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
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THU—FRI 12—6 PM
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World Food Books
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PO Box 435
Flinders Lane
Victoria 8009
Australia
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Pick-Ups
Pick-up orders can be collected in our bookshop during opening hours after order date. Please collect any Pick-up orders within 2 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. If you cannot make it in to the bookshop in this time-frame, please choose postage option.
Return Policy
All sales are final. We do accept returns (for refund or 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.
$.00 - Out of stock
The eternal clean out! New items weekly.
https://worldfoodbooks.com/category/sale
Published by World Food Books / Melbourne
$20.00 - In stock -
A World Food Books gift voucher is redeemable in our Melbourne bookshop or via our webshop (here). An e-voucher (printable pdf) will be sent to your purchase email address (please notify us if you wish to have the voucher sent to an alternate address and wish us to fill in the receiver's details on the card).
Gift vouchers can be purchased in increments of $20 (Australian Dollars) and the total amount can simply be added to by increasing the quantity in your shopping cart. eg. A quantity of 5 gift vouchers will result in an item total of $100 - a $100 gift voucher. Simply click "ADD TO CART" 5 times, or update your quantity in the shopping cart.
If you wish to purchase multiple, separate gift vouchers in one go, please just email us and we can personally prepare and email you a payment request.
Please note: Please select Pick-Up on gift voucher purchse to avoid any postage charges. Accidental postage charges will be refunded right away!
Thank you.
For any questions, please don't hesitate to email: [email protected]
1999, English
Softcover, 186 pages, 15.5 x 23 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Cityful Press / Seattle
$200.00 - In stock -
First, only edition of "Think of The Self Speaking : Harry Smith — Selected Interviews", published in 1998 by Cityful Press and long out-of-print. In this incredible collection you will find the flavour and texture of experimental filmmaker, music anthologist, and enigmatic polymath Harry Smith’s conversation, his rambling, obscure, luminous, cantankerous genius. This collection of interviews spans Harry Smith's long and influential life in American arts and letters. They cover a quarter-century, touching on the full range of Smith's activity as a groundbreaking experimental filmmaker, obsessive collector, folk music anthologist, visionary painter, student of Native American lore, anthropologist, cosmographer, alchemist, hermetic scholar, occultist, autodidact, classic American eccentric, and all-around explorer of the possibilities of human consciousness and creativity. Jordan Belson writes, "THINK OF THE SELF SPEAKING is the next best thing to being with Harry himself-perhaps better, certainly safer. The interviews are remarkably similar to his collage films. A brilliant mind unhinged." Includes an introduction by Allen Ginsberg.
Very Good copy with only light shelf wear.
1980, English / Japanese
Softcover (w. acetate jacket and obi-strip), 190 pages, 30 x 22 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Byakuya Shobo / Tokyo
$850.00 - In stock -
First edition. A seminal Japanese photo book and instant classic upon release, Flash up is one of the most remarkable photographic excursions into the seedy underbelly of 1970s Tokyo. Kurata (b. 1945—2020), one Japan’s formidable contemporary photographers who’s work is often referenced in the same circles as his "Provoke" teachers Daido Moriyama and Nobuyoshi Araki, won the fifth Kimura Ihei Award in 1980 for this, his first book, his acclaimed collection of photographs of creatures of the night — gangsters showing off their full-length tattoos, youth styling themselves after the Hells Angels, self-professed ultra-nationalists from the notorious Black Dragon Society, transvestites drawing in crowds of men, cabaret girls...
"The photographs of Seiji Kurata are striking for their violence. The viewer must be prepared to be hit by his flashgun along with the subjects. ‘Violence’, in this case, is not necessarily invoked by the scenes of blood-shed; rather, it is Kurata’s sharp-shooting ability to stop the flow of time, capture the moment, draw of details we would otherwise never see, then proffer them up before our eyes. Sometimes our response is to avert our eyes for fear of seeing too much. This is not to say that the images are not exaggerated; for after all, people tend only to see what they want to see. If there are those who find Kurata’s photographs ‘ugly’, it can only be said that he has succeeded in paradoxically pointing the finger at them: You who want to avoid ugliness, he says, this is reality and I have cut it out for you. [...] we must admit that the ugliness apparent in these photographs is our ugliness. Our failure to do so simply invites Kurata to deal us an extra-violent blow with his images."—Akira Hasegawa, from the afterword.
Included in Martin Parr & Gerry Badger, The Photobook, Vol. II.
Text in English and Japanese.
Very Good copy, wear and usual shrinkage to publisher's thick acetate dust jacket, VG original metallic obi-strip, Very Good book, light bump to one corner.
