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
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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.
2024, English
Softcover, 510 pages, 28 x 21 cm
Published by
Rickmoe Publishing / US
$72.00 - Out of stock
The most comprehensive, all-inclusive look at the history and evolution of shot on video horror films. In 1982, "Boardinghouse" became the first shot on video feature-length horror film ever made. Totally lensed on videotape, the film was later transferred to 16mm and blown-up to 35mm for theatrical exhibition. In 1983, David A. Prior shot "Sledgehammer" on video and eventually released the film on videotape. For the first time, analog video became the format used in motion picture productions. It was smeary, messy and it wasn't film... but it was cheap. In 1985, United Home Video boldly released "Blood Cult" with the claim it was "the first movie made for the home video market." The booming popularity of video stores coupled with a never-satisfied demand for content ensured these films longevity. Soon hundreds of titles followed, all video-created features by independent unknowns. They weren't from Hollywood. They weren't trained. But they had a lot of heart and a love for horror. And they made their own movies against the odds. For the first time EVER - "ANALOG NIGHTMARES" has brought these films together. Everything from "Boardinghouse" to "Zombie Holocaust" individually reviewed, categorized and presented chronologically by production year. Over 260 films! Featuring in-depth interviews with the filmmakers themselves - some speaking for the very first time! TIM BOGGS! MARK POLONIA! DONALD FARMER! TIM RITTER! JOEL D. WYNKOOP! DOUG STONE! ANDREA ADAMS! GARY WHITSON! DAVE CASTIGLIONE! PHIL HERMAN! ERIC STANZE! JAMES L. EDWARDS! WALTER RUETHER! TODD JASON COOK! NICK MILLARD! DAVID "THE ROCK" NELSON! RON BONK!
2008, English
Softcover, 489 pages, 15.3 x 22.8 cm
Published by
Zone Books / New York
$58.00 - In stock -
Tony Conrad is exemplary of the 1960s artist who remains inassimilable to canonic histories. Creator of the “structural” film, The Flicker, collaborator on Jack Smith’s Flaming Creatures and Normal Love, follower of Henry Flynt’s radical anti-art, member of the Theatre of Eternal Music and the first incarnation of The Velvet Underground, and early associate of Mike Kelley, Tony Oursler, and Cindy Sherman, Conrad has significantly impacted cultural developments from minimalism to underground film, “concept art,” postmodern appropriation, and the most sophisticated rock and roll. Yet Beyond the Dream Syndicate does not claim Conrad as a major but under-recognized figure.
Rather, by drawing on Deleuzian notions of the “minor” and the Foucauldian problematization of authorship found in Conrad’s own artistic/musical project, Early Minimalism, it disperses him into an “author function.” Neither monograph nor social history, the book takes Conrad’s collaborative interactions as a guiding thread by which to investigate the contiguous networks and discursive interconnections amongst the arts of the time.
“A tour de force of both interpretative and historiographic acuity.”—Art Bulletin
2024, English
Softcover, 216 pages, 12 x 18.5 cm
Published by
After 8 Books / Paris
$48.00 - Out of stock
Can critical thinking spring from both a fortune cookie and Jacques Lacan’s most obscure seminar footnote? Estelle Hoy says yes. In saké blue, overpriced cheesecakes are the starting point for an essay on art writing; shoplifting in Berlin opens to a reflection on the economies of activist practices; fiction allows us to discuss the legacy of institutional critique, queer mélanges, or quiet melancholy. To her, the story of art becomes more nuanced in light of lyrics by Arthur Russell, the posthumous sorrow of Sylvia Plath, or a poem by Yvonne Rainer.
saké blue gathers critical essays, art reviews, and poetic fiction. Written in dialogue with the work of Martine Syms, Marlene Dumas, Hervé Guibert, or Camille Henrot, these texts combine the subjective and analytic, addressing power relations and the force of affect. Hoy spares nothing—and no one, exposing cultural clichés and urgent political issues through fast-paced acerbity. She advocates the work of women artists, mocks stereotypes, questions myths, and champions desire, sadness, and boredom. Simultaneously beautiful, lyrical, and cutthroat, her writing echoes to the reader like l’esprit d’escalier—we think of the perfect reply just a little too late.
“Estelle Hoy practises philosophy as an unsettled but deeply committed query into existing together. She reads, she looks, she writes, to find out something essential about the future and living for it.”—Lisa Robertson, author of The Baudelaire Fractal
“Estelle Hoy's prose slap and bite, saké blue is a sharp pleasure to read.”—Calla Henkel, author of Scrap
“Hoy’s renditions of all-too familiar scenes are made more visceral than life with sparkling prose and a sly attention to life’s many shifting values that feels more than appropriate for anyone truly interested in art.”—Natasha Stagg, author of Artless
“I love saké blue. It makes me smile. Sometimes I don’t understand it. Language or brain? But then I hop in and catch bits. Of Hoy’s thoughts or mine. It’s all very curly-wurly on a straight line. Cool!!!”—Camille Bidault Waddington
Edited by Antonia Carrara
With an introduction by Lisa Robertson
Cover art: Camille Henrot
Design by Marco Caroti
2024, English
Softcover, 296 pages, 12 x 18.5 cm
Published by
After 8 Books / Paris
$48.00 - In stock -
Dispersed Events brings together for the first time Nick Mauss’ essays from the last fifteen years. Shimmering with the urgency of a new generation of queer thinkers, Mauss’ writing refracts contemporary art through histories of decorative art, film, theater, and dance.
