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 JAN 16
WEB-SHOP OPEN 24/7
ORDERS SHIP FROM JAN 6
World Food Books
Postal Address:
PO Box 435
Flinders Lane
Victoria 8009
Australia
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World Food Books Gift Voucher
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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.
1990, English
Softcover, 196 pages, 24 x 19 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Giancarlo Politi Editore / Milan
$65.00 - Out of stock
Long out-of-print English edition monographic survey of legendary Italian designer Alessandro Mendini, published by Giancarlo Politi Editore in Milano in 1990. Profusely illustrated throughout with examples of Mendini's incredible practice alongside texts in English. Among distinguished contemporary designers, Alessandro Mendini is perhaps most deserving of the overused title of Renaissance man. Painter, writer, architect, theorist, designer: His work in all these fields has influenced generations of other artists and craftsmen and delighted even those who don't know his name but have entered his spaces (like his stores for Alessi and Swatch), sipped from his espresso cups, and rested in his chairs. Through his work as a founder of Studio Alchimia in 1979 and editor of the magazines Casabella, Modo, and domus, Mendini has fought the strictures of modernism and championed the expressive value of decoration, which is the foundation for the development of his designs. This book offers a window into Mendini's working methods by presenting his iconic designs, sketches, and texts.
"Published on the occasion of his eightieth birthday, this catalogue gives an overview of the 40-year career of the provocative Italian designer and architect Alessandro Mendini, encompassing objects, furniture, interior decorations, paintings, installations and works of architecture. Mendini's iconic 1978 "Proust Armchair," an eighteenth-century style armchair embellished with Pointillist flecks of contrasting colors, celebrates the potential of high kitsch and is now considered a crucial precursor to postmodern furniture. Known for design collaborations with companies such as Alessi, Philips, Swarovski and Swatch, Mendini has made the use of exuberant color one of his signature extravagances. In Mendini's world, bright chips, blocks and whorls of color play across furniture, wristwatches, "objets d'art" and even entire buildings." — publisher's blurb
Very Good copy. Very scarce in the English edition.
2022, English / Italian
Softcover, 416 pages, 22 x 32 cm
Published by
MACRO (Museum of Contemporary Art of Rome) / Rome
Mousse Publishing / Milan
Mousse
Archivio Cinzia Ruggeri / Milan
$115.00 $90.00 - In stock -
“Cinzia Ruggeri’s clothes refuse to be just clothes. They are better understood as genre-defying explorations of the human body.”—Financial Times
Finally! Long overdue — the first, comprehensive monographic overview of Cinzia Ruggeri's career to date.
Artist and fashion designer Cinzia Ruggeri (1942–2019) made her artistic research a tool for inquiry into the functional and semantic properties of the object and the architectural and social dimension of the body, according to an original and nonconformist perspective enriched by irony and oneirism.
Cinzia Says… is the first major survey of artist and fashion designer Cinzia Ruggeri (1942–2019), a unique figure of Italian postmodernism who moved freely across disciplines. From clothing and accessories to furniture and lighting—as well as sculptural installations often including these objects—Ruggeri created worlds that were continually imaginative, provocative, elegant and unpredictable. Ruggeri founded her own fashion line in 1977 and immediately became known for her use of architecture and geometry, such as the ziggurat and representations of the shape of Italy. During her lifetime she also worked and collaborated with Brian Eno, Occhiomagico, Alessandro Mendini, Casa Vogue, Maison Carven and Studio Alchimia. This catalog offers the widest and most complete overview of Ruggeri’s career to date, thanks to in-depth research conducted by MACRO (Museum of Contemporary Art of Rome) in collaboration with the Archivio Cinzia Ruggeri in Milan.
Published by Mousse with MACRO – Museum of Contemporary Art of Rome, this book is constructed as a broad, expanded chronology offering documents, photographs, accounts, and essays that bring to light a story left in the shadows for too long, and a legacy to look to now.
Published on the occasion of the eponymous exhibition at MACRO, Rome, in 2022.
Cinzia Ruggeri (1942–2019) was an Italian fashion designer and artist associated with the Memphis Group and Studio Alchimia, known for her postmodern work incorporating technology into surreal garments, combining fashion with sculpture, performance, and architecture.
