Straus, Austin

(Lancaster, California): 2014. (Lancaster, California): 2014. 12mo, 18 leaves, loosely bound with string in painted boards, with an elastic band to secure closure. Fine. Item #204253

Painter, poet, broadcaster, and human rights activist Austin Straus has been producing unique handmade artist's books for several years. His book artwork is represented numerous libraries and museums. Already as a child he began experimenting with the simple technique of burning paper by focusing the sun's rays with a magnifying lens. Combining this method as a mode of drawing with colored papers, paints, text, and collage imagery, Straus creates rich, visually deep and complex books that act as intimate maps of his inner life. This one, including striking graphic collage elements and text fragments with allusions to pop culture, is a tribute to his wife the late poet Wanda Coleman. Price: $4,500.00

Straus, Austin

(Lancaster, California): 2012. (Lancaster, California): 2012. 8vo, 16 leaves of painted paper in painted boards. Fine. Item #204255

Painter, poet, broadcaster, and human rights activist Austin Straus has been producing unique handmade artist's books for several years. His book artwork is represented numerous libraries and museums. Each leaf of this book features the image of a face, with additional faces on pastedowns and front cover. A lively, inventive work recalling art brut and executed in Straus's trademark techniques of paint, collage, and literal burning through the painted pages. The title derives from a Yiddish word for "face" and the book is marked by dark humor. Price: $2,500.00

Straus, Austin

(Lancaster, California): 2012-2013. (Lancaster, California): 2012-2013. Small 4to, hand-drawn in a leather-bound, lined diary. Fine. Item #204256

Painter, poet, broadcaster, and human rights activist Austin Straus has been producing unique handmade artist's books for several years. His book artwotrk is represented in numerous libraries and museums. This example, executed entirely in pen and ink, using various colors, displays his remarkable focus and consistency. On each leaf, he has filled all the lines with imaginary writing, inventing language-like forms, gestures, symbols, and pictographs. Each invented "text" has its own distinctive character and style. A hypnotic, almost obsessive work of admirable rigor and elegance. Price: $1,500.00

Straus, Austin

(Lancaster, California): N.P. 2008. (Lancaster, California): N.P. 2008. 4to, 18 leaves, spiral bound in black boards with aluminum painted collage element affixed to front. Fine. Item #204627

Painter, poet, broadcaster, and human rights activist Austin Straus has been producing unique handmade artist's books for several years. His book artwork is represented in numerous libraries and museums. This book is easily his masterpiece: both sides of each leaf, as well as both pastedowns, is an elaborate collage incorporating the full range of his artistic techniques and vocabularies: text fragments, images, three-dimensional objects inlcuding jewelry, buttons, metallic fragments, toys, coins, watches, along with painting, calligraphic drawings, and his distinctive burning though painted pages by means of a magnifying glass. The resultant work is a complex, interlocking bookwork that invokes the entire history of art, from ancient incised tablets to post-pop assemblage and the media blitz of an atomized culture. Each page warrants close scrutiny and at the same time they are drawn into dialogue with each other through the burned holes that penetrate them, opening small windows between them. A work of extraordinary artistry and accomplishment.

Straus, Austin

(Lancaster, California): N.P. 2009. (Lancaster, California): N.P. 2009. 8vo, 30 leaves, spiral bound in painted black wrappers. Fine. Item #204628

Painter, poet, broadcaster, and human rights activist Austin Straus has been producing unique handmade artist's books for several years. His book artwork is represented in numerous libraries and museums. This book, as titled, consists of thirty indiviual collages, each approx. 5 X 7 inches, mounted to leaves of colored paper. The collages reflect the artist's expansive and restless vision and multifaceted visual vocabulary of texts, images, fragments, painting, calligraphy and found objects. A lively compendium, filled with surprises, humor, and deep feeling. Price: $6,250.00

Straus, Austin

(Lancaster, California): N.P. n.d. (2012). (Lancaster, California): N.P. n.d. (2012). 8vo, 94 leaves in painted wrappers. Corners turned slightly, fine. Item #204629

Painter, poet, broadcaster, and human rights activist Austin Straus has been producing unique handmade artist's books for several years. His book artwork is represented in numerous libraries and museums. Here he has produced a joyful, sprawling, series of painted, drawn, calligraphed, rubberstamped and surface-scratched pages using the word "Love" as a springboard setting his restless imagination into flight. The outcome is characteristically energetic and vivid, displaying a remarkable visual versatility. Price: $4,500.00

Straus, Austin

N.P. N.p. (1983-1988). N.P. N.p. (1983-1988). 12mo, 96 leaves in small antique boards, taped, with collaged title page, collaged fabric strengthening inner hinges. Some wear to extremities, probably predating assembly into current form. Item #204630

Painter, poet, broadcaster, and human rights activist Austin Straus has been producing unique handmade artist's books for several years. His book artwork is represented in numerous libraries and museums. An impressive, early sequence of collages showing influences of Schwitters and Rauschenberg and pointing to the playful dynamism that would mark his work in later years. Here, he has relied almost exclusively on torn-paper techniques, adapting each separate collage to the restrictions of the book's small format to produce a striking series of graphic gems. Price: $7,500.00

