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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World Food Books
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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]
2024, English
Hardcover (clothbound), 496 pages, 29 x 24 cm
Published by
Mumok / Vienna
Walther König / Köln
$100.00 - In stock -
The rediscovery of a still underappreciated artist who, along with Auguste Rodin, revolutionised sculpture in the 19th century.
Artist and artisan, art theorist and proto-installation artist, master of high-publicity productions and rival of Auguste Rodin, Medardo Rosso (b. 1858 in Turin, d. 1928 in Milan) was one of the great pioneers of modernism and a figure as extraordinary as he was eccentric.
Published on the occasion of a comprehensive retrospective curated by Heike Eipeldauer withexhibition design by Florian Pumhösl and Walter Kräutler, devoted to the Italian-French artist’s still little-known oeuvre, with more than fifty sculptures and a large selection of photographs, photocollages, and drawings. The exhibition and catalogue (at almost 500 pages) delves into a thorough analysis of Rosso’s processual and repetitive approach, with which the artist defied all conventions of traditional sculpture. A concise selection of works by artists directly or indirectly influenced by Rosso further unpack and create a dialogue with Rosso’s equally groundbreaking and hermetic work. The show thus adheres to Rosso’s own artistic practice of not exhibiting alone but always in “conversation” with others — among them Francis Bacon, Nairy Baghramian, Phyllida Barlow, Louise Bourgeois, Constantin Brancusi, Edgar Degas, Alberto Giacometti, David Hammons, Eva Hesse, Robert Morris, and Andy Warhol - who resonate directly or indirectly with Rosso. The book is profusely illustrated with Rosso's works, as well as the works in dialogue and full installation documentation of this triumphant exhibition.
Artists in dialogue with Medardo Rosso: Giovanni Anselmo / Guillaume Apollinaire / Francis Bacon / Nairy Baghramian / Olga Balema / Phyllida Barlow / Lynda Benglis / Louise Bourgeois / Anton Giulio Bragaglia / Constantin Brâncuși / Eugène Carrière / John Chamberlain / Honoré Daumier / Edgar Degas / Raymond Duchamp-Villon / Luciano Fabro / Loïe Fuller / Isa Genzken / Alberto Giacometti / Robert Gober / David Hammons / Eva Hesse / Jasper Johns / Hans Josephsohn / Ellsworth Kelly / Käthe Kollwitz / Yayoi Kusama / Maria Lassnig / Sherrie Levine / Matthijs Maris / Marisa Merz / Amedeo Modigliani / Robert Morris / Juan Muñoz / Senga Nengudi / Carol Rama / Auguste Rodin / Richard Serra / Georges Seurat / Erin Shirreff / Edward Steichen / Alina Szapocznikow / Paul Thek / Rosemarie Trockel / Hannah Villiger / Andy Warhol / Rebecca Warren / James Welling / Francesca Woodman
Texts by: Jo Applin, Birgit Brunk, Georges Didi-Huberman, Heike Eipeldauer, Elena Filipovic, Ines Gebetsroither, Francesco Guzzetti, Karola Kraus, Lisa LeFeuvre, Megan R. Luke, Esmee Postma, Florian Pumhosl, Nina Schallenberg, Francesco Stocchi, Matthew S. Witkovsky.
Medardo Rosso, b. 1858 in Turin, d. 1928 in Milan, was a resident of Paris from 1889 on. There, he befriended Auguste Rodin, whose collaborator and later rival he became. Both artists sought to radically redefine the ostensibly unmodern medium of sculpture, which had been stuck in the confines of the monumental. Designed in the spirit of a fluid idea of modernism and shaped by the philosopher Henri Bergson's revolutionary concept of space and time, Rosso's sculptures overcame classical characteristics such as solidity and durability in favor of modern phenomena of the transitory and immaterial.
The exhibition, which is organized in close collaboration with the Medardo Rosso Estate, travels from Mumok, Vienna to Kunstmuseum Basel, spanning 2024—2025.
Highly recommended!
2025, English
Softcover, 448 pages, 22.5 x 19.2 cm
Published by
FAB Press / UK
$79.00 - In stock -
In 2012, a book debuted that would go on to canonical status and usher in a new way of writing about film. Kier-La Janisse's HOUSE OF PSYCHOTIC WOMEN is an autobiographical exploration of female neurosis in horror and exploitation films that examines hundreds of films through a daringly personal lens. In this pioneering work, anecdotes and memories interweave with film history, criticism, trivia and confrontational imagery to create a reflective personal history and a consideration of female madness, both onscreen and off.
To mark its 10th anniversary, Kier-La Janisse and FAB Press have reteamed to produce an expanded edition the book, featuring new writing on 100 more films - many of which were inspired in part by the book itself - and hundreds of new images. This hardcover expanded edition is now available in softcover.
