Reyner Banham. 
 
Peregrine Smith: 1982. Hardcover in a jacket. Octavo. Minor chipping along the top and bottom of the jacket. An aura of soiling on the bottom and top of the back panels of the jacket. Slight sunning on the top of the boards, and a bit of bumping on the crown and heel, but the corners of the boards and the pages are clean. 228 pages. Jacket is very good, book near fine. Signed by Banham. 
 
Unexpected love. Is there any other kind? Freak. Is there any other Banham? And why does this freak love the desert as no other landscape?This last question, at least, Banham will answer for you at a breezy pace with plenty of theoretical fun along the way. He is a self-described stranger and not a dweller, a Brit and tourist coming late to the love of the desert. The legendary art historian seeks the desert in all its forms: as a natural landscape, in the worlds humans build there, and the literature great writers (from Bradbury to Bachelard) make in their heads about it. 
 
"Practically everybody's favorite view of the American deserts seems to have a mountain in it. There is a kind of scenographic rightness in the standard relationship between a flat foreground, containing old prospectors, cacti, the U.S. Cavalry, the lights of Las Vegas, or other picturesque impedimenta, and some massive upstanding outcrop or mountain range behind."