The Golden Flea: A Story of Obsession and Collecting

The Golden Flea: A Story of Obsession and Collecting PDF Author: Michael Rips
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 1324004088
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 224

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Book Description
A lovable oddball cast of characters is at the heart of this treasure-hunt through the last days of one of the greatest flea markets on earth. "[Rips] has humanity, humor and the gift of a limpid, agile, unpretentious prose style.… A captivating portrait.”—Ben Downing, Wall Street Journal Across America and around the world, people wander through flea markets to search for lost treasures. For decades, no such market was more renowned than the legendary Chelsea flea market, which sprawled over several blocks and within an old garage on the west side of Manhattan. Visitors would trawl through booths crammed with vintage dresses, rare books, ancient swords, glass eyeballs, Afghan rugs, West African fetish dolls, Old Master paintings, and much more. In The Golden Flea, the acclaimed writer Michael Rips takes readers on a trip through this charmed world. With a beguiling style that has won praise from Joan Didion and Susan Orlean, Rips recounts his obsession with the flea and its treasures and provides a fascinating account of the business of buying and selling antiques. Along the way, he introduces us to the flea’s lovable oddball cast of vendors, pickers, and collectors, including a haberdasher who only sells to those he deems worthy; an art dealer whose obscure paintings often go for enormous sums; a troubadour who sings to attract customers; and the Prophet, who finds wisdom among all the treasures and trash. As Rips’s passion for collecting grows and the flea’s last days loom, he undertakes a quest to prove the provenance of a mysterious painting that just might be the one.

The Golden Flea: A Story of Obsession and Collecting

The Golden Flea: A Story of Obsession and Collecting PDF Author: Michael Rips
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 1324004088
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 224

Get Book

Book Description
A lovable oddball cast of characters is at the heart of this treasure-hunt through the last days of one of the greatest flea markets on earth. "[Rips] has humanity, humor and the gift of a limpid, agile, unpretentious prose style.… A captivating portrait.”—Ben Downing, Wall Street Journal Across America and around the world, people wander through flea markets to search for lost treasures. For decades, no such market was more renowned than the legendary Chelsea flea market, which sprawled over several blocks and within an old garage on the west side of Manhattan. Visitors would trawl through booths crammed with vintage dresses, rare books, ancient swords, glass eyeballs, Afghan rugs, West African fetish dolls, Old Master paintings, and much more. In The Golden Flea, the acclaimed writer Michael Rips takes readers on a trip through this charmed world. With a beguiling style that has won praise from Joan Didion and Susan Orlean, Rips recounts his obsession with the flea and its treasures and provides a fascinating account of the business of buying and selling antiques. Along the way, he introduces us to the flea’s lovable oddball cast of vendors, pickers, and collectors, including a haberdasher who only sells to those he deems worthy; an art dealer whose obscure paintings often go for enormous sums; a troubadour who sings to attract customers; and the Prophet, who finds wisdom among all the treasures and trash. As Rips’s passion for collecting grows and the flea’s last days loom, he undertakes a quest to prove the provenance of a mysterious painting that just might be the one.

Dust & Grooves

Dust & Grooves PDF Author: Eilon Paz
Publisher: Ten Speed Press
ISBN: 1607748703
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 428

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Book Description
A photographic look into the world of vinyl record collectors—including Questlove—in the most intimate of environments—their record rooms. Compelling photographic essays from photographer Eilon Paz are paired with in-depth and insightful interviews to illustrate what motivates these collectors to keep digging for more records. The reader gets an up close and personal look at a variety of well-known vinyl champions, including Gilles Peterson and King Britt, as well as a glimpse into the collections of known and unknown DJs, producers, record dealers, and everyday enthusiasts. Driven by his love for vinyl records, Paz takes us on a five-year journey unearthing the very soul of the vinyl community.

The Golden Flea

The Golden Flea PDF Author: Michael Rips
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781911547761
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 224

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Book Description
The captivating story of Manhattan's legendary Chelsea Flea Market.

