Don Miller: “B” Movies: An Informal Survey of the American Low-Budget Film, 1933-1945 (1973)

“Charlie Chan gave nuggets of Oriental wisdom to his number one son? Ann Miller tap-danced in front of cardboard backdrops? Tarzan swung through the trees? The sound of the Whistler echoed in the dark? Abbott and Costello joined the army? Andy Hardy faced his father? Sherlock Holmes found the vital clue? A producer named Val Lewton sent shivers down your spine?

From the beginning of sound to the start of the television era, Hollywood turned out thousands of low-budget “B” movies. Some were simply awful, most were pretty good, and not a few reached greatness. Don Miller, one of the most notable of movie experts, has written a superlative survey of this neglected facet of Hollywood’s golden age-a brilliant history of the studios, producers, directors, performers and films that made “B” stand for beautiful in the memory of every movie buff.” (from the back cover)

Publisher Curtis Books, New York, 1973
The Curtis Film Series
350 pages

PDF (126 MB, updated on 2016-12-23)

Mutually: Communities of the 1970s and 1980s / Navzájem: Společenství 70. a 80. let, catalogue (2013) [EN/SK/CZ]

Catalogue for an exhibition held in March-May 2013 at tranzitdisplay in Prague and The Brno House of Arts, Czech Republic, curated by Barbora Klímová, Daniel Grúň and Filip Cenek.

The selected fragments in this exhibition, borrowed from the archives of Moravian, Slovak, and Hungarian artists, reference different communities within the framework of “unofficial culture” during the period of Czechoslovak normalisation in the 1970s-80s.

Publisher tranzitdisplay, Prague, and The House of Arts, Brno, 2013
44 pages
via Academia.edu

Publisher

PDF

Paul Klee Notebooks, vol. 1: The Thinking Eye (1956–) & vol. 2: The Nature of Nature (1970–)

Paul Klee Notebooks is a two-volume work by Paul Klee that collects his lectures at the Bauhaus schools in 1920s Germany and his other main essays on modern art. These works are considered so important for understanding modern art that they are compared to the importance that Leonardo’s A Treatise on Painting had for Renaissance; Herbert Read called the collection “the most complete presentation of the principles of design ever made by a modern artist – it constitutes the Principia Aesthetica of a new era of art, in which Klee occupies a position comparable to Newton’s in the realm of physics.”

The final work was edited by Swiss artist Jürg Spiller. In an earlier 1925 shorter book, Pedagogical Sketchbook, Klee published a condensation of his lectures at the Weimar Bauhaus. (from Wikipedia)

Volume 1
First published as Das bildnerische Denken, Schwabe & Co., Basel, 1956
Translated by Ralph Manheim
Edited by Jürg Spiller
Publisher Lund Humphries, London, 1961
541 pages

Volume 2
First published as Unendliche Naturgeschichte, Schwabe & Co., Basel, 1970
Translated by Heinz Norden
Edited by Jürg Spiller
Publisher Lund Humphries, London, 1973
454 pages

Volume 1: The Thinking Eye (42 MB, updated on 2019-12-25)
Volume 2: The Nature of Nature (49 MB, updated on 2019-12-25)

See also Klee’s class notes in manuscript (1921-31) and his Pedagogical Sketchbook (1925–).