The North Fork is the roughly sixty-mile-long spit of New York's Long Island that runs from Riverhead to Orient Point. With the fairly well protected Long Island Sound on the North and Peconic Bay on the South, it was a logical place for some of the earliest English immigrants to settle and build barns. It is still home to more working farms than any other part of the island. And from the timber-frame barns of the British farmers of the seventeenth century to the pole barns of the twentieth, the variety is stunning. In a survey sponsored by the Old House Society in Cutchogue, Mary Ann Spencer spent the last few years making a comprehensive inventory and photographing more than six hundred barns on the North Fork. Two hundred of them are still in use, although their fate is by no means certain. Here in their glory (and sometimes less than that) are the most interesting barns,which reveal, among other things, their functional development, their often haphazard fenestration, their soft patina of age, and their fit in the landscape. Spencer's complete survey forms a second part of this book, which provokes feelings of nostalgia and raises our fears for the future of these wonderful structures. More than 150 color photographs.

Barns of the North Fork

Mary Ann Spencer

Literature & Fiction

Quantuck Lane

Here are more than a hundred wonderful and sensitive duotone portraits of our major novelists, poets, and playwrights. Paired with the photographs are fascinating texts from each writer on writing—thoughts on the craft, recollections of significant moments from their personal history, meditations on the civic importance of writing, and so forth. Some of these photographs are well known—Bellow, Mailer, Cheever, and Capote—and others have never before been published. Many were taken on location, from Muriel Spark in Tuscany and James Baldwin in Provence to Gabriel Garcia Marquez in Mexico City. All are strikingly fresh and authentic. The pithy and idiosyncratic thoughts on writing are a perfect complement to the superb portraits; often words and pictures seem to exist in a magical rapport. For all of us who care about the American literary scene, Nancy Crampton's gift is an intimate look at our literary heroes, our Writers. 104 duotone photographs.

Writers: Photographs

Arts & Photography

Mark Strand

Nancy Crampton

Individual Artists

The beauty and simplicity of the enchanted land as it was for hundreds of years. "Greece has changed dramatically since Robert McCabe made the pictures collected in this book, some of them fifty years ago. Certain viewers— especially those who were also there at that time—might find McCabe's photographs elegiac. This is the Greece they too remember, glazed in dazzling sunlight and now gone. To me, however, the principal sensation they convey is pleasure…" Andrew Szegedy-Maszak Robert McCabe first visited Greece in 1954 while an undergraduate at Princeton University. He returned in 1955 and 1957 via freighter from the U.S., travelling extensively in the Aegean and documenting a way of life that today has all but vanished. This stunning collection of 116 iconic photographs covers four areas: History, People, the Seas, and Orthodoxy. Introductory texts by Yale classics professor Andrew Szegedy-Maszak, archaeologist John Camp, and Greek mythology expert Edmund Keeley are presented in both Greek and English. The 116 photographs, made with a Rolleiflex and Plus-X film, are beautifully reproduced here in sumptuous tritone.

Greece: Images of an Enchanted Land, 1954-1965

McCabe, Robert

A 10th-generation native of New Jersey, renowned photographer George Tice began his thirty-year documentation of the vernacular architecture of his home state with Paterson in 1972, which formed part of his acclaimed one-man show at Metropolitan Museum of Art. His most iconic images from this exploration are White Castle, Route 1, Rahway, N.J., and Petit's Mobil Station, Cherry Hill, N.J. In Paterson II, Tice revisits his source of inspiration, adding scores of new images, and making an eloquent statement about time and change in a small Northeastern city. 77 quadratone photographs.

Paterson II

Tice, George

Books are man-made artifacts designed to convey information. When they are inevitably invaded by forces of nature and decay, they become suggestive of an alternative literary universe. Noted photographer and collage artist Rosamond Purcell has been exploring this universe for the past thirty years, and in this extraordinarily beautiful collection, the first retrospective of her work, her images teach us to read in a new way. Here are two conjoined volumes transformed by a nesting mouse into a heap of disrupted plot and straw; a 19th century French economics text re-interpreted by foraging termites, and many other oddities from a fertile imagination. Bookworm's 125 color reproductions are imaginative evidence of those processes that render literal meaning irrelevant.

