New :

(...less)

First 1980 edition of Nobuyoshi Araki's Pseudo-Reportage, over 300 pages of Araki's photographic reportage spanning 1977—1979, and one of more uncommon and best Araki books. Wrapped in silver and pink metallic dust jacket, Pseudo-Reportage is akin to his famed Tokyo Luckyhole, a visual record tracing Araki's movements through the Tokyo nightlife (mostly) of the late 1970's and a tour to the haunts of New York City in 1979 on the occasion of a group exhibition at the International Center of Photography — JAPAN: A SELF PORTRAIT, in which Daido Moriyama, Eikoh Hosoe, Tomatsu, Fukase also participated. Lots of sex clubs, bars, restaurants, and lots of women — the Japanese Empress, female kickboxers, girl glam rockers, hostesses, girls, girls, girls. Explicit, profound, charming, Araki.

"With an epigraph, Photos are jokes on society. The high ([Japan's] Empress) and the low (female kickboxers) are combined; Araki's great wit in full display."—Kōtarō Iizawa

Good copy in Good dust jacket, light edge wear/spine sunning/foxing. Book block is cocked from storage.

File under:

(...less)

First 1990 edition, 1995 second print of this iconic photobook by Araki, distributed on the day of the funeral of Yoko, Araki's wife who died of cancer in 1990. One of the most popular of Araki's books, 'Chiro, My Love' is a delightful book devoted entirely to Araki's photographs of he and his wife Yoko's beloved cat, Chiro. Consisting of some 100 black and white photographs, this photographic essay presents Chiro in a variety of different moods and situations. On the balcony and on the roof of the neighborhood, on the sofa, in the shower, in Yoko's arms, on the sleeping belly of Araki... The figure of Chiro behaving freely, and Araki taking the shutter to love it. Poignant in retrospect as it includes a number of photos of Chiro with Yoko. ‘Yoko was very much looking forward to this book; it’s a pity she couldn’t live to see it.’ Like Masahisa Fukase's "Sasuke", this is an intimate book for cats and photographers.

Very Good hardcover copy.

File under:

(...less)

Now out-of-print first 2002 Dalkey Archive English-language edition of Klossowski's Roberte Ce Soir and The Revocation of the Edict of Nantes. Together these two novels comprise the most fascinating, obsessive, and erotic works of contemporary French fiction. Like the works of Georges Bataille, and those of the Marquis de Sade before him, Klossowski's erotic fiction explores the connections between the mind and body. This pair of short novels merges the sexual misadventures of Octave, his striking young wife Roberte, and their nephew Antoine, with Klossowski's philosophical and theological concerns. Roberte Ce Soir is a dramatic enactment of Octave's ritual of hospitality in which Roberte offers herself to any guest who desires her, and The Revocation of the Edict of Nantes relates Roberte's predicament when she is forced to censor this same play. The resulting text represents one of the most painstakingly baroque, provocative intellectual and sexual discourses of our time.

Pierre Klossowski (1905—2001) was a French writer, translator and artist, widely rcognized as a central figure in the contemporary French avant-garde. He was the eldest son of the artists Erich Klossowski and Baladine Klossowska, and his younger brother was the painter Balthus.

As a writer, Pierre Klossowski wrote full length volumes on the Marquis de Sade and Friedrich Nietzsche, a number of essays on literary and philosophical figures, and five novels. Roberte Ce Soir (Roberte in the Evening) provoked controversy due to its graphic depiction of sexuality.[1] He translated several important texts (by Virgil, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Martin Heidegger, Friedrich Hölderlin, Franz Kafka, Nietzsche, and Walter Benjamin) into French, worked on films and was also an artist, illustrating many of the scenes from his novels. Klossowski participated in most issues of George Bataille's review, Acéphale, in the late 1930s.

His 1969 book, Nietzsche and the Vicious Circle, greatly influenced French philosophers such as Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze, and Jean-François Lyotard.

