World Food Books' programme is largely produced on Kulin Nation land. We acknowledge the Wurundjeri people of the Kulin Nation as the first and continuing custodians of this land, and pay respect to their Elders past, present, and emerging.
World Food Books is an arts and special interests bookshop in Naarm / Melbourne. Founded in 2010, World Food Books is devoted to the presentation of a rotating, hand-selection of international art, design, literary and counterculture publications with an emphasis on the anti-traditional, the experimental, the avant-garde, the heretic, the marginal.
Presenting new titles alongside rare and out-of-print books, catalogues and journals spanning the fields of modern and contemporary art, design, photography, illustration, film, literature, poetry, cultural theory, philosophy, sexuality, popular and underground culture in its many radical forms, World Food Books wishes to encourage adventurous, thoughtful and open-minded reading, looking, writing, and exchange of publishing and ideas, both current and historical.
As well as our bookshop, located in Melbourne's historical Nicholas Building, all of our inventory is available internationally via our online mail-order service.
World Food Books semi-regularly co-ordinates "Occasions", a programme of exhibits and events at the bookshop and in partnership with other hosts (such as museums and art galleries) that develop out of the activities, relationships and content of the bookshop itself.
World Food Books
The Nicholas Building
37 Swanston Street
Room 5, Level 6
Melbourne 3000
Australia
SHOP HOURS:
CLOSED FOR SUMMER.
RE-OPENING 01.02.24
WEB-SHOP OPEN 24/7.
World Food Books
Postal Address:
PO Box 435
Flinders Lane
Victoria 8009
Australia
Art
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World Food Books Gift Voucher
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Fluxus
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Arte Informale / Haute Pâte / Tachism
Nouveau Réalisme / Zero / Kinetic
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Art Brut / Folk / Visionary / Fantastic
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Furniture
Italian Radical Design / Postmodernism
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Literary Theory / Semiotics / Language
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Drugs / Psychedelia
Crime / Violence
Animal Rights / Veganism
Occult / Esoterica
Ecology / Earth / Alternative Living
Whole Earth / Crafts
All prices in AUD (Australian dollars)
Pick-Ups
Please note: The bookshop is closed until February 1, 2024.
Pick-up orders can be collected in our bookshop during opening hours after this date. Please collect any Pick-up orders within 3 weeks of ordering as we have limited storage space. Orders will be released back into stock if not collected within this time. No refunds can be made for pick-ups left un-collected.
Return Policy
All sales are final. We do accept returns (for refund, exchange) for items received in error. All our orders are packed with special care using heavy-duty padding and cardboard book-mailers or bubble mailers (for smaller books), using reinforcement where required. We cannot take responsibility for any lost, stolen or damaged parcels.
Insurance
Should you wish to insure your package, please email us directly after placing your order and we can organise this at a small extra expense. Although all standard/express tracked packages are very safe and dependable, we cannot take responsibility for any lost, stolen or damaged parcels. We recommend insurance on valuable orders.
Interested in selling your old books, catalogues, journals, magazines, comics, fanzines, ephemera? We are always looking for interesting, unusual and out-of-print books to buy. We only buy books in our fields of interest and specialty, and that we feel we can resell.
We base these prices on desirability, market value, in-print prices, condition and our current stock levels. We offer cash, store credit, and can take stock on consignment. All
about 25% of the price we expect to get when we sell them, or 30% in store credit. We base these prices on desirability, market value, in-print prices, condition and our current stock levels.
Sell your books any day of the week. You can drop them off and return later. If you have a lot of books, we can visit your Sydney home.
We buy books that we feel we can resell. We offer about 25 % of the price we expect to get when we sell them, or 30% in store credit. We base these prices on desirability, market value, in-print prices, condition and our current stock levels.
Philadelphia Wireman
03 August - 01 September, 2018
World Food Books is proud to announce our next Occasion, the first presentation of sculptures by Philadelphia Wireman in Australia.
The Philadelphia Wireman sculptures were found abandoned in an alley off Philadelphia’s South Street on trash night in 1982. Their discovery in a rapidly-changing neighbourhood undergoing extensive renovation, compounded with the failure of all attempts to locate the artist, suggests that the works may have been discarded after the maker’s death. Dubbed the "Philadelphia Wireman" during the first exhibition of this work, in 1985, the maker’s name, age, ethnicity, and even gender remain uncertain. The entire collection totals approximately 1200 pieces, all intricately bound together with tightly-wound heavy-gauge wire (along with a few small, abstract marker drawings, reminiscent both of Mark Tobey and J.B. Murry). The dense construction of the work, despite a modest range of scale and materials, is singularly obsessive and disciplined in design: a wire armature or exoskeleton firmly binds a bricolage of found objects including plastic, glass, food packaging, umbrella parts, tape, rubber, batteries, pens, leather, reflectors, nuts and bolts, nails, foil, coins, toys, watches, eyeglasses, tools, and jewellery.
Heavy with associations—anthropomorphic, zoomorphic, and socio-cultural responses to wrapped detritus—the totemic sculptures by Philadelphia Wireman have been discussed in the context of work created to fulfil the shamanistic needs of alternative religions in American culture. Curators, collectors, and critics have variously compared certain pieces to sculpture from Classical antiquity, Native American medicine bundles, African-American memory jugs, and African fetish objects. Reflecting the artist’s prolific and incredibly focused scavenging impulse, and despite—or perhaps enhanced by—their anonymity, these enigmatic objects function as urban artefacts and arbiters of power, though their origin and purpose is unknown. Philadelphia Wireman, whatever their identity, possessed an astonishing ability to isolate and communicate the concepts of power and energy through the selection and transformation of ordinary materials. Over the course of the past two decades, this collection has come to be regarded as an important discovery in the field of self-taught art and vernacular art.
Presented in collaboration with Fleisher-Ollman Gallery, Philadelphia, and Robert Heald, Wellington.
Susan Te Kahurangi King
02 February - 10 March, 2018
Susan Te Kahurangi King (24 February 1951 - ) has been a confident and prolific artist since she was a young child, drawing with readily available materials - pencils, ballpoint pens and felt-tip markers, on whatever paper is at hand. Between the ages of four and six Susan slowly ceased verbal communication. Her grandparents William and Myrtle Murphy had developed a special bond with Susan so they took on caring responsibilities for extended periods. Myrtle began informally archiving her work, carefully collecting and storing the drawings and compiling scrapbooks. No drawing was insignificant; every scrap of paper was kept. The King family are now the custodians of a vast collection containing over 7000 individual works, from tiny scraps of paper through to 5 meter long rolls.
The scrapbooks and diaries reveal Myrtle to be a woman of great patience and compassion, seeking to understand a child who was not always behaving as expected. She encouraged Susan to be observant, to explore her environment and absorb all the sights and sounds. Myrtle would show Susan’s drawings to friends and people in her community that she had dealings with, such as shopkeepers and postal workers, but this was not simply a case of a grandmother’s bias. She recognised that Susan had developed a sophisticated and unique visual language and sincerely believed that her art deserved serious attention.
