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:
BOOKSHOP CLOSED FOR BREAK UNTIL NOV 10.
WEB-SHOP OPEN 24/7.
ORDERS CAN STILL BE PLACED AND WILL BE PROCESSED AFTER NOV 10.
World Food Books
Postal Address:
PO Box 435
Flinders Lane
Victoria 8009
Australia
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All prices in AUD (Australian dollars)
Pick-Ups
Please note: The bookshop is closed until February 1, 2024.
Pick-up orders can be collected in our bookshop during opening hours after this date. Please collect any Pick-up orders within 3 weeks of ordering as we have limited storage space. Orders will be released back into stock if not collected within this time. No refunds can be made for pick-ups left un-collected.
Return Policy
All sales are final. We do accept returns (for refund, exchange) for items received in error. All our orders are packed with special care using heavy-duty padding and cardboard book-mailers or bubble mailers (for smaller books), using reinforcement where required. We cannot take responsibility for any lost, stolen or damaged parcels.
Insurance
Should you wish to insure your package, please email us directly after placing your order and we can organise this at a small extra expense. Although all standard/express tracked packages are very safe and dependable, we cannot take responsibility for any lost, stolen or damaged parcels. We recommend insurance on valuable orders.
Interested in selling your old books, catalogues, journals, magazines, comics, fanzines, ephemera? We are always looking for interesting, unusual and out-of-print books to buy. We only buy books in our fields of interest and specialty, and that we feel we can resell.
We base these prices on desirability, market value, in-print prices, condition and our current stock levels. We offer cash, store credit, and can take stock on consignment. All
about 25% of the price we expect to get when we sell them, or 30% in store credit. We base these prices on desirability, market value, in-print prices, condition and our current stock levels.
Sell your books any day of the week. You can drop them off and return later. If you have a lot of books, we can visit your Sydney home.
We buy books that we feel we can resell. We offer about 25 % of the price we expect to get when we sell them, or 30% in store credit. We base these prices on desirability, market value, in-print prices, condition and our current stock levels.
Philadelphia Wireman
03 August - 01 September, 2018
World Food Books is proud to announce our next Occasion, the first presentation of sculptures by Philadelphia Wireman in Australia.
The Philadelphia Wireman sculptures were found abandoned in an alley off Philadelphia’s South Street on trash night in 1982. Their discovery in a rapidly-changing neighbourhood undergoing extensive renovation, compounded with the failure of all attempts to locate the artist, suggests that the works may have been discarded after the maker’s death. Dubbed the "Philadelphia Wireman" during the first exhibition of this work, in 1985, the maker’s name, age, ethnicity, and even gender remain uncertain. The entire collection totals approximately 1200 pieces, all intricately bound together with tightly-wound heavy-gauge wire (along with a few small, abstract marker drawings, reminiscent both of Mark Tobey and J.B. Murry). The dense construction of the work, despite a modest range of scale and materials, is singularly obsessive and disciplined in design: a wire armature or exoskeleton firmly binds a bricolage of found objects including plastic, glass, food packaging, umbrella parts, tape, rubber, batteries, pens, leather, reflectors, nuts and bolts, nails, foil, coins, toys, watches, eyeglasses, tools, and jewellery.
Heavy with associations—anthropomorphic, zoomorphic, and socio-cultural responses to wrapped detritus—the totemic sculptures by Philadelphia Wireman have been discussed in the context of work created to fulfil the shamanistic needs of alternative religions in American culture. Curators, collectors, and critics have variously compared certain pieces to sculpture from Classical antiquity, Native American medicine bundles, African-American memory jugs, and African fetish objects. Reflecting the artist’s prolific and incredibly focused scavenging impulse, and despite—or perhaps enhanced by—their anonymity, these enigmatic objects function as urban artefacts and arbiters of power, though their origin and purpose is unknown. Philadelphia Wireman, whatever their identity, possessed an astonishing ability to isolate and communicate the concepts of power and energy through the selection and transformation of ordinary materials. Over the course of the past two decades, this collection has come to be regarded as an important discovery in the field of self-taught art and vernacular art.
Presented in collaboration with Fleisher-Ollman Gallery, Philadelphia, and Robert Heald, Wellington.
Susan Te Kahurangi King
02 February - 10 March, 2018
Susan Te Kahurangi King (24 February 1951 - ) has been a confident and prolific artist since she was a young child, drawing with readily available materials - pencils, ballpoint pens and felt-tip markers, on whatever paper is at hand. Between the ages of four and six Susan slowly ceased verbal communication. Her grandparents William and Myrtle Murphy had developed a special bond with Susan so they took on caring responsibilities for extended periods. Myrtle began informally archiving her work, carefully collecting and storing the drawings and compiling scrapbooks. No drawing was insignificant; every scrap of paper was kept. The King family are now the custodians of a vast collection containing over 7000 individual works, from tiny scraps of paper through to 5 meter long rolls.
The scrapbooks and diaries reveal Myrtle to be a woman of great patience and compassion, seeking to understand a child who was not always behaving as expected. She encouraged Susan to be observant, to explore her environment and absorb all the sights and sounds. Myrtle would show Susan’s drawings to friends and people in her community that she had dealings with, such as shopkeepers and postal workers, but this was not simply a case of a grandmother’s bias. She recognised that Susan had developed a sophisticated and unique visual language and sincerely believed that her art deserved serious attention.
This was an unorthodox attitude for the time. To provide some context, Jean Dubuffet coined the term Art Brut in 1945 to describe work created by self-taught artists – specifically residents of psychiatric institutions and those he considered to be visionaries or eccentrics. In 1972 Roger Cardinal extended this concept by adopting the term Outsider Art to describe work made by non-academically trained artists operating outside of mainstream art networks through choice or circumstance. Susan was born in Te Aroha, New Zealand in 1951, far from the artistic hubs of Paris and London that Dubuffet and Cardinal operated in. That Myrtle fêted Susan as a self-taught artist who deserved to be taken seriously shows how progressive her attitudes were.
Susan’s parents Doug and Dawn were also progressive. Over the years they had consulted numerous health practitioners about Susan’s condition, as the medical establishment could not provide an explanation as to why she had lapsed into silence. Dawn educated herself in the field of homeopathy and went on to treat all twelve of her children using these principles – basing prescriptions on her observations of their physical, mental and emotional state.
