum.
$150.00 - 10% hardcover
- Zaha Hadid: Complete Works, 1979-2009 displays the controversial work of this Iraqi-born architect, who for many years built almost nothing, despite her designs winning prizes and critical acclaim. Some even said her work was unbuildable. Yet over the past decade she has completed numerous structures including the Rosenthal Center for Contemporary Art in Cincinnati (which the New York Times called ‘the most important new building in America since the Cold War’), the Phaeno Science Center in Wolfsburg, Germany, and the Central Building of the new BMW Assembly Plant in Leipzig
$65.00 - 10% hardcover
- The Leopold Museum in Vienna is a Mecca for devotees of Egon Schiele, housing as it does the world’s largest permanent collection of the artist’s works, from 1905 to 1918, the year of Schiele’s death. “Egon Schiele: The Leopold Collection” features large-scale reproductions that allow readers to closely examine the artist’s extraordinary use of line and color. Presented chronologically, these works on paper are accompanied by insightful commentary. An introduction and biography of Schiele by Rudolf Leopold discuss the artist’s influences, his controversial career, and his place in the pantheon of twentieth-century artists.
$55.00 - 10% hardcover
- “Turner and the Masters” juxtaposes J.M.W. Turner’s greatest paintings alongside works by old masters and contemporaries that he hoped to imitate, rival, and surpass. Published to accompany a major international exhibition, it includes some 100 works reproduced in glorious color plates, with paintings by Canaletto, Ruisdael, Van de Velde, Poussin, Rubens, Rembrandt, Constable, Bonington and many others who Turner knew personally.
$24.95 - 10% hardcover
- One of the most beloved characters in all of comics, Tintin won an enormous international following. Translated into dozens of languages, Tintin’s adventures have sold millions of copies, and Steven Spielberg is presently adapting the stories for the big screen. Yet, despite Tintin’s enduring popularity, Americans know almost nothing about his gifted creator, Georges Remi, better known as Herge. Offering a captivating portrait of a man who revolutionized the art of comics, “Herge: The Man Who Created Tintin” by Pierre Assoouline and Charles Ruas, is the first full biography of Herge available for an English-speaking audience.
$20.00 -10% hardcover
- “Unpacking My Library: Architects and Their Books” asks and answers the question, what does a library say about the mind of its owner? This attractive volume by Jo Steffens, director of Urban Center Books and the editor of “Block by Block: Jane Jacobs and the Future of New York City,” provides an itimate look at the personal libraries of 14 of the world’s leading architects, alongside conversations about the significance of books to their careers and lives. Photographs of bookshelves—displaying well-loved and rare volumes, eclectic organizational schemes, and the individual touches that make a bookshelf one’s own—presents an evocative glimpse of their owner’s personal life.
$50.00 - 10%
- What is more simple and efficient than our familiar two-wheeled vehicle, and “The Golden Age of Handbuilt Bicycles: Craftsmanship, Elegance and Function” is a fitting celebration of its design history. Featuring 50 classic models built by hand, this book unveils the bicycle’s technical evolution within a historical context. Beautifully detailed are early 20th-century models with multi-gear systems, mid-century machines where war and postwar economy challenged craft and utility, as well as modern and contemporary bicycles. With brilliant full-color images of each model and chronological text detailing the craftsmanship that went into producing these elegant machines, this book will appeal to bicycle enthusiasts and to anyone interested in design.