This was an unorthodox attitude for the time. To provide some context, Jean Dubuffet coined the term Art Brut in 1945 to describe work created by self-taught artists – specifically residents of psychiatric institutions and those he considered to be visionaries or eccentrics. In 1972 Roger Cardinal extended this concept by adopting the term Outsider Art to describe work made by non-academically trained artists operating outside of mainstream art networks through choice or circumstance. Susan was born in Te Aroha, New Zealand in 1951, far from the artistic hubs of Paris and London that Dubuffet and Cardinal operated in. That Myrtle fêted Susan as a self-taught artist who deserved to be taken seriously shows how progressive her attitudes were.
Susan’s parents Doug and Dawn were also progressive. Over the years they had consulted numerous health practitioners about Susan’s condition, as the medical establishment could not provide an explanation as to why she had lapsed into silence. Dawn educated herself in the field of homeopathy and went on to treat all twelve of her children using these principles – basing prescriptions on her observations of their physical, mental and emotional state.
Doug was a linguist with an interest in philosophy who devoted what little spare time he had to studying Maori language and culture. To some extent their willingness to explore the fringes of the mainstream made them outsiders too but it was their commitment to living with integrity and their respect for individuality that ensured Susan’s creativity was always encouraged.
Even though Susan’s family supported her artistic pursuits, some staff in schools and hospitals saw it as an impediment to her assimilation into the community and discouraged it in a variety of ways. Her family was not always aware of this and therefore did not fully understand why Susan stopped drawing in the early 1990s. However, rather than dwell on the challenges that Susan faced in pursuit of her artistic practice, they prefer to highlight her achievements. In 2008 Susan began drawing again in earnest, after an almost 20 year interruption, and her work is now shown in galleries around the world.
Susan grew up without television and has been heavily influenced by the comics she read as a child. She is absolutely fearless in the appropriation of recognizable characters, such as Donald Duck and Mickey Mouse, in her work. She twists their limbs, contorts their faces, compresses them together, blends them into complex patterned backgrounds - always imbuing them with an incredible energy. Although Susan often used pop culture characters in her work they are not naive or childlike. These are drawings by a brilliant self-taught artist who has been creating exceptional work for decades without an audience in mind.
Mladen Stilinović
"Various Works 1986 - 1999"
02 February 16 - September 10, 2016
Various works 1986 - 1999, from two houses, from the collections of John Nixon, Sue Cramer, Kerrie Poliness, Peter Haffenden and Phoebe Haffenden.
Including: Geometry of Cakes (various shelves), 1993; Poor People’s Law (black and white plate), 1993; White Absence (glasses, ruler, set square, silver spoon, silver ladel with skin photograph and wooden cubes), 1990-1996; Exploitation of the Dead (grey and red star painting, wooden painting, black spoon with red table, red plate), 1984-1990; Money and Zeros (zero tie, paintings made for friends in Australia (Sue, John, Kerrie), numbers painting), 1991-1992; Words - Slogans (various t-shirts) - “they talk about the death of art...help! someone is trying to kill me”, “my sweet little lamb”, “work is a disease - Karl Marx”; Various artist books, catalogues, monographs, videos; Poster from exhibition Insulting Anarchy; "Circular" Croatian - Australian edition; Artist book by Vlado Martek (Dostoyevsky); more.
Thanks to Mladen Stilinović and Branka Stipančić.
Jonathan Walker
Always Will Need To Wear Winter Shirt Blue + Ochre Small Check Pattern
21 August - 21 September, 2015
Untitled
I am not a great reader of poetry but I always return to the work of Melbourne poet, Vincent Buckley (1925- 1988). Perhaps I find his most tantalising piece to be not a finished poem but a fragment left on a scrap of paper discovered on his desk after the poet’s death.
The poetry gathers like oil
In the word-core, and spreads
It has its music meet,
Its music is in movement.
This fragment is more the shell left behind from a volatile thought than a finished poem. I find the last two lines honest but awkward whereas the first two lines work like an arrow. Most likely he could not find a resolution so it was left. Still, in its present form, it remains an eloquent testimony to the ultimate failure of a medium to express mobile thought and sensation, in Buckley’s case, through verbal language. It’s an important matter because this is something all artists have to deal with regardless of the medium.
I have never written a poem, however, I am forever copying fragments from books on paper scraps in a vain effort to fix certain notions in my head. At first, they function as bookmarks that are sometimes returned to when I open the book. But before long, as they accumulate, they fall out littering the table interspersed with A4 photocopies, bills, books and medications.
To return to Buckley’s fragment, the first two lines very much evoke how I paint nowadays. As you age, detail diminishes and patches of light become more luminous and float. I feel the most honest way of dealing with this is by smearing the oil paint on the canvas with the fingers and working close-up, blind. Only if the patches coalesce into an approaching image can the work gain a life.
-
Jonathan Walker was born in Melbourne, Australia and brought up on a dairy farm in Gippsland. In the 1970’s he studied painting at RMIT and won the Harold Wright Scholarship to the British Museum, London. During the 1980’s he exhibited at Pinacotheca Gallery, Richmond and had work shown at the NGV and Heidi City Art Gallery. Over the same period he designed the cover for the “Epigenesi” LP by Giancarlo Toniutti, Italy and conducted a mail exchange work with Achim Wollscheid, Germany. The work with artists through the post resulted in an article published in the bicentenary issue of Art and Australia 1988. He showed in artist run spaces such as WestSpace in the 90’s and 2000’s, and until 2012, taught painting at Victoria University, which is where we (Colleen Ahern and Lisa Radford) as organisers of the exhibition, among many others, had the privilege of being his student.
Walker’s knowledge was imparted to students through the careful selection of music, literature, and artists found in books that he himself had ordered for the library. Walker’s strategy was the generosity of sharing his vast knowledge with references specific to each student and their context.
Walker’s paintings share a similar focus and intimacy.
This exhibition presents a small selection of recent paintings alongside a publication that includes Walker’s writing. Observational and analytical, Walker’s work is a type of material notation — the time of day, colour and how it is blended, the both specific and fleeting location of a reflection on lino or the question of whether a chair leg should be included in a painting.
Please join us on Friday August 21 between 6-8pm to celebrate the opening of the exhibition.
Curated by Colleen Ahern and Lisa Radford.
B. Wurtz
Curated by Nic Tammens
March 26 - April 4, 2015
B.Wurtz works from a basement studio in his home on Manhattan’s Lower East Side.
This local fact is attested to by the plastic shopping bags and newsprint circulars that appear in his work. As formal objects, they don’t make loud claims about their origins but nonetheless transmit street addresses and places of business from the bottom of this long thin island. Like plenty of artists, Wurtz is affected by what is local and what is consumed. His work is underpinned by this ethic. It often speaks from a neighborhood or reads like the contents of a hamper:
“BLACK PLUMS $1.29 lb.”
“Food Bazaar”
“USDA Whole Pork Shoulder Picnic 99c lb.”
“RITE AID Pharmacy, with us it’s personal.”
“H. Brickman & Sons.”
“Sweet Yams 59c lb."
Most of the work in this exhibition was made while the artist was in residence at Dieu Donne, a workshop dedicated to paper craft in Midtown. Here Wurtz fabricated assemblages with paper and objects that are relatively lightweight, with the intention that they would be easily transportable to Australia. This consideration isn’t absolute in Wurtz’s work, but was prescriptive for making the current exhibition light and cheap. Packed in two boxes, these works were sent from a USPS post office on the Lower East Side and delivered to North Melbourne by Australia Post.
