Search Results: Titles starting with B from Langdon Manor Books LLC

[San Antonio, Texas?], 1970. Very good. 43" x 110". Cloth banner. Very good: some wear and light stains to edges; many creases from folding. This is a cloth banner that shouts, "Vigilia for Peace with Justice." It is three and half feet tall and over nine feet long. It is bright and vivid, featuring examples of Aztec art in the form of black and white shapes along one long border and a large color illustration of a bird. We obtained the banner from an estate in San Antonio, Texas, and were told that it had been used during a protest or march in that city. While we found digitized newspaper accounts of several possible events (most between 1967 and 1971), we can not be certain that this banner was used at any of them in particular. A striking example of what we believe to be a piece of Latino/a American history in San Antonio, worthy of further research.

[Louisville, Kentucky]: [Menelek Club], 1929. Good. Felt banner measuring 11" x 26½" at its tallest and widest. Good: patches of soiling and fading with a few small holes; lacking one tassel. This is a pennant for the Menelek Club of Louisville, an African American social club that began in 1926. According to an oral history given by an employee of the Louisville Leader, a weekly Black newspaper at the time, the club was named for Menelik, the claimed first Emperor of Ethiopia and son of King Solomon and the Queen of Sheba. The members were the city's Black leaders, professional and business men. They made charitable donations to the city and were active in civic affairs. We found only one mention of a Menelek club in a newspaper after 1929, but we believe that this 1932 article referenced a physical place and not the social club. Henry Allen was the founder and first president of the club. He and his wife Bessie were the first African American social workers in Louisville, and managed the… Read More

N.p.: N.p., 1908. Very good. 15 3/8" x 41¾". Printed on a coated, waxlike paper. Very good : a couple of tiny separations at intersections, small closed tear at another, 2" vertical separation at far upper left, a couple of small edge chips, some scattered pinpoints of soiling. A scarce map of San Francisco's waterfront, its southernmost edge shows a portion of Yuba Street and the far Northwest is a portion of Lewis Street. It also denotes the square footage of 27 labeled seawall lots. The map may have been created to assist its maker in evaluating a number of plans for building up the waterfront, as an application the Embarcadero waterfront entered into the National Register of Historic Places shows his regular involvement in those plans from 1908 onward. We locate only a digital copy at Berkeley.

New York, N.Y.: Forbud Books, Inc, 1966. Good. 5¼" x 7 1/8". Stapled wrappers. Pp. [45]. Good: wrappers heavily worn with moderate staining and some chipping; toned leaves with staining to edges of most. This is a rare and early gay-themed comic book, featuring "Batfag" and his sidekick "Sparrow." We have not been able to locate any secondary sources regarding it, save for an old listing on Worthpoint which stated that the book's author, Grayson Smith, was an alias for Don "Duck" Edwing. Edwing wrote and illustrated for MAD Magazine for nearly 50 years, including the famous "Spy vs. Spy" comic from 1987 to 2002. We were not able to corroborate the information in that listing. In this comic, Batfag was called upon by the police commissioner to stop "Jack the Snipper," the "anatomy separating menace before the entire male populus is walking around without their doozy dippers!!" Our hero sprung to action, vowing, "I've got to get over to that men's * drool * steam-bath fast - and save all those… Read More

Michigan, 1982. Very good. 15" x 12". Full leather post binder. 128 pages with 423 photographs, 143 items of ephemera and a few dozen news clippings. Photos are in a range of sizes, most are in color and most are captioned. Album very good with light wear and lightly toned leaves; contents generally near fine or better. This is a massive scrapbook documenting international dance culture throughout the state of Michigan with an emphasis on belly dancing in the mid-1970s and early 1980s. It was compiled by Joan "Mikola" Burnham of Kalamazoo. Per the scrapbook, Joan was the wife of an attorney and started a small business around 1975, the Belly Dance Academy of Kalamazoo, (BDAK). While we don't know when Joan started in belly dancing, the book shows that when she decided to make a business of it, it took off immediately. Per the scrapbook, BDAK's first workshop was held March 13, 1976. That seminar also featured a famous dancer named "Süheyla" was held at a Kalamazoo YWCA and featured an Arab… Read More

