USD
GBP
EUR
CAD
AUD
ZAR
The Accidental Bookseller
Specializing in Uncommon Copies of Interesting Books
Membership(s): IOBA, FABA
A Selection of 65 Drawings from one drawing book 1952-1956
$400.00
Duncan, Robert
Black Sparrow Press: Los Angeles, 1970. 65 loose prints, not bound (as issued).
A signed presentation copy from Duncan to Diane di Prima and her second husband Grant (Fisher), with a full page original drawing on card stock, measuring 6″ X 9″, in the style of drawings from the book. The Black Sparrow Press item appeared with a publisher’s chemise and signed colophon page — these are not present here and presumably weren’t included in the author’s copies of the book.
A few minor age spots to card stock, otherwise fine.
When speaking of the impact of Duncan’s teachings, di Prima cited the lesson that poetry intensifies life. In an interview with fellow Beat poet David Meltzer, she recalled, “Robert was probably one of the closest, most intimate lovers I ever had, even though we never had a physical relationship. I learned a lot of different kinds of things from him. One of the things I learned—in a way no teacher of Buddhism ever showed me—was how precious my life was. How precious the whole ambience of the time. A real sense of appreciating every minute.”
di Prima recalled their personal relationship in an August 2001 interview with poet David Hadbawnik: “Robert used to come and hang for days, he’d move into my house in Marshall in the ’70s, and bring his French mysteries that he was teaching himself idiomatic French from, and his notebook, and he’d stay for days. And he always came to Christmases with the kids, because Jess doesn’t like holidays, and so I’d have to say mid-’70s, through ’75 on, he was there many weekends, many mornings…. Eating fried herring from the bay for breakfast.”
Related products
-
Signed by Artist
Frank Stella
$300.00Phaidon Press, 2018. Signed and dated in the year of publication by Stella on front free endpaper. Illustrated covers, paperbound with French flaps. A fine, bright copy.
Offered for Sale by: The Accidental Bookseller -
LETTER FROM A CONTROVERSIAL BLACK POWER ACTIVIST
HOLOGRAPHIC LETTER FROM A BLACK POWER ACTIVIST
$850.00Single sheet with a handwritten note by this Trinidian-born Black activist, written on one side only, addressed to “Sister” and signed with his usual “Peace and Love.” Undated but the address at the top is 101 Holloway Road, the site of the “Black House,” a commune of which he was the self-appointed leader which was founded in 1969. That was also the year that the Cleavers arrived in Algeria. Michael X described the Black House as a place where “that ‘get a gun’ rhetoric is over. We’re talking of really building things in the community needed by people in the community. We’re keeping a sane approach” although it was later the site of an attempted extortion, for which Michael and four of his colleagues were arrested – and bailed out by John Lennon. This note, which comments that the bearer works for an Australian underground magazine called Oz, co-founded and edited by Richard Neville, reveals how related the various movements of the late 60s were – from the Black Panthers in exile, to Richard Neville’s controversial publishing venture, to John and Yoko Lennon contributing to a fund-raiser for the Black House. Seen in the light of his last years when Michael X returned to Trinidad, where he was tried and convicted and sentenced to death for his involvement in the murders of two members of the commune he founded there (a story told by Nobel Laureate V.S. Naipaul in ‘Killings in Trinidad”), closing with ‘Peace and Love’ seems ironic. Sheet measures approximately 12 1/2 in by 8 inches.
