World Food Books' programme is largely produced on Kulin Nation land. We acknowledge the Wurundjeri people of the Kulin Nation as the first and continuing custodians of this land, and pay respect to their Elders past, present, and emerging.
World Food Books is an arts and special interests bookshop in Naarm / Melbourne. Founded in 2010, World Food Books is devoted to the presentation of a rotating, hand-selection of international art, design, literary and counterculture publications with an emphasis on the anti-traditional, the experimental, the avant-garde, the heretic, the marginal.
Presenting new titles alongside rare and out-of-print books, catalogues and journals spanning the fields of modern and contemporary art, design, photography, illustration, film, literature, poetry, cultural theory, philosophy, sexuality, popular and underground culture in its many radical forms, World Food Books wishes to encourage adventurous, thoughtful and open-minded reading, looking, writing, and exchange of publishing and ideas, both current and historical.
As well as our bookshop, located in Melbourne's historical Nicholas Building, all of our inventory is available internationally via our online mail-order service.
World Food Books semi-regularly co-ordinates "Occasions", a programme of exhibits and events at the bookshop and in partnership with other hosts (such as museums and art galleries) that develop out of the activities, relationships and content of the bookshop itself.
World Food Books
The Nicholas Building
37 Swanston Street
Room 5, Level 6
Melbourne 3000
Australia
SHOP HOURS:
Thu–Fri 12–6, Sat 12–5
WEB-SHOP OPEN 24/7
World Food Books
Postal Address:
PO Box 435
Flinders Lane
Victoria 8009
Australia
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All prices in AUD (Australian dollars)
Pick-Ups
Pick-up orders can be collected in our bookshop during opening hours after order date. Please collect any Pick-up orders within 2 weeks of ordering as we have limited storage space. Orders will be released back into stock if not collected within this time. No refunds can be made for pick-ups left un-collected. If you cannot make it in to the bookshop in this time-frame, please choose postage option.
Return Policy
All sales are final. We do accept returns (for refund or exchange) for items received in error. All our orders are packed with special care using heavy-duty padding and cardboard book-mailers or bubble mailers (for smaller books), using reinforcement where required. We cannot take responsibility for any lost, stolen or damaged parcels.
Insurance
Should you wish to insure your package, please email us directly after placing your order and we can organise this at a small extra expense. Although all standard/express tracked packages are very safe and dependable, we cannot take responsibility for any lost, stolen or damaged parcels. We recommend insurance on valuable orders.
Interested in selling your old books, catalogues, journals, magazines, comics, fanzines, ephemera? We are always looking for interesting, unusual and out-of-print books to buy. We only buy books in our fields of interest and specialty, and that we feel we can resell.
We base these prices on desirability, market value, in-print prices, condition and our current stock levels. We offer cash, store credit, and can take stock on consignment. All
about 25% of the price we expect to get when we sell them, or 30% in store credit. We base these prices on desirability, market value, in-print prices, condition and our current stock levels.
Sell your books any day of the week. You can drop them off and return later. If you have a lot of books, we can visit your Sydney home.
We buy books that we feel we can resell. We offer about 25 % of the price we expect to get when we sell them, or 30% in store credit. We base these prices on desirability, market value, in-print prices, condition and our current stock levels.
Philadelphia Wireman
03 August - 01 September, 2018
World Food Books is proud to announce our next Occasion, the first presentation of sculptures by Philadelphia Wireman in Australia.
The Philadelphia Wireman sculptures were found abandoned in an alley off Philadelphia’s South Street on trash night in 1982. Their discovery in a rapidly-changing neighbourhood undergoing extensive renovation, compounded with the failure of all attempts to locate the artist, suggests that the works may have been discarded after the maker’s death. Dubbed the "Philadelphia Wireman" during the first exhibition of this work, in 1985, the maker’s name, age, ethnicity, and even gender remain uncertain. The entire collection totals approximately 1200 pieces, all intricately bound together with tightly-wound heavy-gauge wire (along with a few small, abstract marker drawings, reminiscent both of Mark Tobey and J.B. Murry). The dense construction of the work, despite a modest range of scale and materials, is singularly obsessive and disciplined in design: a wire armature or exoskeleton firmly binds a bricolage of found objects including plastic, glass, food packaging, umbrella parts, tape, rubber, batteries, pens, leather, reflectors, nuts and bolts, nails, foil, coins, toys, watches, eyeglasses, tools, and jewellery.
Heavy with associations—anthropomorphic, zoomorphic, and socio-cultural responses to wrapped detritus—the totemic sculptures by Philadelphia Wireman have been discussed in the context of work created to fulfil the shamanistic needs of alternative religions in American culture. Curators, collectors, and critics have variously compared certain pieces to sculpture from Classical antiquity, Native American medicine bundles, African-American memory jugs, and African fetish objects. Reflecting the artist’s prolific and incredibly focused scavenging impulse, and despite—or perhaps enhanced by—their anonymity, these enigmatic objects function as urban artefacts and arbiters of power, though their origin and purpose is unknown. Philadelphia Wireman, whatever their identity, possessed an astonishing ability to isolate and communicate the concepts of power and energy through the selection and transformation of ordinary materials. Over the course of the past two decades, this collection has come to be regarded as an important discovery in the field of self-taught art and vernacular art.
Presented in collaboration with Fleisher-Ollman Gallery, Philadelphia, and Robert Heald, Wellington.
Susan Te Kahurangi King
02 February - 10 March, 2018
Susan Te Kahurangi King (24 February 1951 - ) has been a confident and prolific artist since she was a young child, drawing with readily available materials - pencils, ballpoint pens and felt-tip markers, on whatever paper is at hand. Between the ages of four and six Susan slowly ceased verbal communication. Her grandparents William and Myrtle Murphy had developed a special bond with Susan so they took on caring responsibilities for extended periods. Myrtle began informally archiving her work, carefully collecting and storing the drawings and compiling scrapbooks. No drawing was insignificant; every scrap of paper was kept. The King family are now the custodians of a vast collection containing over 7000 individual works, from tiny scraps of paper through to 5 meter long rolls.
The scrapbooks and diaries reveal Myrtle to be a woman of great patience and compassion, seeking to understand a child who was not always behaving as expected. She encouraged Susan to be observant, to explore her environment and absorb all the sights and sounds. Myrtle would show Susan’s drawings to friends and people in her community that she had dealings with, such as shopkeepers and postal workers, but this was not simply a case of a grandmother’s bias. She recognised that Susan had developed a sophisticated and unique visual language and sincerely believed that her art deserved serious attention.
This was an unorthodox attitude for the time. To provide some context, Jean Dubuffet coined the term Art Brut in 1945 to describe work created by self-taught artists – specifically residents of psychiatric institutions and those he considered to be visionaries or eccentrics. In 1972 Roger Cardinal extended this concept by adopting the term Outsider Art to describe work made by non-academically trained artists operating outside of mainstream art networks through choice or circumstance. Susan was born in Te Aroha, New Zealand in 1951, far from the artistic hubs of Paris and London that Dubuffet and Cardinal operated in. That Myrtle fêted Susan as a self-taught artist who deserved to be taken seriously shows how progressive her attitudes were.