[South Pacific?], 1945. Five watercolors and one pencil/colored pencil drawing measuring from 9½" x 6" to 10 7/8" x 14". The two largest paintings and the drawing are on artist board, the rest on paper. Generally very good plus or better; painting of men in jungle with small chip and a couple of small creases. This is a collection of six stunning scenes with little provenance. We acquired them from a picker in Michigan who purchased them from a dealer at a flea market. Three of the watercolors show Marines fighting on beaches in the South Pacific, one shows a group waist-deep in water slogging through the jungle and one is a peaceful beach scene showing men landing on shore in a raft. The pencil drawing is very different: it's a graphic cartoon of a marine, one hand with a knife, the other shooting a machine gun, surrounded by Japanese soldiers getting slaughtered while a plane overhead is on its way to crashing. It's the only one captioned on its verso, "Marine Regular 'Master Sgt. McGoik.'"… Read More

Washington, D.C.: Merchants' Printing Co., Printers, 1907. Very good. 6 7/8" x 4 3/8". Blue cloth, title gilt. Pp. ix, [2], 244 + two unnumbered pages of charts. Very good: covers a bit scuffed and stained; one page with penciled scrawl across three lines of text not affecting legibility; a few tiny creases and a bit of scattered stray ink. This is a book intended to assist with the study of the Bible, written by an African American minister and professor at Howard University, Sterling N. Brown. Sterling Nelson Brown was born to enslaved parents in East Tennessee in 1858. He graduated from Fisk College in 1885 and from the Oberlin Theological Seminary in 1888. Brown was a pastor in Washington, D.C. for 25 years, simultaneously serving as a Bible professor at Howard University. He resigned from the ministry in 1913 to work solely at Howard, teaching and directing the School of Religion's Department of Extension Work and Correspondence Study. He wrote an autobiography in 1924 and died in 1929.… Read More

[Bisbee, Arizona]: [F. A. McKinney], 1927. Very good. 9"x 8". Stapled self-wrappers. Pp. [16]. Very good: old vertical center fold to all leaves; some light dust soiling. This is a heavily illustrated land and tourism promotional for Bisbee in and around Bisbee, Arizona and its surrounding area. The book has 31 photographic images with highlights including a panoramic shot of Bisbee that stretches across the top half of the two center pages and a nearly half page panorama of the town of Warren. A few images show street scenes in Bisbee, while several depict camp, resort, and ranch sites in surrounding areas. The rear cover is dedicated to images of Sonora, Mexico, just seven miles across the border "over a good road, and no formalities to cross the line." One of the images depicts ten Mexican children (and swears they lined up in height order, "as shown, on their own accord") and another shows the Mexican Rural Guard. The text in the book describes places of interest such as "The Pit," an 18… Read More

Detroit, Michigan: Black Political Review, 1966. Very good. 11" x 8½". Stapled wrappers. pp. 28 + laid in leaf. Very good: top staple loosening, wrappers lightly dust soiled, moderate edge wear; laid in sheet with numerous small tears at right edge. This is the first issue of a periodical which documents a short-lived political movement by a young man who later married the author, Gayl Jones. Over time, he went insane and made nationwide news in 1998 when an article about Jones' latest book led to a standoff with police and his suicide. The founder of the movement, Robert C. Higgins, was born in Cleveland in 1947, abandoned at a young age by his mother, and raised by relatives and foster families in Detroit. One foster family was that of George Breitman, a strong supporter of Black nationalism, who was also a strong influence on Higgins. At the age of 19 Higgins founded an organization on the Wayne State campus called the "Black Political Study Group" ("BPSG"). According to a 1998 New York Times… Read More

[Xenia, Ohio?], 1918. Very good. 6¼" x 28". Blueprint. Very good with some creases and chips; rolled. This is a blueprint for a trolley guard that was invented and patented by Robert Dickenson, an African American from Ohio. While his wife raised their nine children in Xenia, he was almost always on the road trying to earn a living as a carpenter. His invention received patent number 1,314,130 in 1919. Its description in the Official Gazette of the United States Patent Office reads, [i]"the combination with a trolley wheel having flanges and a bearing therefor, of a pair of rotatable rollers mounted at opposite sides of said wheel and having semi-speherical upper portions and frusto-conical lower portions overlying and engaging the flanges of said wheel."[/i] In 1920, with four others, Dickenson formed The Dickenson Trolley Guard Manufacturing Company. Although the business was capitalized with $10,000, we can find no record of its manufacturing the guard. A rare artifact documenting an… Read More

