Philippines.
Folio (43 cm). 288 pp., color illustrations. Bound in blue cloth stamped in gilt, in matching cloth slipcase with ivory-style clasps. Fine condition. A lavish, large-format survey of the Philippine archipelago, produced at the height of the Marcos government's international image campaign and clearly conceived as a showpiece. The volume includes well over a hundred color photographs by Larry Secrist and Jeffrey Aas, organized by region — Luzon, the Visayas, Mindanao, Palawan, and the Sulu Archipelago — in the saturated, oversized plates typical of Abrams's prestige coffee-table production of the era. The text is by Richard Z. Chesnoff (1937–2015), then executive editor of Newsweek International and a veteran Middle East correspondent, who later wrote the acclaimed Pack of Thieves (1999) on the Nazi plunder of Jewish property. More striking to collectors, though, is the book's supporting cast: a signed preface by President Ferdinand E. Marcos and a chapter on Manila written by First Lady Imelda Romualdez Marcos herself. Appearing just six years after Marcos declared martial law, and at a moment when the regime was investing heavily in glossy cultural diplomacy abroad, the book reads today as much as a period artifact of that campaign as a picture book of the islands — a striking survival from a closely scrutinized chapter of Philippine political history, and a title of interest well beyond the travel and geography shelf.
Price: $1,500.00