Opening Hours
Daily: 10 A.M.–5 P.M.
Closed on Tuesdays
1151 Oxford Road
San Marino, CA 91108
Rare Books
Why things go wrong, or, The Peter principle revisited
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Rare Books
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Daily: 10 A.M.–5 P.M.
Closed on Tuesdays
1151 Oxford Road
San Marino, CA 91108
Image not available
Rare Books
"In the illuminating essay he has written to accompany this new work by Peter Fraser, Gerry Badger tells of the mix of feelings he had on first seeing one of Fraser's photographs. Moving from surprise, bafflement and incomprehension to admiration and pleasure, he experienced the 'flame of recognition' when, to quote James Joyce, the 'whatness' of a thing is revealed. Fraser himself has described his pictures of static, seemingly mundane objects as 'trying to understand what the world around me is made of.' The results of this quest, which is at once delightfully simple and highly sophisticated, are visually stunning images that, best of all, become more rewarding every time you look at them. Since his work was first exhibited in the early 1980s, Peter Fraser has established himself as one of the most important photographers working in the UK. Drawing inspiration from the work of William Eggleston, with whom he spent a formative two months in 1984, he has become a master in the poetic use of color in his art. In 2004 Fraser was shortlisted for the prestigious Citigroup Photography Prize. An internationally acclaimed photographer, his work has been widely exhibited and is included in many collections in Europe and the United States"--Publisher's description.
653245
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Rare Books
This tale of the adventures of Professor William Waterman Sherman, a disillusioned schoolteacher who sails across the Pacific Ocean in a giant balloon, and witnesses the explosion of the island of Krakatoa, is so full of curious escapades. It's a hilarious read. The story begins where we find Professor Sherman adrift in the Atlantic ocean, clinging to the debris of some twenty deflated balloons. He is shortly picked up by S.S. Cunningham, and the interest of the world is immediately sparked. You see, Professor Sherman started a journey in a hot air balloon... in the Pacific ocean. Could he have completely orbited the earth, to crash on the other side of the United States?
660736
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Rare Books
""If you cannot speak truth at a beheading, when can you speak it?" England, May 1536. Anne Boleyn is dead, decapitated in the space of a heartbeat by a hired French executioner. As her remains are bundled into oblivion, Thomas Cromwell breakfasts with the victors. The blacksmith's son from Putney emerges from the spring's bloodbath to continue his climb to power and wealth, while his formidable master, Henry VIII, settles to short-lived happiness with his third queen before Jane dies giving birth to the male heir he most craves. Cromwell is a man with only his wits to rely on; he has no great family to back him, no private army. Despite rebellion at home, traitors plotting abroad and the threat of invasion testing Henry's regime to the breaking point, Cromwell's robust imagination sees a new country in the mirror of the future. But can a nation, or a person, shed the past like a skin? Do the dead continually unbury themselves? What will you do, the Spanish ambassador asks Cromwell, when the king turns on you, as sooner or later he turns on everyone close to him? With The Mirror & the Light, Hilary Mantel brings to a triumphant close the trilogy she began with Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies. She traces the final years of Thomas Cromwell, the boy from nowhere who climbs to the heights of power, offering a defining portrait of predator and prey, of a ferocious contest between present and past, between royal will and a common man's vision: of a modern nation making itself through conflict, passion, and courage"--
653024
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Rare Books
If you cannot speak truth at a beheading, when can you speak it? England, May 1536. Anne Boleyn is dead, decapitated in the space of a heartbeat by a hired French executioner. As her remains are bundled into oblivion, Thomas Cromwell breakfasts with the victors. The blacksmith's son from Putney emerges from the spring's bloodbath to continue his climb to power and wealth, while his formidable master, Henry VIII, settles to short-lived happiness with his third queen, before Jane dies giving birth to the male heir he most craves. Cromwell is a man with only his wits to rely on; he has no great family to back him, no private army. Despite rebellion at home, traitors plotting abroad and the threat of invasion testing Henry's regime to breaking point, Cromwell's robust imagination sees a new country in the mirror of the future. But can a nation, or a person, shed the past like a skin? Do the dead continually unbury themselves? What will you do, the Spanish ambassador asks Cromwell, when the king turns on you, as sooner or later he turns on everyone close to him? With The Mirror and the Light, Hilary Mantel brings to a triumphant close the trilogy she began with Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies. She traces the final years of Thomas Cromwell, the boy from nowhere who climbs to the heights of power, offering a defining portrait of predator and prey, of a ferocious contest between present and past, between royal will and a common man's vision: of a modern nation making itself through conflict, passion and courage.
