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
Theory / Essay
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Eros
LGBTQ+
Fiction / Poetry
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Curatorial
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Posters / Ephemera / Discs
Signed Books
World Food Books Gift Voucher
World Food Book Bag
Australian Art
Australian Photography
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Minimal Art
Dada
'Pataphysics / Oulipo
Fluxus
Concrete Poetry
Pop Art
Surrealism
Arte Povera
Arte Informale / Haute Pâte / Tachism
Nouveau Réalisme / Zero / Kinetic
Situationism / Lettrism
Collage / Mail Art / Xerox Art
Art Brut / Folk / Visionary / Fantastic
Illustration / Graphic Art / Bandes Dessinées
Furniture
Italian Radical Design / Postmodernism
Textiles
Ceramics / Glass
Counterculture
Protest / Revolt
Anarchism
Socialism / Communism / Capitalism
Literary Theory / Semiotics / Language
Feminism
Fetishism / BDSM
Drugs / Psychedelia
Crime / Violence
Animal Rights / Veganism
Occult / Esoterica
Ecology / Earth / Alternative Living
Whole Earth / Crafts
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.
1980, Japanese
Softcover, 200 pages (plus poster insert), 21 x 15 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Night Vision / Japan
$80.00 - Out of stock
First 1980 edition of cult Japanese underground magazine Night Vision, a special edition dedicated to the work of German artist Hans Bellmer (1902-1975). ("the doll = the human form - the body"). Nowhere in the world has Bellmer's "Die Puppe" has such a lasting effect than in Japan. This volume compiles many of the artist's texts, translated to Japanese, with many illustrations of Bellmer's graphic works, drawings nad photography, alongside contributions by Miyoko Nakano, Yuichi Konno, Shuzo Takiguchi, Hideo Nakai and others. This book also comes with an inserted copy of Japanese doll artist Nori Doi's four-fold poster
German artist Hans Bellmer (1902-1975) was one of the most subversive artists associated with Surrealism, famous--notorious, even--for his erotic engravings, objects and photographs. Best known for the life-sized pubescent female dolls he produced in the mid-1930s. "Bellmer was born in the city of Kattowitz, then part of the German Empire (now Katowice, Poland). Up until 1926, he'd been working as a draftsman for his own advertising company. He initiated his doll project to oppose the fascism of the Nazi Party by declaring that he would make no work that would support the new German state. Represented by mutated forms and unconventional poses, his dolls were directed specifically at the cult of the perfect body then prominent in Germany. Bellmer was influenced in his choice of art form by reading the published letters of Oskar Kokoschka (Der Fetisch, 1925)."
Very Good copy.
unknown, English
Softcover (screw post binding), 108 pages, 28 x 21.5 cm
Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
? / ?
$140.00 - In stock - Add to cart
Super rare production storyboard bootleg publication for the original 1984 Blade Runner, illustrated throughout by Sherman Labby with typed and handwritten notes, original notes from the production team and bearing the photocopied signature of production manager John W. Rogers. These storyboards were confidential and not allowed to be re-xeroxed, but leaked copies were bootlegged and leaked into fan market places. An incredible insight into the making of one of the greatest films of all time.
Sherman Labby (1929—1998) was a legendary American storyboard artist and production illustrator. After many years as a magazine illustrator, and like many in his craft, his first motion-picture work was in animation at studios such as Filmation, Hanna-Barbera, and Marvel. He worked as a storyboard artist on such shows as Star Trek: The Animated Series, Groovie Goolies, The Batman/Superman Hour, The New Adventures of Batman, The New Adventures of Gilligan, The Secret Lives of Waldo Kitty, and Will the Real Jerry Lewis Please Sit Down, and the animated TV series of Journey to the Center of the Earth, Fantastic Voyage, and Godzilla. His best-known live-action credits include Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1978), The Wanderers, The Incredible Shrinking Woman, Blade Runner, 2010, The Witches of Eastwick, Broadcast News, Lethal Weapon 2, The War of the Roses, Thelma & Louise, Bram Stoker's Dracula, Made in America, Free Willy, The Horse Whisperer, and What Dreams May Come.
Near Fine copy.
2000, English
Hardcover (w. dust jacket), 72 pages, 24 x 21 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Titan Books / London
$300.00 - Out of stock
Super collectible first, limited edition hardcover edition of the amazing "Blade Runner : The Inside Story," the first extensively illustrated book about the most influential sci-fi film ever made, published by the mighty Cinefex and Titan Books in 2000.
In 1982, to coincide with Blade Runner's original release, the highly respected movie magazine Cinefex devoted an entire, extended issue to the design and special effects of Ridley Scott's sci-fi masterpiece. Selling out immediately and in constant demand since, Cinefex and Titan Books brought this classic back into print, in an expanded, remastered hardcover edition in 2000. Not surprisingly, this first clothbound book edition, which was published in a limited edition, also went out of print quickly and has become a collectors item itself. It was later re-issued again in the more common 2003 edition.