Edited by Luca Lo Pinto
Texts by Mariuccia Casadio, Elena Fava, Maria Luisa Frisa, Corrado Levi, Luca Lo Pinto, Valeria Magli, Giancarlo Maiocchi, Sarah McCrory, Marco Poma & Andrea Giannotti, Mauro Sabbione, Davide Stucchi & Anna Franceschini, Jeppe Ugelvig.
2002, English
Hardcover (dust jacket), 140 pages, 31 x 22 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / fine
Published by
Umberto Allemandi / Milan
$280.00 - In stock -
Rare first English hardcover edition of this outstanding survey, exhibition catalogue and invaluable reference to the fascinating light objects produced in Italy between 1967 and 1972 — a period generally known as "gli anni d´oro" (The Golden Years). Published in 2002 by Milan's legendary Allemandi publishing house and compiled by light designer and writer Fulvio Ferrari and author behind all the best books on Carlo Mollino, Napoleone Ferrari. Lavishly illustrated in colour and b/w on gloss stock, this large volume offers and outstanding survey of Italian light-design with more than 150 objects illustrated and detailed entries on each and every one, including materials and exhibition histories. Includes the work of designers, artists and manufacturers Livio Castiglioni & Gianfranco Frattini, Archizoom, Cini Boeri, Ettore Sottsass, Nanda Vigo, Ugo La Pietra, Achille Castiglioni, Lapo Binazzi, UFO, Angelo Lelli, Ingrid Hsalmarson, Gino Sarfatti, Rinaldo Cutini, Gae Aulenti, Superstudio, Gaetano Pesce, Angelo Mangiarotti, Joe Colombo, Gianfranco Fini, Mario Bellini, Memphis, Fabrizio Cocchia, Alchimia, Sergio Asti, Tomoko Tsuboi Ponzio, Gianni Gamberini & Studio ARDITI, Fulvio Ferrari, Gino Marotta, Studio Uno, Cesare Casati, Theodore Waddell, George Sowden, Arteluce, Zanotta, Stilnovo, Valenti, Kartell, Poltronova, Arredoluce, Flos, Lumenform, Zanotta, and many more. Also includes introductory essays and a full index of designers and manufacturers.
Very Good-Fine copy in VG-Fine dust jacket.
1988, English
Softcover, 100 pages
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / average
Published by
The MIT Press / Massachusetts
$55.00 $20.00 - Out of stock
Long out-of-print classic 1988 textbook from the great Andrea Branzi, published by The MIT Press. Learning from Milan begins where his previous discourses on the sources and traditions of Italian design leave off and draws on the Italian experience to address issues of international significance.
Andrea Branzi is one of Italy's leading design critics and practitioners. Learning from Milan begins where his previous discourses on the sources and traditions of Italian design leave off and draws on the Italian experience to address issues of international significance. Moving from a pointed summary and interpretation of design over the past two decades to a highly charged manifesto and blueprint for designers of the next century, this is Branzi's most provocative and original work to date. Foremost among the challenges now facing designers is the development of expressive talents appropriate to what Branzi calls the "second modernity," a stable diversity that has emerged during the difficult transition front industrialism to post industrialism. Branzi covers the design debates that have taken place outside of Italy in the United States, Japan, and Germany. He takes up the widely observed but little discussed questions of why Argentina has produced such extraordinary design talent in recent decades; why Canada has the potential for becoming a major geographical design center in the next generation; and why the famous design school at Ulm, West Germany, has had such a powerful and, in Branzi's view, negative influence on international design. Branzi examines the key laboratories of Italian design Global Tools, Alchymia, Winphis, Domus, Academy and Zabro identifying the qualities that set Italian design thinking apart from the approach of the rest of Europe. And he looks at the production mechanisms and entrepreneurial cycles that made the rise of manufacturers like, Canina, Zanotta, and Bartell possible.
Andrea Branzi lives and works in Milan where he is Educational Director of Domus Academy and Editorial Director of MOIETY. He is author of The Hot House: Italian New Wave Design and, with Nicoletta, Branzi, of Domestic Animals: The Neoprimitive Style.
Ex-libris copy with laminate stiff protective cover and associated markings/stickers. Otherwise clean interior, never borrowed copy.