Winner of the National Book Award for translation and a graduate of Harvard University, translator Austryn Wainhouse left the United States for Paris partway through graduate work at the University of Iowa. He has worked in France as an editor and translator ever since. He was the first to translate the Marquis de Sade, including de Sade's 120 Days of Sodom, Juliette, and Justine. And he has translated the works of many other vital writers, including Pierre Klossowski, Georges Bataille, Simone de Beauvoir, and Jean Cocteau. Hedyphagetica, his only work of fiction, was first published by the Olympia Press. Wainhouse lives in the South of France.

Fine—As New copy. Ex-libris stamp to title page.

File under:

(...less)

No other writer has so scandalized proper society as the Marquis de Sade, but despite the deliberate destruction of over three-quarters of his work, Sade remains a major figure in the history of ideas. His influence on some of the greatest minds of the last century -- from Baudelaire and Swinburne to Nietzsche, Dostoyevksy, and Kafka -- is indisputable. This volume contains the only authentic and complete American edition of his most famous work, "Justine; Philosophy in the Bedroom, " a major novel that presents the clearest summation of his political philosophy; Eugenie de Franval, a novella widely considered to be a masterpiece of eighteenth-century French literature; and the only authentic and complete American edition of his most famous work, Justine. This literary portrait of Sade is completed by one of his earliest philosophical efforts, Dialogue between a Priest and a Dying Man, a selection of his letters, a fifty-page chronology of his life, two important essays on Sade, and a bibliography of his work.

VG copy.

File under:

(...less)

First 2008 English-language print of The Lost Journals Of The Marquis De Sade.

The secret journal which the Marquis de Sade worked hard at maintaining, even when ill and ageing at Charenton asylum, reveals the shadowy life of an exceptional, strange man whose abuses are often legendary. The book takes us beyond the prisoner who once fled the Vincennes fortress; it also takes us beyond the prisoner of the Bastille whose imagination tortured him, both deliciously and cruelly, and who projected onto paper the burning and pitiable ghosts of his imagination with a desperate sensuality. This book contains the living, everyday presence of the old man, almost 67 years old when the "first notebook" begins of this once-lost journal.

He had seven years left to live in the "hospital-prison" of Charenton, where his days were slow and grim, full of everyday preoccupations, worries about money, nasty quarrels with the people around him - but were also lit up by the sordid, squalid episodes of a final erotic adventure: the last flames of his senile passion. At the Charenton asylum, where he was under a liberal regime of surveillance, Sade's death approached, darkening the colours of his life and tearing apart his feelings.
Only the first (1807-8) and fourth (1814) of these notebooks have been rediscovered, out of a series of four.
The Ghosts Of Sodom also includes a selection of Sade's letters from Charenton, as well as the working notes for his terminal novel "The Days At Florbelle" - a huge work deemed so pornographic that the only manuscript was burned by the police at the behest of Sade's own son.

File under:

(...less)

First 1992 edition of French Lolita, a Japanese photo book collection paying homage to 22 maidens of French film, from the 1960s to the 1990s, from Brigitte Bardot to Vanessa Paradis! Lavishly illustrated throughout in colour and b/w with photographic chapters on Jean Seberg, Jane Birkin, Catherine Deneuve, Anna Karina, Sylvie Vartan, Joanna Shimkus, Dominique Sanda, Isabel Adjani, Nastassja Kinski, Marie Laforet, Françoise Hardy, Jane March, Charlotte Gainsbourg, Julie Delpy, Beatrice Dalle, Irene Jacob, Emmanuel Beart, Juliette Binoche, Sophie Marceau... Scarce and only available in Jpaan.

Originating from Vladimir Nabokov's 1955 novel, "Lolita" is an English-language term defining a young girl as "precociously seductive." As Simone de Beauvoir out it in her study, "Brigitte Bardot and Lolita Syndrome", “Nabokov’s “Lolita” which deals with the relations between a forty-year-old male and a ‘nymphet’ of twelve, was at the top of the best-seller list in England and America for months. The adult woman now inhabits the same world as the man, but the child-woman moves in a universe which he cannot enter. The age difference re-established between them the distance that seems necessary for desire. At least that is what those who have created a new Eve by merging the ‘green fruit’ and ‘femme fatale’ types have pinned their hopes on.

Very Good copy with VG obi and vinyl jacket.