Described as 'the single most comprehensive examination of Blade Runner's special effects', this must-have book contains scores of images not available elsewhere, as well as authoritative text, containing in-depth, exclusive interviews with director Ridley Scott, special effects supervisor Douglas Trumbull, legendary futurist/designer Syd Mead and dozens of other artists who contributed to this landmark film. This book is the definitive guide to the creation of Bladerunner's unsurpassed vision of the future, and a must for any fan.
Don Shay is the founder and publisher of Cinefex magazine.
Very Good copy in Very Good dust jacket with tanning and light wear.
2009, English
Softcover, 912 pages, 13.84 x 20.96 cm
Published by
Picador / USA
$48.00 - Out of stock
The posthumous masterwork from "one of the greatest and most influential modern writers”—James Wood, The New York Times Book Review
Composed in the last years of Roberto Bolaño's life, 2666 was greeted across Europe and Latin America as his highest achievement, surpassing even his previous work in its strangeness, beauty, and scope. Its throng of unforgettable characters includes academics and convicts, an American sportswriter, an elusive German novelist, and a teenage student and her widowed, mentally unstable father. Their lives intersect in the urban sprawl of SantaTeresa—a fictional Juárez—on the U.S.-Mexico border, where hundreds of young factory workers, in the novel as in life, have disappeared.
Translated from the Spanish by Natasha Wimmer.
2008, English
Softcover, 656 pages, 13.84 x 20.96 cm
Published by
Picador / USA
$44.00 - Out of stock
The Savage Detectives is an exuberant, raunchy, wildly inventive, and ambitious novel from one of the greatest Latin American authors of our age.
New Year's Eve, 1975: Arturo Belano and Ulises Lima, founders of the visceral realist movement in poetry, leave Mexico City in a borrowed white Impala. Their quest: to track down the obscure, vanished poet Cesárea Tinajero. A violent showdown in the Sonora desert turns search to flight; twenty years later Belano and Lima are still on the run.
The explosive first long work by "the most exciting writer to come from south of the Rio Grande in a long time" (Ilan Stavans, Los Angeles Times), The Savage Detectives follows Belano and Lima through the eyes of the people whose paths they cross in Central America, Europe, Israel, and West Africa. This chorus includes the muses of visceral realism, the beautiful Font sisters; their father, an architect interned in a Mexico City asylum; a sensitive young follower of Octavio Paz; a foul-mouthed American graduate student; a French girl with a taste for the Marquis de Sade; the great-granddaughter of Leon Trotsky; a Chilean stowaway with a mystical gift for numbers; the anorexic heiress to a Mexican underwear empire; an Argentinian photojournalist in Angola; and assorted hangers-on, detractors, critics, lovers, employers, vagabonds, real-life literary figures, and random acquaintances.
A polymathic descendant of Borges and Pynchon, Roberto Bolaño traces the hidden connection between literature and violence in a world where national boundaries are fluid and death lurks in the shadow of the avant-garde. The Savage Detectives is a dazzling original, the first great Latin American novel of the twenty-first century.
Translated by Natasha Wimmer.
2016/2017, Japanese
2 softcover publications (staple-bound), 26 x 18 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Vanilla Gallery / Tokyo
$120.00 - Out of stock
Rare 2 volume catalogue from the first exhibitions of Serial Killer Art at Vanilla Gallery, Ginza, Tokyo, in 2016 and 2017, from the HN collection. From John Wayne Gacy, Ed Gein, Ted Bundy, Henry Lee Lucas, and Ronnie Clay, these exhibitions featured artworks, self-portraits, letters, and documents of serial killers in Europe and America whose heinous personalities and numerous crimes have served as models for novels and films, becoming known the world over.
"The world portrayed by murderers who committed crimes that make you want to look away is like a dreadful, lonely, impermanent feeling that looks into the depths of the viewer's heart, and is like when confronted with something unknown. It's full of tension."
Collected by Mr. HN (H. Nakajima), over 200 items were displayed in Tokyo on the occasion of these exhibits, with these pamphlets available at the exhibitions only. Illustrated with examples throughout in colour and b/w, texts in Japanese by film critic Kiichirō Yanashita, Orihara Ichi, and collector/curator H. Nakajima.
Killers included in the exhibitions: John Wayne Gacy, Henry Lee Lucas, Peter Sutcliffe, Danny Rowling, Keith Jasperson, James Earl Ray, Thomas Pitera, Henry Hill, Nicholas Crowe, Dorothy Puente, Haddon Clarke, Gerald Shaffer, Anthony Shore, James Munro, Gary Ray Balls, Hudson Graham, Carroll Bundy, Otis Toole, Charles Watson, Lawrence Bittaker, Herbert Mullin, Arthur Shawcross, Rod Ferrell, Ted Bundy, Jim Jones, Christa Pike, Harvard Baumeister, David Berkowitz, Richard Ramirez, Ronnie Clay, Irene Wuornos, Wayne Low, Dana Sue Gray, Roy Norris, Kenneth Bianchi, Michael Alig, Veronica Compton, Joe Roy Metheny, Gary Heidnik, Charles Manson, Jeremy Jones, Jack Trawick, Carl Drew, Wayne Harton, Rosemary West, Theodore Kaczynski, Thomas Heyer, Ed Gein, Ferrell Mykers, Douglas Clark, Richard Clarey, Ian Brady, Jack Kevorkian, Bonnie & Clyde, Philip Jacobinski, Daniel Siebert, Tommy Lynn Sells.