Bookworm: The Art of Rosamond Purcell

Purcell, Rosamond

History & Criticism

"Rathbone nails down a little bit of the Scottish soul in all its stark splendor."—New York Times Book Review This memoir offers an American woman's uniquely privileged view into the pastoral Scotland of today. By turns funny, heartwarming, and occasionally sad, it is the author's account of her marriage to a Scottish landowner and of the years they spent together at "The Guynd," his large ancestral estate. We follow her steep learning curve in dealing with a grand and crumbling mansion still recovering from the effects of two World Wars, as well as an overgrown landscape, a derelict garden, troublesome tenants, local aristocracy, Scottish rituals, and a husband for whom change is anathema. A son and heir draws the author into an intimate relationship with every tier of the local society, while a visiting American friend heightens the strain of the ever-present culture gap. Alternating between enchantment and despair, Rathbone digs into family and local history in an effort to understand her surroundings and free her husband from the grip of the past. Like a letter home from a strange land, this book offers a view of Scotland not found in the guide books. The tale of the journey through the wrought iron gates and up the long tree-lined drive into the living past is both wry and poignant, both oddball and deeply reflective of the ties that bind us.

The Guynd: A Scottish Journal

Rathbone, Belinda

History

More than a hundred wonderful and sensitive duotone portraits of our major novelists, poets, and playwrights. Paired with the photographs are fascinating texts from each writer on writing-thoughts on the craft, recollections of significant moments from their personal history, meditations on the civic importance of writing, and so forth. Some of the photographs in this treasure trove are already well known-Bellow, Mailer, Cheever, Wolfe, Singer, and Capote, to name a few. Others have never before been published. Many were taken on location, from Tom Stoppard in London and James Baldwin in Provence to Gabríel Garcia Márquez in Mexico City-one of ten Nobel Prize winners in the book. Closer to home, we have Eudora Welty in Jackson, Nelson Algren in Chicago, Philip Roth and Maurice Sendak in rural Connecticut, Anne Sexton and John Updike near Boston, Walker Percy in Louisiana, Christopher Isherwood in Santa Monica, Annie Proulx in Wyoming, and several writers in the Hamptons. Whatever the setting, the images are strikingly fresh and authentic. The pithy and idiosyncratic thoughts on writing are a perfect complement to the superb portraits; often words and pictures seem to exist in a magical rapport. For all of us who care about the American literary scene, Nancy Crampton's intimate look at our literary heroes, our Writers, is a gift. 104 duotone photographs.

Writers: Photographs by Nancy Crampton

Crampton, Nancy

"The Oak Behind the House is the quintessential book for King. It represents a cherished natural place, and the human station in the greater world. Though its subject may be an insentient being, a personality emerges, so intensely observed that the suite can be characterized as portraiture."—from the Introduction by David Acton This is a poignant photographic memorial to the magnificent Northern Red Oak that presided over B.A. King's family home in Southborough, Massachusetts. Almost 400 years old, the oak became a wise and comforting touchstone for the lives that grew up beneath its low, welcoming branches. Compiled from over thirty years of photographs taken at all times of day, in all kinds of weather, this book is testament to the tree's rich role in the rituals of family life—marriages, lazy afternoons, children at play—carried out in and around the majestic oak. Lovely and elegiac, this book is a powerful meditation on transcience and inheritance revealed through the deep connection between a family and the surrounding natural world. 55 tritone photographs.

The Oak Behind the House

King, B. A.

A classic small celebration and meditation on dice through the ages; both brilliant and beautiful. "Jay's writing is exactly what one would expect from the extremely erudite, witty and decent author of Learned Pigs &amp; Fireproof Women and Jay's Journal of Anomalies. There is an explanation of the etymology of "craps," and there are various tales of armless dicers, ingenious hustlers, and Scandinavian kings of the Middle Ages who diced for islands. Dice turn out to be rich subjects for Purcell's photography. She presents them as, in a way, monumental ruins on a Stonehenge-type of scale relative to the book. Their forms are enriched by their disintegration and are bathed in light that their varying translucence seems to contain for a moment before releasing it to the lens . . . The book itself is, like a die, a modest object, small for a book of photography and, with a short text, casually organized."—Crispin Sartwell, Los Angeles Times 21 color photographs.

Dice: Deception, Fate & Rotten Luck

JAY, Ricky

Photography & Video

These photographs were taken in the early 1970s for a book on sexual love. At a time when people were jailed for depicting acts of intimacy, artist and photographer Arnold Skolnick made some of the most memorable and erotic images of the twentieth century, many far too sophisticated for the book for which they were taken. Of the few that were exhibited at the time, a critic wrote: "These photos give the forms of two people making love the grandeur and power of sculpture. One is, of course, reminded of Rodin." With good reason not to promote them, Skolnick stored the negatives and contact sheets away for over thirty years, but he did not forget them. Now, having reached his seventieth birthday, Skolnick has gone back to the work, to produce an extraordinarily beautiful lovesong—a lush and highly sensual celebration of the union of man and woman. LoveSong features fifty-five stunning tritone images, printed in Italy, and is bound in full satin, with a satin slipcase. 55 tritone photographs.

LoveSong: The Erotic Photographs of Arnold Skolnick

Skolnick, Arnold

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