Cinema is full of neurotic personalities, but few things are more transfixing than a woman losing her mind onscreen. Horror as a genre provides the most welcoming platform for these histrionics: crippling paranoia, desperate loneliness, masochistic death-wishes, dangerous obsessiveness, apocalyptic hysteria. Unlike her male counterpart - 'the eccentric' - the female neurotic lives a shamed existence, making these films those rare places where her destructive emotions get to play.
This sharply-designed book, including a 48-page full-colour section, is packed with 680 rare stills, posters, pressbooks and artwork throughout, that combine with family photos and artifacts to form a titillating sensory overload, with a filmography that traverses the acclaimed and the obscure in equal measure. Films covered include The Entity, The Corruption of Chris Miller, Singapore Sling, 3 Women, Toys Are Not for Children, Repulsion, Let's Scare Jessica to Death, The Haunting of Julia, Secret Ceremony, Cutting Moments, Out of the Blue, Mademoiselle, The Piano Teacher, Possession, Antichrist and hundreds more!
Compendium of Female Neurosis. A cross-section of horror and violent exploitation films that feature disturbed or neurotic women as primary or pivotal characters.
Alice, Sweet Alice; All the Colors of the Dark; Alucarda; Anima persa; Antichrist; Asylum; The Attic; Audition; Autopsy; The Baby; Bad Dreams; Bad Guy; Bas-fonds; Bedevilled; The Beguiled; La Belle Bête; The Bird with the Crystal Plumage; Black Narcissus; Black Swan; The Blood Spattered Bride; The Blue Eyes of the Broken Doll; Born Innocent; Boy Meets Girl; The Brave One; The Bride; The Brood; Burnt Offerings; Butcher, Baker, Nightmare Maker; Can Go Through Skin; A Candle for the Devil; Carrie; La casa muda; Cat People; La cérémonie; Children Shouldn't Play with Dead Things; Christiane F.; The Collector; The Corruption of Chris Miller; Les cousines; "Criminally Insane"; The Curse of the Cat People; Cutting Moments; Daddy; Dead Creatures; Defenceless: A Blood Symphony; Dementia; Descent; The Devil's Widow; The Devils; Diabel; Die! Die! My Darling!; The Dinner Party; Dirty Weekend; Dr. Jekyll and His Women; Don't Deliver Us from Evil; Don't Look Now; Don't Torture a Duckling; Doppelganger; Dracula's Daughter; Dream Home; The Entity; The Escapees; Eyes of a Stranger; Fatal Attraction; Feed; Five Across the Eyes; Footprints; Forbidden Photos of a Lady Above Suspicion; Four Flies on Grey Velvet; Freeze Me; The Frightened Woman; Frightmare; Funeral Home; Gently Before She Dies; The Geography of Fear; The Girl Next Door; The Glass Ceiling; Goodbye Gemini; A Gun for Jennifer; Handgun; Happy Birthday to Me; Hard Candy; The Haunting (1963); The Haunting (2009); The Haunting of Julia; Haute tension; Heavenly Creatures; The Honeymoon Killers; A Horrible Way to Die; I Never Promised You a Rose Garden; Images; In My Skin; The Innocents; Inside; The Isle; Julie Darling; Kichiku; The Killer Nun; Kissed; Knife of Ice; The Ladies Club; The Last Exorcism; The Legend of Lylah Clare; The Legend of the Wolf Woman; Let's Scare Jessica to Death; A Lizard in a Woman's Skin; Love Me Deadly; The Loved Ones; Macabre; The Mad Room; Mademoiselle; Madhouse (1974); Madhouse (1981); Madness; The Mafu Cage; Man, Woman and Beast; Marnie; Martyrs; Masks; May; Misery; Morris County; Morvern Callar; Mother's Day; Ms.45; Mumsy, Nanny, Sonny & Girly; Nabi: The Butterfly; Neighbor; Neither the Sea Nor the Sand; Nekromantik; Nekromantik 2; Next of Kin; The Night Porter; A Night to Dismember; Nightbirds; Nightmares; La nuit des traquées; The Other Hell; The Other Side of the Underneath; Out of the Blue; Paranoia; Paranormal Activity; The Perfume of the Lady in Black; Persona; Phenomena; The Piano Teacher; Pigs; Play Misty for Me; Possession; Pretty Poison; Prey; Psycho Girls; The Rapture; The Rats Are Coming! The Werewolves Are Here!; Rebecca; Red Desert; Red Sun; Red White & Blue; The Reincarnation of Peter Proud; Repulsion; Road to Salina; Roman's Bride; Santa Sangre; Schizo; Scissors; Scream 4; Séance on a Wet Afternoon; Secret Ceremony; The Secret Life of Sarah Sheldon; Shock; Singapore Sling; Sinner; Sisters (1973); Sisters (2006); Slaughter Hotel; The Snake Pit; Sombre; Spider Baby; The Stendhal Syndrome; Straight On Till Morning; Strait-Jacket; The Strange Possession of Mrs. Oliver; The Strange Vengeance of Rosalie; Symptoms; Szamanka; That Cold Day in the Park; They Call Her One Eye; 3 Women; To Let; Toys Are Not for Children; Trance; Trilogy of Terror; Trouble Every Day; Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me; The Uninvited; Venom; Venus Drowning; The Washing Machine; What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?; The Whip and the Body; Whoever Slew Auntie Roo?; Windows; The Witch Who Came from the Sea; The Woman; Woman Transformation; Wound PLUS MORE THAN 100 EXTRA FILM REVIEWS EXCLUSIVE TO THIS NEW EDITION