Very Good with only light wear.
1988, English
Softcover, 528 pages, 22.9 x 14.9 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Routledge / London
$60.00 - Out of stock
Sigmund Freud evolved his theories throughout his lifetime. This entailed many revisions and changes which he himself never tried to standardize rigidly into a definitive conceptual system. The need for some sort of a reliable guide which would spell out both the pattern of the evolution of Freud's thinking, as well as establish its inherent logic, was felt for a long time by both scholars and students of psychoanalysis.
Drs. Laplanche and Pontalis of the Association Psychoanalytique de France succeeded admirably in providing a dictionary of Freud's concepts which is more than a compilation of mere definitions. After many years of creative and industrious research, they were able to give an authentic account of the evolution of each concept with pertinent supporting texts from Freud's own writing (in the Standard Edition translation), and thus have endowed us with an instrument for work and research which is characterized by its thoroughness, exactitude and lack of prejudice towards dogma.
The Language of Psychoanalysis has already established itself as a classic, and will long continue to be indispensible guide to psychoanalytic vocabulary for both student and research-worker in psychoanalysis.
Jean Laplanche (1924 – 2012) was described by the journal Radical Philosophy as “the most original and philosophically informed psychoanalytic theorist of his day.” Studying philosophy under Hyppolite, Bachelard, and Merleau-Ponty, he became an active member of the French Resistance under the Vichy regime. Under the influence (and treatment) of Jacques Lacan, Laplanche came to earn a doctorate in medicine and was certified as a psychoanalyst. He eventually broke ties with Lacan and began regularly publishing influential contributions to psychoanalytic theory, his first volume appearing in 1961. In 1967 he published, with his colleague J.-B. Pontalis, the celebrated encyclopaedia The Language of Psychoanalysis. A member of the International Psychoanalytical Association, co-founder of the Association Psychanalytique de France, emeritus professor and founder of the Center for Psychoanalytic Research at the Université de Paris VII, and assistant professor at the Sorbonne, he also oversaw, as scientific director, the translation of Freud’s complete oeuvre into French for the Presses Universitaires de France.
VG copy, with light cover/corner wear.
1987, English
Softcover, 20.5 x 13 cm
Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Ark / London
$35.00 - Out of stock
Rare 1987 ARK English edition of Eros and Civilization: A Philosophical Inquiry into Freud, a classic work by Herbert Marcuse that takes as his starting point Freud's statement that civilization is based on the permanent subjugation of the human instincts, his reconstruction of the prehistory of mankind - to an interpretation of the basic trends of western civilization, stressing the philosophical and sociological implications.
Herbert Marcuse — German-Jewish philosopher, political theorist and sociologist, and a member of the Frankfurt School. Celebrated as the "Father of the New Left", his best known works are Eros and Civilization, One-Dimensional Man and The Aesthetic Dimension. Marcuse was a major intellectual influence on the New Left and student movements of the 1960s.
Very Good copy, light wear, tanning.
1969, English
Softcover (folded publication), 20 pages, 21.5 x 17 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Philip N. West / Carlton
$100.00 - In stock - Add to cart
Very rare copy of the mighty Underground, published and edited by Philip N. West of Australian Free Press. This issue (Volume 2, Number 2), published in Carlton in 1969. An unyielding anti-Vietnam war, anti-state/pig corruption, pro-freedom of expression and opinion publication that directly reports on anti-dissent government repression, the jailing, sentencing, and fining of poets, protestors, and activists in Melbourne, suspicious deaths, Australian politics, human-rights, and other "Private Eye" matters concerning the abuses of power. Here we have reports on anti-conscription arrests, including re-print of Victorian Police offence notice for the distribution of "Why Register for National Service" pamphlet, an introduction and guide to Australian Free Universities, "Don't Go: The Ballad of Ho Chang by I. Lerik (an anti-Vietnam war piece), "how-to" chemical fire bottles, an Intelligent Guide to Sexual Contraception (anti-abortion laws and luxury taxes and profiteering on contraceptives), The League for Spiritual Discovery, poetry, a cartoon by the legendary Ron Cobb, and much more. A wonderful historical piece of Australian counterculture publishing from the anti-war movement.
Philip West (1947-1994) was most likely one of the first underground countercultural journalists in Australia. He published Psychedelic Stir, Underground and similar small magazines and newsletters from 1967, contributed to Revolution "Australia's First Rock Magazine", and others, reporting on subjects such as the Vietnam War protest movements and marijuana laws. He later edited the Alternate News Service both in Australia and from overseas as well as being the first publisher to document the Pentagon Papers controversy in book form. In the last years he worked as a night news editor at SBS dealing with international stories.
