World Food Books' programme is largely produced on Kulin Nation land. We acknowledge the Wurundjeri people of the Kulin Nation as the first and continuing custodians of this land, and pay respect to their Elders past, present, and emerging.
World Food Books is an arts and special interests bookshop in Naarm / Melbourne. Founded in 2010, World Food Books is devoted to the presentation of a rotating, hand-selection of international art, design, literary and counterculture publications with an emphasis on the anti-traditional, the experimental, the avant-garde, the heretic, the marginal.
Presenting new titles alongside rare and out-of-print books, catalogues and journals spanning the fields of modern and contemporary art, design, photography, illustration, film, literature, poetry, cultural theory, philosophy, sexuality, popular and underground culture in its many radical forms, World Food Books wishes to encourage adventurous, thoughtful and open-minded reading, looking, writing, and exchange of publishing and ideas, both current and historical.
As well as our bookshop, located in Melbourne's historical Nicholas Building, all of our inventory is available internationally via our online mail-order service.
World Food Books semi-regularly co-ordinates "Occasions", a programme of exhibits and events at the bookshop and in partnership with other hosts (such as museums and art galleries) that develop out of the activities, relationships and content of the bookshop itself.
World Food Books
The Nicholas Building
37 Swanston Street
Room 5, Level 6
Melbourne 3000
Australia
SHOP HOURS:
THU—FRI 12—6 PM
WEB-SHOP OPEN 24/7
World Food Books
Postal Address:
PO Box 435
Flinders Lane
Victoria 8009
Australia
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All prices in AUD (Australian dollars)
Pick-Ups
Pick-up orders can be collected in our bookshop during opening hours after order date. Please collect any Pick-up orders within 2 weeks of ordering as we have limited storage space. Orders will be released back into stock if not collected within this time. No refunds can be made for pick-ups left un-collected. If you cannot make it in to the bookshop in this time-frame, please choose postage option.
Return Policy
All sales are final. We do accept returns (for refund or exchange) for items received in error. All our orders are packed with special care using heavy-duty padding and cardboard book-mailers or bubble mailers (for smaller books), using reinforcement where required. We cannot take responsibility for any lost, stolen or damaged parcels.
Insurance
Should you wish to insure your package, please email us directly after placing your order and we can organise this at a small extra expense. Although all standard/express tracked packages are very safe and dependable, we cannot take responsibility for any lost, stolen or damaged parcels. We recommend insurance on valuable orders.
Interested in selling your old books, catalogues, journals, magazines, comics, fanzines, ephemera? We are always looking for interesting, unusual and out-of-print books to buy. We only buy books in our fields of interest and specialty, and that we feel we can resell.
We base these prices on desirability, market value, in-print prices, condition and our current stock levels. We offer cash, store credit, and can take stock on consignment. All
about 25% of the price we expect to get when we sell them, or 30% in store credit. We base these prices on desirability, market value, in-print prices, condition and our current stock levels.
Sell your books any day of the week. You can drop them off and return later. If you have a lot of books, we can visit your Sydney home.
We buy books that we feel we can resell. We offer about 25 % of the price we expect to get when we sell them, or 30% in store credit. We base these prices on desirability, market value, in-print prices, condition and our current stock levels.
Philadelphia Wireman
03 August - 01 September, 2018
World Food Books is proud to announce our next Occasion, the first presentation of sculptures by Philadelphia Wireman in Australia.
The Philadelphia Wireman sculptures were found abandoned in an alley off Philadelphia’s South Street on trash night in 1982. Their discovery in a rapidly-changing neighbourhood undergoing extensive renovation, compounded with the failure of all attempts to locate the artist, suggests that the works may have been discarded after the maker’s death. Dubbed the "Philadelphia Wireman" during the first exhibition of this work, in 1985, the maker’s name, age, ethnicity, and even gender remain uncertain. The entire collection totals approximately 1200 pieces, all intricately bound together with tightly-wound heavy-gauge wire (along with a few small, abstract marker drawings, reminiscent both of Mark Tobey and J.B. Murry). The dense construction of the work, despite a modest range of scale and materials, is singularly obsessive and disciplined in design: a wire armature or exoskeleton firmly binds a bricolage of found objects including plastic, glass, food packaging, umbrella parts, tape, rubber, batteries, pens, leather, reflectors, nuts and bolts, nails, foil, coins, toys, watches, eyeglasses, tools, and jewellery.
Heavy with associations—anthropomorphic, zoomorphic, and socio-cultural responses to wrapped detritus—the totemic sculptures by Philadelphia Wireman have been discussed in the context of work created to fulfil the shamanistic needs of alternative religions in American culture. Curators, collectors, and critics have variously compared certain pieces to sculpture from Classical antiquity, Native American medicine bundles, African-American memory jugs, and African fetish objects. Reflecting the artist’s prolific and incredibly focused scavenging impulse, and despite—or perhaps enhanced by—their anonymity, these enigmatic objects function as urban artefacts and arbiters of power, though their origin and purpose is unknown. Philadelphia Wireman, whatever their identity, possessed an astonishing ability to isolate and communicate the concepts of power and energy through the selection and transformation of ordinary materials. Over the course of the past two decades, this collection has come to be regarded as an important discovery in the field of self-taught art and vernacular art.
Presented in collaboration with Fleisher-Ollman Gallery, Philadelphia, and Robert Heald, Wellington.