An artist renowned for critically and poetically reconfiguring inherited genealogies and hierarchies of visual culture and art history, Mauss engages writing as a space for relentlessly activating counter-histories, repositioning the voice of the artist and the readers along the way. Whether he considers the practice of artist Lorraine O’Grady, the radical fashion of Susan Cianciolo, the anarcho-vaudevillian theater of Reza Abdoh, or the potential for textiles to disclose a different way of thinking, Mauss insists on the intense power of forms and feelings in their actual rather than enforced prehistories. Reevaluating experiments in fashion, dance, and the decorative arts on the same plane as painting, sculpture and cinema, he locates art as taking shape in the middle of conversations—“between art history and any afternoon.”
“Among what might initially appear, following Mauss, ‘a wildly inscrutable web of lineages,’ the reader quickly perceives unexpected, unheralded, conjunctions: affiliations, alignments, and affinities. . . . It generates a conviction that, in the best sense, is partisan. Singular, independent, illuminating.”—from the foreword by Lynne Cooke
“What I adore in this book is first that it doesn’t abide by any category, nor proposes any definition for what queer art or culture could be or for what research in art history should be, even expanded to certain comforting genealogies or influences.
On the contrary, the actual disparity of “events” is at the core of the book, and shapes its narrative. It allows Nick Mauss to associate, affiliate, link and weave a “widely inscrutable web,” in which the author and the reader shift their positions and points of view, constantly redirecting the conversation. What I adore in this book is that Nick Mauss tells what art, whatever it is, does to him.”—Elisabeth Lebovici
“In these cruel times, when too many operate as if ignorance, popularity, and money set the metronome of meaning, Nick Mauss, beneficent as Mother Ginger, lifts a flounce to release his polichinelles of untimely thinking. Easy to imagine Tina Chow and Edwin Denby, critical representatives of the knowing hereafter, nodding their approval at these keen syncopations to now’s drab, monocultural rhythm.”—Bruce Hainley
“These pages are written through a sensuous eye; encounters with art are laid bare and made tactile. With an insistent curiosity that is generous and imagistic, Mauss makes contemporaries of predecessors, creating connective tendrils and textures that generatively rupture the past. I cannot help but feel that the artworks and practices written about here love and revel in being witnessed and revisited by Mauss. They are seen-touched and responded to without closure or fixity; in the artist’s words, they ‘'cast long shadows forward.”—Lotus L. Kang
“This is the book I want to be reading right now.”—Josephine Pryde
Edited by Antonia Carrara and Benjamin Thorel.
Foreword by Lynne Cooke.
Design by Marco Caroti.
2024, English
Softcover, 160 pages, 20.5 x 13.5 cm
Published by
Wakefield Press / Cambridge
$34.00 - In stock -
With the 2018 publication of Letters, Dreams, and Other Writings, Wakefield Press introduced the writings of Surrealist painter Remedios Varo into English for the first time. These texts, never published during her lifetime, presented something of a missing chapter, and offered the same qualities to be found in her visual work: an engagement with mysticism and magic, a breakdown of the border between the everyday and the marvelous, a love of mischief, and an ongoing meditation on the need for (and the trauma of) escape in all its forms.
This new, expanded volume brings together the painter’s collected writings, an unpublished interview, letters to friends and acquaintances (as well as to people unknown), dream accounts, notes for unrealized projects, a project for a theater piece, whimsical recipes for controlled dreaming, and exercises in Surrealist automatic writing, as well as prose-poem commentaries on her paintings. It also includes her longest manuscript, the pseudoscientific On Homo rodans: an absurdist study of the wheeled predecessor to Homo sapiens (the skeleton of which Varo had built out of chicken bones). Written by the invented anthropologist Hälikcio von Fuhrängschmidt, the essay utilizes eccentric Latin and a tongue-in-cheek pompous discourse to explain the origins of the first umbrella and in what ways Myths are merely corrupted Myrtles.
Also included are newly discovered writings, among them three short stories, never before published in any language.
Edited and translated by Margaret Carson
Remedios Varo (1908–1963) was a Spanish-born painter who entered the Surrealist circle in Paris before the German occupation forced her into exile to Mexico at the end of 1941, where she would stay until the end of her life. Her dream-infused allegorical works combine the elements of classical training, alchemical mysticism, and fairy-tale science.
2024, English
Softcover, 228 pages, 20.5 x 13.5 cm
Published by
Breakout Bits / Berlin
$45.00 $20.00 - In stock -
Shota means cute boys.
The amateur comic genre called shota was pioneeres by young women in Japan in the 1980s. It has since then been embraced and loved by ever more people, but little is known about this manga genre and its readers since research is lacking, both in and outside of Japan. Impossibly Cute Boys is the first book in English about Japanese shota comics. In this research-based ethnography, we meet the readers and creators of this unique and elusive manga genre. Academic rigor meets playful passion when the researcher and his participants try to understand and convey the magical attraction of cute boy characters in Japanese manga and anime.
Based on new research on PhD level, Impossibly Cute Boys details the history of shota (or shotacon) in Japan, before introducing us to the readers and creators of these comics, and asking them what it means to them to love shota. Their answers challenge both previous research and common assumptions about shota fans. And for the first time in English, shota's tumultuous history is mapped in detail.