File under:

(...less)

2006 facsimile edition of this wonderful 1976 slip-cased hardcover monograph on German artist Friedrich Schröder-Sonnenstern, considered one of the most important representatives of Art Brut or Outsider Art. Bound in red cloth and wrapped in illustrated original dust-jacket, this heavily illustrated book surveys Schröder-Sonnenstern's incredible paintings and drawings through beautiful colour and monochrome gravure reproductions, with alongside various texts, biography, bibliography and portrait of the artist. Published as volume 6 of the deluxe La Septième Face du Dé series by Kawade Shobo Shinsha in Japan in the 1970s, all later re-printed in the 2000s. All editions now out-of-print.

Friedrich Schröder-Sonnenstern was a draftsman, painter and poet-philosopher. Born in 1892 in East Prussia, one of thirteen children, all of whom apart from one other died shortly after birth. He was sent to a number of reform schools due to accusations of theft and violent behaviour and then, at the age of twenty-six, he was diagnosed with schizophrenia and committed to a sanatorium. His experiences as a child contributed to his lifelong hatred of authority. One year later he showed up in Berlin, where he occupied himself with occultism, divination and healing magnetism. He founded a sect and distributed its income in the form of bread rolls to poor children, earning him the title "Schrippenfürst of Schöneberg". He created the name Sonnenstern (English: Sun Star) for himself while working as a con-artist, posing as a Quack doctor in "natural health", calling himself Professor Dr. Eliot Gnass von Sonnenstern. This career path was cut off by the Nazis' interdiction of occult practices, and after being confined in psychiatric institutes and in a penal camp, Schröder-Sonnenstern reemerged in 1944, scavenging firewood in the bombed-out German capital. Only in his late fifties, in 1949, did he begin to draw, using coloured pencils to create allegorical grotesques stocked with a personal iconography. Although his art was rarely shown, he was championed in Surrealist and art brut circles; Jean Dubuffet and Hans Bellmer were among his admirers, and a few drawings were included in Marcel Duchamp and André Breton's 1959 "Exposition inteRnatiOnale du Surréalisme" in Paris. The demand for his pictures by collectors and gallerists rose rapidly and he resorted to employing assistants to produce his work for him. His success was short-lived when he began to paint less and less and became the victim of counterfeiting cliques by his assistants, destroying his position in the art market. He became increasingly dependent on alcohol following the death, in 1964, of his long-time companion, Martha Möller whom he called Aunt Martha. He died almost forgotten and impoverished in 1982 in Berlin.

Fine copy.

File under:

(...less)

Rare copy of the First English hardcover edition of The Modern Room, published in 1967 by the legendary Studio Vista, edited by Giulio Peluzzi, originally published in Italian under the title "Forma e Colore Nell'Arredamento Moderno". One of the best books on mid-century 1950s—1960s interior design. "Using 288 photographs, all in full color, of actual rooms in both new and remodeled houses and apartments, this book gives tasteful solutions to the many decorating problems encountered in the creation of a truly modern room. The Modern Room taps the creative resources of American and European architects, designers, and manufacturers." Those include: Ludwig Mies Van Der Rohe, Eero Saarinen, Charles Eames, Finn Juhl, Marco Zanuso, Knoll International, Herman Miller Furniture Company, George Nelson, Paul Mccobb, Florence Knoll, Joe Colombo, Cassina, Ettore Sottsass, Eduardo Vittorio, Vico Magistretti, Franco Campo, Carlo Graffi, Ostuni, Azucena, Augusto Bozzi, Tassoni, Peter Maly, Giovanni Frigerio, Egle Amaldi, Enzo Cozzini, Tito Agnoli, Forma, Carlo Hauner, Martinelli-Luce, Magazzini Coin, Avigdor, Sergio Mazza, Raffaela Crespi, Renata Bonfanti, Emilia Sala, Lumenform, Vistosi Glass Co., Elio Martinelli, Fardomus, Bjorn Wiinblad and many more. Beautiful, bold photographs illustrate chapters covering everything from fireplaces and libraries to terraces and gardens. Highly recommended.

Good copy with heavy foxing and tanning to page edges. Ex-Japanese personal library stamp to back blank page. Well preserved VG dust jacket in mylar wrap.

