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—SAT 12—6 PM
WEB-SHOP OPEN 24/7
World Food Books
Postal Address:
PO Box 435
Flinders Lane
Victoria 8009
Australia
info@worldfoodbooks.com
Art
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World Food Books Gift Voucher
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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.
$.00 - Out of stock
The eternal clean out! New items weekly.
https://worldfoodbooks.com/category/sale
Published by World Food Books / Melbourne
$20.00 - In stock - Add to cart
A World Food Books gift voucher is redeemable in our Melbourne bookshop or via our webshop (here). An e-voucher (printable pdf) will be sent to your purchase email address (please notify us if you wish to have the voucher sent to an alternate address and wish us to fill in the receiver's details on the card).
Gift vouchers can be purchased in increments of $20 (Australian Dollars) and the total amount can simply be added to by increasing the quantity in your shopping cart. eg. A quantity of 5 gift vouchers will result in an item total of $100 - a $100 gift voucher. Simply click "ADD TO CART" 5 times, or update your quantity in the shopping cart.
If you wish to purchase multiple, separate gift vouchers in one go, please just email us and we can personally prepare and email you a payment request.
Please note: Please select Pick-Up on gift voucher purchse to avoid any postage charges. Accidental postage charges will be refunded right away!
Thank you.
For any questions, please don't hesitate to email: info@worldfoodbooks.com
1905, English
Hardcover (leather bound, gilded), 276 pages, 15 x 9.5 cm
Out of print title / used / average
Published by
J.M. Dent & Sons / London
$60.00 - Out of stock
Gorgeous gold embellished green leather bound 1905 printing of American essayist and Transcendentalist Ralph Waldo Emerson's Second book of essays (including "The Poet") together with "Nature", published by J.M. Dent & Sons, London. Probably the most important collection of his essays from his most fertile period, written in he mid-1830s to the mid-1840s. "Nature", written in 1936, represents Emerson's move away from the religious and social beliefs of his contemporaries, formulating and expressing the philosophy of Transcendentalism.
Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803—1882), who went by his middle name Waldo, was an American essayist, lecturer, philosopher, minister, abolitionist, and poet who led the Transcendentalist movement of the mid-19th century. He was seen as a champion of individualism and critical thinking, as well as a prescient critic of the countervailing pressures of society and conformity. Friedrich Nietzsche thought he was "the most gifted of the Americans," and Walt Whitman called Emerson his "master".
Average—Good copy with tanning to edges/spine, wear to extremities, some foxing, toned pages. Binding still sound with ribbon present.
1907, English
Hardcvoer (leatherbound, gilded), 354 pages, 15.5 x 10 cm
Out of print title / used / good
Published by
George Allen / London
$25.00 - In stock - Add to cart
Lovely green leather-bound 1907 hardcover edition of John Rushkin's classic "The Elements of Drawing", published by George Allen, London. Written during the winter of 1856, the First Edition was published in 1857. ""The Elements of Drawing" has never been completely superseded, and as many readers of Mr. Ruskin's works have expressed a desire to possess the book in its old form, it is now reprinted as it stood in 1859, [with the additions and slight alterations from the first edition], and with the addition of an Index."
Can drawing — sound, honest representation of the world as the eye sees it, not tricks with the pencil or a few "effects" — be learned from a book? One of the most gifted draftsmen, who is also one of the greatest art critics and theorists of all time, answers that question with a decided "Yes." He is John Ruskin, the author of this book, a classic in art education as well as a highly effective text for the student and amateur today.
The work is in three parts, cast in the form of letters to a student, successively covering "First Practice," "Sketching from Nature," and "Colour and Composition." Starting with the bare fundamentals (what kind of drawing pen to buy; shading a square evenly), and using the extremely practical method of exercises which the student performs from the very first, Ruskin instructs, advises, guides, counsels, and anticipates problems with sensitivity. The exercises become more difficult, developing greater and greater skills until Ruskin feels his reader is ready for watercolors and finally composition, which he treats in detail as to the laws of principality, repetition, continuity, curvature, radiation, contrast, interchange, consistency, and harmony. All along the way, Ruskin explains, in plain, clear language, the artistic and craftsmanlike reasons behind his practical advice — underlying which, of course, is Ruskin's brilliant philosophy of honest, naturally observed art which has so much affected our aesthetic.
Illustrated by the author.
Average copy with tanning to edges/spine, wear to extremities, some foxing, toned pages. Binding still sound with ribbon present.
