Items related to Wisconsin Death Trip
Synopsis
From 1890 to 1910, Charles Van Schaick, the town photographer of a small Wisconsin community, took over 30,000 photographs. The negatives were left after his death, and by this accident of history, an extraordinary picture of a small town under the impact of the Great Depression has proved possible.
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Review
The last decade of the 19th century was, for some Americans, a time when great fortunes were to be made. For many others, however, the period was a time of economic dislocation, when the gap between city and countryside, rich and poor, grew ever wider. As the Indian Wars ended and the Gilded Age extended into America's first Imperial Age, social critics such as Mark Twain and William Dean Howells began to examine the dark side of the American dream: violence, poverty, degenerate behavior, suicide, and insanity.
In the late 1960s, another desperate time, historian Michael Lesy took a long look at fin-de-siècle America. Examining a collection of several thousand glass plate negatives and historical documents from Jackson County, Wisconsin, he concocted a sprawling treatise on a past that had been willfully forgotten, a brooding rejoinder to Edgar Lee Masters's Spoon River Anthology. First published in 1973, Lesy's Wisconsin Death Trip, now reissued in a handsome paperbound edition, became a key text of the counterculture, a book to shelve alongside Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee and Custer Died for Your Sins--and it sometimes reads like a hip product of its time. Lesy documents the unsettling record of one small corner of rural America, turning up accounts of barn burnings, attacks by gangs of armed tramps, threatening and obscene letters, death by diphtheria and smallpox (the Wisconsin townsfolk had, some years, to attend several funerals a week), alcoholism, madness, business and bank failures, and even a case or two of witchcraft.
After reading Lesy's texts and viewing the sometimes unsettling images he's turned up, you would be forgiven for thinking that no one in small-town Wisconsin in our great-great-grandparents' time was well-adjusted--which is, of course, not the case. Hyperbole notwithstanding, this is a remarkable study, one that Lesy himself rightly calls an experiment in both history and alchemy. --Gregory McNamee
From the Publisher
Wisconsin Death Trip is the subject of a forthcoming Cinemax Reel Life documentary scheduled to air in summer 2000.
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Wisconsin Death Trip
Seller: Friends of the Multnomah County Library, Portland, OR, U.S.A.
Seller rating 5 out of 5 stars
Hardcover. Condition: Good. Dust Jacket Condition: Poor. Dust jacket bumped along the edges and has closed tears, some of which are taped. Boards faded along edges. Clean pages tightly bound. Seller Inventory # 041925eg10
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Wisconsin Death Trip
Seller: John M. Gram, Port Huron, MI, U.S.A.
Seller rating 5 out of 5 stars
Hardcover. Condition: Good. Dust Jacket Condition: Very Good. 1st Edition. numerous tears to jacket edges, sunning to portions of the board edges particularly along the spine, otherwise clean and sound, oblong octavo hardcover, Seller Inventory # 041823
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Wisconsin Death Trip
Seller: BookHolders, Towson, MD, U.S.A.
Seller rating 5 out of 5 stars
Condition: Good. [ No Hassle 30 Day Returns ][ Ships Daily ] [ Underlining/Highlighting: NONE ] [ Writing: NONE ] [ Edition: first ] Publisher: Pantheon Books Pub Date: 5/1/1973 Binding: Hardcover Pages: 250 first edition. Seller Inventory # 6947908
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Wisconsin Death Trip
Seller: PDNB Gallery, Denton, TX, U.S.A.
Seller rating 3 out of 5 stars
Hardcover. Condition: Very Good. 1st Edition. Hardcover: 8.88 x 11.38 x 1 in., Front and back cover: wrapped in mylar, small tears on dust jacket edges, 1 in. tear on bottom edge of front cover, slight wear on jacket corners and spine edges, overall good condition; Pages: in very good condition; Overall very good condition. Seller Inventory # ABE-1772839322370
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Wisconsin Death Trip
Seller: Barner Books, New Paltz, NY, U.S.A.
Seller rating 4 out of 5 stars
hardcover. Condition: Very Good. Hardcover with jacket. Stated first edition. Second printing. Binding is sound, with prior owner's name written at the top of the title page and no other writing. Some fading to edges of purple cloth covered boards, silver gilt on spine is bright. Jacket, now in Brodart cover, is not priceclipped. Moderate wear and curling at edges, with some old tape from repair efforts by prior owner(s). Seller Inventory # 020723001
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Wisconsin Death Trip
Seller: Mispah books, Redhill, SURRE, United Kingdom
Seller rating 4 out of 5 stars
hardcover. Condition: Acceptable. Acceptable .Ships From Multiple Locations. book. Seller Inventory # ERICA80303944836693
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Wisconsin Death Trip
Published by
Pantheon Books, New York, NY, 1973
ISBN 10: 0394483669
ISBN 13: 9780394483665
Used
Hardcover
First Edition
Seller: True Oak Books, Highland, NY, U.S.A.
