While a professor and researcher on digital photography, scanning, and giclee printing at Brevard Community College in Florida, one source of income for the research projects of FLAAR was helping libraries obtain rare books which were hard to find in these years.
There was not yet a fully functioning Internet or worldwide use of e-mail, so finding books in these years was not as easy as finding books is today. Although the Robicsek book was widely known and readily available to everyone, the other three books listed here were extremely rare and hard to find.
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Photograph of tobacco, Nicotiana, from the FLAAR Mesoamerica ethnobotanical and medicinal garden of Mayan plants, Guatemala City. |
AMERLINCK, Maria Concepcion, Historia y cultura del tabaco en Mexico (Spanish Edition).
291 color photos, 19 B+W, 33 figs, 51 tables, hardbound, 293 pages. An impressive
coffee table book on tobacco including scenes from Aztec codices of smoking.
The Mexican tobacco industry must have poured lots of money into producing
this book. Mexican coffee table books are equal to Japanese and Italian
quality, often surpassing the beauty of art books even produced in the USA.
ATLAS del TABACO en MEXICO, 1989, 134 pages (an immense 13 inches wide times by 17 inches
long), extensive bibliography, discusses soils, history of tobacco (including
in pre-Columbian times, with artifacts). Long out of print (means unavailable
even in Mexico), we have not seen this offered for sale in the United States
or Europe. Instituto Nacional de Estadistica Geografia e Informatica,
Joaquin Abdon Huerta Alva (coordinator).
d'ANNA, Enrico, TABACCO STORIA ARTE. Fancy coffee table book subsidized
by the Italian government as a present to ambassadors, senators. There was
no way ever to buy a copy of this book. 307 pages, 198 works of art in full
color, from Matisse, Munch, Degas, Duchamp, van Gogh, and also a section
of MAYA vase paintings showing smoking, photos by Hellmuth.
ROBICSEK, Francis, The Smoking Gods Tobacco in Maya Art, History, and Religion, foreword by Michael Coe.
233 pages, 234 illustrations (including photographs by Nicholas Hellmuth),
265 outstanding color plates.
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Medicinal tobacco in Q�eqchi� Mayan village of Senahu, Alta Verapaz, Guatemala. Photograph by Nicholas Hellmuth, July 2015. |