1980, English
Hardcover, 740 pages, 20.5 x 13 cm
Out of print title / used / good
Published by
Routledge & Kegan Paul / London
$60.00 - In stock - Add to cart
'A great and singular book ... for lovers of self-knowledge, of wisdom - if there be such - it seems to be the right book'—Carl Jung
1980 hardcover print of the single volume English 1968 edition published by Routledge and Keegan Paul, London and Henley, 1980, Richard Wilhelm translation. Rendered into English by Cary F. Baynes. Preface by Hellmut Wilhelm.
At least 5000 years old, the I Ching is a book of oracles containing the whole of human experience. Used for divination, it is a method of exploring the unconscious; through the symbolism of its hexagrams we are guided towards the solution of difficult problems and life situations. It can also be read as a book of wisdom revealing the laws of life to which we must all attune ourselves if we are to live in peace and harmony.
Good—VG copy with light marking to cloth/general light age/wear.
1946, English
Hardcover, 286 pages, 19 x 13.5 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Hutchinson International Authors / London
$45.00 - In stock - Add to cart
Rare first English edition of Heinrich Mann's controversial "Man of Straw", published by Hutchinson International Authors Ltd. London, 1946, originally published in the German language by Leipzig K Wolff, Berlin in 1918. Der Untertan (literally "the underling", translated into English under the titles Man of Straw, The Patrioteer, and The Loyal Subject) is one of the best known novels of German author Heinrich Mann. An indictment of the Wilhelmine regime and a warning against the joint elevation of militarism and commercial values, "Man of Straw" was beloved in the Weimar Republic and burnt by the Nazis. The title character, Diederich Hessling, a dedicated 'Untertan' in the sense of a person subservient to a monarch or prince, is an immoral man who is meant to serve as an allegory of both the reign of Kaiser Wilhelm II and German society of his time. Hessling is the embodiment of the corrupt society in which he moves and his progression through life forms the central theme of this book.
The novel was completed during the July Crisis in 1914, shortly before the outbreak of World War I. Extracts had been published in the satirical magazine Simplicissimus from 1912 onwards, causing great controversy. Mann signed a contract with the magazine Die Zeit im Bild [de] for the publication of the censored version of the novel from the beginning of 1914, but on 1 August the publication was stopped as "inappropriate". A book edition was not published until 1918 by Kurt Wolff in Leipzig.
Luiz Heinrich Mann (1871—1950), best known as simply Heinrich Mann, was a German writer known for his sociopolitical novels. From 1930 until 1933, he was president of the fine poetry division of the Prussian Academy of Arts. His fierce criticism of the growing Fascism and Nazism forced him to flee Germany after the Nazis came to power during 1933. He was the elder brother of writer Thomas Mann. Mann's essay on Émile Zola and the novel "Der Untertan" (published over the years 1912-1918) earned him much respect during the Weimar Republic, since they satirized Imperial German society. Together with Albert Einstein and other celebrities during 1932, Mann was a signatory to the "Urgent Call for Unity", asking the voters to reject the Nazis. Mann became persona non grata in Nazi Germany and left even before the Reichstag fire of 1933. He went to France where he lived in Paris and Nice. During the German occupation, he made his way to Marseille, where he was aided by Varian Fry in September 1940 to escape to Spain. Assisted by Justus Rosenberg, he and his wife Nelly Kröger, his nephew Golo Mann, Alma Mahler-Werfel and Franz Werfel hiked for six hours across the border at Port Bou. After arriving in Portugal, the group stayed in Monte Estoril, at the Grande Hotel D'Itália, between 18 Sep and 4 Oct 1940. On 4 Oct 1940, they boarded the S.S. Nea Hellas, headed for New York City. The Nazis burnt Heinrich Mann's books as "contrary to the German spirit" during the infamous book burning of May 10, 1933, which was instigated by the then Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels.
VG copy with some light sunning and marking, lacking dust jacket. From the library of Melbourne artist and academic Bernhard Sachs (1954-2022). Name penned to blank endpaper.
1988, English
Hardcover, 282 pages, 22 x 14.5 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Cambridge University Press / Cambridge
$45.00 - In stock - Add to cart
Very rare first hardcover edition of Anna K. Kuhn's book-length chronological study in English of Christa Wolf's works, published by Cambridge in 1988. It traces the development and continuity of the writer's major themes and concerns against the backdrop of her constantly evolving relationship to Marxism, and documents the rise of her feminist consciousness. It does not, however, focus only on political and feminist issues, but addresses all facets of Wolf's identity by showing how her works reflect her own self-understanding. Forced by the clash between her vision of a humane socialism and the practice of socialism she observed in the German Democratic Republic to reassess her role as a writer and critic, Wolf broke through to her unique style in The Quest for Christa T., a work initially repudiated in the GDR both for its unorthodox subject matter and for its unconventional form. Since then, Wolf has effectively challenged the restrictions placed on writers in the GDR by writing on topics such as the Nazi past (Patterns of Childhood), Romanticism (No Place on Earth), patriarchal attitudes in the GDR (Cassandra) and the Chernobyl nuclear disaster (Storfall)."