Susan’s parents Doug and Dawn were also progressive. Over the years they had consulted numerous health practitioners about Susan’s condition, as the medical establishment could not provide an explanation as to why she had lapsed into silence. Dawn educated herself in the field of homeopathy and went on to treat all twelve of her children using these principles – basing prescriptions on her observations of their physical, mental and emotional state.
Doug was a linguist with an interest in philosophy who devoted what little spare time he had to studying Maori language and culture. To some extent their willingness to explore the fringes of the mainstream made them outsiders too but it was their commitment to living with integrity and their respect for individuality that ensured Susan’s creativity was always encouraged.
Even though Susan’s family supported her artistic pursuits, some staff in schools and hospitals saw it as an impediment to her assimilation into the community and discouraged it in a variety of ways. Her family was not always aware of this and therefore did not fully understand why Susan stopped drawing in the early 1990s. However, rather than dwell on the challenges that Susan faced in pursuit of her artistic practice, they prefer to highlight her achievements. In 2008 Susan began drawing again in earnest, after an almost 20 year interruption, and her work is now shown in galleries around the world.
Susan grew up without television and has been heavily influenced by the comics she read as a child. She is absolutely fearless in the appropriation of recognizable characters, such as Donald Duck and Mickey Mouse, in her work. She twists their limbs, contorts their faces, compresses them together, blends them into complex patterned backgrounds - always imbuing them with an incredible energy. Although Susan often used pop culture characters in her work they are not naive or childlike. These are drawings by a brilliant self-taught artist who has been creating exceptional work for decades without an audience in mind.
Mladen Stilinović
"Various Works 1986 - 1999"
02 February 16 - September 10, 2016
Various works 1986 - 1999, from two houses, from the collections of John Nixon, Sue Cramer, Kerrie Poliness, Peter Haffenden and Phoebe Haffenden.
Including: Geometry of Cakes (various shelves), 1993; Poor People’s Law (black and white plate), 1993; White Absence (glasses, ruler, set square, silver spoon, silver ladel with skin photograph and wooden cubes), 1990-1996; Exploitation of the Dead (grey and red star painting, wooden painting, black spoon with red table, red plate), 1984-1990; Money and Zeros (zero tie, paintings made for friends in Australia (Sue, John, Kerrie), numbers painting), 1991-1992; Words - Slogans (various t-shirts) - “they talk about the death of art...help! someone is trying to kill me”, “my sweet little lamb”, “work is a disease - Karl Marx”; Various artist books, catalogues, monographs, videos; Poster from exhibition Insulting Anarchy; "Circular" Croatian - Australian edition; Artist book by Vlado Martek (Dostoyevsky); more.
Thanks to Mladen Stilinović and Branka Stipančić.
Jonathan Walker
Always Will Need To Wear Winter Shirt Blue + Ochre Small Check Pattern
21 August - 21 September, 2015
Untitled
I am not a great reader of poetry but I always return to the work of Melbourne poet, Vincent Buckley (1925- 1988). Perhaps I find his most tantalising piece to be not a finished poem but a fragment left on a scrap of paper discovered on his desk after the poet’s death.
The poetry gathers like oil
In the word-core, and spreads
It has its music meet,
Its music is in movement.
This fragment is more the shell left behind from a volatile thought than a finished poem. I find the last two lines honest but awkward whereas the first two lines work like an arrow. Most likely he could not find a resolution so it was left. Still, in its present form, it remains an eloquent testimony to the ultimate failure of a medium to express mobile thought and sensation, in Buckley’s case, through verbal language. It’s an important matter because this is something all artists have to deal with regardless of the medium.
I have never written a poem, however, I am forever copying fragments from books on paper scraps in a vain effort to fix certain notions in my head. At first, they function as bookmarks that are sometimes returned to when I open the book. But before long, as they accumulate, they fall out littering the table interspersed with A4 photocopies, bills, books and medications.
To return to Buckley’s fragment, the first two lines very much evoke how I paint nowadays. As you age, detail diminishes and patches of light become more luminous and float. I feel the most honest way of dealing with this is by smearing the oil paint on the canvas with the fingers and working close-up, blind. Only if the patches coalesce into an approaching image can the work gain a life.
-
Jonathan Walker was born in Melbourne, Australia and brought up on a dairy farm in Gippsland. In the 1970’s he studied painting at RMIT and won the Harold Wright Scholarship to the British Museum, London. During the 1980’s he exhibited at Pinacotheca Gallery, Richmond and had work shown at the NGV and Heidi City Art Gallery. Over the same period he designed the cover for the “Epigenesi” LP by Giancarlo Toniutti, Italy and conducted a mail exchange work with Achim Wollscheid, Germany. The work with artists through the post resulted in an article published in the bicentenary issue of Art and Australia 1988. He showed in artist run spaces such as WestSpace in the 90’s and 2000’s, and until 2012, taught painting at Victoria University, which is where we (Colleen Ahern and Lisa Radford) as organisers of the exhibition, among many others, had the privilege of being his student.
Walker’s knowledge was imparted to students through the careful selection of music, literature, and artists found in books that he himself had ordered for the library. Walker’s strategy was the generosity of sharing his vast knowledge with references specific to each student and their context.
Walker’s paintings share a similar focus and intimacy.
This exhibition presents a small selection of recent paintings alongside a publication that includes Walker’s writing. Observational and analytical, Walker’s work is a type of material notation — the time of day, colour and how it is blended, the both specific and fleeting location of a reflection on lino or the question of whether a chair leg should be included in a painting.
Please join us on Friday August 21 between 6-8pm to celebrate the opening of the exhibition.
Curated by Colleen Ahern and Lisa Radford.
B. Wurtz
Curated by Nic Tammens
March 26 - April 4, 2015
B.Wurtz works from a basement studio in his home on Manhattan’s Lower East Side.
This local fact is attested to by the plastic shopping bags and newsprint circulars that appear in his work. As formal objects, they don’t make loud claims about their origins but nonetheless transmit street addresses and places of business from the bottom of this long thin island. Like plenty of artists, Wurtz is affected by what is local and what is consumed. His work is underpinned by this ethic. It often speaks from a neighborhood or reads like the contents of a hamper:
“BLACK PLUMS $1.29 lb.”
“Food Bazaar”
“USDA Whole Pork Shoulder Picnic 99c lb.”
“RITE AID Pharmacy, with us it’s personal.”
“H. Brickman & Sons.”
“Sweet Yams 59c lb."
Most of the work in this exhibition was made while the artist was in residence at Dieu Donne, a workshop dedicated to paper craft in Midtown. Here Wurtz fabricated assemblages with paper and objects that are relatively lightweight, with the intention that they would be easily transportable to Australia. This consideration isn’t absolute in Wurtz’s work, but was prescriptive for making the current exhibition light and cheap. Packed in two boxes, these works were sent from a USPS post office on the Lower East Side and delivered to North Melbourne by Australia Post.
Wurtz appears courtesy of Metro Pictures, New York.
Thanks to Rob Halverson, Joshua Petherick, Sari de Mallory, Matt Hinkley, Helen Johnson, Fayen d'Evie, Ask Kilmartin, Lisa Radon, Ellena Savage, Yale Union, and "Elizabeth".
John Nixon
"Archive"
December 15 - January 20, 2014
The presentation of John Nixon's archive offered a rare showcase of this extensive collection of the artist's own publications, catalogues, posters, ephemera, editions and more, from the mid 1980s onwards, alongside a selection of his artworks.