File under:

(...less)

Vintage 1981 Wizard & Genius poster featuring the fantasy artwork "Safe and Sound on the Sundial" by Rodney Matthews. Matthews (b. 1945) is a leading British fantasy/Sc-Fi illustrator and conceptual designer who has painted over 140 subjects for record album covers, including Hawkwind, Amon Düül II, Bo Hansson, Thin Lizzy, Asia, Rick Wakeman, Scorpions, Eloy, Uriah Heep, Captain Lockheed and the Starfighters (Robert Calvert of Hawkwind), and many more. Matthews is also well-known for his long standing collaboration with English fantasy and science fiction author Michael Moorcock. As well as illustrating numerous book covers, their collaboration in the 1970s resulted in a series of 12 large posters, depicting scenes from Moorcock's Eternal Champion series.

Near Fine copy, genuine vintage poster, not a re-print. No notable damage. Printed in Switzerland.
Dimensions: 49.5 x 98 cm

File under:

(...less)

First edition of this 1969 collection of female nude photography from three of Japan's leading photographers — Tetsuya Ichimura, Eikoh Hosoe, and Shunji Okura. Lavishly printed in gloss and photo-gravure, in stark b/w contrasts and rich colour kodachrome, across different paper stocks, featuring many of the most iconic erotic images from Tokyo 1969! Lovely examples from all photographers, including some of Eikoh’s most famous work. Published by The Mainichi Newspapers.

Average—Good copy with foxing to covers and some page edges, some pinches to spine, general light wear as is common to old magazine-format books.

File under:

(...less)

First 1994 English edition of the classic "Fetish Girls" by American fetish photographer, erotica historian, photojournalist, and book editor, Eric Kroll (b. 1946, New York). Fetish Girls is an incredible collection of Kroll's 1980s-1990's erotic photographs, ranking among the absolute classics of fetishistic imagery. Rising from the downtown New York art and fashion scene of the 1970s and 80s, shooting for Elle Magazine, Vogue, The New York Times and Der Spiegel, Kroll published his first book, "Sex Objects" in 1976 with a grant from the New York State Council of the Arts, a book documenting sex workers across America. His best-seller "Fetish Girls" (1994), was an instant classic, full of powerful women and drawing one into a world of bizarre fantasies and sadomasochistic desires while retaining a sense of irony and surreal humour. Many of Kroll's photographs refer to and pay homage to his predecessors Weegee and Bunny Yeager as well as Eric Stanton and John Willie, while being grounded in the conceptual influences of artists such as Man Ray, and Marcel Duchamp. Text in English, German and French. Wonderful introduction by Kroll.

"My therapist says that I take photographs that make people blush because I suffer from 'middle-child' syndrome. She says I want to draw attention to myself because when I was a child I was ignored. She says I want to be heard, so I scream with my photographs. I was concerned she might cure me, so I stopped going to therapy."—Eric Kroll

Very Good copy, light wear. This is the first print of the original full-size book, not to be mistaken for the mini-version or the postcard book.

File under:

(...less)

First 1997 over-sized hardcover edition of "Beauty Parade" by American fetish photographer, erotica historian, photojournalist, and book editor, Eric Kroll (b. 1946, New York). Beauty Parade is an incredible collection of his 1990's erotic photographs, ranking among the absolute classics of fetishistic imagery. Rising from the downtown New York art and fashion scene of the 1970s and 80s, shooting for Elle Magazine, Vogue, The New York Times and Der Spiegel, Kroll published his first book, "Sex Objects" in 1976 with a grant from the New York State Council of the Arts, a book documenting sex workers across America. "Beauty Parade" follows on from his best-seller "Fetish Girls" (1994), full of powerful women and drawing one into a world of bizarre fantasies and sadomasochistic desires while retaining a sense of irony and surreal humour. Many of Kroll's photographs refer to and pay homage to his predecessors Weegee and Bunny Yeager as well as Eric Stanton and John Willie, while being grounded in the conceptual influences of artists such as Man Ray, and Marcel Duchamp. Text in English, German and French. Wonderful introduction by Kroll.

Very Good copy in VG dust jacket, light wear.