Wurtz appears courtesy of Metro Pictures, New York.
Thanks to Rob Halverson, Joshua Petherick, Sari de Mallory, Matt Hinkley, Helen Johnson, Fayen d'Evie, Ask Kilmartin, Lisa Radon, Ellena Savage, Yale Union, and "Elizabeth".
John Nixon
"Archive"
December 15 - January 20, 2014
The presentation of John Nixon's archive offered a rare showcase of this extensive collection of the artist's own publications, catalogues, posters, ephemera, editions and more, from the mid 1980s onwards, alongside a selection of his artworks.
Organized by John Nixon, Joshua Petherick and Matt Hinkley.
"Habitat"
at Minerva, Sydney (organised by Joshua Petherick and Matt Hinkley)
November 15 - December 20, 2014
Lupo Borgonovo, Janet Burchill & Jennifer McCamley,
Lewis Fidock, HR Giger, Piero Gilardi, Veit Laurent Kurz,
Cinzia Ruggeri, Michael E. Smith, Lucie Stahl, Daniel Weil, Wols
Press Release:
“...It contained seven objects. The slender fluted bone, surely formed for flight, surely from the wing of some large bird. Three archaic circuitboards, faced with mazes of gold. A smooth white sphere of baked clay. An age-blackened fragment of lace. A fingerlength segment of what she assumed was bone from a human wrist, grayish white, inset smoothly with the silicon shaft of a small instrument that must once have ridden flush with the surface of the skin - but the thing’s face was seared and blackened.”
William Gibson, “Count Zero”, 1986
"Autumn Projects Archive"
Curated by Liza Vasiliou
March 6 - March 15, 2014
World Food Books, in conjunction with the Virgin Australia Melbourne Fashion Festival 2014, presented the Autumn Projects archive, consisting of a selection of early examples in Australian fashion with a particular interest in collecting designers and labels from the period beginning in the 1980’s, who significantly influenced the discourse of Australian Fashion.
Curated by Liza Vasiliou, the exhibition provided a unique opportunity to view pieces by designers Anthea Crawford, Barbara Vandenberg, Geoff Liddell and labels CR Australia, Covers, Jag along with early experimental collage pieces by Prue Acton and Sally Browne’s ‘Fragments’ collection, suspended throughout the functioning World Food Books shop in Melbourne.
H.B. Peace
presented by CENTRE FOR STYLE
November 14, 2013
"Hey Blinky, you say chic, I say same"
Anon 2013
H.B. Peace is a clothing collaboration between great friends Blake Barns and Hugh Egan Westland. Their pieces explore the divergences between 'character’ and ‘personality’ in garments....etc
Special Thanks to Joshua Petherick and Matt Hinkley of WFB and Gillian Mears
and a Very Special Thank you to Audrey Thomas Hayes for her shoe collaboration.
Janet Burchill & Jennifer McCamley
"Aesthetic Suicide"
May 10 - June 8, 2013
The first of our occasional exhibitions in the World Food Books office/shop space in Melbourne, "Aesthetic Suicide" presented a body of new and older works together by artists Janet Burchill & Jennifer McCamley, including videos, prints, a wall work, and publications.
During shop open hours videos played every hour, on the hour.
2024, English
Softcover (w. dust jacket), 456 pages, 24 x 33.5 cm
Published by
Les Presses Du Reel / Paris
Sprint / Milan
$90.00 - Out of stock
Out of the Grid presents a critical selection of 100 Italian zines from 1978 to 2006 that display a broad spectrum of social, political, aesthetic, and technological changes in the use of language and communication strategies across the territory of self publishing.
Widely mapping Italian society, particularly youth culture—over an extended period that can be symbolically defined as the "post-movement" and "pre-internet3.0"—, this outpouring of creativity gave visibility to small, imaginative and technical shifts on paper that made mimeographs, photocopiers and offset machines tremble, and often erupted into the need to communicate through other mediums. The titles selected originated from different scenes—musical, social, artistic, literary...—within which the distances between authors and readers is eliminated. To help navigate this multitude of subcultures, each zine is introduced by a profile that provides further analysis and information. No specific structure has been imposed, leaving room for the specific characteristics of each project to emerge. 100 titles ∞ paths.
Edited by Dafne Boggeri with Sara Serighelli.
Contribution by Marta Zanoni; interviews with Dafne Boggeri, Gino Gianuizzi, Stefano Gilardino, Glezös, Fabiola Naldi, Lorenza Pignatti, Pietro Rivasi, Giulia Vallicelli [Compulsive Archive].
Graphic design: Dafne Boggeri.
Published with Sprint (sprintmilano.org) and O' (www.on-o.org), Milan.
1983, English
Hardcover (w. dust jacket), 380 pages (approx), 36 x 24 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / fine
Published by
Abbeville Press / New York
$980.00 - In stock -
Very rare, most handsome copy of the first 1983 Abbeville English hardcover edition of the ever mysterious Codex Seraphinianus by Italian artist and designer Luigi Serafini (1949—), a book like no-other. Ever since the Codex Seraphinianus was first published in Italy in limited edition by Franco Maria Ricci in 1981, the book has been recognized as one of the strangest and most beautiful art books ever made. This phantasmagorical visual encyclopedia of an unknown world written in an unknown language has fueled much debate over its meaning. Written for the information age and addressing the import of coding and decoding in genetics, literary criticism, and computer science, the Codex confused, fascinated, and enchanted a generation, including Roland Barthes and Italo Calvino. While its message may be unclear, its appeal is obvious: it is a most exquisite artifact. Blurring the distinction between art book and art object.
Beautifully preserved Near Fine—F copy of the first 1983 English printing in NF dust jacket, preserved in mylar wrap.
1982, English
Softcover, 224 pages, 23 x 14 cm
Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
University of Chicago Press / Chicago
$45.00 - In stock -
Ambroise Paré, born in France around 1510, was chief surgeon to both Charles IX and Henri III. In one of the first attempts to explain birth defects, Paré produced On Monsters and Marvels, an illustrated encyclopedia of curiosities, of monstrous human and animal births, bizarre beasts, and natural phenomena. Janis L. Pallister’s acclaimed English translation offers a glimpse of the natural world as seen by an extraordinary Renaissance natural philosopher.
Scarce 1982 edition. Good—VG copy, light wear and spotting to block edges.
1993—2000, Japanese
Softcover, 300—400 pages ea., 21 x 15 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Sun Publishing / Japan
$300.00 - In stock -
Huge lot of 11 issues of Sabu, "Magazine For Men Who Love Men", the trailblazing gay erotic magazine from Japan, founded in 1974. All issues from the 1990s, with one issue from 2000 thrown in, 1993—2000, all featuring the gorgeous wrap-around (front and back) cover artwork by legendary gay erotic illustrator Ben Kimura (1947—2003). Packed with illustrations by Gengoroh Tagame, Gekko Hayashi, Go Mishima, Ben Kimura, and many other artists, at roughly 350—400 pages in each issue, Sabu is more of a book (a "mook" as it were). Filled to the brim with gay erotic art galleries, glossy hardcore erotic photography, loads of fetish and bondage materials, wild "bara" manga, classifieds/letters/sexmate messageboards, articles, ads for Japanese gay bars, clubs, saunas, dungeons, gyms, mail-order toys, publications, media, news and reports on international scenes, and much more.
