| |
|
|
 (Click for larger image) 
Gilfoyle, Timothy J. .
A PICKPOCKET'S TALE: THE UNDERWORLD OF NINETEENTH-CENTURY NEW YORK.
New York City, NY:
W. W. Norton,
2007.
Hardcover.
First Edition/First Printing.
480 pages.
As New/As New.
The author's account on subject. One of the finest historical studies on the American criminal underworld ever written. Advance Signed Copy. "Autographed Copy" removable sticker pasted on the front cover. Precedes and should not be confused with all other subsequent editions. "George Appo, the anti-hero of this fascinating study, was a pickpocket and con man who gained notoriety after testifying in 1894 about police corruption, and even played himself on Broadway. Historian Gilfoyle uses Appo's autobiography as a starting point for an exploration of the urban demimonde and the varieties of criminal experience in The Gilded Age. We follow Appo through Gotham's teeming sidewalks and streetcars as he casually picks pockets for spending money, and then smokes it away in opium dens where the classes and races mingle. Sooner or later, he runs afoul of New York's police and court system, as corrupt and chaotic as the criminal subculture they regulate. Then he is off to an archipelago of correctional institutions, from a shipboard reform school to Sing Sing, a prison-industrial hellhole where convicts are contracted out as factory laborers and disciplined with such tortures as the weighing machine. Gilfoyle paints a Hogarthian cityscape peopled with gang ruffians, gentleman swindlers, dirty politicians, cunning shysters, and evangelical reformers, all depicted with a sympathetic understanding of the rigors of life on the margins. The result is a colorful, evocative social history" (Publishers Weekly). A book that looks at History "from below" (rather than from above), it is deeply indebted to and would have been warmly endorsed by the late philosopher and historian Michel Foucault, who wrote the meticulously researched and groundbreaking "Discipline and Punish", on Europe's own corrupt penal system, which the Rich owned and controlled in order to keep the Poor prisoners, whether they were actually in jail or not. A "must-have" title for students of American history. This copy is very prominently and beautifully signed in black pen on the title page by Timothy J. Gilfoyle. It is signed directly on the page, not on a tipped-in page even though it comes from the publisher. This title will become a classic. This is the only signed copy available online and has no flaws, a pristine beauty. A very scarce signed copy thus. 60 illustrations and photographic reproductions. Winner of The Society of American Historians' Nevins Prize in 1994 for "City of Eros: New York City, Prostitution, and the Commercialization of Sex, 1790-1920". One of the most brilliant living American historians. A flawless copy. . ISBN 0393061906. $70.00 |