Susan Te Kahurangi King
02 February - 10 March, 2018
Susan Te Kahurangi King (24 February 1951 - ) has been a confident and prolific artist since she was a young child, drawing with readily available materials - pencils, ballpoint pens and felt-tip markers, on whatever paper is at hand. Between the ages of four and six Susan slowly ceased verbal communication. Her grandparents William and Myrtle Murphy had developed a special bond with Susan so they took on caring responsibilities for extended periods. Myrtle began informally archiving her work, carefully collecting and storing the drawings and compiling scrapbooks. No drawing was insignificant; every scrap of paper was kept. The King family are now the custodians of a vast collection containing over 7000 individual works, from tiny scraps of paper through to 5 meter long rolls.
The scrapbooks and diaries reveal Myrtle to be a woman of great patience and compassion, seeking to understand a child who was not always behaving as expected. She encouraged Susan to be observant, to explore her environment and absorb all the sights and sounds. Myrtle would show Susan’s drawings to friends and people in her community that she had dealings with, such as shopkeepers and postal workers, but this was not simply a case of a grandmother’s bias. She recognised that Susan had developed a sophisticated and unique visual language and sincerely believed that her art deserved serious attention.
This was an unorthodox attitude for the time. To provide some context, Jean Dubuffet coined the term Art Brut in 1945 to describe work created by self-taught artists – specifically residents of psychiatric institutions and those he considered to be visionaries or eccentrics. In 1972 Roger Cardinal extended this concept by adopting the term Outsider Art to describe work made by non-academically trained artists operating outside of mainstream art networks through choice or circumstance. Susan was born in Te Aroha, New Zealand in 1951, far from the artistic hubs of Paris and London that Dubuffet and Cardinal operated in. That Myrtle fêted Susan as a self-taught artist who deserved to be taken seriously shows how progressive her attitudes were.
Susan’s parents Doug and Dawn were also progressive. Over the years they had consulted numerous health practitioners about Susan’s condition, as the medical establishment could not provide an explanation as to why she had lapsed into silence. Dawn educated herself in the field of homeopathy and went on to treat all twelve of her children using these principles – basing prescriptions on her observations of their physical, mental and emotional state.
Doug was a linguist with an interest in philosophy who devoted what little spare time he had to studying Maori language and culture. To some extent their willingness to explore the fringes of the mainstream made them outsiders too but it was their commitment to living with integrity and their respect for individuality that ensured Susan’s creativity was always encouraged.
Even though Susan’s family supported her artistic pursuits, some staff in schools and hospitals saw it as an impediment to her assimilation into the community and discouraged it in a variety of ways. Her family was not always aware of this and therefore did not fully understand why Susan stopped drawing in the early 1990s. However, rather than dwell on the challenges that Susan faced in pursuit of her artistic practice, they prefer to highlight her achievements. In 2008 Susan began drawing again in earnest, after an almost 20 year interruption, and her work is now shown in galleries around the world.
Susan grew up without television and has been heavily influenced by the comics she read as a child. She is absolutely fearless in the appropriation of recognizable characters, such as Donald Duck and Mickey Mouse, in her work. She twists their limbs, contorts their faces, compresses them together, blends them into complex patterned backgrounds - always imbuing them with an incredible energy. Although Susan often used pop culture characters in her work they are not naive or childlike. These are drawings by a brilliant self-taught artist who has been creating exceptional work for decades without an audience in mind.
Mladen Stilinović
"Various Works 1986 - 1999"
02 February 16 - September 10, 2016
Various works 1986 - 1999, from two houses, from the collections of John Nixon, Sue Cramer, Kerrie Poliness, Peter Haffenden and Phoebe Haffenden.
Including: Geometry of Cakes (various shelves), 1993; Poor People’s Law (black and white plate), 1993; White Absence (glasses, ruler, set square, silver spoon, silver ladel with skin photograph and wooden cubes), 1990-1996; Exploitation of the Dead (grey and red star painting, wooden painting, black spoon with red table, red plate), 1984-1990; Money and Zeros (zero tie, paintings made for friends in Australia (Sue, John, Kerrie), numbers painting), 1991-1992; Words - Slogans (various t-shirts) - “they talk about the death of art...help! someone is trying to kill me”, “my sweet little lamb”, “work is a disease - Karl Marx”; Various artist books, catalogues, monographs, videos; Poster from exhibition Insulting Anarchy; "Circular" Croatian - Australian edition; Artist book by Vlado Martek (Dostoyevsky); more.
Thanks to Mladen Stilinović and Branka Stipančić.
Jonathan Walker
Always Will Need To Wear Winter Shirt Blue + Ochre Small Check Pattern
21 August - 21 September, 2015
Untitled
I am not a great reader of poetry but I always return to the work of Melbourne poet, Vincent Buckley (1925- 1988). Perhaps I find his most tantalising piece to be not a finished poem but a fragment left on a scrap of paper discovered on his desk after the poet’s death.
The poetry gathers like oil
In the word-core, and spreads
It has its music meet,
Its music is in movement.
This fragment is more the shell left behind from a volatile thought than a finished poem. I find the last two lines honest but awkward whereas the first two lines work like an arrow. Most likely he could not find a resolution so it was left. Still, in its present form, it remains an eloquent testimony to the ultimate failure of a medium to express mobile thought and sensation, in Buckley’s case, through verbal language. It’s an important matter because this is something all artists have to deal with regardless of the medium.
I have never written a poem, however, I am forever copying fragments from books on paper scraps in a vain effort to fix certain notions in my head. At first, they function as bookmarks that are sometimes returned to when I open the book. But before long, as they accumulate, they fall out littering the table interspersed with A4 photocopies, bills, books and medications.