Kier-La Janisse is a film writer, programmer, producer and founder of The Miskatonic Institute of Horror Studies. She is the author of A Violent Professional: The Films of Luciano Rossi (2007) and has been an editor on numerous books including Warped & Faded: Weird Wednesday and the Birth of the American Genre Film Archive (2021), Yuletide Terror: Christmas Horror on Film and Television (2017) and Satanic Panic: Pop-Cultural Paranoia in the 1980s (2015). She was a producer on David Gregory’s Tales of the Uncanny (2020) and wrote, directed and produced the award-winning documentary Woodlands Dark and Days Bewitched: A History of Folk Horror (2021) for Severin Films, where she is a producer and editor of supplemental features. She is currently at work on several books including a monograph about Monte Hellman’s Cockfighter.
1990, French
Softcover (w. dust jacket), 288 pages, 24 x 21 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Centre National Des Arts Plastiques / Paris
$200.00 - In stock -
First edition of the comprehensive Pierre Klossowski catalogue raisonné published on the occasion of the major retrospective exhibition of his work held in Paris in 1990-1991 at CNAP. Profusely illustrated in colour and b/w with Klossowski's wonderful works, texts throughout by Catherine Grenier, Bernard Blistene, Claude Ritschard, Pascal Bonitzer, Marie-Dominique Wicker, Franco Cagnetta, André Masson, and Pierre Zucca (in French), a densely illustrated catalogue raisonné spanning his work dated 1952/53 through to 1990 (many not seen elsewhere), biography, exhibition history, and much more. Still the most in-depth book on Klossowski's oeuvre to date.
Pierre Klossowski (1905-2001) was a significant and influential philosopher, writer, translator and artist who befriended Georges Bataille and formulated an original stance on many theological issues, as well as the philosophy of the Marquis de Sade. His first novel, Roberte, ce soir, appeared in 1954 as a limited edition containing six of his own erotic illustrations, after he rejected drawings by his younger brother, the painter Balthus. Following the encouragement of Robert Lebel, Andre Masson and Alberto Giacometti, Klossowski held his first exhibition in Paris in 1956, and subsequently produced numerous life-size drawings of erotic scenes imbued with mythological, allegorical and philosophical connotations. By the 1970s, he had won the acclaim of such eminent thinkers as Maurice Blanchot, Michel Butor, Gilles Deleuze, Michel Foucault and Felix Guattari. Of Klossowski, Gilles Deleuze once said, "That bodies speak has been known for a long time."
Very Good in Very Good dust jacket.
1993-1995, English
Softcover (staple-bound), approx 64 pages, 30 x 21 cm
Published by
M.I.M.A. / St. Kilda
$65.00 - In stock -
Rare lot of three issues of MESH magazine, the quarterly journal of the Modern Image Makers Association, based in St. Kilda, Melbourne, founded in 1987 and devoted to critical writing about experimental film, video art, electronic multimedia art and related art practice. These issues (No. 1 Spring 1993, No. 3 Autumn 1994, No. 5 Autumn 1995) edited between Melinda Tuz and Lisa Logan, include features on Michael Snow, Linda Dement, "Gamegirls": Australian female artists working with New Imaging Technologies (VNS Matrix, Linda Dement, Faye Maxwell, Kim Bonds, Moira Corby, Maryella Hatfield, Elena Popa), Tracy Moffett, Cyberdada (Troy Innocent, Dale Nason, Elena Popa), Paula Dawson, Heather Fernon, Jacinta Le Plastrier, Czech-Australian painter and animator Dušan Marek, John Maybury, Experimenta, Maya Deren, Marie Craven, Domenico de Clario, Germaine Dulac, Ted Colless, Sally Potter..... essays, articles, reviews by Adrian Martin, Julie Clarke, Kevin Murray, David Cox, Freda Freiberg, Peter Mundie, Heather Barton, Barbara Allen, Jyanni Steffensen, Barrett Hodsdon, and many more.
