World Food Books' programme is largely produced on Kulin Nation land. We acknowledge the Wurundjeri people of the Kulin Nation as the first and continuing custodians of this land, and pay respect to their Elders past, present, and emerging.
World Food Books is an arts and special interests bookshop in Naarm / Melbourne. Founded in 2010, World Food Books is devoted to the presentation of a rotating, hand-selection of international art, design, literary and counterculture publications with an emphasis on the anti-traditional, the experimental, the avant-garde, the heretic, the marginal.
Presenting new titles alongside rare and out-of-print books, catalogues and journals spanning the fields of modern and contemporary art, design, photography, illustration, film, literature, poetry, cultural theory, philosophy, sexuality, popular and underground culture in its many radical forms, World Food Books wishes to encourage adventurous, thoughtful and open-minded reading, looking, writing, and exchange of publishing and ideas, both current and historical.
As well as our bookshop, located in Melbourne's historical Nicholas Building, all of our inventory is available internationally via our online mail-order service.
World Food Books semi-regularly co-ordinates "Occasions", a programme of exhibits and events at the bookshop and in partnership with other hosts (such as museums and art galleries) that develop out of the activities, relationships and content of the bookshop itself.
World Food Books
The Nicholas Building
37 Swanston Street
Room 5, Level 6
Melbourne 3000
Australia
SHOP HOURS:
OPEN 12—5 THU—FRI
WEB-SHOP OPEN 24/7.
World Food Books
Postal Address:
PO Box 435
Flinders Lane
Victoria 8009
Australia
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All prices in AUD (Australian dollars)
Pick-Ups
Please note: The bookshop is closed until February 1, 2024.
Pick-up orders can be collected in our bookshop during opening hours after this date. Please collect any Pick-up orders within 3 weeks of ordering as we have limited storage space. Orders will be released back into stock if not collected within this time. No refunds can be made for pick-ups left un-collected.
Return Policy
All sales are final. We do accept returns (for refund, exchange) for items received in error. All our orders are packed with special care using heavy-duty padding and cardboard book-mailers or bubble mailers (for smaller books), using reinforcement where required. We cannot take responsibility for any lost, stolen or damaged parcels.
Insurance
Should you wish to insure your package, please email us directly after placing your order and we can organise this at a small extra expense. Although all standard/express tracked packages are very safe and dependable, we cannot take responsibility for any lost, stolen or damaged parcels. We recommend insurance on valuable orders.
Interested in selling your old books, catalogues, journals, magazines, comics, fanzines, ephemera? We are always looking for interesting, unusual and out-of-print books to buy. We only buy books in our fields of interest and specialty, and that we feel we can resell.
We base these prices on desirability, market value, in-print prices, condition and our current stock levels. We offer cash, store credit, and can take stock on consignment. All
about 25% of the price we expect to get when we sell them, or 30% in store credit. We base these prices on desirability, market value, in-print prices, condition and our current stock levels.
Sell your books any day of the week. You can drop them off and return later. If you have a lot of books, we can visit your Sydney home.
We buy books that we feel we can resell. We offer about 25 % of the price we expect to get when we sell them, or 30% in store credit. We base these prices on desirability, market value, in-print prices, condition and our current stock levels.
Philadelphia Wireman
03 August - 01 September, 2018
World Food Books is proud to announce our next Occasion, the first presentation of sculptures by Philadelphia Wireman in Australia.
The Philadelphia Wireman sculptures were found abandoned in an alley off Philadelphia’s South Street on trash night in 1982. Their discovery in a rapidly-changing neighbourhood undergoing extensive renovation, compounded with the failure of all attempts to locate the artist, suggests that the works may have been discarded after the maker’s death. Dubbed the "Philadelphia Wireman" during the first exhibition of this work, in 1985, the maker’s name, age, ethnicity, and even gender remain uncertain. The entire collection totals approximately 1200 pieces, all intricately bound together with tightly-wound heavy-gauge wire (along with a few small, abstract marker drawings, reminiscent both of Mark Tobey and J.B. Murry). The dense construction of the work, despite a modest range of scale and materials, is singularly obsessive and disciplined in design: a wire armature or exoskeleton firmly binds a bricolage of found objects including plastic, glass, food packaging, umbrella parts, tape, rubber, batteries, pens, leather, reflectors, nuts and bolts, nails, foil, coins, toys, watches, eyeglasses, tools, and jewellery.
Heavy with associations—anthropomorphic, zoomorphic, and socio-cultural responses to wrapped detritus—the totemic sculptures by Philadelphia Wireman have been discussed in the context of work created to fulfil the shamanistic needs of alternative religions in American culture. Curators, collectors, and critics have variously compared certain pieces to sculpture from Classical antiquity, Native American medicine bundles, African-American memory jugs, and African fetish objects. Reflecting the artist’s prolific and incredibly focused scavenging impulse, and despite—or perhaps enhanced by—their anonymity, these enigmatic objects function as urban artefacts and arbiters of power, though their origin and purpose is unknown. Philadelphia Wireman, whatever their identity, possessed an astonishing ability to isolate and communicate the concepts of power and energy through the selection and transformation of ordinary materials. Over the course of the past two decades, this collection has come to be regarded as an important discovery in the field of self-taught art and vernacular art.
Presented in collaboration with Fleisher-Ollman Gallery, Philadelphia, and Robert Heald, Wellington.
Susan Te Kahurangi King
02 February - 10 March, 2018
Susan Te Kahurangi King (24 February 1951 - ) has been a confident and prolific artist since she was a young child, drawing with readily available materials - pencils, ballpoint pens and felt-tip markers, on whatever paper is at hand. Between the ages of four and six Susan slowly ceased verbal communication. Her grandparents William and Myrtle Murphy had developed a special bond with Susan so they took on caring responsibilities for extended periods. Myrtle began informally archiving her work, carefully collecting and storing the drawings and compiling scrapbooks. No drawing was insignificant; every scrap of paper was kept. The King family are now the custodians of a vast collection containing over 7000 individual works, from tiny scraps of paper through to 5 meter long rolls.
The scrapbooks and diaries reveal Myrtle to be a woman of great patience and compassion, seeking to understand a child who was not always behaving as expected. She encouraged Susan to be observant, to explore her environment and absorb all the sights and sounds. Myrtle would show Susan’s drawings to friends and people in her community that she had dealings with, such as shopkeepers and postal workers, but this was not simply a case of a grandmother’s bias. She recognised that Susan had developed a sophisticated and unique visual language and sincerely believed that her art deserved serious attention.
This was an unorthodox attitude for the time. To provide some context, Jean Dubuffet coined the term Art Brut in 1945 to describe work created by self-taught artists – specifically residents of psychiatric institutions and those he considered to be visionaries or eccentrics. In 1972 Roger Cardinal extended this concept by adopting the term Outsider Art to describe work made by non-academically trained artists operating outside of mainstream art networks through choice or circumstance. Susan was born in Te Aroha, New Zealand in 1951, far from the artistic hubs of Paris and London that Dubuffet and Cardinal operated in. That Myrtle fêted Susan as a self-taught artist who deserved to be taken seriously shows how progressive her attitudes were.
Susan’s parents Doug and Dawn were also progressive. Over the years they had consulted numerous health practitioners about Susan’s condition, as the medical establishment could not provide an explanation as to why she had lapsed into silence. Dawn educated herself in the field of homeopathy and went on to treat all twelve of her children using these principles – basing prescriptions on her observations of their physical, mental and emotional state.