To return to Buckley’s fragment, the first two lines very much evoke how I paint nowadays. As you age, detail diminishes and patches of light become more luminous and float. I feel the most honest way of dealing with this is by smearing the oil paint on the canvas with the fingers and working close-up, blind. Only if the patches coalesce into an approaching image can the work gain a life.
-
Jonathan Walker was born in Melbourne, Australia and brought up on a dairy farm in Gippsland. In the 1970’s he studied painting at RMIT and won the Harold Wright Scholarship to the British Museum, London. During the 1980’s he exhibited at Pinacotheca Gallery, Richmond and had work shown at the NGV and Heidi City Art Gallery. Over the same period he designed the cover for the “Epigenesi” LP by Giancarlo Toniutti, Italy and conducted a mail exchange work with Achim Wollscheid, Germany. The work with artists through the post resulted in an article published in the bicentenary issue of Art and Australia 1988. He showed in artist run spaces such as WestSpace in the 90’s and 2000’s, and until 2012, taught painting at Victoria University, which is where we (Colleen Ahern and Lisa Radford) as organisers of the exhibition, among many others, had the privilege of being his student.
Walker’s knowledge was imparted to students through the careful selection of music, literature, and artists found in books that he himself had ordered for the library. Walker’s strategy was the generosity of sharing his vast knowledge with references specific to each student and their context.
Walker’s paintings share a similar focus and intimacy.
This exhibition presents a small selection of recent paintings alongside a publication that includes Walker’s writing. Observational and analytical, Walker’s work is a type of material notation — the time of day, colour and how it is blended, the both specific and fleeting location of a reflection on lino or the question of whether a chair leg should be included in a painting.
Please join us on Friday August 21 between 6-8pm to celebrate the opening of the exhibition.
Curated by Colleen Ahern and Lisa Radford.
B. Wurtz
Curated by Nic Tammens
March 26 - April 4, 2015
B.Wurtz works from a basement studio in his home on Manhattan’s Lower East Side.
This local fact is attested to by the plastic shopping bags and newsprint circulars that appear in his work. As formal objects, they don’t make loud claims about their origins but nonetheless transmit street addresses and places of business from the bottom of this long thin island. Like plenty of artists, Wurtz is affected by what is local and what is consumed. His work is underpinned by this ethic. It often speaks from a neighborhood or reads like the contents of a hamper:
“BLACK PLUMS $1.29 lb.”
“Food Bazaar”
“USDA Whole Pork Shoulder Picnic 99c lb.”
“RITE AID Pharmacy, with us it’s personal.”
“H. Brickman & Sons.”
“Sweet Yams 59c lb."
Most of the work in this exhibition was made while the artist was in residence at Dieu Donne, a workshop dedicated to paper craft in Midtown. Here Wurtz fabricated assemblages with paper and objects that are relatively lightweight, with the intention that they would be easily transportable to Australia. This consideration isn’t absolute in Wurtz’s work, but was prescriptive for making the current exhibition light and cheap. Packed in two boxes, these works were sent from a USPS post office on the Lower East Side and delivered to North Melbourne by Australia Post.
Wurtz appears courtesy of Metro Pictures, New York.
Thanks to Rob Halverson, Joshua Petherick, Sari de Mallory, Matt Hinkley, Helen Johnson, Fayen d'Evie, Ask Kilmartin, Lisa Radon, Ellena Savage, Yale Union, and "Elizabeth".
John Nixon
"Archive"
December 15 - January 20, 2014
The presentation of John Nixon's archive offered a rare showcase of this extensive collection of the artist's own publications, catalogues, posters, ephemera, editions and more, from the mid 1980s onwards, alongside a selection of his artworks.
Organized by John Nixon, Joshua Petherick and Matt Hinkley.
"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.
1998, English
Softcover, 172 pages, 19 x 17 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Atlas Press / London
$65.00 - In stock -
First English translation, first edition of Jean Ray's masterpiece, Malpertuis, translated by Iain White published by Alastair Brotchie's mighty Atlas Press. Long out-of-print in this edition.
"A manuscript stolen from a monastery, the ancient stone house of a sea-trading dynasty, which may be haunted. These are familiar ingredients for a Gothic novel, but something far more strange and disconcerting is taking place within the walls of Malpertuis as the relatives gather for the impending death of Uncle Cassave. The techniques of H. P. Lovecraft, when transplanted into the suffocating Catholic context of a Belgium scarred by the inquisition, produce in Jean Ray's masterpiece a story of monumental intensity from which events of startling ferocity break the surface- without ever lessening the suspense of the tale's approaching apocalyptic dénouement. Terrifying, all-absorbing, this novel is one of the most celebrated examples of the modern gothic genre in Europe and should have been available in English years ago."
Good—VG copy with some corner wear/creasing, soft buckling.
2018, English
Softcover, 278 pages, 21.6 x 21.6 cm
Published by
Eraserhead Press / US
$49.00 - In stock -
From Michael Cisco, one of the most innovative and subversive writers working today, comes the long-awaited, ground-breaking novel of a suicide survivor trying in vain to write himself back into existence.
Unlanguage is the story of a man transformed by death and by language change. The language, once understood, transforms him, and transforms learning itself. One day, he looks down at the hand resting on his thigh and sees that it's just an ordinary hand. What had been composed of colored light made solid goes back to being meat and blood. His body reverts to the ordinary sloshing heaviness of a regular body. The exalted vision of his eyes becomes the filmy, blurred vision of the usual kind. He slumps back into his former self. Whirlwinds of shame close on him. With a violent, monkey-like energy he wracks his brains for a way back. Then it occurs to him, he can still write that language. He must write his way back.