Each issue Very Good—Good, with light wear and tear. Specific shipping costs may apply.
1987, English
Softcover, 352 pages, 27 x 22 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Semiotext(e) / Los Angeles
Autonomedia / New York
$80.00 - Out of stock
Rare copy of one of the remarkable special book issues of the original Semiotext(e) journal — the notorious Semiotext(e) U.S.A., published in 1987, edited by Jim Fleming and Peter Lamborn Wilson (Hakim Bey), and designed by Sue Ann Harkley. Complete with the unprintable 4-pages, in still-sealed plastic pocket. ("Calling it "subversive" and "obscene," five book printers in the spring of 1987 refused to print Semiotext(e) USA. A sixth printer agreed to do all but four pages, which we have printed separately and included here.") Semiotext(e) U.S.A. is an absolute treasure and time-capsule of subcultural publishing in the 1980s—1990s, centering around Autonomedia and Semiotext(e). The original publisher's blurb says it all:
"THE JOURNAL DENOUNCED IN THE U.S. SENATE FOR ITS ADVOCACY OF "ANIMAL SEX" PRESENTS..."
"A huge compendium of works in AMERICAN PSYCHOTOPOGRAPHY Areas not found on the official map of consensus perception — Maps of energies, secret maps of the USA in the form of words and images.
We are amazed. We are NOT BORED. We have discarded the outworn charm of post-modern incommunicadismo. Passion and involvement, self-abandoned craziness, funny, sexy, dangerous, unabashedly precious, punk, loud and direct. SF, speculative fiction, weird fantasy — Pornography — Other mutated genres — Sermons, rants, broadsheets, crackpot pamphlets, manifestoes — Xerox and mimeo zines — Punkzines — Mail art — Kids' poetry — Subverted advertisements — American samizdat — Astounding rhetoric, elegant propaganda — Underground comix — Geographical documentation (maps, monuments, guides to weird places, photographs) — Stolen top secret documents — And a special feature: scores of personal and classified ads. each one with a box-number or address, to connect YOU with the edges of the USA — Anarchists, unidentified flying leftists, neo-pagans, secessionists, the lunatic fringe of survivalism, cults, foreign agents, mad bombers, ban-the-bombers, nudists, monarchists, children's liberation, tax resisters, zero-workers, mimeo poets, vampires, feuilletonistes, xerox pirates, prisoners, pataphysicians, unrepentant faggots, witches, hardcore youth, poetic terrorists...
For the realization of almost-unheard of desires"
Founded in 1974, Semiotext(e) began as a journal that emerged from a semiotics reading group led by Sylvère Lotringer at the Columbia University philosophy department. Initially, the magazine was devoted to readings of thinkers like Nietzsche and Saussure. In 1978, Lotringer and his collaborators published a special issue, Schizo-Culture, in the wake of a conference of the same name he had organized two years before at Columbia University. The magazine brought together artists and thinkers such as Gilles Deleuze, Kathy Acker, John Cage, Michel Foucault, Jack Smith, Martine Barrat and Lee Breuer. Schizo-Culture brought out connections between high theory and underground culture that had not yet been made, and forged the "high/low" aesthetic that remains central to the Semiotext(e) project.
Good—VG copy with some wear and creasing to the covers and a couple of loose pages at the end. Complete with still-sealed additional censored pages.
2022, English
Hardcover, 76 pages, 25 x 20 cm
Published by
Baron / UK
$70.00 - In stock -
Back in print! Baron is pleased to present the first posthumous book by Japanese artist Sadao Hasegawa (Jan 1945- Nov 1999), dedicated to Hasegawa’s rarely-published archive.
Hasegawa work is notable for incorporating Japanese, Indian, South-East Asian and African mythology, combined with homo-erotic depictions of hyper-masculine men, in acts of BDSM.
Beauty, eroticism and death are recurring themes in Hasegawa’s work; he was inspired by Nobel Prize nominee Yukio Mishima. After Hasegawa’s suicide in 1999, his family was going to dispose of the artists archive but discovered a portrait of Mishima painted on a stone, accompanied by a note requesting that the works be bequeathed to Gallery Naruyama, Tokyo, where the artist’s estate is today.
Whilst gaining acclaim in queer publications in the USA and Europe, with critics historicising Hasegawa’s work as an influence on contemporary Japanese queer culture, and the gay manga genre, Hasegawa's works have not been widely recognized: his only book is the highly collectable Paradise Visions (Kochi Studio, 1996).
The book also includes an essay by Dr Thomas Baudinette, author of Regimes of Desire: Young Men, Media and Masculinity in Tokyo (University of Michigan Press, 2021) and is designed by Sam Boxer, Art Director of Gut Magazine.
2014, Japanese
Softcover (staple-bound), 20 pages, 29.7 x 21 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / good
Published by
Gallery Naruyama / Tokyo
$200.00 - In stock -
Rare Japanese softcover catalogue on Japanese artist Sadao Hasegawa's (1945—1999) amazing homo-erotic artwork — a blend of fantasy, Asian folklore, sado-masochism, and the homoeroticism of Yukio Mishima. Published by Gallery Naruyama in 2014 on the occasion of a survey of Hasegawa's technicolour works spanning 1978—1983, profusely illustrated on gloss stock with only text a short biography. features 48 artworks, many unpublished elsewhere.
Inspired by Nobel Prize nominee Yukio Mishima, beauty, eroticism and death are recurring themes in the self-taught Hasegawa’s work. His unique vision incorporates Japanese, Indian, South-East Asian and African mythology, combined with homo-erotic depictions of men in acts of sado-masochism, juxtaposed with lush tropical flowers, strings of pearls, birds and animals that float through the margins of dreamy, ecstatic scenes. After Hasegawa’s suicide in Bangkok, Thailand, in 1999, his family was going to dispose of the artists archive but discovered a portrait of Mishima painted on a stone, accompanied by a note requesting that the works be bequeathed to Gallery Naruyama, Tokyo, where the artist’s estate is today.
"When I was a child, I was alone with kūsō (daydreams and wild imagination). Always I went to the fields and the woods. I liked talking to animals and plants. In my imagination, I changed into birds and insects and flowers... These childhood experiences are the basis for my pictures." Sadao Hasegawa (In Touch for Men)
Good—Very Good with light cover wear and pinching to spine.
