Search Results: Titles starting with J from Johnson Rare Books & Archives

London: Latimer House Limited, 1955. Hardcover. Near fine/Very good. Frontispiece illustration. London: Latimer House Limited, 1955. Reprint. Historical novel set during the Crimean War. Small octavo. Original red cloth binding, with gilt titles. Internally crisp and clean. Light bumping to the corners and tips. The dust jacket is price-clipped; else clean and bright. Better than very good.

Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press, 1999. First edition. Hardcover. Fine/Fine. 278 p. "In the only critical examination of all of Jack Kerouac's published prose, James T. Jones turns to Freud to show how the great Beat writer used the Oedipus myth to shape not only his individual works but also the entire body of his writing." Signed by Jones on the title page. Octavo. Original purple cloth binding, with gilt titles. A fine copy in a fine dust jacket.

New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1998. First edition. Hardcover. Fine/Fine. A bizarre tale set in Dickensian London. Signed by Carey on the title page. Some mild fading along the extremities of the dust jacket; otherwise a fine copy. Signed by Author.

New York: Random House, 1970. First Edition. Hardcover. Near fine/Very good. First edition, first printing. A desperate man is trying to find his partner's killer by means of astrology, and resist as he may, ex-cop Mitch Tobin is destined to help him do it. Octavo. Original green and black paper-covered boards, with silver titles. A crisp, unread copy. Some negligible bubbling in the dust jacket laminate. Better than very good.

New York: McGraw-Hill Book Company, 1966. First Edition. Hardcover. Very good/Very good. Both the first (1966) and second (1984) volume are first editions. The definitive biography of James Boswell (1740-1795) one of the world's great diarists, and author of the exceptional biography 'Life of Johnson,' who ranks as one of the literary giants of the Age of Enlightenment. Prepared by the two greatest Boswellian scholars of the 20th century. Textual illustrations. The first volume is a very good copy, with some mild edgewear to the boards and pictorial dust jacket. The second volume is fine in a fine dust jacket. An essential set.

Berkeley, California: Berkeley Young Socialist League, 1955. Wraps. Very good. Likely the first separate American printing of this essay, which was first published in the May 1946 issue of Polemic. In this critical discussion, Orwell (born Eric Arthur Blair, 1903-50) acknowledges that the general drift has "almost certainly been towards oligarchy" and "an increasing concentration of industrial and financial power" but criticizes the tendency of Burnham's "power-worship" and comments upon the failures in analysis that arise from it. As biographer Michael Shelden observed, "Orwell was always at his best when he was on the attack, and his Polemic essay on Burnham is a brilliant criticism of the whole concept of power worship." Preceded by publisher's remarks by James Robertson of the Berkeley Young Socialist League, the influential leftist campus group. The recto of the rear wrapper includes the YSL Statement of Principles, along with a mailing form with the organization's Berkeley and New York… Read More

Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1990. First edition. Hardcover. Near Fine. 432 p. Frontispiece portrait, with numerous textual illustrations. A volume in the Pittsburgh Series in Bibliography. Octavo. Original blue cloth binding, with silver stamping. Issued without a dust jacket. Near fine.

Vancouver: Mitchell Press Limited, 1969. First edition. Hardcover. Fine/Fine. 306 p. Textual photographs. Octavo. Original red cloth binding, with gilt titles. Internally crisp and clean. A fine copy in a fine dust jacket.

San Francisco: The San Francisco Corral of the Westerners, 1988. First edition. Hardcover. Fine. Frontispiece portrait, with textual photographs. Inscribed by Shumate on the title page. Original red cloth binding, with gilt stamping. A fine copy. Inscribed by Author.

Malden, Massachusetts and Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2002. First Edition. Hardcover. Fine. A volume in the Blackwell Introductions to Literature series. Octavo. Original glossy boards; issued without a dust jacket.

San Francisco: Privately Published, 1935. First Edition. Hardcover. Very good. Limited to 150 copies printed at the Grabhorn Press. Laudatory biography of James Phillips, Jr. (1848-1931), the Scottish-born American businessman whose distinguished career included successful ventures in manufacturing, editing, politics, and copper mining. Frontispiece portrait, with numerous textual photographs and illustrations. This copy is inscribed by the author, Phillips' grandson, on the verso of the front flyleaf. Octavo. Original blue paper-covered boards over a tan cloth spine, with a printed paper spine label. The spine is lightly sun faded, with a very mild bump to the bottom corners; else very good or better.

New York: Guggenheim Museum, 2003. First Edition. Hardcover. Near fine/Fine. ...a definitive investigation of Rosenquist's more than forty-year career in painting and sculpture, source collages, drawings, and graphics and multiples, from his earliest works to the present. Lavishly illustrated, the book features nearly three hundred of the artist's most significant works, including several that have never been published and a broad selection of source collages." Oblong quarto: xxv, 414 p. Original red cloth binding, with silver stamping. A near fine copy in a clean and bright dust jacket.

Austin: University of Texas Press, 2005. First edition. Hardcover. Fine/Near Fine. 152 p. With an essay by Eleanor Heartney. 62 plates and 32 textual figures, including many in full color. A prolific artist with a prodigious gift for stimulating the creativity of others, James Surls (b.1943) is one of the most important sculptors working in America today. His art blends natural forms created of wood, steel, and bronze with sophisticated, sometimes edgy imagery and content to explore fundamental dualities and paradoxes - male and female, joyous optimism and anxious foreboding, conscious rationality and unconscious intuition. This beautifully illustrated book, which accompanied an exhibition of the same name at the Blaffer Gallery, the Art Museum of the University of Houston, captures an extraordinarily creative period in Surls's career - the two decades he lived and worked in Splendora, Texas. Signed by Sultan on the title page. Quarto. Pictorial boards. The dust jacket is a touch faded along the… Read More

New York: G.P. Putnam's Sons, 1921. First Edition. Hardcover. Near fine. Groundbreaking academic study by two members of the University of Chicago faculty, concerning the immigration and assimilation of Japanese into California. Following the lifting of Japanese restrictions against emigration in 1891, the Japanese population in California, which was listed by the 1880 census at only 86, began to grow at the rate of more than 1,000 per year. Like the Chinese before them, the Japanese were targeted by a number of discriminatory state and federal laws that denied them citizenship and the right to own real estate. Octavo. Original blue cloth binding, with gilt titles. Tiny bookseller's label to the rear pastedown. Light wear to the corners and tips; else near fine.

Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1925. This report, submitted to the Committee on Immigration and Naturalization, House of Representatives, provides a comprehensive history of diplomacy leading up to the adoption of the Immigration Act of 1924, which severely limited Japanese immigration, following protests by the Japanese government. In this introduction, Trevor writes that the Act was not adopted in criticism of others, "but solely for the purpose of protecting ourselves. We cast no aspersions on any race or creed, but we must remember that every object of our institutions of society and government will fail unless America can be kept American." U.S. Representative Albert Johnson and Senator David Reed were the two main architects of the Act, which prevented immigration from Asia, set quotas on the number of immigrants from the Eastern Hemisphere, and provided funding and an enforcement mechanism to carry out the longstanding ban on other immigrants. They sought to establish a… Read More

New York: Albert & Charles Boni, 1926. First Edition. Hardcover. Very good. Tully had started making contacts (and friends) in the nascent movie industry within a few years of his arrival in Southern California in 1912. In the early 1920s, by which time he had finally (more or less) settled in the city, he began finding work in the studios with the aid of such influential friends as novelist/scenarist Rupert Hughes and producer Paul Bern. At a party in February 1924, he was introduced to Charlie Chaplin, who hired him as a kind of writer-of-all-trades - equal parts publicist, ghostwriter and paid confidant/companion. As time went on, Tully found his mercurial boss difficult and the position stressful, and by mid-1925, with the success of Beggars of Life under his belt, he was able to break with Chaplin. His experience among the movie-makers informs this 'Hollywood novel' about a hard-living ex-con/drifter who becomes a big-shot film director" (Prouty, The Dozen and One: A Field Guide to the Books of… Read More

New York: Albert & Charles Boni, 1926. First Edition. Hardcover. Very good. Tully had started making contacts (and friends) in the nascent movie industry within a few years of his arrival in Southern California in 1912. In the early 1920s, by which time he had finally (more or less) settled in the city, he began finding work in the studios with the aid of such influential friends as novelist/scenarist Rupert Hughes and producer Paul Bern. At a party in February 1924, he was introduced to Charlie Chaplin, who hired him as a kind of writer-of-all-trades - equal parts publicist, ghostwriter and paid confidant/companion. As time went on, Tully found his mercurial boss difficult and the position stressful, and by mid-1925, with the success of Beggars of Life under his belt, he was able to break with Chaplin. His experience among the movie-makers informs this 'Hollywood novel' about a hard-living ex-con/drifter who becomes a big-shot film director" (Prouty, The Dozen and One: A Field Guide to the Books of… Read More

San Francisco: The Book Club of California, 2001. First edition. Hardcover. Fine. Introduction by Charles A. Fracchia. Edited by Robert J. Chandler. Tipped-in color frontispiece portrait, with eight pp. photographs. First edition, limited to 350 copies. "Arriving in Alta California in 1843, twenty-six-year-old Jasper O'Farrell (1817-1875) aborted a planned journey up the Columbia River and over the Rockies to accept an appointment as Surveyor General of land grants in what is now Northern California. His practice continued from Mexican to American rule. Under O'Farrell's direction almost all of the land grants north of San Francisco Bay were surveyed, as were the layouts for the cities of San Francisco, Benicia, and Stockton." Original printed tan paper-covered boards over a green linen spine, stamped in gilt. A fine copy in the original plain paper dust jacket.

Fine. A collection of 19 hand-signed bookplates designed by Jay Chambers (1877-1929), a graduate of Philadephia's Drexel Institute of Art, Science and Industry who studied under the famous book illustrator and author Howard Pyle. The large paper proofs in this collection are indicative of Chamber's pictorial style, many with idealized figures in historical dress. Chambers is the father of writer Whittaker Chambers, the former Communist and Russian spy whose testimony helped bring down Alger Hiss. Chambers was a sought-after bookplate illustrator at the turn of the last century. A survey of his work is found in Wilbur Macy Stone's books "Jay Chambers: His Book-Plates, With XXVII Examples and an Essay Concerning Them" (1902). Stone and Chambers were two of the three partners in the Triptych Designers of New York, which produced bookplates, published this work, and other small-press publications. After graduating from Drexel, Chambers moved to New York to take a job as a graphic artist at the New York… Read More

New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2001. First Edition. Hardcover. Near fine/Near fine. Inscribed by Ricky Jay to Eric Idle on the half-title. Small quarto. Original brown paper-covered boards, with decorative bronze stamping. A near fine copy in a near fine dust jacket with some light fading along the extremities. A gathering of all sixteen issues of Jay's Journal of Anomalies, with significant new material and illustrations. In delectably deadpan prose, Jay (1946-2018) explores the history of bizarre entertainments, from dogs stealing acts from other dogs to an anthropological hoax involving the only survivors of a caste of ancient Aztec priests. He also explains how wags since the sixteenth century have cheated at bowling, delves into the ancient relationship between conjuring and dentistry, and chronicles the exploits of ceiling walkers and human flies. From the library of revered English actor, comedian, musician, and writer Eric Idle, accompanied by a letter of provenance. Idle (b.1943) is… Read More