Doug was a linguist with an interest in philosophy who devoted what little spare time he had to studying Maori language and culture. To some extent their willingness to explore the fringes of the mainstream made them outsiders too but it was their commitment to living with integrity and their respect for individuality that ensured Susan’s creativity was always encouraged.
Even though Susan’s family supported her artistic pursuits, some staff in schools and hospitals saw it as an impediment to her assimilation into the community and discouraged it in a variety of ways. Her family was not always aware of this and therefore did not fully understand why Susan stopped drawing in the early 1990s. However, rather than dwell on the challenges that Susan faced in pursuit of her artistic practice, they prefer to highlight her achievements. In 2008 Susan began drawing again in earnest, after an almost 20 year interruption, and her work is now shown in galleries around the world.
Susan grew up without television and has been heavily influenced by the comics she read as a child. She is absolutely fearless in the appropriation of recognizable characters, such as Donald Duck and Mickey Mouse, in her work. She twists their limbs, contorts their faces, compresses them together, blends them into complex patterned backgrounds - always imbuing them with an incredible energy. Although Susan often used pop culture characters in her work they are not naive or childlike. These are drawings by a brilliant self-taught artist who has been creating exceptional work for decades without an audience in mind.
Mladen Stilinović
"Various Works 1986 - 1999"
02 February 16 - September 10, 2016
Various works 1986 - 1999, from two houses, from the collections of John Nixon, Sue Cramer, Kerrie Poliness, Peter Haffenden and Phoebe Haffenden.
Including: Geometry of Cakes (various shelves), 1993; Poor People’s Law (black and white plate), 1993; White Absence (glasses, ruler, set square, silver spoon, silver ladel with skin photograph and wooden cubes), 1990-1996; Exploitation of the Dead (grey and red star painting, wooden painting, black spoon with red table, red plate), 1984-1990; Money and Zeros (zero tie, paintings made for friends in Australia (Sue, John, Kerrie), numbers painting), 1991-1992; Words - Slogans (various t-shirts) - “they talk about the death of art...help! someone is trying to kill me”, “my sweet little lamb”, “work is a disease - Karl Marx”; Various artist books, catalogues, monographs, videos; Poster from exhibition Insulting Anarchy; "Circular" Croatian - Australian edition; Artist book by Vlado Martek (Dostoyevsky); more.
Thanks to Mladen Stilinović and Branka Stipančić.
Jonathan Walker
Always Will Need To Wear Winter Shirt Blue + Ochre Small Check Pattern
21 August - 21 September, 2015
Untitled
I am not a great reader of poetry but I always return to the work of Melbourne poet, Vincent Buckley (1925- 1988). Perhaps I find his most tantalising piece to be not a finished poem but a fragment left on a scrap of paper discovered on his desk after the poet’s death.
The poetry gathers like oil
In the word-core, and spreads
It has its music meet,
Its music is in movement.
This fragment is more the shell left behind from a volatile thought than a finished poem. I find the last two lines honest but awkward whereas the first two lines work like an arrow. Most likely he could not find a resolution so it was left. Still, in its present form, it remains an eloquent testimony to the ultimate failure of a medium to express mobile thought and sensation, in Buckley’s case, through verbal language. It’s an important matter because this is something all artists have to deal with regardless of the medium.
I have never written a poem, however, I am forever copying fragments from books on paper scraps in a vain effort to fix certain notions in my head. At first, they function as bookmarks that are sometimes returned to when I open the book. But before long, as they accumulate, they fall out littering the table interspersed with A4 photocopies, bills, books and medications.
To return to Buckley’s fragment, the first two lines very much evoke how I paint nowadays. As you age, detail diminishes and patches of light become more luminous and float. I feel the most honest way of dealing with this is by smearing the oil paint on the canvas with the fingers and working close-up, blind. Only if the patches coalesce into an approaching image can the work gain a life.
-
Jonathan Walker was born in Melbourne, Australia and brought up on a dairy farm in Gippsland. In the 1970’s he studied painting at RMIT and won the Harold Wright Scholarship to the British Museum, London. During the 1980’s he exhibited at Pinacotheca Gallery, Richmond and had work shown at the NGV and Heidi City Art Gallery. Over the same period he designed the cover for the “Epigenesi” LP by Giancarlo Toniutti, Italy and conducted a mail exchange work with Achim Wollscheid, Germany. The work with artists through the post resulted in an article published in the bicentenary issue of Art and Australia 1988. He showed in artist run spaces such as WestSpace in the 90’s and 2000’s, and until 2012, taught painting at Victoria University, which is where we (Colleen Ahern and Lisa Radford) as organisers of the exhibition, among many others, had the privilege of being his student.
Walker’s knowledge was imparted to students through the careful selection of music, literature, and artists found in books that he himself had ordered for the library. Walker’s strategy was the generosity of sharing his vast knowledge with references specific to each student and their context.
Walker’s paintings share a similar focus and intimacy.
This exhibition presents a small selection of recent paintings alongside a publication that includes Walker’s writing. Observational and analytical, Walker’s work is a type of material notation — the time of day, colour and how it is blended, the both specific and fleeting location of a reflection on lino or the question of whether a chair leg should be included in a painting.
Please join us on Friday August 21 between 6-8pm to celebrate the opening of the exhibition.
Curated by Colleen Ahern and Lisa Radford.
B. Wurtz
Curated by Nic Tammens
March 26 - April 4, 2015
B.Wurtz works from a basement studio in his home on Manhattan’s Lower East Side.
This local fact is attested to by the plastic shopping bags and newsprint circulars that appear in his work. As formal objects, they don’t make loud claims about their origins but nonetheless transmit street addresses and places of business from the bottom of this long thin island. Like plenty of artists, Wurtz is affected by what is local and what is consumed. His work is underpinned by this ethic. It often speaks from a neighborhood or reads like the contents of a hamper:
“BLACK PLUMS $1.29 lb.”
“Food Bazaar”
“USDA Whole Pork Shoulder Picnic 99c lb.”
“RITE AID Pharmacy, with us it’s personal.”
“H. Brickman & Sons.”
“Sweet Yams 59c lb."