Dig

Dig PDF Author: A.S. King
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 1101994924
Category : Young Adult Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 402

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Book Description
Winner of the Michael L. Printz Medal ★“King’s narrative concerns are racism, patriarchy, colonialism, white privilege, and the ingrained systems that perpetuate them. . . . [Dig] will speak profoundly to a generation of young people who are waking up to the societal sins of the past and working toward a more equitable future.”—Horn Book, starred review “I’ve never understood white people who can’t admit they’re white. I mean, white isn’t just a color. And maybe that’s the problem for them. White is a passport. It’s a ticket.” Five estranged cousins are lost in a maze of their family’s tangled secrets. Their grandparents, former potato farmers Gottfried and Marla Hemmings, managed to trade digging spuds for developing subdivisions and now they sit atop a million-dollar bank account—wealth they’ve refused to pass on to their adult children or their five teenage grandchildren. “Because we want them to thrive,” Marla always says. But for the Hemmings cousins, “thriving” feels a lot like slowly dying of a poison they started taking the moment they were born. As the rot beneath the surface of the Hemmings’ white suburban respectability destroys the family from within, the cousins find their ways back to one another, just in time to uncover the terrible cost of maintaining the family name. With her inimitable surrealism, award winner A.S. King exposes how a toxic culture of polite white supremacy tears a family apart and how one determined generation can dig its way out.

Retromania

Retromania PDF Author: Simon Reynolds
Publisher: Macmillan
ISBN: 0865479941
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 497

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Book Description
The influential rock critic and author of Rip It Up and Start Again traces society's obsession with retro music as reflected by reunion tours and expanded re-releases of classic albums, expressing his concern that our culture's disproportionate focus on past music eras is compromising the distinctiveness of today's sound. Original. 15,000 first printing.

Pasquale's Nose

Pasquale's Nose PDF Author: Michael Rips
Publisher: Little, Brown
ISBN: 0759524491
Category : Travel
Languages : en
Pages : 164

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Book Description
Everywhere hailed for its quirkiness, its hilarity, its charm, Pasquale's Nose tells the story of a New York City lawyer who runs away to a small Etruscan village with his wife and new baby, and discovers a community of true eccentrics -- warring bean growers, vanishing philosophers, a blind bootmaker, a porcupine hunter -- among whom he feels unexpectedly at home.

The Face of a Naked Lady

The Face of a Naked Lady PDF Author: Michael Rips
Publisher: HMH
ISBN: 0547975066
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 201

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Book Description
A son uncovers the remarkable secret life of his midwestern father—and his Nebraska city—in this “beguiling [and] deeply unusual” memoir (The Boston Sunday Globe). Nick Rips’s son had always known him as a conservative midwesterner, dedicated, affable, bland to the point of invisibility. Upon his father’s death, however, Michael Rips returned to his Omaha family home to discover a hidden portfolio of paintings—all done by his father, all of a naked black woman. His solid Republican father, Michael would eventually discover, had an interesting past and another side to his personality. Raised in one of Omaha’s most famous brothels, Nick had insisted on hiring a collection of social misfits to work in his eyeglass factory—and had once showed up in his son’s high school principal’s office in pajamas. As Michael searches for the woman in the paintings, he meets, among others, an African American detective who swears by the clairvoyant powers of a Mind Machine, a homeless man with five million dollars in the bank, an underwear auctioneer, and a flying trapeze artist on her last sublime ride. Ultimately, in his investigations through his Nebraska hometown, he will discover the mysterious woman—as well as a father he never knew, and a profound sense that all around us the miraculous permeates the everyday. “Writing with similar pain and urgency as Nick Flynn in Another Bullshit Night in Suck City and August Kleinzahler in Cutty, One Rock, Rips’ terse, flinty syntax perfectly embodies the hard-boiled nature of this nearly surreal true-life tale.” —Booklist “An amazing, beautiful book—a study of a certain family in a certain place at a certain time that gives us, in stunning shorthand, the reality of America.” —Joan Didion, author of The White Album “At once a lyrical family portrait, a philosophical inquiry, a bittersweet evocation of a lost time and place, and an enthralling domestic mystery.” —Susan Orlean, author of The Orchid Thief “Quirky, funny, moving, and immensely readable . . . a brilliantly observed story about place, family, and race in America.” —Randall Kennedy