1990 / 1996, English
Softcover, 80 pages, 31 x 25.5 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / good
Published by
Gay Men's Press / London
Éditions Aubrey Walter / London
$440.00 - In stock -
First softcover edition of this incredible and exceptionally rare, collectible book on Japanese artist Sadao Hasegawa's (1945—1999) amazing homo-erotic artwork — a blend of fantasy, Asian folklore, sado-masochism, and the homoeroticism of Yukio Mishima. Published in 1990 by Éditions Aubrey Walter, the art book arm of The Gay Men's Press, London, this was the first and only book of Sadao Hasegawa's artwork to be published outside Japan in his lifetime, and it is still the ultimate collection of works, featuring Hasegawa's most graphic artworks. Self-taught and refusing to exhibit overseas, this book became a rare, uncensored look into this artist's world from the West. Profusely, lavishly colour illustrated from cover to cover on heavy stock paper, this long out-of-print, over-sized art book features 77 illustrations, introduced in English by Frits Staal (Professor of Asian Studies, University of California at Berkeley). It has become a treasure to collector's the world over. Hasegawa commited suicide in Bangkok, Thailand, in 1999.
"Sadao Hasegawa is a leading gay artist from Japan. His work, as represented here in this astounding collection, is a direct route into contemporary Japanese consciousness. An awareness absorbing world-wide cultural influences and expressing a new hybrid visuality. He has been called Japan's "Tom of Finland" because of his celebratory stance towards male homosex, much symbolic emphasis on male-male eroticism and Japan-style sado-masochism. But the similarity ends there. His work is a riot of bright optimistic colour and his symbolisms go deep into the myth and legend of the non-Western world. Sadao Hasegawa's imagination is overwhelmingly diverse but his technique is modern and masterful - focussed and fused with form, colour and content."—book cover
"When I was a child, I was alone with kūsō (daydreams and wild imagination). Always I went to the fields and the woods. I liked talking to animals and plants. In my imagination, I changed into birds and insects and flowers... These childhood experiences are the basis for my pictures." Sadao Hasegawa (In Touch for Men)
Good—Very Good 1st ed 1996 paperback copy. Interior VG, French-fold stiff cover with some traces of wear.
1996, Japanese
Softcover, 84 pages, 24 x 18.5 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Kochi Studio / Japan
$480.00 - In stock -
First edition of the incredible and exceptionally rare and collectible book on Japanese artist Sadao Hasegawa's (1945—1999) amazing male nude erotic artwork — a blend of fantasy, Asian folklore, and the homoeroticism of Yukio Mishima. Beautifully designed and printed, fully illustrated from cover to cover on heavy stock paper with metallic detailing, this long out-of-print monographic volume was the only book collection to be published only years before Hasegawa’s suicide in 1999, and has become a treasure to collector's ever since. Inspired by Nobel Prize nominee Yukio Mishima, beauty, eroticism and death are recurring themes in Hasegawa’s work, his unique vision incorporating Japanese, Indian, South-East Asian and African mythology, combined with homo-erotic depictions of hyper-masculine men, in acts of BDSM, juxtaposed with lush tropical flowers, strings of pearls, birds and animals that float through the margins of dreamy, ecstatic scenes. Hasegawa cited Tom of Finland, photographer Tamotsu Yato and his travels to Bali and Thailand as influences on his work.
Very Good copy, beautifully preserved with only light cover edge wear.
1972, Japanese
Softcover (w. illustrated slipcase), 34 x 25 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Haga Bookstore / Japan
$450.00 - Out of stock
Very rare, complete first edition of this cult work by ero-guro master Toshio Saeki (1945—2019), an absolute favourite, published in 1972 in this over-sized slipcased edition by the legendary Haga Shoten. The most famous work by Toshio Saeki, Red box (Akai Hako) brings together over fifty illustrations drawn by Toshio Saeki in 1972, sublimely reproduced as large-format double-page spread artworks, captivating in their mania and gorgeous, vivid colour printing on matte stock. A stunning book to behold. A masterpiece! A must!
Toshio Saeki (1945—2019) was an illusive Japanese illustrator and painter, and icon of 1970s Tokyo counterculture, known for combining Japanese folklore, Yōkai spirits and elements of Western art with his own sophisticated aesthetics to create a unique, sensational world of eros, dark humour, and horror. Given the title “Erotic Engineer” by Timothy Leary, Saeki's provocative art broke all sexual taboos, questioned Japanese ideology and traditional views on love, desire and gender roles. Saeki’s surgically-precise graphic work is closely related to the Japanese cultural phenomenon ‘Erotic, Grotesque, Nonsense’ (ero, guro, nansensu).
“Toshio Saeki conjures death with a pen”—Shūji Terayama, 1969.
Very Good copy with light wear/age, usual print buckling, VG—G slipcase with some light wear/age/marking.
1989, English
Softcover, 192 pages, 22 x 28 cm
Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
The Gay Men's Press (GMP) / London
Tom of Finland Foundation / Los Angeles
$190.00 - Out of stock
1989 printing of one of the finest collections of the great Tom of Finland, published by the Tom of Finland Foundation, Los Angeles, and The Gay Men's Press (GMP), London.
Preface by Tom of Finland with appreciation by Dennis Forbes and Fred Bisonnes. This book covers Tom of Finland's work from 1946 to 1987, depicting page by page throughout his iconic and impeccable erotic graphite drawings of macho leathermen, bikers, cowboys, cops, lumberjacks, hardhats, soldiers and sailors, all in all their glory.
Touko Valio Laaksonen (8 May 1920 – 7 November 1991), best known by his pseudonym Tom of Finland, was a Finnish artist known for his stylized highly masculine homoerotic fetish art, and his influence on late twentieth century gay culture. He has been called the "most influential creator of gay pornographic images" by cultural historian Joseph W. Slade. Over the course of four decades, he produced some 3500 illustrations.
Very Good copy with light cover/edge wear.
1991, English
Softcover, 192 pages, 22 x 28 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Tom of Finland Foundation / Los Angeles
$150.00 - Out of stock
First printing of Retrospective II, another of the finest collections of work from the great Tom of Finland, published in 1991 by the Tom of Finland Foundation, Los Angeles.
Preface by Tom of Finland. This book covers Tom of Finland's work dating back to 1944, depicting page by page throughout his iconic and impeccable erotic graphite drawings of macho leathermen, bikers, cowboys, cops, lumberjacks, hardhats, soldiers and sailors, all in all their glory.
Touko Valio Laaksonen (8 May 1920 – 7 November 1991), best known by his pseudonym Tom of Finland, was a Finnish artist known for his stylized highly masculine homoerotic fetish art, and his influence on late twentieth century gay culture. He has been called the "most influential creator of gay pornographic images" by cultural historian Joseph W. Slade. Over the course of four decades, he produced some 3500 illustrations.
Very Good copy with light cover/edge wear.
1995, English / German
Softcover (staple-bound), 62 pages, 28 x 21.5 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Tom of Finland Foundation / Los Angeles
$140.00 - In stock -
Rare copy of Tom of Finland Exhibition 1994-95, published in 1995 by the Tom of Finland Foundation, Los Angeles, on the occasion of the retrospective exhibition held in 1994 and the Schwules Museum, Berlin, Germany. Profusely illustrated with many unseen works, as well as photographs and documents tracing the life and work of Touko Valio Laaksonen (1920—1991), best known by his pseudonym Tom of Finland, the "most influential creator of gay pornographic images"(—Joseph W. Slade). Every period accounted for, from Tom's early commercial work to his most hardcore gay erotica, his sketch-books, his prints to his very last work. An incredible insight into this prolific artist of enduring influence. Texts throughout in English and German by president of Tom of Finland Foundation Durk Dehner and German art critic Wolfgang Max Faust, amongst others, plus chronology,
“Sometimes the attraction of the uniform is so powerful in me that I get the feeling that I am making love to the clothes and the man inside is just there to hold them up and give them shape, sort of like an animated department store dummy.”
