Johnson Rare Books & Archives
Specializing in Literature, Poetry, California and the West, Travel and Exploration, Archives and Ephemera, Heavy Metal
About
Established in 1981, Johnson Rare Books & Archives offers a vast array of materials, with specialties in literature and poetry, California and the West, archives and archival material, vernacular photography, and heavy metal. Our bricks and mortar location in downtown Covina, The Book Shop, is about 20 miles east of Los Angeles. The shop is open three days a week and houses an inventory of some 30,000 titles, ranging from the general second-hand to the truly antiquarian.Appraisals
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The Book Shop is pleased to offer a unique selection of culinary and mixology material. Highlights include an extensive early 20th century holographic cookbook, a Space Race-era educational piece on a different sort of rocket fuel (coffee), and a shipboard menu that is, well, bananas.
Scholars have long recognized the link between games and learning. In this catalog we offer a wide variety of modern American board games that are unified by a common theme - they all carry some type of social commentary. Whether it was by accident or by design, these games are a reflection of cultural anxieties and changing social mores.
Letters, scrapbooks, diaries, photo albums and ephemera from the past are a gift from prior generations to the future. In history books and memoirs, we can read about important events, memorize dates and learn about the principle players. But to understand how it felt to live at a significant time and how it affected people of that time and place, their own accounts are the vehicle that will transport us.
A selection of 35 volumes of poetry and verse. Highlights include a copy of Anne Sexton’s To Bedlam and Part Way Back that belonged to her confidant and lover, the psychiatrist Anne Wilder; the exquisite fine press printing of B.H. Fairchild’s poem Beauty by The Blackbird Press; a presentation copy of Robert Pinsky’s The Figured Wheel, inscribed to Farrar Straus, and Giroux publisher Jonathan Galassi; and the exceedingly scarce first book by Stella Knight Ruess, mother of the writer, artist, and explorer Everett Ruess and an accomplished poet and artist in her own right.
Each of the books on this list come from the personal library of American computer pioneer Willis Ware (1920-2013). Some have his bookplate to the front pastedown, others may include an inscription or have items laid in that help further illuminate the advanced thinking of this leader in the technological revolution. In the late 1940s, Ware helped John von Neumann build a machine that would become a blueprint for computer design in the 20th century, and later played an important role in defining the importance of personal privacy in the information age.
a selection of books, zines, vinyl, demos, photographs, fashion, posters, flyers, and other material documenting the history, influence, and enduring appeal of heavy metal over the past fifty years