Offered for Sale by: Bookfever.com -
Hicks' First Book with ALS to Fellow Economist
The Theory of Wages
$6,750.00London: Macmillan & Company, 1932. First edition of Hicks’ first book, an attempt at a careful and complete restatement of the marginal productivity theory. In the book, Hicks developed the microeconomics of wage determination in competitive and regulated labor markets. This work also introduced the famous concept of “elasticity of substitution” between capital and labor, which became his basis to dispute Karl Marx’s theory by arguing that labor-saving technological progress does not necessarily reduce labor’s share of income. The book became a standard textbook on labor economics for decades. Pasted in to rear is an autograph letter signed by Hicks to fellow economist Jacob Marschak. Circa 250 words over two-pages. Dear Marschak, I am sorry to have been so long before answering your letters. I certainly did not mean to imply that the elasticity of demand for labour being greater than one would be deemed a priori. The note on p. 100 is certainly badly expressed, especially as I did not really need this condition for my argument! But I was led into certain expression because I did feel convinced that the long run elasticity must be in fact > 1; and this for the reasons you suspect. I could not believe that the elasticity of supply of the other factors (long-period elasticities gains) were likely to be very negative – I should on the whole expect that their curves won’t be far from zero; and if this is so, the <mathematical expression> formula gives what seems a quite impossibly low value for σ if λ < 1. (This with a view to the Bowley calculation.) But I don’t nowadays put much confidence in all this. I think I should now approach the problem by regarding the <illegible> non-labour means of production as the “<illegible> factors whose elasticity of supply (ε), has to be considered. And I should bring in most of the “capital” complications (discovery, etc.) on the demand side. But this would probably mean a reconsideration of the “relative share” statistics. Anyway it is all rather vague. Yes, I agree that your diagram will <illegible> do. But I hope your research will throw more light on the question than (I am sure) mine has done. Autographed material from John Hicks is quite rare, and none of his letters, and few signed books, appear in book auction records. A very good copy lacking the scarce dust wrapper, spine tips rubbed, foxing to side of text block, weakness to the hinge between pages 96 & 97, and bookseller’s label from B. H. Blackwell of Oxford (Marschak, it should be noted, held positions at Oxford from 1930 – 1939). John R. Hicks received the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences (jointly with Kenneth J. Arrow) in 1972 for his pioneering contributions to general equilibrium theory and welfare theory. One of the most important and influential economists of the twentieth century, the trail of the eternally eclectic John Richard Hicks is found all over economic theory. Hicks made major contributions to many areas of 20th-century economics; four, in particular, stand out. First, he showed that, contrary to what Karl Marx had believed, labor-saving technological progress does not necessarily reduce labor’s share of the income. Second, he devised a diagram—the IS-LM diagram—that graphically depicts John M. Keynes’s conclusion that an economy can be in equilibrium with less-than-full employment. Third, through his book Value and Capital (1939), Hicks showed that much of what economists believe about value theory (the theory about why goods have value) can be reached without the assumption that utility is measurable. Fourth, he came up with a way to judge the impact of changes in government policy. He proposed a compensation test that could compare the losses for the losers with the gains for the winners. If those who gain could, in principle, compensate those who lose—even if they do not actually and directly compensate them—then, claimed Hicks, the change in policy would be efficient. “How is one to assess an economist whose legacy runs as wide and deep as that of John Hicks? The quintessential ‘economist’s economist’, Hicks cannot be said to have founded a ‘school’ – unless one were to count the generation of eclectic and critical Neo-Walrasian theorists inspired by his visionary but careful work, such as Morishima, Hahn and Negishi. But Hicks was for the most part a lone thinker, part of every school and thus part of no school. If any, his school was ‘economics’. Hicks himself claimed to have created no new economics but simply to have spent his life understanding, formulating and channeling the ideas of the Continental and Keynesian schools and his own historical, philosophical and practical reflections. In a sense, he may have been right – but he analyzed and extended them in a meaningful and challenging way and thus transformed economics in the process. In many ways, Hicks’s scholarly output is a perfect demonstration of how economics should be done: without partisanship for pet theories, without ideological quibbling, his own strictest critic, learning from all and everywhere, constantly