Doug was a linguist with an interest in philosophy who devoted what little spare time he had to studying Maori language and culture. To some extent their willingness to explore the fringes of the mainstream made them outsiders too but it was their commitment to living with integrity and their respect for individuality that ensured Susan’s creativity was always encouraged.
Even though Susan’s family supported her artistic pursuits, some staff in schools and hospitals saw it as an impediment to her assimilation into the community and discouraged it in a variety of ways. Her family was not always aware of this and therefore did not fully understand why Susan stopped drawing in the early 1990s. However, rather than dwell on the challenges that Susan faced in pursuit of her artistic practice, they prefer to highlight her achievements. In 2008 Susan began drawing again in earnest, after an almost 20 year interruption, and her work is now shown in galleries around the world.
Susan grew up without television and has been heavily influenced by the comics she read as a child. She is absolutely fearless in the appropriation of recognizable characters, such as Donald Duck and Mickey Mouse, in her work. She twists their limbs, contorts their faces, compresses them together, blends them into complex patterned backgrounds - always imbuing them with an incredible energy. Although Susan often used pop culture characters in her work they are not naive or childlike. These are drawings by a brilliant self-taught artist who has been creating exceptional work for decades without an audience in mind.
Mladen Stilinović
"Various Works 1986 - 1999"
02 February 16 - September 10, 2016
Various works 1986 - 1999, from two houses, from the collections of John Nixon, Sue Cramer, Kerrie Poliness, Peter Haffenden and Phoebe Haffenden.
Including: Geometry of Cakes (various shelves), 1993; Poor People’s Law (black and white plate), 1993; White Absence (glasses, ruler, set square, silver spoon, silver ladel with skin photograph and wooden cubes), 1990-1996; Exploitation of the Dead (grey and red star painting, wooden painting, black spoon with red table, red plate), 1984-1990; Money and Zeros (zero tie, paintings made for friends in Australia (Sue, John, Kerrie), numbers painting), 1991-1992; Words - Slogans (various t-shirts) - “they talk about the death of art...help! someone is trying to kill me”, “my sweet little lamb”, “work is a disease - Karl Marx”; Various artist books, catalogues, monographs, videos; Poster from exhibition Insulting Anarchy; "Circular" Croatian - Australian edition; Artist book by Vlado Martek (Dostoyevsky); more.
Thanks to Mladen Stilinović and Branka Stipančić.
Jonathan Walker
Always Will Need To Wear Winter Shirt Blue + Ochre Small Check Pattern
21 August - 21 September, 2015
Untitled
I am not a great reader of poetry but I always return to the work of Melbourne poet, Vincent Buckley (1925- 1988). Perhaps I find his most tantalising piece to be not a finished poem but a fragment left on a scrap of paper discovered on his desk after the poet’s death.
The poetry gathers like oil
In the word-core, and spreads
It has its music meet,
Its music is in movement.
This fragment is more the shell left behind from a volatile thought than a finished poem. I find the last two lines honest but awkward whereas the first two lines work like an arrow. Most likely he could not find a resolution so it was left. Still, in its present form, it remains an eloquent testimony to the ultimate failure of a medium to express mobile thought and sensation, in Buckley’s case, through verbal language. It’s an important matter because this is something all artists have to deal with regardless of the medium.
I have never written a poem, however, I am forever copying fragments from books on paper scraps in a vain effort to fix certain notions in my head. At first, they function as bookmarks that are sometimes returned to when I open the book. But before long, as they accumulate, they fall out littering the table interspersed with A4 photocopies, bills, books and medications.
To return to Buckley’s fragment, the first two lines very much evoke how I paint nowadays. As you age, detail diminishes and patches of light become more luminous and float. I feel the most honest way of dealing with this is by smearing the oil paint on the canvas with the fingers and working close-up, blind. Only if the patches coalesce into an approaching image can the work gain a life.
-
Jonathan Walker was born in Melbourne, Australia and brought up on a dairy farm in Gippsland. In the 1970’s he studied painting at RMIT and won the Harold Wright Scholarship to the British Museum, London. During the 1980’s he exhibited at Pinacotheca Gallery, Richmond and had work shown at the NGV and Heidi City Art Gallery. Over the same period he designed the cover for the “Epigenesi” LP by Giancarlo Toniutti, Italy and conducted a mail exchange work with Achim Wollscheid, Germany. The work with artists through the post resulted in an article published in the bicentenary issue of Art and Australia 1988. He showed in artist run spaces such as WestSpace in the 90’s and 2000’s, and until 2012, taught painting at Victoria University, which is where we (Colleen Ahern and Lisa Radford) as organisers of the exhibition, among many others, had the privilege of being his student.
Walker’s knowledge was imparted to students through the careful selection of music, literature, and artists found in books that he himself had ordered for the library. Walker’s strategy was the generosity of sharing his vast knowledge with references specific to each student and their context.
Walker’s paintings share a similar focus and intimacy.
This exhibition presents a small selection of recent paintings alongside a publication that includes Walker’s writing. Observational and analytical, Walker’s work is a type of material notation — the time of day, colour and how it is blended, the both specific and fleeting location of a reflection on lino or the question of whether a chair leg should be included in a painting.
Please join us on Friday August 21 between 6-8pm to celebrate the opening of the exhibition.
Curated by Colleen Ahern and Lisa Radford.
B. Wurtz
Curated by Nic Tammens
March 26 - April 4, 2015
B.Wurtz works from a basement studio in his home on Manhattan’s Lower East Side.
This local fact is attested to by the plastic shopping bags and newsprint circulars that appear in his work. As formal objects, they don’t make loud claims about their origins but nonetheless transmit street addresses and places of business from the bottom of this long thin island. Like plenty of artists, Wurtz is affected by what is local and what is consumed. His work is underpinned by this ethic. It often speaks from a neighborhood or reads like the contents of a hamper:
“BLACK PLUMS $1.29 lb.”
“Food Bazaar”
“USDA Whole Pork Shoulder Picnic 99c lb.”
“RITE AID Pharmacy, with us it’s personal.”
“H. Brickman & Sons.”
“Sweet Yams 59c lb."
Most of the work in this exhibition was made while the artist was in residence at Dieu Donne, a workshop dedicated to paper craft in Midtown. Here Wurtz fabricated assemblages with paper and objects that are relatively lightweight, with the intention that they would be easily transportable to Australia. This consideration isn’t absolute in Wurtz’s work, but was prescriptive for making the current exhibition light and cheap. Packed in two boxes, these works were sent from a USPS post office on the Lower East Side and delivered to North Melbourne by Australia Post.
Wurtz appears courtesy of Metro Pictures, New York.
Thanks to Rob Halverson, Joshua Petherick, Sari de Mallory, Matt Hinkley, Helen Johnson, Fayen d'Evie, Ask Kilmartin, Lisa Radon, Ellena Savage, Yale Union, and "Elizabeth".
John Nixon
"Archive"
December 15 - January 20, 2014
The presentation of John Nixon's archive offered a rare showcase of this extensive collection of the artist's own publications, catalogues, posters, ephemera, editions and more, from the mid 1980s onwards, alongside a selection of his artworks.
Organized by John Nixon, Joshua Petherick and Matt Hinkley.
"Habitat"
at Minerva, Sydney (organised by Joshua Petherick and Matt Hinkley)
November 15 - December 20, 2014
Lupo Borgonovo, Janet Burchill & Jennifer McCamley,
Lewis Fidock, HR Giger, Piero Gilardi, Veit Laurent Kurz,
Cinzia Ruggeri, Michael E. Smith, Lucie Stahl, Daniel Weil, Wols
Press Release:
“...It contained seven objects. The slender fluted bone, surely formed for flight, surely from the wing of some large bird. Three archaic circuitboards, faced with mazes of gold. A smooth white sphere of baked clay. An age-blackened fragment of lace. A fingerlength segment of what she assumed was bone from a human wrist, grayish white, inset smoothly with the silicon shaft of a small instrument that must once have ridden flush with the surface of the skin - but the thing’s face was seared and blackened.”