Straus, Austin

(Lancaster, California): N.p. 2012. (Lancaster, California): N.p. 2012. 12mo, 10 leaves, with collaged inside wrappers, spiral bound in painted and collaged wrappers. Fine. Item #204631

Painter, poet, broadcaster, and human rights activist Austin Straus has been producing unique handmade artist's books for several years. His book artwork is represented in numerous libraries and museums. This example is a wonderfully harmonious realization of his preferred range of techniques: fragments of text; collaged and drawn imagery, especially faces; found objects; paint; and literal burning of the paper, a means of drawing with light and heat that Straus executes by focussing sunlight with a magnifying lens. The book comprises a small series that is sure-footed and visually pleasing. Price: $3,750.00

Straus, Austin

(Lancaster, California): N.P. n.d. (Lancaster, California): N.P. n.d. 12mo, 16 leaves, in painted boards with an elastic band to secure closure. Fine. Item #204632

Painter, poet, broadcaster, and human rights activist Austin Straus has been producing unique handmade artist's books for several years. His book artwork is represented in numerous libraries and museums. Already as a child he began experimenting with the simple techinque of burning paper by focusing the sun's rays with a magnifying lens. As a mature artist, he uses this method as means of drawing, combining the graphic, incisive gestures of burning with layers of colored paper, painting, and collaged fragments of text and image. This a dark, sculptural work, evoking nighttime inner thoughts. Price: $4,500.00

Straus, Austin

(Lancaster, California): N.P. 2013. (Lancaster, California): N.P. 2013. 12mo, ten leaves, spiral bound in collaged black wrappers. Fine. Item #204633

Painter, poet, broadcaster, and human rights activist Austin Straus has been producing unique handmade artist's books for several years. His book artwork is represented in numerous libraries and museums. In this playful book, he employs a lively range of collage techniques inlcuding classic torn paper, burned papers, text fragments, bright plastic and glittering synthetic materials, all mounted on a series of brightly colored papers and resulting in an hyper-energetic and optimistic sequence. Price: $1,500.00

Straus, Austin

(Lancaster, California): N.P. 2015. (Lancaster, California): N.P. 2015. 12mo, 30 leaves of brightly colored paper, spiral bound in plasticized wrappers with clear plastic front cover. Fine. Item #204635

Painter, poet, broadcaster, and human rights activist Austin Straus has been producing unique handmade artist's books for several years. His book artwork is represented in numerous libraries and museums. Already as a child he began experimenting with the simple technique of burning paper by focusing the sun's rays with a magnifying lens. This work is characteristic of books he has produced as mature artist using the technique: a series of abstract, lace-like, and meditative pages in which the burned paper becomes a vehicle for the emergence of light, color, and an aura of delicate beauty. Price: $2,500.00

Pynchon, Thomas

New York: Henry Holt and Company, (1997). New York: Henry Holt and Company, (1997). First edition. Cloth-backed boards. Thick 8vo, 773pp; cloth-backed boards. A copy with numerous signs of having been read: corners of a few pages turned down, a bit of concavity to the spine, a few spots on foredge and light shelf-rubbing to lower board-edges and tips, otherwise near fine in dust jacket and printed plastic overlay, which were likely removed during reading and then replaced. Item #204187

With a signed inscription on the half-title page: "For Richard -- Thanks for the read! Thomas Pynchon." The recipient, a journalist and long-time admirer of the novelist, was present when Pynchon recorded his guest appearance on "The Simpsons," -- Simpsons creator Matt Groening was an old friend -- at which time he signed this book. Pynchon inscriptions have seldom been offered for sale. While more have surfaced in the past ten years than in the forty before then, his remains one of the very rarest of modern literary autographs. The only other Pynchon inscriptions recently on the market appear to have been done specifically for charitable purposes.

Wright, Frank Lloyd

New York: F. Schumacher Co. (1955). New York: F. Schumacher Co. (1955). First edition. Folio; bolt bound in tan cloth-covered boards, printed in orange and black. Tips bumped; dampstain affecting lower corners and touching some of the wallpaper sheets, but leaving the fabric samples unscathed; covers showing some marks. Item #204800

Original salesman's sample book from the collaboration between Wright and the Schumacher company. While Wright was on the whole resistant to the commercial exploitation of his designs, and generally disdainful of interior decorators ("inferior desecrators"), Elizabeth Gordon, the editor of a special Wright issue of "House Beautiful" magazine (November 1955), and Rene Carillo, Schumacher's merchandising executive,were able to persuade him to go ahead with this project despite his reluctance. The Schumacher company had done similar collaborations with other desginers, inlcuding Donald Deskey, Raymond Loewy, and Paul Poiret. Some of the designs here were produced by Schumacher's staff, under inspiration from Wright and with his approval; others were executed by Wright's own Taliesin West staff under his direct supervision. The sample book contains 13 large fabric swatches (seven woven and six printed), along with 125 small samples, and 26 sizeable wallpaper sheets, and 30 photographs of Wright buildings and interiors. The last page is a sheet of perforated order cards. Price: $3,200.00