Very Good copy with light ageing, softening to edges.
1969, English
Softcover (folded pamphlet), 16 pages, 26 x 10.5 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Philip N. West / Carlton
$90.00 - In stock - Add to cart
Very rare copy of the mighty Underground, published and edited by Philip N. West of Australian Free Press. This issue (Volume 2, Number 5), published in Carlton on March 21, 1969, was prepared "while awaiting the police to take us away at Melbourne University", jailed for non-payment of fines arising out of leaflet distribution. An unyielding anti-Vietnam war, anti-state/pig corruption, pro-freedom of expression and opinion publication that directly reports on anti-dissent government repression, the jailing, sentencing, and fining of poets, protestors, and activists in Melbourne, suspicious deaths, Australian politics, human-rights, and other "Private Eye" matters concerning the abuses of power. Free-Zarb!
A wonderful historical piece of Australian counterculture publishing from the anti-war movement.
Philip West (1947-1994) was most likely one of the first underground countercultural journalists in Australia. He published Psychedelic Stir, Underground and similar small magazines and newsletters from 1967, contributed to Revolution "Australia's First Rock Magazine", and others, reporting on subjects such as the Vietnam War protest movements and marijuana laws. He later edited the Alternate News Service both in Australia and from overseas as well as being the first publisher to document the Pentagon Papers controversy in book form. In the last years he worked as a night news editor at SBS dealing with international stories.
Very Good copy with light ageing, softening to edges.
1986, English
Softcover, 484 pages, 22 x 13 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Lawrence and Wishart / London
$45.00 - Out of stock
First English 1986 edition of Selections from the Prison Notebooks. Antonio Gramsci (1891-1937) is widely celebrated as the most original political thinker in Western Marxism and an all-around outstanding intellectual figure. Arrested and imprisoned by the Italian Fascist regime in 1926, Gramsci died before fully regaining his freedom. Nevertheless, in his prison notebooks, he recorded thousands of brilliant reflections on an extraordinary range of subjects, establishing an enduring intellectual legacy.
Antonio Francesco Gramsci (1891—1937) was an Italian Marxist philosopher, journalist, linguist, writer, and politician. He wrote on philosophy, political theory, sociology, history, and linguistics. He was a founding member and one-time leader of the Italian Communist Party.
Very Good copy.
1971, English
Hardcover (w. dust jacket), 268 pages, 29.5 x 21.5 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Praeger Publishers Inc. / New York
$80.00 - Out of stock
First 1971 clothbound hardcover edition of the first major English-language monograph on Argentinian artist Lucio Fontana (1899–1968), published two years after his death. Profusely illustrated with texts by Italian writer and art critic Guido Ballo (1914-2010), this volume surveys Fontana's works across painting (many of his Concetti Spaziale examples), sculpture, drawing, installation and graphic work, encompassing his Spatialism manifesto, along with biographic details, bibliography, photographs documenting the life and work of the great artist.
Lucio Fontana (1899–1968) is one the most innovative artists of the 20th century. A major figure of postwar European art and a binational resident of Argentina and Italy, Fontana blurred numerous boundaries in his life and art, crossing borders both literally and figuratively. The founder of Spatialism, a movement focused on the spatial qualities of sculpture and paintings with the goal of breaking through the two-dimensionality of the traditional picture plane, he pushed the painterly into the sculptural and redefined the relationship between the arts. He was best known for his monochrome canvases known as Concetti Spaziale that he would cut or puncture, leaving distinctive gaping slash marks and holes that imbued the finished work with an almost violent energy. In his seminal writing, White Manifesto (1946), the artist traced ideas for creating a new medium that blended architecture, painting, and sculpture. “I do not want to make a painting; I want to open up space, create a new dimension, tie in the cosmos, as it endlessly expands beyond the confining plane of the picture,” he said of his work. Fontana had widespread impact on the following generation of artists, who began to use installation media more aggressively to address the dynamics of space in gallery environments and Land Art. Fontana died on September 7, 1968 in Varese, Italy at the age of 69, just two years after being awarded the Grand Prize for painting at the Venice Biennale.
Very Good copy in VG dust jacket. All near Fine.
1984, Lithuanian / Russian / English / French / German
Hardcover (w. dust jacket), 310 pages, 33 x 25 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Vaga / Vilnius
$100.00 - Out of stock
First 1984 edition of this wonderful, comprehensive monograph published by Leidykla Vaga in Vilnius on the work of fin de siècle composer, artist and writer Mikalojus Konstantinas Čiurlionis. Profusely illustrated with Čiurlionis' visionary musical landscape paintings, with accompanying texts by Antanas Gedminas, Jonas Kuzminskis and Pranas Gudynas in Lithuanian, Russian, English, French and German.
