Art | Invisible Books

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Please click on the titles to view images of the books listed below.

Dore Ashton | Yes, but … | Viking | 1976 | 670793884 No jacket, boards are foxed, spine is almost unreadable. The book has been exposed to damp at some time, with some crinkling to the corners of the opening pages, & offset from the spine’s cloth binding on the front endpapers. Some clippings on Guston are loosely inserted. Name label on the ffep, apparently covering over some earlier ownership mark. | £50

Milton Avery | Figures from the Forties | Thomas Gibson Fine Art | 1981 | Jacket is lightly sunned at edges, with a few tiny marks on the back cover. Outer edge of this slender book is a little bumped about a quarter of the way down: this only touches the extreme edge of the margin of the affected pages, & does not intrude anywhere near the text or reproductions. | £25

Freddie Baer; Peter Lamborn Wilson (pref.) | Ecstatic Incisions | AK | 1992 | 01873176600 Light wear to cover & edge. | £50

Basil Beattie | Basil Beattie: Private View Invitations | Goldsmiths’s College Gallery; Maak Gallery; Curwen Gallery; Todd Gallery | n.d. | Invitation cards to four private views of Beattie’s work: Goldsmiths’s College Gallery 2 Feb. 1982 (with ink correction to date of Beattie’s talk); Curwen Gallery 4 Mar. 1987; Maak Gallery 23 Nov. 1993; Todd Gallery 1 Dec 1993; plus a folded card for his exhibition at the Curwen Gallery 21-31 Mar. 1990. Several of the cards show signs of being handled & carried about, & the relevant tube station has been marked in ink on the back of the Maak Gallery card. | £20

William Blake | Illustrations of the Book of Job | Methuen | 1904 | Boards are worn & marked, with loss to extremities of spine. Label on spine is worn & rubbed. Name on ffep. A previous owner has numbered each plate in pencil in the upper right hand corner of the page, well away from the illustration itself. | £100

William Blake; Meira Perry-Lehmann (ed.) | There was a Man in the Land of Uz | Israel Museum | 1992 | Reproductions of Blake’s engravings, watercolours & studies for the Book of Job. Text in English & Hebrew. White jacket is lightly marked, blue lettering faded on its spine. Some wear to edges of boards. | £30

John Bratby; John Rothenstein (intr.) | John Bratby | French | n.d. | Minor wear to cover & edge. White back cover is foxed & marked. Old secondhand prices pencilled on reverse of cover & ffep. A 1975 letter from Bratby has been clipped from a newspaper & loosely inserted. | £15

John Bratby; Alan Clutton-Brock | Painters of Today: John Bratby A.R.A. | Studio Books | 1961 | Pictorial boards are worn & scuffed. The cloth quarter-binding is worn & discoloured. The book is a little slant, with the front cover set forward. No problem with text pages or plates. | £15

Charles Biederman | The New Cezanne | Red Wing | 1958 | First edition in worn, marked jacket. The book itself is in close to very good condition, with a light mark on the top edge of the page-block, foxing on the endpapers, & some wear to the edges of the cloth cover. | £50

Ettore Colla; Giovanni Carandente (intr.) | Ettore Colla | Marlborough Gallery | 1973 | A rough copy. The pale cover is worn & marked, & the glue binding the book has perished, so many of the pages are now loose. The top inner corner of the book is bumped. | £15

Robert Colquhoun; John Deakin (frontispiece); George Barker; Bryan Robertson (pref.) | Robert Colquhoun: Catalogue of an Exhibition of Paintings, Drawings and Prints from 1942-1958 held at the Whitechapel Art Gallery, London March-May 1958 | Whitechapel Art Gallery | 1958 | Cover worn, plain white back panel looks rather grubby, old pencilled price on ffep, pen notes written on reverse of colour plate at the end of the book. | £15

Joanna Drew; Michael Harrison; David Attenborough | Miniature African Sculptures from the Herman Collection | Arts Council of Great Britain | 1985 | 0728704544 Predominantly white cover rather worn & marked, impression of old pencilled price on first page. | £100

J.J. Fox & T.H. Bowles | The Analysis of Pigments, Paints & Varnishes | Ernest Benn | 1927 | Hardback/no dj. Good. Grey boards rather worn at top and foot of spine and corners. Spine slightly faded but blue lettering still clear and well-defined. Top of page edges dusty and a little foxed. Some foxing to eps. Crossed-out name on fep. Ready to post in UK. | £35

Robert O. Lenkiewicz | Observations on Local Vagrancy Plymouth | Ferns | n.d. | 903516020 Stapled booklet with stain at top corner of spine & a light crease to the front cover & first page. Includes a brief fold-out questionnaire on vagrancy. Shakespearian quotations have been written in ink on three otherwise blank pages at the beginning & end of the book: the handwriting does not appear to be Lenkiewicz’s. A price list for Lenkiewicz’s vagrancy paintings has been loosely inserted. | £250