Most of the work in this exhibition was made while the artist was in residence at Dieu Donne, a workshop dedicated to paper craft in Midtown. Here Wurtz fabricated assemblages with paper and objects that are relatively lightweight, with the intention that they would be easily transportable to Australia. This consideration isn’t absolute in Wurtz’s work, but was prescriptive for making the current exhibition light and cheap. Packed in two boxes, these works were sent from a USPS post office on the Lower East Side and delivered to North Melbourne by Australia Post.
Wurtz appears courtesy of Metro Pictures, New York.
Thanks to Rob Halverson, Joshua Petherick, Sari de Mallory, Matt Hinkley, Helen Johnson, Fayen d'Evie, Ask Kilmartin, Lisa Radon, Ellena Savage, Yale Union, and "Elizabeth".
John Nixon
"Archive"
December 15 - January 20, 2014
The presentation of John Nixon's archive offered a rare showcase of this extensive collection of the artist's own publications, catalogues, posters, ephemera, editions and more, from the mid 1980s onwards, alongside a selection of his artworks.
Organized by John Nixon, Joshua Petherick and Matt Hinkley.
"Habitat"
at Minerva, Sydney (organised by Joshua Petherick and Matt Hinkley)
November 15 - December 20, 2014
Lupo Borgonovo, Janet Burchill & Jennifer McCamley,
Lewis Fidock, HR Giger, Piero Gilardi, Veit Laurent Kurz,
Cinzia Ruggeri, Michael E. Smith, Lucie Stahl, Daniel Weil, Wols
Press Release:
“...It contained seven objects. The slender fluted bone, surely formed for flight, surely from the wing of some large bird. Three archaic circuitboards, faced with mazes of gold. A smooth white sphere of baked clay. An age-blackened fragment of lace. A fingerlength segment of what she assumed was bone from a human wrist, grayish white, inset smoothly with the silicon shaft of a small instrument that must once have ridden flush with the surface of the skin - but the thing’s face was seared and blackened.”
William Gibson, “Count Zero”, 1986
"Autumn Projects Archive"
Curated by Liza Vasiliou
March 6 - March 15, 2014
World Food Books, in conjunction with the Virgin Australia Melbourne Fashion Festival 2014, presented the Autumn Projects archive, consisting of a selection of early examples in Australian fashion with a particular interest in collecting designers and labels from the period beginning in the 1980’s, who significantly influenced the discourse of Australian Fashion.
Curated by Liza Vasiliou, the exhibition provided a unique opportunity to view pieces by designers Anthea Crawford, Barbara Vandenberg, Geoff Liddell and labels CR Australia, Covers, Jag along with early experimental collage pieces by Prue Acton and Sally Browne’s ‘Fragments’ collection, suspended throughout the functioning World Food Books shop in Melbourne.
H.B. Peace
presented by CENTRE FOR STYLE
November 14, 2013
"Hey Blinky, you say chic, I say same"
Anon 2013
H.B. Peace is a clothing collaboration between great friends Blake Barns and Hugh Egan Westland. Their pieces explore the divergences between 'character’ and ‘personality’ in garments....etc
Special Thanks to Joshua Petherick and Matt Hinkley of WFB and Gillian Mears
and a Very Special Thank you to Audrey Thomas Hayes for her shoe collaboration.
Janet Burchill & Jennifer McCamley
"Aesthetic Suicide"
May 10 - June 8, 2013
The first of our occasional exhibitions in the World Food Books office/shop space in Melbourne, "Aesthetic Suicide" presented a body of new and older works together by artists Janet Burchill & Jennifer McCamley, including videos, prints, a wall work, and publications.
During shop open hours videos played every hour, on the hour.
1985, Japanese
Softcover (w. dust jacket), unpaginated, 30 x 21.5 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Tsurumakisha / Japan
$200.00 - In stock -
"Increase your pleasure without knowing it! "Libido" is proof that you live a healthy life. For beautiful women!" "Sexual performance that invites pure libido" (from cover)
Exceptionally rare and obscure "Mystery" Japanese photo-collage book by one Osamu Yokota, vividly illustrated cover to cover with full-bleed nude photographic poses combining meditation, yoga, kama sutra set into psychedelic graphic collage, published in 1985! Like a Japanese mix of Penny Slinger's Mountain Ecstasy and John Champ's Yoga For Men, this instructional book is without words (only a short instruction list on the inside of the dust jacket), inviting the viewer to relax to ambient music, pick a page at random and breathe into the poses illustrated by the female instructors to find the cosmic force of "Qi" within. "A mysterious book that increases the power of the pyramid by 250%" (?) Playful hippy studio photography cut to Yokoo-esque cosmic graphic forces — one of a kind!
Very Good copy in VG dust jacket preserved under mylar wrap.
2022, English
Softcover, 436 pages, 23.4 x 28 cm
Published by
Third Man Books / US
$79.00 - In stock -
In this remarkable tale of creativity and chaos, do-it-yourself innovation and extraordinary attempts at world domination, Needles and Plastic tells the inside story of one of New Zealand - and the world's - great independent music labels. Hundreds of full color & black and white photos illustrate the story! Founded in 1981 by Roger Shepherd in Christchurch, New Zealand, Flying Nun Records unleashed an extraordinary wave of music that had an impact around the world.Needles and Plastic is the first comprehensive history of the early years of the label and its bands covering the critical period from 1981-1988 when many of the most influential and critically acclaimed artists emerged on Flying Nun, bands like - from The Clean, The Chills, The Verlaines, Straitjacket Fits and Bailter Space.
The influence of the obscure label became apparent in the 1990s, when big-time indie acts like Pavement, Cat Power or Yo La Tengo started covering Flying Nun bands. In entries on over 140 records from The Clean's 'Tally Ho!' 7" in 1981 to The Verlaines Bird-Dog LP in 1988, Matthew Goody tells the story through the records themselves. His book draws on years of in-depth research to reveal the stories of the bands, the recordings, the songs, and the audience, with a host of significant characters contributing along the way - Shepherd, Chris Knox, Doug Hood, Hamish Kilgour and many more.
In this remarkable tale of creativity and chaos, do-it-yourself innovation and extraordinary attempts at world domination, Needles and Plastic tells the inside story of one the world's great independent music labels.