William Gibson, “Count Zero”, 1986
"Autumn Projects Archive"
Curated by Liza Vasiliou
March 6 - March 15, 2014
World Food Books, in conjunction with the Virgin Australia Melbourne Fashion Festival 2014, presented the Autumn Projects archive, consisting of a selection of early examples in Australian fashion with a particular interest in collecting designers and labels from the period beginning in the 1980’s, who significantly influenced the discourse of Australian Fashion.
Curated by Liza Vasiliou, the exhibition provided a unique opportunity to view pieces by designers Anthea Crawford, Barbara Vandenberg, Geoff Liddell and labels CR Australia, Covers, Jag along with early experimental collage pieces by Prue Acton and Sally Browne’s ‘Fragments’ collection, suspended throughout the functioning World Food Books shop in Melbourne.
H.B. Peace
presented by CENTRE FOR STYLE
November 14, 2013
"Hey Blinky, you say chic, I say same"
Anon 2013
H.B. Peace is a clothing collaboration between great friends Blake Barns and Hugh Egan Westland. Their pieces explore the divergences between 'character’ and ‘personality’ in garments....etc
Special Thanks to Joshua Petherick and Matt Hinkley of WFB and Gillian Mears
and a Very Special Thank you to Audrey Thomas Hayes for her shoe collaboration.
Janet Burchill & Jennifer McCamley
"Aesthetic Suicide"
May 10 - June 8, 2013
The first of our occasional exhibitions in the World Food Books office/shop space in Melbourne, "Aesthetic Suicide" presented a body of new and older works together by artists Janet Burchill & Jennifer McCamley, including videos, prints, a wall work, and publications.
During shop open hours videos played every hour, on the hour.
1993, French / English
Softcover (staple-bound), 80 pages, 24.5 x 18 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Purple Institute / Paris
$220.00 - Out of stock
The very scarce second issue of Elein Fleiss and Olivier Zahm's Purple Prose, the Parisian literary art zine that began the world of Purple. Founded in 1992 as a reaction against the superficial glamour of the 1980’s, Purple Prose embraced the immediate fanzine aesthetics of what became referred to as 1990's anti-fashion, a far cry from what we now identify with Purple Fashion with.
Purple Prose 2 (Winter 1993) features: Martine Aballea, Olivier Badot, Pierre Bismuth, Dike Blair, Olivier Blanckart, Henry Bond, Cocto, Tommaso Corvi-Mora, Liz Dalton, Peter Fleissig, Anne Frémy, Vitaly Glabel, Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster, Isabelle Graw, John S. Hall, Markus Hansen, Lothar Hempel, Thomas Johnson, Bernard Jolsten, Isaac Julien, Jutta Koether, Ariel Kyrou, Simon Lee, Christophe Lemaire, Michel Maffesoli, Eva Marisaldi, Barbara Osborn, Valerie Pigato, Jeff Rian, David Robbins, François Roche, Julia Scher, R. U. Sirius, Liz Stirling, Tom Verlaine, Jean-Luc Vilmouth, Jacques-Arthur Weil.
Soon after the birth of Purple Prose, Zahm created spin-off publications like Purple Sexe, Purple Fiction and what we now know and love, Purple Fashion. Zahm aimed at fusing together his two worlds, fashion and art, in creating Purple Fashion.
Before entering the world of fashion, Zahm worked as an art critic with widespread recognition for his work as a curator as well as his participation in over 150 exhibitions featuring international contemporary art. In 1994, Zahm and Fleiss curated “The Winter of Love,” a hit show for the Museum of Modern Art in Paris that they later took to P.S.1 in New York. In responding to the superficial glamour of the 1980s, Zahm co-founded Purple Prose magazine. In the introduction of Purple Anthology, Zahm shares why he chose to create Purple Prose:
"We launched Purple Prose in the early 1990s without any means, and without any experience, because we wanted to make a magazine that was radically different. We wanted to support the artists around us that no one else supported, much less talked about. [..] It would be a form of opposition of our own".
Very Good—Near Fine copy, light wear.
2004, English / French
Softcover (staple-bound), 21 x 27.5 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Purple Institute / Paris
$190.00 - In stock -
Rare copy of the first issue of The Purple Journal, featuring Elein Fleiss, Jeffrey Rian, Dorothée Perret, Mark Borthwick, Gérard Duguet-Grasser, Laetitia Benat, Marina Faust, Allen Ginsberg, Susan Cianciolo, Henry Roy, Lizzi Bougatsos, Anders Edström, Maurizio Cattelan, Takashi Homma, Michel Zumpf, Chikashi Suzuki, Barbet Schroeder, Alain Lacroix, Jonathan Boulting, Maison Martin Margiela, Cora Maghnaoui, Claude Lévêque, Beth Yahp, Cosmic Wonder, Angela Hill, Ferdinand Gouzon, Comme des Garçons, Curtis Winter, Beth Yahp, Ferdinand Gouzon, Curtis Winter, Manon de Boer, Christophe Brunnquell, Sébastien Jamain, Tiphaine Samoyault, Helmut Lang, Veronique Branquinho, Sébastien Jamain, Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster, Sharon Mesmer, Gérard Duguet-Grasser, and much more. Includes the special Paris supplement (16 pages).
"This is our first issue: joy, hope. Starting out or beginning again (the journal Hélène and the magazine Purple)-anyway, it's a first appearance. A path we'll travel together, we, the editors, and you, the readers. We will show reality as we see it through encounters with people, places, landscapes, artworks. Writing and photographs, original voices. The journey is not mapped out in advance, we'll discover it (as it reveals itself) with the changing seasons."—the editors
In 1992 Olivier Zahm and his partner Elein Fleiss printed the first issue of Purple Prose, a Parisian literary art zine that over the years has evolved into Purple Fashion Magazine. Soon after the birth of Purple Prose, Zahm and Fleiss created spin-off publications like les cahiers purple, Purple Sexe, Purple Fiction, and of course, Purple Fashion. Zahm aimed at fusing together his two worlds, fashion and art, in creating Purple Fashion.
Very Good copy, light wear/age/rippling to page edges.
2023, English
Softcover, 364 pages, 23 x 15.2 cm
Published by
West Martian / USA
$60.00 - In stock -
Xenosystems: Fragments is a selection of recovered blog posts by Nick Land, following Xenosystems' dormancy and ultimate deletion. This second edition, with a "Gift from the Lemurs", contains additional works by Land added to the compilation.
First conceived in 2013 by British philosopher Nick Land, Xenosystems is the ur-text of neoreactionary thought. Pathbreaking, uncompromising, and, as its name suggests, utterly alien, Xenosystems’ cold, often “anti-human” analytical approach to the problems of the early 21st Century provides a clarifying, if equally horrifying lens through which to see our current and future realities.
Presented here in book form for the first time, these selected excerpts, organized around the blog’s main themes of fragmentation, entropy, techno-capital, and political and social disintegration, captures the spirit of neoreaction and the discursive battlefield over which these idea were originally forged.