Very Good, well preserved copy with light bump top of spine, crease to bottom front cover.
1972, French
Harcover (w. dust jacket), 88 pages, 28 x 21.8 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / fine
Published by
Eric Losfeld / Paris
$140.00 - In stock -
First hardcover edition of Jean-Marie Poumeyrol's Dessins Érotiques, published by Eric Losfeld in 1972. Beautifully illustrated throughout with Poumeyrol's incredible erotic drawings, "the techniques and ideas behind each of the finely drawn, lewd and Surrealist paintings of cult erotic French artist Jean-Marie Poumeyrol (b.1946) are explained by French Surrealist author and filmmaker Raymond Borde." In these, his early works, Jean-Marie Poumeyrol was recognized as a master of erotica, and often associated with the fantastic realism movement, combining hallucinogenic and macabre imagery in an unparalleled manner. Upon graduation at the Academy of Fine Arts in Bordeaux he already had a four year old son to support, and so began his illustrious career as a teacher of mechanical draftsmanship, before his educational career was cut short by the system. Art teachers had to pass tests given by the board to determine if they were skilled enough to teach drawing. At the same time that Poumeyrol’s erotic works were first seeing print and sought out avidly by collectors, he failed his art teacher’s exam—being given an ‘F’ for nude drawing. Encouraged by this failure, he dedicated himself to painting and drawing full time, eventually creating a large body of erotica which have marked him ever since (along with Sibylle Ruppert) as one of France’s greatest artists in this domain.
Raymond Borde (1920-2004) is a French film critic, film maker and essayist, co-founder and curator of the Cinémathèque de Toulouse. Associated with the surrealist movement and André Breton, he contributed to Positif and Premier Plan and published around twenty books.
Éric Losfeld (1922 - 1979) was a Belgian-born French publisher who had a reputation for publishing controversial material and was as often sued as Jean-Jacques Pauvert. A publisher who despised profit, he boasted that he had been, throughout his life, "in debt like a mule". When the creditors and the prosecutors gave him a little respite, he who defined himself as a "free editor" had only one principle: to be faithful to his tastes and unfaithful to his disgusts. "The only literature that touches me," he proclaimed, " is literature written with passion, or rather passionate literature." Thus, for thirty years, Losfeld created, at Arcane Editions, Le Terrain Vague, and under his own name, an invaluable and often clandestine catalog of Babouvist and hallucinated principality, and where he gathered all his preferences. For surrealism, eroticism, anarchism, romanticism, fantasy, black humor, jazz and comics. The world according to Losfeld, was that of Artaud, Mandiargues, Druillet, Sade, Vian, Peret, Allais, Jarry, Gbe, Sternberg, Forneret, Bealu, Topor, Arrabal, Peellaert or Klossowski. He was the publisher of Emmanuelle (1967), surrealist magazines ("Bief") and cinematographic magazines ("Midi Minuit Fantastique" and "Positif"), and the Barbarella science fiction comic book created by Jean-Claude Forest, amongst many other titles. Losfeld's tombstone inscription reads, "Tout ce qu'il éditait avait le souffle de la liberté." ("Everything he edited had the breath of freedom.").
Very Good copy in Good dust jacket.
1981, French
Hardcover (w. dust jacket), 96 pages, 33 x 25.5 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / fine
Published by
Galerie Bijan Aalam / Paris
Editions Natiris / Paris
$150.00 - Out of stock
First hardcover edition of Jean-Marie Poumeyrol — Peintures et Dessins, published by Éditions Baal-Natiris in association with the great Galerie Bijan Aalam, Paris, in 1981. Beautifully illustrated throughout with the visionary drawings and paintings of Jean-Marie Poumeyrol (b. 1941), this over-sized limited edition volume includes text by author Jean-François Reverzy and a conversation between the artist and author. Reverzy's text is fittingly entitled "The Haunting", introducing a remarkable period of Poumeyrol's work from 1973—1980 that matures from his early, complex, fantasy erotic work into his unique, finely-rendered depictions of scarred and haunted liminal spaces, ensnaring the viewer in his forensic scenes of obsession. Poumeyrol's dark architectural Wunderkammers are heavy with disturbance. What has happened, what is to come, what is desired, what is feared. Located out of time, yet littered with curios and trompe-l'œil portholes to many different time-places, Poumeyrol masters the familiar and gentle sensibility of mid-century European still-life/landscape painting with one-hand, whilst luring the viewer into an alien and unsettling pyscho-sexual dread with the other. Often associated with the fantastic realism movement, Poumeyrol combines hallucinogenic and macabre imagery in an unparalleled manner. Upon graduation at the Academy of Fine Arts in Bordeaux he already had a four year old son to support, and so began his illustrious career as a teacher of mechanical draftsmanship, before his educational career was cut short by the system. Art teachers had to pass tests given by the board to determine if they were skilled enough to teach drawing. At the same time that Poumeyrol’s erotic works were first seeing print and sought out avidly by collectors, he failed his art teacher’s exam—being given an ‘F’ for nude drawing. Encouraged by this failure, he dedicated himself to painting and drawing full time, eventually creating a large body of erotica which have marked him ever since (along with German born Sibylle Ruppert) as one of France’s greatest artists in this domain.
Fine copy in Fine dust jacket.
1983 / 1995, Japanese
Softcover (w. dust jacket), 176 pages, 21 x 14.8 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Seirindo / Tokyo
$60.00 - In stock -
First 1983 edition, 1995 print of Japanese ero guro (erotic grotesque) horror manga master Suehiro Maruo's DDT, a classic collection of artworks and short transgressive manga stories by Maruo (b. 1956) from the early 1980s, arguably the author's most creative period. Packed with sex, violence, gore, and maggots... "These short stories allow Maruo to give free rein to his imagination: funny and absurd, always full of references - notably to surrealism and German expressionism -, they deal with rape, murder and incest. And despite the horror and morbidity, a certain romanticism emerges, each board being able to be contemplated as a work of art in its own right. Between voyeurism and curiosity about the fate of the characters, we enter as if trapped in the fascinating world of Maruo. A work not to be put into everyone's hands."
Very Good copy in VG dust jacket. General light wear.