All Good—Very Good copies, light general magazine wear.
2006, English
Softcover, 272 pages, 27.1 x 21.4 cm
Published by
Hayward Gallery Publishing / London
$75.00 - In stock -
An exploration of the unsettling collisions of art and culture in Georges Bataille's revolutionary journal and a new consideration of twentieth-century masterpieces by Picasso, Miro, Dali, and others against the canvas of their renegade times.
In the Paris art world of the 1920s, Georges Bataille and his journal DOCUMENTS represented a dissident branch of surrealism. Bataille—poet, philosopher, writer, and self-styled "enemy within" surrealism—used DOCUMENTS to put art into violent confrontation with popular culture, ethnography, film, and archaeology. Undercover Surrealism, taking the visual richness of DOCUMENTS as its starting point, recovers the explosive and vital intellectual context of works by Picasso, Miro, Dali, Giacometti, and others in 1920s Paris.
Profusely illustrated (featuring 180 colour images) and filled with valuable English translations of original French texts from DOCUMENTS accompanied by essays and shorter descriptive texts, Undercover Surrealism recreates and recontextualizes Bataille's still unsettling approach to culture. Putting Picasso's Three Dancers back into its original context of sex, sacrifice, and violence, for example, then juxtaposing it with images of gang wars, tribal masks, voodoo ritual, Hollywood musicals, and jazz, makes the urgency and excitement of Bataille's radical ideas startlingly vivid to a twenty-first-century reader.
1970, Czech
Hardcover (w. dust jacket), 172 pages, 17 x 24 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Odeon / Prague
$120.00 - Out of stock
First edition of this major, long out-of-print hardcover monograph on Czech photographer Jaromír Funke, published by the great Prague publishing house Odeon in 1970. Profusely illustrated with 132 beautiful photo-gravure reproductions, includes some of the best known photographs from this important Czech photographer, presented alongside a text by Ludvik Soucek.
Jaromír Funke (1896–1945) was a Czech photographer. Funke was a leading figure in Czech photography during the 1920s and 1930s. Although his earliest imagery was influenced by Pictorialism, Funke quickly turned to a more sharp-focus, documentary style. Abstract images of shadows and organic forms made in the early twenties evolved into more objective representations of objects by the end of the decade. In 1924 he cofounded the Czech Photographic Society with Josef Sudek and Adolf Schneeberger. Two years later he produced a series of Surrealist images of store windows originally titled Glass and Reflection, based on the photographs of Eugène Atget. Also influential as a teacher, Funke served for several years as editor of the journal Fotograficky obzor (Photographic Horizons).
Very Good copy in Good dust jacket with some wear.
1982, Czech / English / French / German
Hardcvoer (w. dust jacket), 182 pages, 28 x 24.5 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / fine
Published by
Panorama / Prague
$120.00 - In stock -
First 1982 hardcover edition of this beautifully produced retrospective survey of legendary Czech photographer Josef Sudek (1896 – 1976), famous for his haunting images photographs of Prague, where this volume was published by Panorama. Comprising almost entirely full-page reproductions of Sudek's wonderful photographs, introduced by an opening essay by biographer Zdeněk Kirschner and chaptered expanded caption sections on the works throughout with summary and resume in Czech, English, French and German.
Dubbed the "Poet of Prague," Josef Sudek became well known around the streets and concert halls of his city. A poor student, Sudek decided to become a bookbinder, receiving his certificate at age seventeen, while his younger sister became a photographer. At the same time Sudek began to experiment with a box camera and was particularly fond of self-portraits. During active service in World War I, he brought his camera to the front and subsequently produced three albums of photographs.
After the war Sudek turned his attention more fully to photography and became friendly with photographer Jaromir Funke, who introduced him to artists and intellectuals in Prague. In 1921 Sudek applied to the State School of Graphic Arts and soon after was admitted to the Bohemian Amateur Photography Association. After graduating, Sudek and Funke cofounded the Czech Photographic Society in 1924. From the beginning, Sudek met with great commercial success; he leased a studio in 1927 and prospered there for more than thirty years.
Fine copy in Fine DJ preserved under archival mylar wrap.
1960, Czech
Softcover, 126 pages, 17.5 x 15.5 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
SNKLU / Prague
$120.00 - Out of stock
Wonderful and long out-of-print Jaromír Funke monograph, published in Prague in 1960 as part of the distinctive series of Czech monographs on photographers published by SNKLU, a wing of the great Odeon publishing house. With introductory text by theorist Lubomír Linhart, this beautifully printed book presents a selection of 96 of Funke's photographs printed in gorgeous gravure.
