Yes, television had a history before Lucy, Jackie and Uncle Miltie, or what author and film director (Bad News Bears, Fletch) Ritchie calls a prehistory. Please Stand By covers the period from television’s invention in 1920 until regularly scheduled programming began in 1948. It is largely a chronicle of “firsts”: the first commercial, the first soap opera, the first newscast. It is also full of anecdotes such as the first professional football broadcast consisting of a single shot of a toy football game board, or the station manager in Washington, D.C., who had a metropolitan map on his office wall marking each of the 48 TV sets in town. On another level, Ritchie outlines the battles between inventors (Philo Farnsworth, Charles Francis Jenkins, Allen DuMont), who were trying to perfect the new medium, and businessmen (Robert Sarnoff, William Paley) and corporations (RCA, Westinghouse), who were trying to wring out a profit from their investments, for control of the airwaves. AP

Publisher: Overlook
Hardback: 247 pages

Chapters include “Mesmer and Animal Magnetism,” “The Birth of Spiritualism,” “The Society for Psychical Research,” “The Early Work of J.B. Rhine,” “Investigations Into Precognition,” and “ESP and Altered States of Consciousness.”

Publisher: Overlook
Paperback: 392 pages
Illustrated

Coffee-table chronicle of the awesome architectural legacy of the Freemasons, from graveyard pyramids and sphere-shaped temples to deluxe neo-Egyptian lodge interiors. “Lurking somewhere under the conventional histories that deal with the Renaissance, Baroque and Neo-classical periods is a strange world…” That world is the Masonic world. “For a brief period in the 18th century Freemasonry was the heart of much that was enlightened, forward-looking, and promised a regeneration of society. The searches for wisdom, to rediscover antiquity, to replace superstition by reasoned philosophy, to better mankind, and to find expressions for the new age in architecture, music and in all the arts” were all conducted by men schooled in the mystic brotherhood. Hail, the all-seeing eye! GR

Publisher: Overlook
Hardback: 271 pages
Illustrated

“In his signature style, a lyrical combination of classical theory, anecdote and poetry, Jarman takes the reader through the spectrum, introducing each color as an embodiment of an emotion, evoking memories or dreams. Jarman explains the use of color from medieval painting through the Renaissance to the modernists, and draws on the great color theorists from Pliny to Leonardo. He writes too about the meanings of color in literature, science, philosophy, psychology, religion and alchemy.”

Publisher: Overlook
Hardback: 151 pages

First in the series of memoirs by late filmmaker and artist Derek Jarman, Dancing Ledge charts Jarman’s growth as a man and artist. Starting with childhood memories as an army brat in occupied Italy after World War II and continuing through his years at public school and university, Jarman recounts his youth in a journal-like format. JAT

Publisher: Overlook
Hardback: 254 pages

Second in the series of memoirs by late filmmaker and artist Derek Jarman, At Your Own Risk is a distillation of his philosophy of life and a witty guide to gay sexuality from the repressed ‘40s through the AIDS-chilled present. “Landscapes of time, place, memory, imagined landscapes. At Your Own Risk recalls the landscapes you were warned off: Private Property, Trespassers Will Be Prosecuted; the fence you jumped, the wall you scaled, fear and elation, the guard dogs and police in the shrubbery, the byways, bylaws, do’s and don’ts, Keep Out, Danger, get lost, shadowland, pretty boys, pretty police who shoved their cocks in your face and arrested you in fear.” JAT

Publisher: Overlook
Paperback: 314 pages

Third in the series of memoirs by late filmmaker and artist Derek Jarman, Modern Nature is the journal he kept during 1989 and 1990 with the awareness that one day it would be published. Written during the period Jarman was at work on The Garden and Edward II, he here juxtaposes his planning and cultivation of his famous garden in Dungeness with his declining health due to the ravages of AIDS. JAT

Publisher: Overlook
Paperback: 154 pages

Last in the series of memoirs by late filmmaker and artist Derek Jarman, Derek Jarman’s Garden is his personal account of how his garden evolved from its beginnings to the last days of his life. The photographs provide glimpses of Jarman’s life in Dungeness: “walking, weeding, watering or simply enjoying life.” JAT

Publisher: Overlook
Paperback: 144 pages

Notes, letters, documents and essays on the early years, 1910 to 1914. “We were possessed. In cafés, in the streets and squares, in artists’ studios, we were ‘on the march’ day and night, we drove ourselves to fathom the unfathomable, and, as poet, painter and composer in one, to create the incomparable ‘Art of the Century,’ a timeless art which would surpass all art forms of preceding centuries.” That was the Expressionist vision, but the art of its adherents became imbued with another sort of timelessness—the horrors of World War I and death, which came “like a visitation upon mankind, and the words of those writers who survived formed themselves into a scream of revolt, desperation and hatred.” From 1915 through 1920, Expressionism went dark during and after the war. “Yet something of the old European heritage survived in the passionate hope and faith in the future.” GR

Publisher: Overlook
Paperback: 421 pages

An exhaustive A-to-Z compilation of Hollywood’s popular postwar film fad, hopelessly over-analyzed by scholars and critics. “[These movies] consistently evoke the dark side of the American persona. The central figures in these films, caught in their double binds, filled with existential bitterness, drowning outside the social mainstream, are America’s stylized vision of itself, a true cultural reflection of the mental dysfunction of a nation in uncertain transition.” Includes plot synopses, critiques, casts and credits. GR

Publisher: Overlook
Paperback: 479 pages
Illustrated