Suehiro Maruo (b. 1956) is a Japanese manga artist, illustrator, and painter. Maruo's nightmarish manga fall into the Japanese category of "erotic grotesque" ("ero-guro"). Though relatively few of Maruo's manga have been published outside Japan, his work enjoys an international cult following. A high school drop-out in 1972, Maruo moved to Tokyo and began working for a bookbinder. At 17, he made his first manga submission to Weekly Shōnen Jump, but it was considered by the editors to be too graphic and was rejected. Maruo temporarily removed himself from manga until November 1980 when he made his official debut as a manga artist in Ribon no Kishi at the age of 24. It was at this stage that the young artist was finally able to pursue his artistic vision without such stringent restrictions over his work’s visual content. Two years later, his first stand-alone anthology, Barairo no Kaibutsu (Rose Colored Monster) was published. Maruo was a frequent contributor to the underground manga magazine Garo and also produced illustrations for concert posters; CD jackets; magazines; novels; and various other media, including his collaboration with composer John Zorn's band Naked City. The illustrations throughout several of his works show grotesquely dark imagery, strange sexual acts / rituals, as well as sexual-violence towards minors. It is referred to as contemporary "bloody prints" muzan-e (a subset of Japanese ukiyo-e depicting violence or other atrocities.) Maruo himself featured in a 1988 book on the subject with fellow artist Kazuichi Hanawa entitled Bloody Ukiyo-e, presenting their own contemporary works alongside the traditional prints of Yoshitoshi and Yoshiiku.
1985, Japanese
Softcover, 260 pages, 19 x 13 cm
Published by
Data House / Tokyo
$200.00 - In stock -
Possibly the most fun you can cram into 260-odd pages! A now very collectible volume edited by none other than Japanese master of erotic superrealism, Hajime Sorayama, Pink Department Store is a wild book digest of visual sex — straight out of 1985! A compendium of remarkable erotic imagery packed into this one-stop look-book of kink compiled by Sorayama, all reproduced in full-colour on beautiful warm raw paper stock, designed by Hisao Iguchi. From the Tokyo sex clubs, phone-booths and toilet stalls, Shibari photography to pink film posters, x-rated manga to wildlife fornication, leather daddys to dominatrixes, Pink Department Store is a safari through graphic perversion and joyous visual innuendo. Alongside archival material and international works the book generously features an abundance of works by over 100 contemporary Japanese illustrators and photographers, including Aimei Ozaki, Harumi Yamaguchi, Takashi Nemoto, Yosuke Onishi, Suehiro Maruo, Hajime Sorayama, Mizumaru Anzai, Yokoyama Akira, Keiichi Ota, Akira Ishigaki, Kaoru Ueda, Teruhiko Yumura, Yoshiharu Ebisu, Arata Taga, to name but a few. There is also a directory list to contact them all!
Very Good—NF copy in VG original dust jacket and rarely preserved publisher's obi-strip.
1967, German
Offset poster (double-sided), 83.5 x 59 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
$600.00 - Out of stock
Where it all started.... H.R. Giger's first ever poster! Rare vintage original and never reprinted.
Published in a limited edition to accompany the The-Telllife-No-mads-presents: Poëtenz happening/exhibition, organized by young Giger's friend and collaborator, Swiss writer, artist and publisher Urban Gwerders. Gwerders was the publisher of Swiss underground counterculture magazine Hotcha (1968—1971), to which Giger was also a contributor. The poster folds-down into a catalogue/program for the event with original cover artwork by Giger and collage contents, poems, photographs (including pics of Giger, Li, et al) and Poëtenz information, all designed in the montage style of Hotcha, and the "poster" side entirely reproducing Giger's incredible early "Astreunuchen" masterpiece, pre-dating ALIEN by over ten years.
A stunning collector's item and piece of Giger history, ready to frame.
Dimensions : 83.5 x 59 cm
Very Good condition, never mounted/pinned, well preserved in folded state as issued.
1981, English
Softcover, 48 pages, 40 x 28 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Charles E. Tuttle / Tokyo
$170.00 - In stock -
Scarce first Japanese edition (entirely in English language), published in Tokyo by Charles Tuttle, of this beautifully produced over-sized 1981 book by H. R. Giger. Foreword by Timothy Leary.
In 1981, a year after being awarded the Oscar for Best Achievement for Visual Effects for Alien, the book H.R. GIGER N.Y. CITY was published. This series of post Alien works, the result of an intense period of non-stop painting, literally day and night, were inspired by Giger's trip to New York City and a template which his colleague Cornelius de Fries, brought back from one of his excursions into the electronic industry. The stencil was actually a sheet of scrap metal from which electrical components had been punched out. Alongside these incredible works are drawings, articles, press clippings, posters and polaroids from Giger's time in New York City.
Fantastic Swiss surrealist painter, sculptor and set designer Hans Rudolf “Ruedi” Giger was born in 1940, the son of a chemist. He spoke of a father who viewed art as a "breadless profession", and strongly encouraged his son to enter into pharmaceutics. Despite this, in 1962, he moved to Zürich, where he studied Architecture and industrial design at the School of Applied Arts until 1970. Giger's style and thematic execution have been hugely influential. His design for the Alien was inspired by his painting Necronom IV and earned him an Oscar in 1980. His books of paintings, particularly Necronomicon and Necronomicon II (1985) and the frequent appearance of his art in Omni magazine continued his rise to international prominence. Giger is also well known for artwork on several music recording albums. His most distinctive stylistic innovation is that of a representation of human bodies and machines in a cold, interconnected relationship, he described as "biomechanical". His paintings often display fetishistic sexual imagery. His main influences were painters Ernst Fuchs and Salvador Dalí. He was also a personal friend of Timothy Leary. Giger suffered from night terrors and his paintings are all to some extent inspired by his experiences with that particular sleep disorder, making his first paintings as a means of art therapy. In 1998 Giger acquired the Château St. Germain in Gruyères, Switzerland, and it now houses the H. R. Giger Museum, a permanent repository of his work.
Good copy, tight binding with some corner cover wear, tanning to page edges and foxing to preliminary pages.
1998, English / Japanese
Hardcover (w. dust jacket), 100 pages, 37 x 26 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / fine
Published by
Sakuhinsha / Tokyo
$200.00 - In stock -
Scarce first Japanese hardcover edition of Japanese master of erotic fantasy illustration Hajime Sorayama's absolute classic Torquere (Torture), published in 1998. Following the success of best-seller NAGA, Sorayama's Torquere delves deeper into the darker realm of fantasy fetishism and, as the title suggests, into the world of Sadomasochism. This lavish over-sized volume is illustrated cover-to-cover with Sorayama's most explicit works presented in dramatic, glossy full-colour throughout. Rare in this original hardcover edition.
Hajime Sorayama is revered for his erotic airbrushed illustrations of humanoid robots that explore ideals of femininity and beauty. Drawing on pinup pictures, Sorayama published the first book of his signature “Sexy Robot” series of chromium-plated figures in 1983. Decades later, these striking works have sold for more than $500,000. Sorayama started his career in advertising before freelancing in Hollywood, where he helped to produce visuals for sci-fi films. His illustrations gained widespread attention in 1995, when Penthouse began featuring them in a monthly column. While Sorayama has enjoyed a particular cult status for his sensual cyborgs —who appear empowered rather than objectified —he has also received mainstream commercial attention. Sony enlisted him to produce the first designs for its robotic dog AIBO, which won the grand prize for Japan’s Good Design Award in 1999. Sorayama has also worked with fashion titans such as Thierry Mugler and Dior on projects that have extended his illustrations into the realm of wearables, sculpture, and performance.
Near Fine copy.