2020, English
Hardcover, 288 pages, 26.7 x 22.9 cm
Published by
MoMA / New York
$120.00 - Out of stock
The first retrospective in 30 years on American maverick Donald Judd's minimalist sculpture, architecture and furniture. Published to accompany the first US retrospective exhibition of Donald Judd's sculpture in more than 30 years, Judd explores the work of a landmark artist who, over the course of his career, developed a material and formal vocabulary that transformed the field of modern sculpture. Donald Judd was among a generation of artists in the 1960s who sought to entirely do away with illusion, narrative and metaphorical content. He turned to three dimensions as well as industrial working methods and materials in order to investigate "real space," by his definition. Judd surveys the evolution of the artist's work, beginning with his paintings, reliefs and handmade objects from the early 1960s; through the years in which he built an iconic vocabulary of works in three dimensions, including hollow boxes, stacks and progressions made with metals and plastics by commercial fabricators; and continuing through his extensive engagement with colour during the last decade of his life.
This richly illustrated catalog takes a close look at Judd's achievements, and, using newly available archival materials at the Judd Foundation and elsewhere, expands scholarly perspectives on his work. The essays address subjects such as his early beginnings in painting, the fabrication of his sculptures, his site-specific pieces and his work in design and architecture.
Donald Judd (1928-94) began his professional career working as a painter while studying art history and writing art criticism. One of the foremost sculptors of our time, Judd refused this designation and other attempts to label his art: his revolutionary approach to form, materials, working methods and display went beyond the set of existing terms in midcentury New York. His work, in turn, changed the language of modern sculpture.
2022, English
Hardcover, 168 pages, 24 x 30 cm
Published by
RM / Barcelona
$110.00 - Out of stock
A significantly expanded hardcover edition of Carrington's acclaimed Tarot series, featuring new archival images and research.
The British-born Mexican surrealist Leonora Carrington (1917-2011) spent a lifetime exploring the esoteric traditions of diverse cultures, and incorporated their ideas and symbols into her artistic and literary oeuvre. Tibetan Buddhism, the Kabbalah, ancient Egyptian and Mesopotamian magic, Celtic mythology, witchcraft, astrology and the Tarot were filtered through her feminist lens to create a visionary, woman-centered worldview.
Carrington created a spectacular Major Arcana Tarot deck sometime during the 1950s, laying gold and silver leaf over brilliant color. Exhibited for the first time during her centennial exhibition Leonora Carrington: Magical Tales in 2018, this extraordinary work was a revelation for the public and inspired the publication of The Tarot of Leonora Carrington.
This second, considerably expanded edition--encouraged by the overwhelmingly positive reception of Fulgur's publication in 2020--explores further the central position that the Tarot held in Carrington's work. The volume includes an introductory text by her son Gabriel Weisz Carrington, who recalls his mother's long involvement with the Tarot, followed by a revised and more extensive essay by scholar Susan Aberth and curator Tere Arcq, including detailed analysis of each card: their color symbolism, their relationship to other works and their iconographic origins in ancient esoteric beliefs, including the Mesoamerican influences of her adopted country.
This new edition also reproduces previously unpublished photographs and images, as well as exciting new research into Carrington's influences, emphasizing the authors' claim that her work on the Major Arcana represents an esoteric roadmap to Carrington's feminist vision and wish for a new global gender equality toward a better ecological future for our planet.
2021, English
Hardcover, 120 pages, 30 x 24cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / as new
Published by
Fulgur Press / UK
$450.00 - In stock -
The immediately out-of-print Tarot of Leonora Carrington. As New sealed copy.
The British-born artist Leonora Carrington (1917–2011) is one of the more fascinating figures to emerge from the Surrealist movement. As both a writer and painter, she was championed early by André Breton and joined the exiled Surrealists in New York, before settling in Mexico in 1943. The magical themes of Carrington’s otherworldly paintings are well-known, but the recent discovery of a suite of tarot designs she created for the Major Arcana was a revelation for scholars and fans of Carrington alike. Drawing inspiration from the Tarot of Marseille and the popular Waite-Smith deck, Carrington brings her own approach and style to this timeless subject, creating a series of iconic images. Executed on thick board, brightly coloured and squarish in format, Carrington’s Major Arcana shines with gold and silver leaf, exploring tarot themes through what Gabriel Weisz Carrington describes as a ‘surrealist object’. This tantalising discovery, made by the curator Tere Arcq and scholar Susan Aberth, has placed greater emphasis upon the role of the tarot in Carrington’s creative life and has led to fresh research in this area.
The Tarot of Leonora Carrington is the first book dedicated to this important aspect of the artist’s work. It includes a full-size facsimile of her newly discovered Major Arcana; an introduction from her son, Gabriel Weisz Carrington; and a richly illustrated essay from Tere Arcq and Susan Aberth that offers new insights — exploring the significance of tarot imagery within Carrington’s wider work, her many inspirations and mysterious occult sources.
1978, English
Hardcover (w. dust jacket), 387 pages, 21.59 x 28.58 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / good
Published by
US Games Systems / US
$90.00 - Out of stock
First volume of Stuart R. Kaplan's The Encyclopedia Of Tarot, published by Kaplan's own U.S. Games Systems imprint in 1978. The first major reference work of its kind, this comprehensive volume traces the history and origins of the earliest extant tarot, tarocchi, and tarock decks. Written with authority, and sharing a wealth of information, Kaplan's chronological presentation takes readers from the earliest hand-painted cards, through the historical developments of printed cards, and surveys twentieth century tarot interests. Included are discussions and photographs of 3,200 cards from decks dating from the 15th to the 20th century, plus 100 references to the origins of tarot and playing cards. Annotated bibliography of over 1,700 entries.
Very Good copy with Good dust jacket, small tears and light wear.
2009, English
Hardcover (w. dust jacket), 184 pages, 30 x 26 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / fine
Published by
Australian Centre for the Moving Image (ACMI) / Melbourne
Govett-Brewster Art Gallery / New Plymouth
Len Lye Foundation Collection / New Plymouth
$90.00 - In stock -
Rare first hardcover edition of this monograph on New Zealand-born experimental film maker and kinetic artist Len Lye (1901-1980), published on the occasion of a major retrospective, organised by the Australian Centre for the Moving Image (ACMI) and the Govett-Brewster Art Gallery (New Plymouth, New Zealand), the largest and most comprehensive exhibition of the artist’s work to date. Edited by Wystan Curnow and Tyler Cann with texts by Alessio Cavallaro, Tylar Cann, Rhana Devenport, Roger Horrocks, Guy Brett, Wystan Curnow, Tessa Laird, Evan Webb, plus chronology, bibliography, lexicon, and much more. Lavishly illustrated throughout. An incredible reference book on this important artist.