Mikalojus Konstantinas Čiurlionis (1875 – 1911) was a Lithuanian composer, painter and writer in Polish. Čiurlionis contributed to symbolism and art nouveau, and was representative of the fin de siècle epoch. He has been considered one of the pioneers of abstract art in Europe. During his short life, he composed about 400 pieces of music and created about 300 paintings, as well as many literary works and poems. His works have had a profound influence on modern Lithuanian culture. His pictures often have a philosophical background. The influence of music on painting is striking: Čiurlionis created several cycles of paintings, which he called "sonatas" and whose individual pictures he titled "allegro", "andante" and the like. The individual images are based on the character of the respective musical performance instructions: an Andante, for example, conveys a rather calm atmosphere. Some paintings even bear the title "Fuge". This synthesis of music and painting is unique in terms of art history.
Very Good copy in VG dust jacket.
1951, German
Softcover, 98 pages, 27.5 x 20 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Self Published / Brühl
$70.00 - Out of stock
Lovely publication produced in 1951 on the occasion of a special exhibition of Max Ernst held in the Augustusburg Castle, organised by Karl Seibt and the city of Brühl in Germany on the 60th birthday of the artist. Illustrated throughout with many fine examples of Ernst's paintings, collages, frottages, prints and drawings, alongside two essays by Ernst (including "What is Surrealism?"), plus writings on Ernst by fellow Surrealist artists and writers Andre Breton, Nicolas Calas, Hans Arp, and Paul Eluard, amongst others, essay by Lothar Pretzell. All texts in German.
Good-Very Good copy with general wear, tanning.
1997, Japanese
Softcover (w. dust jacket), 440 pages, 15 x 11 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Kyoto Shoin / Tokyo
$70.00 - Out of stock
First 1997 edition of the hefty 440-page pocket version of what is now one of the truely iconic interior "design" books - Tokyo Style. Over a period of two years, Japanese writer-photographer Kyoichi Tsuzuki visited apartments, condos and suburban homes in Tokyo, and documented exactly what he saw in colour photography. First published in 1993 in the larger format, Tokyo Style is a collection of these photographs along with Tsuzuki's texts. Divided into eight sections - Beauty in Chaos, The Fancy Fetish, Artsy Pads, The Traditional Touch, Monomaniacs, Kiddie Kingdoms, Inertial Living and Hermitages - the book shows readers a demystified Tokyo and the ordinary lifestyles of the Tokyo people. No wide-angles or post-production here, just the most amazing compendium of hundreds of tiny Tokyo living spaces, no two alike. Somehow this print format seems all the more appropriate!
Reprinted many times since, this is the first edition of this format.
Very Good. Good dust jacket with light wear to edges, spine.
1972, English
Softcover, unpaginated, 27.5 x 21 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / good
Published by
Playboy Press / Chicago
$180.00 - In stock - Add to cart
"Playboy's Vargas Girls in full color — fifty years of beauty by Playboy's favorite delineator of the american girl"
First edition of this now rare first book collection of Alberto Vargas (1896—1982), the celebrated Peruvian-American painter of pin-up girls, published by Playboy Press in 1972. Profusely illustrated, this is the only collection of Vargas' pin-up paintings for Playboy—reproducing 99 in all, as full-page or double-page spreads, exactly as published in Playboy magazine 1962—1972. Also includes 17 further examples of his earlier work spanning the 1920s—1950s.
Vargas, often considered one of the most famous of the pin-up artists, made his name in the 1940s as the creator of iconic World War-II era pin-ups for Esquire magazine known as "Vargas Girls." Between 1940 and 1946 Vargas produced 180 paintings for the magazine. He would leave Esquire in 1946, striking for better compensation, and a four year lawsuit ensued over the use of his "Varga" signature. He struggled financially until 1959 when Hugh Hefner, who was formerly a copywriter for Esquire and quit after he was denied a $5 raise, signed him up to create artwork for his nascent Playboy magazine. Over the next 16 years Vargas produced 152 paintings for the magazine. His career flourished and he had major exhibitions of his work all over the world.
Good—VG copy with minor cover edge/corner wear/marking to glossy black boards.
1976, French
Softcover, 360 pages, 27 x 21 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Obliques / Paris
$100.00 - Out of stock
The landmark, over-sized Obliques special double issue dedicated to Antonin Artaud, published in Paris in 1976. The French literary journal Obliques (who published special issues on Bellmer, Kafka, Klossowski, Vian, Sartre, Robbe-Grillet, Strindberg, Genet, Female Surrealists...) published this extensive study and portrait of the extreme and provocative life of Antonin Artaud (1896—1948), French writer, poet, dramatist, artist, essayist, actor, theatre director and major figure of the European avant-garde. From his volatile alliance with the Surrealist movement to his legendary Theatre of Cruelty, this heavily illustrated (including many photographs and Artaud's drawings) documents his writings, letters and artworks, his cinema, theatre and esotericism, biography and bibliography, with contributions by Michel Sicard, Michel Camus,
Jerome Peignot, Guy Rosolato, Jean Domeneghini, Jerome Prieur, Jean Cocteau, Françoise Buisson, Alfred Jarry, Marc Fumaroli, Jean Thibaudeau, Alain Jouffroy, Jean-Michel Heimonet, Jean-Paul Morel, Pierre Courtens, Georges-Arthur Goldschmidt, Charles Bachat, Ronald Hayman, Jacques Prevel, Anie Besnard, Bruno Chabert, Claude Reichler, Florence De Meredieu, Daniel Giraud, Camille Bryen, J.M.G. Le Clezio, Jacques Derrida, Gilles Deleuze, Henri Thomas, Philippe Sollers, Paule Thevenin, Camille Bryen, Michel Butor, Jean-Claude Grosjean, Gerard Mace, Jose Quiroga, Roger Caillois, and more. Texts in French.