Anna K. Kuhn's research interests include women's literature, feminist theory, film studies and German cultural studies.
VG copy w/o dust jacket. Note: not the 2009 re-issue often listed as a 1988 edition.
1977, English
Softcover, 222 pages, 19 x 11.5 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / good
Published by
Seven Seas Books / Berlin
$45.00 - In stock - Add to cart
Rare first 1977 English edition of this collection of important essays by German novelist and essayist Christa Wolf (1929—2011) first published in German in 1973. Translated here by Joan Becker.
"The Reader and the Writer consists of a number of essays and prose pieces by a leading writer of the German Democratic Republic and a concluding portrait of the author by biogeneticist, Hans Stubbe. "Writing," says Christa Wolf in the title essay, "is only one operation in a more complex process to which we give the splendid name of living." Her concern for literature's function within the context of life is a theme that runs through all her pieces. Whether she is describing the simple heroism of people she has encountered or reminiscences of a darker past or a visit to a biogeneticist at his research center her sense of vitality, honest quest for answers and warmth of personality are always present. Essays on other writers include those on Bertolt Brecht, Vera Inber, Ingeborg Bachmann, Fred Wander and Anna Seghers who come alive first as people and as writers whose works express the profound commitment of their lives. Another is a sketch that recalls a date in 1948 when she read her first Marxist book, Engels on Feuerbach, in which she underlined: "In the place of moribund reality comes a new viable reality. That was the process which was to fill my life..."—publisher's blurb
Christa Wolf (1929—2011) was German novelist and essayist. She is considered one of the most important writers to emerge from the former East Germany. Wolf was a German writer of rare purity and sensitivity who grew up under nazism and became an adult under communism. Her work records the impact of these ideologies on individual lives. She was, as one critic put it, "a writer of scrupulous 'touchstone' honesty", and it is the pursuit and uncovering of truth, under the most beleaguered circumstances, that defines her.
Good—VG copy. Clear laminate peeling with age at cover edges, repaired by some pieces of tape, cover in tact with only light edge wear. Binding and interior VG throughout., a well preserved copy.
1947, English
Hardcover, 292 pages, 20 x 13 cm
Out of print title / used / good
Published by
Chatto & Windus / London
$50.00 - In stock - Add to cart
Rare 1947 hardcover edition of "Art" by Clive Bell (1881—1964), an English art critic, associated with formalism and the Bloomsbury Group. Like fellow Bloomsbury painter and critic Roger Fry, Bell adored French painting. Written by Bell in the early 20th century and first published in 1914, "Art" was the first publication of his art theory and the introduction to his concept of "significant form". The book aims to develop a comprehensive theory of aesthetics, particularly emphasizing his theory of "significant form" as the core quality that distinguishes works of art from other objects. With a focus on how art elicits aesthetic emotions, Bell's work engages with both historical and contemporary artistic movements, offering insights into the nature of art and its intrinsic value. The opening of "Art" establishes Clive Bell's intention to articulate a clear and actionable theory of aesthetics, positing that a universal understanding of art can be achieved through recognizing a shared quality he terms "significant form." He describes the pervasive belief in the distinctiveness of art, advocating for a more rational approach to aesthetic judgments, . Bell differentiates between mere decorative or descriptive works and those that provoke genuine aesthetic emotion, emphasizing the importance of form over representational accuracy. This foundational premise sets the stage for further discussion about aesthetics, art's relation to life, and the transformative power of artistic experience. Bell's work was influential amongst the Bloomsbury Group and in the development of art criticism and aesthetics in general.
Good copy with marking/foxing/tanning to cloth, endpapers, and block edge, spine sunning and light fraying.
1963, English
Softcover, 190 pages, 18.5 x 12 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / good
Published by
Jupiter Books / London
$20.00 - In stock - Add to cart
First 1963 Jupiter Books English edition, translated from French by David Watson.
This volume contains Eugene lonesco's The Killer, a play that is considered among his best and perhaps the most typical of his highly individual style, together with two shorter plays. These are The Chairs, perhaps the most famous and praised among his early work and Maid to Marry which shows lonesco in a different mood.
