Available Copies from Independent Booksellers
Helen Levitt, James Agee. A Way of Seeing. The Viking Press, 1965.
Price: US$42.00 + shipping
Condition: Good
Description: Special Museum of Modern Art Edition. Shelf wear. Spots on the front cover. Cover has wear at the edges, heavier on the back edges, which also have small folds. Price sticker on inside cover. Inscription on the fly page. Inside pages are clean. Binding intact.
Seller: FriendsFPL, Falmouth, MA, U.S.A.
Price: US$125.00 + shipping
Condition: Poor
Description: Special Museum of Modern Art Edition. Spine is worn. Cover separated from text block. 78 pages.
Seller: Yes Books, portland, ME, U.S.A.
Price: US$199.50 + shipping
Condition: Very Good
Description: Very good paperback. FIRST EDITION THUS. Pages are clean and unmarked. Minimal foxing. Covers show very light edge wear.; 100% Satisfaction Guaranteed! Ships same or next business day!
Seller: Redux Books, Grand Rapids, MI, U.S.A.
Levitt, Helen, James Agee. A Way of Seeing. The Viking Press, 1965.
Price: US$200.00 + shipping
Condition: Very Good
Description: Illustrated wraps. Oblong 8vo. First edition. Special Museum of Modern Art edition. Very good +. Minor edge wear. Rear wrapper lightly rubbed. Illustrated with black & white photographic illustrations of New York by Helen Levitt. Essay by James Agee.
Seller: David Morrison Books, Portland, OR, U.S.A.
Price: US$200.00 + shipping
Description: Softcover, 78 pages; good condition; front cover has large coffee ring stains; 1-inch crease to lower right corner of front cover; light rubbing to covers; moderate edgewear to spine; part of old price sticker on inside front cover; owner's name crossed out on first blank page; no other internal marks. Foreign shipping may be extra.
Seller: ANARTIST, New York, NY, U.S.A.
LEVITT, Helen and James Agee. A Way Of Seeing. The Viking Press, New York, 1965.
Price: US$250.00 + shipping
Description: First edition. Oblong softcover. Simultaneous special Museum of Modern Art issue. The first book to collect fifty of Levitt's classic black and white street photographs. Includes James Agee's terrific posthumous essay. A very near fine copy in wrappers. A lovely copy of what is widely considered one of the best photo books of the 20th century. (Parr & Badger, v1 252-253: Roth 178-179).
Seller: Jeff Hirsch Books, ABAA, Wadsworth, IL, U.S.A.
Price: US$750.00 + shipping
Description: A near fine copy bound in finely woven black oblong cloth boards stamped brightly in white lettering on the front boards and along the spine. Very lean and tight throughout with 50 numbered black and white photographs by Helen Levitt. In a splendid, crisp striking dust jacket with Levitts photograph of 4 boys on the front panel and on the spine. With just a touch of wear to the bottom of the spine ends and some tiny chipping to the top edges. The jacket is price-clipped at the top right-hand corner of the front flap. A beautiful, collectors copy of this iconic photographic work with the James Agee essay which frames the photographs. Publishers Note: "Helen Levitt took most of the photographs in this book in the 1940s in the streets of what is now Spanish Harlem; James Agees essay was written in the late 1940s, when he and Helen Levitt planned this book, and remained unpublished at his death in 1955. The photographs following page 8 are arranged in a numbered sequence suggested by the essay, and the form in which pictures and text are being presented corresponds as closely as possible to the writers and the photographers original intentions for the book." "Helen Levitt was the first American photographer to fully comprehend the essence of Henri Cartier-Bresson's photographic message and put it into practice. Like Cartier-Bresson, she understood how to combine intuition and intellect to forge sophisticated, lyrical compositions from commonplace events" (New York Times). According to ArtForum, "Levitt may well be the most celebrated and least known photographer of her time." "Though it did not see print until 1965, A Way of Seeing, Helen Levitt's first published collection of photographs was essentially completed in 1948. All the pictures in it had been taken over the previous decade in the streets of Yorkville, Harlem, and the Lower East Side, and many of them had already been on exhibit at the Museum of Modern Art. James Agee, dead ten years in 1965, had written his essay for the book in 1946 Although Agee may not have been the first writer to apply the word lyrical to Levitt's marvelously serendipitous images of urban street theater, his essay was for some time their most persuasive critical frame. In this edition, his text literally brackets the 50 photos, which are arranged in an episodic montage-bleak, antic, poignant; sometimes melodramatic, often comic-at once suggestively narrative and as ephemeral as a passing glance" (Roth, 178). First Edition with "First Published in 1965 by the Viking Press" on the copyright page; no subsequent printings listed.
Seller: Brainerd Phillipson Rare Books, Holliston, MA, U.S.A.