Drawing from the Len Lye Foundation Collection and Archives and featuring materials never exhibited before the exhibition and book follows the technical processes and conceptual threads that run through Len Lye’s artistic career, from his earliest sketches, paintings and batiks of the 1920s, through to his photographic work, experimental and documentary films, and astounding motorised steel sculptures from the 1960s and 1970s. Also featured is a wide range of the artist’s notebooks and working materials.
The New Zealand-born Len Lye (1901-1980) is one of the most innovative artists of the modernist era, and a seminal figure in the history of the moving image. Beginning in the 1930s he developed techniques of making films without a camera, applying hand-painted imagery directly to the film strip. Combining these vibrant abstractions with rhythmic Cuban jazz, works such as A Colour Box (1935) have become touchstones for the medium of film as an artistic expression. Lye’s film Free Radicals (1957) is perhaps the culmination of a body of film work that influenced successive generations of experimental filmmakers, including Norman McClaren and Stan Brakhage.
As the ubiquity of the moving image in contemporary culture drives a re-appraisal of its history, the critical recognition of Lye’s films has increased. Less well-known is the diverse range of media, styles and places in which the artist worked. Lye left New Zealand in his early twenties, travelled throughout the South Pacific, and lived for extended periods in Australia and Samoa before settling in London and then, at the close of World War II, New York. As a writer, painter, and kinetic sculptor, as well as in his work in photography, documentary and experimental film, Lye traversed the boundaries of media as readily as he crossed continents.
Informed by his longstanding interest in non-western and prehistoric art, Lye attempted to cut through distinctions of modern and ancient, technological and biological forms. Films such as Tusalava (1929) and Trade Tattoo (1937) share patterns and techniques derived from traditional bark-cloth and batik painting. Lye’s dynamic kinetic sculptures reference dance and the body as much as mechanical technology. Lye’s work consistently makes porous the barriers between different media: his films tend toward paintings or drawings, while his sculptures often evoke the condition of film. In each, Lye was concerned with the encounter between the viewer’s physical body and the raw materials of light, movement and sound. Len Lye stages this meeting in a vivid mix of film and flashing metal.
Very Good copy in VG—Near Fine dust jacket. Only light storage buckling, otherwise as new.
2022, English / French
Softcover, 48 pages, 22 x 31 cm
$40.00 - Out of stock
The portfolio of the eponymous exhibition at the Jeu de Paume, Paris, in 2022, the first major retrospective in France on the filmmaker and biologist specializing in underwater fauna Jean Painlevé (1902-1989), considered one of the founding fathers of scientific cinema and a source of inspiration for the avant-gardes and the surrealist movement.
A filmmaker with an international reputation for his filmic experiments, Jean Painlevé (1902-1989) was a specialist in scientific documentary and film techniques. During the inter-war period, his work was shown outside the scientific field, in avant-garde cinemas and film clubs. Painlevé was quickly recognised and his publications in the illustrated press of the 1930s contributed to his fame. His non-conformist attitude and his affinity with the surrealist spirit are undoubtedly at the origin of the privileged link he has with independent documentary cinema. The ease with which he crossed the boundaries between science and art was rooted in his artistic associations: Jacques-André Boiffard, Alexander Calder, Ivan Goll, Fernand Léger, Éli Lotar, Pierre Naville, Pierre Prévert, Jean Vigo…
From the 1950s onwards, Painlevé and Geneviève Hamon, his partner and collaborator, made a large number of research films, while their personal work continued, nourished by the research of the zoologists and biologists for whom they worked.
Texts by Pia Viewing, notes by Sergi Álvarez Riosalido, Ève Lepaon, Pia Viewing.
2010, English / German
Softcover, 226 pages, 12 x 16 cm
Published by
Walther König / Köln
$45.00 - Out of stock
A founding member of Fluxus and the concrete poetry movement, Emmett Williams (1925-2007) made several performances and poems that stand today as defining gems of those genres. Among them is the book-length concrete poem Sweethearts, first published by Something Else Press (where Williams was editor in chief) in 1968, and back in print for the first time, still sporting its classic cover by Marcel Duchamp.
Sweethearts is an anagrammatic erotic encounter between a "he" and a "she," whose entire vocabulary is derived from the word "sweethearts." The letters maintain the same spacing in every word on each page, lending the volume a flipbook dimension that Williams enhances by organizing the text to read backwards, so that the reader can flip the book with her or his left hand (thus the front cover is on the back, and vice versa). Richard Hamilton described Sweethearts as being "to concrete poetry as Wuthering Heights is to the English novel... compelling in its emotional scope, readable, a sweetly heartfelt, jokey, crying, laughing, tender expression of love."
2022, English
Softcover, 368 pages, 15 x 23.5 cm
Published by
Primary Information / New York
$66.00 - Out of stock
A Something Else Reader is a previously-unpublished anthology edited by Dick Higgins in 1972 to celebrate Something Else Press, the publishing house he founded in 1963 to showcase Fluxus and other experimental artistic and literary forms. The publication features selections from Claes Oldenburg’s Store Days, John Cage’s Notations, An Anthology of Concrete Poetry, Breakthrough Fictioneers, Jackson Mac Low’s Stanzas for Iris Lezak, Gertrude Stein’s Matisse Picasso and Gertrude Stein, Bern Porter’s I’ve Left, Wolf Vostell’s Dé-coll/age Happenings, Al Hansen’s A Primer of Happenings & Time/Space Art, and other projects for the page by Robert Filliou, Alison Knowles, Nam June Paik, Philip Corner, Daniel Spoerri, André Thomkins, and Richard Meltzer, among others. An annotated checklist assembled by Hugh Fox and Higgins’s unpublished introduction are also included.