Impossibly Cute Boys is based on ethnographic fieldwork in Tokyo and Yokohama. An original contribution to academic research in the fields of anthropology and queer studies, the book is written in an accessible style and can be enjoyed by anyone wanting to learn more about an often misunderstood manga genre.
1975, English
Softcover, 202 pages, 18 x 11 cm
Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Quartet Books / London
$25.00 - Out of stock
Image of the Beast (1968) is a horror erotic novel by American writer Philip José Farmer. Private dick Herald Childe is sent a snuff movie of his partner being brutally murdered. His pursuit of her killers leads him into a waking nightmare of sexual brutality and supernatural bestiality, as he becomes entangled with sex-starved she-ghosts, snake-women and a filthy human sow. Philip Jose Farmer conjures up a universe of unrelenting sexual degradation and horror populated by erogenous vampires, werewolves and other polymorphic creatures from the darkest recesses of the human imagination.
Philip José Farmer (1918—2009) is a three-time Hugo Award winner, and Nebula Grand Master. He has long been recognized as one of the foremost writers in the fields of science fiction and fantasy. He is best known for being the author who introduced sex into science fiction in 1952 with his groundbreaking novella "The Lovers"; his biographies of Tarzan and Doc Savage; his fascination for and reworking of the lore of legendary pulp heroes; his Riverworld, World of Tiers, and Dayworld series; his Wold Newton Family concept; and his occasional tongue-in-cheek pseudonymous works written as if by fictional characters.
Very Good copy of the 1975 Quartet edition, light edge wear.
2019, English
Softcover, 286 pages, 15.24 x 22.86 cm
Published by
Schism Press / World
$48.00 - Out of stock
In France, the poetry of Roger Gilbert-Lecomte has long received the major press attention it deserves. Now, thanks to David Ball's fine translation, English readers can experience its fractured eloquence in full, from wry early sketches and experiments with prose poetry, to the stark, skeletal verse for which he is best known. Gilbert-Lecomte's adult life was spent gazing, wilfully, into the abyss. In his poetry, the voice that dominates is cold, ancient, and inhuman. It is the hum of the abyss gazing back.—Dennis Duncan, University College London, Author of Theory of the Great Game and The Oulipo and Modern Thought
While a handful of other translations of Roger Gilbert-Lecomte's poetry exist, David Ball's Coma Crossing is likely to be the one whose pages we'll be absorbed in for some time to come. Gilbert-Lecomte was one of those peripheral poets who went against the Surrealist tide to carve his own psychic path; René Daumal was one of his comrades in their effort called Le Grand Jeu (The Great Game). Now, because of Ball's expertise as a thinker and translator, we will have to pay attention to Gilbert-Lecomte at last.—Bill Zavatsky, author of Theories of Rain and Other Poems, and co-translator of Earthlight: Poems of André Breton.
2023, English / German / French
Softcover, 128 pages, 13.97 x 22.23 cm
Published by
World Poetry Books / New York
$40.00 - In stock -
The Loveliest Vowel Empties presents for the first time in English the collected poems of legendary Swiss Surrealist Meret Oppenheim, printed with facing-page originals in German and French.
Oppenheim's poetry—49 poems written between 1933 and 1980—moves beyond Surrealism to inhabit a voice all her own, with imagery and sound that, as the Herald Tribune wrote, "express witty and poetic responses to the surprises of life."
A key figure of the Paris art scene in the 1930s, Oppenheim moved in a circle that included André Breton, Man Ray, Marcel Duchamp, Max Ernst, and Elsa Schiaparelli. Writing for the Village Voice about her work, Gary Indiana noted that "the singularity of Meret Oppenheim's work is such that nothing seems dated ... the range of the work and its quirky self-assurance are striking." The publication of her collected poems coincides with a major retrospective exhibition of her artwork at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.
"I am in awe of Meret Oppenheim's poems, a seismic force heretofore unknown to me. Her aesthetic compatriots include Alejandra Pizarnik, Georg Trakl, Max Jacob, and Paul Celan—artists of deep symbol, deep void. Kathleen Heil's translations are themselves works of the highest literary refinement and ingenuity. To read Oppenheim's lyric bulletins, conveyed tactfully into English, is to feel that we are plunging for the first time into the pure waters of poetry itself, impervious to fad. No dross, no affectation: instead, Oppenheim gives us strangeness, tone, translucency."—Wayne Koestenbaum
"What an ingenious way of translating this superbly ingenious poet/artist! Over and over, Kathleen Heil selects a word which many would find out of the way, although I find this a true delight. To me, it feels as deeply surrealist as possible. Two examples may suffice: for the verb 'nimmt, ' she offers us the rare 'thieves' instead of the far more usual 'steals' or 'robs'; while for 'Wie rät ein Untergang dem nächsten?' she selects the far less ordinary phrase: 'How does one demise advise the next?' thus capturing a near-echo. Such a gift proves true throughout this all-in-all inventive rendering. The extraordinary Meret Oppenheim deserves no less!"—Mary Ann Caws
"The singularity of Meret Oppenheim's work is such that nothing seems dated ... the range of the work and its quirky self-assurance are striking."—Gary Indiana, Village Voice
"Oppenheim's poetry often feels as if a fairy tale and a bestiary were put into a blender."—John Bradley, Rain Taxi Review
1990, Japanese
Hardcover (w. dust jacket), 206 pages, 13.6 cm x 19.4 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / fine
Published by
Seikyūsha / Tokyo
$70.00 - In stock -
First hardcover edition of "Fetish Fashion", written by Merzbow's Masami Akita and published only in Japan in 1990, an in-depth exploration of the eroticisation and transformation of the body through fetish fashion that revolutionised the world of sexuality, from SM Bizarre, Transvestism, Rubber/latex, mistresses and dominatrixes, bondage clubs, male and female castration, restraints, piercing, the fascist artificial body, medical fetish/medical art (including Romain Slocombe), and much more, all subjects illustrated in b/w. Merzbow is a noise project created in Tokyo, Japan in 1979 under the direction of noise technician Masami Akita. As well as a legendary underground noise artist, Akita is a prolific writer in Japan and frequently writes on the arts, music, erotica, esoterica, modern architecture, and animal rights, with articles on emerging subcultures and underground extreme cultures appearing in publications like SM Sniper, Studio Voice and Fool's Mate. His development of the Merzbow aesthetic ran parallel with a series of investigative books in which he catalogued and introduced a vast amount of hermetic types of music, sexual practices and autonomous creativity to a fairly conservative (but not close-minded) Japanese audience. "Fetish Fashion" is one of these very books.