was the first publisher to present a comprehensive list of the literary and plastic production of Surrealist women with this gorgeous volume, long before the works of surrealist women, as a corpus, began to be more widely studied in the 1980s. Featuring well known names, but also many female artists neglected and seldom mentioned in the recent (strangely narrow-minded) re-evaluation of this period, this beautifully printed issue of Obliques is an incredibly valuable reference on a movement that was decidedly ‘feminine’. Edited by Roger Borderie with Michel Camus, it features profiles on the work and writing of Belen, Maya Bell, Bona, Leonora Carrington, Lise Deharme, Jacqueline Duprey, Aube Elléouët, Josette Exandier, Leonor Fini, Aline Gagnaire, Giovanna, Jane Graverol, Marianne Van Hirtum, Rozeta Hum, Valentine Hugo, Karskaya, Greta Knutson, Laure, Gina Pane, Annie Lebrun, Georgette Magritte, Manina, Joyce Mansour, Nora Mitrani, Meret Oppenheim, Mimi Parent, Valentine Penrose, Gisele Prassinos, Karina Raeck, Remedios Varo, Sibylle Ruppert, Colette Thomas, Toyen, Isabelle Waldberg, Unica Zurn, Cécile Reims, Dorothea Tanning, Greta Knutson, and more. Additional texts and works by Beatrice Didier, Cécile Reims, Michel Butor, Michel Sicard, Andre Pieyre De Mandiargues, Jean Roudaut, Rene Micha, Gerard Legrand, Jean Pfeiffer, Jacques Laurans, Michel Carassou, Annie Lebrun, Charles Bachat, Olivier Milliard, Robert Brechon, Jules Michelet, Jerome Prieur, Xaviere Gauthier, Elsa Thoresen Gouveia, plus a gallery by Titi Parant and Henri Maccheroni's Portraits Corrigés. Profusely illustrated with artworks, mostly in b/w with some colour sections.
Very Good copy of the rarer hardcover edition in VG dust jacket with signs of ageing and some wear/small tears
1977, French
Hardcover (w. dust jacket), 352 pages, 28 x 22 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Obliques / Paris
$180.00 - Out of stock
The landmark, over-sized Obliques special double issue, "La Femme Surréaliste", published in Paris in 1977. The French literary journal Obliques (who published special issues on Artaud, Bellmer, Kafka, Klossowski, Vian, Sartre, Robbe-Grillet, Strindberg, Genet...) was the first publisher to present a comprehensive list of the literary and plastic production of Surrealist women with this gorgeous volume, long before the works of surrealist women, as a corpus, began to be more widely studied in the 1980s. Featuring well known names, but also many female artists neglected and seldom mentioned in the recent (strangely narrow-minded) re-evaluation of this period, this beautifully printed issue of Obliques is an incredibly valuable reference on a movement that was decidedly ‘feminine’. Edited by Roger Borderie with Michel Camus, it features profiles on the work and writing of Belen, Maya Bell, Bona, Leonora Carrington, Lise Deharme, Jacqueline Duprey, Aube Elléouët, Josette Exandier, Leonor Fini, Aline Gagnaire, Giovanna, Jane Graverol, Marianne Van Hirtum, Rozeta Hum, Valentine Hugo, Karskaya, Greta Knutson, Laure, Gina Pane, Annie Lebrun, Georgette Magritte, Manina, Joyce Mansour, Nora Mitrani, Meret Oppenheim, Mimi Parent, Valentine Penrose, Gisele Prassinos, Karina Raeck, Remedios Varo, Sibylle Ruppert, Colette Thomas, Toyen, Isabelle Waldberg, Unica Zurn, Cécile Reims, Dorothea Tanning, Greta Knutson, and more. Additional texts and works by Beatrice Didier, Cécile Reims, Michel Butor, Michel Sicard, Andre Pieyre De Mandiargues, Jean Roudaut, Rene Micha, Gerard Legrand, Jean Pfeiffer, Jacques Laurans, Michel Carassou, Annie Lebrun, Charles Bachat, Olivier Milliard, Robert Brechon, Jules Michelet, Jerome Prieur, Xaviere Gauthier, Elsa Thoresen Gouveia, plus a gallery by Titi Parant and Henri Maccheroni's Portraits Corrigés. Profusely illustrated with artworks, mostly in b/w with some colour sections.