Organized by John Nixon, Joshua Petherick and Matt Hinkley.
<a href=http://wfb.public-office.info/artist/john-nixon>All titles by John Nixon
"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]
2025, English
Hardcover (clothbound), 120 pages, 30 x 30 cm
Ed. of 250 copies w. unique hand-drawn details,
Published by
Self-Published / Naarm
$55.00 - In stock -
Darcey Bella Arnold’s A Measure of Disorder brings together a series of works on paper produced between 2022 and 2024. Presented in a 120-page limited edition (250 copies), measuring 30 x 30 cm, and printed in full colour on high-quality paper in a section-sewn hardback format, the publication documents a body of drawing-based works that extend Arnold’s ongoing inquiry into language, visual structure, and the disruptions embedded within systems of order.
The cover is embossed with black foil printing and each copy of the limited edition book is distinguished by hand-drawn lines in pencil by Darcey Bella Arnold to the cover, rendering each copy unique.
The book includes essays by curator Tim Riley Walsh and artist and curator Brooke Babington. These essays were originally developed in response to Arnold’s two-part exhibition series A Measure of Disorder, held at Gertrude Glasshouse (2022) and ReadingRoom (2023), both in Naarm/Melbourne. Babington’s essay Disordering Measures and Riley Walsh’s If a canvas is feeling and a page is thought situate Arnold’s work within broader conversations around feminist approaches to materiality, language, and repetition.
Designed by Yanni Florence, the publication maintains a focus on the material and formal qualities of the work. The drawings—reproduced at scale and in colour—are presented with attention to their spatial and conceptual detail.
Darcey Bella Arnold is a Melbourne-based artist working across painting, sculpture, and drawing in a research-led practice that interrogates language—its necessity, fallibility, and creative potential. Her work draws on metaphor, humour, and repetition to reframe familiar histories, cultural symbols, and institutional pedagogies through installation-driven environments that merge personal archives with broader cultural and political references. Arnold holds a BFA from the Victorian College of the Arts and Honours from Monash University, and has participated in national and international residencies including Gertrude Contemporary (AUS) and Eastside International (LA). Her work has been exhibited at major Australian institutions, with recent commissions at the Melbourne and Lorne Sculpture Biennales.
2015, English
Softcover + flexi–disc, 184 pages, 26 x 19.5 cm
Limited Edition,
Published by
First To Knock / Michigan
$72.00 - In stock -
Limited-edition version with flexi-disc recording of Satie’s “Leit-motiv du Panthée” performed, as intended, as an accompaniment to a reading of Joséphin Péladan’s Le Panthée.
In 1892, Erik Satie was at a crossroads. Despite having already composed some of the finest works ever written for piano, the 26-year-old was still penniless and unappreciated. His artistic ethos—a paradoxical mix of reactionary Medievalism and avant-garde absurdism—could find no quarter in fin-de-siècle Paris. And so, with his musical aspirations dashed and nowhere left to turn, Satie would turn to himself.
His subsequent revolt was as shocking as it was incomprehensible to his contemporaries. Satie announced himself to be “the Parcener,” the head of a new religious order. It was, in fact, a church of his own founding—The Metropolitan Church of Art of Jesus the Conductor.
Transforming his dilapidated apartment into an “Abbatial Church,” Satie began issuing scathing letters to prominent cultural figures who had sought to render judgment upon his Art. Targets of the Parcener’s screeds ranged from the cape-clad mystagogue, Joséphin Péladan, to the pompous composer, Camille Saint-Saëns; from the novelist Octave Mirbeau, who had dared to lampoon the Parcener, to the theatre director Aurélien Lugné-Poe, whose unintentionally nude stage production had offended the Parcener’s moral sensibilities. The fiercest feud was reserved for music critic Henry Gauthier-Villars, whom the Parcener battled in the press for years, until the spat culminated in a physical altercation at a concert. Throughout the 1890s, luminaries, such as these, found themselves excommunicated from a church to which they had not even known they once belonged.
Inscrutable as the author himself, Satie’s writings from this brief period strike a tone that lies somewhere between fervent Catholicism, anarchistic satire, and the righteous rage of the true Artist—leaving readers befuddled as to the composer’s true intent. Yet, despite the impenetrability of his writings, the Parcener’s missives took the Parisian art scene by storm and, as Satie’s crusade grew in intensity, so too did his reputation, making this era as historically crucial as it is bewildering. Nevertheless, the Metropolitan Church was ultimately a solitary undertaking. Despite certain documents indicating that the Church expected to have more than a billion members, history would show that its congregation never grew beyond one: Erik Satie himself.
Know Me To Be Your Superior in Everything is the first book dedicated exclusively to the story of Erik Satie’s Metropolitan Church of Art of Jesus the Conductor. Drawing upon a multitude of firsthand sources—including documents held in the Erik Satie archives in Caen—the book includes new English translations of all known Church publications and correspondence by Satie as the Parcener. Facsimilic translations of Satie’s Church publications are reproduced herein as well, capturing, for the first time in English, the design and typography of the original productions.
Know Me To Be Your Superior in Everything was written by Sam Kunkel, a scholar of 19th century Symbolist literature. Previous to this book, Kunkel has also provided translations for Echoes of a Natural World—Tales of the Strange & Estranged (First To Knock, 2020); A Beam of Sunlight in the Deep Forest—Mystical Prose Works by Édouard Schuré (First To Knock, 2021); as well as The Solar Circus by Gustave Kahn (First To Knock, 2022). Kunkel has also written extensively in French, covering topics such as Joséphin Péladan and religion in fin-de-siècle Paris. His critical reedition of Péladan’s notorious novel, Istar, was published by Éditions du Lérot in 2024, and his book, L’Orphisme et le roman post-romantique, a comparative study of the mystical novel, was released by Éditions Otrante in 2023.
Design by Bryan Cipolla
2022, English
Softcover, 232 pages, 20.5 x 13.5 cm
Published by
First To Knock / Michigan
$40.00 - In stock -
“Have I understood the philosophy of The Solar Circus correctly? One must savor life in a few fevered grasps, as one might squeeze all of the juice and all of the beauty from a fruit, before casting aside its useless skin.” — Albert Mockel
“Henceforth, The Solar Circus shall be one of the two or three novels that I savor during the quiet hours of dream and melancholy, when the soul surrenders to the painful nostalgia of infinity and the beyond.” — Filippo Tommaso Marinetti
The Solar Circus is the great forgotten masterpiece of French Symbolist literature. Written by Gustave Kahn—the man whom Stéphane Mallarmé and Jules Laforgue credited as inventing free verse poetry—the novel drips in decadent images of pastoral vistas, exotic gemstones, merfolk, and a phantasmagoric menagerie. Inverting day for night and reality for a dazzling dream, The Solar Circus tells the story of a solipsistic, isolated Bavarian count who falls in love with the star of a traveling circus. Their relationship, in both love and jealousy, dramatizes that great tension between the inner life of contemplation and the dynamic beauty of the external world. And as they set out from the count’s castle, the couple examines this duality while encountering a world in transformation: peasants in rebellion, the bright lights of London’s Orpheum theater, and even an ether-swilling Jack the Ripper who analyzes humanity through a fog of opium.
Best known as a poet and member of the Symbolist movement, The Solar Circus showcases Kahn’s talents as a narrative writer and bears the hallmarks of many of the poetic endeavors unique to late 19th century. Indeed, in the same way that the novel’s circus coaxes the count out of oppressive isolation, so too does Kahn’s prose lead the reader in new and fantastic directions. The Solar Circus is a text unlike any other, one that vacillates effortlessly between imagistic poetry and obliquely philosophical prose, prefiguring those seminal 20th century works of Modernist literature which would appear more than two decades later.
This publication marks not only the novel’s first appearance in English but also its first independent reissue since it was published in 1898. The Solar Circus has been newly translated by Sam Kunkel, a scholar of 19th century Symbolist literature. Kunkel has also provided translations for the First To Knock collection Echoes of a Natural World—Tales of the Strange & Estranged (2020) as well as A Beam of Sunlight in the Deep Forest—Mystical Prose Works by Édouard Schuré (2021).
“It is a tale that is lucid, transparent, crystalline, but also enveloped in, and thick with, legend and dream. Is it an adventure or a daydream?... [A] blend of novel and legend, of poetry and prose: this transient world, dotted with figures who are painted with disarming clarity and soft style give to The Solar Circus its enigmatic and persistent charm. This novel is a true dream, drained and exhausted by the vigor of logic and thought.” — Léon Blum
“[With The Solar Circus,] Kahn is perhaps the only Symbolist to have successfully composed a novel free from the Naturalist mindset still perceptible in Against Nature.” — Sophie Basch, professor of 19th century French literature at the Sorbonne
2024, English
Softcover, 256 pages, 21.5 x 14 cm
Published by
Ↄalamari / Earth
$55.00 - In stock -
2024 redux edition of the long out-of-print 2002 cyberpunk cult classic
"A Finnegans Wake for the postdigital millennium, Kenji Siratori’s Blood Electric is probably the foundational text of the language-horror sub-genre: an evasive, esoteric and ultraexperimental writing style produced by the convergence of poetics and methods borrowed from avantgarde literature, electronic/noise music, synthetic abstract image generation, and severe—yet delicate—syntactic deconstruction. Siratori’s unique writing technique results in a hardcore-cyberpunk material account of a bio-techno singularity network in which flesh-code wetware and silicon-thriving software infold together into wave-multitudes of text-organisms. While most contemporary authors exploring the possibility of the blending of humans and machines focus on the extrapolation of logical and transcendental interactions (as in classical cyberpunk, from which Blood Electric initiates a radical breakup), Siratori’s language emanates directly from the contingent, rhizomatic, non-teleological, reciprocal disruption of several unstable and immanent modes of embodied (in)existence. In Blood Electric the text becomes an incantation demanding full abandonment, generating its own unpredictable rhythms as it enraptures you beyond reading, beyond yourself, like when participating in a rave."—Germán Sierra
"… Blood Electric is unreadable in anything other than short, migraine-inducing bursts."—The Guardian
"Following the publication of Kenji Siratori's Blood Electric, the Japanese cyberpunk writer perhaps pioneered a movement among all non-English speaking writers whose languages are radically dissociated from the dominant Latin-Anglo-Franco-German linguistic germ-line on the one hand, and are, on the other, enthusiastically seeking to contribute to the diversification of the English language whose centrality has already been sabotaged in the wake of emerging cyber-societies."—Reza Negarestani, in 3:AM Magazine
"Kenji is making rather more sense than usual. Perhaps the lad is finally coming into his own as the literary avatar of our times."—Bruce Sterling
"Kenji is a madman for sure, but if you scan his hallucinatory textual mashups in just the right frame of mind, they begin to make sense. And that's the scary part."—Douglas Rushkoff
"Contemporary Japan is exploding in slow-motion, and Kenji Siratori arranges the blood- and semen-encrusted deris with the finesse of a berserk Issey Miyake. Rendering English-language cyberpunk instantly redundant with his relenteless, murderous prose-drive, Siratori transmits his authentic, category-A hallucinogenic product direct to this reader’s cerebellum. A virulently warped amalgam of Tetsuo and cut-up era William Burroughs."—Stephen Barber (author of Tokyo Vertigo)
"Blood Electric is the black reverb of soft machine seppuku, a molten unspooling of sheet metal entrails and crucified memory banks into the howling void of violence. It is a cyborg crash nightmare of the new flesh, a final dispatch from mutant Hell where the embryo hunts in secret."—Jack Hunter (author of Eros in Hell)
"Siratori’s hypermodern project articulates the nonarticulation that currently dominates the substratum of much current discourse. Without the intense atomization of the individual, Siratori’s work does not resound. Yet, if we take pause, Siratori’s work resonates at a fever pitch, blaring at the limitless informational realm of our minds as it bursts the parameters of the skull. As a kind of accelerationist aesthetic, Siratori critiques technology by pushing it beyond its sensible potentiality; he cultivates alien cognitions where alternatives thrive, where semantic derangement is revolt, where epistemology uncoils. Ultimately, he uncompromisingly forces us to pause on the chaos of the glitch, to claim the instance where embodying the unquantifiable amounts to insurgency."—Andrew C. Wenaus, Author of The Literature of Exclusion: Dada, Data, and the Threshold of Electronic Literature
2002, English
Softcover, 224 pages, 21.5 x 13.5 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Creation Books / London
$150.00 - Out of stock
Rare first 2002 edition of Kenji Siratori's cyberpunk cult classic, published by Creation Books, London.
A fatal collusion of drag embryos and DNA angels in Cadaver City ignites the circuitry of the ADAM Doll... dogs of zero waging gene war in Placenta World, chaos unleashed by the digital vampires of Sato Corporation, nano-junk virus pandemic. On the pink ash planet EVOL, ADAM and ANTI-ADAM clash in terminal zodiac burn... enter robo-succubus Super Cherry 666, hunting for the grotesque nova skulls of Sato Corporation napalm torture victims.
Vividly evoking the coming to consciousness of an artificial intelligence Blood Electric is a devastating loop of language from the Japanese avant-garde which breaks with all existing writing traditions. With unparalleled stylistic terrorism fully embracing the image mayhem of the internet/multimedia/digital age, Kenji Siratori unleashes his first literary Sarin attack.
"Contemporary Japan is exploding in slow-motion, and Kenji Siratori arranges the blood- and semen-encrusted debris with the finesse of a berserk Issey Miyake. Rendering English-language cyberpunk instantly redundant with his relentless, murderous prose-drive, Siratori transmits his authentic, category-A hallucinogenic product direct to his reader's cerebellum. A virulently warped amalgam of Tetsuo and cut-up era William Burroughs."–Stephen Barber (author, Tokyo Vertigo)
"Blood Electric is the black reverb of soft machine seppuku, a molten unspooling of sheet metal entrails and crucified memory banks into the howling void of violence. It is a cyborg crash nightmare of the new flesh, a final dispatch from mutant Hell where the embryo hunts in secret."–Jack Hunter (author, Eros In Hell)
"A Finnegans Wake for the postdigital millennium, Kenji Siratori’s Blood Electric is probably the foundational text of the language-horror sub-genre: an evasive, esoteric and ultraexperimental writing style produced by the convergence of poetics and methods borrowed from avantgarde literature, electronic/noise music, synthetic abstract image generation, and severe—yet delicate—syntactic deconstruction. Siratori’s unique writing technique results in a hardcore-cyberpunk material account of a bio-techno singularity network in which flesh-code wetware and silicon-thriving software infold together into wave-multitudes of text-organisms. While most contemporary authors exploring the possibility of the blending of humans and machines focus on the extrapolation of logical and transcendental interactions (as in classical cyberpunk, from which Blood Electric initiates a radical breakup), Siratori’s language emanates directly from the contingent, rhizomatic, non-teleological, reciprocal disruption of several unstable and immanent modes of embodied (in)existence. In Blood Electric the text becomes an incantation demanding full abandonment, generating its own unpredictable rhythms as it enraptures you beyond reading, beyond yourself, like when participating in a rave."—Germán Sierra
"… Blood Electric is unreadable in anything other than short, migraine-inducing bursts."—The Guardian
"Following the publication of Kenji Siratori's Blood Electric, the Japanese cyberpunk writer perhaps pioneered a movement among all non-English speaking writers whose languages are radically dissociated from the dominant Latin-Anglo-Franco-German linguistic germ-line on the one hand, and are, on the other, enthusiastically seeking to contribute to the diversification of the English language whose centrality has already been sabotaged in the wake of emerging cyber-societies."—Reza Negarestani, in 3:AM Magazine
"Kenji is making rather more sense than usual. Perhaps the lad is finally coming into his own as the literary avatar of our times."—Bruce Sterling
"Kenji is a madman for sure, but if you scan his hallucinatory textual mashups in just the right frame of mind, they begin to make sense. And that's the scary part."—Douglas Rushkoff
"Siratori’s hypermodern project articulates the nonarticulation that currently dominates the substratum of much current discourse. Without the intense atomization of the individual, Siratori’s work does not resound. Yet, if we take pause, Siratori’s work resonates at a fever pitch, blaring at the limitless informational realm of our minds as it bursts the parameters of the skull. As a kind of accelerationist aesthetic, Siratori critiques technology by pushing it beyond its sensible potentiality; he cultivates alien cognitions where alternatives thrive, where semantic derangement is revolt, where epistemology uncoils. Ultimately, he uncompromisingly forces us to pause on the chaos of the glitch, to claim the instance where embodying the unquantifiable amounts to insurgency."—Andrew C. Wenaus, Author of The Literature of Exclusion: Dada, Data, and the Threshold of Electronic Literature
Very Good copy. Light edge wear to boards, some foxing to block edges. No spine creases, overall a great copy.
1998, English
Softcover, 188 pages, 21.5 x 13.5 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Creation Books / London
$150.00 - In stock -
Very rare first 1999 Creation Books paperback edition of Cows, the cult classic first book by British–born, Australian–based novelist Matthew Stokoe. One of the most polarizing books of transgressive fiction from the end of the end of the 20th century.
"...enormously disturbing and transcendently clever, Cows, a literally eviscerating portrait of life among the British lower classes, is revered internationally as one of the most daring English-language novels of the past few decades."–Dennis Cooper
"Stokoe's vision of Hell is a carnivore's nightmare. A powerful and all-too-possibly prophetic work."–Kathy Acker
"Underground literary shock-rocker Stokoe slaps his readers in the face with this bloody, truly disgusting diatribe against normalcy. On the bright side, there’s absolutely no pretense about what the book is aiming for..."–Kirkus Review
"If we had to name the most bloody, unpleasant piece of fiction we've read, COWS would be near the top of the list. That's a compliment."–Bizarre
"Forget Bret Easton Ellis, Poppy Z Brite, and Dennis Cooper. That's kid's stuff. If you want something truly repellent, try this."– Gay Times
"The word is out that COWS is every bit as dark and deranged as lain Banks' classic 'The Wasp Factory. It's not: it's even more so. Possibly the most visceral novel ever written."–Billy Chainsaw, Kerrang!
Very Good copy with some sun discolouration to spine edge of cover boards.
2003, English
Softcover, 310 pages, 21.5 x 13.5 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Creation Books / London
$150.00 - Out of stock
Rare first 2003 English Edition of Antonin Artaud’s evil simulacrum of The Monk, the only work of sustained fiction by the infamous literary provocateur. Taking Matthew Gregory Lewis's gothic novel of 1794 as the raw material for an astonishing exploration of the far edges of death, sexuality, terror, language and the body, Artaud conducted an aberrant evisceration of the original novel, discarding entire chapters, recreating others and stamping his own distinctive identity on the work in his avowed aim to accentuate the story's violence and atrocity to the maximal degree.
In Artaud's The Monk, sexual obsession is irrepressibly crushed together with murder, cruelty and blasphemy. The result is a searing narrative of massacred nuns, raped virgins and satanic retribution which will leave the reader simultaneously ensnared, gratified and abused.
Best known for his Theatre of Cruelty manifestoes, experimental film projects and corporeal poetry, Artaud created The Monk in France in 1930, to the acclaim of such figures as Jean Cocteau, at a time when Artaud's explicit purpose in his work was to cancel out all existing social and moral systems. This is the first time ever that the book has appeared in English. With an introduction by Stephen Barber.
"A great masterpiece of fantastic literature... marvels burst out at the reader, burning with a thousand fires... the spirit of the supernatural inflames this book to the very core"—André Breton
Very Good—NF copy.
2003, English
Softcover, 310 pages, 21.5 x 13.5 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Creation Books / London
$150.00 - Out of stock
Rare first 2003 English Edition of Artaud's Heliogabalus, published by Creation Books.
Translated into English for the first time, this novelized biography of the 3rd-century Roman Emperor Heliogabalus is simultaneously Artaud’s most accessible and his most extreme book. Written in 1933, at the time when Artaud was preparing to stage his legendary Theatre of Cruelty, Heliogabalus is a powerful concoction of sexual excess, self-deification and terminal violence. Reflecting its author’s preoccupations with the occult, magic, Satan, and a range of esoteric religions, this account of Heliogabalus’ reign invents incidents in the Emperor’s life in order to make the print of the author’s own passionate denunciations of modern existence.
Heliogabalus is Artaud’s greatest and most revolutionary masterpiece: an incendiary work that reveals both the divine cruelty of the Roman Emperor and that of Artaud himself.–Stephen Barber
Very Good copy.
2003, English
Softcover, 164 pages, 14 x 21.5 cm
Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Creation Books / London
$150.00 - Out of stock
Rare 2003 English edition of Eden, Eden, Eden - Pierre Guyotat's masterpiece of atrocity and obscenity.
The most subversive French novelist of the later 20th century, Pierre Guyotat (b. 1940) was the uncompromising heir of De Sade, Artaud, Rimbaud and Genet. Published in France in 1970 by Gallimard, with a preface by Michel Leiris, Roland Barthes and Philippe Sollers, Eden, Eden, Eden was greeted by both furore and acclaim. The book was immediately banned by the French government as pornographic. A campaign of international support for the book was signed by the like of Pier Paolo Pasolini, Jean-Paul Sartre, Pierre Boulez, Joseph Beuys, Pierre Dac, Jean Genet, Simone de Beauvoir, Joseph Kessel, Maurice Blanchot, Max Ernst, Italo Calvino, Jacques Monod, and Nathalie Sarraute. François Mitterrand and Georges Pompidou tried to get the ban lifted but failed until 11 years later when a newly elected President Mitterrand personally intervened to lift the ban in 1981.
Today Eden, Eden, Eden is recognised as one of the major works of the last century. In literally a single sentence, a desert-like, polluted, apocalyptic landscape of unending civil war unfolds without any morality (and therefore also without evil). This delirious, lacerating novel of startling innovation brings scenes of brutal carnage into intimate collision with relentless acts of prostitutional sex and humiliation.
'a new landmark and starting-point for new writing'—Roland Barthes
'I have never read anything like it in any stream of literature'—Michel Foucault
Good–Very Good copy. Some light general wear, board wear and some scratching to the middle of the back cover. Sample images only.
1997, English
Softcover, 418 pages, 22 x 14 cm
Out of print title / used / good
Published by
John Calder / London
$35.00 - In stock -
1997 reprint of this 1959 Calder collection of Beckett's classic trilogy of novels: Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnamable. Awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature 1969.
The trilogy has always been considered the central work of Samuel Beckett's fiction, the three novels that have been most admired and have received the greatest amount of critical comment, just as Waiting for Godot, written in the same period of concentrated creativity between 1947 and 1949, is central to Beckett's drama. After Proust's great many-volumed novel, Joyce's Ulysses and the masterworks of Kafka, it dominates twentieth-century literature, and much as Beckett's pre-war fiction and the late minimalist novellas are admired, it is on the trilogy that the author's reputation will chiefly depend.
Molloy was a new departure for Samuel Beckett; written in the first person, it consists of two monologues, that of bedridden Molloy on his odyssey towards his mother, lost in town and country and finally emerging from the forest, and that of Moran, a private detective who is sent to find him. The two narrowly miss each other, but the contrast between their characters, and the similarity of their decline give the reader much ground to speculate and much humour towards understanding both the grimness and the comedy of the human situation.
Malone Dies pictures the decrepit Malone, also bedridden, waiting to die and filling his mind and his remaining time with memories, stories and bitter comment, while waiting for 'the throes'. The novel disintegrates as the protagonist does.
The Unnamable seems to contain and encompass its predecessors and the characters of earlier Beckett novels. Its power of language and breadth of imagination make it a tour de force that recalls Dante as it moves into an ever greater void of despair and panic, a metaphysical work that must take its place among the very greatest works of literature. Its dramatic power has been proved by the successful endeavours of those actors who have specialised in Beckett's work to bring it, and earlier parts of the trilogy, to the stage, or to life on the radio. Patrick Magee, Jack Magowran, Jack Emery, Barry McGovern and Max Wall are only a few of the actors who have become closely associated, with all or parts of the trilogy.
G—VG copy. Very light wear/very light rippling to a few initial page edges.
2026, English
Softcover, 108 pages, 21.5 x 14 cm
Published by
Grim Roar / UK
S.S.C.—Grim Roar
$68.00 - In stock -
In a joint venture with GrimRoar & S:.S.:C:. Books we're unleashing a wicked complement to their Debauched book series, we now switch gears to examine the obsession with Satanism and Witchcraft in the murky nether world of rare vintage under the counter adult paperbacks.
“Revealed: The erotic secrets of witchcraft and orgiastic Satanism. Photo illustrated!”
Real deal occult sleaze, overflowing with powerful sexy witchcraft, lurid occultism and satanic black magic. Quality infernal visual content to drag your brain down to the depths.
The golden age of the adult bookstore may be a distant memory, but you’re invited to Satan’s Library. Come feast your eyes on these unholy grails from the realm of satanic sleaze paperbacks.
“There are witches today who dare to choose devil sex!”
1974, Japanese
Softcover (staple–bound), 90 pages, 21 x 15 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Spin / Tokyo
$45.00 - Out of stock
Rare copy of Dabu–dabo No. 24, published in Tokyo in 1974, with original cover art painted by Aquirax Uno (Akira Uno). Dabu-dabo was wild countercultural lifestyle magazine ("A Lifestyle Catalog of Dawn Culture") that featured artwork, photography, manga and articles that proposed "new human life materials for the global village." This issue features Japanese jazz and blues singer/composer Maki Asakawa, actress/singer/politician Chinatsu Nakayama, pink actress Chiho Yuki, photography by Masaaki Nakagawa, Araki Nobuyoshi, illustration galleries by Yōji Kuri, Shizuichi Hayashi, Ryuzan Aki, folk singer Itsuro Shimoda (of Shimonsai and Tokyo Kid Brothers), Ryōhei Uchida, singer Mari Natsuki, Yonin Bayashi (rock group), singe/director Morio Agata, articles on how to grow marijuana, how to improve your jeans, how to make a lie detector, how to find out about psychic abilities, how to cure men's (sexual) illnesses, how to cure women's (sexual) illnesses, how to make candles, how to make shoes, how to raise chickens, how to make a flying horse, and how to spend time well in jail, and much more. Like Goro meets CoEvolution Quarterly via Oz!
VG with light wear to extremities, rusted staples.
1974, Japanese
Softcover (staple–bound), 90 pages, 21 x 15 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Spin / Tokyo
$45.00 - Out of stock
Rare copy of Dabu–dabo No. 25, published in Tokyo in 1974, with original cover art painted by Aquirax Uno (Akira Uno). Dabu-dabo was wild countercultural lifestyle magazine ("A Lifestyle Catalog of Dawn Culture") that featured artwork, photography, manga and articles that proposed "new human life materials for the global village." This issue features an interview with author/model/actress/icon Izumi Suzuki, photography by Hajime Sawatari, jazz musician Sadao Watanabe, illustration galleries by avant–garde artist and author Genpei Akasegawa, Ayumi Ohashi and Teruya Harada, Hiro Tsunoda of the Sadistic Mika Band and psych legends Jacks, nude photography by Kenji Hiruma, poet and folk singer Shigeru Izumiya, a host of informative feature articles on "Commune Practices": developing commune practices, including the use of geodesic domes and inflatable housing, the farming practices of Japanese folk singer Masato Minami, DIY solar thermal devices, and much more. Like Goro meets CoEvolution Quarterly via Oz!
VG with light wear to extremities, rusted staples.
2007, Japanese
Softcover (w. dust jacket), 144 pages, 23 x 21.5 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Esquire Magazine / Japan
$70.00 - In stock -
Scarce exhibition catalogue surveying the work of Czech Surrealist artists Jan Švankmajer & Eva Švankmajerová, published to accompany a major retrospective in Japan in 2007, where the artists work is most commonly exhibited. Eva Švankmajerová (1940 – 2005, b. Eva Dvořáková in Kostelec nad Černými lesy), was a renowned painter, ceramicist, and writer active in the Czech and Slovak Surrealist Group who's poetry and prose regularly appeared in the journal Analogon. Švankmajerová was married to the Surrealist filmmaker Jan Švankmajer (b. Prague, 1934) and collaborated on many of his award-winning animated masterpieces, including Alice (1988), Faust (1994), Conspirators of Pleasure (1996) and Otesánek (2000). Lavishly illustrated throughout, this catalogue includes Jan and Eva Švankmajer's independent and collaborative works, spanning painting, objects, collage, ceramics, poetry, graphics, and their highly acclaimed animated film works. Encompassing the entirety of the large-scale exhibition of over 200 works centered around the world of "Alice". Texts in Japanese by Hiroyuki Watanabe.
As New copy.
2007, Japanese
Softcover, 160 pages, 24 x 18.3 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Atelier Peyotl / Tokyo
$65.00 - In stock -
"Jan Svankmajer" Special Feature Issue of cult Japanese underground magazine Yaso, published in 2007, edited by Yuichi Konno and Atelier Peyotl (publishers of Night Vision/Yaso/Peyotl/Wave/Silvester Club...). Profusely illustrated in colour with texts in Japanese that look at the genius of Jan Švankmajer, the Czech filmmaker, animator, writer, playwright and artist, a self-labeled surrealist celebrated for his innovative stop–motion animations and feature films, his extensive collaboration with wife painter and author Eva Švankmajerová, his collage, ceramics, tactile objects and assemblages. In the early 1960s, he explored informel, which later became an important part of the visual form of his animated films. Packed with his drawings, film stills, artworks, photographs, interviews, articles on Svankmajer's motifs, artists inspired by Svankmajer and their works, a Svanmkajer filmography, and a section on Travel Tips to the Czech Republic. In typical Japanese magazine fashion, and Yaso in particular, this volume is incredibly comprehensive.
Very Good copy.
2025, English
Hardcover, 80 pages, 17.8 x 12.1 cm
Published by
Further Reading Library / New York
$55.00 - In stock -
Inventor, designer, artist and musician Thomas Wilfred (1889–1968) devoted his life to the creation of a new art form – “Lumia,” or the art of light. He invented his own version of a colour organ (a term he disliked) and dubbed it the Clavilux, from the Latin meaning “light played by key.” This title presents a stimulating collection of archival material culled from the Wilfred archive at Yale University and other sources, including Wilfred’s never-before-published sketches.
After a successful international tour in the 1920s, Wilfred reinvented these large-scale performances as self-enclosed light shows for domestic entertainment. While they enjoyed a short commercial life, Wilfred’s aesthetically elegant and interactive Clavilux and Lumia home models soon found their way into storied collections. His work was included in the Museum of Modern Art’s 1952 exhibition 15 Americans, where it was seen by many artists who would work with light as their medium in the 1960s and ’70s.
THE FURTHER READING LIBRARY is an ongoing series of books dedicated to forgotten ideas, overlooked accomplishments, and idiosyncratic world views. Each book explores — through a collection of original documents, photographs, and primary source material — a body of work, a specific topic, or an individual. Modeled on the size and range of topics of the King Penguin and Insel-Bücherei series, The Further Reading Library is edited by Christine Burgin and Andrew Lampert.
Christine Burgin is a publisher and former gallerist. Her publications include books by Hilma af Klint, Robert Walser, Emily Dickinson, and Susan Howe and projects with artists Rodney Graham, Matt Mullican, and Allen Ruppersberg.
christineburgin.com
Andrew Lampert is an artist, writer, and curator. His moving-image, photo, and performance works have been widely exhibited at international venues, and he has edited books on Tony Conrad, George Kuchar, and Harry Smith, among others. The former Curator of Collections at Anthology Film Archives, Lampert is co-author with Howie Chen of the advice columns Hard Truths and Hard Choices for Art in America.
2025, English
Hardcover, 88 pages, 17.8 x 12.1 cm
Published by
Further Reading Library / New York
$55.00 - In stock -
Science fiction writer Richard Sharpe Shaver believed that rocks were books imprinted with valuable information about such mythical ancient races as the Lemurians and Atlanteans. This title contains a generous selection of 'Rokfogos' accompanied by hand-typed texts in which Shaver explains – not always patiently – all that can be seen in these stones. Also included are facsimiles of his handmade books and publications, all of which he felt to be of incalculable importance to civilisation.
His controversial stories about an advanced prehistoric civilisation and a race of evil beings living at the center of the earth appeared in 'Amazing Stories' and other landmark sci-fi publications of the ’40s and ’50s.
A decade later, he was living in relative isolation and devoting himself to rock book research, a course of study that he shared with a devoted group of correspondents. Shaver believed that ancient leaders had left behind images embedded into rocks, which he then tried to interpret.
Richard Sharpe Shaver (1907–75) was an artist and author whose work frequently appeared in 1940s science fiction magazines such as Amazing Stories. He was the center of the Shaver Mystery, a controversy regarding his alleged discovery of a prehistoric civilization, which sparked mass interest and a devoted following that continues to this day.
THE FURTHER READING LIBRARY is an ongoing series of books dedicated to forgotten ideas, overlooked accomplishments, and idiosyncratic world views. Each book explores — through a collection of original documents, photographs, and primary source material — a body of work, a specific topic, or an individual. Modeled on the size and range of topics of the King Penguin and Insel-Bücherei series, The Further Reading Library is edited by Christine Burgin and Andrew Lampert.
Christine Burgin is a publisher and former gallerist. Her publications include books by Hilma af Klint, Robert Walser, Emily Dickinson, and Susan Howe and projects with artists Rodney Graham, Matt Mullican, and Allen Ruppersberg.
christineburgin.com
Andrew Lampert is an artist, writer, and curator. His moving-image, photo, and performance works have been widely exhibited at international venues, and he has edited books on Tony Conrad, George Kuchar, and Harry Smith, among others. The former Curator of Collections at Anthology Film Archives, Lampert is co-author with Howie Chen of the advice columns Hard Truths and Hard Choices for Art in America.
2025, English
Hardcover, 88 pages, 17.8 x 12.1 cm
Published by
Further Reading Library / New York
$50.00 - In stock -
Sampling from Schwartz’s voluminous catalogue of recordings and coupling them with the poetic descriptions he gave to them, 'Snapshots in Sound' assembles an A–Z of Schwartz’s vivid practice. Filled with candid images of his documentation in action, cover art from his many records and his own writings, this charming volume also includes an appreciation of Schwartz’s work from the legendary 'Village Voice' columnist Nat Hentoff.
A born and bred New Yorker, Tony Schwartz (1923–2008) was enamoured with his city. Though a popular campaign designer for Madison Avenue clients such as Johnson & Johnson and American Airlines, and later creating the sound for hundreds of political advertisements (including the infamous 'Daisy' spot for Lyndon B. Johnson’s 1964 campaign), his first and truest love was the sounds of the streets around him. Using a reel-to-reel tape recorder, the agoraphobic Schwartz ventured only a few blocks from his Hell’s Kitchen apartment yet captured an encyclopedia of sounds. Many of these tapes were broadcast on his perennial WNYC radio show “Around New York” from 1945 to 1976. Though the term may seem an oxymoron, Tony Schwartz truly was an audio visionary.
THE FURTHER READING LIBRARY is an ongoing series of books dedicated to forgotten ideas, overlooked accomplishments, and idiosyncratic world views. Each book explores — through a collection of original documents, photographs, and primary source material — a body of work, a specific topic, or an individual. Modeled on the size and range of topics of the King Penguin and Insel-Bücherei series, The Further Reading Library is edited by Christine Burgin and Andrew Lampert.
Christine Burgin is a publisher and former gallerist. Her publications include books by Hilma af Klint, Robert Walser, Emily Dickinson, and Susan Howe and projects with artists Rodney Graham, Matt Mullican, and Allen Ruppersberg.
christineburgin.com
Andrew Lampert is an artist, writer, and curator. His moving-image, photo, and performance works have been widely exhibited at international venues, and he has edited books on Tony Conrad, George Kuchar, and Harry Smith, among others. The former Curator of Collections at Anthology Film Archives, Lampert is co-author with Howie Chen of the advice columns Hard Truths and Hard Choices for Art in America.