The last decade has seen lonesco emerge as the most famous figure in the 'theatre of the absurd' as it has come to be known. He is undoubtedly one of the most original and influential creative figures of the twentieth century and one of the half-dozen greatest living playwrights. This volume presents three of his most important and best-known plays, selected for the contrast they offer to each other.
Good—VG copy with some light cover rubbing and marking, otherwise VG.
1965, English
Softcover, 288 pages, 18.5 x 12 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Jupiter Books / London
$60.00 - In stock - Add to cart
First 1965 Jupiter Books English edition of Michel Butor's Passing Time, first published in France in 1956 as L'Emploi du temps, winning the 1957 Fénéon Prize.
"Michel Butor is perhaps the most gifted and original of that avant-garde group of young French writers who are seeking to regenerate the novel by means of a 'new realism'."—BBC
Frenchman Jacques Revel arrives in Bleston, an industrial city in the north of England—also a thinly disguised, reimagined Manchester—to begin employment as a shipping clerk. Lost under the spell of a dark, dank, labyrinthine metropolis, he endeavours to solve the puzzle of an attempted murder. We follow his erratic odyssey in diary form as a growing sense of unease envelops him and mysterious fires erupt throughout the city.
Passing Time, originally published in France as L'Emploi du temps (1956), is the great, forgotten Manchester novel, a book of enormous imagination and vitality. Melding Greek myth with Proustian method to formulate a brilliant study of alienation and the nebulousness of memory. A work that attempts to excavate Britain's proto-capitalist past and industrial forebears—interrogating their affect on modernity and the human soul.
"[Butor] is crammed, one might say, with positivity: it is the visible side of a hidden truth—once again literature defines itself by the illusion it is more than itself, the work being destined to illustrate a trans-literary order."—Roland Barthes
"Judging by this novel the experience [of working in Manchester] has marked him for life, for Passing Time is not so much a hymn, as a whole oratorio of hate. The mood suggests Kafka at his most paranoid; the method harks back to Virginia Woolf but here the stream-of-consciousness has become a turbid flood, the dark Irwell, mazy as the Ganges delta."—The Guardian
Michel Butor (1926—2016) was a French poet, novelist, teacher, essayist, art critic and translator, and one of the leading exponents of the nouveau roman (“new novel”) alongside Alain Robbe-Grillet, Claude Simon, Nathalie Sarraute, an avant-garde literary movement that emerged in France in the 1950s.
Very Good copy.
2024, English
Hardcover, 224 pages, 24.5 x 24.5 cm
Published by
Hatje Cantz / Berlin
Albertina Modern / Vienna
$90.00 - In stock - Add to cart
Kubin's eerie, unsettling illustrations reveal his preoccupation with the world's evils
For Austrian artist Alfred Kubin (1877-1959), evil was intrinsic to his life and work. After a traumatic childhood growing up in Zell am See and subsequent mental crises, he began his artistic training in Munich in 1898. He processed his nightmares and obsessions in a large number of fantastical drawings. His subjects, perpetually pessimistic, remain relevant a century later: war, famine, pestilence, death and every horror in between. Kubin had a pronounced fear of the feminine, sexuality, night time and of being at the mercy of fate, all of which visited him in uncanny dreams. For Kubin, the aesthetic of evil proved to be the antithesis of the idyll: the deliberate suppression of a hideous reality.
Drawn from the Albertina Museum's collection of over 1,800 drawings by the artist, The Aesthetic of Evil displays Kubin's grotesque vision as well as his superb draftsmanship. Amid the violent, haunting atmosphere of his graphic works it is easy to see how Kubin became trapped in his dark visions, to the point where the inexhaustible, intangible specter of evil consumed his life. Essays by Elisabeth Dutz, Natalie Lettner and Brigitte Holzinger explore Kubin's cosmos of the sinister: his personal iconography of evil fueled by his nightmares and obsessions.
Highest recommendation.
2002, English / German
Softcover, 144 pages, 29 x 22.5 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Hatje Cantz / Berlin
$80.00 - In stock - Add to cart
First edition of this major survey catalogue of the great Austrian draftsman, illustrator and author Alfred Kubin (1877–1959) from The Leopold Collection, Vienna, published by Hatje Cantz in 2002. Long out-of-print and one of the best catalogues on the master of the macabre.