Garden City, New York: Doubleday, Page & Company, 1916. Good. 9½" x 6¼". Green cloth over boards, t.e.g. Pp. xx, 331 + author frontispiece + 15 (of 15) unnumbered plates interspersed + laid in two page circular letter. Good: Julius Rosenwald gift bookplate on FFEP; hinges cracked; covers moderately soiled; a few leaves adhered together; scattered spotting, tears and edge wear. Owner signature in two spots. This is a reasonably common book made special by its history of ownership and association. The book, a biography of Booker T. Washington, was co-written by Emmett Jay Scott, Washington's personal secretary, key adviser and Secretary of the Tuskegee Institute, and Lyman Beecher Stowe, grandson and biographer of Harriet Beecher Stowe. It has a foreword by Robert Moton, Principal of Tuskegee Institute, and a preface by President Theodore Roosevelt. This copy features two signatures of its owner, Mrs. Nellie Lee Elmore. Elmore, a graduate of Tuskegee Institute, was a teacher and supervisor of… Read More

[Atlanta, Georgia]: (Eugene Talmadge Campaign?), 1946. Very good +. 14¾" x 8¼". Broadside. Very good plus with minimal wear and folded horizontally at center. This is an ugly reminder of the 1946 Georgia Gubernatorial primary which saw the disenfranchisement of thousands of African Americans--more than enough to sway that election. Earlier in 1946, the Georgia Democratic party's use of a white primary was struck down as unconstitutional. While four people ran in this primary, the race was mostly between Eugene Talmadge, a former two-term governor and staunch segregationist, and James V. Carmichael. Carmichael was a businessman who was seen as a progressive reformer and he had strong support among African American voters. The primary that year was held July 17, 1946. According to Joseph L. Bernd, in "White Supremacy and the Disfranchisement of Blacks in Georgia, 1946." (The Georgia Historical Quarterly, vol. 66, no. 4, 1982, pp. 492-513. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/40580970. Accessed 16 Apr.… Read More

Xenia, Ohio: N. P., 1927. Good. 11" x 13¾". Broadside on thick card, printed recto only. Good: three heavy creases from vertical folds; two inch tear at center crease; moderate staining and discoloration at extremities. This is a broadside for a "Musicale" performance held in 1927 at the St. John's A. M. E. church in Xenia, Ohio. Professor William A. Sykes, pianist/organist, chorus director and head of the Conservatory of Music at Wilberforce University, served as accompanist for lyric tenor James S. Lucas and baritone Siljaum Earl Bauchamp (which was likely a typo for "Beauchamp"). Though the hometowns of the vocalists were listed on the broadside (New York City and Detroit, Michigan, respectively), Lucas and Beauchamp were soloists in the Wilberforce men's chorus. Professor Sykes had a long career in music education and performance, previously serving as Director of the Haven Conservatory of Music (part of an HBCU in Meridian, Mississippi) and as Music Director at Bennett College (an HBCU for… Read More

[Washington, D.C.]: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1945. Poster. Near fine: folded as issued, 1/8" tear in upper and lower left margins and one pinpoint separation at intersection. An World War II government poster which uncommonly features an African American. It encourages the purchase of war bonds, with an image of Booker T. Washington, along with his quote, "Without vision there is no hope. Protect your country...and your future." OCLC locates four holdings over two entries, internet searches reveal another two. This item is offered by Langdon Manor Books, LLC, antiquarian booksellers. Please do not hesitate to contact us for additional information and/or photos and we will respond promptly. We package our items carefully, ship daily, and have a no hassle returns policy--your satisfaction is guaranteed. We are members of the Antiquarian Booksellers' Association of America (ABAA), the International League of Antiquarian Booksllers (ILAB) and the Independent Online Booksellers Association… Read More

South Bend, Indiana, 1938. Full limp leather bound with rivets. 32 pages with 76 black and white photographs hing mounted, several to a page, vertically overlapping. Most photos measure 2¾" x 4 ½" and most are captioned in small typescripts that are scotch taped to the pages. Album very good with moderate wear and scuffing; internally near fine or better. A working realtor's album highlighting his listings in Indiana, Illinois and Michigan. His highlights may not have been entirely accurate as we note that a commercial realtor named Rufus W. Smith in South Bend, Indiana was found in 1933 to be engaged in the sale of real estate without a license while participating in a fraudulent land deal. One listing is for a huge mixed use building that contained 22 apartments, 12 stores and four offices. The photographs for this and another commercial building provide fantastic street level views with lots of business signage. The book also has several listings for farms, including one with 304 acres and a… Read More