Very Good copy of the rarer hardcover edition in VG dust jacket with signs of ageing and some wear/small tears
1999, English
Hardcover (w. dust jacket), 224 pages, 27.8 x 21.2 cm
1st US Edition, Out of print title / as new
Published by
Flammarion / Paris
$100.00 - In stock - Add to cart
First edition of “Correspondences”, the now out-of-print major catalogue / monograph of the fabulous artist Ray Johnson.
In 1995, the resolutely reclusive Ray Johnson reemerged into the spotlight when he died in a mysterious and spectacular way, leading to the discovery of thousands of works of art in his house. Drawing upon this vast trove, Donna De Salvo, the Wexner Center's Curator at Large, has organized Ray Johnson: Correspondences, the first comprehensive exhibition to be mounted (with the complete cooperation of the artist's estate).
Like Rauschenberg, Cy Twombly, Jasper Johns, and later Andy Warhol and Jim Rosenquist, Johnson combined the signs and symbols of contemporary culture with the lessons of abstraction to develop a new lexicon of forms. A pioneer in the use of 'found' images and techniques of mechanical reproduction, Johnson created in 1955 what may have been the first informal happening.
Johnson first created 'mail art' in the fifties. These were part collage, part manifesto, part parody; he often instructed recipients to 'add to', 'return to', or 'send to', spawning an interactive art form, a continuous happening, that pre-figured electronic mail. Johnson was the nerve center of this pre-digital netscape that spread around the nation and, eventually, the world, which continues to flourish today.
By the eighties, Johnson was a legend in the artistic community. Ray Johnson: correspondences, offers the first opportunity for in-depth examination of the work of an artist who reflected and dissected many of the aesthetic, cultural, and theoretical preoccupations of the last forty years; a figure whose impact and influence will finally be made known.
Essays by the exhibition’s curator, Donna De Salvo, Mason Klein, Wendy Steiner, Jonathan Weinberg, Sharla Sava, Lucy Lippard, William S. Wilson, and Henry Martin, all profusely illustrated throughout with Johnson's artworks.
Co-published by Flammarion and the Wexner Center in conjunction with an exhibition held at the Wexner Center September 16 – December 31, 2000.
As New.
1984, French
Softcover, 24 pages, 31.5 x 22 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / average
Published by
Galerie Maeght / Paris
$45.00 - Out of stock
1984 catalogue for solo exhibition by Pierre Klossowski at Galerie Maeght Lelong, Paris. Illustrated throughout with Klossowski's artworks in colour and black and white, alongside photographic portraits, biography and texts by conceptual painter and critic Rémy Zaugg, including "Simulacra", an interview with Pierre Klossowski.
Pierre Klossowski (August 9, 1905, Paris – August 12, 2001, Paris) was a French writer, translator and artist. He was the eldest son of the artists Erich Klossowski and Baladine Klossowska, and his younger brother was the painter Balthus. As a writer, Pierre Klossowski wrote full length volumes on the Marquis de Sade and Friedrich Nietzsche, a number of essays on literary and philosophical figures, and five novels. Roberte Ce Soir (Roberte in the Evening) provoked controversy due to its graphic depiction of sexuality. He translated several important texts (by Virgil, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Martin Heidegger, Friedrich Hölderlin, Franz Kafka, Nietzsche, and Walter Benjamin) into French, worked on films and was also an artist, illustrating many of the scenes from his novels. Klossowski participated in most issues of George Bataille's review, Acéphale, in the late 1930s.
Good copy but with wear and tanning to covers.
1971, French
Softcover (staple-bound), 16 pages, 16 x 21 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Galerie André François Petit / Paris
$65.00 - Out of stock
Beautiful, scarce Pierre Klossowski publication "dessins à la mine de plomb", published by Galerie André François Petit, Paris, on the occasion of the Klossowski exhibition in 1971. Illustrated throughout with Klossowski's drawings, alongside texts by André Masson, Patrick Waldberg and Klossowski himself. Includes biography and list of works.
Pierre Klossowski (August 9, 1905, Paris – August 12, 2001, Paris) was a French writer, translator and artist. He was the eldest son of the artists Erich Klossowski and Baladine Klossowska, and his younger brother was the painter Balthus.
As a writer, Pierre Klossowski wrote full length volumes on the Marquis de Sade and Friedrich Nietzsche, a number of essays on literary and philosophical figures, and five novels. Roberte Ce Soir (Roberte in the Evening) provoked controversy due to its graphic depiction of sexuality.[1] He translated several important texts (by Virgil, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Martin Heidegger, Friedrich Hölderlin, Franz Kafka, Nietzsche, and Walter Benjamin) into French, worked on films and was also an artist, illustrating many of the scenes from his novels. Klossowski participated in most issues of George Bataille's review, Acéphale, in the late 1930s.
His 1969 book, Nietzsche and the Vicious Circle, greatly influenced French philosophers such as Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze, and Jean-François Lyotard.
