20th

This charming binder served as the exhibition catalog for Man Ray’s second show at the Hanover Gallery in London (April-May 1969). The exhibition featured mid-career painting and sculpture from the 1940s and 50s, with clear stylistic references to Man Ray’s peers, such as De Chirico, Picabia, and Kandinsky. The metal ring binder is polished aluminum, silk-screened in bright red. The yellow-bordered pages include an essay by Man Ray, 17 illustrations (7 in full color), and a checklist.

In the early 1900s, wood sculptures from Africa (long regarded as curios in the West) suddenly caught the attention of Picasso and other artists who were intrigued by the stylized treatment—simple yet powerful—of human and animal figures. Their experiments with this “new aesthetic” announced the beginning of Modernism, the shift from realism to increasing abstraction.

In the lead up to 1963’s March on Washington, several of the decade’s most prominent African American artists joined together in a collective called Spiral. Their efforts culminated in a two-day exhibition in June of 1965. This catalogue is the record of that exhibition; it features an illustrated checklist with works from Romare Bearden, Norman Lewis, and more, as well as a complete list of the collective’s members.

This multiple was created by George Maciunas, ostensible leader of the avant-garde movement Fluxus, in conjunction with Yoko Ono’s 1971 retrospective This is Not Here at the Everson Museum of Art in Syracuse, NY. Yoko Ono, artist, peace activist, and widow of John Lennon has used smiles as a recurring theme since the 1960s. "It is the simplest thing to make yourself healthy and make others feel good," she says about smiling.

This seemingly insignificant, slim volume is the catalog for a groundbreaking exhibition curated by Sam Wagstaff at the Detroit Institute of Arts. A renowned curator and collector, Wagstaff is best known as the benefactor of photographer Robert Mapplethorpe and poet-musician Patti Smith.

The Expedition Citroën crossed Africa (from October 1924 to June 1925) to establish a reliable automobile link between French territories in West Africa and Madagascar. Tourists, businessmen, and government officials would be able to travel in comfort, riding in Citroën’s new half-track vehicles and lodging in specially built, rather luxurious accommodations. The sixty-three photographs included in this volume are invaluable records of people, customs, and dwellings seen along the way.  The most iconic image is the head elongation and elaborate coiffure of the Mangbetu woman.

On August 31, 1962, Fannie Lou Hamer rode a bus with 17 other African Americans from her hometown of Ruleville to Indianola, Mississippi to register to vote. She was refused her legal right to register. When she returned home, she was fired by her employer and her family was thrown off the land where they had been sharecroppers. This injustice lit a fire inside Mrs. Hamer and put her on a path to becoming an important leader for the Civil Rights Movement in the South. This book tells the life story of this strong, indomitable woman who marched with Dr.

This is a large, thin book with vivid black and white photos throughout. As a young Washington Post reporter covering jazz during the 1930s through 1940s, the author William Gottlieb (1917-2006) took many pictures of Louis Armstrong, Ella Fitzgerald, Billie Holiday, and Dizzy Gillespie.  Before he died, he willed for all his photographs to be put in the public domain. This was carried out four years after his death. The Golden Age of Jazz consists of more than two hundred photos and captions, which are visual thrills for jazz fans.

The author of this book, Arnold Shaw (1909–1989) was a songwriter, pianist, composer, and music publisher who wrote a dozen books on 20th century pop music, including two books on Frank Sinatra and a biography of African American pop sensation Harry Belafonte. He founded the Arnold Shaw Popular Music Research Center at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas in 1985 and taught there for a decade. This 600-page long guide to the history of R&B has eight parts, with seven chapters each. Those chapters are broken out into 25 sections each, which are called grooves.

Julius Rosenwald (1862–1932) was a businessman, billionaire and philanthropist. His net worth was $80M at death (equaling about $1.4B today).  He was half owner of Sears--he saved the company during the infamous financial panic of 1893--and he donated millions to educating African Americans in the South in the 1920s. He also donated to the Tuskegee Institute. In this biography, Mr. Ascoli paints a portrait of Julius Rosenwald, aka, "JR." This book, which was signed by the author, has 450 pages and features black and white photographs.

This copy of one of Jules Verne’s most celebrated adventure tales has an elusive past. With no publication date, an annotation on its inside cover dated ‘1925,’ and a blind stamp minted 1932 on the title page from the Institute of the Aeronautical Sciences, this book presents just as much wonder itself as the story it features. The Smithsonian Libraries Research Annex (SLRA) discovered that this copy of Verne’s work, among others, had been released by Chicago-based publisher M.A. Donohue in the early part of the Twentieth Century.

First published in 1942, Beryl Markham's "West with the Night," account of her expatriate life in Africa as a well-born English woman, horse trainer, and bush pilot was well received by critics, including Ernest Hemingway. She was the first woman to fly from Europe to North America solo in 1936. Her original book was re-published in the 1980s and was acclaimed by new readers who made it a best seller. This particular edition was published in 1989 and contains photographs and illustrations not in the original work.    

The eponymous “stubborn dirigible,” Zep, goes against orders during a flight in order to save his crew and passengers from a terrible storm in this children's book. In the wake of many zeppelin disasters in the 1930s—both in America and abroad—this book resists disaster and excites the young imaginations who looked to the sky for inspiration and adventure. Published by Rand McNally and Company in 1935, The Stubborn Dirigible was one of many children’s books released by the famous cartographic corporation.