Alfred Kubin, an accomplished draughtsman, was inspired by his fascination with the philosophies of Schopenhauer and Nietzsche; and influenced by the artists Goya, Klinger, Ensor, Redon, Rops and Munch. Kubin called his dreamlike imagery a vital "escape into the unreal": ghostly figures, hybrid creatures, variants of torture and self-torture, dream, vampirism, spiritualism, decadence, sex, death and birth. His extraordinary oeuvre comprises more than 20,000 drawings, a large part of it consist of pen drawings, portfolio pieces and illustrations from more than 70 books. This book features a representative selection of master sheets by the bizarre multi-talented artist.
Very Good copy with light wear.
1990, English
Softcover, 144 pages, 20.5 x 14 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
City Lights Books / San Francisco
$40.00 - Out of stock
First 1990 edition of Shock Treatment, the collection of Karen Finley’s most provocative and acclaimed performance monologues, essays, and poems, with “The Constant State of Desire,” “We Keep Our Victims Ready,” “It's Only Art,” and “The Black Sheep.” Excoriating misogyny, homophobia, abusive families, greed, and state coercion of bodies and minds, Finley holds out hope for a world informed not by hate and fear, but by truth and unconditional love.
“If you haven’t read this book yet–buy it, take it home, and read it now! This is the work that made me get off my ass and actually do something, and it will inspire you, too.”–Kathleen Hanna, singer, Bikini Kill, Le Tigre and The Julie Ruin
“Finley’s Shock Treatment is more than just ‘art.’ It remains a searing and necessary indictment of America, a call to arms, a great protest against the injustices waged on queers and women during a time in recent American history where government intervention and recognition was so desperately needed. Twenty-five years on, Finley’s work continues to shock and provoke readers and audiences, demonstrating the powerful cultural and political impact her work has had on modern American art and performance art.”–Nathan Smith, Los Angeles Review of Books
No other artist captures the drama and fragility of the AIDS era as Karen Finley does in her 1990 classic book Shock Treatment. “The Black Sheep,” “We Keep Our Victims Ready,” “I Was Never Expected to Be Talented,”–these are some of the seminal works which excoriated homophobia and misogyny at a time when artists and writers were under attack for challenging the status quo. This twenty-fifth anniversary expanded edition features a new introduction in which Finley reflects on publishing her first book as she became internationally known for being denied an NEA grant because of perceived obscenity in her work. She traces her journey from art school to burlesque gigs to the San Francisco North Beach literary scene. A new poem reminds us of Finley’s disarming ability to respond to the era’s most challenging issues with grace and humor.
KAREN FINLEY’s raw and transgressive performances have long provoked controversy and debate. Karen Finley (b. 1956) is an American performance artist, musician, poet, and educator. Her raw and transgressive performances have long provoked controversy and debate. Her performance art, recordings, and books are used as forms of activism. Her work frequently uses nudity and profanity.Finley incorporates depictions of sexuality, abuse, and disenfranchisement in her work. She is a professor at the Tisch School of the Arts at New York University.
VG copy.
2000, English
Hardcover (w. dust jacket), 142 pages, 27.5 x 22 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Scalo Publishers / New York
$45.00 - In stock - Add to cart
"Time and again in recent decades, art world denizens have celebrated or mourned the demise and subsequent resurgence of painting. In the Power of Painting invites you to take a look at painting above and beyond the rather tiresome modernist myth of the end of painting. It proposes to consider the challenges and problems facing painters in the age of photography not as an omen of painting's eventual final exhaustion, but rather as a source of its lasting vitality. In the Power of Painting traces how six seminal postwar artists—Andy Warhol, Sigmar Polke, Gerhard Richter, Cy Twombly, Brice Marden, and Ross Bleckner—developed their signature approach to painting in response to the art form's perceived crisis. The six groups of works from the Daros collection impressively demonstrate how these painters re-wrote the rules of painting, from their initial experimenting to the canvases that heralded their maturity. A handsome and splendidly reproduced book, indispensable for all those looking for ways out of the restrictions and limitations of modernist and postmodernist approaches to art."
Very Good copy. in VG dust with closed tear to upper spine, preserved under mylar wrap.
1999, English
Softcover, 96 pages, 13.5 x 21.5 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / fine
Published by
Creation Books / London
$45.00 - In stock - Add to cart
Dead Brides contains the vampire cycle of live stories, written between 1835 and 1842, which in many ways forms the nucleaus of Poe's prose work: Berenic, Montella, The Fall of the House of Usher, and The Oval Portrait. In these classic tales, Poe investigates the vampiric nature of human relationships, including love and lust both normal and incestuous, and develops his theme to observe the vampiric qualities inherent in the creative or artistic process.