Told as a structural guide to impossible grammar, Michael Cisco’s Unlanguage is a brilliant, thought-provoking novel that not only pushes the boundaries of literature but of language itself.
2009, English
Softcover, 136 pages, 114 x 178 mm
Published by
Semiotext(e) / Los Angeles
$29.00 - In stock -
Thirty years of “crisis,” mass unemployment, and flagging growth, and they still want us to believe in the economy. . . . We have to see that the economy is itself the crisis. It’s not that there’s not enough work, it’s that there is too much of it.—from The Coming Insurrection
The Coming Insurrection is an eloquent call to arms arising from the recent waves of social contestation in France and Europe. Written by the anonymous Invisible Committee in the vein of Guy Debord—and with comparable elegance—it has been proclaimed a manual for terrorism by the French government (who recently arrested its alleged authors). One of its members more adequately described the group as “the name given to a collective voice bent on denouncing contemporary cynicism and reality.” The Coming Insurrection is a strategic prescription for an emergent war-machine to “spread anarchy and live communism.”
Written in the wake of the riots that erupted throughout the Paris suburbs in the fall of 2005 and presaging more recent riots and general strikes in France and Greece, The Coming Insurrection articulates a rejection of the official Left and its reformist agenda, aligning itself instead with the younger, wilder forms of resistance that have emerged in Europe around recent struggles against immigration control and the “war on terror.”
Hot-wired to the movement of ’77 in Italy, its preferred historical reference point, The Coming Insurrection formulates an ethics that takes as its starting point theft, sabotage, the refusal to work, and the elaboration of collective, self-organized forms-of-life. It is a philosophical statement that addresses the growing number of those—in France, in the United States, and elsewhere—who refuse the idea that theory, politics, and life are separate realms.
1992, English
Softcover, 188 pages, 23 x 15.5 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
University of Ottawa Press / Canada
$40.00 - In stock -
First 1992 edition. This book provides an unconventional introduction to core philosophical issues by considering and contrasting two brief and accessible but highly influential and representative philosophical works: Descartes' Meditations on First Philosophy and Michel Foucault's The History of Sexuality: works which, in their respective styles and methods offer the most widely divergent paradigms of philosophizing on questions of epistemology.
VG copy with tanning to spine and cover top edge.
1998, English
Hardcover (w. dust jacket), 486 pages, 24 x 16 cm
Out of print title / used / fine
Published by
Allen Lane / UK
$45.00 - In stock -
'A fabulous journey through thirty years of political and intellectual ferment that shows that Foucault's work is as alive and contemporary as ever. It's almost like witnessing the birth of a new Foucault, so thick are the volumes with surprises and unexpected enlightenments. They constitute a veritable trove that will reorient our reading of Foucault's major works'—Didier Eribon
'A magnificent, essential compendium, in the absence of which the man, the thinker, and his thought would have been amputated, unfinished, and incompletely understood'—Libération
Fine copy in Fine dust jacket, 1998 edition.
2009, English
Softcover, 728 pages, 28 x 17.4 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Routledge / London
$45.00 - In stock -
First Routledge complete edition of Michel Foucault's classic History of Madness, translated from the original French texts by Jonathan Murphy, edited by Jean Khalfa and published in 2009.
When it was first published in France in 1961 as Folie et Deraison: Histoire de la Folie a l'âge Classique, few had heard of a thirty-four year old philosopher by the name of Michel Foucault. By the time an abridged English edition was published in 1967 as Madness and Civilization, Michel Foucault had shaken the intellectual world.
This translation is the first English edition of the complete French texts of the first and second edition, including all prefaces and appendices, some of them unavailable in the existing French edition.
History of Madness begins in the Middle Ages with vivid descriptions of the exclusion and confinement of lepers. Why, Foucault asks, when the leper houses were emptied at the end of the Middle Ages, were they turned into places of confinement for the mad? Why, within the space of several months in 1656, was one out of every hundred people in Paris confined?
Shifting brilliantly from Descartes and early Enlightenment thought to the founding of the Hopital General in Paris and the work of early psychiatrists Philippe Pinel and Samuel Tuke, Foucault focuses throughout, not only on scientific and medical analyses of madness, but also on the philosophical and cultural values attached to the mad. He also urges us to recognize the creative and liberating forces that madness represents, brilliantly drawing on examples from Goya, Nietzsche, Van Gogh and Artaud.
The History of Madness is an inspiring and classic work that challenges us to understand madness, reason and power and the forces that shape them.
"Scarcely any philosopher working on the history of philosophy, or historian working on the history of institutions, social science or sexuality can avoid confronting the challenge of Foucault's books."—Michael Ignatieff, Times Literary Supplement
"Without a shadow of a doubt, the most original, influential and controversial text in this field during the last forty years. It remains as challenging now as on first publication. Its insights have still not been fully appreciated and absorbed."—Roy Porter
"Extraordinary!rich and insistent, and almost unreasonable in its necessary repetitions."—Maurice Blanchot
Very Good copy, light wear.
1986, English
Softcover, 400 pages, 12.9 x 19.8 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Pantheon / New York
$45.00 - In stock -
First 1984 edition of The Foucault Reader, published by Pantheon, New York, edited by Paul Rabinow.