653495
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Manuscripts
Indian War journal kept by James Worden Pope, who with a wagon train of supplies accompanied Major Eugene A. Carr's 5th Cavalry expedition to locate and bring provisions to Captain William H. Penrose's cavalry. The 5th Cavalry departed from Fort Lyon, Colorado, in November 1868 and spent the next month in Indian Territory in search of Penrose. Pope's journal provides a detailed account of the 5th Cavalry's movements and their initially futile attempts to locate Penrose. He recounts the many difficulties of the expedition, from cold weather and inadequate provisions to drunkenness among some of its men. Pope also writes of encountering dead horses that had belonged to Penrose's cavalry and of the starving conditions of Penrose's men (when the 5th Cavalry finally caught up to Penrose on December 19, Pope writes that their men had just received their last rations, although they did have a supply of buffalo meat). He writes of encounters with Mexican buffalo hunters and Buffalo Soldiers, although not Indians (Pope's party discovered only "deserted Indian wigwams"). He also gives detailed descriptions of terrain, mainly around Purgatory River, Cimarron River, and Two Buttes Creek, as well as writing of the large numbers of buffalo and of buffalo hunts. The last entries of the journal, made in January 1869, recount camp life after the 5th Cavalry had joined Penrose's party, including the story of a man killed by Indians. Most of Pope's entries recount facts and do not have much personal reflection, although in an entry from New Year's Eve 1868 he writes of staying up until midnight, when the old year "gave up the ghost; burying with him many pleasant associations and hopes and fear. How little did I expect at this time last year to be out in this desolate region with only a tent for shelter...an episode in the life of [a] soldier." Some mentions are made of Carr, Penrose, Wild Bill Hickok, and General Philip Sheridan. The last page has a light sketch of unidentified terrain and what appears to be a list of Pope's provisions.
mssHM 74606
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Manuscripts
The 137 oral history tapes and 105 transcriptions, together with 363 pieces of correspondence, that make up this collection were created by Peter A. Brazeau during the course of his research for his oral history biography of Wallace Stevens: Parts of a World: Wallace Stevens Remembered (New York: Random House, 1983). Brazeau, a member of the English Department faculty of St. Joseph College, wrote to and interviewed dozens of Stevens' relatives, friends, neighbors, employees, business colleagues, and literary associates and acquaintances in order to elicit their recollections about the poet. While Brazeau mined the material fairly thoroughly, the mass of information was too great for it all to be used in the book, and there yet remains a good deal of unused data. Therefore, this collection is an excellent research tool for Stevens scholarship. Researchers are advised to use Brazeau's Parts of a World: Wallace Stevens Remembered as a reference source for the collection, to identify the people whose interviews and correspondence are contained in the collection. There are three formats of material:1. Tapes. Duplicate cassette tapes have been made from the master tapes (which are in both cassette and reel-to-reel formats). A fairly substantial number of the master tapes are of markedly inferior sound quality, and, while the copies are no worse in quality, it has not been possible to improve or enhance the quality of the copies. The most frequent problem is either very low volume or loud background noise, or a combination of the two.Researchers are cautioned that there is almost certainly some duplication in the tapes for some individuals. This is often due to Brazeau's inconsistent practice of making a second master of a given interview (in either the same or a different format), whose contents may or may not exactly match those of the first master. In almost every instance, the task of exhaustively comparing the contents of two masters proved too unwieldy and time-consuming and had to be abandoned; all that could be done was to copy each master tape unless duplicate masters could be readily identified. Moreover, Brazeau would group interviews on tapes in the most economical manner possible, and these would not be grouped similarly for duplicate master tapes, e.g., groups of interviews on a reel-to-reel tape would not then be retained as a group on Brazeau's own second (cassette) master but would be dispersed to several cassette tapes. This made the identification of duplicate interviews especially difficult. A third difficulty was Brazeau's frequent habit of beginning an interview too early on the tape (with far too little leader tape) or with the volume initially too low, so that his verbal identification of the interviewee and date of the interview are unintelligible. In short, the tapes were made, not by a professional oral historian, but by a Stevens scholar who used the craft as a means to pursue his own research, so the quality of recordings is highly uneven.2. Transcriptions. The transcriptions have been xeroxed, and the xeroxes will be used for research purposes. Both the originals and the xeroxes are difficult to read, for Brazeau wrote the transcriptions by hand, often in pencil. Moreover, his transcriptions are not complete but are selective; he omitted segments that were not of interest for his own research.3. Correspondence. The correspondence consists of originals, most in good condition.
mssHM 53675-54279