Perhaps no other publisher in the 60s influenced artists’ books more than Something Else Press. Higgins had a firm vision that radical art could be housed in book form and distributed throughout the world and he worked endlessly to cultivate new works that challenged conventional notions of both contemporary art and books. While other presses created extraordinary publications, none were able to achieve the breadth of titles and artists like Higgins, who successfully ran Something Else Press until 1974 in a manner that resembled a more traditional paperback publisher. Oddly, Higgins hadn’t intended to publish A Something Else Reader himself. Instead, in 1972, he assembled the table of contents and an introduction into a proposal that he then pitched to Random House. They eventually rejected the title and encouraged Higgins to publish it, but before he could do that, Something Else Press went out of business, and the dreams of the anthology evaporated. From there, the proposal went into Higgins’s archive, where it was found by scholar and curator Alice Centamore, who compiled the works and assembled A Something Else Reader.
Eleanor Antin, George Brecht, Pol Bury, Augusto de Campos, Clark Coolidge, Philip Corner, William Brisbane Dick, Robert Filliou, Albert M. Fine, Ian Hamilton Finlay, Hugh Fox, Buckminster Fuller, Eugen Gomringer, Brion Gysin, Richard Hamilton, Al Hansen, Jan J. Herman, Dick Higgins, Åke Hodell, Ray Johnson, Allan Kaprow, Kitasono Katue, Bengt af Klintberg, Alison Knowles, Richard Kostelanetz, Ruth Krauss, Jackson Mac Low, Robert K. Macadam, Toby MacLennan, Hansjörg Mayer, Charles McIlvaine, Richard Meltzer, Manfred Mohr, Claes Oldenburg, Pauline Oliveros, Nam June Paik, Benjamin Patterson, Charles Platt, Bern Porter, Dieter Roth, Aram Saroyan, Tomas Schmit, Carolee Schneemann, Mary Ellen Solt, Daniel Spoerri, Gertrude Stein, André Thomkins, Wolf Vostell, and Emmett Williams are all included in A Something Else Reader.
Dick Higgins was an American artist, composer, theorist, poet, and publisher, as well as a co-founder of Fluxus. After attending Yale and Columbia Universities and receiving a BA in English, he graduated from the Manhattan School of Printing. He studied music composition with Henry Cowell, attended John Cage’s course in experimental music at The New School, and participated in the inaugural Fluxus activities in Europe from Fall 1962 to Summer 1963. He founded Something Else Press in 1963 and in 1972, he founded Unpublished Editions (later renamed Published Editions). Over the course of his life, Higgins wrote and edited forty-seven books.
2022, English
Softcover, 172 pages, 12.5 x 20 cm
Published by
Sternberg Press / Berlin
$58.00 - Out of stock
The notion of the handmade has shifted from the margins to center stage. Craft’s value is increasingly recognized across creative, economic, social, cultural, and political contexts. Because of its widespread appropriation, and the dissolution of disciplinary boundaries, the meaning of handicrafts is changing. While craft’s claims of authenticity and anti-consumerism are in question, its role is poised for optimization within the contemporary climate. Amid new economies of making, craft is moving from “modern craft” to “post-craft.” Through essays, conversations, and projects by designers, artists, and scholars, the third volume in the EP series examines not only the practice of post-craft but also its mediation and interpretation.
With contributions by 6A Architects, Glenn Adamson, Assemble, Jeremy Deller, Peter Dormer, Tanya Harrod, Martina Margetts, Clare Twomey, John Roberts, Catharine Rossi, Richard Sennett, Flore De Taisne.
2007, English
Hardcover (w/ 2 cd), 452 pages, 23 x 28 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain / Paris
Éditions Xavier Barral / Paris
$350.00 - In stock -
The first major collection of artwork by the acclaimed movie director David Lynch. Rare English-language first hardcover edition of this long out-of-print, comprehensive book, complete with double-CD accompaniment — an interview with David Lynch in which the artist provides a veritable commentary on his works.
Spanning a period of forty years, David Lynch's widely respected films and television series include Eraserhead, The Elephant Man, Blue Velvet, Twin Peaks, Lost Highway, and Mulholland Drive. However, his prolific visual art production, which began even before his films, has rarely been seen.
In 2007, the Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain presented The Air is on Fire, an expansive retrospective exhibition portraying the multiple facets of David Lynch’s art. It was the first time that the artist exhibited such an extensive number of paintings, photographs, drawings, experimental films, and sound creations.
This lavishly illustrated, deluxe volume unveils David Lynch’s little known yet highly prolific artistic production — a reference work that covers the artist’s different fields of creation: painting, photography, drawing, and motion pictures. His visual creations are aesthetic echoes of his films that offer a new look at his work and the opportunity to plunge deeper into his personal world. Includes many texts and an interview with Lynch. The book is accompanied by the seldom present 2 x audio commentary cds.
Very Good—Near Fine copy. Only some storage buckling and a tiny bit of light wear to the lower front cover, otherwise As New and complete. This is the original printing from the museum, in the English version, scarcer still.
2022, English
Softcover, 256 pages, 17 x 24 cm
Published by
Sternberg Press / Berlin
Museo Nivola / Orani
$66.00 - In stock -
What if art holds solutions to the ecological crises of our time?
For forty-six years, Peter Fend has argued that art premonitions material culture, therefore the means of production, ensuing changes in social relations. Hence, in his view, works by Marcel Duchamp, Carolee Schneemann, Mary Beth Edelson, Paul Sharits, and others, can prefigure ecological restoration and cohabitation. In the late 1970s, artists in New York initiated teams—first Colab, The Offices, and later Ocean Earth and Space Force—to move from critique into effecting real-world change. Initiatives came from Jenny Holzer, Coleen Fitzgibbon, Taro Suzuki, Joan Waltemath, and Eve Vaterlaus, among others, who linked up with scientists to produce reports and analyses with satellite imagery for news media.
Africa-Arctic Flyway: Physiocratic States gathers documents of Peter Fend’s efforts through Ocean Earth for a planet organized according to hydrology—water basins—rather than national and colonial borders. It lays out tools and technologies derived from art, architecture, and science to replace fossil fuels, dams, nuclear industry, and industrial farming. The ensuing proposal for governance builds on what is identified as the first school of economic thought: physiocracy. Here, via satellite-aided eco-taxation, governance pursues an increase in the numbers of fish, marine mammals, migratory birds, and insects. For instance, ideas from Earth art are applied to restoring wetlands and flyways in three swaths—the Americas, East Asia, and Eurafrica—converging on the Arctic. This book focuses on the Eurafrica flyway and surveys four decades of work. It asks, “How do we go from visual art to reality?” Fend answers: “Through architecture.”