Seller rating 5 out of 5 stars
Hardcover. Condition: Good+. Dust Jacket Condition: Good+. First Edition; Second Printing. b&w photographs throughout the book. Light wear on DJ edges, minor tears. Light foxing inside the DJ. Minor foxing on the top exterior edge of textblock. Speckles on the covers inside the DJ and on front and rear endpapers. Good condition otherwise. No other noteworthy defects. No markings. ; - Your satisfaction is our priority. We offer free returns and respond promptly to all inquiries. Your item will be carefully cushioned in bubble wrap and securely boxed. All orders ship on the same or next business day. Buy with confidence. Seller Inventory # HVD-61515-OS-0
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WISCONSIN DEATH TRIP
Published by
Pantheon Books, New York, 1973
ISBN 10: 0394483669
ISBN 13: 9780394483665
Used
Hardcover
First Edition
Seller: Second Story Books, ABAA, Rockville, MD, U.S.A.
Seller rating 4 out of 5 stars
Hardcover. Dust Jacket Condition: dj. First Edition, First Printing. Oblong Quarto, unpaginated. In Very Good minus condition with a Very Good minus dust jacket. Black-and-white pictorial spine with purple lettering. Dust jacket protected with a mylar covering, price uncut: "$15.00." Creasing and closed tearing along edges of dust jacket, particularly at head of spine and top edge of rear cover. Discoloring to edges of boards. Mild bumping to corners of boards. Binding beginning to loosen. Random House stamp to bottom edge of textblock. Previous owner's signature to front pastedown. Creasing with some small tearing to bottom corner of textblock. Light age toning throughout interior with a smoky smell. Shelved in Case 1. 1415182. Shelved Dupont Bookstore. Seller Inventory # 1415182
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Wisconsin Death Trip
Seller: Lost Books, AUSTIN, TX, U.S.A.
Seller rating 5 out of 5 stars
Audience: General/trade. Very good in very good dust jacket. Light shelf wear to jacket, now in mylar. Text unmarked with tight binding, pages are clean. Seller Inventory # Alibris.0015652
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Wisconsin death trip. With a preface by Warren Susman. (Photographs: Charles van Schaick)
Published by
New York, Pantheon Books a Division of Random House (1973), 1973
ISBN 10: 0394483669
ISBN 13: 9780394483665
Used
Hardcover
First Edition
Seller: Antiquariat Haufe & Lutz, Karlsruhe, BW, Germany
Seller rating 5 out of 5 stars
Quer-4°. [131] Bl. mit 153 Abb. auf Tafeln. OLn. mit illustr. OU. (by Kenneth Miyamoto). Auer 558. Roth, The Book of 101 Books 222 f. The Open Book 292 f. - Erste Ausgabe. - "Michael Lesy's Wisconsin Death Trip is an eccentric, audacious, and frequently annoying book that its author calls "as much an exercise of history as it is an experiment of alchemy." Originally presented as Lesy's Ph.D. thesis at Rutgers, the book is also as much a document of its time as it is a reflection on the past. In the early '70s, when all received wisdom was subject to skeptical 'interrogation," Lesy's imaginative and radical reevaluation of the historical record became a campus cult book much as Marshall McLuhan's Understanding Media had nearly a decade before. Drawing primarily from an archive of 3,000 images (culled from 30,000 glass-plate negatives) made by town photographer Charles Van Schaick and from newspaper accounts first printed in the Badger State Banner, Lesy lays out an intricate patchwork of fact and fiction whose blighted nexus is the Wisconsin community of Black River Falls betwee n the Years 1890 and 1910. Lesy approaches the material like a novelist or a New Journalist, supplementing terse news from the Banner with observations by "two mythical creatures, a town historian and a local gossip, and excerpts from Main Street, Spoon River Anthology, and other relevant texts. . The photographs aren't much more convincing, but they've got a certain morbid fascination. Van Schaick was not an undiscovered small-town visionary like Disfarmer, but he was considerably more versatile than the Arkansas studio photographer, and Lesy includes his pictures of school groups, rural scenes, still lifes, parties, commercial facades, and even a muscular male nude among the expected array of formal and informal portraits. But since the book is haunted by death, the photos of the living are bracketed and overshadowed by pictures of babies dead in their coffins, of extravagant memorial wreaths, and of mourning or maddened females. Lesy's decision to collage and manipulate some of these images, often simply by doubling them as if in a mirror, is in keeping with his approach to the other historical raw material here, which is to say at once respectful and fanciful. Some would call it fast and loose" (V. Aletti in Roth). - Sehr gutes sauberes Exemplar der gesuchten gebundenen Ausgabe. Seller Inventory # 106858BB
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