File under:

(...less)

First edition, edited and designed by Galerie Sydow's Heinrich Sydow-Zirkwitz, this beautiful book of Hans Bellmer's graphic works was published as a special project between Studio 69 in Cologne and Galerie Sydow in Frankfurt to accompany the exhibition "Ars Erotica" in 1970. Handsomely printed with spot-colour over-printing and illustrated throughout with Bellmer's graphic famous graphic series' "Bellmer à Sade" (1961), "Petite Traité de Morale" (1965) and illustrations for Georges Bataille's "Madame Edwarda" (1965). Includes text by Horst Albert Glaser. A very handsome collection and one of the nicest Bellmer books.

Very Good copy in Good dust jacket with very small closed repaired tear to bottom corner.

File under:

(...less)

At 400 pages, this is the definitive overview of the great and influential pioneers of Italian radical architecture, Superstudio. Immediately out-of-print and now collectible.

The avant-garde Italian architecture collective Superstudio was founded in 1966 by Adolfo Natalini (1941–2020) and Cristiano Toraldo di Francia (1941–2019), and quickly leaped to the forefront of the 1960s radical architecture movement alongside the likes of Archigram and Haus-Rucker-Co. Through their architectural projects (housing, industrial buildings, banks, interiors), design objects, photocollages, drawings, texts, installations, models, films and exhibitions, Superstudio found brilliant and highly inventive ways in which to inhabit a world transformed by capitalist forces and technological evolutions. This beautifully produced, slipcased, 400-page volume explores their oeuvre through the lens of “migrations” (migrazioni). Borrowed from Superstudio’s vocabulary, this term serves as a conceptual and poetic key to the group’s architecture and their works in all mediums.

Presented in 3 books, the first is a collection of critical essays and interviews with three prominent figures in architecture who have been in close contact with Superstudio over the past 50 years; By examining their personal and theoretical careers, these different voices show the great influence of the small group, bringing to life this “journey to the higher realms of reason.” The second book proposes a thematic journey through the work: it shows the rich iconography through a series of concepts from Superstudio’s vocabulary. They reveal the richness of the projects and images produced over the active years of the group that go beyond the narrative contained in some of the quasi-iconic photo collages. The last book presents previously unpublished letters from the archive of Adolfo Natalini. The exchanges between the members of Superstudio and the letters to prominent architects from the second half of the twentieth century form a collective autobiography in which architecture and life increasingly converge. In addition to the group’s oeuvre, the publication also presents work by 9999, Archizoom, Hiromi Fujii, Hans Hollein, Arata Isozaki, Rem Koolhaas, Ugo La Pietra, Leonardo Ricci, Aldo Rossi, Leonardo Savioli, Ettore Sottsass Jr. and Bernard Tschumi.

Edited with text by Emmanuelle Chiappone-Piriou. Text by Beatrice Lampariello, Gabriele Mastrigli, Frédéric Migayrou. Interviews with Veronique Patteeuw, Rem Koolhaas, Aurelien Vernant, Bernard Tschumi, Yûki Yosikawa, Hiromi Fujii.

As New sealed copy. Out-of-print.

File under:

(...less)

Foreword by Toby Mott
Designed by Jamie Andrew Reid
Edition of 1,500

The ultimate punk bible! From Kathy Acker to Grace Jones, Cosey Fanni Tutti to Bruce LaBruce and Richard Prince, Showboat explores the relationship between punk and sex as seen through original posters, flyers, record covers, photographs and ephemera drawn from Toby Mott’s own punk archive.

Showboat: Punk / Sex / Bodies delves into the intersection of sex and punk, exploring how each influences and is influenced by the other. As a radical subculture, punk enjoyed the freedom to address sex openly, unencumbered by mainstream censorship. This uninhibited expression of sexuality imbued punk with its rawness and immediacy.

Spanning from 1972 to the present day, Showboat offers a chronological exploration of the dynamic relationship between punk and sex. Drawing from The Mott Collection, the exhibition features original posters, flyers, record covers, photographs, and ephemera. Additionally, contributions from notable figures such as Julie Burchill, Paul Cook, Vivien Goldman, Eve Libertine, Bruce LaBruce, Amos Poe, Richard Prince, and Will Self provide further insight into this captivating intersection.