Vampirism, with its terrible energy exchanges and lesions, is ultimately Poe's analogy for a love that persists beyond the grave - an all-consuming passion that knows no peace until an undead reconciliation is effected.
With a preface by Jeremy Reed, Dead Brides is illustrated by the lithographs of the Symbolist Odilon Redon, who was compelled to reproduce the most insane images from his unconcious through the inspiration of Baudelaire, Huysmans, and other dangerous writers of his age.
Near Fine copy.
1994, English
Softcover (staple-bound), 24 pages, 29 x 23 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Chisenhale Gallery / London
$50.00 - In stock - Add to cart
Scarce copy of the British catalogue published on the occasion of Chilean-Australian artist Juan Davila's solo exhibition, Juanito Laguna, at Chisenhale Gallery 16 November - 18 December 1994, travelling to Ikon Gallery in Birmingham in 1995. Heavily illustrated with exhibition views, works and details from Davila's tremendous painting installation, accompanied by texts by Guy Brett and Carlos Pérez Villalobos.
Juan Davila (b. 1946, Santiago, Chile) is a Chilean-Australian artist and writer who migrated to Melbourne, Australia, in 1974, where he lives and works. One of Australia's most distinguished artists, Juan Davila’s work always arouses controversy. In 2019 the Australian Christian Lobby called for one of his pictures to be removed from Griffith University Art Museum in Brisbane, which was part of an exhibition called The Abyss. The artwork, Holy Family, depicts Mary cradling a giant penis, in the style of the famous Michelangelo sculpture The Pieta. Over the last 3 decades, Juan Davila’s paintings have interrogated cultural, sexual and social identities, resulting in a rich, complex and provocative body of work. Davila’s work has been shaped by the political upheaval during the Pinochet dictatorship of Chile in the 1970s, conveying the violence and psychological turmoil its citizens experienced. A distrust of nationalism and state control has formed a strong thread in Davila’s work ever since, extending to stinging and often hilarious critiques of the Australian political system, aspects of government policy, and public figures in Australia and Latin America.
Published by Chisenhale, London, 1994
Paperback, colour illustrations, pp 24
Text by Guy Brett and Carlos Pérez Villalobos
Juan Davila’s work always arouses controversy. There are attacks and defences. But I would like to write about his work as one which refuses antagonistic, exclusive positions and embraces multiplicity. I do not deny that many of his images have the power to shock and disturb. Familiarity with the discourse of art, and a repertoire of distancing and calming intellectual terms I could employ, does not make these images any less affecting to me, and I imagine the response of others who do not belong to art circles. Here each viewer of the work responds involuntarily and translates their perturbation into words or actions. To me, those images of Davila’s which are cursorily or indignantly described as violent, pornographic or insulting are multiple, not only in the sense of the references they make (their representations), but in relation to the onlooker. These days we are continually exposed to shocking images, but Davila’s do not disturb in the manner of the media which bombard us daily with shattered bodies, lifeless dolls, huddled lumps, piles of dust merging with the particles of print or electronic media that bring them to us. In fact, the very opposite. His bodies are not objectified as a defined and fixed ‘other’. They have a shifting, vulnerable, libidinal quality of uncertain identity that touches us intimately. That he/she out there, that extravagant, unseemly, no-holds-barred conglomerate, is partly myself, is partly mirror, is made up of parts of you and me.
Heavily-illustrated with Chilean/Australian artist Juan Davila's paintings in full-colour, this catalogue was produced on the occasion of Davila's solo exhibition "The Moral Meaning of Wilderness" at Monash University Museum of Art | MUMA Caulfield campus, 4 August - 1 October 2011. Includes essays by Dr. Kate Briggs, and a conversation with Juan Davila.
The Moral Meaning of Wilderness features recent work by Juan Davila, one of Australia’s most distinguished artists. The exhibition sees Davila turn to the genres of landscape and history painting, at a time when the environment is as much a political as a cultural consideration. With technical virtuosity, Davila’s striking representations of nature achieve monumental significance, depicting beauty and emotion while addressing modern society’s ambivalence to nature and increasing consumerism.
The Moral Meaning of Wilderness represents a radical shift in Davila’s practice, whilst continuing to explore art’s relationship to nature, politics, identity and subjectivity in our post-industrial age. Davila pursues his exploration of the role of art as a means of social, cultural and political analysis. While many contemporary artists turned away from representation of the landscape, due to its perceived allegiance to outmoded forms of national identity and representation, Davila has recently sought to revisit and reconsider our surroundings au natural.