1979, Japanese / English / Italian
Softcover (w. illustrated wax dust jacket), 320 pages, 26 x 21 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Kodansha Int / Tokyo
$400.00 - In stock -
Very rare first edition copy of the best, most comprehensive book on the work of renowned Japanese graphic designer, sculptor, and poster artist Shigeo Fukuda (1932-2009), published in Tokyo in 1979. Fukuda was known for his striking optical illusions and provocative socially conscious work, particularly his anti-war and environmentalist posters. He was a pioneer in Japanese graphic design and the first Japanese designer inducted into the Art Director's Club Hall of Fame. This 350 page survey of his greatest works to date is profusely illustrated in vivid colour and b/w with his logo and display designs, posters, stage designs, environmental design, toys, illustration and graphic art, sculptures, picture books, calendars, ceramics, textiles, and so much more. Multi-lingual texts in Japanese and English/Italian by none other than Paul Rand, Bruno Munari, André Francis, and Yusuke Nakahara, plus a full chronology and list of works, all beautifully wrapped in the original publisher's wax paper jacket illustrated by Fukuda and original title bookmark/obi insert, all seldom preserved. THE book on this iconic Japanese designer.
Very Good copy in Good dust-jacket with wear and tear to spine/general age/tanning.
1969, Japanese
Hardcover (w. dust jacket), 214 pages, 22 x 16 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Taihen Shuppan-Sha / Japan
$550.00 - In stock -
Extremely rare first 1969 hardcover edition of Tadao Mitome's "Records of Revolts 60-70" (or "Documents of Rebellion 60-70"), a stunning collection of Mitome's provocative front-line photographic documentation of Japanese protests during the 1960's, published in 1969. Stunning richly gravure-printed imagery gives a confronting account of the post-war struggles of the "Zengakuren", Japan's radical student activists, including the ANPO protests, a series of massive citizen movement protests throughout Japan from 1959 to 1960 against the US–Japan Security Treaty, which allows the United States to maintain military bases on Japanese soil, the like-wise struggle against the US military presence since the end of World War II in Okinawa, and various other school campus protests, security protests, worker protests, all carefully selected from 150,000 negatives covering 10 years, accompanied by a complete chronological history of the Zengakuren struggle between the 1959—1969. Published at a time of great anti-imperialist government resistance in Japan, "Records of Revolts 60-70", like Kurihara's "Anger Is Our Daily Bread" of the same year, is one of the masterpieces of Japanese protest photo-books of the era. Designed by the legendary designer and activist Kiyoshi Awazu.
Very Good copy with some age/wear/tanning to extremities.
1971, Japanese
Hardcover (w. slip-case) 192 pages, 24 x 18 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Shinsensha / Tokyo
$480.00 - In stock -
Gorgeous first (boxed) hardcover edition of Tadao Mitome's "protest-book masterpiece" published in 1971, documenting the Sanrizuka resistance to the building of Tokyo's Narita Airport. Photographs follow the thousands of protestors into battle against riot police and record their construction of fortresses and underground tunnels.
“A superb document about the medieval fighting that took place over a period of some five years around Narita airport. Fuelled by the spirit of protest in the late 60s this constituted the first of many often violent anti-airport protests in the region.”
“Sanrizuka documents the intense civil unrest between residents of Sanrizuka, an agricultural area located on the east side of Narita airport, and government authorities, in the run up to the construction and later expansion of the airport. Under a 1966 plan, the airport would have been completed in 1971, but due to the ongoing resettlement disputes, not all of the land for the airport was available by then. Finally, in 1971, the Japanese government began forcibly expropriating land. 291 protesters were arrested and more than 1,000 police, villagers and student militants were injured in a series of riots.“
Editing and art direction by the legendary activist designer Kiyoshi Awazu (1929–2009) with stunning deep gravure printing. Included in “The Japanese Photobook, 1912–1990” by Kaneko Ryuichi and Manfred Heiting and "The Photobook: A History, Volume III" by Martin Parr and Gerry Badger, p. 57.
Very Good copy with some age/wear/light scratching to box.
1996/2003, English / Japanese
Softcover (w. dust jacket and obi), 176 pages, 21 x 30 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Treville / Tokyo
Pan-Exotica / Tokyo
$300.00 - In stock -
The second volume of Toshio Saeki's erotic nightmare masterpiece, "Chimushi II" was published in 1996 by Treville, only available in Japan, and now very collectible in every edition. A lavishly illustrated book collection of every darkest sexual depravity rendered in vibrant colour by Japanese master of Ero guro, Toshio Saeki, published by Treville and Pan-Exotica, here in the 2003 softcover edition. In the introduction, Timothy Leary writes, "We salute the style and grace with which you tease our secret sensualities. And teach us how our dark, twisted images and fearful fantasies are created by our own minds."
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.
Good—Very Good copy, with light wear/bumping to cover extremities, interior Fine. With Average obi inserted.