Very Good copy.
2009, English / Spanish
Hardcover (w. dust jacket), 199 pages, 31 x 26 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / as new
Published by
MoMA / New York
Museo Nacional Centro De Arte Reina Sofia / Madrid
$65.00 - In stock - Add to cart
First edition hardcover comprehensive catalogue on the avant-garde Latin American artists León Ferrari and Mira Schendel, published on the occasion of the major travelling exhibition organised by Luis Pérez-Oramas at MoMA, New York; Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid; and the Fundação Iberê Camargo, Porto Alegre, 2009—2010. Profusely illustrated with essays by Luis Perez-Oramas, Andrea Giunta, and Rodrigo Naves.
León Ferrari (Argentine, b. 1920) and Mira Schendel (Brazilian, b. Switzerland, 1919–1988) are considered among the most significant artists working in Latin America during the second half of the twentieth century. Their works address language as a major visual subject matter: the visual body of language, the embodiment of voices as words and gestures, and language as a metaphor of the worldly aspect of human existence through the eloquence of naming and writing. They produced their works in the neighboring countries of Argentina and Brazil throughout the 1960s and 1980s, when the question of language was particularly central to Western culture due to the central role taken by post-structuralism, semiotics, and the philosophy of language. Although their drawings, sculptures, and paintings are contemporary with the birth of Conceptualism, they are distinctively different, and have not yet been exhibited in their entirety in the United States.
As New.
2022, English / Japanese
Softcover (w. dust jacket), 21 x 30 cm
Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Treville / Tokyo
$90.00 - Out of stock
"Beksinski's powerfully unique paintings are such as I have never before seen" — H.R. Giger
Comprehensive collection Zdzisław Beksiński's apocalyptic fantastic paintings, sculptures and reliefs, mostly never published before, issued in Japan as part of Treville's series of volumes on the Polish master of introvert fantasy. Profusely illustrated in colour and b/w, accompanied by texts in English and Japanese.
Zdzisław Beksiński (1929 – 2005) was a Polish painter, photographer and sculptor. Beksiński had no formal training as an artist. Born in Sanok, he studied architecture in Kraków and worked as a construction site supervisor before turning to his passion for art, sculpting with construction site materials for his medium. His early photography would be a precursor to his paintings, often referred to as dystopian surrealism. Beksiński claimed, "I wish to paint in such a manner as if I were photographing dreams". Beksiński undertook painting with a passion, working intensely whilst listening to classical music and quickly becoming a leading figure in contemporary Polish art. In the late 1960s, Beksiński entered what he himself called his "fantastic period", which lasted up to the mid-1980s, during which he created his famed images of desolate, surrealistic landscapes with intricate depictions of anxious, abstracted figures and architecture in states of decay, mutation and decomposition. Although Beksiński's art was often dark, he himself was known to be a pleasant person with a keen sense of humour. Modest and somewhat shy, he avoided public events such as the openings of his own exhibitions and almost never visited museums or exhibitions in general. He always credited music as his main source of inspiration. Beksiński avoided concrete analysis of the content of his work, saying "I cannot conceive of a sensible statement on painting". Beksiński was stabbed to death at his Warsaw apartment in February 2005 by a 19-year-old acquaintance from Wołomin, reportedly because he refused to lend the teenager money.
"In the medieval tradition, Beksinski seems to believe art to be a forewarning about the fragility of the flesh – whatever pleasures we know are doomed to perish – thus, his paintings manage to evoke at once the process of decay and the ongoing struggle for life. They hold within them a secret poetry, stained with blood and rust." — Guillermo del Toro, Mexican film director
As New copy of the revised 2020 edition.
2019, English
Hardcover, 158 pages, 28 x 31 cm
Published by
Yossi Milo / New York
Radius Books / New Mexico
$115.00 - Out of stock
For his notorious Park photos, taken at night in Tokyo’s Shinjuku, Yoyogi and Aoyama parks during the 1970s, Kohei Yoshiyuki used a 35mm camera, infrared film and flash to capture a secret community of lovers and voyeurs. His pictures document the people who gathered in these parks at night for clandestine trysts, as well as the many spectators lurking in the bushes who watched – and sometimes participated in – these couplings. With their raw, snapshot-like quality, these images not only uncover the hidden sexual exploits of their subjects, both same-sex and heterosexual, but they also serve as a chronicle of a Japan we rarely see. As Martin Parr writes in The Photobook: A History, Volume II, The Park is “a brilliant piece of social documentation, capturing perfectly the loneliness, sadness and desperation that so often accompany sexual or human relationships in a big, hard metropolis like Tokyo".
This newly designed, comprehensive edition of Kohei Yoshiyuki: The Park brings this collectible classic back into print with eight never-before-seen images, as well as documentation of the Japanese zines that predated the 2007 Hatje Cantz/Yossi Milo edition.
Photography by Kohei Yoshiyuki
Introduction by Yossi Milo
Text by Vince Aletti
Interview by Nobuyoshi Araki