First edition, Japanese text, fine copy with fine illustrated dust jacket.
1999, English
Softcover (staple bound), 17.7 x 13 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / as new
Published by
Omni Press / Millbrae
$35.00 - In stock -
Scarce copy of Sun Ra Research issue no. 37, 1999, an exceptional fanzine project edited by Sun Ra devotee Peter Hinds, founded in 1995 to publish extensive, illuminating interviews and conversations with Sun Ra and members of his Arkestra, spanning the 1970's to Sun Ra’s passing in 1993. With each issue featuring exclusive insights from Sun Ra and the Arkestra themselves, plus transcriptions of rehearsals, radio shows, articles, Sun Ra declarations and poetry, and rare, unpublished Arkestra images by many photographers, all risographed on different paper stocks, hand-bound, and independently published by Omni Press in Millbrae, California, Sun Ra Research forms a valuable "product of a lunatic obsession and deranged scholarship" in homage to the cosmic jazz philosopher.
As New copy.
1978, English
Softcover, 158 pages, 21 x 29.5 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Dragon's Dream / Paris
$220.00 - Out of stock
First printing of this cult classic of magmatic erotic collage from 1978 by artist Penny Slinger and poet Nik Douglas, published by Dragon's Dream of Paris. Seized and burnt by British customs, Mountain Ecstasy is an explicit, kaleidoscopic work that melds the sacred with the profane — an ecstatic and cosmic journey to tantric utopia by way of Penny’s wild collages created from found images – many from Slinger’s own collection of erotica, saturated in colour and volcanic sensuality.
"'Mountain Ecstasy' was my celebration of Tantric alchemy, freed from any restrictions, out of the confines of the house ('An Exorcism') and into the wide-open Technicolor landscapes of the high Himalayas. I never really thought of the collages as being material for a book - as they were rather outrageous - but Dragon's Dream wanted to publish. Whereas 'An Exorcism' had been mostly my own photographs, the images for 'Mountain Ecstasy' were nearly all 'objects trouves'. I had traveled for the first time in exotic parts (India, Nepal, Thailand) and the work reflects this input. Thousands of copies of 'Mountain Ecstasy' were subsequently seized and burnt by British customs, my comment at the time was, "They thought it was pornography, they didn't realize it was its antidote"—Penny Slinger
"Magnificant erotic assemblages of nudes, flowers, masks and rocks against landscapes, they tease, they excite and they dazzle the eye and in the end the sheer voluptuous beauty of these erotic montages finally exist in their own right as works of art and nary a bullet or a bomb in them."—Arthur Moyse, Freedom Anarchist Review
Very Good copy, beautifully preserved with light cover wear/crease, tightly bound/unsunned — rare for this title.
1998 / 2009, English
Hardcover (w. dust jacket), 72 pages, 32 x 24.5 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Morpheus International / US
$200.00 - In stock -
"Beksinski's powerfully unique paintings are such as I have never before seen"—H.R. Giger
Wonderful, scarce and collectible monograph capturing 30 years of the work of the great Polish painter Zdzisław Beksiński, published by Galerie Morpheus in Las Vegas. First issued in 1998, this lavishly illustrated hardcover monograph reproduces Beksiński's surreal dystopian paintings spanning his entire career, alongside an introduction by James Cowen, texts by Tadeusz Nyczek, and great quotes and reflections throughout by Beksiński himself.
Zdzisław Beksiński (1929 – 2005) was a Polish painter, photographer and sculptor. Beksiński had no formal training as an artist. Born in Sanok, he studied architecture in Kraków and worked as a construction site supervisor before turning to his passion for art, sculpting with construction site materials for his medium. His early photography would be a precursor to his paintings, often referred to as dystopian surrealism. Beksiński claimed, "I wish to paint in such a manner as if I were photographing dreams". Beksiński undertook painting with a passion, working intensely whilst listening to classical music and quickly becoming a leading figure in contemporary Polish art. In the late 1960s, Beksiński entered what he himself called his "fantastic period", which lasted up to the mid-1980s, during which he created his famed images of desolate, surrealistic landscapes with intricate depictions of anxious, abstracted figures and architecture in states of decay, mutation and decomposition. Although Beksiński's art was often dark, he himself was known to be a pleasant person with a keen sense of humour. Modest and somewhat shy, he avoided public events such as the openings of his own exhibitions and almost never visited museums or exhibitions in general. He always credited music as his main source of inspiration. Beksiński avoided concrete analysis of the content of his work, saying "I cannot conceive of a sensible statement on painting". Beksiński was stabbed to death at his Warsaw apartment in February 2005 by a 19-year-old acquaintance from Wołomin, reportedly because he refused to lend the teenager money.
