Waikiki In the Wake of Dreams 2000 First Edition F/NF

A lavishly produced visual and cultural history of Waikiki, tracing the famous Honolulu district from ancient Hawaiian life through the development of surfing, tourism and the beachboy culture, the golden age of steamship travel and Hollywood's fascination with Hawai'i, wartime Waikiki, and the postwar tourism boom. The volume draws heavily upon archival photographs, advertisements, sheet music, paintings, maps, oral histories, and contemporary photography, with appearances and recollections involving such figures as Duke Kahanamoku, Don Ho, Daniel K. Inouye and others associated with Waikiki's history. The bibliography concludes on p. 125. The book was created as the companion project to Edgy Lee's documentary film Waikiki: In the Wake of Dreams, also released in 2000; the Hawai'i Film Office identifies Lee as the documentary's writer-producer. This is the stated First Hard Cover Edition, May 2000, published by FilmWorks Press and sponsored by the Pacific Arts Foundation. The production itself is unusually ambitious: designer Michel V. M. Le combines patterned preliminary leaves, monochromatic illustrated endpapers, archival montages, period advertisements and sheet-music graphics, documentary photographs, full-bleed color imagery, and dramatically changing chapter-opening treatments. The acknowledgments identify an unusually broad network of historical resources, including the Bishop Museum, Hawaiian Historical Society, Mission Houses Museum, University of Hawai'i Center for Oral History, Honolulu Academy of Arts, Peabody Museum, and private collections. First Hawaiian Bank provided principal assistance, with numerous Hawaiian cultural, commercial, and visitor organizations participating in the project. Condition: Fine book / Near Fine dust jacket. The dark blue cloth remains exceptionally clean and square with strong silver-gray lettering; binding is firm and pages are clean, bright, and unmarked. The elaborate endpapers and illustrated interior remain particularly fresh. Original pictorial dust jacket is bright and complete, retaining excellent color and presenting only very minor handling/shelf evidence consistent with a Near Fine grade. An especially well-preserved copy of a book whose large landscape format makes jackets susceptible to edge wear. Michel V. M. Le deserves specific credit here. The book itself describes him as an award-winning designer and graphic designer, classically trained and self-taught, who attended both La Sorbonne and Les Ateliers School of Design in Paris and subsequently worked in advertising and design studios in Paris, London, and New York; by the time of this publication he had also created Honolulu Magazine's visual look beginning in April 1998. That background helps explain why Waikiki feels less like a standard regional history and more like an exhibition in book form. Particularly effective are the blue-on-blue endpapers, which turn fragments of Hawaiian popular imagery into a repeating visual memory, while archival photographs, postcards, advertisements and sheet music are treated as design objects rather than merely reproduced as illustrations.…