Michel Foucault was one of the most influential thinkers in the contemporary world, someone whose work has affected the teaching of half a dozen disciplines rang-ing from literary criticism to the history of criminology. But of his many books, not one offers a satisfactory introduction to the entire complex body of his work. The Foucault Reader was commissioned precisely to serve that purpose. The Reader contains selections from each area of Foucault's work as well as a wealth of previously unpublished writings, including important material written especially for this volume, the preface to the long-awaited second volume of The History of Sexuality, and interviews with Foucault himself, in the course of which he discussed his philosophy at first hand and with unprecedented candor. This philosophy comprises an astonishing intellectual enter-prise: a minute and ongoing investigation of the nature of power in society. Foucault's analyses of this power as it manifests itself in society, schools, hospitals, factories, homes, families, and other forms of organized society are brought together in The Foucault Reader to create an overview of this theme and of the broad social and political vision that underlies it.
Good—VG copy.
1974 / 1982, English
Softcover, 388 pages, 23 x 15 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / good
Published by
Tavistock / London
$30.00 - In stock -
When one defines "order" as a sorting of priorities, it becomes beautifully clear as to what Foucault is doing here. With virtuoso showmanship, he weaves an intensely complex history of thought. He dips into literature, art, economics and even biology in The Order of Things, possibly one of the most significant, yet most overlooked, works of the twentieth century. Eclipsed by his later work on power and discourse, nonetheless it was The Order of Things that established Foucault's reputation as an intellectual giant. Pirouetting around the outer edge of language, Foucault unsettles the surface of literary writing. In describing the limitations of our usual taxonomies, he opens the door onto a whole new system of thought, one ripe with what he calls "exotic charm". Intellectual pyrotechnics from the master of critical thinking, this book is crucial reading for those who wish to gain insight into that odd beast called Postmodernism, and a must for any fan of Foucault.
Good copy of 1982 print of 1974 edition with reading wear and eraser-able lead-pencil marginalia.
1983, English
Softcover, 272 pages, 22.5 x 15 cm
Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
University of Chicago Press / Chicago
$35.00 - In stock -
This book, which Foucault himself has judged accurate, is the first to provide a sustained, coherent analysis of Foucault’s work as a whole. Published by University of Chicago Press in 1983, this 2nd edition with an afterword by and an Interview with Michel Foucault.
To demonstrate the sense in which Foucault’s work is beyond structuralism and hermeneutics, the authors unfold a careful, analytical exposition of his oeuvre. They argue that during the of Foucault’s work became a sustained and largely successful effort to develop a new method—“interpretative analytics”—capable oo explaining both the logic of structuralism’s claim to be an objective science and the apparent validity of the hermeneutical counterclaim that the human sciences can proceed only by understanding the deepest meaning of the subject and his tradition.
“There are many new secondary sources [on Foucault]. None surpass the book by Hubert Dreyfus and Paul Rabinow. . . . The American paperback edition contains Foucault’s ’On the Genealogy of Ethics,’ a lucid interview that is now our best source for seeing how he construed the whole project of the history of sexuality.”—David Hoy, London Review of Books
VG copy.
2025, English
Softcover, 122 pages, 21.6 x 14 cm
Published by
Routine Art Co. / London
$19.00 - In stock -
"This booklet fills a gap between my two previous books on working class culture and oppression. It looks a the first defences of popular culture by Herbert J. Gans and then Richard Shusterman. I looks for theorising about the aesthetics of working class cultures and finds some interesting ideas."
Born Hammersmith, London in 1948, of working-class parents displaced after the second world war, author Stefan Szczelkun "Lived an isolated life in a bedsit at the top of Regents street until we moved to Feltham when I was 3. Later I was a mod; then a reluctant architect; then a happy artist. Since then I've been in ten collectives of cultural producers from the Scratch Orchestra to Exploding Cinema. With one of these groups I built my own house in Kennington (finished in 1995)." In the 1970's he was the author of three Survival Scrapbooks: ‘Survival Scrapbook 1: Shelter’ (1972), ‘Survival Scrapbook 2: Food’ (1974), ‘Survival Scrapbook 2: Energy’ (1974), published in the UK and US. "My work is a sensible response to situations that I am in. This has led me to work in open artists collectives and to produce books."
2023, English
Hardcover (w. dust jacket), 224 pages, 29 x 29 cm
Published by
George Schwarz and Charis / East Sydney
$190.00 - In stock -
Powerful Paradise the Art of George Schwarz and Charis is an artists book, a collaboration between George Schwarz, his partner Charis, Linda Dement and Craig Judd. It is an introduction to a wonderful life and to beautiful, complex and intriguing art. Ernest Georg Schwarz and Charis Elizabeth McKittrick enjoy a unique partnership beginning 1964. The word collaborators in this case is an inadequate descriptor. In their presence one is witness to but a force of nature, a swirling vortex of creative mutuality. Simultaneously lovers, artists, apiarists, activists, authors, film and wine makers, 'Powerful Paradise' is a celebration and a legacy.
This extremely limited hardcover edition is the first survey of the couple's life in art, the last survivors of bohemian Kings Cross. Creators of the first Australian hardcore sex films to be passed by the censors (and also refused classification), George and Charis were ahead of the curve in every aspect of their practice. This volume features the only writing covering their film output, extensive photographic work and global travels. Simultaneously erotic, taboo, progressive, liberated; lives dedicated to their work and one another and perhaps too provocative/evocative for the Australian art establishment.
1977, Japanese
Softcover, 56 pages, 26 x 18.5 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Gallery 8 / Tokyo
$90.00 - In stock -
Very scarce Japanese publication on German painter and photographer Alfred Otto Wolfgang Schulze, known as Wols, published by Fuji Television Co. in 1977 on the occasion of an exhibition at Gallery 8, Tokyo. Beautifully illustrated throughout in colour and b/w with over 40 works, including chronology, exhibitions history, and bibliography. Exhibition work-list inserted.
