A lovable oddball cast of characters is at the heart of this treasure-hunt through the last days of one of the greatest flea markets on earth. "[Rips] has humanity, humor and the gift of a limpid, agile, unpretentious prose style.… A captivating portrait.”—Ben Downing, Wall Street Journal Across America and around the world, people wander through flea markets to search for lost treasures. For decades, no such market was more renowned than the legendary Chelsea flea market, which sprawled over several blocks and within an old garage on the west side of Manhattan. Visitors would trawl through booths crammed with vintage dresses, rare books, ancient swords, glass eyeballs, Afghan rugs, West African fetish dolls, Old Master paintings, and much more. In The Golden Flea, the acclaimed writer Michael Rips takes readers on a trip through this charmed world. With a beguiling style that has won praise from Joan Didion and Susan Orlean, Rips recounts his obsession with the flea and its treasures and provides a fascinating account of the business of buying and selling antiques. Along the way, he introduces us to the flea’s lovable oddball cast of vendors, pickers, and collectors, including a haberdasher who only sells to those he deems worthy; an art dealer whose obscure paintings often go for enormous sums; a troubadour who sings to attract customers; and the Prophet, who finds wisdom among all the treasures and trash. As Rips’s passion for collecting grows and the flea’s last days loom, he undertakes a quest to prove the provenance of a mysterious painting that just might be the one.

The captivating story of Manhattan's legendary Chelsea Flea Market.

A photographic look into the world of vinyl record collectors—including Questlove—in the most intimate of environments—their record rooms. Compelling photographic essays from photographer Eilon Paz are paired with in-depth and insightful interviews to illustrate what motivates these collectors to keep digging for more records. The reader gets an up close and personal look at a variety of well-known vinyl champions, including Gilles Peterson and King Britt, as well as a glimpse into the collections of known and unknown DJs, producers, record dealers, and everyday enthusiasts. Driven by his love for vinyl records, Paz takes us on a five-year journey unearthing the very soul of the vinyl community.

A refreshing antidote to the saccharine charms of Peter Mayle's A Year in Provence and Frances Mayes' Under the Tuscan Sun, this is the quirky and hilarious memoir of a criminal lawyer who gives up his New York practise to spend a year in the Etruscan town of Sutri, near Rome, where he moves - reluctantly - with his artist wife and baby. Himself something of an eccentric from a bizarre Nebraskan family, he has spent his adult life living in hotels; and in Sutri, he heads straight for the caf- in the main square. From there he observes the baroque events of small-town life, conjures up a cast of Italian eccentrics (including Pasquale and his hypersensitive organ of smell), and relishes the weirdness and the wonder of Sutri's history, folklore, architecture and above all its food - particularly the notorious 'fagioli regina' (beans in a tomato and pig skin sauce) and the annual Bean Festival. Part of the delight of reading this memoir is that it not only evokes the sights and smells of an ancient and little-known town in Southern Italy, and brings its people to extraordinary life, but it also reveals the irresistible foibles and philosophy of a talented and unusual mind. Funny, philosophical and surprisingly moving, this is the story of how a rootless American finds home in the most unexpected places and how Pasquale and his compatriots put life into perspective in the strangest way.

A vibrantly illustrated exploration of the creative, inclusive, and inspiring movement happening in today’s Southern interior design The American South is a place steeped in history and tradition. We think of sweet tea, thick drawls, and even thicker summer air. It is also a place with a fraught history, complicated social norms, and dated perspectives. Yet among the makers and artists of the South, there is a powerful movement afoot. Alyssa Rosenheck shines a much-needed spotlight on a burgeoning community of people who are taking what’s beloved, inherent, and honored in the South and making it their own. The New Southern Style tours more than 30 homes and includes interviews with the designers, artists, and creative entrepreneurs who are reinventing Southern design and culture. This beautifully illustrated book is sure to inspire the home and soul.

Hailed for its quirkiness and charm, this book tells the story of a New York City lawyer who runs away to a small Etruscan village with his wife and baby and discovers a community of eccentrics who make them feel right at home.

A one-of-a-kind collection of movie posters spanning fifty years, from silent films to Cinemascope For four decades film historian Ira M. Resnick has been amassing a superb collection of 2,000 vintage movie posters and 1,500 stills, which has never before been published. Starstruck: Vintage Movie Posters from Classic Hollywood features the best of Resnick’s collection, with vivid reproductions of 250 posters and forty stills from the golden age of Hollywood, 1912 to 1962. In a moving introduction, Resnick relates how his love of vintage movie art translated into a career as a collector and the founder of the Motion Picture Arts Gallery, the first gallery devoted exclusively to the art of the movies. Resnick’s firsthand account offers entertaining anecdotes about how he managed to acquire such stellar film artwork, as well as historical information about the stars and films shown on the pieces he collected. Guiding the reader through the best posters and stills of his collection, Resnick provides a tour of cinematic history, starting in the silent film era and continuing up to Breakfast at Tiffany’s (1961). By showcasing several posters for each performer—such as Lillian Gish, the Marx Brothers, Marilyn Monroe, John Barrymore, and Audrey Hepburn—Resnick offers a unique method of charting the evolution of each movie star’s career. Organizing his account both chronologically and thematically, in later chapters Resnick discusses some of Hollywood’s legendary directors and films, and critiques fantastic graphic art from little-known films. Bonus material includes a list of Resnick’s fifty favorite one-sheets, helpful tips for the collector, and a glossary of terms and poster sizes. A must-have book for every collector and film buff, Starstruck offers a beautifully illustrated, personal tour of a bygone age of the motion picture advertising industry.

Rips returns to his Omaha family home to discover a hidden portfolio of paintings--all done by his late father, all of a naked black woman. So begins a gloriously funny yet deeply serious gem of a book that offers more than a little redemption in our cynical times.

One of The Telegraph's Best Music Books 2011 We live in a pop age gone loco for retro and crazy for commemoration. Band re-formations and reunion tours, expanded reissues of classic albums and outtake-crammed box sets, remakes and sequels, tribute albums and mash-ups . . . But what happens when we run out of past? Are we heading toward a sort of culturalecological catastrophe where the archival stream of pop history has been exhausted? Simon Reynolds, one of the finest music writers of his generation, argues that we have indeed reached a tipping point, and that although earlier eras had their own obsessions with antiquity—the Renaissance with its admiration for Roman and Greek classicism, the Gothic movement's invocations of medievalism—never has there been a society so obsessed with the cultural artifacts of its own immediate past. Retromania is the first book to examine the retro industry and ask the question: Is this retromania a death knell for any originality and distinctiveness of our own?

For fans of Rebecca Stead and Jennifer L. Holm, this is the perfect middle grade summer beach read. Twelve-year-old Shayne Whittaker has always spent summers on the Maine coast, visiting her grandmother Bea and playing with her BFF Poppy. Both Shayne and Bea are collectors, in their own ways: Shayne revels in golden memories of searching for sea glass and weaving friendship bracelets with Poppy, while Bea scours flea markets for valuable finds, much of which she adds to a growing pile in her house that Shayne jokingly calls Junk Mountain. This summer, though, everything has changed. Poppy would rather talk about boys than bracelets, and Bea's collecting mania has morphed into hoarding. Only Linc, the weird Civil War-obsessed kid next door, pays attention to her. Turns out Linc's collected a secret of his own, one that could enrage the meanest lobsterman on the planet, his grandpa. What begins as the worst summer of Shayne's life becomes the most meaningful, as she wages an all-out battle to save her friendships, rescue her grandmother, and protect the memories she loves the most.