Edited by Elisa R. Linn, Lennart Wolff
Foreword by Eve Vaterlaus & Joan Waltemath
2017, Enlgish
Softcover (w. dust jacket), 276 pages, 20.6 x 14.2 cm
Published by
Vauxhall&Company / London
$65.00 - Out of stock
First published in France in 1970, immediately greeted by both furore and acclaim, today Eden, Eden, Eden is recognised as one of the major works of the last century.
This edition is a much-revised translation of the out of print English version originally published in 1995. It also includes new translations of the original prefaces by Michel Leiris, Roland Barthes and Philippe Sollers, plus a postface by Paul Buck. Edited by Paul Buck and Catherine Petit.
"Brought forth in an egalitarian way, or almost, beings and things are offered here for nothing more than what they are in the strict reality of their physical presence, animated or not: humans, animals, clothes and other utensils thrown in a mêlée in a way close to panic, that evokes the myth of eden because it obviously has for stage a world without morals or hierarchy, where desire is the rule and nothing can be declared precious or repugnant.
An implicit poetry that is sometimes replaced by an explicit poetry: those moments when, above the magma only disturbed by the quest for fulfilment led by each protagonist, human words appear, all the more moving for they seem to emerge – as if by miracle – from a layer of existence in which all words have been abolished."
from the preface by Michel Leiris
"To stretch the powers of one single sentence to the material, divided teeming carried forth through an unrelenting drive. Organic and celestial mechanics, biological, chemical, physical, astronomic. “The natural science will later subsume the human science as the human science will subsume the natural science: There will be one science” (Marx). On the very first page of Eden, Eden, Eden, see that inconceivable theatre: flint, thorns, sweat, oil, barley, wheat, brain, flowers, ears of wheat, blood, saliva, excrement... See the golden space of matters and bodies, endlessly transmutable, rhythmic."
from the preface by Philippe Sollers
2016, English
Softcover, 74 pages, 21 x 16.5 cm
Edition of 500,
Published by
Vauxhall&Company / London
$52.00 - Out of stock
From his first books of the 1960s – such as Tomb for Five Hundred Thousand Soldiers and Eden, Eden, Eden – to his recent books such as Coma, 2006, Pierre Guyotat’s seminal work has deeply marked and transformed that of innumerable artists and writers in many countries beyond France itself. With its focus extending from his novels to his work in film, art and performance, this illuminating collection of seven texts – drawn from encounters and conversations with Pierre Guyotat over a period of close to thirty years – explores his driving preoccupations and experimentations, with corporeality and vision, conflict and warfare, sex and the entity of language, activism and revolution, hallucination and aberration.
Series editors Catherine Petit and Paul Buck.
Edition of 500 copies.
2019, English
Softcover, 80 pages, 18.5 x 13.1 cm
Published by
Vauxhall&Company / London
$32.00 - Out of stock
Translated by Paul Buck & Catherine Petit.
Apropos of Van Gogh, magic and spells: all the people who, for two months now, went to see the exhibition of his works at the Musée de l’Orangerie, are they really sure they remember everything they did and all that happened to them every evening of the months of February, March, April and May 1946? Was there not a certain evening when the atmosphere of the air and the streets became liquid, gelatinous, unstable, and when the light from the stars and the heavenly vault disappeared?
And Van Gogh who painted the café in Arles was not there. But I was in Rodez, which means, still on earth, while all the residents of Paris must have felt, for one night, very close to leaving it.
A new English language translation and the first time this essay has been available as a single publication.
2022, English
Softcover (w. dust jacket), 196 pages, 20.6 x 14.2 cm
Ed. of 500,
Published by
Vauxhall&Company / London
$35.00 - Out of stock
Perhaps it was not something he knew. And leaving it, and then coming back to it, and at the edge of the writing, always having to write, as if his paradise hadn’t the ripeness to affirm itself. With one exception, and that was not what she said, my love, o my love, come with me, this way. That fragile moment, that absolute fall into what, all of a sudden, that moment, that fraction of the instant, that momentariness, falls into here, and here is the one thing to try to relate, to attempt, and yet these words would disappear when transforming the ways and the leaves on the memory. To turn all into the formulations of what is somehow an accident, an opening moment, opened, and where the room is reflected, the lid is inlaid with a memory, a falling through that which is removed, that which would play and be able to come back through the sides, through what ought to be, allowing us to ponder the obscure, the less than clear, the clarity that fights between thought and what would continue to work, to warm and comfort itself, to be the passion through which comes the notion, singing in its own language, something that would appear, disappear, as on the outside, as outside the image, no one there either from or there to. A fragmentary existence, a fraction of itself, what is best to be scuttled.—Paul Buck, from Marthe, Dear Marthe (Nakedness)
Series editors Catherine Petit and Paul Buck.
Paul Buck is a poet, translator and writer, with interests in European film, art and music as well as literature. "Paul Buck worked at Better Books in the 1960s, his memories of this period can be found in Iain Sinclair‘s anthology London: City of Disappearances. His work derives from text, from language, & through various performance approaches often resulting in other textual realizations. He has written somewhere in the region of 50 books, including the novel The Honeymoon Killers. In the 1970s he edited the literary/arts magazine Curtains, which published writing by Georges Bataille, Jacques Derrida, Iain Sinclair, Allen Fisher, Eric Mottram, & Paul Auster. He has performed at the ICA as part of an Artaud/Genet weekend along with artists including Peter Sellars, Patti Smith, & Pierre Guyotat. He has translated works by Bernard Noël, Pierre Klossowski, Maurice Blanchot, Catherine Breillat, & Raul Ruiz. He has worked with Marc Almond, Melinda Miel, & 48 Cameras. Spread Wide (2004) is a work generated from correspondence with Kathy Acker. His current projects include works on Paris & the cinema & a new novel."—introduction to Exit Theory: An Interview with Paul Buck
Interview by Steve Finbow, 3:AM Magazine
Edition of 500 copies.