File under:

(...less)

Cultural Traffic presents PRELUDE: Transgression In The UK, by Toby Mott. This visual archive explores the UK’s fetish and transgressive scenes from the 1980s onwards, featuring material from Mott’s collection. The book includes pre-internet items, club flyers, posters, and fashion catalogues, documenting this underground movement.

PRELUDE highlights the influence of publications like Skin Two magazine and clubs such as Torture Garden, where fashion, music, and art combined. Mott’s collection traces how leather, latex, punk, and goth subcultures moved from Soho to mainstream fashion.

From London’s Kensington Market to Manchester’s Affleck’s Palace, this book offers a look into the culture that shaped ideas of self-expression. PRELUDE marks a movement that continues to challenge norms.

Publisher: Cultural Traffic, London, 2024 Size: A4
- Pages: 32 Graphic Design: Nicolás Meza Printed by: Angel Press, UK Edition: First Edition, 300 copies Binding: Centre sewn and wrapped Printing: Digital print on 120gsm Stardream Silver, including insides and dust jacket

File under:

(...less)

Unique collection of drawings by the celebrated Swedish artist Jockum Nordström, featuring never-before-seen work

Swedish artist Jockum Nordström (b. 1963) is one of Scandinavia’s most celebrated contemporary voices, renowned for the evocative, dreamlike worlds he brings to life through his art. This book spans more than three decades, from 1992 to 2025, tracing both early pieces and recent works, several of which have never been shown to the public before. Alongside captivating drawings, Nordström also creates sculptures, collages and maquettes – a testament to his versatility and to the richly imaginative universe he continues to shape.

With accompanying essays by Femke Vandenbosch and Carl Fredrik Hårleman. Graphic design by Kim Beirnaert.

Published on the occasion of the artist’s exhibition at Tim Van Laere Gallery from 9 October to 22 November 2025.

Jockum Nordström is a Swedish contemporary artist known for his distinct mixed-media works, which blend collage, drawing, and painting. Born in 1963 in Stockholm, Nordström’s style is often characterized by a whimsical yet surreal aesthetic, combining figures, landscapes, and architectural elements. Throughout his career, Nordström has exhibited internationally, earning recognition for his innovative approach to visual storytelling.

File under:

(...less)

From October 14th 2025 to March 1st 2026, the Musée National Picasso-Paris will present an exhibition dedicated to the American painter Philip Guston, bringing together a group of figurative works and drawings made by the artist responding to to Philip Roth’s book Our Gang (1971). The exhibition will also show the satirical verve of Guston’s painting as well as a form of political commitment rooted in his discovery of Picasso’s Guernica, surrealism and Mexican muralism in the late 1930s.

Supported by the Philip Guston Foundation and the artist’s daughter Musa Meyer, who have entrusted the museum with the Nixon drawings series, as well as never-seen-before works, the exhibition will offer a precise look at Guston’s work from the 1940s to the end of his life. In total, the book will feature around 150 works by Guston as well as the 73 drawings, along with Philip Roth’s text.

File under:

(...less)

First French edition of this extravagant, lavishly illustrated book of wines and famous vineyards, created by Dalí in honor of his wife Gala and published in 1977 by Draeger, Paris. The perfect, equally surreal and sensual viticulture follow-up companion to Dalí's best-selling cookbook, Les dîners de Gala. A Dalínian take on pleasures of the grape and a coveted collectible, the book sets out to organize wines “according to the sensations they create in our very depths.” Through eclectic metrics like production method, weight, and color, the book presents wines of the world in such innovative, Dalíesque groupings as “Wines of Frivolity,” “Wines of the Impossible,” and “Wines of Light.”

Bursting with imagery, the book features more than 140 illustrations by Dalí. Many of these are appropriated artworks, including various classical nudes, all of them reconstructed with suitably Surrealist, provocative touches, like Jean-François Millet’s The Angelus, one of Dalí’s favorite points of reference over the decades. Dalí also included what is now considered one of the greatest works from his late “Nuclear Mystic” phase, The Sacrament of the Last Supper (1955), which sets the iconic biblical scene in a translucent dodecahedron-shaped space before a Catalonian coastal landscape. Dalí was by this stage a devout Catholic, simultaneously captivated by science, optical illusion, and the atomic age.