"In the medieval tradition, Beksinski seems to believe art to be a forewarning about the fragility of the flesh – whatever pleasures we know are doomed to perish – thus, his paintings manage to evoke at once the process of decay and the ongoing struggle for life. They hold within them a secret poetry, stained with blood and rust." — Guillermo del Toro, Mexican film director
Very Good—Fine copy of the later expanded edition, now long out-of-print. With VG—Fine dust jacket.
1969, Japanese / English
Softcover (w. dust jacket), 166 pages, 26 x 19 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Tojusha / Tokyo
$390.00 - In stock -
Extremely rare first 1969 edition of Anger Is Our Daily Bread, Japanese photographer Tatsuo Kurihara's arresting book of front-line photographic student protest reportage published by Tojusha, Tokyo. The book of the "Zengakuren", Japan's radical student activists. With stunning, richly gravure-printed imagery, Anger Is Our Daily Bread is one of the most provocative and powerful photographic records of political unrest in Japan ever published. A desperate documentary and a master work from a Japanese photo-journalist at the forefront of bloodshed. Text in Japanese and English.
Anger Is Our Daily Bread concerns one of the most important political events in post-war Japan, The Anpo protests, also known as the Anpo struggle, a series of massive protests throughout Japan from 1959 to 1960 against the US–Japan Security Treaty, which allows the United States to maintain military bases on Japanese soil. Inspired by anti-imperialist left, these protests, the largest popular protests in Japan's history, were the coordinated actions of various citizen movements, from labor unions, student and women's organizations, mothers' groups, poetry circles, theatre troupes, groups affiliated with the Japan Socialist and Communist Parties, even conservative businessmen, who all wanted to prevent the ratification of the treaty and, as survivors of the unrivalled disasters of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, end the trauma of American military presence in Japan. The planned visit of the US president Eisenhower escalated the protests, which gripped hundreds of thousands to protest daily for a year around the Japanese Parliament National Diet building. With an unparalleled police presence physically removing the Socialist Diet members' attempted opposition sit-in, Prime Minister Kishi undemocratically passed the treaty provoking nationwide outrage, strikes and actions. The Zengakuren were always on the front-line. Facing strong anti-government public opinion which had been enhanced by the death of a female Tokyo University student named Michiko Kanba during a demonstration, Eisenhower's visit was cancelled and Kishi resigned as Prime Minister, in order to quell the widespread popular anger at his extremist actions. Yet the treaty remained in effect and wide-spread Americanisation of Japan ensued.
On the eve of the 1970 treaty revision, Anger Is Our Daily Bread was published.
"Another revision term coming next year, the Zengakuren students started to resort to "Molotov cocktail" method. They are not only against the Japan—US Security Treaty, but also struggling to address those problems like university reform, the new international airport at Narita, Chiba, the U.S. bases in Japan, Okinawa's return to Japan, etc. Helmeted and armed with the so-called "Gewalt" clubs and sticks, those students of Zengakuren repeatedly clash with the armed police. Pictures shown here are the record of the Zengakuren movement for the past twelve months."—from Tatsuo Kurihara's introduction
Kurihara's extremely vivid first hand visual accounts of the immense student demonstrations, their meetings, their brutal conflict with the police, the molotov cocktails from stormed buildings, and constant armed street battles, make for one of the most moving protest books ever printed. His stark, heavy contrast images are so immersive they give the viewer the impression of themselves being in the violent clashes, a witness to people's lives thrown into turmoil, the urgency and desperation to be heard by the elite.
Tatsuo Kurihara was born in downtown Tokyo in 1937. Upon graduating from Waseda University's Faculty of Political Science and Economics in 1961, he began working at the Asahi Shimbun Tokyo Headquarters Publishing Photography Department. In 1962, he won the Japan Photographers Association Newcomer's Award. In 1967, he left Asahi Shimbun and became a freelancer and a member of the Japan Photographers Society (JPS).
Very Good copy in Good—VG dust jacket with some light wear to jacket extremities. Corner bump to front top first few pages.
1988, English
Hardcover (clothbound w. dust jacket), 96 pages, 31x 26 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / fine
Published by
Secker & Warburg / London
$990.00 - In stock -
Very rare first 1988 edition, first printing of Chris Killip's masterpiece, In Flagrante, one of the greatest photo books of the late 20th century by one of Europe's most outstanding and uncompromising photographers, published by Secker & Warburg, London. For this book Killip became the first recipient of the prestigious Henri Cartier-Bresson Award. Extremely rare in this original UK hardcover edition.