1969, Japanese / English
Softcover (w. dust jacket), 166 pages, 26 x 19 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Tojusha / Tokyo
$380.00 - In stock -
Extremely rare first 1969 edition of Anger Is Our Daily Bread, Japanese photographer Tatsuo Kurihara's arresting book of front-line photographic student protest reportage published by Tojusha, Tokyo. The book of the "Zengakuren", Japan's radical student activists. With stunning, richly gravure-printed imagery, Anger Is Our Daily Bread is one of the most provocative and powerful photographic records of political unrest in Japan ever published. A desperate documentary and a master work from a Japanese photo-journalist at the forefront of bloodshed. Text in Japanese and English.
Anger Is Our Daily Bread concerns one of the most important political events in post-war Japan, The Anpo protests, also known as the Anpo struggle, a series of massive protests throughout Japan from 1959 to 1960 against the US–Japan Security Treaty, which allows the United States to maintain military bases on Japanese soil. Inspired by anti-imperialist left, these protests, the largest popular protests in Japan's history, were the coordinated actions of various citizen movements, from labor unions, student and women's organizations, mothers' groups, poetry circles, theatre troupes, groups affiliated with the Japan Socialist and Communist Parties, even conservative businessmen, who all wanted to prevent the ratification of the treaty and, as survivors of the unrivalled disasters of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, end the trauma of American military presence in Japan. The planned visit of the US president Eisenhower escalated the protests, which gripped hundreds of thousands to protest daily for a year around the Japanese Parliament National Diet building. With an unparalleled police presence physically removing the Socialist Diet members' attempted opposition sit-in, Prime Minister Kishi undemocratically passed the treaty provoking nationwide outrage, strikes and actions. The Zengakuren were always on the front-line. Facing strong anti-government public opinion which had been enhanced by the death of a female Tokyo University student named Michiko Kanba during a demonstration, Eisenhower's visit was cancelled and Kishi resigned as Prime Minister, in order to quell the widespread popular anger at his extremist actions. Yet the treaty remained in effect and wide-spread Americanisation of Japan ensued.
On the eve of the 1970 treaty revision, Anger Is Our Daily Bread was published.
"Another revision term coming next year, the Zengakuren students started to resort to "Molotov cocktail" method. They are not only against the Japan—US Security Treaty, but also struggling to address those problems like university reform, the new international airport at Narita, Chiba, the U.S. bases in Japan, Okinawa's return to Japan, etc. Helmeted and armed with the so-called "Gewalt" clubs and sticks, those students of Zengakuren repeatedly clash with the armed police. Pictures shown here are the record of the Zengakuren movement for the past twelve months."—from Tatsuo Kurihara's introduction
Kurihara's extremely vivid first hand visual accounts of the immense student demonstrations, their meetings, their brutal conflict with the police, the molotov cocktails from stormed buildings, and constant armed street battles, make for one of the most moving protest books ever printed. His stark, heavy contrast images are so immersive they give the viewer the impression of themselves being in the violent clashes, a witness to people's lives thrown into turmoil, the urgency and desperation to be heard by the elite.
Tatsuo Kurihara was born in downtown Tokyo in 1937. Upon graduating from Waseda University's Faculty of Political Science and Economics in 1961, he began working at the Asahi Shimbun Tokyo Headquarters Publishing Photography Department. In 1962, he won the Japan Photographers Association Newcomer's Award. In 1967, he left Asahi Shimbun and became a freelancer and a member of the Japan Photographers Society (JPS).
Very Good copy in Good—VG dust jacket with some light wear to jacket extremities. Corner bump to front top first few pages.
1970, Japanese
Softcover, 300 pages, 21 x 15 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Tenjō Sajiki / Tokyo
$260.00 - In stock -
Very rare copy of Angura (Underground Theatre) issue 3, 1970, the "Dramatic Theory Magazine" published in Tokyo by Shūji Terayama's radical avant-garde theatre company Tenjō Sajiki. With gorgeous graphic design and (Aleister Crowley) cover by graphic designer Heikichi Harata, this issue's special feature is ‘Eros and Theater’, edited by Shūji Terayama and Masahiko Akuta with contributions by Terayama, photographer Hajime Sawatari, writer Taruho Inagaki, director Takahiko Iimura, anthropologist Masao Yamaguchi, playwright Yasunari Takahashi, director and cinematographer Sakumi Hagiwara, film director Nobuhiro Kawanaka, playwright Rio Kishida, and many others. A very unique periodical that not only discusses in-depth the works of Angura theatre, but also the international avant-garde, inviting diverse critical perspectives on performance and anti- and living-theatre, sharing ground with Gutai and Fluxus. Illustrated throughout with drawings, diagrams and photographs, mixing themes of pop, protest, surrealism, and eros, plus texts and scripts in Japanese. A rare printed embodiment of Tenjō Sajiki, Terayama, Tadanori Yokoo and the Japanese underground.