The New Southern Style

The New Southern Style PDF Author: Alyssa Rosenheck
Publisher: Abrams
ISBN: 1647001757
Category : House & Home
Languages : en
Pages : 449

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Book Description
A vibrantly illustrated exploration of the creative, inclusive, and inspiring movement happening in today’s Southern interior design The American South is a place steeped in history and tradition. We think of sweet tea, thick drawls, and even thicker summer air. It is also a place with a fraught history, complicated social norms, and dated perspectives. Yet among the makers and artists of the South, there is a powerful movement afoot. Alyssa Rosenheck shines a much-needed spotlight on a burgeoning community of people who are taking what’s beloved, inherent, and honored in the South and making it their own. The New Southern Style tours more than 30 homes and includes interviews with the designers, artists, and creative entrepreneurs who are reinventing Southern design and culture. This beautifully illustrated book is sure to inspire the home and soul.

The Devil's Teeth

The Devil's Teeth PDF Author: Susan Casey
Publisher: Henry Holt and Company
ISBN: 1466800518
Category : Nature
Languages : en
Pages : 304

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Book Description
A journalist's obsession brings her to a remote island off the California coast, home to the world's most mysterious and fearsome predators--and the strange band of surfer-scientists who follow them Susan Casey was in her living room when she first saw the great white sharks of the Farallon Islands, their dark fins swirling around a small motorboat in a documentary. These sharks were the alphas among alphas, some longer than twenty feet, and there were too many to count; even more incredible, this congregation was taking place just twenty-seven miles off the coast of San Francisco. In a matter of months, Casey was being hoisted out of the early-winter swells on a crane, up a cliff face to the barren surface of Southeast Farallon Island-dubbed by sailors in the 1850s the "devil's teeth." There she joined Scot Anderson and Peter Pyle, the two biologists who bunk down during shark season each fall in the island's one habitable building, a haunted, 135-year-old house spackled with lichen and gull guano. Two days later, she got her first glimpse of the famous, terrifying jaws up close and she was instantly hooked; her fascination soon yielded to obsession-and an invitation to return for a full season. But as Casey readied herself for the eight-week stint, she had no way of preparing for what she would find among the dangerous, forgotten islands that have banished every campaign for civilization in the past two hundred years. The Devil's Teeth is a vivid dispatch from an otherworldly outpost, a story of crossing the boundary between society and an untamed place where humans are neither wanted nor needed.

Starstruck

Starstruck PDF Author: Ira M. Resnick
Publisher: National Geographic Books
ISBN: 0789210193
Category : Antiques & Collectibles
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
A one-of-a-kind collection of movie posters spanning fifty years, from silent films to Cinemascope For four decades film historian Ira M. Resnick has been amassing a superb collection of 2,000 vintage movie posters and 1,500 stills, which has never before been published. Starstruck: Vintage Movie Posters from Classic Hollywood features the best of Resnick’s collection, with vivid reproductions of 250 posters and forty stills from the golden age of Hollywood, 1912 to 1962. In a moving introduction, Resnick relates how his love of vintage movie art translated into a career as a collector and the founder of the Motion Picture Arts Gallery, the first gallery devoted exclusively to the art of the movies. Resnick’s firsthand account offers entertaining anecdotes about how he managed to acquire such stellar film artwork, as well as historical information about the stars and films shown on the pieces he collected. Guiding the reader through the best posters and stills of his collection, Resnick provides a tour of cinematic history, starting in the silent film era and continuing up to Breakfast at Tiffany’s (1961). By showcasing several posters for each performer—such as Lillian Gish, the Marx Brothers, Marilyn Monroe, John Barrymore, and Audrey Hepburn—Resnick offers a unique method of charting the evolution of each movie star’s career. Organizing his account both chronologically and thematically, in later chapters Resnick discusses some of Hollywood’s legendary directors and films, and critiques fantastic graphic art from little-known films. Bonus material includes a list of Resnick’s fifty favorite one-sheets, helpful tips for the collector, and a glossary of terms and poster sizes. A must-have book for every collector and film buff, Starstruck offers a beautifully illustrated, personal tour of a bygone age of the motion picture advertising industry.