Jaromír Funke (1896–1945) was a Czech photographer. Funke was a leading figure in Czech photography during the 1920s and 1930s. Although his earliest imagery was influenced by Pictorialism, Funke quickly turned to a more sharp-focus, documentary style. Abstract images of shadows and organic forms made in the early twenties evolved into more objective representations of objects by the end of the decade. In 1924 he cofounded the Czech Photographic Society with Josef Sudek and Adolf Schneeberger. Two years later he produced a series of Surrealist images of store windows originally titled Glass and Reflection, based on the photographs of Eugène Atget. Also influential as a teacher, Funke served for several years as editor of the journal Fotograficky obzor (Photographic Horizons).
Very Good copy. Light edge wear and tanning.
2024, English
Hardcover (w. dust jacket), 334 pages, 32 x 22 cm
Published by
Centre Pompidou / Paris
$110.00 - In stock -
The defining book for the centenary of Surrealism. From September 2024 to January 2025, the Centre Pompidou will celebrate the 100th anniversary of André Breton's Surrealist Manifesto. For the next two years, their unprecedented Surrealist exhibition will tour the art galleries of the world, accompanied by this special catalogue.
Perhaps more than any other artistic movement, Surrealism had a cataclysmic effect on the modern mind, changing forever the way we think about experiencing the world. By rejecting the gross linearity that typified several centuries of preceding artworks, the legendary Surrealists Magritte, Ernst, Carrington, Dali, Tanning and so many others reached beyond the facade of that which is patently visible and found something more. Featuring original essays from leading academics and excerpts from the Surrealist Manifesto itself, this stands among the most essential Surrealist catalogues ever published.
2020, English
Hardcover, 200 pages, 26.7 x 33 cm
Published by
Hauser & Wirth / Zurich
$120.00 - In stock -
Featuring paintings from series that span from 1994 through 2009, this volume traces Mike Kelley's (1954–2012) engagement with the medium through bodies of work including The Thirteen Seasons (Heavy on the Winter), a series of oval-shaped paintings on wood; Timeless Painting, which marked Kelley's distinct return to painting in colour, and which he described as "mannerist take-offs on Hans Hofmann's compositional theory of ‘push and pull'"; and the Horizontal Tracking Shots series.
2017 / 2022, English
Softcover, 600 pages, 15.2 x 20.3 cm
Published by
Nightboat Books / New York
$58.00 - In stock -
At last a major anthology of New Narrative, the movement fueled by punk, pop, porn, French theory, and social struggle to change writing forever.
Impossible to get for years, now finally back in print, and back in stock!
In the twenty years that followed America’s bicentennial, narrative writing was re-formed, reflecting new political and sexual realities. With the publication of this anthology, the New Narrative era bounds back to life, ripe with dramatic propulsion and infused with the twin strains of poetry and continental theory. The reader will discover classic New Narrative texts, from Robert Glück to Kathy Acker, as well as rare supplemental materials, including period interviews, essays, and talks, which form a new map of late 20th century creative rebellion.
"Dodie Bellamy and Kevin Killian’s edited anthology, Writers Who Love Too Much: New Narrative 1977–1997, takes an expansive view. A monumental tome decades in the making, it contains the work of forty-two recognised and little-known authors… Published, unpublished, and long-forgotten works, interviews, illustrations, and ephemera are all included, and each piece is accompanied by an invaluable note by Bellamy and Killian offering context and contributing to a sense of an exceptionally large, diverse, and exciting writing scene. Proof that nothing sticks a scene together like bodily fluids, the editors’ notes are also heavy on gossip and innuendo. Like New Narrative prose itself, which often used salacious, intimate asides to establish a conspiratorial relationship with its reader, Bellamy and Killian’s reminiscences seem designed to make their reader feel included or at least momentarily implicated in their community." — Diarmuid Hester, Critical Quarterly
Includes the writings of : Kevin Killian, Dodie Bellamy, Robert Glück, Kathy Acker, Edith A. Jenkins, Carla Harryman, David O. Steinberg, Michael Amnasan, Judy Grahn, John Norton, Marsha Campbell, Brad Gooch, Camille Roy, Sam D'Allesandro, Bruce Boone, Dennis Cooper, Kathe Burkhart, Roberto Bedoya, Steve Abbott, Gabrielle Daniels, Gary Indiana, Leslie Dick, Scott Watson, Gail Scott, Richard Hawkins, Kevin Killian, Matias Viegener, R. Zamora Linmark, Ishmael Houston-Jones, Rebecca Brown, Nayland Blake, Lynne Tillman, Bruce Benderson, Cecilia Dougherty, Eileen Myles, Sarah Schulman, Laurie Weeks, Bob Flanagan, Lawrence Braithwaite, Chris Kraus.