George Dunlop Leslie | The Inner Life of the Royal Academy | John Murray | 1914 | Inscribed by the author to his son on half title page. A note by Leslie is loosely inserted between the two plates bound between pp.96 & 97. The cover is worn, & the page-block foxed. All plates are present. | £25

Norman Lindsay et al | Art in Australia, First Number | Sydney Ure Smith, Bertram Stevens and C. L. Jones | 1916 | Cover is tatty & marked. Internally in very good condition, apart from some foxing, with all plates present. A page in between the final article in the magazine & the advertising section has been cropped close to the margin. | £50

Barry Martin | Barry Martin | Rigo | 2003 | Three statements by the artist in English & Croatian translation, 14 colour reproductions of artwork, & a colour photograph of Martin & Teeny Duchamp playing chess: details of this last item have been pasted onto the facing page. | £30

Robert Medley; Mel Gooding (intr.) | Robert Medley RA | Louise Hallett Gallery | 1988 | Unlaminated cover is worn & marked, outer edge of page-block foxed, old pencil price on ffep. Despite the book’s unprepossessing exterior, all the plates are in very good condition. | £15

Jane Morris [compiler] | Directory of Artists: Space Open Studios, London, 1975 | Space Open Studios | 1975 | Ringbound publication. Photos, CVs & statements for artists based at Somers Town Depot, Old St Patrick’s School, 124-130 Tabernacle St, Bombay Wharf, 79-89 Lots Rd, New Crane & Metropolitan Wharves, 71 Stepney Green, 10 Martello St, Charlton House Studio, 1 Cahill St, The Dairy, Ravenscroft Studios & 18 Phipp St. Artists listed include Susan Hiller, Brian Catling & COUM. | £50

An-Yi Pan: Contemporary Taiwanese Art in the Era of Contention. Taipei Fine Arts Museum/ Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art, 2004. 9570169273. Oversized paperback. Catalogue published to accompany exhibition of same name. Parallel English/Chinese text. Illustrated. Good. Cover is rather worn, particularly on lower edge front cover. Corners bumped. Lower corner front cover creased. Gift inscription on title page which also has set off from yellow inside front cover. Tiny closed nick in top of edge of contents page. Edge of page block a little grubby. Dispatched first class from UK within 2 working days. (Stock ref 373) £55

Alan Riddell | Typewriter Art | London Magazine Editions | 1975 | 0900626992 Unclipped dustjacket is worn & badly scuffed, with what looks like some damage from a label having been clumsily removed. The pale cover of the book itself has picked up a few small marks, & is a little worn at the extremities of its spine. | £1,000

The Robert Moore Collection of Fine and Important Korean Ceramics. Thursday, October 16, 1986 | Christie’s New York | 1986 | Pressure marks on back cover of jacket where book has been used as a writing surface. Price list loosely inserted. | £35

Emil Schumacher, Jens Christian Jensen, Andreas Franzke, Luigi Cavadini | Emil Schumacher | Fidia | 1994 | Two-volume set in worn slipcase. A few marks on white covers of books. Faint trace of an old pencilled price on ffep of vol 1, ownership signature on half-title page. Text pages & plates in very good condition. | £40

Joao Vieira | 25 Anos de Trabalho | &etc | 1985 | Paperback. PORTUGUESE TEXT ONLY. Blue cover rather worn and grubby, several thumb marks, corners bumped. Generously illustrated, with biography and texts by E.M. de Melo e Castro & Ernesto de Sousa among others. PORTUGUESE TEXT ONLY. | £50

Andrea Vizzini | The Teoretical Painting | Ravagan | 1986 | Paperback with flaps. 118pp. Good plus. Top and lower edges are rather worn where they have been deliberately cut longer than the page block. Cover has few tiny indentations. Corners bumped. Faint grubby mark on back ep. Many colour and b&w plates. | £20

H. S. Ede | Alfred Wallis, 17th July to 11th August 1962, Piccadilly Gallery | William G. Ridler | 1962 | Eight page stapled catalogue for the second gallery exhibition of Wallis’s work, following one shared with Christopher Wood in 1950, consisting of an introduction by Ede, an unsigned biographical note, three black & white reproductions of his paintings, & the list of 52 works on display. A typed price list for 10 of the paintings is loosely inserted.The top edge of the catalogue is a little crinkled. | £50

Wols; Rene Guilly | Wols | Rene Drouin | 1947 | Worn & heavily handled copy from an artist’s studio collection. The glassine protective cover is tatty & marked, the cover of the book itself is bumped & marked around the lowest 3cm of the spine. There is a diagonal crease to the upper margin of the text block, & light reading creases to many of the pages. Despite this, the plates still look good, although there is some offset from them to the facing text pages. No. 202 of a numbered edition. | £20

Rose Wylie | Twink & Ivy, and Other Paintings and Small Drawings 1999-2003 | R&R | 2004 | 0954665600 Minor external wear. A sticker with the logo of the Trinity Theatre, Tunbridge Wells, has been rather wonkily added to the publishing information page directly under its acknowledgement there. | £50