2012, English / Japanese
Hardcover, unpaginated, 26.5 x 18.5 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Presspop Gallery / Tokyo
$200.00 - Out of stock
First edition of this fast out-of-print and collectible hardcover volume collecting the artwork of legendary and prolific Japanese horror master Hideshi Hino, including three never-before-seen short manga stories, all in full-colour, published in 2012 by Presspop, Tokyo. Cover-to-cover artworks with only one exceptionally appropriate text, "Pseudo Amida Sutra of a Dreaming Embryo", by fellow horror manga artist Suehiro Maruo. Also includes valuable visual bibliography of all his illustrated books printed as the book's endpapers.
Hideshi Hino (b. 1946) is a Japanese manga artist who specializes in horror stories. His comics include Hell Baby, Hino Horrors, and Panorama of Hell. He also wrote and directed two entries in the Guinea Pig series of horror films: Flower of Flesh and Blood (1985), and Mermaid in a Manhole (1988).
"Mother, breasts, conception, last month of pregnancy, praying for easy delivery, painful delivery, stillbirth, hemorrhage, filth, midwife, pitiless hag, cropping, selling of own child, convention, superstition, Dog Spirit, curse, whisper, lie, paranoia, auditory hallucination, neurosis, insanity, isolation, confinement, basement, cell, prison, reformatory, orphanage, abandoned child, abandoned old men and women, missing woman, old legend of Toono, loner, hermit, bum, beggar, solitary death, prairie fire, will-o'-the-wisp, graveyard, cluster-amaryllis, offering, cake, ant, lizard, viper, hornet, poisonous sting, syringe needle, drugs, morphine, strychnine, promin, opium, drug addiction, sanatorium, tuberculosis, nurse, white robe, hygiene, unsanitary, filthy, stench, body odor, heat rash, scabies, ringworm, pus, eye mucus, trachoma, cataract, eyepatch, bandage, mummy, offering, human sacrifice, regrettable death, grudge, ghost, evil spirit, malice, secession, echtoplasma, spiritualistic medium, shrine maiden, Japanese voodoo doll, little boy, big boy, nostalgia, loss of homeland, childhood, old age, afterlife, pilgrim's hymn, the invocation Namu Amida Butsu, the special practice of one million nenbutsu, death, lotus flower, transmigration, near death experience, immortality of the soul, funeral, black and white striped bunting for funeral, mourning dress, hearse, crematory, smoke, whirlpool, labyrinth, dizziness, acrophobia, claustrophobia, socialphobia, stuttering, deafness, blindness, night-blindness, malnutrition, hypoplasia, poliomyelitis, crutches, crippled legs, bound feet, freak angel, peculiar disease, genetic inheritance, lineage, ancestor, clan, blood relative, incest, necrophilia, maggot, gutbucket, defecation, excreta, drainage, cave, stalagmite, darkness, moonless night, eclipse of the moon, crowd under the moon, Dogra Magra, Pseudo Amida Sutra."
Near Fine—Very Good copy.
1982/1992, Japanese
Softcover, 192 pages, 21 x 14.5 cm
Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Atelier Peyotl / Tokyo
$90.00 - In stock -
"Corpse" Special Feature Issue of cult Japanese underground magazine Yaso, first published in 1982, then re-printed in 1992, edited by Yuichi Konno and Atelier Peyotl (publishers of Night Vision/Yaso/Peyotl/Wave/Silvester Club...). Heavily illustrated with texts in Japanese that look at the theme of death and the dead in the arts, literature, occultism, ancient sciences, philosophy, mythology, poetry, film, crime, and much more. Features John Duncan, Tetsumi Kudo, Cosey Fanni Tutti, Masahisa Fukase, Franz Kafka, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Guillaume Apollinaire, Joe Potts (LAFMS), Takashi Ishii, Rudolf II — Holy Roman Emperor, Akinari Ueda, Marcel Duchamp, Chris Burden, Paul Celan, Alain Resnais, Gilyak Amagasaki, Shusaku Arakawa, Pieter Bruegel the Elder, Shuji Terayama, Andy Warhol, Charles Manson, Brian Wilson, Kyoko Endoh, Princess Yongtai, Salvador Dalí, Ono no Komachi, Kiyoshi Kasai, Caravaggio, Throbbing Gristle, Takizawa Bakin, Leno and Rosemary LaBianca, Manson Family, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Wu Zetian, Genesis P-Orridge, Yusuke Nakahara, Ranpo Lagrange, Mitsusada Fukasaku, Nakai Hideo, Richard Wagner, and many more.
Very Good copy.
2013, English / Japanese
Softcover (staple-bound), various pagination, 28.5 x 20.5 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / fine
Published by
Comme des Garçons / Tokyo
$220.00 - Out of stock
Copies of the infamous printed collaboration between Rei Kawakubo's Comme des Garçons and legendary manga artist Katsuhiro Otomo, best known as the creator of Akira, both the original 1982 manga series and the 1988 animated film adaptation. Issued as mail-outs privately by Comme to announce the arrival of their 2013—14 Autumn—Winter collection, and not commercially available, these gorgeous, elaborate leaflets designed by CDG founder Rei Kawakubo, showcase Otomo’s Akira artwork in a series of collages put together and coloured by Kawakubo herself, with fold-outs, inserts and die-cut illustrations have become highly desirable, for obvious reasons. Surprisingly Otomo is the first Japanese artist to feature in Comme’s mail outs, so this collaboration was very special for fans of both. Very Good, preserved copies of three of the best of 28 volumes (issued separately) as they all feature Otomo's artwork on the covers (many others feature other artist mash-ups from Otomo-related NoBrow magazine, and now becoming very scarce.
2015, Japanese
Softcover (w. dust jacket and obi), unpaginated, 31 x 22 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
GOT / Japan
$90.00 - Out of stock
Third instalment of GREASEBERRIES, the adult erotic art book series by Japanese cyber-punk manga master Masamune Shirow (b. 1961), acclaimed for his 1980s—1990s cult sci-fi manga Ghost in the Shell, Dominion, Appleseed, and Black Magic. Shirow is also known for creating erotic art. GREASEBERRIES, "A Collection of Masamune Shirow's Full Color Indecent Works" is one of his most popular graphic series, each over-sized, glossy, lavishly produced collection exploding with his iconic Galgrease hentai action. Mature audiences only!
Masanori Ota (b. 1961), better known by his pen name Masamune Shirow, is a master of the Japanese cyber-punk manga genre, internationally renowned for his 1980s—1990s cult manga Ghost in the Shell, Dominion, Appleseed, and Black Magic. Shirow is also known for creating erotic art. His unique artistic vision and complex techno-drama stories centred around key themes synonymous to Shirow — artificial-intelligence, highly lethal heroines, techno-philosophy, politics and mysticism, police-procedures, robotics/cyborgs, highly detailed mechanical designs and hard sci-fi rendering. During the 1990s Shirow shifted his focus from manga to art book or poster book formats, his Intron Depot art collections introducing many of his more graphic works edited from his earlier iconic mangas, alongside his personal works. Intron Depot and his Galgrease posterbooks segwayed perfectly into his more reclusive artistic life and 2000s works Pieces, W-Tails Cat, and Greaseberries, retaining all the innovative technical and detailed rendering, and applying them to graphic hentai fantasy manga, a genre he has mastered, much to the dismay of his more puritan (largely pathetic American) fans/critics.
Very Good—NF copy with original obi.