1991, English
Softcover, 296 pages, 15.3 x 22.8 cm
Published by
Zone Books / New York
$44.00 - In stock -
In his stunning essay Coldness and Cruelty Gilles Deleuze provides a rigorous and informed philosophical examination of the work of late nineteenth-century German novelist Leopold von Sacher-Masoch. Deleuze's essay, certainly the most profound study yet produced on the relations between sadism and masochism, seeks to develop and explain Masoch's "peculiar way of 'desexualizing' love while at the same time sexualizing the entire history of humanity." He shows that masochism is something far more subtle and complex than the enjoyment of pain, that masochism has nothing to do with sadism: their worlds do not communicate, just as the genius of those who created them -- Masoch and Sade -- lie stylistically, philosophically, and politically poles apart.
Venus in Furs, the most famous of Masoch's novels, belongs to an unfinished cycle of works that Masoch entitled The Heritage of Cain. The cycle was to treat a series of themes, including love, war, and death. The present work is about love. Although the entire constellation of symbols that has come to characterize the masochistic syndrome can be found here -- fetishes, whips, disguises, fur-clad women, contracts, humiliations, punishment, and always the volatile presence of a terrible coldness -- these received associations do not eclipse the truly singular and surprising power of Masoch's eroticism.
1981/1995, English
Softcover, 300 pages, 24.6 x 17 cm
Published by
Semiotext(e) / Los Angeles
$98.00 - In stock -
Originally conceived as a special Semiotext(e) issue on homosexuality at the end of the 70s, "Polysexuality" quickly evolved into a more complex and iconoclastic project whose intent was to do away with recognized genders altogether, considered far too limitative. The project landed somewhere between humor, anarchy, science-fiction, utopia and apocalypse. In the few years that it took to put it together, it also evolved from a joyous schizo concept to a darker, neo-Lacanian elaboration on the impossibility of sexuality. The tension between the two, occasionally perceptible, is the theoretical subtext of the issue. Upping the ante on gender distinctions, "Polysexuality" started by blowing wide open all sexual classifications, inventing unheard-of categories, regrouping singular features into often original configurations, like Corporate Sex, Alimentary Sex, Soft or Violent Sex, Discursive Sex, Self- Sex, Animal Sex, Child Sex, Morbid Sex, or Sex of the Gaze. Mixing documents, interviews, fiction, theory, poetry, psychiatry and anthropology, "Polysexuality" became the encyclopedia sexualis of a continent that is still emerging. What it displayed in all its forms could be called, broadly speaking, the Sexuality of Capital. (Actually the issue being rather hot, it was decided to cool it off somewhat by only using “capitals” throughout the issue. It was also the first issue for which we used the computer). It was first issued in 1981.—Semiotext(e)
The "Polysexuality" issue was attacked in Congress for its alleged advocation of animal sex.
Includes work by Pierre Klossowski, Pierre Guyotat, Paul Verlaine, Arthur Rimbaud, Alain Robbe-Grillet, Félix Guattari, Gilles Deleuze, Jean-François Lyotard, William S. Burroughs, Paul Virilio, Georges Bataille, Jacques Lacan, Roland Barthes, Peter Lamborn Wilson, Sylvère Lotringer, Bernard Noel, Terence Sellers, Guy Hocquenghem, Roger Caillois, Tony Duvert, together with an introduction written by Canadian editor and psychoanalyst François Peraldi.
1995 reprint edition.
1997, Japanese
Softcover, 400 pages, 21 x 15 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Million Publishing / Tokyo
$70.00 - Out of stock
September 1997 issue of S&M Sniper, the cutting-edge cult glossy fetish magazine published in Japan between 1979—2009 that, unlike previous SM magazines, didn't centre so much around professional kinbakushi, favouring instead the exploration of new innovations of fetish and underground sex culture and emphasising the work of the models, stylists, make-up artists, and fashions designers, as much as the writers or photographers. The "new wave" of SM counterculture, embedded in 1980s underground music, fashion and visual art culture in Japan. Explicitly and profusely illustrated, each issue came wrapped in the iconic hyper-stylized airbrushed front covers of artist Yosuke Onishi, veiling the core content of non-fiction realist degradation and an eclectic, expressive editorial of kinbaku and all manner of SM, and extreme fetish photoshoots, illustrations, comics, essays, diaries, reports, exhibitions, reviews, interviews, and included regular contributors such as SM archivist and noise musician Masami Akita (Merzbow), legendary SM writer and editor Dan Oniroku ("the most celebrated writer of popular SM novels in Japan"), features by legendary SM and seppuku performer, actress, and author Hiromi Saotome, features by contributing photographers Nobuyoshi Araki, Masaaki Toyoura, Kenichi Murata, Nobuhiko Ansai, Kinichi Tanaka, Domu Kitahara, sadistic BDSM trainer Shima Shikou, and regular writings by convicted murderer and cannibal Issei Sagawa!! Including his translations of Guido Crepax comics from Italian to Japanese. This was not a magazine like the others. Each issue is also brimming with amazing Japanese advertisements and classifieds for the latest bondage clubs, boutiques, dungeons, fashion, toys, video and publication catalogues, hook-ups, phone sex, and much more.
This issue includes Yosuke Onishi, Nobuyoshi Araki, Masaaki Toyoura, Kenichi Muata, Sakai Atsushi, Kinichi Tanaka, actress Ruka Aida, article on the films of American artist Michelle Handelman by Hiroko Nishino, Shima Shikou, Bondage Photoscape vol. 7 by Keita Haginiwa (w. behind the scenes making-of article by Masaaki Toyoura), The Sex Maniacs charity ball in London, actress Miku Fujioka, Sniper Gallery artwork by Maro Sumi, Katsu Yoshida, SM Club scene report by Jinno Ryutarou, all the usual and more... Not for the faint of heart.
Strictly 18+ customers only.
Very Good copy.
1990, Japanese
Softcover, 300 pages, 21 x 15 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Million Publishing / Tokyo
$70.00 - In stock -
August 1990 issue of S&M Sniper, the cutting-edge cult glossy fetish magazine published in Japan between 1979—2009 that, unlike previous SM magazines, didn't centre so much around professional kinbakushi, favouring instead the exploration of new innovations of fetish and underground sex culture and emphasising the work of the models, stylists, make-up artists, and fashions designers, as much as the writers or photographers. The "new wave" of SM counterculture, embedded in 1980s underground music, fashion and visual art culture in Japan. Explicitly and profusely illustrated, each issue came wrapped in the iconic hyper-stylized airbrushed front covers of artist Yosuke Onishi, veiling the core content of non-fiction realist degradation and an eclectic, expressive editorial of kinbaku and all manner of SM, and extreme fetish photoshoots, illustrations, comics, essays, diaries, reports, exhibitions, reviews, interviews, and included regular contributors such as SM archivist and noise musician Masami Akita (Merzbow), legendary SM writer and editor Dan Oniroku ("the most celebrated writer of popular SM novels in Japan"), features by legendary SM and seppuku performer, actress, and author Hiromi Saotome, features by contributing photographers Nobuyoshi Araki, Masaaki Toyoura, Kenichi Murata, Nobuhiko Ansai, Kinichi Tanaka, Domu Kitahara, sadistic BDSM trainer Shima Shikou, and regular writings by convicted murderer and cannibal Issei Sagawa!! Including his translations of Guido Crepax comics from Italian to Japanese. This was not a magazine like the others. Each issue is also brimming with amazing Japanese advertisements and classifieds for the latest bondage clubs, boutiques, dungeons, fashion, toys, video and publication catalogues, hook-ups, phone sex, and much more. This issue includes Nobuyoshi Araki, Yosuke Onishi, Katsu Yoshida, Ansai Nobuhiko, Kinichi Tanaka, Masao Takahashi, Tadao Chigusa, Masatoshi Aki, Shima Shikou, Tokuro Takahashi, Yukimasa Okumura, Naito Hisashi, all the usual and more... Not for the faint of heart.
Very Good copy.
1991, Japanese
Softcover, 320 pages, 21 x 15 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Million Publishing / Tokyo
$70.00 - In stock -
January 1991 issue of S&M Sniper, the cutting-edge cult glossy fetish magazine published in Japan between 1979—2009 that, unlike previous SM magazines, didn't centre so much around professional kinbakushi, favouring instead the exploration of new innovations of fetish and underground sex culture and emphasising the work of the models, stylists, make-up artists, and fashions designers, as much as the writers or photographers. The "new wave" of SM counterculture, embedded in 1980s underground music, fashion and visual art culture in Japan. Explicitly and profusely illustrated, each issue came wrapped in the iconic hyper-stylized airbrushed front covers of artist Yosuke Onishi, veiling the core content of non-fiction realist degradation and an eclectic, expressive editorial of kinbaku and all manner of SM, and extreme fetish photoshoots, illustrations, comics, essays, diaries, reports, exhibitions, reviews, interviews, and included regular contributors such as SM archivist and noise musician Masami Akita (Merzbow), legendary SM writer and editor Dan Oniroku ("the most celebrated writer of popular SM novels in Japan"), features by legendary SM and seppuku performer, actress, and author Hiromi Saotome, features by contributing photographers Nobuyoshi Araki, Masaaki Toyoura, Kenichi Murata, Nobuhiko Ansai, Kinichi Tanaka, Domu Kitahara, sadistic BDSM trainer Shima Shikou, and regular writings by convicted murderer and cannibal Issei Sagawa!! Including his translations of Guido Crepax comics from Italian to Japanese. This was not a magazine like the others. Each issue is also brimming with amazing Japanese advertisements and classifieds for the latest bondage clubs, boutiques, dungeons, fashion, toys, video and publication catalogues, hook-ups, phone sex, and much more. This issue includes Nobuyoshi Araki, Yosuke Onishi, Yukimasa Okumura, Shōzō Numa, Issei Sagawa, Tadao Chigusa, Shima Shikou, Nobuhiko Ansai, Akira Mouri, Shin Suzuki, Yoshiro Hori, Kinichi Tanaka, Katsu Yoshida, Akira Gomi, all the usual and more... Not for the faint of heart.
Strictly 18+ customers only.
Very Good copy.
1999, Japanese
Softcover, 300 pages, 21 x 15 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Million Publishing / Tokyo
$70.00 - In stock -
May 1999 issue of S&M Sniper, the cutting-edge cult glossy fetish magazine published in Japan between 1979—2009 that, unlike previous SM magazines, didn't centre so much around professional kinbakushi, favouring instead the exploration of new innovations of fetish and underground sex culture and emphasising the work of the models, stylists, make-up artists, and fashions designers, as much as the writers or photographers. The "new wave" of SM counterculture, embedded in 1980s underground music, fashion and visual art culture in Japan. Explicitly and profusely illustrated, each issue came wrapped in the iconic hyper-stylized airbrushed front covers of artist Yosuke Onishi, veiling the core content of non-fiction realist degradation and an eclectic, expressive editorial of kinbaku and all manner of SM, and extreme fetish photoshoots, illustrations, comics, essays, diaries, reports, exhibitions, reviews, interviews, and included regular contributors such as SM archivist and noise musician Masami Akita (Merzbow), legendary SM writer and editor Dan Oniroku ("the most celebrated writer of popular SM novels in Japan"), features by legendary SM and seppuku performer, actress, and author Hiromi Saotome, features by contributing photographers Nobuyoshi Araki, Masaaki Toyoura, Kenichi Murata, Nobuhiko Ansai, Kinichi Tanaka, Domu Kitahara, sadistic BDSM trainer Shima Shikou, and regular writings by convicted murderer and cannibal Issei Sagawa!! Including his translations of Guido Crepax comics from Italian to Japanese. This was not a magazine like the others. Each issue is also brimming with amazing Japanese advertisements and classifieds for the latest bondage clubs, boutiques, dungeons, fashion, toys, video and publication catalogues, hook-ups, phone sex, and much more. This issue includes Nobuyoshi Araki, Yosuke Onishi, Masami Akita (Merzbow), Haruki Yukimura, Wakao Takahashi, Shima Shikou, Katsu Yoshida, Tayoura Masaaki, Katsumi Oka, Kinichi Tanaka, Kenichi Nakano, all the usual and more... Not for the faint of heart.
Strictly 18+ customers only.
Very Good copy.
1982, Japanese
Softcover (staple-bound), 60 pages, 39.1 x 30 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / good
Published by
JICC Publishing Bureau / Japan
$180.00 - In stock -
First 1982 edition of this wonderful, very early collection of artworks by Japanese artist Katsu Yoshida (1938—2002). Bold, expressionist and homo-erotically charged, Yoshida's illustration work defined the new wave of 1980's Tokyo. "Portfolio" is packed cover to cover with full-bleed, over-sized reproductions of his sensational, sensual colour brushwork that was to become iconic through the pages of Japanese underground magazines such as SM Sniper and through his collaborations in the world of fashion with Issey Miyake.
Good copy with some chipping to the spine edge of covers, tanning to extremities of newsprint stock.
1970, German
Softcover, unpaginated, 18 x 12 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Kiepenheuer & Witsch / Köln
$100.00 - Out of stock
Scarce first 1970 German edition of Roland Topor's famous book collection Die Masochisten (The Masochists), one of the finest examples of the artist's profound command of illustrated dark humour. Almost entirely made up of wordless b/w illustrations, with a foreword in german by German designer, illustrator and typographer, Hannes Jähn.
Roland Topor (1938—1997) was one of the most unique and versatile French artists of the second half of the 20th century, working prolifically as a provocative and spirited illustrator, author, humorist, satirist, poet, painter, performer, sculptor, playwright, film and TV writer, filmmaker and actor, and much more. A founder of the Panic Movement, an art collective formed by Fernando Arrabal, Alejandro Jodorowsky, and Roland Topor in Paris in 1962, Topor was known for the surreal and absurdist nature of his work.
Very Good copy. A crisp, solidly bound copy with some foxing/tanning to pages, usual spine edge tanning to bright fluro pink boards (most often bleached out).
1974, Flemish / French
Softcover, unpaginated (100 pages approx), 15 x 16 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Lens Fine Art / Antwerp
$140.00 - Out of stock
Scarce 1974 catalogue published on the occasion of the exhibition of Roland Topor at Lens Fine Art, Antwerp, 25 April — 31 May, 1974. Profusely illustrated throughout with a catalogue of Topor's artworks from this paeriod, accompanied by texts by Topor and Arrabal (in Flemish/French).
Roland Topor (1938—1997) was one of the most unique and versatile French artists of the second half of the 20th century, working prolifically as a provocative and spirited illustrator, author, humorist, satirist, poet, painter, performer, sculptor, playwright, film and TV writer, filmmaker and actor, and much more. A founder of the Panic Movement, an art collective formed by Fernando Arrabal, Alejandro Jodorowsky, and Roland Topor in Paris in 1962, Topor was known for the surreal and absurdist nature of his work.
Fernando Arrabal Terán is a Spanish playwright, screenwriter, film director, novelist, poet and founder of the Panic Movement, an art collective formed by Fernando Arrabal, Alejandro Jodorowsky, and Roland Topor in Paris in 1962.
Very Good copy.
1959/1960, French
Softcover, 60 pages, 18.5 x 13.5 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / fine
Published by
Eric Losfeld / Paris
Le Terrain Vague / Paris
$100.00 - In stock -
Rare first 1960 edition of Jacques Sternberg's L'ARCHITECTE, illustrated by Roland Topor, published by Eric Losfeld and Le Terrain Vague, Paris. Printed in 1959 in beautiful letterpress limited edition of 3000 copies, issued in 1960 as the first volume in “Le Second Degré” collection.
Jacques Sternberg (1923—2006) was a French-language writer of science fiction and fantastique.
Roland Topor (1938—1997) was one of the most unique and versatile French artists of the second half of the 20th century, working prolifically as a provocative and spirited illustrator, author, humorist, satirist, poet, painter, performer, sculptor, playwright, film and TV writer, filmmaker and actor, and much more. A founder of the Panic Movement, an art collective formed by Fernando Arrabal, Alejandro Jodorowsky, and Roland Topor in Paris in 1962, Topor was known for the surreal and absurdist nature of his work.
Fine copy.
1970, French
Softcover, 166 pages, 14 x 21 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
André Balland / Paris
$180.00 - Out of stock
"One and one make two, but two breasts, side by side, do not necessarily make a chest.
The game consists of reuniting the 480 twins Topor has sadistically scattered throughout this book, and then, in each small square below the printed figure, enter the number of the breast that you believe to be its companion, then ... to go check at the end of the volume the correctness of your solution.
If you have friends, it's better to write with a pencil. You can erase.
But, how do we know if we have friends?"
First edition of this scarce artist book by Roland Topor, published in Paris in 1970 by André Balland. Topor's titillating absurdist conceptual photo-book/game is a fine and curiously unusual example of his perverse humour and more absurdist Fluxus leanings. A fantastic book only ever printed in this one edition. 480 colour illustrations.
Roland Topor was one of the most unique and versatile French artists of the second half of the 20th century, working prolifically as a provocative and spirited illustrator, author, humorist, satirist, play-write, actor, poet, painter, performer, sculptor, and much more. Son of a Parisian painter and sculptor of Polish-Jewish descent, in 1941, Topor's father was arrested and sent to camp Pithiviers. Two years later, the family moved to Savoy, where they baptised their son to hide his real identity. After the war, he studied art at the Institute of Beaux-Arts in Paris. He discovered surrealism, Hieronymus Bosch and the scatological plays of Alfred Jarry, which would influence his work and his attitude to life in general.
In 1958, he published his first work in magazines such as Bizarre and later Elle. Three years later, he joined the anarchic group of artists who created the controversial magazine Hara-Kiri, publishing his surreal juxtapositions of people, animals, plants and objects. Topor seldom used words in his illustrations, leaving all power to the visual. In February 1962, Topor, Alejandro Jodorowsky, Olivier O. Olivier, Jacques Sternberg, Christian Zeimert, Abel Ogier and Fernando Arrabal founded the "Mouvement Panique" ("Panic Movement"). This collective focused on creating absurd and bewildering performances to reject the commercialization of surrealism. The founders created many provocative and surreal works in the next decade before Jodorowsky dissolved the movement in 1973. However, Topor continued making scandalous plays afterwards, including 'Le Bébé de Monsieur Laurent' (1975) and 'Vinci avait raison' (1976).
In print, Topor's history is legendary. In 1964 Topor published his debut novel 'Le Locataire Chimérique' ('The Tenant', 1964), a psychological horror story about a man moving in an apartment where he is gradually pestered into madness by the other inhabitants. The work was adapted to film in 1976 by Roman Polanski and both the book as well as the picture are cult classics to this day. His 1980s pamphlet '100 Bonnes Raisons Pour Me Suicider' ('100 Good Reasons To Commit Suicide') is another example of his taste for black comedy. The most unique and unusual book in Topor's oeuvre must be 'Souvenir' (1972), a kind-of Fluxus obscurity featuring a text with all the sentences scratched out to the point of being unreadable. When the artist was interviewed on Dutch television by Adriaan van Dis to read some extracts from it Topor accepted the request by holding his hand in front of his mouth and mumble through it. In 1966 Topor illustrated 'Topographie Anécdotée du Hasard' (Anecdoted Topography of Chance) by Swiss assemblage artist Daniel Spoerri. Following a rambling conversation with his friend Robert Filliou in 1961, Daniel Spoerri one day mapped the objects lying at random on the table in his room, adding a rigorously scientific description of each. These objects subsequently evoked associations, memories and anecdotes from both the original author and his friends Filliou, Emmett Williams, Dieter Roth and Roland Topor. Considered a "quasi-autobiographical tour de force", incredible book was published in 1966 by the Something Else Press in New York City. Topor added sketches of each object. Acknowledged as one of the most important and entertaining artists’ books of the postwar period, An Anecdoted Topography of Chance is a unique collaborative work by four artists associated with the Fluxus and Nouveau Réalisme movements.
Topor also had an interest in film. He designed the posters of movies such as 'L'Ibis Rouge' (1975), 'Ai no borei' ('The Empire of Passion', 1978) and 'Die Blechtrommel' ('The Tin Drum', 1979). His drawings can also be seen during the opening titles of Fernando Arrabal's experimental film 'Viva La Muerte' (1971) and during the magic lantern sequence in Federico Fellini's 'Il Casanova di Fellini' (1976). He also worked as an actor, appearing in Dusan Makavejev's 'Sweet Movie' (1974) and as Dracula's assistant Renfield in Werner Herzog's horror remake of 'Nosferatu' (1979). The latter film has also immortalized his notorious hysterical and chilling laugh.
Together with René Laloux, he created the animated shorts 'Les Temps Morts' (1964) and 'Les Escargots' ('The Snails', 1965) and the full length animated feature 'La Planète Sauvage' ('Fantastic Planet', 1973). The latter work was based on Stefan Wul's science fiction novel 'Oms en Série' and takes place on a surreal planet where gigantic blue aliens treat humans as pets. 'La Planète Sauvage' won the special jury prize at the Festival of Cannes and has achieved cult status over the years.
Topor was a frequent guest in the philosophical radio show 'Des Papous dans la tête' (1984) at France Culture. Together with his good friend and playwright Jean-Michel Ribes, he wrote scripts for the satirical TV sketch series 'Merci Bernard' (1982-1984) on France 3 and 'Palace' (1988-1989) on Canal +. They wrote the theatrical play 'Batailles' (1983) about people of different social classes stranded on a raft, which was a satirical allegory of capitalism. Another collaborative project was the comedy film 'La Galette du Roi' (1985). In 1975 he recorded an album with his Belgian friend Freddy De Vree called 'Panic (The Golden Years)'. It features Topor being interviewed by De Vree on the Flemish public radio channel BRT 3. Apart from talking he also recites some nonsensical songs, including the Dutch nursery rhyme 'Iene miene mutte' and the tongue twister 'De kat krabt de krullen van de trap.' Topor also wrote two songs, 'Je m'aime' and 'Monte dans mon ambulance', which were set to music by François d'Aime and recorded by Japanese singer Megumi Satsu in 1980.
In the 1980s, Topor published in Le Petit Psikopat Illustré, an alternative review, and also teamed up with Belgian film director Henri Xhonneux to create the cult children's series 'Téléchat', a news show featuring anthropomorphic animals and objects and marionets presenting news. The program received various awards, including the 1984 award for best French broadcast for children and adolescents at the Festival of Cannes. It was also nominated for an Emmy in 1985.
