Search Results: Titles starting with A from W. C. Baker Rare Books & Ephemera

Sandusky: Printed by Henry D. Cooke & Company, 1858. First Edition. Original printed wrappers. 49 pp. Minor chipping to upper-outer corner front wrapper and first several leaves, half-inch closed tear in fore-edge of front wrapper. Light soiling in wrappers and thin, long stain across front wrapper. Overall very good. A detailed description of the large 45th-anniversary celebration of the Battle of Lake Erie at Put-in-Bay Island, where American forces under Oliver Hazard Perry beat the British Royal Navy and reestablished U.S. control of Lake Erie during the War of 1812. In addition to its account of the proceedings, the pamphlet prints the constitution of the Battle of Lake Erie Monument Association, an address by Hon. Eleutheros Cooke of Sandusky, the poems, "The Battle of Lake Erie," by D. Bethune Dunfield (ending with the line, "WE'VE MET THE ENEMY, AND THEY ARE OURS!"), "The Islands of Erie," by R. R. McMeens, portions of an eyewitness account of the battle by Dr. Usher Parsons, and the lyrics… Read More

New York: Oxford Uniiversity Press, 1958. xiii,[3],272 pp. Publisher's tan paper over boards, front cover pictorially stamped in black, in pictorial dust jacket. Rubbing and light scuffing to dust jacket, with small closed tears at upper edge and early pencil graffiti on rear panel and penciled price revision in front inner flap. Fine in a good to very good dust jacket. Olive Wolley Burt (1894-1981) was an American journalist, teacher, writer, and folklorist, best known for her works in juvenile literature and for the present work, her only book written for an adut audience. Burt had a lifelong fascination with true crime stories, noting that in her childhood her mother clipped "mournful verses from newspapers and saved them in a scrapbook" and would sing dark lullabies to her children. While workinig at the DESERET NEWS in Salt Lake City during the late 1940s and 1950s, Burt began to compile research on American murder ballads, leading to the publication of this extensive work, which in 1959 eanred a… Read More

New York: Aperture, 1999. Folio. 151,[1] pp. including numerous in-text photographic images. Publisher's cloth, spine stamped in silver. Signed and inscribed by the author/photographer, "For Valeria + Johnny - I also _love_ the side show Fondly Mary Ellen 2003 New York." Some rubbing and a few small dents in dust jacket. Fine in a very good dust jacket. 36-year portrait retrospective of the late Mary Ellen Mark (1940-2015), who was named the previous year "Most Influential Woman Photographer" by AMERICAN PHOTO magazine. This copy was warmly inscribed to Johnny Fox and his wife at the time, Valeria Duarte, in the year of publication. Johnny Fox (1953-2017) was a celebrated American sword swallower, sleight-of-hand artist, and proprietor of the Freakatorium / El Museo Loco, the first dime museum to appear in New York since the closing of Hubert's Museum in 1969. Located in a Lower East Side storefront from 1999 to 2005, the Freakatorium housed a collection of oddities, relics, photographs, and ephemera… Read More

Philadelphia: Printed for Thomas Dobson [by Archibald Bartram], 1804. First Edition. Hardcover. Very good. [13],10-151,[22],152-219 pp. plus 2 folding plates. Antique-style quarter calf and marbled boards, gilt leather label, endpapers refreshed. Minor chips at outer corners of title leaf, professionally repaired. Mild toning throughout, heavy toning at edges of rear endpapers, light offsetting in plates. Very good to near fine. "Said to be the first book on distilling printed in the United States" - Amerine & Borg. The author, Michael August Krafft of Bristol, Pennsylvania, received a fourteen-year-term patent in 1801 for an improvement in stills, around which, he writes in the book's Advertisement, "Many unsuccessful attempts have been made to deprive him of the fruits of six years of sacrifice of property and labor" with "[s]light evasions of form, without a departure from the principle." Krafft's patent beat the attempted evasions, and, by the time of writing, 217 distilleries were legitimately… Read More

Springfield, Illinois: Charles C. Thomas, [1964]. First Edition. Hardcover. Fine/very good. Publiisher's green cloth, spine titled in gilt, in printed dust jacket. Light foxing in front endpapers, uneven sunning and half-inch closed tear at head of dust jacket. Overall near fine in a very good dust jacket. A longitudinal study prepared under the auspices of the Postgraduate Center for Mental Health by a group of six psychologists, psychiatrists, and therapists based at various institutions in New York and Madison, Wisconsin. The study follows "six creative people in the field of painting, sculpture, writing, and acting. Both the development of their personalities and of their work habits or attitudes towards work were studied over a three-year period. The book presents both clinical histories of the six artists and specific measurements of their movements during therapy. It is basically preoccupied with the question of whether an artist has to be neurotic to be creative ... " (dust jacket).

New York: Uranian Press, [ca. 1960] Broadside, approximately 12 x 9 inches, printed on brown paper. Contemporary rubber stamp monogram of Richard O. Tyler. Fine. Early broadside of the Uranian Press, advertising founder Richard Tyler's first exhibition at Judson Gallery, March 25 - April 14, 1960. An April 6 review in the VILLAGE VOICE points to "pages from his Uranian Press folios and chapbooks ... . Here too are stark and striking woodcuts in the manner of Mexico's great Posada, aptropaic [sic] icons, giant paintings, and collages set off by fantastic hand-worked frames. Prices range from 30 cents for broadsides up to $1000 for a collage." Richard Oviet Tyler (1926-1983) established the Uranian Press in 1958 in the basement of a tenement on the Lower East Side where, by 1960, he had installed four printing presses. Under the Uranian imprint, Tyler, his wife, Dorothea Baer Tyler, and friends produced chapbooks, broadsides, and artist's books through the mid-1960s. Tyler was a fixture in Greenwich… Read More

Camp near Carthage, Tennessee, 1863. Loose leaf. Near fine. Bifolium, 9 3/4 inches (folded). [3] pp. Manuscript letter in an addressed envelope with stamp, postmark, and cancel. Wear and slight discoloration on blank verso of second leaf at folds, else near fine. A gripping Civil War letter home from a Union private to his mother from outside Carthage Tennessee, where his company and regiment - Company H of the 89th Ohio Infantry - had just established a Union outpost to combat a guerilla insurgency in the region. The author, Elijah Rockhold, Jr. (1844-1924) of Bainbridge, Ohio (Ross County), writes as he is recovering from jaundice and preparing for a possible battle. He begins the letter with an account of his company making "a scout" up the Cumberland River as he remained at camp convalescing. At a town 30 miles up the river, the soliders confiscated approximately 1000 pounds of feathers, 300-400 bushels each of corn and wheat, and "ten intelligent contrabands" - enslaved people freed from the… Read More