Photographs by Man Ray: 105 Works

Man Ray

Man Ray’s best-known works from 1920 to 1934, some created by experimental means. Arriving in Paris in 1921 and with his artistic vision rooted in Dada and Surrealism, the American photographer experimented with various techniques such as shooting through different fabrics and superimposing images. In his own words, “the removal of inculcated modes of presentation, resulting in an apparent artificiality of strangeness, is a confirmation of the free functioning of this automatism and is to be welcomed.” DW

Publisher: Dover
Paperback: 128 pages
Illustrated

The Secret Life of Salvador Dali

Salvador Dali

Early autobiography filled with flamboyance and lathered with self-praise from the master himself. Dali’s tongue runs on with lucidity for 400 pages. Humbling but also wearing, it will enlighten those who may believe Dali was only a painter. Exposes his brilliance not just as an artist but in his understanding of victimization and its shocking repercussions. OAA

Publisher: Dover
Paperback: 400 pages
Illustrated

Une Semaine de Bonté: A Surrealistic Novel in Collage

Max Ernst

Eroticism and tragedy are the prevailing moods in this collage “novel” (all images, no text) by Max Ernst. Ernst was one of the founders of Dada in Zurich (he later became a Surrealist) and is recognized as one of the greatest of collage artists. A vague storyline emerges as page after page of bizarre imagery display many levels of emotion and angst through collage. The book, whose title means “week of kindness,” has seven chapters (one for every day of the week), each with a loose theme. The publisher suggests that Paul Eluard’s first “visible poem” could be the motto for the entire book: “I object to the love of readymade images in place of images to be made.” DW

Publisher: Dover
Paperback: 208 pages
Illustrated

Ecce Homo

Friedrich Nietzsche

Late in 1888, only weeks before his mental collapse, Nietzsche set out “with a cynicism which will become world-historic” to narrate his own story.

Publisher: Dover
Paperback: 144 pages

London Labour and the London Poor: Volume 2

Henry Mayhew

Extraordinary document of Victorian London, told from the bottom up, by a literary gadfly and one-time editor of Punch, the British humor magazine. “The image of London that emerges from Mayhew’s pages is that of a vast, ingeniously balanced mechanism in which each class subsists on the drippings and droppings of the stratum above, all the way from the rich, whom we scarcely glimpse, down to the deformed and starving, whom we see groping for bits of salvageable bone or decaying vegetables in the markets. Such extreme conditions bred weird extremities of adaption, a remarkably diverse yet cohesive subculture of poverty. Ragged, fantastic armies, each with its distinctive jargon and implements, roamed the streets: ‘pure-finders’ with bucket and glove, picking up dog dung and selling it to tanners; rag-gatherers, themselves dressed in the rotted cloth they salvaged, armed with pointed sticks; bent, slime-soiled ‘mud-larks,’ groping at low tide in the ooze of the Thames for bits of coal, chips of wood, or copper nails dropped from the sheathing of barges… The rapid, wrenching industrialization of England (London’s population trebled between 1800 and 1850) was breeding a new species of humanity, a rootless generation entirely environed by brick, smoke, work and want.” Hundreds of first-person narratives, told in the vernacular of the workers themselves. Puts Dickens to shame. GR

Publisher: Dover
Paperback: 494 pages
Illustrated

London Labour and the London Poor: Volume 3

Henry Mayhew

Extraordinary document of Victorian London, told from the bottom up, by a literary gadfly and one-time editor of Punch, the British humor magazine. “The image of London that emerges from Mayhew’s pages is that of a vast, ingeniously balanced mechanism in which each class subsists on the drippings and droppings of the stratum above, all the way from the rich, whom we scarcely glimpse, down to the deformed and starving, whom we see groping for bits of salvageable bone or decaying vegetables in the markets. Such extreme conditions bred weird extremities of adaption, a remarkably diverse yet cohesive subculture of poverty. Ragged, fantastic armies, each with its distinctive jargon and implements, roamed the streets: ‘pure-finders’ with bucket and glove, picking up dog dung and selling it to tanners; rag-gatherers, themselves dressed in the rotted cloth they salvaged, armed with pointed sticks; bent, slime-soiled ‘mud-larks,’ groping at low tide in the ooze of the Thames for bits of coal, chips of wood, or copper nails dropped from the sheathing of barges… The rapid, wrenching industrialization of England (London’s population trebled between 1800 and 1850) was breeding a new species of humanity, a rootless generation entirely environed by brick, smoke, work and want.” Hundreds of first-person narratives, told in the vernacular of the workers themselves. Puts Dickens to shame. GR

Publisher: Dover
Paperback: 494 pages
Illustrated

London Labour and the London Poor: Volume 4

Henry Mayhew

Extraordinary document of Victorian London, told from the bottom up, by a literary gadfly and one-time editor of Punch, the British humor magazine. “The image of London that emerges from Mayhew’s pages is that of a vast, ingeniously balanced mechanism in which each class subsists on the drippings and droppings of the stratum above, all the way from the rich, whom we scarcely glimpse, down to the deformed and starving, whom we see groping for bits of salvageable bone or decaying vegetables in the markets. Such extreme conditions bred weird extremities of adaption, a remarkably diverse yet cohesive subculture of poverty. Ragged, fantastic armies, each with its distinctive jargon and implements, roamed the streets: ‘pure-finders’ with bucket and glove, picking up dog dung and selling it to tanners; rag-gatherers, themselves dressed in the rotted cloth they salvaged, armed with pointed sticks; bent, slime-soiled ‘mud-larks,’ groping at low tide in the ooze of the Thames for bits of coal, chips of wood, or copper nails dropped from the sheathing of barges… The rapid, wrenching industrialization of England (London’s population trebled between 1800 and 1850) was breeding a new species of humanity, a rootless generation entirely environed by brick, smoke, work and want.” Hundreds of first-person narratives, told in the vernacular of the workers themselves. Puts Dickens to shame. GR

Publisher: Dover
Paperback: 494 pages