In Flagrante is a beautiful, brutal, powerful and enduring collection of black and white photographs made in Northern England during its "de-industrialisation" between 1973 and 1985. Set against the miners strike and the dark age of the Thatcher years, Killip's arresting "portraits of Tyneside's working class communities amongst the signifiers of the region's declining industrial landscape" are recognised as among the most important visual records of living in 1980s Britain. Gerry Badger describes the photographs as "taken from a point of view that opposed everything [Thatcher] stood for". "A dark, pessimistic journey, perhaps even a secret odyssey, where rigorous documentary is suffused with a contemplative inwardness, a rare quality in modern photography." Killip has chosen, for the book's epigraph, Yeats's poem, "He wishes for the cloths of Heaven", with the famous closing lines, "tread softly because you tread on my dreams", a choice which Berger & Grant, in their essay, describe as "searingly apt. for it is as if all the photos here have been branded, like a hundred cattle, with the tenderness of those eight lines." The essay which follows the photographs is the result of a unique and remarkable collaboration between John Berger and Sylvia Grant.
Highest recommendation in the rarest edition.
Chris Killip (1946—2020) was was a Manx photographer born in Douglas, Isle of Man. Leaving school at age sixteen he become a beach photographer while working at his father's pub on the Isle of Man in order to earn enough money to leave the Isle of Man. By 1964 he took up photography full-time, working as a freelance assistant for various photographers in London from 1966—69. In 1969, after seeing his very first exhibition of photography at MoMA, he decided to leave commercial photography to return to photograph in the Isle of Man. The work from this time was eventually published by the Arts Council as Isle of Man: A Book about the Manx in 1980 with a text by John Berger. Killip received the Henri Cartier-Bresson Award for his acclaimed second book In Flagrante and was shortlisted for the Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation Prize. Killip worked at Harvard University from 1991 to 2017, as a Professor of Visual and Environmental Studies. He exhibited all over the world, wrote extensively, appeared on radio and television, and curated many exhibitions.
Near Fine copy in NF dust jacket, protected by archival mylar wrap.
1947, French
Softcover, 142 pages, 24 x 20.5 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / good
Published by
Maeght Editeur / Paris
$650.00 - Out of stock
Very scarce copy of the legendary "Le Surréalisme en 1947 : Exposition Internationale de Surréalisme présentée par André Breton et Marcel Duchamp", published by Maeght Editeur, Paris, in conjunction with an important exhibition of Surrealist artists in 1947. Features the cover design by Marcel Duchamp - a photographic reproduction by Rémy Duval of "Prière de toucher (Please touch)", the famous Duchamp rubber breast edition, created with Italian-born painter Enrico Donati, that adorned the first 999 copies of the catalogue. This gorgeous catalogue features the work of artists from 24 countries including Victor Brauner, Max Ernst, Leonora Carrington, Jacqueline Lamba, Jacques Hérold, Wilfredo Lam, Joan Miró, Hans Bellmer, Marcel Jean, Maria Martins, Yves Tanguy, Dorothea Tanning, Hans Arp, Frederick Kiesler, Alberto Giacometti, Hector Hyppolite, Serge Brignoni, Alexander Calder, Bruno Capacci, Elizabeth van Damme, Jacques Halpern, Julio de Diego, Enrico Donati, Francis Bouvet, David Hare, Iaroslav Serpan, Jacqueline Lamba, Taro Okamoto, Roberto Matta, Kay Sage, Toyen, Vilhelm Bjerke-Petersen, Leonard Baskin, Jindrich Heisler, Jeanne Reynal, Isabelle Waldberg, Roger Brielle, Jindrich Styrsky, Bruno Capacci, Jean Guerin, Isamu Noguchi, Gerome Kamrowski, Frédéric Delanglade, Eugenio Granell, Francis Picabia, Remedios Varo, Hans Richter, Arshile Gorky, and many more, along with the folding sheet catalogue, and newspaper clipping about the show inserted.
Good copy considering age. Tanned edges and wear to corners, edges and spine. Some spine chipping.
1946, English / French
Hardcover (w. die-cut dust jacket), unpaginated, 23.5 by 15.9 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / average
Published by
View Editions / New York
$690.00 - In stock -
Very Rare first 1946 hardcover English edition of André Breton's poetry collection "Young Cherry Trees Secured Against Hares / Jeunes cerisiers garantis contre less lievres", with original die-cut cover art by Marcel Duchamp and internal illustrations by Arshile Gorky, published by View Editions. A beautiful publication with Breton's original French poems with facing English translations by Edouard Roditi. Breton asked Armenian-American painter Gorky, an essential bridge between European Surrealism and American Abstract Expression, to produce unique drawings in 1945. Marcel Duchamp contributed the cover design and the title was a chance find in a horticulture magazine that also contains a pun on Breton's private life, whose wife had recently left him for artist David Hare. Gorky produced drawings to accompany Breton's poems that did not so much illustrate the poems, as they applied free association mark making analogous with the poetry's evocation, similarly free from logic or narration. Gorky's “automatic drawings” were made without preconception and the creations are interpreted as subconscious thought.
Average—Good copy for a book rarely seen outside museum collections. Internally Good throughout, content pages Very Good. Ex-library of Royal College of of Art, London, with associated markings to front/back blanks (not covers), jacket laminated (die-cut free) adhered in place with wear to extremities, tanning, marking and spine damages. More images upon request.
1955, English
Hardcover (w. dust jacket), 208 pages, 22 x 15 cm
1st UK Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Routledge & Kegan Paul / London
$500.00 - In stock -
Rare first 1955 hardcover edition of Wittgenstein's Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, with introduction by Bertrand Russell, published by Routledge & Keegan Paul, London. The sixth impression of the first edition, which includes the index. Published for The International Library of Psychology, Philosophy and Scientific Method. English translation by C. K. Ogden. Blue cloth covers with gilt lettering on spine.
The Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus first appeared in 1921 and was the only philosophical work that Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889-1951) published during his lifetime. Written in short, carefully-numbered paragraphs of extreme compression and brilliance it immediately convinced many of its readers and captured the imagination of all. Its chief influence, at first, was on the Logical Positivists of the 1920's and 30's, but many other philosophers were stimulated by its philosophy of language, finding attractive, even if ultimately unsatisfactory, its view that propositions were pictures of reality. Perhaps most of all, its own author, after his return to philosophy in the late 1920's, was fascinated by its vision of an inexpressible, crystalline world of logical relationships. The posthumous publication of other writings of his has, therefore, only served to reawaken interest in the Tractatus and to illuminate its more neglected aspects.
Very Good—Near Fine copy in Very Good dust jacket. Light age marking/wear to dust jacket extremities with clip to blank inner flap. Small pleasant bookseller sticker to lower first blank page — purchased at F. W. Cheshire Pty. Ltd, Little Collins Street in Melbourne. Frank Cheshire (1896–1987) was an Australian bookseller and publisher. His bookshop in Little Collins Street, Melbourne was described as a "gathering place for all interested in books and literature" in the mid-twentieth century. His publishing firm published Robin Boyd's The Australian Ugliness and Joan Lindsay's Picnic at Hanging Rock and "gave many Australian writers their first start". An incredible, tightly bound well preserved copy of this rare first edition, dust jacket now protected in archival mylar.
1997, English
Hardcover (w. dust jacket), 286 pages, 23 x 19.2 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
The MIT Press / Massachusetts
$55.00 - In stock -
First 1997 hardcover edition.
In an 1828 letter to his partner, Nicéphore Niépce, Louis Daguerre wrote, "I am burning with desire to see your experiments from nature." In this book, Geoffrey Batchen analyzes the desire to photograph as it emerged within the philosophical and scientific milieus that preceded the actual invention of photography. Recent accounts of photography's identity tend to divide between the postmodern view that all identity is determined by context and a formalist effort to define the fundamental characteristics of photography as a medium. Batchen critiques both approaches by way of a detailed discussion of photography's conception in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. He examines the output of the various nominees for "first photographer," then incorporates this information into a mode of historical criticism informed by the work of Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida. The result is a way of thinking about photography that persuasively accords with the medium's undeniable conceptual, political, and historical complexity.
"Given its ambitious and groundbreaking scope, "Burning with Desire" is bound to become the touchstone for any further consideration of the topic of photography's invention."—Douglas R. Nickel, Assistant Curator of Photography, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art
Very Good copy in VG dust jacket.
1997, Japanese
Softcover (w. dust jacket), 440 pages, 15 x 11 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / good
Published by
Kyoto Shoin / Tokyo
$70.00 - Out of stock
First 1997 edition of the hefty 440-page pocket version of what is now one of the truely iconic interior "design" books - Tokyo Style. Over a period of two years, Japanese writer-photographer Kyoichi Tsuzuki visited apartments, condos and suburban homes in Tokyo, and documented exactly what he saw in colour photography. First published in 1993 in the larger format, Tokyo Style is a collection of these photographs along with Tsuzuki's texts. Divided into eight sections - Beauty in Chaos, The Fancy Fetish, Artsy Pads, The Traditional Touch, Monomaniacs, Kiddie Kingdoms, Inertial Living and Hermitages - the book shows readers a demystified Tokyo and the ordinary lifestyles of the Tokyo people. No wide-angles or post-production here, just the most amazing compendium of hundreds of tiny Tokyo living spaces, no two alike. Somehow this print format seems all the more appropriate!
Reprinted many times since, this is the first edition of this format, 2nd printing from 1997.
Good copy. Very Good book in Average—Good dust jacket with wear to extremities and light fading.
1961, English
Hardcover (w. dust jacket), 90 pages, 28 x 24 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Bodley Head / London
$340.00 - In stock -
Rare first hardcover 1961 edition of this very important book of nude photography by British photographer Bill Brandt, published by Bodley Head, London, with a preface by Lawrence Durrell and an introduction by Chapman Mortimer. Fascinating Braque, Picasso, Dubuffet, Henry Moore, Edward Steichen, Eikoh Hosoe, Kishin Shinoyama, to name but a few, and having a profound influence on nude photography hence-forth, Brandt's nudes are as powerful and beautiful now as they were fifty years ago.
"These startling images rewrote the language of nude photography ... Brandt's approach was primarily formal, but his own sensibilities, combined with photography's tendency to overwhelm form's purity with life's impurities, ensured that his nudes are as interesting for their psychological undertones as for the wealth of unexpected forms he conjured. He did so with a camera that was devoid of a practicable viewing mechanism [a shutterless old Kodak he found in a secondhand shop] and thus reduced him, in effect, to working by blind instinct. ... At close range, his ancient camera yields a Venusian giantism, where sometimes sharply defined, sometimes blurred mountains of flesh loom over the artist/observer." (The Photobook A History Volume I, Parr & Badger)
Bill Brandt, best known for his photographs of London, his landscapes and portraits of celebrities, publishes here, for the first time, a selection of nudes, a subject which has obsessed him since 1945. Brandt used an old wooden camera with a wide angle lens for most of the pictures. Instead of making the camera register what he saw, he let himself be guided by the lens and made use of its acute distortion and unrealistically steep perspective. Thus the camera produced new anatomical images and shapes which his eyes had never observed. The lens helped him 'to get rid of the accepted image and to view his subjects without the cellophane-wrapping of conventional sight'. Chronologically arranged, the photographs record the transition from an early romantic style to more radical themes, ending with the pure form of extreme close-ups, taken on the beaches of East Sussex, Normandy and the Mediterranean. The pictures have fascinated Braque, Picasso, Dubuffet, Henry Moore and Edward Steichen, and had a profound influence on nude photography hence-forth.
