John L. Volk, Palm Beach Architect
Green cloth with sewn ribbon marker.
John L. Volk was one of the signature Palm Beach architects. Includes drawings and photos.
$75.00
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Bubble in the Sun: The Florida Boom of the 1920s and How It Brought on the Great Depression
The 1920s in Florida was a time of incredible excess, immense wealth, and precipitous collapse. The decade there produced the largest human migration in American history, far exceeding the settlement of the West, as millions flocked to the grand hotels and the new cities that rose rapidly from the teeming wetlands. The boom spawned a new subdivision civilization—and the most egregious large-scale assault on the environment in the name of “progress.” Nowhere was the glitz and froth of the Roaring Twenties more excessive than in Florida. Here was Vegas before there was a Vegas: gambling was condoned and so was drinking, since prohibition was not enforced. Tycoons, crooks, and celebrities arrived en masse to promote or exploit this new and dazzling American frontier in the sunshine. Yet, the import and deep impact of these historical events have never been explored thoroughly until now. In Bubble in the Sun Christopher Knowlton examines the grand artistic and entrepreneurial visions behind Coral Gables, Boca Raton, Miami Beach, and other storied sites, as well as the darker side of the frenzy. For while giant fortunes were being made and lost and the nightlife raged more raucously than anywhere else, the pure beauty of the Everglades suffered wanton ruination and the workers, mostly black, who built and maintained the boom, endured grievous abuses. Knowlton breathes dynamic life into the forces that made and wrecked Florida during the decade: the real estate moguls Carl Fisher, George Merrick, and Addison Mizner, and the once-in-a-century hurricane whose aftermath triggered the stock market crash. This essential account is a revelatory—and riveting—history of an era that still affects our country today.
$18.00 paperback
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Secrets of the Southern Shells
20 TIPS for Southern Shells and Other Belles While the global world has changed extensively over the last 200 years since the birth of America and the Southern U.S., the intimate advice from Southern mothers to their children has remained virtually unchanged. Sometimes as adults we need a little reminder, also. Remember who you are, you are a Southern Star.
$19.95 Hardcover
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Addison Mizner: Architect of Fantasy and Romance
The work of the acclaimed designer of villas in Spanish, Moorish, Venetian, and Mediterranean style, in all-new color photography. The go-to architect for the Jazz Age elite of South Florida and beyond, Addison Mizner created a new architectural style and a new lifestyle for the wealthy and socially prominent of Palm Beach–America’s preeminent winter resort town of the time. Building mansions, clubs, hotels and apartment houses with a bent toward fantasy and romance, Mizner established a design vocabulary and tradition that to this day influences architects, designers, and builders. Evocative of old Spain, Venice, and the Moorish capitals of Granada and Seville, Mizner’s work is a dream realized: courtyards with fountains, trellises with climbing bougainvillea, arched windows, glazed tile floors, spiraling marble columns, expansive interiors with grand proportions. This book explores Mizner’s legacy through the extraordinary houses and other structures he built, including such storied homes as La Guerida, an 11-bedroom Spanish Revival mansion, best known now as the Kennedy Estate–the place where JFK he composed his Inaugural Address. Known for their beauty, opulence, fantastic detail, as well as the stories of those individuals who have lived or played in them, the houses and buildings of Addison Mizner stand as monuments to grand living and romance made in stone and iron, stucco and tile.
$75.00 Hardcover
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Palm Beach Houses
This classic volume, now back in print in a new format and at a reduced price, offers a strikingly illustrated, extensively researched history of Palm In 1894, Palm Beach leaped to world prominence as a winter playground with the completion of Henry Morrison Flagler’s Royal Poinciana Hotel. In the 1920s, Palm Beach’s extravagant lifestyle reached its height, and grand Mediterranean-style mansions abounded. Palm Beach Houses details the building and design of more than thirty great houses and public buildings on the “American Riviera.” Public and private structures designed by some of the style-setting early architects are depicted, including works of Addison Mizner, Joseph Urban, and Maurice Fatio, as well as those of anonymous designers, whose feats of imagination rivaled the most celebrated professionals. The photography has been taken to respectfully document these superb homes, many of which have never before been published.
$39.95 Hardcover
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Addison Mizner: The Architect Whose Genius Defined Palm Beach
In words and photographs, the story of visionary architect Addison Mizner
* Introduced the Mediterranean Revival and Spanish Colonial Revival styles to southern Florida
* Designed and developed the resort town of Boca Raton
* Designed the exquisite Everglades Club in Palm Beach
Addison Mizner transformed Palm Beach and South Florida with his visionary architecture. He designed, among many others, the landmark Everglades Club in Palm Beach and the Boca Raton Resort and Club in Boca Raton. In this detailed biography, Stephen Perkins and James Caughman examine Mizner’s life and origins, and explore how the events of his life influenced his marvelous architectural legacy.