The first section is dedicated to “Ten Divine Dalí Wines,” an overview of 10 important wine-growing regions, while the second develops Dalí’s revolutionary ordering of wine by emotional experience, instead of by geography or variety. Rather than any prescriptive classification, it’s a flamboyant, free-flowing manifesto in favor of taste and feeling, as much a multisensory treat as a full-bodied document of Dalí’s late-stage oeuvre, in which the artist both reflected on formative influences and refined his own cultural legacy. Texts in French by Dalí, Max Gerard, Louis Orizet.

Very Good copy in beautiful gold dust jacket in Good condition, light wear to extremities, now preserved under mylar wrap.

File under:

(...less)

Duchamp’s historic 1959 catalogue raisonné-cum-artist's book now back in print in a facsimile English edition. ‘Marcel Duchamp’ became the go-to book on the artist for many decades following its publication in late 1959, when exclusive grand-deluxe and deluxe editions in French, along with trade editions in French and English, were simultaneously released. While Trianon Press’s French trade edition was reprinted numerous times, the Grove Press English edition languished out of print for the better part of two generations—until now, with Hauser & Wirth Publishers’ fully authorized facsimile re-edition.

By Robert Lebel. Edited by Jean-Jacques Lebel and Association Marcel Duchamp. Foreword by Harald Falckenberg. Introduction by Michaela Unterdörfer. Text by Marcel Duchamp, André Breton, Henri-Pierre Roché, Jean-Jacques Lebel, Man Ray, Michael Taylor.

Marcel Duchamp, the artist’s first legendary monograph and draft catalogue raisonné, was written by art historian and novelist Robert Lebel and published in French in 1959; later that same year, it was translated into English by George Heard Hamilton for Grove Press. The book was a cooperation between Lebel and Duchamp, and beyond Lebel’s extensive writing and bibliography, additional chapters were authored by Duchamp, H.P. Roché and André Breton. The coupling of these texts with diverse archival photographs and an illustrated compendium of Duchamp’s artworks delivered a complex and personal rendering of the artist’s life and inner circle. For the first time since its release more than 60 years ago, this landmark publication is back in circulation with Hauser & Wirth Publishers’ meticulous facsimile of the English edition, reflecting everything from its hand-tipped images to its recto-verso dust jacket appearing as close to the original as possible.

Fully authorized by artist Jean-Jacques Lebel—Robert Lebel’s son—and the Association Marcel Duchamp, the facsimile is accompanied by a supplement volume of essays and archival material that tells the story of Duchamp and Lebel’s close collaboration, and, as contributor Michael Taylor writes, how the original publication signified a "sea change in the artist’s receptivity to critical interpretation." The supplement includes texts by both Robert and Jean-Jacques Lebel and a newly discovered note by Man Ray, among a bevy of photographs from the Lebel and Duchamp archives, extending the story presented in the 1959 edition.

Robert Lebel’s analysis of Duchamp’s oeuvre remains fresh to this day, as does the book’s design, which was personally supervised by the artist. Hauser & Wirth Publishers reanimated Marcel Duchamp with the curatorial-design firm fluid, who recast the original typefaces as digital fonts, positioning each letter and image exactly as it was in the original. To achieve a near-exact facsimile, fluid consulted with paper conservators and printers to recreate the book with modern materials that match those available in 1959. This precise production quality assures that today’s readers will experience this historic book as Marcel Duchamp and Robert Lebel intended.

File under:

(...less)

1989 hardcover re-print of this seminal monograph on Marcel Duchamp, first published ib 1973.

"Marcel Duchamp has changed the history of modern art.

His impact on the twentieth century is rivalled only by that of Matisse and Picasso, and no other figure has so directly influenced recent art forms.

Nude Descending a Staircase (1912), The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even (1915-23), and the Readymades are acknowledged landmarks in the art of our century, but reference to them only hints at the scope of Duchamp's œuvre. He took up a succession of projects after his much-publicized precocious retirement from "art," and upon his death in 1968 it was revealed that he had been secretly at work for twenty years on a major piece, the naturalistic assemblage entitled Etant donnés (1946-66). As the culmination of his artistic activity, the work allows us to see his total achievement in a new light.