1976 / 2000, English
Softcover, 92 pages, 15.3 x 23 cm
Published by
Barrytown Ltd. / US
Station Hill Press / Barrytown
$30.00 - In stock -
Death Sentence is a philosophical novel by Maurice Blanchot. First published in 1948, it is his second complete work of fiction. This long awaited reprint of a book about which John Hollander wrote: "A masterful version of one of the most remarkable novels in any language since World War II," is the story of the narrator's relations with two women, one terminally ill, the other found motionless by him in a darkened room after a bomb explosion has separated them. "Through more than 40 years, the French writer Maurice Blanchot has produced an astonishing body of fiction and criticism," writes Gilbert Sorrentino in the New York Review of Books, and John Updike in The New Yorker: "Blanchot's prose gives an impression, like Henry James, of carrying meanings so fragile they might crumble in transit."
Translated from French by Lydia Davis
Maurice Blanchot (1907-2003) was a French writer, philosopher, and literary theorist. His work had a strong influence on later post-structuralist theorists such as Jacques Derrida. He is one of the most enigmatic and influential figures in modern French writing yet no interview, no biographical sketch, and hardly any photographs have ever been published of him.
1994, Japanese
Hardcover (w. dust jacket), unpaginated, 32 x 23 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
? / Japan
$90.00 - In stock -
Lovely rare 1994 Japanese erotic photo book by photographer Seiichi Nomura of Japanese singer, actress and AV idol Natsuki Ozawa (b. 1972). Colour and monochrome heavy gloss imagery throughout of Ozawa at the age of 22 in various erotic poses and scenarios.
Very Good copy in VG dust jacket.
2023, English
Softcover, 600 pages, 21.2 x 15.2 cm
Published by
Strange Attractor / London
$60.00 - In stock -
Core members of the legendary British experimental band Coil tell its story in the present-tense, as events unfold across their twenty-year history.
Between 1983 and 2004 the legendary British experimental band Coil established themselves as shape-shifting doyens of esoteric music whose influence has grown spectacularly in the years since their untimely end. With music that could be dark, queer, and difficult, but often retained a warped pop sensibility, Coil's albums were multi-faceted repositories of esoteric knowledge, lysergic wisdom and acerbic humor. In Everything Keeps Dissolving, core members John Balance and Peter Christopherson tell Coil's story in the present-tense, and from their personal perspectives, as events unfold across their twenty-year history.
Accompanied by their various collaborators, Coil describe the fertile eruption of ideas, inspirations, and stray tangents that informed their lyrical and musical visions-as well as those dead paths and castoff concepts that didn't take root. No only a worm's eye view of Coil, these interviews provide insight into the late twentieth century's evolving British cultural underground as channeled through two of its most astutely mercurial minds.
1997, Japanese
Softcover (w. dust jacket + obi), 192 pages, 15 x 23 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Heibonsha / Tokyo
$130.00 - Out of stock
First edition of one of the finest of Araki's photo books, dedicated entirely to his incredible Erotos series. Published as part of the Complete Works collection, in this work, controversial and legendary Japanese photographer Nobuyoshi Araki makes a radical departure from his usual portraits and cityscapes. A collection of arrestingly primal close-ups of parts of the body as well as various objects—pipes, fruit, wet sidewalks, flowers, snails—Erotos delves deep into the erotic subconscious. Reproduced in gorgeous glossy duotone and bound in the original jacket and publisher's obi-strip (not pictured). One our favourite bodies of work by Araki.
Nobuyoshi Araki was born in Tokyo in 1940. Given a camera by his father at the ripe age of twelve, Araki has been taking pictures ever since. He studied photography and film at Chiba University and went into commercial photography soon after graduating. In 1970 he created his famous Xeroxed Photo Albums, which he produced in limited editions and sent to friends, art critics, and people selected randomly from the telephone book. Over the years, his bold, unabashed photographs of his private life have been the object of a great deal of controversy and censorship (especially in his native Japan), a fact that has not fazed the artist nor diminished his influence. To date, Araki has published over 400 books of his work.
Very Good in VG dust jacket and obi. Sample image.
1988, English
Softcover (staple-bound), 28 pages, 30 x 20.5 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / good
$15.00 - In stock -
Rare copy of Arterial magazine, published for a moment in the late 1980's out of the Monash University Union Building in Clayton, edited by Stephen O'Connell, Giacomina Pradolin, Eleni Prodromidis, Roger Leong, Robert L. Schubert... This issue featuring an interview with author Kathy Acker, Peter Greenaway, Jacques Lacan, Luce Irigaray, and more.