Wols was the pseudonym of Alfred Otto Wolfgang Schulze (27 May 1913, Berlin – 1 September 1951, Paris), a German painter and photographer predominantly active in France. Though broadly unrecognized in his lifetime, he is considered a pioneer of Lyrical Abstraction, one of the most influential artists of the Tachisme movement. He is the author of a book on art theory entitled Aphorismes de Wols.
Near Fine copy.
1965, French
Softcover, 34 pages, 21 x 17 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Alexander Iolas / Paris
$65.00 - Out of stock
Lovely catalogue published on the occasion of the exhibition "Un Hommage a Wols" at Alexandre Iolas Gallery, Paris, in February 1965. Illustrated throughout with the paintings and drawings of German painter and photographer Alfred Otto Wolfgang Schulze, known as Wols, alongside an excerpt from Jean-Paul Sartre's text "Wols in person", Gallery Europe, Paris. This copy includes "Oevres exposées" booklet inserted, listing the works exhibited at the Galerie Alexandre Iolas. Texts in French.
Wols was the pseudonym of Alfred Otto Wolfgang Schulze (27 May 1913, Berlin – 1 September 1951, Paris), a German painter and photographer predominantly active in France. Though broadly unrecognized in his lifetime, he is considered a pioneer of Lyrical Abstraction, one of the most influential artists of the Tachisme movement. He is the author of a book on art theory entitled Aphorismes de Wols.
Very Good copy with light tanning.
1986 / 2023, English
Softcover, 208 pages, 21.5 x 14 cm
Published by
Princeton University Press / New York
$33.00 - In stock -
Named one of the 100 best nonfiction books of all time by the Modern Library. Anne Carson’s remarkable first book about the paradoxical nature of romantic love.
Since it was first published in 1986, Eros the Bittersweet, Anne Carson’s lyrical meditation on love in ancient Greek literature and philosophy, has established itself as a favourite among an unusually broad audience, including classicists, essayists, poets, and general readers. Beginning with the poet Sappho’s invention of the word “bittersweet” to describe Eros, Carson’s original and beautifully written book is a wide-ranging reflection on the conflicted nature of romantic love, which is both “miserable” and “one of the greatest pleasures we have.”
Originally published in 1986.
1985 / 2001, English
Softcover, 148 pages, 11.4 x 17.2 cm
Published by
Autonomedia / New York
$29.00 - Out of stock
"A Blake Angel on Bad Acid" — Robert Anton Wilson
"Fascinating..." — William Burroughs
"Who is Hakim Bey? I love him!" — Timothy Leary
Back in print — the underground cult bestseller and first book by anarchist writer and poet Hakim Bey (Peter Lamborn Wilson) published in 1991 by Autonomedia. Originally published in 1985 and circulated in the underground via small private and pirate editions, these texts were an inspiration for a generation of troublemakers and idealists. Both celebrated in the punk underground (where the original book has become a seminal text) and denounced in some anarchist circles, the book has proved itself as both influential and relevant to multiple generations of dreamers, agitators, and activists.
Essays that redefine the psychogeographical nooks of autonomy. Recipes for poetic terror, anarcho-black magic, post-situ psychotropic surgery, denunciations of spiritual addictions to vapid infotainment cults — this is the bastard classic, the watermark impressed upon our minds. Where conscience informs praxis, and action infects consciousness, T.A.Z. is beginning to worm its way into above-ground culture. This book offers inspired blasts of writing, from slogans to historical essays, on the need to insert revolutionary happiness into everyday life through poetic action, and celebrating the radical optimism present in outlaw cultures. It should appeal to alternative thinkers and punks everywhere, as it celebrates liberation, love and poetic living.
This new edition contains the full text of "Chaos: The Broadsheets of Ontological Anarchism", the complete "Communiques of the Association for Ontological Anarchy", and the new long essay "The Temporary Autonomous Zone", and a new preface by the author.
Very Good copy with some light wear.
1973/2000, English
Softcover, 132 pages, 15.3 x 23 cm
Published by
Barrytown Ltd. / US
Station Hill Press / Barrytown
$32.00 - In stock -
Before Sartre, before Beckett, before Robbe-Grillet, Maurice Blanchot created the “new novel,” the ultimate post-modern fiction. Written between 1932 and 1940, Blanchot’s first novel, here brilliantly translated by Robert Lamberton, contains all the remarkable aspects of his famous and perplexing invention, “the ontological narrative”―a tale whose subject is the nature of being itself. This paradoxical work discovers being in the absence of being, mystery in the absence of mystery, both to be searched for limitlessly. As Blanchot launches this endless search in his own masterful way, he transforms the possibilities of the novel. First issued in English in 1973 in a limited edition, this re-issue includes an illuminating essay on translation by Lamberton.
"A novel of consciousness brought to a high point of perfection, Blanchot's masterpiece thus far , one of the major works of contemporary French literature: such is Thomas the Obscure"—Georges Poulet
Maurice Blanchot (1907-2003) was a French writer, philosopher, and literary theorist. His work had a strong influence on later post-structuralist theorists such as Jacques Derrida. He is one of the most enigmatic and influential figures in modern French writing yet no interview, no biographical sketch, and hardly any photographs have ever been published of him.
2004, English
Softcover, 200 pages, 21.6 x 14 cm
Published by
Stanford University Press / Palo Alto
$48.00 - In stock -
In Lautréamont and Sade, originally published in 1949, Maurice Blanchot forcefully distinguishes his critical project from the major intellectual currents of his day, surrealism and existentialism. Today, Lautreamont and Sade, these unique figures in the histories of literature and thought, are as crucially relevant to theorists of language, reason, and cruelty as they were in post-war Paris.