His paintings are, at first view, striking representations of nature. The paintings, created since 2003, are undertaken en plain air, a pre-modern technique based on speed of execution in situ, and the use of large scale canvases characteristic of history painting. He has also employed other techniques such as studio painting and representations of the landscape with reference to the sublime, the historical, memory and modernity.
Presented in association with Drill Hall Gallery, The Australian National University, and Griffith University Art Gallery.
1993, English
Softcover, 246 pages, 21 x 13.5 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Museum of Contemporary Art / Sydney
$45.00 - In stock - Add to cart
Rare 1993 exhibition book published to accompany "La Cita Transcultural: Art from Latin America", a curatorial project by Nelly Richard, 9 March – 13 June 1993, Museum of Contemporary Art Australia (MCA) Sydney, featuring the work of Luis F Benedit, Juan Davila, Eugenio Dittborn, Arturo Duclos, Flavio Garciandia and the essays of Nestor Garcia Canclini, Ticio Escobar, Celeste Olalquiaga, Nelly Richard, Osvaldo Sanchez.
This major exhibition of artists from Latin America questioned the nostalgic and stereotypical view of Latin America as an exotic and primitive culture. It set up a dialogue between five artists and five authors, emphasising the dislocation, appropriation and reconversion of multiple cultural and artistic references. Through the development of these themes, hybrid identities, signs and cultures were allowed to emerge in the artists’ practice, reflecting the authors’ provisional relationships with language and identity.
This exhibition was the outcome of a dialogue between critic Nelly Richard and artist Juan Davila that began in the early 1980s. Davila was based in Melbourne, but continued to be involved with and explore political and cultural issues in his home country of Chile. Davila and Richard’s discussions evolved from the conflicts and similarities between these greatly divergent cultures with different indigenous and colonial histories. It also considered the larger project of developing a post-colonial understanding of art across a diversity of contexts and regions, acknowledging the heterogeneity of all culture and the complex relationships between centre and periphery.
La Cita Transcultural aimed to initiate an ongoing dialogue and exchange with artists in Chile, Cuba, Argentina and other countries in Latin America.
Very Good copy with residue of old bookshop sticker to back cover. Previous owner's name to title page, Australian curator/author Linda Michael.
2023, English
Softcover, 304 pages, 22.86 x 15.24 cm
Published by
Latin American Research Commons / Mountain View
$49.00 - In stock - Add to cart
Diamela Eltit's literary work emerged on the Chilean cultural scene in the 1980s when the Pinochet regime (1973-1990) had consolidated its project of extermination, censorship, and neoliberal shock therapy. Forced to write in a suffocating atmosphere of restriction and violence, Eltit boldly cultivated a radical, insurrectional poetics aimed at questioning the very underpinnings of authoritarian power and discourse.
While Eltit's novels, published between 1983 and the present, provide a remarkable vision of Chile that has evolved over the past decades, she offers a different vantage point through her prolific and rigorous cultivation of literary essays.
Translated for the first time into English, this collection of Eltit's essays allows readers to delve into her key concerns as a writer and intellectual: the neoliberal marketplace; the marginalization of bodies in society; questions of gender and power; struggles for memory, truth, and justice after dictatorship; and the ever-complex relationships among politics, ethics, and aesthetics.
Diamela Eltit (Santiago de Chile, 1947) is a Chilean writer and university professor. She is a recipient of the National Prize for Literature.
1993, Japanese
Hardcover (w. dust jacket), 100 pages, 31 x 23 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Futami Shobo / Japan
$150.00 - Out of stock
Fetish! from 1993, a rare over-sized hardcover photo collection published in Japan by Futami to celebrate a "new radical eros" compiling the work "five ultra-inspired fetish/bondage photographers from Europe and the United States". Cover-to-cover full-bleed photography of Wolfgang Eichler, Robert Chouraqui, Eric Kroll, Karo, John Morrison.