searching for new ideas and staying glued to none. Hicks’s approach to economics was informed by all the best qualities of the scientist, poet, philosopher and practical man, and he let none of these tendencies overreach themselves and overwhelm any other. In this sense, no economist before or since Hicks, has achieved such ‘Olympian’ scholarship.” (The History of Economic Thought) The book is annotated in pencil, presumably by Marschak, with the summary “Assuming truth’s and half-truth’s with equal self confidence” written to the front free end paper. Jacob Marschak was an “important developer of economics information theory and a contributor to the early study of econometrics…Marschak’s major work was done in an obscure but important area of conceptual economic theory helping develop methodology for mathematical problem solving” (NY Times obituary). Not mentioned – because not known at the time – is that three of Marschak’s doctoral students went on to win the Nobel Prize for Economics: Leonid Hurwicz (2007), Harry Markowitz (1990) and Franco Modigliani (1985). Marschak was impressed by the need for quantification of economics. His 1931 paper on the elasticity of demand was a landmark in econometric analysis, and as head of the Cowles Commission from 1943 – 1948, Marschak can be given credit for getting the ball rolling for the development of Neo-Walrasian economics and econometrics in the post-war era. Marschak’s contributions to economic theory in this phase were dominated by his interest in the concept of uncertainty. Already in his classic 1938 papers (one with Helen Makower) on monetary theory, Marschak set down the basic ideas for portfolio theory, in which risk was acknowledged to play a role. His encounter with the work of John von Nemann and Oskar Morgenstern (1944) led him to write his famous 1950 exposition of the axiomatization of choice under uncertainty, when he introduced the infamous “independence axiom”. It was specifically in the theory of information, the theory of “teams” and decentralized organizations where Marschak was to make his name (1954, 1968, 1971, 1972). He is renowned for having developed the theory of stochastic design as a way of statistically measuring demand. It was Marschak who helped introduce modern information theory into economics via Shannon’s formalization of information via the mathematical theory of communication. Kenneth J. Arrow, himself a Nobelist, wrote “Marschak became a leader of research organizations at a relatively young age in Germany, and later—with his increasing recognition—was director of the Oxford Institute of Statistics (1935-1939) and of the Cowles Commission for Research in Economics at The University of Chicago (1943-1948)—a fertile period that greatly influenced the course of economic analysis in several diverse fields. Only after 1948 did he begin to make the contributions to economic analysis that are most distinctively his own. Yet in curious ways, the subject matter of his later studies was consonant with his earlier career. An organizer of economic research, he became a theorist of organization. A student and critic of new developments in economic analysis, he developed the economics of information. A skeptic distrustful of received dogma, he studied the economics of uncertainty. Another characteristic of Marschak’s work was his consistently interdisciplinary approach. Some of his early papers dealt with class structure and the emerging phenomenon of Italian fascism. From 1928 to about 1953, though his titles stayed more narrowly within the field of economics as it was then understood, the papers themselves not infrequently contained broader notions derived from politics, sociology, and—later—individual psychology. His work on information and organization, for example, led to a series of experimental and theoretical studies on the psychology of decision making, while during his last fifteen years he organized an interdisciplinary behavioral sciences seminar that proved a main source of contact among mathematical modelers with widely divergent interests.”
Offered for Sale by: The Accidental Bookseller -
Exhibition Program with Artist's Scarce Signature
A Retrospective Exhibition 1954
$400.00Art Galleries, University of California Los Angeles (UCLA): 1954. Foreword by William Carlos Williams. Signed boldly by Sheeler and scarce thus, as Sheeler’s signature is quite uncommon. Few creases, wear to spine, some loss of color. Overall, very good in wrappers. Sheeler was a leading exponent of the innovative modernist style that arose after World War I in the United States and came to be known as Precisionism. Artists associated with the movement fused a planar geometry developed from European Cubism with an interest in uniquely American subjects, often celebrating industry and a Machine Age aesthetic. Sheeler worked across artistic mediums and developed a versatile, complex practice in which his vision was expressed with equal artistic command and intellectual rigor, masterfully devising compositions of modern, geometric form from America’s burgeoning urban and industrial landscapes. (source: The Whitney Museum).
Offered for Sale by: The Accidental Bookseller