"Sade's Reason," in part a review of Pierre Klossowski's Sade, My Neighbor, was first published in Les Temps modernes. Blanchot offers Sade's reason, a corrosive rational unreasoning, apathetic before the cruelty of the passions, as a response to Sartre's Hegelian politics of commitment.
"The Experience of Lautreamont," Blanchot's longest sustained essay, pursues the dark logic of Maldoror through the circular gravitation of its themes, the grinding of its images, its repetitive and transformative use of language, and the obsessive metamorphosis of its motifs. Blanchot's Lautreamont emerges through this search for experience in the relentless unfolding of language. This treatment of the experience of Lautreamont unmistakably alludes to Georges Bataille's "inner experience."
Republishing the work in 1963, Blanchot prefaced it with an essay distinguishing his critical practice from that of Heidegger.
Maurice Blanchot (1907-2003) was a French writer, philosopher, and literary theorist. His work had a strong influence on later post-structuralist theorists such as Jacques Derrida. He is one of the most enigmatic and influential figures in modern French writing yet no interview, no biographical sketch, and hardly any photographs have ever been published of him.
1955, English
Softcover, 168 pages, 13.2 x 20.3 cm
New, Reprint,
Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
New Directions / New York
$35.00 - In stock -
New Directions trade paperback edition of "The Flowers Of Evil: A Selection" by Charles Baudelaire, first published in 1955, containing 53 poems which the editors feel best represent the total work and which, in their opinion, have been most successfully rendered into English. The French texts as established by Yves Gérard Le Dantec for the Pléiade edition are printed en face. Along with Three Drafts of a Preface by Baudelaire, this contains poems too numerous to list but some of the highlights include: The Blessing; Don Juan in Hell; The Punishment of Pride; The Dancing Serpent; Reversibility; Invitation to the Voyage; The Sadness of the Moon; The Seven Old Men; The Gaming Table; Parisian Dream; Litany to Satan; and many more.
Charles Pierre Baudelaire (April 9, 1821 – August 31, 1867) was a French poet who also produced notable work as an essayist, art critic, and pioneering translator of Edgar Allan Poe. His most famous work, a book of lyric poetry titled Les Fleurs du mal (The Flowers of Evil), expresses the changing nature of beauty in modern, and rapidly industrializing Paris during the mid-19th century. Baudelaire's highly original style of prose-poetry influenced a whole generation of poets including Paul Verlaine, Arthur Rimbaud and Stéphane Mallarmé, among many others. He is credited with coining the term "modernity" (modernité) to designate the fleeting, ephemeral experience of life in an urban metropolis, and the responsibility of artistic expression to capture that experience.
2021, English
Hardcover, 192 pages, 17.2 x 19.8 cm
Published by
Atlas Press / London
$50.00 - Out of stock
Unica Zürn’s celebrated autobiography, plus the greatest of her short fictional texts, edited and in a revised by translation by Malcolm Green.
In the 25 years since Atlas Press first published this account by Unica Zürn of her long history of mental crises, she has come to be recognised as a great artist at least the equal of her partner, the Surrealist Hans Bellmer.
Yet her work is barely comprehensible without the texts printed here, in which she demonstrates how her familiarity with Surrealist conceptions of the psyche allowed her to welcome the most alarming experiences as offering her access to an inner existence that was the vital source for her artistic output. The introduction here was the first study to consider her life and work from this perspective.
Zürn’s initial mental collapse was initiated when she encountered her fantasy figure “the man of Jasmine” in the real world in the person of the writer Henri Michaux. Her meeting with him plunged her into a world of hallucination in which visions of her desires, anxieties and events from her unresolved past overwhelmed her present life. Her return to “reality” was constantly interrupted by alternate visionary and depressive periods, and her description of these episodes reveals how language itself formed a part of the “divinatory” method that could aid her recovery or predict a new crisis. Her compulsion for composing anagrams allowed her to dissect everyday language so as to release from it an astonishing flood of messages, threats and evocations. This method, if such it can be called, and Zürn’s eloquent yet direct style make this book a masterpiece of literature as well as providing an acute first-hand insight into extreme psychological states.
In 1970 Unica Zürn committed suicide by throwing herself from the sixth-floor apartment that she shared with Bellmer.
2024, English
Softcover, 192 pages, 19.8 x 12.9
Published by
Verso / London
$39.00 - In stock -
Translated by Helen O'Horan
The first novel from Izumi Suzuki to be published in English: a candid, intimate exploration of passion, music and transgression.
Hope I’m in for a good time, I thought. Even if it’s just for tonight.
Set in the underground bar and club scene of 1970s Tokyo, Set My Heart On Fire tells the story of Izumi in her turbulent twenties. Through a series of disarmingly frank vignettes, author Izumi Suzuki presents an unforgettable portrait of a young woman encountering missteps and miscommunication, good music and unreliable men, powerful drugs and disorientating meds. Izumi usually keeps her relationships short but complicated, until she meets Jun.
Set My Heart on Fire is a visceral novel about mistaken relationships and the convolutions of desire, about regret and acceptance. Pulsing through the narration is the protagonist’s love of music, a vital soundtrack spanning the Zombies, T. Rex and the Rolling Stones as well as underground Japanese psychedelic-rock bands such as the Tigers and the Tempters.