This book, besides presenting a documented photographic survey of Duchamp's works, offers ten original essays by eminent scholars and critics. The essays cover Duchamp's explorations in the areas of language, poetry, the machine, alchemy, and the epistemology of art; on a more personallevel, they treat the milieux and the friendships that shaped his character, the life style to which he adhered, and the influence his example has exerted. Passages from his lectures are included in the book, as well as comments and tributes by more than fifty colleagues, friends, and interested observers. Documentary illustrations, a chronology, and a bibliography complete the volume.

First published in 1973 to immediate acclaim, this monograph continues to be a definitive book on Duchamp.
Lavishly illustrated, it documents his entire career."

ANNE D'HARNONCOURT is Director of the Philadelphia Museum of Art.
KYNASTON McSHINE is Senior Curator of Painting and Sculpture at The Museum of Modern Art, New York.

Good copy. Would be NF/NF but one section of back cover edge dust jacket and board are worn back, the book and jacket are otherwise NF and nicely preserved. Now all under mylar wrap.

File under:

(...less)

This publication offers backstage access to one of the most compelling artistic outputs exploring the boundary between the human body and the machine.

Alexandra Bircken combines a variety of materials and techniques with which she explores the boundary between the human and the created environment. At the same time, the Berlin-based artist dissects everyday technical objects with surgical precision, bringing the biomorphic nature of machines into view. This dual approach leads to an ambivalent work that is both cyborg-like and androgynous and questions human behaviour and desire. This book brings together Bircken's work from the past twenty years, along with an in-depth interview with the artist and a selection of reference and archive images collected over three decades.

File under:

(...less)

An exceptional catalogue in every respect: Published in an unusual format, it reflects the eponymous first museum exhibition centred on artists living with disabilities, complemented by an extended reader on the subject.

"Crip Time" (2021/22 at the Frankfurt Museum für Moderne Kunst) was the first museum exhibition to centre on artists living with disabilities. In their works, they call into question the norms and standards of capitalist society and explore who they benefit - and thereby exclude. The title refers to the idea of "crip time," developed by the American scholar Alison Kafer, which contends that people with disabilities need a different and more flexible sense of time in order to thrive. As is not unusual when working in crip time, this catalogue is published three years after the show closed. It provides a comprehensive account of and reflections on the exhibition in 19 texts, an extended thematic reader on the subject that can serve as a resource for future scholarship, and a new collaborative work by the artists Carolyn Lazard, Park McArthur, and Constantina Zavitsanos.

Artists include: John Akomfrah, Jillian Crochet, Jesse Darling, Isa Genzken, Nan Goldin, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Mike Kelley, Christine Sun Kim, Carolyn Lazard, Park McArthur, Michelle Miles, Leroy F. Moore Jr., Cady Noland, Dietrich Orth, Gerhard Richter, Finnegan Shannon, Wolfgang Tillmans, Rosemarie Trockel.

File under:

(...less)

"Imagine: a small, white booklet with around 150 ink drawings and no text other than the title on the front: «up and down town» by David Weiss, written on a cover page that is, quite literally, rain-soaked. But it gets even worse. In all of the drawings, it keeps raining – constantly, heavily, pouring, drenching, streaming down – and it never stops. The wet asphalt glistens, neon signs reflect in reverse on car roofs, a tram splashes water from the tracks onto the hunched figures beneath umbrellas. But if you look more closely at this ever-changing urban setting, strange characters begin to flicker into view. A booklet to return to again and again, always discovering new details, events, constellations. And what's more, it is absolutely brilliantly drawn."—Bice Curiger, “Tages-Anzeiger”, Zürich (November 14, 1975)

up and down town was was first published in 1974 in an edition of 1000 copies by Edition Galerie Stähli in Zürich. In 2014, up and down town was published – as Regenbüchlein – in the collection Nine Books 1973-1979 initiated by David Weiss (1946-2012), by Edition Patrick Frey. This new edition was published in summer 2025 on the occasion of the exhibition David Weiss Il sogno di Casa Aprile – Carona 1968-1978 at MASI in Lugano.

File under: