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:
OPEN 12—5 THU—FRI
WEB-SHOP OPEN 24/7.
World Food Books
Postal Address:
PO Box 435
Flinders Lane
Victoria 8009
Australia
Art
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World Food Books Gift Voucher
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Animal Rights / Veganism
Occult / Esoterica
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All prices in AUD (Australian dollars)
Pick-Ups
Please note: The bookshop is closed until February 1, 2024.
Pick-up orders can be collected in our bookshop during opening hours after this date. Please collect any Pick-up orders within 3 weeks of ordering as we have limited storage space. Orders will be released back into stock if not collected within this time. No refunds can be made for pick-ups left un-collected.
Return Policy
All sales are final. We do accept returns (for refund, exchange) for items received in error. All our orders are packed with special care using heavy-duty padding and cardboard book-mailers or bubble mailers (for smaller books), using reinforcement where required. We cannot take responsibility for any lost, stolen or damaged parcels.
Insurance
Should you wish to insure your package, please email us directly after placing your order and we can organise this at a small extra expense. Although all standard/express tracked packages are very safe and dependable, we cannot take responsibility for any lost, stolen or damaged parcels. We recommend insurance on valuable orders.
Interested in selling your old books, catalogues, journals, magazines, comics, fanzines, ephemera? We are always looking for interesting, unusual and out-of-print books to buy. We only buy books in our fields of interest and specialty, and that we feel we can resell.
We base these prices on desirability, market value, in-print prices, condition and our current stock levels. We offer cash, store credit, and can take stock on consignment. All
about 25% of the price we expect to get when we sell them, or 30% in store credit. We base these prices on desirability, market value, in-print prices, condition and our current stock levels.
Sell your books any day of the week. You can drop them off and return later. If you have a lot of books, we can visit your Sydney home.
We buy books that we feel we can resell. We offer about 25 % of the price we expect to get when we sell them, or 30% in store credit. We base these prices on desirability, market value, in-print prices, condition and our current stock levels.
Philadelphia Wireman
03 August - 01 September, 2018
World Food Books is proud to announce our next Occasion, the first presentation of sculptures by Philadelphia Wireman in Australia.
The Philadelphia Wireman sculptures were found abandoned in an alley off Philadelphia’s South Street on trash night in 1982. Their discovery in a rapidly-changing neighbourhood undergoing extensive renovation, compounded with the failure of all attempts to locate the artist, suggests that the works may have been discarded after the maker’s death. Dubbed the "Philadelphia Wireman" during the first exhibition of this work, in 1985, the maker’s name, age, ethnicity, and even gender remain uncertain. The entire collection totals approximately 1200 pieces, all intricately bound together with tightly-wound heavy-gauge wire (along with a few small, abstract marker drawings, reminiscent both of Mark Tobey and J.B. Murry). The dense construction of the work, despite a modest range of scale and materials, is singularly obsessive and disciplined in design: a wire armature or exoskeleton firmly binds a bricolage of found objects including plastic, glass, food packaging, umbrella parts, tape, rubber, batteries, pens, leather, reflectors, nuts and bolts, nails, foil, coins, toys, watches, eyeglasses, tools, and jewellery.
Heavy with associations—anthropomorphic, zoomorphic, and socio-cultural responses to wrapped detritus—the totemic sculptures by Philadelphia Wireman have been discussed in the context of work created to fulfil the shamanistic needs of alternative religions in American culture. Curators, collectors, and critics have variously compared certain pieces to sculpture from Classical antiquity, Native American medicine bundles, African-American memory jugs, and African fetish objects. Reflecting the artist’s prolific and incredibly focused scavenging impulse, and despite—or perhaps enhanced by—their anonymity, these enigmatic objects function as urban artefacts and arbiters of power, though their origin and purpose is unknown. Philadelphia Wireman, whatever their identity, possessed an astonishing ability to isolate and communicate the concepts of power and energy through the selection and transformation of ordinary materials. Over the course of the past two decades, this collection has come to be regarded as an important discovery in the field of self-taught art and vernacular art.
Presented in collaboration with Fleisher-Ollman Gallery, Philadelphia, and Robert Heald, Wellington.
Susan Te Kahurangi King
02 February - 10 March, 2018
Susan Te Kahurangi King (24 February 1951 - ) has been a confident and prolific artist since she was a young child, drawing with readily available materials - pencils, ballpoint pens and felt-tip markers, on whatever paper is at hand. Between the ages of four and six Susan slowly ceased verbal communication. Her grandparents William and Myrtle Murphy had developed a special bond with Susan so they took on caring responsibilities for extended periods. Myrtle began informally archiving her work, carefully collecting and storing the drawings and compiling scrapbooks. No drawing was insignificant; every scrap of paper was kept. The King family are now the custodians of a vast collection containing over 7000 individual works, from tiny scraps of paper through to 5 meter long rolls.
The scrapbooks and diaries reveal Myrtle to be a woman of great patience and compassion, seeking to understand a child who was not always behaving as expected. She encouraged Susan to be observant, to explore her environment and absorb all the sights and sounds. Myrtle would show Susan’s drawings to friends and people in her community that she had dealings with, such as shopkeepers and postal workers, but this was not simply a case of a grandmother’s bias. She recognised that Susan had developed a sophisticated and unique visual language and sincerely believed that her art deserved serious attention.
This was an unorthodox attitude for the time. To provide some context, Jean Dubuffet coined the term Art Brut in 1945 to describe work created by self-taught artists – specifically residents of psychiatric institutions and those he considered to be visionaries or eccentrics. In 1972 Roger Cardinal extended this concept by adopting the term Outsider Art to describe work made by non-academically trained artists operating outside of mainstream art networks through choice or circumstance. Susan was born in Te Aroha, New Zealand in 1951, far from the artistic hubs of Paris and London that Dubuffet and Cardinal operated in. That Myrtle fêted Susan as a self-taught artist who deserved to be taken seriously shows how progressive her attitudes were.
Susan’s parents Doug and Dawn were also progressive. Over the years they had consulted numerous health practitioners about Susan’s condition, as the medical establishment could not provide an explanation as to why she had lapsed into silence. Dawn educated herself in the field of homeopathy and went on to treat all twelve of her children using these principles – basing prescriptions on her observations of their physical, mental and emotional state.
Doug was a linguist with an interest in philosophy who devoted what little spare time he had to studying Maori language and culture. To some extent their willingness to explore the fringes of the mainstream made them outsiders too but it was their commitment to living with integrity and their respect for individuality that ensured Susan’s creativity was always encouraged.
Even though Susan’s family supported her artistic pursuits, some staff in schools and hospitals saw it as an impediment to her assimilation into the community and discouraged it in a variety of ways. Her family was not always aware of this and therefore did not fully understand why Susan stopped drawing in the early 1990s. However, rather than dwell on the challenges that Susan faced in pursuit of her artistic practice, they prefer to highlight her achievements. In 2008 Susan began drawing again in earnest, after an almost 20 year interruption, and her work is now shown in galleries around the world.
Susan grew up without television and has been heavily influenced by the comics she read as a child. She is absolutely fearless in the appropriation of recognizable characters, such as Donald Duck and Mickey Mouse, in her work. She twists their limbs, contorts their faces, compresses them together, blends them into complex patterned backgrounds - always imbuing them with an incredible energy. Although Susan often used pop culture characters in her work they are not naive or childlike. These are drawings by a brilliant self-taught artist who has been creating exceptional work for decades without an audience in mind.
Mladen Stilinović
"Various Works 1986 - 1999"
02 February 16 - September 10, 2016
Various works 1986 - 1999, from two houses, from the collections of John Nixon, Sue Cramer, Kerrie Poliness, Peter Haffenden and Phoebe Haffenden.
Including: Geometry of Cakes (various shelves), 1993; Poor People’s Law (black and white plate), 1993; White Absence (glasses, ruler, set square, silver spoon, silver ladel with skin photograph and wooden cubes), 1990-1996; Exploitation of the Dead (grey and red star painting, wooden painting, black spoon with red table, red plate), 1984-1990; Money and Zeros (zero tie, paintings made for friends in Australia (Sue, John, Kerrie), numbers painting), 1991-1992; Words - Slogans (various t-shirts) - “they talk about the death of art...help! someone is trying to kill me”, “my sweet little lamb”, “work is a disease - Karl Marx”; Various artist books, catalogues, monographs, videos; Poster from exhibition Insulting Anarchy; "Circular" Croatian - Australian edition; Artist book by Vlado Martek (Dostoyevsky); more.
Thanks to Mladen Stilinović and Branka Stipančić.
Jonathan Walker
Always Will Need To Wear Winter Shirt Blue + Ochre Small Check Pattern
21 August - 21 September, 2015
Untitled
I am not a great reader of poetry but I always return to the work of Melbourne poet, Vincent Buckley (1925- 1988). Perhaps I find his most tantalising piece to be not a finished poem but a fragment left on a scrap of paper discovered on his desk after the poet’s death.
The poetry gathers like oil
In the word-core, and spreads
It has its music meet,
Its music is in movement.
This fragment is more the shell left behind from a volatile thought than a finished poem. I find the last two lines honest but awkward whereas the first two lines work like an arrow. Most likely he could not find a resolution so it was left. Still, in its present form, it remains an eloquent testimony to the ultimate failure of a medium to express mobile thought and sensation, in Buckley’s case, through verbal language. It’s an important matter because this is something all artists have to deal with regardless of the medium.
I have never written a poem, however, I am forever copying fragments from books on paper scraps in a vain effort to fix certain notions in my head. At first, they function as bookmarks that are sometimes returned to when I open the book. But before long, as they accumulate, they fall out littering the table interspersed with A4 photocopies, bills, books and medications.
To return to Buckley’s fragment, the first two lines very much evoke how I paint nowadays. As you age, detail diminishes and patches of light become more luminous and float. I feel the most honest way of dealing with this is by smearing the oil paint on the canvas with the fingers and working close-up, blind. Only if the patches coalesce into an approaching image can the work gain a life.
-
Jonathan Walker was born in Melbourne, Australia and brought up on a dairy farm in Gippsland. In the 1970’s he studied painting at RMIT and won the Harold Wright Scholarship to the British Museum, London. During the 1980’s he exhibited at Pinacotheca Gallery, Richmond and had work shown at the NGV and Heidi City Art Gallery. Over the same period he designed the cover for the “Epigenesi” LP by Giancarlo Toniutti, Italy and conducted a mail exchange work with Achim Wollscheid, Germany. The work with artists through the post resulted in an article published in the bicentenary issue of Art and Australia 1988. He showed in artist run spaces such as WestSpace in the 90’s and 2000’s, and until 2012, taught painting at Victoria University, which is where we (Colleen Ahern and Lisa Radford) as organisers of the exhibition, among many others, had the privilege of being his student.
Walker’s knowledge was imparted to students through the careful selection of music, literature, and artists found in books that he himself had ordered for the library. Walker’s strategy was the generosity of sharing his vast knowledge with references specific to each student and their context.
Walker’s paintings share a similar focus and intimacy.
This exhibition presents a small selection of recent paintings alongside a publication that includes Walker’s writing. Observational and analytical, Walker’s work is a type of material notation — the time of day, colour and how it is blended, the both specific and fleeting location of a reflection on lino or the question of whether a chair leg should be included in a painting.
Please join us on Friday August 21 between 6-8pm to celebrate the opening of the exhibition.
Curated by Colleen Ahern and Lisa Radford.
B. Wurtz
Curated by Nic Tammens
March 26 - April 4, 2015
B.Wurtz works from a basement studio in his home on Manhattan’s Lower East Side.
This local fact is attested to by the plastic shopping bags and newsprint circulars that appear in his work. As formal objects, they don’t make loud claims about their origins but nonetheless transmit street addresses and places of business from the bottom of this long thin island. Like plenty of artists, Wurtz is affected by what is local and what is consumed. His work is underpinned by this ethic. It often speaks from a neighborhood or reads like the contents of a hamper:
“BLACK PLUMS $1.29 lb.”
“Food Bazaar”
“USDA Whole Pork Shoulder Picnic 99c lb.”
“RITE AID Pharmacy, with us it’s personal.”
“H. Brickman & Sons.”
“Sweet Yams 59c lb."
Most of the work in this exhibition was made while the artist was in residence at Dieu Donne, a workshop dedicated to paper craft in Midtown. Here Wurtz fabricated assemblages with paper and objects that are relatively lightweight, with the intention that they would be easily transportable to Australia. This consideration isn’t absolute in Wurtz’s work, but was prescriptive for making the current exhibition light and cheap. Packed in two boxes, these works were sent from a USPS post office on the Lower East Side and delivered to North Melbourne by Australia Post.
Wurtz appears courtesy of Metro Pictures, New York.
Thanks to Rob Halverson, Joshua Petherick, Sari de Mallory, Matt Hinkley, Helen Johnson, Fayen d'Evie, Ask Kilmartin, Lisa Radon, Ellena Savage, Yale Union, and "Elizabeth".
John Nixon
"Archive"
December 15 - January 20, 2014
The presentation of John Nixon's archive offered a rare showcase of this extensive collection of the artist's own publications, catalogues, posters, ephemera, editions and more, from the mid 1980s onwards, alongside a selection of his artworks.
Organized by John Nixon, Joshua Petherick and Matt Hinkley.
"Habitat"
at Minerva, Sydney (organised by Joshua Petherick and Matt Hinkley)
November 15 - December 20, 2014
Lupo Borgonovo, Janet Burchill & Jennifer McCamley,
Lewis Fidock, HR Giger, Piero Gilardi, Veit Laurent Kurz,
Cinzia Ruggeri, Michael E. Smith, Lucie Stahl, Daniel Weil, Wols
Press Release:
“...It contained seven objects. The slender fluted bone, surely formed for flight, surely from the wing of some large bird. Three archaic circuitboards, faced with mazes of gold. A smooth white sphere of baked clay. An age-blackened fragment of lace. A fingerlength segment of what she assumed was bone from a human wrist, grayish white, inset smoothly with the silicon shaft of a small instrument that must once have ridden flush with the surface of the skin - but the thing’s face was seared and blackened.”
William Gibson, “Count Zero”, 1986
"Autumn Projects Archive"
Curated by Liza Vasiliou
March 6 - March 15, 2014
World Food Books, in conjunction with the Virgin Australia Melbourne Fashion Festival 2014, presented the Autumn Projects archive, consisting of a selection of early examples in Australian fashion with a particular interest in collecting designers and labels from the period beginning in the 1980’s, who significantly influenced the discourse of Australian Fashion.
Curated by Liza Vasiliou, the exhibition provided a unique opportunity to view pieces by designers Anthea Crawford, Barbara Vandenberg, Geoff Liddell and labels CR Australia, Covers, Jag along with early experimental collage pieces by Prue Acton and Sally Browne’s ‘Fragments’ collection, suspended throughout the functioning World Food Books shop in Melbourne.
H.B. Peace
presented by CENTRE FOR STYLE
November 14, 2013
"Hey Blinky, you say chic, I say same"
Anon 2013
H.B. Peace is a clothing collaboration between great friends Blake Barns and Hugh Egan Westland. Their pieces explore the divergences between 'character’ and ‘personality’ in garments....etc
Special Thanks to Joshua Petherick and Matt Hinkley of WFB and Gillian Mears
and a Very Special Thank you to Audrey Thomas Hayes for her shoe collaboration.
Janet Burchill & Jennifer McCamley
"Aesthetic Suicide"
May 10 - June 8, 2013
The first of our occasional exhibitions in the World Food Books office/shop space in Melbourne, "Aesthetic Suicide" presented a body of new and older works together by artists Janet Burchill & Jennifer McCamley, including videos, prints, a wall work, and publications.
During shop open hours videos played every hour, on the hour.
2001, English
Softcover, 188 pages, 20.4 x 13.97 cm
Published by
City Lights Books / San Francisco
$36.00 - Out of stock
Translations by Robert Hurley.
In a philosophical erotic narrative, an essay on poetry, and in poems Georges Bataille pursues his guiding concept, the impossible. The narrator engages in a journey, one reminiscent of the Grail quest; failing, he experiences truth. He describes a movement toward a disappearing object, the same elusive object that moved Theresa of Avila and Catherine of Siena to ecstasy.
"Humanity is faced with a double perspective: in one direction, violent pleasure, horror and death – precisely the perspective of poetry – and in the opposite direction, that of science or the real world of utility. Only the useful, the real, have a serious character. We are never within our rights in preferring seduction to it: truth has rights over us. Indeed it has every right. And yet we can, and indeed we must respond to something which, not being God, is stronger than every right, that impossible to which we accede only by forgetting the truth of all these rights." —Georges Bataille
Georges Bataille (1897-1962) was a French intellectual and literary icon who wrote essays, novels, and poems exploring philosophical and sociological subjects such as eroticism and surrealism. City Lights published more of Bataille's works including Erotism, The Tears of Eros, and Story of the Eye.
2001, English
Softcover, 103 pages, 14 x 20.4 cm
Published by
City Lights Books / San Francisco
$28.00 - In stock -
"The caress of the eye over the skin is so utterly, so extraordinarily gentle, and the sensation is so bizarre that it has something of a rooster's horrible crowing." - G.B.
A masterpiece of transgressive, surrealist erotica, Bataille's first novel, published under the pseudonym 'Lord Auch', is still his most notorious work. Called a "metaphysician of evil, Bataille wrote the 1928 novella "Story of the Eye (French: L'histoire de l'œil) as a psychoanalytical task. In this explicit erotic fantasy, the young male narrator and his lovers Simone and Marcelle embark on a sexual quest involving sadism, torture, orgies, madness and defilement, culminating in a final act of transgression. Shocking and sacrilegious, Story of the Eye is the fullest expression of Bataille's obsession with the closeness of sex, violence and death. Yet it is also hallucinogenic in its power, and is one of the erotic classics of the twentieth century.
Georges Bataille (1897-1962), French essayist and novelist, was born in Billom, France. He converted to Catholicism, then later to Marxism, and was interested in psychoanalysis and mysticism, forming a secret society dedicated to glorifying human sacrifice. Leading a simple life as the curator of a municipal library, Bataille was involved on the fringes of Surrealism, founding the Surrealist magazine Documents in 1929, and editing the literary review Critique from 1946 until his death.
2024, English
Softcover, 152 pages, 18 x 12 cm
Published by
Mudam / Luxembourg
Sternberg Press / Berlin
$42.00 - In stock -
Edited by Bettina Steinbrügge. Contributions By Cory Arcangel, Karen Archey, Motoko Ishibashi, Ingrid Luquet-Gad, Clémentine Proby, Fabian Schöneich, Stephanie Seidel, Bettina Steinbrügge, Sarah Johanna Theurer
In the span of a short yet exceptionally prolific career, Luxembourgish artist Michel Majerus (1967–2002) transgressed the well-worn rules of painting to capture the influence of digital media and pop culture during the 1990s and early 2000s.
Majerus’s large-scale paintings and installations—characterized by the artist’s ‘sampling’ and collaging of an eclectic repertoire of imagery and text borrowed from art history, video games, commercials, and electronic music—resonate with the rapid expansion of globalized consumer culture and digital technology.
This book collects and preserves the talks and lecture-performances held during a symposium on Majerus at Mudam, the contemporary art museum in Luxembourg. The convening considered the relevance of Majerus’s reflections today and discussed the dimensions of his legacy—investigating his influence on the practices of the digitally native artists, curators, and researchers who came after him.
The symposium was the first chapter of a program dedicated to Majerus’s work at the museum and was followed by the exhibition SINNMASCHINE, curated by Bettina Steinbrügge. Rather than a retrospective, the exhibition examined Majerus’s working methods by displaying never-before-exhibited archival material, including Majerus’s drawings and writings from his expansive collection of notebooks. This publication bridges the exhibition and the symposium’s reflections, featuring images of Majerus’s work and notebooks alongside contributions by Cory Arcangel, Karen Archey, Motoko Ishibashi, Ingrid Luquet-Gad, Clémentine Proby, Fabian Schöneich, Stephanie Seidel, Bettina Steinbrügge, and Sarah Johanna Theurer.
what looks good today may not look good tomorrow: The Legacy of Michel Majerus is the first book in the Mudam Series. This series is an edited collection of interventions, symposiums, and lectures by artists, critics, writers, curators, art historians, and thinkers that have taken place at Mudam, the contemporary art museum in Luxembourg. Each volume is dedicated to a specific artist or theme, following the museum’s exhibition program. The series is meant as a collection of working documents that open up a dialogue beyond institutional walls—a gentle nod to books still being the greatest of meeting places. Mudam Series is conceived and edited by Bettina Steinbrügge and Mudam’s editorial team.
2024, English
Softcover, 96 pages, 21.6 x 15.2 cm
Published by
Afterall / London
The MIT Press / Massachusetts
$38.00 - Out of stock
A strikingly original analysis of Isa Genzken’s move towards merging sculptural and architectural morphologies into a trailblazing practice of contemporary assemblage.
Fuck the Bauhaus, a series of audacious architectural models for future high-rise buildings in Manhattan, marks a poetic and provocative shift in Isa Genzken’s artistic oeuvre. Made in the year 2000, out of quotidian objects and cheap materials foraged in the streets and stores of New York, these sculptural assemblages depart from the German artist’s ‘post-Minimalist’ works begun in the 1970s. The earlier works conjured the haunting spectres of catastrophe, destruction and failed utopia, as well as the potential for freedom amidst the ruins of post-War reconstruction culture.
Analysing Genken’s post–2000 penchant for appropriation, collage and montage, André Rottmann draws on the writings of Deleuze and Guattari, Bruno Latour and other theorists of "assemblage," to show how her ‘late style’ is not a return to (neo-)avant-garde traditions but a powerful reimagining of them for the contemporary moment.
André Rottmann is an Assistant Professor for Art and Media Theory at the European University Viadrina Frankfurt (Oder), Germany, and the editor of the October Files volume John Knight.
2024, English / German
Softcover, 330 pages, 30 x 22 cm
Published by
Walther König / Köln
Neue Nationalgalerie / Berlin
$90.00 - Out of stock
This comprehensive monograph is published in conjunction with Isa Genzken’s eponymous exhibition at Neue Nationalgalerie, Berlin, gathering 75 sculptures by the artist, spanning all phases of her oeuvre from the 1970s to the present. Alongside many photographs of the works on display, the catalogue, edited by Daniel Buchholz and Christopher Müller, assembles texts by Dieter Schwarz, Sabine Breitwieser, Manfred Hermes, Tom McDonough, Juliane Rebentisch and Isa Genzken, a preface by curators Klaus Biesenbach and Lisa Botti, and a new essay by Diedrich Diederichsen, as well as two conversations of the artist with Wolfgang Tillmans and Diedrich Diederichsen.
Bilingual German / English.
Design by Julie Peeters
1984 / 1991, English
Softcover, 172 pages, 28 x 21.5 cm
Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
RE/SEARCH / San Francisco
$70.00 - Out of stock
"The definitive guide to Ballard to date"—The Face
1991 edition of RE/Search's classic 1984 issue on J.G. Ballard, a volume packed with interviews with Ballard, fiction, non-fiction pieces, art by Ballard, bibliography, and much more! The nonpareil introduction to the visionary prophet of the 21st century; a comprehensive special on this supremely relevant writer, now famous for Empire of the Sun and Crash, with some of the best interviews ever recorded, PLUS! his rarely-seen collages. This strikingly illustrated volume contains interviews and a wealth of rare selections from every aspect of Ballard’s career, plus bibliography and more. Essays include "Time, Memory and Inner Space," "Why I Want to Fuck Ronald Reagan," an article about William Burroughs entitled "Mythmaker of the 20th Century," and "Coming of the unconscious."
Very Good copy, light wear.
1990 re-print, English
Softcover, 120 pages, 20.3 x 28 cm
Published by
RE/SEARCH / San Francisco
$50.00 - In stock -
Revised, Expanded, Illustrated, and Annotated Edition of the author’s classic, published by RE/Search in 1990. Original text supplemented with Annotations, Commentary, and Four Additional Stories by J.G. Ballard.
Contains beautifully shocking Illustrations by Phoebe Gloeckner and Ana Barrado; design was conceived by V. Vale and executed at his typesetting shop. J.G. Ballard wrote the explanatory annotations for this RE/Search edition at Vale’s request.
Foreword by William S Burroughs, Introduction by V. Vale. First published in 1970 and widely regarded as a prophetic masterpiece, this is a groundbreaking experimental novel by the acclaimed author of “Crash” and “Super-Cannes”.
The 1970 First American Edition was banned by court order, forcing Doubleday to shred the entire print run. An experimental (rather than a conventional) novel, it has lost none of its awesome power to shock. Atrocity Exhibition is widely regarded as Ballard’s finest, most complex work…
The irrational, all-pervading violence of the modern world is the subject of this extraordinary tour de force. The central character’s dreams are haunted by images of John F. Kennedy and Marilyn Monroe, dead astronauts and car-crash victims as he traverses the screaming wastes of nervous breakdown. Seeking his sanity, he casts himself in a number of roles: H-bomber pilot, presidential assassin, crash victim, psychopath. Finally, through the black, perverse magic of violence he transcends his psychic turmoils to find the key to a bizarre new sexuality.
A “must-have” edition for J. G. Ballard collectors.
2010, English
Hardcover (w. dust jacket), 21 x 31 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / fine
Published by
Steidl / Göttingen
$70.00 $20.00 - Out of stock
First 2010 hardcover English edition. Full-page colour photographs by Mauro D'Agati, taken between 2006 and 2009. Divided into "Outskirts" and "Downtown," Mauro D'Agati's Napule Shot makes a composite portrait of contemporary life in Naples, through a variety of characters and locations: a music manager, local singers, weddings, police operations, the heart of the city center and the edgier eastern zone of Naples and its inhabitants.
Mauro D'Agati, born in 1968 in Palermo, began working as a professional photographer in 1995, initially documenting Sicilian jazz festivals, art and theater events, before working for Italian and international magazines.
Near Fine, light wear.
2011, English
Softcover, 128 pages, 17.5 x 13 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / as new
Published by
Seven Stories Press / New York
$20.00 - Out of stock
With her characteristic brilliance, grace and radical audacity, Angela Y. Davis has put the case for the latest abolition movement in American life: the abolition of the prison. As she quite correctly notes, American life is replete with abolition movements, and when they were engaged in these struggles, their chances of success seemed almost unthinkable. For generations of Americans, the abolition of slavery was sheerest illusion. Similarly,the entrenched system of racial segregation seemed to last forever, and generations lived in the midst of the practice, with few predicting its passage from custom. The brutal, exploitative (dare one say lucrative?) convict-lease system that succeeded formal slavery reaped millions to southern jurisdictions (and untold miseries for tens of thousands of men, and women). Few predicted its passing from the American penal landscape. Davis expertly argues how social movements transformed these social, political and cultural institutions, and made such practices untenable.
In Are Prisons Obsolete?, Professor Davis seeks to illustrate that the time for the prison is approaching an end. She argues forthrightly for "decarceration", and argues for the transformation of the society as a whole.
Angela Yvonne Davis (b. 1944) is an American Marxist and feminist political activist, philosopher, academic, and author; she is a professor emerita at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Davis was a longtime member of the Communist Party USA (CPUSA) and a founding member of the Committees of Correspondence for Democracy and Socialism (CCDS). She was active in movements such as the Occupy movement and the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions campaign.
Fine copy.
1996, Japanese
Softcover, 195 pages, 23.4 x 24.7 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Kanagawa Prefectural Museum of Art / Yokohama
$150.00 - Out of stock
First edition of this major survey exhibition catalogue on the Japanese Surrealist painter Kikuji Yamashita (1919—1986), a postwar painter who confronted the problem of the common people's consciousness and characterised the chaos of social realism with spectacular surrealist methods, inventing reportage paintings, and turning real-life incidents into provocative picture-story shows. Profusely illustrated with Yamashita's incredible phantasmagorical paintings and collages, accompanied by texts tracing his life "Memories, Encounters with Surrealism, Experiences in the Battlefield" by Tamon Miki, Masato Ozaki, Ikuo Arikawa, Hikaru Harada.
Kikuji Yamashita (b. 1919, Tokushima, Shikoku Island, d. 1986) was a Japanese Surrealist painter, printmaker, collagist, activist and bird lover associated with the postwar avant-garde art movement in Japan who studied under the Japanese Surrealist painter Ichiro Fukuzawa in Tokyo. In 1939 he was drafted into the Japanese Imperial military to fight in China, and although he survived the war, feelings of guilt and traumatic memories of his wartime experience, including participating in the torture and murder of a Chinese prisoner, pervaded his ferocious postwar artistic vision and output. His work became emblematic of the ‘Reportage’ style of painting, whereby artists expressed Socialist concerns in a style combining Social Realism and Surrealism. As a young man he travelled to Europe where he was introduced to the works of artists including Max Ernst, Salvador Dali and Hieronymus Bosch. Yamashita transposes the perverse and fantastical imagery of Bosch into an explicitly Surrealist register. In Yamashita’s paintings, the human figure is fragmented and morphed into erotically suggestive, comical or abject guises. The nude body, and its potential to contort into something uncanny or grotesque, is a continual subject of Yamashita Kikuji’s phantasmagorical paintings. Although he continued to paint hundreds of canvases, he deliberately avoided seeking out commercial success, perhaps out of a sense of guilt, and was only able to survive as a full-time artist thanks to his devoted wife's earnings as a beautician. "He didn’t talk about it much, but he would cry out from his nightmares at night. He sounded like he was in such pain that I used to wake him. He didn’t tell me directly, but in 1970 he published an article, “A Peephole onto Discrimination.” In it, he wrote about how he had executed a prisoner of war in a very brutal fashion." He deeply regretted the fact that he couldn’t give his own life by refusing that order. He wanted to take responsibility for what he had done. That became the driving force behind his paintings. Yamashita was a bird lover—evident in the recurring image of birds in his paintings—and shared his home and studio with many birds, including owls and hawks. It is said that he would sometimes appear at an exhibition, disheveled and cheerful, accompanied by a small bird in his pocket that he would feed premasticated (pre‐chewed) food directly from his mouth.
Very Good copy.
1979, Japanese
Softcover (w. dust jacket and obi strip), 118 pages, 20.7 x 18.3 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Subaru Shobo / Japan
$90.00 - In stock -
Wonderful 1979 publication on Japanese Surrealist painter Kikuji Yamashita (1919—1986), a painter who can be said to have grown up with the pure spirit of freedom like a boy. This book is a human record of Yamashita's life and opinions, his suffering and rebellion, based on the documentary film "Kuzureru Swamp Painter Kikuji Yamashita". Heavily illustrated with images of Yamashita's incredible phantasmagorical paintings alongside many rare images of his personal life, studio and birds, biographical details, and much more giving insight into this incredible artist's world.
Kikuji Yamashita (b. 1919, Tokushima, Shikoku Island, d. 1986) was a Japanese Surrealist painter, printmaker, collagist, activist and bird lover associated with the postwar avant-garde art movement in Japan who studied under the Japanese Surrealist painter Ichiro Fukuzawa in Tokyo. In 1939 he was drafted into the Japanese Imperial military to fight in China, and although he survived the war, feelings of guilt and traumatic memories of his wartime experience, including participating in the torture and murder of a Chinese prisoner, pervaded his ferocious postwar artistic vision and output. His work became emblematic of the ‘Reportage’ style of painting, whereby artists expressed Socialist concerns in a style combining Social Realism and Surrealism. As a young man he travelled to Europe where he was introduced to the works of artists including Max Ernst, Salvador Dali and Hieronymus Bosch. Yamashita transposes the perverse and fantastical imagery of Bosch into an explicitly Surrealist register. In Yamashita’s paintings, the human figure is fragmented and morphed into erotically suggestive, comical or abject guises. The nude body, and its potential to contort into something uncanny or grotesque, is a continual subject of Yamashita Kikuji’s phantasmagorical paintings. Although he continued to paint hundreds of canvases, he deliberately avoided seeking out commercial success, perhaps out of a sense of guilt, and was only able to survive as a full-time artist thanks to his devoted wife's earnings as a beautician. "He didn’t talk about it much, but he would cry out from his nightmares at night. He sounded like he was in such pain that I used to wake him. He didn’t tell me directly, but in 1970 he published an article, “A Peephole onto Discrimination.” In it, he wrote about how he had executed a prisoner of war in a very brutal fashion." He deeply regretted the fact that he couldn’t give his own life by refusing that order. He wanted to take responsibility for what he had done. That became the driving force behind his paintings. Yamashita was a bird lover—evident in the recurring image of birds in his paintings—and shared his home and studio with many birds, including owls and hawks. It is said that he would sometimes appear at an exhibition, disheveled and cheerful, accompanied by a small bird in his pocket that he would feed premasticated (pre‐chewed) food directly from his mouth.
Very Good copy.
1975, English
Softcover, 178 pages, 18 x 11 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / good
Published by
Telos Press / St. Louis
$65.00 - In stock -
Rare first 1975 English edition of Baudrillard's The Mirror of Production. Translated with introduction by Mark Poster.
"Are the concepts of labor and of production adaptable to a developing industrial society? What is the meaning of "pre-industrial organization"? In attempting to answer these questions, Jean Baudrillard examines the lessons of Marxism, which has created a productivist model and a fetishism of labor. He argues that we must break the mirror of production, which "reflects all of Western metaphysics," and free the Marxist logic from the restrictive context of political economy whence it was born."
Good copy with some marginalia on a few pages.
1977, English
Softcover, 244 pages, 18 x 18 cm
Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Faber & Faber / London
$35.00 - Out of stock
1977 revised re-print of the first UK edition from 1954 of Le Corbusier's classic The Modulor.
Between 1942 and 1955 the architect Le Corbusier (1887–1965) developed a universal measuring system known as the "Modulor".
The Modulor represented an attempt to give architecture a mathematical order oriented to a human scale. Starting from the golden ratio and the proportions of the human body, Le Corbusier developed his doctrine for the proportions of construction. He started from an assumed standard size of the human body and marked three intervals related to each other in the proportion of the golden ratio.
Le Corbusier managed to combine the imperial measuring system based on the foot with the metric decimal system and at the same time to relate to human body measurements. As a result, he obtained a systematic planning basis for architecture and industrial products that gained worldwide currency and was applied by countless practitioners.
Le Corbusier published Le Modulor in 1948, followed by Modulor 2 in 1955. These works were first published in English as The Modulor in 1954 and Modulor 2 (Let the User Speak Next) in 1958.
Very Good copy. Not sure what year this print comes from.
2020, Japanese
Softcover (w. obi strip), 224 pages, 21 x 15 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / as new
Published by
Disc Union Books / Tokyo
$90.00 - Out of stock
An epoch-making book, New Age Music Disc Guide, published in 2020 by the mighty Disc Union book imprint and compiled by new age music enthusiast, collector, writer and staff member of the Meditations record store in Kyoto, Tsunaki Kadowaki, is an essential and definitive overview of acoustic, ambient, electronic, and meditative sounds. The book collects and profiles over 600 international new age and ambient album recommendations, with full-colour reproductions of the cover artwork, spanning various styles and eras from the private issued 1970's underground, tracing global shifts in the music over decades all the way up to the genre’s well-deserved current revival and re-evaluation. Also takes a look back at various inspirations earlier still (pre 1974), from folk, early electronic, krautrock, prog and cosmic jazz. Spans electronic, acoustic, balearic, "kankyō ongaku” (environmental music), ambient-oriented Japanese 'anime' soundtracks, modern classical, ethereal, fourth world, minimal, fusion, drone, library .... The book also features interviews with Haruomi Hosono, Yoshio Ojima, Chee Shimizu, Dubby, Spencer Dolan of Visible Cloaks and includes an article by Koki Emura of EM Records.
Some artists includes: Iasos, Ariel Karma, Francesco Messina, Hiroshi Yoshimura, Laurie Spiegel, K. Leimer, Gigi Masin, Satoshi Ashikawa, Midori Takada, Robert Rich, Steven Halpern, John Elder, Ros Bandt, Pepe Maina, Giusto Pio, Richard Pinhas, Dorothy Carter, Emerald Web, Dominique Guiot, Suzanne Ciani, Monopoly Child Star Searchers, Dolphins Into The Future, Hype Williams, Ana Roxanne, James Ferraro, Visible Cloaks, Susumu Yokota, S.E.N.S., Hiroki Okano, Yasuaki Shimizu, Popol Vuh, Yoshio Suzuki, Yas-Kaz, Axis, Aragon, Yutaka Hirose, Robert Ashley, Pauline Anna Strom, Dom, Arica, Moondog, John Fahey, Bobby Brown, Third Ear Band, Sun Ra, Terry Riley, Klaus Schulze, Virginia Astley, Lino Capra Vaccina, Woo, Ashra, Iury Lech, Enya, Erik Wøllo, The Ghostwriters, Laraaji, Eric Tingstad, Deuter, Vidna Obmana, Constance Demby, Nik Tyndall, Eduard Artemiev, Peter Davison, Don Slepian, Mark Isham, Igor Savin, Roedelius, Jon Hassell, Michael Stearns, A.r.t. Wilson, Oneohtrix Point Never, Mark McGuire, Sean McCann, Joanna Brouk, Manuel Gottsching, Michael Hoenig, Carlos Maria Trindale / Nuno Canavarro, Steve Roach, Philippe Saisse, Roberto Donnini, Patricia Escudero, Luis Paniagua, Peter Michael Hamel, Morgan Fisher, Wally Badarou, Robert Turman, Malcolm Cecil, J.D. Emmanuel, Joel Vandroogenbroeck, Tangerine Dream, David Lanz, Brainticket ............. to name but a few!!
Highly recommended resource to the music that is usually playing in the World Food Books shop!
1981, English
Softcover, 200 pages, 21 x 13.5 cm
Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Weiser / Boston
$30.00 - In stock -
The Book of Lies was first published in 1913—far ahead of its time. The 1952 revision was significant because an additional commentary appeared at the end of each chapter. This 1981 edition reprints this revised edition back into paperback, published by Weiser, Boston.
The Book of Lies is a witty, instructive, and admirable collection of paradoxes; however, it is not a philosophical or mystical treatise. Actually, its subtleties exhilarate. Scholars have said it is "stupendously idiotic and amazingly clever." To endeavor to translate into definite terms Crowley's aphorisms would detract from the value of the book. It is wiser for readers to make their own interpretation.
The ninety-three chapters, which may be a single word, a half dozen phrases, twenty paragraphs, or even two pages, have subjects determined more or less definitely by Qabalistic significance—for example, Chapter 25 gives a revised ritual of the Pentagram.
The Commentaries following each chapter are equally outrageously impressive. Subtly embodied in the book is the entire symbolism of Freemasonry as well as the symbolism of other traditions. Aleister Crowley was not only a deep well of fundamental knowledge but also an even deeper well of symbolic knowledge.
Very Good copy.
1989, English / German / French
Softcover, 66 pages, 21 x 15 cm
Published by
Ex Pose Verlag / Berlin
$90.00 - Out of stock
Rare monograph on Czech self-taught photographer Miloš Koreček (1906—1989), a founding member of the para-surrealist Ra Group. Profusely illustrated with Koreček's experimental and poetic abstract photographic works, which he called fokalk ("focal point" or "focal"), including multi-panel fold-out. Features text by Czech art historian Zdenek Primus in English, German and French. A rare look into into this important Czech artist seldom known outside Czechia.
At the turn of 1943–1946, while copying from a wet photographic plate in a hot enlarger, he accidentally discovered this artistic method of manipulating photographic emulsion. Named after the Spanish painter Oscar Dominguez, who is often referred to as the father of the so-called "decal" painting technique, where the painter uses transfer techniques to paint from his subconscious (“with no preconceived object”), rather than from a model, Koreček devoted himself to this method consistently, looking for interesting artistic details on the plate, which he photographed and copied. His stunning photo-method marked a significant creative contribution to the creation of Informel and abstract art in Europe. Together with Václav Zykmund, he organized photo happenings, which they themselves called "Rádění" — bizarre, grotesque and poetic object collages were later arranged with a living object — Václav Zykmund, who decorated himself with fake tattoos for these purposes. Koreček documented everything, and in 1944, a samizdat copy of Threatening Compass with accompanying text by Ludvík Kundera was created from the photographs. Both artists can be considered the forerunners of action art. Koreček exhibited focal lenses at the Ra Group's first exhibition in Brno in 1947 and at the group's other domestic exhibitions. In 1948, the Ra Group (inc. Josef Istler, Ludvík Kundera, Zdenek Lorenc, Vilém Reichmann, Václav Tikal, Vaclav Zykmund) was banned after the communist coup, and Koreček devoted himself to teaching, while his artist output largely fell into oblivion.
Very Good copy, light cover wear.
1989, German
Hardcover, 136 pages, 25.5 x 21.5 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Ex Pose Verlag / Berlin
$100.00 - Out of stock
First edition of the out-of-print hardcover monograph on the work of Czech Surrealist photographer Vilém Reichmann, published on the occasion of a major survey exhibition at the Museum Bochum in 1989 and the Austrian Photo Archive in the Museum of Modern Art, Vienna in 1990. Extensive documentation of Reichmann's photographic works, including his incredible experimental photogram works. Includes portrait, biography, bibliography and texts by Antonín Dufek and Peter Spielmann in German.
Vilém Reichmann (1908-1991) was one of the premiere Czech surrealist photographers. Reichmann comes from the German-Jewish community in Brno and began photographing in 1930, whilst working as a graphic artist for numerous left-wing magazines in Czechoslovakia. Influenced by the Depression and war years, he developed a Surrealist style modelled on lyrical interpretations of reality through visual metaphors. After World War II he became a member of ‘Ra’, a Czech Surrealist art group, and his work shows the influence of textural abstraction and absurdist humor. Antonín Dufek, an erudite specialist in the field of the Czech photography, confirms Reichmann’s fundamental position in the history of the Czech photography, especially its surrealist movement.
Very Good copy, only very light wear to spine ends, cover, internally perfect.
1975 / 1985, English
Softcover, 272 pages, 23 x 14.5 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
The Overlook Press / New York
$40.00 - In stock -
First 1975 US edition (1985 print) of Stephen Dwoskin's important critical history of international independent and underground film-making, its pioneers and masters, and their creations, from the 1920s to the present (late 1970s), assessing the movements importance to the current status of film as art and entertainment. Published by Overlook Press.
Underground' film is finally emerging in terms of the public consciousness as an important and enduring contribution to the world of celluloid, both as entertainment and as an art form. The author, Stephen Dwoskin, is a young American independent filmmaker with personal experience in an expert knowledge of a creative area barely studied until this time. He has created in FILM IS an invaluable record of the pioneering cinematic statements that are at once peripheral and central to film today on an international scale. It is both culturally and sociologically true today that an increasing number of the painters and the poets have become filmmakers. Un-pressured by big business, free cinema has become a personal, creative expression for many men and women who often work in obscurity with small means indeed. Dwoskin's work presents the early history of the independent film from its beginning in the twenties to its phenomenal outburst in the sixties, written by an involved, perceptive critic. Through his own work and his contributions to the juries of international festivals, Dwoskin has a wide-ranging knowledge of the independent film from the U.S. to Britain, Italy, Germany, and Austria. Over 700 films are discussed, many for the first time. Van der Beek, Refenstahl, Brakhage, Emshwiller, Ray and Jack Smith are only some of the experimental filmmakers mentioned in FILM IS, but Dwoskin refers forwards and backwards to the works of others, often better known— Bunuel, Cocteau, Fassbinder, Truffaut, Warhol. There is also a comprehensive index. FILM IS provides a unique and invaluable reference work for all those interested in the frontiers of film consciousness.
Stephen Dwoskin (1939—2012) was a major avant-garde filmmaker whose work was closely connected to the 'gaze theory' associated with Laura Mulvey; a significant disabled filmmaker – though he rejected being framed as such – and an activist for an alternative film culture, through such organizations as the London Film-Makers' Co-op and The Other Cinema. His films are held by the BFI and distributed by LUX. His archive is held at The University of Reading.
Very Good copy, light wear, ex-owner's name in inside front cover.
2016, English
Softcover, 96 pages, 27.8 x 21.4 cm
Published by
Seagull Books / London
$39.00 - In stock -
Translated by Donald Nicholson-Smith
Edited with a Preface by Évelyne Grossman
A poet, philosopher, essayist, playwright, actor, and director, Antonin Artaud was a visionary writer and a major influence within and beyond the French avant-garde. A key text for understanding his thought and his appeal, 50 Drawings to Murder Magic is rooted in the nine years Artaud spent in mental asylums, struggling with schizophrenia and the demonic, persecutory visions it unleashed. Set down in a dozen exercise books written between 1946 and 1948, these pieces trace Artaud’s struggle to escape a personal hell that extends far beyond the walls of asylums and the dark magicians he believed ran them.
The first eleven notebooks are filled with fragments of writing and extraordinary sketches: totemic figures, pierced bodies, and enigmatic machines, some revealing the marks of a trembling hand, others carefully built up from firm, forceful pencil strokes. The twelfth notebook, completed two months before Artaud’s death in 1948, changes course: it’s an extraordinary text on the loss of magic to the demonic—the piece that gives the book its title.
“Artaud matters,” wrote John Simon in the Saturday Review years ago. Nearly seventy years after his death, that remains true—perhaps more than ever.
"A gloriously reproduced edition . . . . There is something in this text that speaks to the creative process--especially to the degree to which so much of what the writer or artist commits to the page (or canvass) extends from a place beyond conscious attention, to be received actively but without specific intention."—Rough Ghosts
2024, English
Softcover, 416 pages, 21.6 x 13.8 cm
Published by
SPBH Editions / UK
$89.00 - In stock -
The cult periodical Little Joe, published as a limited-edition zine from 2010 to 2021, challenged the mainstream narrative of film history with a rebellious, queer perspective. Rather than reviewing new releases, it explored forgotten and overlooked films and celebrated a diverse spectrum of cinema – from obscure art films to porn to Hollywood classics – as worthy of critical debate. Stubbornly print-only, Little Joe was notoriously hard to find, privileging word-of-mouth distribution akin to the films it championed. This volume, compiled by editor-in-chief Sam Ashby, brings together the best of its previously elusive texts and proposes a new, alternative cinematic canon drawn from the fringes of taste and style, while paying homage to the original DIY Risograph aesthetic of the journal.
This volume features essays, in-depth conversations, short stories and archival discoveries from a host of queer and allied writers, artists, filmmakers, and academics, including John Waters, Sarah Schulman, Douglas Crimp, William E. Jones, Erika Balsom, Jeremy Atherton Lin, John Greyson, Elizabeth Purchell, Liz Rosenfeld, Peter Strickland, Ira Sachs, Terence Davies, Shu Lea Cheang, Kevin Killian, Wayne Koestenbaum, Abdellah Taïa, Marlene McCarty, John Cameron Mitchell, Rosa von Praunheim, Stuart Comer, Ed Halter, Jenni Olson, A.L. Steiner, A.K. Burns, Desiree Akhavan, and Andrew Haigh.
1987 / 2000s, English
Softcover, 518 + 507 pages, 22.4 x 15.3 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
University of Minnesota Press / Minnesota
$120.00 - In stock -
First edition, mid 2000s re-prints of Theweleit's 1987 classic two-volume Male Fantasies as complete set translated from the original German. Volume 1: Women, Floods, Bodies, History; Volume 2: Male Bodies: Psychoanalyzing the White Terror.
Klaus Theweleit's two-volume work Mannerphantasien, published in the late 1970s, has become a contemporary German classic. Male Fantasies dives into the sexual, psychological and sociopolitical foundation of National Socialism as it was manifested in the Weimar Republic, arguing that fascism is not a political or economic phenomenon, but a method to manufacture a specific reality. Unlike any study before it, Male Fantasies centers upon the fantasies that preoccupied a group of men who played a crucial role in the rise of Nazism — The German Freikorps, the precursors of the SA and SS. Theweleit draws upon the novels, letters, and autobiographies of these proto-fascists and their contemporaries. There he discovered how the repudiation of one's own body—and of femininity—became a psychic compulsion associating masculinity with hardness, self-denial, and destruction.
The first volume of Male Fantasies deals primarily with the image of women in the collective unconscious of the fascist warrior—visions reflecting hatred and fear, culminating in a series of liquid metaphors—red tide, lava, mud—that threaten to engulf the male ego. In Volume 2, Theweleit shifts his attention to the male self-image. We are shown how the body becomes a mechanism for eluding the dreaded liquid and the "feminine" emotions associated with it. Armored, organized by mental and physical procedures like the military drill, the male body is transformed into "a man of steel'.' As Theweleit shows, only in war does this body find redemption from constraint.
Theweleit writes in a non orthodox, highly personal and associative style, heavily illustrating his works with incredible cartoons, advertisements, engravings, and posters of the era.
"Theweleit's book asks some key questions for those of us interested in Men's Studies. [It] takes us inside the psyches of men who, in Theweleit's analysis, are not destroying and murdering out of sublimation, but because they want to." — Men's Studies Review
"Klaus Theweleit's book, like the first volume of his massive study, usefully employs psychoanalytic insights in conjunction with the social-historical analyses of Elias, Mary Douglas, Foucault, and others to investigate the formation and nature of the fascist psyche in 1920s Germany, exploring here the male self-image, envisaged as armored against the threat and intrusion of the feminine." — Contemporary Sociology
Klaus Theweleit (b. 1942) is a German sociologist and writer. In 1977–78 he published the two volumes of Male Fantasies, now recognized as a pre-eminent work on the body, war and fascism. In 1990 he published Orpheus (und) Eurydike, the first volume of The Book of Kings, an examination of Western art through male artists’ relationship with women.
As New copies both, 2000s re-prints of first Minnesota edition.
1989, English
Softcover, 158 pages, 21.5 x 13.5 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Marion Boyars / London
$45.00 - In stock -
1989 English language edition of Bataille's L'ABBÉ C, translated by Philip A. Facey and published by Marion Boyars.
Told in a series of first person accounts, L'ABBÉ C is a startling narrative of the intense and terrifying relationship between twin brothers, Charles and Robert. Charles is a modern libertine dedicated to vice and depravity; Robert is a priest so devout that he is nicknamed 'L'Abbé'. As the story progresses, the suffocating atmosphere becomes increasingly permeated with illness, breakdown and eventual death. As in Blue of Noon and Story of the Eye, Bataille has succeeded in portraying the darkest and most profound aspects of human experience with amazing strength and dispassionate objectivity.
"Bataille speaks about man's condition, not his nature. Bataille has survived the death of God. In him, reality is conflict."—Jean-Paul Sartre
"Bataille is now recognized in France as one of the most challenging and original writers of our century. English translations of his work are long overdue, and one can only welcome the opportunity for English speaking readers to discover this major modern thinker."—Leo Bersani
"Essentially a psychological novel in which the emotions of the characters determine the movement of the story from beginning to end; explicit sex is absent. The style is crisp and this translation is quite remarkable... always faithful to the spirit."—New York Times Book Review
"The psychological intricacies display a graceful crisscrossing intensity."—Chicago Tribune
Georges Bataille was born in 1897 and died in 1962. He was a philosopher, novelist and critic whose startling and original ideas have influenced much modern literature and thought.
Cover design by Susi Mawani.
VG copy with light wear.
1987, Japanese
Softcover (w. wax dust jacket), 56 pages, 29.5 x 21 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / good
Published by
Seibu Museum of Art / Tokyo
$140.00 $70.00 - In stock -
Rare copy of the 1987 exhibition cataloue OBJET — Deviant Materials, published on the occasion of the group exhibition at Seibu Museum of Art and curated by Tatehata Satoshi, exploring postwar sculptural art in Japan from around 1960 to the present day through the work of 21 artists, an attempt to provide an opportunity to see the expansion and transformation of the so-called object itself. Heavily illustrated throughout with worksm biographies adn statements from artists including Genpei Akasegawa, Kazunori Ono, Mokuma Kikubata, Ryo Kitatsuji, Yayoi Kusama, Tetsumi Kudo, Yumiko Kanno, Shuzo Takiguchi, Kyoji Takubo, Atsuko Tanaka, Satomi Tim, Natsuyuki Nakanishi, Shiro Matsui, Tomio Miki, Kimiyo Mishima, Toyoji Miyazaki, Saburo Muraoka, Tatsumi Yoshino, Masunobu Yoshimura, Isamu Wakabayashi...
Good copy, some wear, light foxing.
2018, English
Hardcover, 160 pages, 23 x 27.1 cm
Published by
The Renaissance Society / Chicago
$120.00 - In stock -
Over a fifty-year career, Robert Grosvenor has produced a body of work that is at once solidly physical and conceptual, muscular and fluid. Grosvenor frequently uses industrial materials and found objects as he experiments with texture and scale, resulting in sculptures that reveal a handmade quality and subtle vein of humor.
In 2017, the Renaissance Society presented an exhibition of the sculptor's untitled work from 1989 to 1990. Re-contextualized within a spare architectural installation, this assemblage of materials and found objects eludes interpretation at the same time as it asserts its form and construction. Such nuances, combined with its ambiguous scale, evoke what critic John Yau has suggested is the labor of an "anonymous worker." Grosvenor has made significant contributions as a sculptor over the past fifty years, but relatively few books have been published about his work. This monograph documents the Renaissance Society show and also features new scholarship considering Grosvenor's work with a broad scope. The text includes contributions by Yves-Alain Bois, Bruce Hainley, Susan Howe, John Yau, and Renaissance Society executive director and chief curator Solveig Ovstebo.