Tenjō Sajiki was a Japanese independent theater troupe co-founded by Shūji Terayama, Kujō Kyōko, Yutaka Higashi, Tadanori Yokoo, and Fumiko Takagi. Led by Japanese avant-garde poet, dramatist, writer, film director, and photographer Shūji Terayama, the prolific group was active between 1967 and 1983 (until Terayama's death). A major phenomenon on the Japanese Angura ("underground") theater scene, the group has produced a number of stage works marked by experimentalism, folklore influences, social provocation, grotesque eroticism and the flamboyant fantasy characteristic of Terayama's oeuvre. Tenjō Sajiki benefitted greatly from collaborations with a number of prominent artists, including musicians J. A. Seazer and Kan Mikami, and graphic designers Aquirax Uno and Tadanori Yokoo.
Shūji Terayama (1935 — 1983) was a Japanese avant-garde poet, dramatist, writer, film director, and photographer. His works range from radio drama, experimental television, underground (Angura) theatre, countercultural essays, to Japanese New Wave and "expanded" cinema. Terayama is considered one of the most productive and provocative creative artists to come out of Japan, with a wide-reaching influence on many artists from the 1970s onward.
2022, English
Softcover, 228 pages, 14 x 21 cm
Published by
Seven Stories Press / New York
$45.00 - In stock -
"One of the most important chroniclers of the modern psyche." —The Guardian
The novelist, cultural critic, and indie icon serves up sometimes bitchy, always generous, erudite, and joyful assessments from the last thirty-five years of cutting edge film, art, and literature.
Whether he's describing Tracy Emin or Warhol, the films of Barbet Schroeder ("Schroeder is well aware that life is not a narrative; that we impose form on the movements of chance, contingency, and impulse....") or the installations of Barbara Kruger ("Kruger compresses the telling exchanges of lived experience that betray how skewed our lives are..."), Indiana is never just describing. His writing is refreshing, erudite, joyful.
Indiana champions shining examples of literary and artistic merit regardless of whether the individual artist or writer is famous; asserts a standard of care and tradition that has nothing to do with the ivory tower establishment; is unafraid to deliver the coup de grâce when someone needs to say the emperor has no clothes; speaks in the same breath--in the same discerning, insolent, eloquent way--about high art and pop culture. Few writers could get away with saying the things Gary Indiana does. And when the writing is this good, it's also political, plus it's a riot of fun on the page.
Here is Gary Indiana on Euro Disney resort park in Marne-la-Valée outside of Paris:
John Berger compares the art of Disney to that of Francis Bacon. He says that the same essential horror lurks in both, and that it springs from the viewer's imagining: There is nothing else. Even as a child, I understood how unbearable it would be to be trapped inside a cartoon frame.
Since 1987, Indiana has published novels, nonfiction, plays, short stories -- all with an unmistakable, sardonic voice embedded in the text ..." —Los Angeles Times
2018, English
Softcover, 240 pages, 21 x 14 cm
Published by
Seven Stories Press / New York
$35.00 - In stock -
“A novel too weird and perverted and frankly minacious to stay in print, too unforgettable not to be reissued.”—Sarah Nicole Prickett, from the introduction
The narrator of Gone Tomorrow is an actor who has been cast in an unlikely art film set in Colombia. But from the moment he arrives at the airport in Bogota, only to witness a policeman beat a beggar half to death for no apparent reason, it becomes clear that this will not be the story of gritty bohemians triumphing against the odds. The director, Paul Grasvenor, seems more interested in manipulating his cast than shooting film. The cult star, Irma Irma, is a vamp too bored and boring to draw blood. And the incomparably beautiful Michael Simard doesn't seem to be putting out. Meanwhile, the film's shady financier appears to be sleeping with his mother, and a serial killer is skulking around the area killing tourists. Everything comes to a head when the carnaval celebration comes to nearby Cali. But once the fiesta comes to an end, all that's left is the memory and the narrator's insistence on telling the tale. "Unlike the majority of pointedly AIDS-era novels," writes Dennis Cooper, "Gone Tomorrow is neither an amoral nostalgia fest nor a thinly veiled wake-up call hyping the religion of sobriety. It's a philosophical work devised by a writer who's both too intelligent to buy into the notion that a successful future requires the compromise of collective decision and too moral to accept bitterness as the consequence of an adventurous life."