2025, English
Hardcover, 88 pages, 17.8 x 12.1 cm
Published by
Further Reading Library / New York
$55.00 - In stock -
An avant-garde comrade of Jonas Mekas, George Maciunas, Jack Smith and others, Richard Foreman was at the forefront of downtown New York’s experimental theatre scene of the 1960s. He wrote and directed more than 80 verbally and visually singular productions in a career that spanned 45 years.
Handwritten on a series of note cards, the aphoristic declarations and philosophical asides of this text hover between a stream-of-consciousness dialogue and a message sent from another world. Foreman’s visually arresting plays made heavy use of static tableaux, frantic choreography, projected text and Foreman himself sitting in front of the stage operating the lights and sound. Foreman’s wonderfully elliptical words are counterposed with photographs of the mystifying diorama-like maquettes that he created while staging a number of his plays.
THE FURTHER READING LIBRARY is an ongoing series of books dedicated to forgotten ideas, overlooked accomplishments, and idiosyncratic world views. Each book explores — through a collection of original documents, photographs, and primary source material — a body of work, a specific topic, or an individual. Modeled on the size and range of topics of the King Penguin and Insel-Bücherei series, The Further Reading Library is edited by Christine Burgin and Andrew Lampert.
Christine Burgin is a publisher and former gallerist. Her publications include books by Hilma af Klint, Robert Walser, Emily Dickinson, and Susan Howe and projects with artists Rodney Graham, Matt Mullican, and Allen Ruppersberg.
christineburgin.com
Andrew Lampert is an artist, writer, and curator. His moving-image, photo, and performance works have been widely exhibited at international venues, and he has edited books on Tony Conrad, George Kuchar, and Harry Smith, among others. The former Curator of Collections at Anthology Film Archives, Lampert is co-author with Howie Chen of the advice columns Hard Truths and Hard Choices for Art in America.
2025, English
Hardcover, 88 pages, 17.8 x 12.1 cm
Published by
Further Reading Library / New York
$50.00 - In stock -
Loïe Fuller’s (1862–1928) luminously radical dance performances at the turn of the century were unlike anything that had ever been staged or seen before. While her profound influence on writers and artists such as Mallarmé and Rodin is well documented, less well known is Fuller’s passion for technology and her involvement with the leading scientists of the time. This title spotlights Fuller’s scientific forays in her own words alongside an array of archival documents and photographs of the dancer in action.
In her 'Serpentine Dance', she wore a large, diaphanous gown she manipulated with her arms to form undulating waves, while coloured lights projected onto the fabric gave the illusion of birds, animals or flowers. The centrepiece of the book is her 1907 lecture on the invention of radium, her notes on meeting Marie and Pierre Curie and Thomas Alva Edison, and her literally explosive efforts to create a glow-in-the-dark dance performance.
Featuring an introduction by renowned cinema scholar Tom Gunning, this book presents Fuller’s eccentric passions and pioneering pursuits in a fresh light.
THE FURTHER READING LIBRARY is an ongoing series of books dedicated to forgotten ideas, overlooked accomplishments, and idiosyncratic world views. Each book explores — through a collection of original documents, photographs, and primary source material — a body of work, a specific topic, or an individual. Modeled on the size and range of topics of the King Penguin and Insel-Bücherei series, The Further Reading Library is edited by Christine Burgin and Andrew Lampert.
Christine Burgin is a publisher and former gallerist. Her publications include books by Hilma af Klint, Robert Walser, Emily Dickinson, and Susan Howe and projects with artists Rodney Graham, Matt Mullican, and Allen Ruppersberg.
christineburgin.com
Andrew Lampert is an artist, writer, and curator. His moving-image, photo, and performance works have been widely exhibited at international venues, and he has edited books on Tony Conrad, George Kuchar, and Harry Smith, among others. The former Curator of Collections at Anthology Film Archives, Lampert is co-author with Howie Chen of the advice columns Hard Truths and Hard Choices for Art in America.
2016, English
Hardcover, 88 pages, 17.8 x 12.1 cm
Published by
Further Reading Library / New York
$50.00 - Out of stock
'Library of the Paranormal' lifts the lid on Jackie Gleason's treasure trove of arcana. A generous selection of colourful and quizzical covers from Charles Fort, L. Ron Hubbard and dozens more are reproduced alongside press excerpts and interviews in which Gleason manages to shoehorn his thoughts on ESP, aliens, life after death and other decidedly off-topic interests, including his failed plans in the early ’50s to produce a television show devoted to paranormal experiences.
Comic legend Jackie Gleason (1916–87) was one of the biggest, most beloved and best paid stars of his time. His role as Ralph Kramden in 'The Honeymooners' remains a veritable classic of television’s early days. As big as his star was, Gleason never shied away from one of his favourite, non-mainstream topics: the occult. A high school dropout with a photographic memory and a major case of insomnia, he was an avid reader and spiritual searcher who looked for answers in the most unexpected places. Gleason was also a confirmed sceptic who believed that some grand cosmic scheme existed, but he could not say what it might ultimately be. Additionally, Gleason amassed a staggering collection of over 3,000 esoteric books, ranging from scholarly studies to supermarket paperbacks, now part of the holdings of the University of Miami Special Collections Library.
THE FURTHER READING LIBRARY is an ongoing series of books dedicated to forgotten ideas, overlooked accomplishments, and idiosyncratic world views. Each book explores — through a collection of original documents, photographs, and primary source material — a body of work, a specific topic, or an individual. Modeled on the size and range of topics of the King Penguin and Insel-Bücherei series, The Further Reading Library is edited by Christine Burgin and Andrew Lampert.
Christine Burgin is a publisher and former gallerist. Her publications include books by Hilma af Klint, Robert Walser, Emily Dickinson, and Susan Howe and projects with artists Rodney Graham, Matt Mullican, and Allen Ruppersberg.
christineburgin.com
Andrew Lampert is an artist, writer, and curator. His moving-image, photo, and performance works have been widely exhibited at international venues, and he has edited books on Tony Conrad, George Kuchar, and Harry Smith, among others. The former Curator of Collections at Anthology Film Archives, Lampert is co-author with Howie Chen of the advice columns Hard Truths and Hard Choices for Art in America.
2001, English
Softcover, 144 pages, 25.5 x 18 cm
Published by
Hips Road / New York
$59.00 - Out of stock
Reviled, rioted over and banned as pornographic even as it was recognized by many as an unprecedented visionary masterpiece, Jack Smith's Flaming Creatures is one of the most important and influential underground movies ever released in America.
J. Hoberman's monograph details the creative making—and legal unmaking—of this extraordinary film, a source of inspiration for artists as disparate as Andy Warhol, Federico Fellini and John Waters.
Described by its maker as "a comedy set in a haunted music studio," the story of Flaming Creatures is here augmented with a dossier of personal recollections, relevant documents and remarkable, previously unpublished on-set photographs by Norman Solomon, alongside photographs and film–stills by Ken Jacobs. Expanding on notes originally prepared for the 1997 retrospective on Jack Smith at the American Museum of the Moving Image, the monograph includes further material on his unfinished features Normal Love and No President, as well as shorter film fragments.