$50.00 Hardcover
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Palm Beach Chic
Palm Beach interiors have long reflected the travels, penchants, and whimsies of the town’s worldly inhabitants. Today, residents of this tiny barrier island call upon world-class designers to create homes that are testaments to what can be achieved when inspired by the natural beauty of a unique locale and when imagination is one’s only limitation. In Palm Beach Chic, Jennifer Ash Rudick leads the tour of newly restored Mediterranean Revival houses by Mizner, Fatio, and Volk, charming cottages, Moorish casbahs, and vintage condos. Lush photographs capture extraordinary gardens, verandas, lakeside pavilions, a rustic ranch, and simple pastel houses sheltered by dense thickets of Norfolk pines and age-old banyans. It is this eclectic mix of old and new, of Spanish and Caribbean, of contemporary design and sun-faded WASP thrift, that makes Palm Beach chic.
$75 Hardcover
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The Swamp: The Everglades, Florida, and the Politics of Paradise
The Swamp is the stunning story of the destruction and possible resurrection of the Everglades, the saga of man’s abuse of nature in southern Florida and his unprecedented efforts to make amends. Michael Grunwald, a prize-winning national reporter for The Washington Post, takes readers on a riveting journey from the Ice Ages to the present, illuminating the natural, social and political history of one of America’s most beguiling but least understood patches of land. The Everglades was America’s last frontier, a wild country long after the West was won. Grunwald chronicles how a series of visionaries tried to drain and “reclaim” it, and how Mother Nature refused to bend to their will; in the most harrowing tale, a 1928 hurricane drowned 2,500 people in the Everglades. But the Army Corps of Engineers finally tamed the beast with levees and canals, converting half the Everglades into sprawling suburbs and sugar plantations. And though the southern Everglades was preserved as a national park, it soon deteriorated into an ecological mess. The River of Grass stopped flowing, and 90 percent of its wading birds vanished. Now America wants its swamp back. Grunwald shows how a new breed of visionaries transformed Everglades politics, producing the $8 billion rescue plan. That plan is already the blueprint for a new worldwide era of ecosystem restoration. And this book is a cautionary tale for that era. Through gripping narrative and dogged reporting, Grunwald shows how the Everglades is still threatened by the same hubris, greed and well-intentioned folly that led to its decline.
$21.00 Paperback
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Palm Beach (Images of America)
Palm Beach is known internationally as a winter resort where the wealthy enjoy life in a tropical paradise. More than 100 years ago, Palm Beach was far different from its well-kept beaches, estates, and fabulous Worth Avenue shopping mecca of the 21st century. When the first permanent settlers arrived, they found the area covered by thick jungle that had to be tamed before they could carve out a new life for themselves. The settlers ended up with a paradise, and when Henry Flagler decided to build a grand hotel in Palm Beach, he planted the first seed for the creation of a modern winter retreat for the rich.
$21.99 Paperback
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Mar-a-Lago: Inside the Gates of Power at Donald Trump’s Presidential Palace
To know Donald J. Trump it is best to start in his natural habitat: Palm Beach, Florida. It is here he learned the techniques that took him all the way to the White House. Painstakingly, over decades, he has created a world in this exclusive tropical enclave and favorite haunt of billionaires where he is not just president but a king. The vehicle for his triumph is Mar-A-Lago, one of the greatest mansions ever built in the United States. The inside story of how he became King of Palm Beach―and how Palm Beach continues to be his spiritual home even as president―is rollicking, troubling, and told with unrivaled access and understanding by Laurence Leamer. In Mar-A-Lago, the reader will learn:
* How Donald Trump bought a property now valued by some at as much as $500,000,000 for less than three thousand dollars of his own money.
* Why Trump was blackballed by the WASP grandees of the island and how he got his revenge.
* How Trump joined forces with the National Enquirer, which was headquartered nearby, and engineered his own divorce.
* How by turning Mar-A-Lago into a private club, Trump was the unlikely man to integrate Palm Beach’s restricted country club scene, and what his real motives were.
* What transpires behind the gates of today’s Mar-A-Lago during “the season,” when President Trump and assorted D.C. power players fly down each weekend.
In addition to copious interviews and reporting from inside Mar-A-Lago, Laurence Leamer brings an acute and unparalleled understanding of the society of Palm Beach, where he has lived for twenty-five years. He has written an essential book for understanding Donald Trump’s inner character.
$27.99 Hardcover
Before 1947, when Marjory Stoneman Douglas named The Everglades a “river of grass,” most people considered the area worthless. She brought the world’s attention to the need to preserve The Everglades. In the Afterword, Michael Grunwald tells us what has happened to them since then. Grunwald points out that in 1947 the government was in the midst of establishing the Everglades National Park and turning loose the Army Corps of Engineers to control floods–both of which seemed like saviors for the Glades. But neither turned out to be the answer. Working from the research he did for his book, The Swamp, Grunwald offers an account of what went wrong and the many attempts to fix it, beginning with Save Our Everglades, which Douglas declared was “not nearly enough.” Grunwald then lays out the intricacies (and inanities) of the more recent and ongoing CERP, the hugely expensive Comprehensive Everglades Restoration Plan.
$24.94 Hardcover
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