“Horribly refreshing, like an ice-cold glass of acid on a sweltering summer day . . . Indiana writes with an art critic’s eye for detail and a poet’s ear for language.” –Philadelphia Inquirer
“A disturbing, vivid, and brutal novel that succeeds in its dizzy mix of genres and influences. Not for the prudish, though.” –Kirkus Reviews
“Amazingly perverse, savagely amusing, unflinchingly serious. It may be in fact be the first really serious work of the imagination to come out of the AIDS catastrophe.” –Michael Herr, author of Dispatches
2018, English
Softcover, 224 pages, 14 x 21.8 cm
Published by
Seven Stories Press / New York
$35.00 - In stock -
Introduction by Tobi Haslett
"This story, if it is one, deserves the closure of a suicide, perhaps even the magisterial finality of what is usually called a novel, but the remnants of that faraway time offer nothing more than a taste of damp ashes, a feeling of indeterminacy, and the obdurate inconclusiveness of passing time." So writes the unnamed narrator of Horse Crazy, looking back on a season of madness and desire. The first novel from the brilliant, protean Gary Indiana, Horse Crazy tells the story of a thirty-five-year-old writer for a New York arts and culture magazine whose life melts into a fever dream when he falls in love with the handsome, charming, possibly heroin-addicted, and almost certainly insane Gregory Burgess. In the derelict brownstones of the Lower East Side in the late eighties, among the coked out restauranteurs and art world impresarios of the supposed "downtown scene," the narrator wanders through the fog of passion. Meanwhile, the AIDS epidemic is spreading through the city, and New York friendships sputter to an end. Here is a novel where the only moral is that thwarted passion is the truest passion, where love is a hallucination and the gravest illness is desire.
“Horse Crazy is a sad, insane journey of infatuation and love. Frustrating to the bitter end—where all that is left is truth.” – Tracey Emin
“An archetypical story, expertly told. Fascinating to every man, no matter what his sexual tastes—like the characters in Genet.” – William S. Burroughs
“Sex, hypocrisy, solitude, loss, the punitive affinities that swallow the self—these are Gary Indiana’s themes, jingling through his books like money in Balzac. But rumbling beneath the malice is a melancholy yearning, a mind groping vulnerably for a human link.” – Tobi Haslett, from the introduction
2022, English
Softcover, 120 pages, 19.5 x 13 cm
Published by
Repeater Books / London
$30.00 - In stock -
A blending of art and pop cultural criticism about people who injure themselves for our entertainment or enlightenment.
A few weeks before he died, Hunter S. Thompson left an answerphone message for Jackass’ Johnny Knoxville. “I might be coming to Baton Rouge,” he told the stuntman, “and if I do I will call you, because I will be looking to have some fun, which as you know usually means violence.”
Fun does not, of course, usually mean violence; those who choose to make a hobby, a career or an art practice out of injury are wired a little differently from most. In Which as You Know Means Violence, Philippa Snow — taking in the work of Buster Keaton, Marina Abramović, Jackass, Gina Pane, Bob Flanagan, Chris Burden, and various YouTube stunt performers — analyses the subject of pain, injury and sadomasochism in performance, from the more rarefied context of contemporary art to the considerably less rarefied context of a TV show where grown men hurl various objects at each other’s tenderest parts.
In a world where violence — the violence of climate change, say, or of capitalism — is part of our daily lives, Which as You Know Means Violence focuses on those who enact violence on themselves, for art or entertainment, and addresses the role that violence plays in twenty-first century art and culture.
Philippa Snow is a writer based in Norwich. Her reviews and essays have appeared in publications including Artforum, The Los Angeles Review of Books, ArtReview, Frieze, The White Review, Vogue, The New Statesman, The TLS, and The New Republic. She was shortlisted for the 2020 Fitzcarraldo Editions Essay Prize.
2011, English
Softcover, 72 pages, 14.7 x 22.4 cm
Published by
Graywolf Press / Washington
$38.00 - In stock -
Still later, when I was more in touch with
the world, they told me, "You have a future."
I thought that over. Even if I believed them,
what did my little future, whatever that was,
have to do with the real thing, whatever that is?
—from "Waiting"
In this second daring collection, Coming to That, the centenarian painter and poet Dorothea Tanning illuminates our understanding of creativity, the impulse to make, and the longevity of art. Her unique wit and candor radiate through every poem, every line, and her inquisitive mind is everywhere alive and restless. As she writes in one poem, "If Art would only talk it would, at last, reveal / itself for what it is, what we all burn to know."
"[Coming to That] is playful and unrestrained, each poem containing a spontaneous logic of its own. . . . Tanning's poems take the reader on unexpected journeys that stray far from their beginnings, moving with the momentum of sheer joy and restless artistic energy. Pulsing underneath are larger questions, sometimes almost bittersweet, sometimes daunting." —Publishers Weekly (starred review)
"Tanning's poems are beautifully created, filled with rich rhythms and imagery. . . . Often ironic and often filled with wisdom and humor, a Tanning poem asks readers to believe in her artistic vision. These are poems of beginnings and choices, of marriage and aging, and of creation--poems still filled with wondering." —Library Journal
"Dorothea Tanning, who has had a long and marvelous life as a visual artist, is our most surprising new poet." —Edward Hirsch, The Washington Post Book World
"Dorothea Tanning's verbal wizardry is a constant surprise, an abiding delight." —J. D. McClatchy
2004, English
Softcover, 83 pages, 23 x 16 cm
Published by
Graywolf Press / Minneapolis
$38.00 - In stock -
The extraordinary first poetry collection by the renowned painter and sculptor Dorothea Tanning
Finally, on second, in bras. Bras swarming everywhere,
giant pink moths at rest, their empty cups clamoring,
"Fill me."