Very Good—Fine copy in Vey Good—Fine DJ with obi strip (some small tears, creases, tanning to obi)
1997, English
Hardcover (w. dust jacket), 198 pages, 33 x 27 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Taschen / Cologne
$60.00 - Out of stock
First 1997 over-sized hardcover edition of "Beauty Parade" by American fetish photographer, erotica historian, photojournalist, and book editor, Eric Kroll (b. 1946, New York). Beauty Parade is an incredible collection of his 1990's erotic photographs, ranking among the absolute classics of fetishistic imagery. Rising from the downtown New York art and fashion scene of the 1970s and 80s, shooting for Elle Magazine, Vogue, The New York Times and Der Spiegel, Kroll published his first book, "Sex Objects" in 1976 with a grant from the New York State Council of the Arts, a book documenting sex workers across America. "Beauty Parade" follows on from his best-seller "Fetish Girls" (1994), full of powerful women and drawing one into a world of bizarre fantasies and sadomasochistic desires while retaining a sense of irony and surreal humour. Many of Kroll's photographs refer to and pay homage to his predecessors Weegee and Bunny Yeager as well as Eric Stanton and John Willie, while being grounded in the conceptual influences of artists such as Man Ray, and Marcel Duchamp. Text in English, German and French. Wonderful introduction by Kroll.
Very Good copy in VG dust jacket, light wear.
1915, English
Hardcover, 526 pages, 19 x 12.2 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / good
Published by
Methuen & Co. / London
$30.00 - In stock - Add to cart
First 1915 hardcover edition of Arnold Bennett's These Twain, the third in a trilogy of books following Edwin Clayhanger from leaving school, through the next 25-30 years of his life. After "Clayhanger" and "Hilda Lessways", this book follows the early married life of Edwin and Hilda.
Good copy with sunning to cloth spine, tanning/foxing/dustiness to block edges and early pages, cloth light marking, dulling to gild, but sound bind/hinges and overall well kept.
1996, English
Softcover, 14 x 21.5 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Creation Books / London
Velvet Publications / London
$30.00 - In stock - Add to cart
Out-of-print English edition of the erotic masterpiece Philosophy in the Bedroom (La philosophie dans le boudoir), a 1795 book by the Marquis de Sade written in the form of a dramatic dialogue. Though initially considered a work of pornography, the book has come to be considered a socio-political drama and perhaps the most representative of the Marquis de Sade's work and philosophy on religion and morality.
DISCIPLINE
In the boudoir of a sequestered château, a young virgin is ruthlessly schooled in evil. Indoctrinated by her amoral tutors in the ways of sexual perversion, fornication, murder, incest, atheism and wanton self-gratification, she takes part with growing abandon in a series of violent erotic orgies which culminates with the flagellation and torture of her own mother - her final act of liberation.
Philosophy In The Boudoir is the most concise representative text out of all the Marquis de Sade's works, containing his notorious doctrine of libertinage expounded in full, coupled with liberal doses of unbridled eroticism, cruelty and violent sexuality. The renegade philosophies put forward here would later rank amongst the main cornerstones of André Breton's Surrealist manifesto.
This seminal text is presented in a new, modern and authentic translation by Meredith X, herself a former dominatrix descended of Hungarian aristocracy.
The Marquis de Sade (1740 - 1814) was a self-proclaimed libertine. His doctrine of libertinage as expounded in "Philosophy in the Boudoir" - his masterpiece - now reads like a blueprint for those manifestos drawn up will over a century later by Andre Breton; indeed "Philosophy in the Boudoir" has often been regarded as being amongst the first Surrealist texts - the others also being works by De Sade. In the course of this book - erotic, comical, and terrifyingly bleak in turn - he contrives to heap scorn on Christianity, God, and the Church, religion in general, history, marriage and the nuclear family, morality, all love other than sexual love, faith, hope and charity, parenthood, vaginal sex; i.e. all forms of humanity and virtue. At the same time, he advocates atheism, murder and reflexive crimes, torture, cruelty, abortion, all kind of sexual perversion, incest, adultery, self-abuse, ad infinitum; his sexually violent visions mark him as a precursor of modern psychology.
The modern imagination starts here.
VG copy with light wear.
1985, Japanese
Softcover, 246 pages, 29.7 x 21 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / good
Published by
Camera Mainichi and The Mainichi Graphic / Japan
$120.00 $80.00 - In stock - Add to cart
First printing of NEW NUDE 1, published in Japan in 1985 as part of a unique and short-lived book series published by the mighty Camera Mainchi house, showcasing leading photographers and artists on the subject of the nude. Opening with illustrated essays by photo critic Kōtarō Iizawa and others, this lovely volume, printed in Japan, presents works generously and sympathetically presented in colour and black-and-white across various paper-stocks. Includes the work of Joyce Baronio, Jan Saudek, Irina Ionesco, Bill Brandt, Robert Mapplethorpe, Helmut Newton, Man Ray, Dieter Schmitz, Diana Blok, Ralph Gibson, Marcus Leatherdale, Arthur Tress, Christian Vogt, and many others.
Good-VG copy with light general wear/tanning, foxing to inside of covers.