1996, English
Hardcover (w. dust jacket), 232 pages, 30 x 25 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Richter Verlag / Dusseldorf
$200.00 - In stock -
Rare first hardcover edition of Brice Marden — Work Books 1964-1995, published by Harvard University Art Museum and Richter Verlag on the occasion of the major travelling exhibition of 1997—1998 (Staatliche Graphische Sammlung München, Kunstmuseum Winterthur, Wexner Center for the Arts, The State University of Ohio, Harvard University Art Museum). Profusely illustrated throughout presenting the comprehensive and important workbooks and sketchpads of American minimalist Brice Marden (b. 1938) together in one volume. With illustrated essays by Dieter Schwarz and Michael Semff. With an exhibition history, bibliography, biography, and list of works. Bi-lingual texts in German and English.
Brice Marden (b. 1938) is an American artist known for his subtle explorations of colour and gestural lines. Marden, who rose to prominence in 1960s New York, is renowned for an ever-evolving abstract practice with roots in Minimalism, Abstract Expressionism, and calligraphic traditions. Throughout his lyrical canvases, Marden paints colourful networks of serpentine lines that flow hypnotically throughout the picture plane. He sometimes replaces his paintbrush with a stick, giving his lines a more organic appearance. Such interest in line, gesture, and material experimentation is at the heart of Marden’s drawing and painting practices; early in his career, he painted with a kitchen spatula.
First hardcover edition, VG—Near Fine. VG—NF dust jacket.
2022, English
Softcover, 368 pages, 12 x 16 cm
Published by
A+m Bookstore / Viaindustriae
$75.00 - In stock -
This book is not a proper catalogue raisonné, but rather an invitation to browse the library of an amateur. It allows us to consider an important aspect of Richard Prince’s work, addressing books as well as the notion of a collection and its incompleteness, revealed here by the “ghosts” of missing books. It encompasses his library and his production of artists’ books over the past four decades, the direct result of an avid book designer and collector who is also widely recognised for his painterly and photographic practice. His zeal for bound works is expressed in many instances where he photographs tomes from his own collection, transforming the publication into an infinite library.
1988, English
Softcover, 118 pages, 33 x 28 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / good
Published by
Victorian Centre for Photography / Melbourne
$60.00 - Out of stock
Scarce copy of The Thousand Mile Stare, a photographic exhibition curated by Joyce Agee at The Victorian Centre for Photography, Melbourne, in 1988, presented at the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art before touring through Australia in 1989. The exhibition surveys a diverse range of 54 Australian photographers from the previous twenty-five years – traditional photographic genres as well as experimental, commercial and activist uses of the camera – and is intended as a catalyst for debate. According to its curator, Joyce Agee, it aimed to highlight how the "geographic distinctiveness" of Australia brings to its photographic gaze a prophetic, radically distanced quality. Profusely illustrated alongside essays by Joyce Agee, Geoff Strong, Linda Hicks-Williams and others. Geoff Strong’s essay ‘The Melbourne Movement – Fashion and Faction in the Seventies’ outlines the clash of individuals, groups and institutions engaged in photography as a documentary or more self-consciously, artistic medium. Features the work of Carol Jerrems, Sue Ford, Bill Hensen, Fiona Hall, and many more.
Good copy with some tanning and edge wear.
1972, English
Softcover (staple-bound), 48 pages, 28 x 21.5 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / good
Published by
Payton / NSW
$65.00 - In stock -
Rare copy of this fantastic, seldom seen issue of Camera Graphics Australia (no. 5), published in May/June 1972, published by Payton, McMahons Point, NSW, featuring the work of Australian photographers Sue Ford, Paul Cox, Greg Weight, Roger Warwick Scott, Rob Walls, Lissa Coote, Stan Ciccone (inc. front cover), illustrated review of Toowoomba '72 International Salon, illustrated review on American documentary photojournalist Leonard Freed's Germany... As well as the featured photographic portfolios, the magazine includes essays, news, reviews for photo books, exhibitions, products, photography/camera related advertising, and more.
Good copy with edge wear to textured card covers, some shallow insect marking to front.
1974, English
Softcover, 142 pages,
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Outback Press / Fitzroy
$650.00 - Out of stock
First edition of Carol Jerrems first, only photobook, "A Book About Australian Women", published by the Outback Press in Fitzroy in 1974. This now very collectable Australian photobook classic by Jerrems collects 131 portraits of Australian women dating from 1968 to 1974; 'womens liberationists, Aboriginal spokeswomen, activists, revolutionaries, teachers, students, drop-outs'. Preoccupied by subcultures or marginal groups, she intimately captures pockets of life previously ignored. A dynamic series of images that display Jerrems’ compositional flair, evident in the decorative synergy between foreground and background. The photographs are accompained by text by Virginia Fraser.
Very Good copy with light tanning and edge/spine wear. A wonderful copy of this rare book.
Tote Book Bag, 100% cotton canvas, 40 (h) x 38 (w) cm
Published by
World Food Books / Melbourne
$20.00 - Out of stock
Back in stock! The World Food Book bag - tote "libri" edition. Available in single colour-way of royal blue/white and made from 100% lightweight but durable cotton canvas with heavy screen print. Matching 22" cotton handles.
40 (h) x 38 (w) cm
2021, English
Hardcover, 172 pages, 23.5 x 23.5 cm
Ed. of 500,
Published by
M.33 / Melbourne
$70.00 - Out of stock
Published in an edition of 500 and quickly out-of-print, Small Business is a companion volume to David Wadelton’s long out-of-print classic Suburban Baroque — with the focus this time on work rather than domestic spaces.
Designed once again by Yanni Florence and with an accompanying essay by Professor Natalie King OAM, Small Business looks at the small but enduring family-run businesses that are fading away, often tucked away on suburban streets. David Wadelton has gathered a considerable photographic archive of these interiors from all over Melbourne and regional Victoria over the last ten years with a couple of side excursions to iconic interstate locations.
Many of the businesses have traded for decades, and continue to do so even as multi-storey developments and multi-nationals overshadow or consume them. One third of the shops featured in the book have already closed since they were photographed. Many of the interiors depicted are family businesses started by post-war migrants who came to Australia to start a new life and in so doing enriched and transformed our culture. The layouts featured are often pragmatic and utilitarian, arranged decades ago – often without regard for conventional design trends – and left that way. Some were on trend in their day but now look like museum settings. Still others fall on a wide spectrum from spartan, all the way to a tangled disorder that makes sense only to the proprietor. Whatever form taken they are a time-capsule of a generation who toiled in their shop for decades.
This collection is an ode to the overlooked, the obsolete – to those who march to a different drum.
Published in an edition of 500. Out-of-print.