Good—Very Good ex-libris copy w. associated markings not affecting content pages. Good dust jacket with light wear and repaired tear, preserved under mylar.
1975, —
Softcover (staple-bound), 16 pages, 10.5 x 14.5 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
De Harmonie / Amsterdam
$100.00 - Out of stock
Rare 1975 edition of the mysterious artist's book and "Fluxus" classic conceived in 1971 by Roland Topor. All sentences were scratched, making this "Fluxus" book unreadable and therefore "unsaleable".
In 1971, the artist was talking with publisher Jaco Groot in a Paris cafe. The conversation was about illegible books. "I made a book like that," said Topor, "tomorrow, same time, same cafe, I'll bring it." When Groot saw the book the next day, he said to Topor's stupid astonishment: "We'll publish it!"
Three years after, Topor was interviewed by Adriaan van Dis in his book program. Van Dis handed Topor the illegible book and asked him to read a piece. Topor, unprepared for this, spontaneously put a hand to his mouth and began to read, muttering and incomprehensible.
Roland Topor (1938—1997) was one of the most unique and versatile French artists of the second half of the 20th century, working prolifically as a provocative and spirited illustrator, author, humorist, satirist, poet, painter, performer, sculptor, playwright, film and TV writer, filmmaker and actor, and much more. A founder of the Panic Movement, an art collective formed by Fernando Arrabal, Alejandro Jodorowsky, and Roland Topor in Paris in 1962, Topor was known for the surreal and absurdist nature of his work.
Very Good copy with edge tanning.
1978, French
Softcover, 80 pages, 9.5 x 14.5 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / fine
Published by
Chez Yves Rivière / Paris
$150.00 - Out of stock
Very rare first (only) 1978 edition of Roland Topor's artist book, Laid Poulet, a unique book of illustrated oblique absurdist rebuses, beautifully lithograph printed on the presses of the Arte printing company (Adrien Maeght) with the legendary Yves Riviere and filled with Topor's colourful illustrations made specifically for this publication. Published by Chez Yves Rivière, Paris. Edition of 1950 copies, after an initial 50 numbered and signed.
Roland Topor (1938—1997) was one of the most unique and versatile French artists of the second half of the 20th century, working prolifically as a provocative and spirited illustrator, author, humorist, satirist, poet, painter, performer, sculptor, playwright, film and TV writer, filmmaker and actor, and much more. A founder of the Panic Movement, an art collective formed by Fernando Arrabal, Alejandro Jodorowsky, and Roland Topor in Paris in 1962, Topor was known for the surreal and absurdist nature of his work.
Fine copy with light tanning.
1996, English
Softcover, 176 pages, 23 x 21 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / good
Published by
Atlas Press / London
$90.00 - Out of stock
First edition of the incredible and sadly long out-of-print Encyclopedia Acephalica, published by Atlas Press in 1996 as part of their mighty Atlas Arkhive : Documents of the Avant Garde series.
Bataille’s thought is complex, and his books make few concessions to the reader. The first series of texts here, however, were written for a wider audience by Bataille and his friends, in the form of a Critical Dictionary, and they provide a witty, poetic and concise introduction to his ideas. The Dictionary appeared in the magazine edited by Bataille, Documents, in the early 1930s, and includes entries from prominent ethnologists and cultural commentators of the day. The second series of texts here, the Da Costa Encyclopédique was published anonymously after the liberation of Paris in 1947 by members of the Acéphale group and writers associated with the Surrealists. Both cover the essential concepts of Bataille and his associates: sacred sociology; scatology, death and the erotic; base materialism; the aesthetics of the formless; sacrifice, the festival and the politics of the tumult etc: a new description of the limits of being human. Humour, albeit, sardonic, is not absent from these remarkable redefinitions of the most heterogeneous objects or ideas: Camel, Church, Dust, Museum, Spittle, Skyscraper, Threshold, Work – to name but a few.
While the Documents group was celebrated for joining together artists, authors, sociologists and ethnologists (among the most important of their time) in a literary and philosophical project, the Acéphale group was more mysterious. Until recently even its membership was only vaguely known, and its activities remained secret (these are explored in detail for the first time in English in The Sacred Conspiracy, published by Atlas Press, also available at World Food Books). The origins of the Da Costa only became known in 1993, the present volume revealed for the first time its principal compilers: Robert Lebel, Isabelle Waldberg and Marcel Duchamp, but the identity of the authors of a large part of it is still unknown.
Texts by Georges Bataille, Michel Leiris, Marcel Griaule, Carl Einstein, Robert Desnos and writers associated with the Acéphale and Surrealist groups.
Introduced by Alastair Brotchie. Translated by Iain White, Dominic Faccini, Annette Michelson, John Harman, Alexis Lykiard.
Good—Very Good copy, with edge wear to covers and corners, otherwise VG throughout. No spine creasing.