Topor and Xhonneux joined forces again in 1989 to create the film 'Marquis', which was loosely based on the life and work of the notorious Marquis de Sade. The actors performed in animal masks and De Sade's penis was made into a separate puppet with a human face and the ability to talk. Due to the unusualness of its execution it became a cult favorite.
Very good copy of first edition.
2019, English
Softcover, 144 pages, 29 x 20 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / as new
Published by
MACK / London
$480.00 - Out of stock
Sealed copy of the first edition of the highly sought-after Showcaller, the first photo book exploring the work of emerging artist Talia Chetrit. It brings together a broad range of her work made between 1994 and 2018 and is linked to a retrospective museum exhibition at the Kölnischer Kunstverein in early 2018. The title Showcaller is a theatrical term which references the performative aspects of Chetrit’s work, the power dynamic between subject and photographer, and, ultimately, between the photographer and her audience.
The earliest works included were made when Chetrit was a teenager and she adroitly collapses and shuffles images from across 24 years and neutralises the space between family portraits, teenage friends, intimate sex pictures, self-portraits, staged murder pictures, still-lives, and street photographs, to name just a few of the subjects and genres her work adopts. Her focus lies on researching and unveiling the basic social, conceptual and technical conditions of the genre of photography. Her work is imbued with a desire to control the physical and historical limitations of the camera, to trace its manipulative potential, and to question the relationship between photographer and subject.
Now out-of-print. As New, sealed copy.
1989, English
Softcover 138 pages, 28.6 x 19.5 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Aperture / New York
Institute of Modern Art / Valencia
$480.00 - In stock -
Very rare first 1989 edition of one of Richard Prince’s best and most influential books. Spiritual America is a catalogue cum artist's book published by Aperture in conjunction with the artist’s landmark 1989 exhibition at the Institute of Modern Art in Valencia, Spain, and Guggenheim Museum, New York. Lavishly illustrated and stylishly designed closely with Prince by Bethany Johns, Spiritual America “retains a dual role as a retrospective survey of Prince’s work and a fascinating re-integration of his repertoire of images into the format from which they mostly originated - the magazine”(—Greg Hilty, Frieze Magazine). With over 200 colour images of Prince's work (the jokes, the bikers, the cowboys, the glamour girls, the hoods...), Spiritual America marked the first comprehensive publication on the artist and his work, featuring Prince's own texts as well as an incredible transcribed "interview" with author J.G. Ballard, and a preface by Corinne Diserens and Vincent Todoli.
"What would it be if I had the eyes of a fly?"
Artist's book entry 13 in "Bibliotheque d'un Amateur: Richard Prince's Publications 1981-2012"
VG—Near Fine, seemingly unread, tightly bound copy, no sunning. A light remainder stamp to top of book-block is the only detraction from a remarkable copy.
2004, English
Hardcover, 176 pages, 19 x 28.5 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / fine
Published by
Hatje Cantz / Berlin
Regen Projects / Los Angeles
$220.00 - In stock -
First, only edition of the collectable hardcover catalogue cum artist's book that is Richard Prince's pictorial homage to Women, published in conjunction with a 2004 Regen Projects exhibition in Los Angeles and long out-of-print.
"Perfectly beautiful yet strangely faceless, hundreds of interchangeable fashion models and bare-breasted biker chicks find themselves reincarnated in the artwork of Richard Prince. Prince recycles these American (male) pop culture fantasies from found materials, most often advertising images and magazine layouts which he rephotographs, repaints or overpaints, arranges in collages, or breaks down into fragments. Images of women representing various spheres of trivial culture, marketing iconography like the Marlboro Man, and figures borrowed from chauvinist cartoons are central motifs in his art. Without comment, Prince cites and duplicates them in supposedly defunct role clichés that remain stubbornly present even today. Women goes even further, presenting a diverse yet decidedly thematic selection of appropriations chosen by the artist himself and ranging across his body of work. From bad sexist jokes to the covers of books written by female authors, from rockin' out naked biker chicks to Kate Moss, from a rephotographed Untitled Film Still to penny-novel nurses--these are Richard Prince's Women."
Lavishly illustrated throughout. Text by Shaun Caley Regen. Designed by Lorraine Wild and Robert Ruehlmann. (Cat Entry 13 in "Bibliotheque d'un Amateur: Richard Prince's Publications 1981-2012")
Near Fine, As New copy.
1995, English
Hardcover (w. dust jacket), 240 pages, 20 x 29.5 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Scalo Publishers / Zürich
$320.00 - In stock -
First 1995 hardcover edition of Richard Prince's photo/artist's book, Adult Comedy Action Drama, a splendid, rare and controversial volume on the subject of photography, American consumerism and voyeurism.
“An autobiography through words and pictures… Adult Comedy Action Drama links together Prince’s drawings, aphorisms, original photographs and photographs of other peoples’ photographs. Lighthearted and funny, it describes and theatricalizes the visual ‘stage set’ of an artist’s life, enacting all the comedies, actions and dramas with pictures alone. Prince’s is a postmodern landscape, where one becomes what one beholds” (Roth, 30). “Prince updates the old Modernist flirtation between the intellectual and the supposedly primitive… borrowing conceptual and aesthetic strategies from Duchamp, Jasper Johns, Minimalism and the photography-as-painting movement” (New York Times). Open Book, 366. Roth, 274.
Very Good copy with very minor ex-libris markings to top of book block and initial endpaper and title page only, otherwise a gorgeous copy throughout w. VG dust jacket preserved in mylar wrap.
1995, English
Hardcover (w. dust jacket), 176 pages, 28.5 x 24 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Scalo Publishers / Zürich
$340.00 - In stock -
First 1995 Scalo hardcover edition of the infamous Larry Clark photo book, The Perfect Childhood, banned for import and distribution in the United States for years. Includes Clark's controversial black and white photographs from the "Tulsa" and Teenage Lust" work, as well as previously unpublished colour and black and white images.
From the publisher: "Larry Clark's work has always obsessively circled around adolescent boys, their awakening sexual drives, the enormous energies they have to harness. Clark offers the viewer a cultural anthropology of this transitory period that oscillates between painful pleasure and exuberant self-destruction. Clark is spellbound with the vital, unruly, and destructive force teen boys exude. Clark confronts us with lucid images of male sexuality and its equally creative and destructive impulses. He combines pop-culture imagery with his own photographs to evoke a myth ingrained in the heart of our culture.
The Perfect Childhood combines an overview of Clark's work-ranging from collages and found images to photographs from his native Oklahoma in the late 1960's-with a new series of tender and erotic portraits of a skater boy-the latest incarnation of the mythical eternal youth Clark investigates and idolizes in his work. Material from the past 30 years is combined to create one new work of art-overwhelming proof of the consistency of Clark's artistic vision. The book is as raunchy and brutally straightforward as it is melancholy and affectionate. Its attitude will confound all those thinking in comfortable and complacent opposites-gay and straight, creative and destructive, tenderness and violence, good and evil. Clark's work is a mirror for those strong enough to face the truth about growing up as a boy."
Very Good copy in VG dust jacket.
1984, Japanese
Hardcover (w. dust jacket) in slipcase (w. obi), 110 pages, 31cm x 24 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / fine
Published by
Shogakukan / Tokyo
$240.00 - In stock -
First 1984 edition of Kuniyoshi Kaneko's Theatre of Eros, one of the finest monographic volumes on Japanese painter, illustrator and photographer Kuniyoshi Kaneko (1936—2015), this copy with signed dedication by the artist (dated "1984.1.2") to the first blank page. Profusely illustrated throughout in colour and b/w with Kaneko's figurative paintings and drawings of young men and women in enigmatic, metaphysical scenes of surreal, stylised erotic beauty, channeling the spirits of Cocteau and Balthus, including his famous illustrations for Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland, his illustrations for Orpheus, an array of his beloved oil on canvas and pastel and paper works, plus much more. Free of convention, Kaneko's dreamlike scenarios were very often of same-sex, homo-erotic, even fetishistic nature, and his artwork, encouraged by editor and writer Shibusawa Tatsuhiko (1928—1987), became a staple in the underground publishing scene of 1970's Tokyo. Theatre of Eros includes an extensive, illustrated biography, many photographic portraits, and a conversation with Japanese essayist and poet Mutsuo Takahashi (b. 1937). Takahashi was one of the most prominent poets of postwar Japan, known for his bold poetic work of male-male eroticism.
A beautifully preserved complete copy with original publisher's obi, and inserted with a file of various Kaneko Japanese media press clippings, 1984 Seibu gallery Theatre of Eros exhibition flyer, and the complete pages of an amazing photographic feature on Japanese pop star (and YMO-founder Haruomi Hosono collaborator) Miharu Koshi art directed and designed by Kaneko himself.
F copy in NF slipcase and obi.
1980, Japanese
Softcover, 132 pages, 30 x 21 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Sun Publishing / Japan
$590.00 - In stock -
Absolutely incredible, super rare, ultra collectible first edition of the first Namio Harukawa art book, published in Japan in 1980 by leading SM magazine SM Collector and their publishing house, Sun. An absolute treasure of vintage Namio Harukawa femdom works, released a full 20 years prior to his "Big Girl Love / My Fair Fat Lady" (2000) and 32 years before his late "Garden of Domina". By 1980 Namio was already a prolific master of fetish illustration, contributing to countless cult SM magazines. Lavishly illustrated throughout in colour and black and white with gorgeous reproductions on various paper stocks, including full-colour fold-out poster, this volume introduces so many early works never seen in any later monographs with a diverse array of "femdom" fetishes and narratives, including all his SM magazine work through to the establishment of his iconic face-sitting queens. A breath-taking, comprehensive collection that is a must for any fan of Harukawa or erotic illustration, period. Appropriately this "treasured art collection" was named "Chijin No Ai" ("A Fool’s Love") by Harukawa, after Tanizaki Jun’ichiro’s novel featuring Naomi, the sadistic heroine whose name was adopted by Harukawa. Cannot recommend this book more.
Namio Harukawa (1947—2020), a pseudonymous Japanese fetish artist best known for his masterful pencil works depicting female domination ("femdom"), with erotic asphyxiation through facesitting appearing as a frequent subject of his art. Born 1947 in Osaka, Japan, Harukawa’s distinctive penname combines the name of film actress Harukawa Masumi with an anagram of Naomi, the sadistic heroine in Tanizaki Jun’ichiro’s novel "Chijin no ai / A Fool’s Love". While in high school, Harukawa began contributing work to the readers’ column of leading postwar Japanese SM pulp magazine "Kitan Club". Since then, Harukawa’s drawings of male masochism have lovingly portrayed noble, voluptuously beautiful women and the men who serve them as human furniture. An extraordinary and prolific artist who remained committed to the regime of “absolute Ganmen Kijo Shugi (facesitting principle)” throughout his artistic life, Namio Harukawa passed away on April 2020, he was 72 years old.
Very Good copy, beautifully preserved, only light cover wear.
2000, English / Japanese
Hardcover (w. dust jacket), 27.5 x 19.5 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Taiyo Tosho / Japan
$680.00 - In stock -
Super rare, very collectible Namio Harukawa oversized hardcover art book, published in Japan in 2000 and long out-of-print. This deluxe art book is considered the first book devoted entirely to Harukawa's "Paradise under the grand hips" — his iconic big-girl-love-femdom-facesitting illustrations. Beautifully produced and lavishly illustrated heavy book full of the exceptional work of Namio Harukawa (1947—2020), a pseudonymous Japanese fetish artist best known for his masterful pencil works depicting female domination ("femdom"), with erotic asphyxiation through facesitting appearing as a frequent subject of his art. As well as an impeccably reproduced collection of Harukawa's works in full-bleed colour, the book features Harukawa's complete illustrated "lewd love story of a noble lady and a beast", a collection of many of his best known works beautifully reproduced alongside sado-masochist narratives. A stunning book and must for any Harukawa fan.
Namio Harukawa (1947—2020), a pseudonymous Japanese fetish artist best known for his masterful pencil works depicting female domination ("femdom"), with erotic asphyxiation through facesitting appearing as a frequent subject of his art. Born 1947 in Osaka, Japan, Harukawa’s distinctive penname combines the name of film actress Harukawa Masumi with an anagram of Naomi, the sadistic heroine in Tanizaki Jun’ichiro’s novel "Chijin no ai / A Fool’s Love". While in high school, Harukawa began contributing work to the readers’ column of leading postwar Japanese SM pulp magazine "Kitan Club". Since then, Harukawa’s drawings of male masochism have lovingly portrayed noble, voluptuously beautiful women and the men who serve them as human furniture. An extraordinary and prolific artist who remained committed to the regime of “absolute Ganmen Kijo Shugi (facesitting principle)” throughout his artistic life, Namio Harukawa passed away on April 2020, he was 72 years old.
Fine copy in original illustrated, gold foiled Very Good dust jacket, only light wear. Hardcovers also illustrated. A well-preserved copy.
1984, Japanese
Softcover, 138 pages, 22 x 29.5 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Kajima Institute Publishing / Tokyo
$70.00 $35.00 - In stock -
SD (Space Design) no. 234, 1984, featuring in-depth special features on German industrial designers Dieter Rams (Braun, Vitsœ, et al.) and Ferdinand Alexander Porsche. Huge illustrated features surveying the designs and philosophies of both designers, along with other extensive illustrated features on MEMPHIS Milano, László Moholy-Nagy's "Vision in Motion", and much more...
“SD” (Space Design) was founded in Japan in 1965; a comprehensive monthly magazine on architecture, urban problems and fine arts which was unique in the world and quickly became a leading, highly-esteemed journal of international modern design. In-depth articles, photo documents, plans, reports and interviews, SD is one of the finest journals dedicated to new design (architecture, furniture, interior, environmental, industrial...), becoming a much sought-after archival resource.
Good copy.
1983, Japanese
Softcover, 138 pages, 22 x 29.5 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / good
Published by
Kajima Institute Publishing / Tokyo
$70.00 $35.00 - In stock -
SD (Space Design) no. 222, 1983, featuring in-depth special feature on Italian design (furniture, architecture, textile, graphic, industrial...) including MEMPHIS Milano, Michael Graves, Nathalie du Pasquier, Ettore Sottsass, Marco Zanini, Michele De Lucchi, Andrea Branzi, Alessandro Mendini, Matteo Thun, George Sowden, Marco Zanini, Marco Zanuso, Martine Bedin, Shiro Kuramata, etc., Achille Castiglioni, Olivetti, Hans von Krier, Vittorio Gregotti, Emilio Ambasz, Aldo Rossi, Isao Hosoe, Centro DA, Pietro Salmoiraghi, and much more...
“SD” (Space Design) was founded in Japan in 1965; a comprehensive monthly magazine on architecture, urban problems and fine arts which was unique in the world and quickly became a leading, highly-esteemed journal of international modern design. In-depth articles, photo documents, plans, reports and interviews, SD is one of the finest journals dedicated to new design (architecture, furniture, interior, environmental, industrial...), becoming a much sought-after archival resource.
Good copy.