"The work and messages of Ursula K. Le Guin, the author’s longer-lived contemporary, come to mind. Both Suzuki and Le Guin knew that gender roles are a matter of costume or control, affect or affliction. The terms we use to define humanity are often inhuman"—Catherine Lacey, New York Times
"Suzuki's unique sensibility, which combined a punk aesthetic with a taste for the absurd. Her work-populated by misfits, loners, and femmes fatales alongside extraterrestrial boyfriends, intergalactic animal traffickers, and murderous teen-agers with E.S.P.-wryly blurs the boundary between earthly delinquency and otherworldly phenomena."—New Yorker
"Wild and restless ... I can't think of anyone I'd rather read than this countercultural icon of the Japanese literary underground."—Frieze
2002, Japanese / English
Hardcover (w. dust jacket + obi), 132 pages, 37.2 x 26.1 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Bunyusha / Tokyo
$220.00 - Out of stock
Beautiful, over-sized hardcover first edition of IZUMI,this bad girl., the stunning collection of Araki's photographic collaborations with Japanese sci-fi author, actress and countercultural icon, Izumi Suzuki. A gorgeous example of Araki's early work and one of his most sought after books, now long out-of-print. Because of Izumi's relationship with Araki, the photos are particularly intimate, capturing the singular, but tragically short life of Suzuki. The iconoclastic Izumi debuted as a writer at the age of 20. From the stage (as a member of Shuji Terayama's underground theatre troupe Tenjo Saijiki), the screen (as "pink" film actress), the image (as model and muse to photographer Nobuyoshi Araki), the page (as celebrated pop culture essayist and proto-cyberpunk author), through to the life between with marriage to free jazz alto-saxophonist Kaoru Abe and suicide at age 36 — Izumi's was a life as adventurous and tumultuous as the art she made and the counterculture she inhabited. She took her own life in 1986, leaving behind a decade’s worth of groundbreaking and influential writing.
"Izumi has been, still is THE woman in A's heart"—Nobuyoshi Araki
Very Good copy in dust jacket and obi.
2014, English
Hardcover (w. dust jacket), 300 pages, 25.5 x 28.0 cm
Published by
JRP Ringier / Zürich
Kunsthalle Zürich / Zürich
$135.00 - Out of stock
This comprehensive publication is Kai Althoff's third monograph. It contains never-before-seen works in addition to images from every stage of the artist's career, concentrating most heavily on work since 2002. The artist considers this to be a more ideally composed retrospective than any exhibition of his work would be capable of achieving. The selection of images focuses on documenting the work in a way that addresses the character of the works as well as the artist's current and past perspectives on his oeuvre. Possessing the emotional charge of the artist's works, this book presents personal, previously unpublished photographs, paintings, and writings of "failed satire" with a deceptive sentimentality that oscillates between nostalgia and self-deprecation. This stands in contrast with the innate beauty and craftsmanship of the works, which engrossed the artist at the time of their conception. Souffleuse der Isolation is also concerned with re-evaluating past works and the emotional states in which they were spawned, and how this pertains to the act of revisiting past portrayals of oneself.
This volume also features a text by the writer Angus Cook imaginatively inspired by Althoff's work, written specifically for this monograph, which served as a vital conceptual basis to its composition. Also included is a text by Dr. Patrik Scherrer on the use of textiles in the artist's work.
A beautiful book.
Kai Althoff (born 1966 in Cologne) is a German visual artist and musician. Borrowing from moments of history, religious iconography, and counter-cultural movements, Althoff creates imaginary environments in which paintings, sculpture, drawing, video, and found objects commingle. Tapping a multitude of sources, from Germanic folk traditions to recent popular culture, from medieval and gothic religious imagery to early modern expressionism, Althoff’s characters inhabit imaginary worlds that serve as allegories for human experience and emotion. His image bank and painterly style also draw on the past, especially early-20th-century German Expressionism, reconfigured by introducing collaged technique.
2025, English
Hardcover, 224 pages, 30 x 24 cm
Published by
DelMonico Books / US
$125.00 - In stock -
This book is the definitive scholarly volume on Chicago artist Gertrude Abercrombie, who was a critical figure in the midcentury Chicago art and jazz scenes. Abercrombie was a creative force of singular vision who, from the 1930s until her death in 1977, produced enigmatic paintings full of personal significance, drawing consistently on her dreams as source material. This title accompanies the artist’s first retrospective since 1991. With a deft hand, a concise symbolic vocabulary and a restrained palette, she produced potent images that speak to her mercurial nature and her evolving psychology as an artist. Cats, owls, doors, moons, barren trees, seashells and searching female figures all converge in her mysterious works, which suggest a life of purposeful introspection and emotional struggle. Drawing consistently on her dreams as source material, Abercrombie said, “The whole world is a mystery.” This title accompanies the artist’s first retrospective since 1991: an eponymous exhibition which begins at the Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh before traveling to the Colby College Museum of Art in Maine and the Milwaukee Art Museum.
2012, English / French
Hardcover, 112 pages, 28.5 x 26 cm
Published by
Paul Otchakovsky Laurens / France
$70.00 - In stock -
Gisèle Vienne is a visual artist, choreographer, director and photographer. She is now performed all over the world. She works a lot with Dennis Cooper, several of whose texts she has adapted, including, in particular, Jerk, taken up in the collection of short stories that we published last year (Un type immonde). One of the axes of her work is oriented towards adolescents, adolescents who have broken away, adolescents who are tortured by others as well as by themselves. Inscrutable and yet unmanageable adolescents. To do this, rather than using only actors in her shows, she began to imagine and then make dolls, mannequins. It is these dolls that are brought together here to compose a kind of anthology of her very particular universe of Gisèle Vienne.
Two texts, one by Dennis Cooper, the other by Pierre Dourthe, complete this volume in French and English.