Laurence and Geraldine McGilvery have been in the book business in La Jolla, California, since 1960 and have specialized in out-of-print and rare art books, exhibition catalogues, and periodicals since 1967. We have been members in good standing of the Antiquarian Booksellers Association of America since 1970. In our nearly invisible offices in central La Jolla we have a stock of something over fifty thousand art books and exhibition catalogues.

Our stock is strongest in modern and contemporary art and artists, but we also have large holdings in most other areas, including American and European art of all periods, Asian and Oriental art, Latin American art, non-Western art, prints, sculpture, architecture, decorative arts, and photography. Of particular note are our present holdings of Russian materials, especially from the early Soviet period.

We have deep stocks of selected titles from the Museum of Modern Art, the Los Angeles County Museum, the former Pasadena Art Museum, the Art Center in La Jolla (and its later identities, the La Jolla Museum of Art, the La Jolla Museum of Contemporary Art, the San Diego Museum of Contemporary Art, and the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego), University of California Irvine, Marlborough Galleries, Sidney Janis (or Janis Gallery), Curt Valentin Gallery, Buchholz Gallery, Galerie Chalette, Lefebre Gallery, Berggruen (Paris), and Louise Leiris (Paris).

Our periodical holdings include the world's largest stocks of Art in America, Art International, Artforum, Artspace, High Performance (including most of its book and audio publications), and L.A.I.C.A. Journal (Los Angeles Institute of Contemporary Art). Our own work Artforum, 1962-1968: A Cumulative Index to the First Six Volumes provides access to the early years of the periodical before its inclusion in Art Index. In addition, we regularly carry scarce and unusual art titles, including View, XXe Siècle (Vingtième Siècle), Verve, Derrière le Miroir, Minotaure, and others from German Expressionism, Dada, and Surrealism to the contemporary avant-garde. For our policies on appraisals and collection development, please follow the links.

A NOTE ABOUT OUR LOGO
Item number 146 in our Catalogue Number One, Books on Art, October 1968, was Illustrations of buildings near Muttra and Agra, showing the mixed Hindu-Mahomedan style of Upper India (London: India Office/Wm. H. Allen, 1873), by Lt. Henry Hardy Cole [b. 1843], late superintendent, Archæological survey of India, North-western Provinces. Its 42 plates are original photographs made from glass negatives. Plate 13 displays a crack, as if to prove to us the trying conditions of its making and the triumph of its survival. Another of these plates depicts a stone screen on a tomb carved in an all-over geometric style that is both precise and hauntingly off-balance. Before the book went into the catalogue and eventually to its new home at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art--at a net price of $60--I spent many hours copying this image by hand and then manipulating it photographically for use as a cover design. It last appeared in its entirety as the cover of our Catalogue 11, Fall 1989. Since then, we have been using the segment of it that appears in these pages. For those who may have wondered, it reflects a purely aesthetic choice. In good time we will add the image of the whole pattern to this page as a small homage to the probably unknown genius who created it.