—from "End of the Day on Second"
Dorothea Tanning is an exceptional visual artist, and now, in her nineties, she has become an exceptional poet. In A Table of Content, we are made to see more clearly the city landscape, the creative impulse, and the worlds of potential disaster and sensual erotics with a vision that survives taste, trend, and time.
"Some would call these poems collages, finery glued into dreamy images. But I prefer to call the whole of them a kaleidoscope-angled feelings and dappled ideas constantly shape-shifting into remarkable new patterns, by turns giddy and grave. And when you put the little device down, you realize you've all along been looking at your own life, grandly reimagined by a master. Dorothea Tanning's verbal wizardry is a constant surprise, an abiding delight, and readers who sit down to A Table of Content can expect to stand up more strangely themselves. She wears her soul on her sleeve, and it shines, it shines!"—J. D. McClatchy
Dorothea Tanning (1910-2012) lived an extraordinary life as an artist and writer. She published two books of poetry, A Table of Content and Coming to That; two memoirs, Birthday and Between Lives: An Artist and Her World; and a novel, Chasm. In 2012, she died at the age of 101 at her home in New York City.
2012, English
Softcover, 120 pages, 28 x 21.5 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / as new
Published by
Creation Books / London
$45.00 - In stock -
FRACTURED EYE was a large-format annual film journal, edited by well-known authors Stephen Barber and Jack Hunter, who between them have produced around 50 books on global cinema and cultural history. FRACTURED EYE does not concern itself with either "mainstream" or "cult" cinema, but rather takes its cue from Amos Vogel's seminal 1974 study Film As A Subversive Art. Subjects covered by FRACTURED EYE Volume One include illegal film pornography in the 1970s, execution film documents of WW2, film documents of extreme performance art, subversive film documentaries, unfilmed surrealist film scenarios, revolutionary Japanese cinema of 1969, the origins of film projection technology, films of urban demolition, surgical films, and various works of renegade, politically prohibited or transgressive cinema. The book is heavily illustrated with unusual and often disquieting photographs, and is recommended for adult readers only. Subjects covered include Vienna Aktion Cinema, Tokyo 1969, Tatsumi Hijikata, Pierre Guyotat, Koji Wakamatsu, Jean Painlevé, Cosey Fanni Tutti, Jean Vigo, Luis Buñuel, Skladanowsky Brothers, Georges Franju, and much more. Only one volume was published.
1997, English
Softcover, 56 pages, 30 x 21 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Last Gasp / San Fransisco
$60.00 - Out of stock
First 1997 English-language edition of Erich von Gotha's A Very Special Prison, published by Last Gasp, San Fransisco. Dark and disturbing Sadean sadomasochistic masterpiece of bandes dessinées érotiques, first published in France in the 1980s.
Adults only!
Erich von Götha (b. 1924, Wimbledon, London) is the pseudonym of the British illustrator, comic book artist, aconteur, and English gentleman Robin Ray. Robin Ray has gained fame with his erotic and, above all, sadomasochist content. He studied drawing and painting for four years at St Martins art school in London and enjoyed a career in London advertising agencies as designer and copywriter. He took time off for three years to teach graphic design at Ealing School of Art. A chance meeting with the English human rights activist, sex therapist, consultant, campaigner, writer and adult model Tuppy Owens led to the "Sex Maniac's Diary", a remarkable and successful publication which amazingly sold mainly to women, for which EvG became the illustrator from 1975 to 1984. His relationship and ongoing friendship with Tuppy was enormously influential and helped lead to his artistic contributions to erotic publications. But it is "Torrid", entirely conceived and realised by EvG, that is the substantial overture to the comic strip (Bande Dessinée) extravaganza that was to follow. This ground-breaking publication, carried by the creative freedom of the 1970's sexual revolution of the 1970's, and pushing the legal boundaries in its path, spanned 1979 to 1986, all while EvG was running a successful advertising firm. However, his most famous work is The Troubles of Janice, set in the time of the Marquis de Sade. It has appeared in four albums; the first album appeared in 1980, and they represented a close collaboration with the French campaigning writer, historian and collector Bernard Joubert. A luxury edition of all four was published in 2008 by Dynamite. English versions of "Janice" and "Twenty", his other 'serial' story were published in the Noughties by the Erotic Print Society. Since the 80s he has produced many erotic paintings for friends and fans and has several books published by "Larmes d'Eros" in Paris. He continues to produce prints and execute commissions of an erotic nature usually with a mythological theme. He has had solo exhibitions in the Mondo Bizzarro Gallery in Bologna, titled Sweat Tears & Reflections and In "Larmes d'Eros" in Paris on the publication of "The Secret Notebooks of Janice".
VG copy.
1999, English
Softcover, 56 pages, 30 x 21 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Last Gasp / San Fransisco
$60.00 - Out of stock
First 1999 English-language edition of Erich von Gotha's The Troubles of Janice Part 1, published by Last Gasp, San Fransisco. The first book of von Gotha's classic story set in the time of the Marquis de Sade, and a masterpiece of bandes dessinées érotiques, first published in France in 1980.
Adults only!
Erich von Götha (b. 1924, Wimbledon, London) is the pseudonym of the British illustrator, comic book artist, aconteur, and English gentleman Robin Ray. Robin Ray has gained fame with his erotic and, above all, sadomasochist content. He studied drawing and painting for four years at St Martins art school in London and enjoyed a career in London advertising agencies as designer and copywriter. He took time off for three years to teach graphic design at Ealing School of Art. A chance meeting with the English human rights activist, sex therapist, consultant, campaigner, writer and adult model Tuppy Owens led to the "Sex Maniac's Diary", a remarkable and successful publication which amazingly sold mainly to women, for which EvG became the illustrator from 1975 to 1984. His relationship and ongoing friendship with Tuppy was enormously influential and helped lead to his artistic contributions to erotic publications. But it is "Torrid", entirely conceived and realised by EvG, that is the substantial overture to the comic strip (Bande Dessinée) extravaganza that was to follow. This ground-breaking publication, carried by the creative freedom of the 1970's sexual revolution of the 1970's, and pushing the legal boundaries in its path, spanned 1979 to 1986, all while EvG was running a successful advertising firm. However, his most famous work is The Troubles of Janice, set in the time of the Marquis de Sade. It has appeared in four albums; the first album appeared in 1980, and they represented a close collaboration with the French campaigning writer, historian and collector Bernard Joubert. A luxury edition of all four was published in 2008 by Dynamite. English versions of "Janice" and "Twenty", his other 'serial' story were published in the Noughties by the Erotic Print Society. Since the 80s he has produced many erotic paintings for friends and fans and has several books published by "Larmes d'Eros" in Paris. He continues to produce prints and execute commissions of an erotic nature usually with a mythological theme. He has had solo exhibitions in the Mondo Bizzarro Gallery in Bologna, titled Sweat Tears & Reflections and In "Larmes d'Eros" in Paris on the publication of "The Secret Notebooks of Janice".
VG copy.
2025, English
Softcover, 248 pages, 30.7 x 22.4 cm
Published by
Walther König / Köln
$85.00 - In stock -
The first monograph by internationally acclaimed painter Jana Euler, which comprehensively shows and explains more than fifteen years of her creation. Jana Euler's artistic practice is stylistically varied, direct, critical and sometimes funny, downright silly. In doing so, she always refers to the social and material foundations of her chosen medium. The richly illustrated monograph illuminates Euler's specific way of producing exhibitions, which the artist compares to a "body, made of all the parts that flow into the different aspects of exhibition making." Exhibitionism follows its development using its own memories and materials from her studio archive: invitation cards, exhibition texts, posters and diagrams come to light here, in addition to other new drawings and collages specially made for publication.
1999, English / German
Softcover, 64 pages, 27 x 21.6 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / as new
Published by
Walther König / Köln
Kunstverein Braunschweig / Germany
$65.00 - In stock -
Published in 1999, this catalogue is the first book to document two of Mike Kelley's central works, Sublevel (1998) and Deodorized Central Mass with Satellites (1991-1999), and includes deluxe large-format installation shots of these two pieces, as well as an interview and an essay by the artist.
2019, English / Polish
Hardcover (4 volumes), 19.5 x 14.5 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Bosz / Lesko
$80.00 - In stock -
Volumes 1—4 of the Bosz mini-album collected works of legendary Polish artist Zdzisław Beksiński. Issued in 2019, all volumes are hardcover and lavishly illustrated with Beksiński's major works.
"Beksinski's powerfully unique paintings are such as I have never before seen"—H.R. Giger
Zdzisław Beksiński (1929 – 2005) was a Polish painter, photographer and sculptor. Beksiński had no formal training as an artist. Born in Sanok, he studied architecture in Kraków and worked as a construction site supervisor before turning to his passion for art, sculpting with construction site materials for his medium. His early photography would be a precursor to his paintings, often referred to as dystopian surrealism. Beksiński claimed, "I wish to paint in such a manner as if I were photographing dreams". Beksiński undertook painting with a passion, working intensely whilst listening to classical music and quickly becoming a leading figure in contemporary Polish art. In the late 1960s, Beksiński entered what he himself called his "fantastic period", which lasted up to the mid-1980s, during which he created his famed images of desolate, surrealistic landscapes with intricate depictions of anxious, abstracted figures and architecture in states of decay, mutation and decomposition. Although Beksiński's art was often dark, he himself was known to be a pleasant person with a keen sense of humour. Modest and somewhat shy, he avoided public events such as the openings of his own exhibitions and almost never visited museums or exhibitions in general. He always credited music as his main source of inspiration. Beksiński avoided concrete analysis of the content of his work, saying "I cannot conceive of a sensible statement on painting". Beksiński was stabbed to death at his Warsaw apartment in February 2005 by a 19-year-old acquaintance from Wołomin, reportedly because he refused to lend the teenager money.
"In the medieval tradition, Beksinski seems to believe art to be a forewarning about the fragility of the flesh – whatever pleasures we know are doomed to perish – thus, his paintings manage to evoke at once the process of decay and the ongoing struggle for life. They hold within them a secret poetry, stained with blood and rust." — Guillermo del Toro, Mexican film director
Very Good—Fine copies.
1998 / 2009, English
Hardcover (w. dust jacket), 72 pages, 32 x 24.5 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Morpheus International / US
$150.00 - In stock -
"Beksinski's powerfully unique paintings are such as I have never before seen"—H.R. Giger
Wonderful, scarce and collectible monograph capturing 30 years of the work of the great Polish painter Zdzisław Beksiński, published by Galerie Morpheus in Las Vegas. First issued in 1998, this lavishly illustrated hardcover monograph reproduces Beksiński's surreal dystopian paintings spanning his entire career, alongside an introduction by James Cowen, texts by Tadeusz Nyczek, and great quotes and reflections throughout by Beksiński himself.
Zdzisław Beksiński (1929 – 2005) was a Polish painter, photographer and sculptor. Beksiński had no formal training as an artist. Born in Sanok, he studied architecture in Kraków and worked as a construction site supervisor before turning to his passion for art, sculpting with construction site materials for his medium. His early photography would be a precursor to his paintings, often referred to as dystopian surrealism. Beksiński claimed, "I wish to paint in such a manner as if I were photographing dreams". Beksiński undertook painting with a passion, working intensely whilst listening to classical music and quickly becoming a leading figure in contemporary Polish art. In the late 1960s, Beksiński entered what he himself called his "fantastic period", which lasted up to the mid-1980s, during which he created his famed images of desolate, surrealistic landscapes with intricate depictions of anxious, abstracted figures and architecture in states of decay, mutation and decomposition. Although Beksiński's art was often dark, he himself was known to be a pleasant person with a keen sense of humour. Modest and somewhat shy, he avoided public events such as the openings of his own exhibitions and almost never visited museums or exhibitions in general. He always credited music as his main source of inspiration. Beksiński avoided concrete analysis of the content of his work, saying "I cannot conceive of a sensible statement on painting". Beksiński was stabbed to death at his Warsaw apartment in February 2005 by a 19-year-old acquaintance from Wołomin, reportedly because he refused to lend the teenager money.
"In the medieval tradition, Beksinski seems to believe art to be a forewarning about the fragility of the flesh – whatever pleasures we know are doomed to perish – thus, his paintings manage to evoke at once the process of decay and the ongoing struggle for life. They hold within them a secret poetry, stained with blood and rust." — Guillermo del Toro, Mexican film director
Very Good—Fine copy of the later expanded edition, now long out-of-print. With VG—Fine dust jacket.
1992, English
Hardcover (w. dust jacket), unpaginated, 23.5 x 19 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / fine
Published by
Treville / Tokyo
$80.00 - Out of stock
Scarce first hardcover edition of Katan Amano's collection of works, published by Treville in Japan in 1992. Japanese doll and puppet artist Katan Amano (1953—1990) is well known in Japan for her tender and haunting doll works. Amano was staff at Tokyo's Pygmalion Doll Studio in the 1980's and during her short life created a universe of Hans Bellmer and Alice inspired dolls. These elegantly beautiful, otherworldly ball-jointed children are Amano's vehicles for an arresting and primal vision. She died in 1990 in a motorcycle accident. This gorgeous book is lavishly illustrated with the finest examples of her award-winning dolls shot by her collaborator Ryoichi Yoshida. In addition to her incredible doll works, the book also features her Hieronymus Bosch and Lewis Carroll inspired sculptural creatures, grotesque-baroque objects and dark fantasy paintings, all lavishly reproduced on gloss stock. A small amount of text in Japanese.
Near Fine copy in NF dust jacket.