"Arterial's concern in this issue is no longer with a chaste field of investigation whose broad rubric is both 'visual and 'art. The term is emasculated as the visual transgresses into the literary, the psychoanalytic, the anthropological. Unfurling in this way, a polymorphous collection of works undermines its coherence. Greenaway, Acker, Lacan are all on Separate Tables, eating the same menu perhaps - language. Thinking of de Mann, ours is a rhetorical strategy. The type which pushes the question of language to the fore, demanding that 'art' be re-thought in terms of language, "and in this movement art and language are transformed together, neither remains what it was.""—from the introduction
Good copy with some cover wear.
2025, English
Softcover, 74 pages, 23 x 15.3 cm
$28.00 - In stock -
Dub Langlands: Art Theory Texts on Cybernetics is a concise collection of essays that explores how feedback loops, control mechanisms, and informational paradigms shape contemporary art and culture. Artist and theorist Eric Schmid examines art as a complex system entangled with technology and logic, revealing how dynamic interactions between artists, audiences, and machines generate new meanings in the creative process. Drawing bold parallels with the Langlands program in mathematics—a quest to find hidden unity across disparate fields—the book bridges art, science, and abstract thought, while probing the epistemological constraints that underlie art and technology through a blend of structuralist insight and phenomenological sensitivity. Engaging with key thinkers like Norbert Wiener, Gilles Châtelet, and Reza Negarestani, Schmid proposes a new synthesis of art and logic that offers fresh perspectives on contemporary culture, ultimately inviting readers to explore a world where feedback systems and formal rules illuminate the very essence of artistic expression in our cybernetic age.
1982/1992, Japanese
Softcover, 192 pages, 21 x 14.5 cm
Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Atelier Peyotl / Tokyo
$60.00 - In stock -
"Corpse" Special Feature Issue of cult Japanese underground magazine Yaso, first published in 1982, then re-printed in 1992, edited by Yuichi Konno and Atelier Peyotl (publishers of Night Vision/Yaso/Peyotl/Wave/Silvester Club...). Heavily illustrated with texts in Japanese that look at the theme of death and the dead in the arts, literature, occultism, ancient sciences, philosophy, mythology, poetry, film, crime, and much more. Features John Duncan, Tetsumi Kudo, Cosey Fanni Tutti, Masahisa Fukase, Franz Kafka, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Guillaume Apollinaire, Joe Potts (LAFMS), Takashi Ishii, Rudolf II — Holy Roman Emperor, Akinari Ueda, Marcel Duchamp, Chris Burden, Paul Celan, Alain Resnais, Gilyak Amagasaki, Shusaku Arakawa, Pieter Bruegel the Elder, Shuji Terayama, Andy Warhol, Charles Manson, Brian Wilson, Kyoko Endoh, Princess Yongtai, Salvador Dalí, Ono no Komachi, Kiyoshi Kasai, Caravaggio, Throbbing Gristle, Takizawa Bakin, Leno and Rosemary LaBianca, Manson Family, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Wu Zetian, Genesis P-Orridge, Yusuke Nakahara, Ranpo Lagrange, Mitsusada Fukasaku, Nakai Hideo, Richard Wagner, and many more.
Very Good copy.
1974, English
Softcover, 628 pages, 26.5 x 21 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Whole Australian Catalogue Publications / Melbourne
$150.00 - In stock -
The wonderful PIE Anthology, published in 1974, a huge 628-page collection of underground poetry, literature, paintings, drawings, collages and photographs by young Australians. With front cover painting by Dale Hickey, PIE is a phone-book sized capsule of the artistic universe that orbited around two of Melbourne's most important counterculture bookshops — Source Books from America (known as The Source — on Collins Street, then on Manchester Lane next to Archie & Jugheads Records and staffed by Robert Rooney) and Whole Earth Bookstore (known as Whole Earth — on Bourke Street, opposite Pellegrini’s) established by Paul and Ann Smith and Alex Morton in 1969 and 1973 respectively.
Edited by Paul Smith, PIE captures an esoteric blend of "Whole Earth/Source" alternative living culture, cosmic spirituality and philosophy with conceptual art, photo documents and experimental, concrete and visual poetry, featuring the texts and artworks of many notable Australian artists and poets, including contributions by Mirka Mora, Jas H. Duke, Ken Bolton, π.o., Charles Buckmaster, Alex Selenitsch, Walt Whitman, Michael Dugan, Mal Morgan, Shelton Lea, John Tranter, Phil Motherwell, Peter Murphy, Bob Weis. File alongside The Carrionflower Writ, Collective Effort Press, Fitzrot, and the like.
Very Good copy with light cover wear, tanning.
2013, Japanese
Softcover (w. dust jacket), 96 pages, 19 x 13 cm
Published by
Atelier Third / Tokyo
$35.00 - In stock -
Out-of-print full-colour collection of guro manga master Shintaro Kago's “funny girl” painting series. Page after page of Kago's skin-crawling lolita-hell cutesy-horror in overdrive.
