382 pages, chiefly full page photographs. Reprint. The slipcase is water stained along the bottom half of the spine, though not disgustingly so and the front has remnant glue stains from price stickers as well as remnant bits of the price sticker as such. From page 97 to page 148, the stitching is exposed, and the binding shaky. The remainder of the book is solid.Overal a clean, unmarked copy in excellent condition. Customers please note the book is heavy and will attract additional postage, lots for overseas customers. "Robert Mapplethorpe began taking photographs in 1970 with a Polaroid camera given to him by a friend. Nearly twenty years later, when Mapplethorpe died at the age of forty-two, he was considered one of the most important photographers of his time. His elegant and sometimes shocking nudes, the black-and-white portraits, flower still lifes, and images of sexual sadomasochism had been exhibited widely and were the subject of serious critical attention in Europe and America. A few months after his death, Mapplethorpe became the focus of an acrimonious debate over federal funding of the arts when an exhibition of his work was canceled by the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. The director of the Contemporary Arts Center in Cincinnati, Ohio, was subsequently acquitted of obscenity charges brought against him for presenting the same exhibition."