Shintaro Kago (b. 1969) is a Japanese guro manga artist. He debuted in 1988 on the magazine COMIC BOX. Shintaro Kago's style has been called "fashionable paranoia," although he has stated the term stems from Western media and he doesn't use it himself. He has been published in several adult manga magazines, gaining him considerable popularity. Many of his manga have strongly satirical overtones, often parodying Japanese politics. Separately, he deals extensively with grotesque subjects such as extreme sex, rape, scatology and body modification (to the extent of forniphilia). He has also written non-guro sci-fi manga, most notably Super-Conductive Brains Parataxis for Weekly Young Jump. Many of his shorts are experimental and bizarre. He frequently breaks the fourth wall, and he likes to play with the page layout in extreme ways, mostly for comedic effect. When asked about his influences, he's mentioned Shigeru Mizuki, Fujiko Fujio, Masamune Shiro, and Katsuhiro Otomo.
Fine—As New copy.
1991, Japanese
Softcover (w. dust jacket, 128 pages, 26 x 18.5 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Heibonsha / Tokyo
$60.00 - In stock -
Wonderful photo-book chronology of the world of Shūji Terayama (1935—1983) and his experimental theatre troupe Tenjō Sajiki (with Kujō Kyōko, Yutaka Higashi, Tadanori Yokoo, Fumiko Takagi, ...), a major phenomenon on the Japanese Angura ("underground") theater scene of the 1960s and 70s. Terayama's activities encompass a who's-who of the Japanese avant-garde arts and literature of the time. This book visually documents it all; the filmography, performances, installations, happenings, exhibitions, posters, publications, and all else that resonated from Japan’s most revered and provocative avant-garde film-maker and his collaborators. Profusely illustrated with hundreds of illustrations in colour, duo and b/w with Japanese commentary, biographies and chronology. A wonderful, visually mind-blowing reference for anyone interested in the work of Terayama, Tenjō Sajiki, Surrealist performance, or Japanese avant-garde underground (Angura) theatre.
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. In 1967 Terayama founded Tenjō Sajiki with Kujō Kyōko, Yutaka Higashi, Tadanori Yokoo, and Fumiko Takagi, a Japanese experimental theater troupe. A major phenomenon on the Japanese Angura ("underground") theater scene, the group produced a number of stage works marked by experimentalism, folklore influences, social provocation, grotesque eroticism and the flamboyant fantasy characteristic of Terayama's oeuvre. 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.
Very Good—Near Fine (w/o obi — image just a sample)
1953, Japanese
Softcover, 334 pages, 26 x 18.5 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Nihon Tokushu Publishing / Tokyo
$90.00 - Out of stock
Very rare copy of 1953 special "Secret" edition of Fuzoku Soushi, one of the first Japanese Kinbaku/SM magazines to exist, alongside Yomikiri Romance and Kitan Club, edited by Nomura Yoshihide, Ujiie Fura, and Murata Kiyoshi and first published in 1953 to only last one year before authorities put an end to it. Features a full-colour fold-out artwork by legendary Japanese fantasy artist Ayako Nakagawa. Fuzoku Soushi, which was adorned with a series of gorgeous painted covers by master artist Ran Akiyoshi, was a strong rival to Kitan Club, but with a more lavish production, pronounced artwork galleries by many of the leading SM illustrators and very progressive fictional and critical content on all manner of sexual perversions and customs, contemporary, historical, political, including roundtable discussions between people of all walks of cultural life (from medical doctors to Buddhist scholars) to original Japanese erotic fiction and translations of many Europeans stories and essays. Fuzoku Soushi was also heavy with lesbian and male homosexual content and featured female authors.
Fuzoku Soushi featured a remarkable cast of artists and writers, including Seiu Ito, Ran Akiyoshi, Takahashi Tetsu, Matsui Ryōko, Toshiyuki Suma, Ayako Nakagawa, Reiko Kita (Suma Toshiyuki), Hideo Furusho, Tamaki Kitahara, Yanome Genichi, Kazuhiko Kabiya, Eizo Nakano, Yo Masaoka, Tosuke Takeno, Imao Hirano, Hiroshi Hara, Nobuo Sakanoue, Shigeru Kayama, to name a few. Packed with expressive sadism, masochism, fantasy and perversion in the form of brilliant paintings, photography, illustrations, articles, fiction, Fuzoku Soushi, in its brief and controversial lifespan, became one of the most influential SM magazines ever published.
Good—VG copy with some wear to extremities, tanning, minor closed tears to cover edges, but with the full-colour Ayako Nakagawa fold-out painting present.