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
Art
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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.
2024, English
Hardcover (w. dust jacket), 88 pages, 26 x 28.6 cm
Published by
Letter16 Press / Miami
$95.00 - In stock -
New documentation of Joseph Beuys’ controversial performance piece.
Edited with foreword by Brett Sokol
May 2024 marks the 50th anniversary of Joseph Beuys’ infamous piece of performance art staged in New York City: I Like America and America Likes Me. The premise—a man and a wild coyote locked together inside a room—helped build a cult following for Beuys that has made him alternately revered and reviled throughout the contemporary art world. Stephen Aiken’s (born 1948) photographs of this May 1974 "action" by Beuys—recently unearthed and previously unpublished—offer a fresh look at this seminal art happening. These striking images are supplemented with a set of previously unseen color photos taken by Aiken of Beuys at Greenwich Village’s New School in January 1974: verbally sparring onstage with fellow artist Hannah Wilke and jousting with a raucous audience that threatened to turn his lecture into a brawl.
2024, English
Softcover, 264 pages, 21.59 x 13.96 cm
Published by
Yale University Press / New Haven
$55.00 - Out of stock
Two never-before-published novels by Mina Loy, the celebrated modernist poet, artist, and feminist
Mina Loy (1882-1966) is an essential figure of the European and American modernist avant-garde. A groundbreaking writer of poetry, novels, essays, plays, and uncategorizable prose, she was also a fashion and lighting designer and an accomplished visual artist. As gallery agent for figures such as Giorgio de Chirico, Alberto Giacometti, and Salvador Dali, she was a significant conduit for art that traversed the Atlantic. Loy has been best known for the poetry she published in the little magazines of the late teens and early twenties, most notably the long poem "Songs to Joannes" and the autobiographical verse-epic "Anglo-Mongrels and the Rose."
Featuring two never-before-published manuscripts of Loy's autobiographical prose-The Child and the Parent and Islands in the Air-this remarkable book expands Loy's rich oeuvre. Interlinked texts written over twenty years, from the 1930s to the 1950s, these fascinating works narrate the feminist struggle of the creative spirit as it comes into consciousness and encounters indoctrinating social norms. The works are accompanied by an introduction and afterword by Karla Kelsey that frame Loy as a poet, prose writer, businesswoman, and visual artist and discuss the texts, their stylistic innovations, and their unique interconnectedness.
"At once philosophical and lyrical, these novels are a revelation. Their rediscovery confirms Loy as one of the major feminist writers of her time, and a dazzling, neglected novelist of the modernist period."—Alys Moody, author of The Art of Hunger
"Mina Loy's writings were animated by a desire to articulate the interior of consciousness through the register of the senses. She understood perception to attach to both the known and unknown, the material world seen often as a veil across an infinite mystery. The familiar dualities of mind and matter, time and space, good and evil, find themselves, in Loy's rich lexicon and dazzling sentences, under the most prescient and dissolving scrutiny. At once personally intimate and philosophically astute, Loy's prose has the mesmerizing singularity and wit of her acclaimed poetry. As intoxicating as an essential oil, these unpublished works are a rare and welcome gift to our arid times. 'The blaze exploded in me. I was riddled with splinters of delight.'"-Ann Lauterbach, author of Door
2024, English
Softcover, 160 pages, 22 x 16.5 cm
Published by
Hauser & Wirth / Zurich
$59.00 - Out of stock
Sigríður Björnsdóttir met 22-year-old Dieter Roth in Copenhagen in 1952. A year later, Roth joined her in Reykjavík, and in 1957 they married. 50 years later, Björnsdóttir recounts their meeting, the ups and downs of their marriage, their life with their children and their eventual separation. 'Dieter Roth in My Life' is an honest and personal account of a period in Björnsdóttir’s life, shared with a man she describes as the love of her life who went on to become a successful and highly influential artist. Beyond her own artistic activities, Björnsdóttir describes her collaborative and experimental work with Roth, their encounters with friends and peers within the tightly woven Icelandic creative community and the beginnings of Roth’s multifaceted practice. Sigríður Björnsdóttir is an art therapist and artist living in Reykjavík. She graduated from the Icelandic College of Arts and Crafts in 1952 and went on to become a pioneer in art therapy, practicing in Iceland and lecturing worldwide.
2024, English
Softcover, 128 pages, 20.19 x 13.59 cm
Published by
Wakefield Press / Cambridge
$32.00 - In stock -
First published posthumously in 1966, Trouble in the Swaths was written for a small audience of family and friends during the Nazi Occupation of Paris, but it presented little evidence of those dark years. It is a flippant, at times outrageous parody of genre fiction laced through with bursts of Sadean violence, absurdist slapstick, and excessive wordplay in which Vian makes his fictionalized debut under such anagrammed monikers as the Baron Visi and the detective Brisavion.
Preceding Ian Fleming’s novels by several years, Trouble in the Swaths nonetheless anticipates and ridicules such spy thrillers and their sexism, casual murders, plot twists, and technological gadgetry. The plot quickly shifts from mock realist novel to comic-book escapade as our two young dandy heroes, Count Adelphin de Beaumashin and Sérafinio Alvaraide, quickly abandon the Baroness Pyssenlied’s party to set off on a quest for a missing artifact. The adventure involves bombs and machine guns, planes and parachutes, trapdoors and underground caverns, a secret manuscript that endeavors to absorb the novel, and, at the center of it all, the core of the narrative maelstrom: the forked barbarin.
Translated, with an introduction, by Terry Bradford.
Boris Vian (1920–1959) was a French polymath who in his short life managed to inhabit the roles of writer, poet, playwright, musician, singer/songwriter, translator, music critic, actor, inventor, and engineer. He died of a cardiac arrest at the age of 39 after authoring ten novels, several volumes of short stories, plays, operas, articles, and nearly 500 songs. Vian is remembered as one of the reigning spirits of the postwar Parisian Latin quarter, a friend to everyone from Jean-Paul Sartre, Raymond Queneau, and Miles Davis, playing trumpet with Claude Abadie and Claude Luter, and an influence on such future kindred spirits as Serge Gainsbourg.
2024, English
Softcover, 72 pages, 17.27 x 10.92 cm
Published by
Wakefield Press / Cambridge
$29.00 - In stock -
Introduction by Jean-Luc Nancy
Translated by Stéphanie Boulard and Timothy Lavenz
In 1902, Hugo von Hofmannsthal’s “Lord Chandos Letter” articulated a deep crisis of faith in language; having “lost completely the ability to think or speak of anything coherently,” the titular character abandons literature in favor of silence. In The Answer to Lord Chandos, a text the author spent forty-one years meticulously crafting, Pascal Quignard passionately challenges this withdrawal and urges us not to forsake the power of poetry. By uniting us with the tremendous cry at nature’s birth, literature rejuvenates our connection to the universe and transcends the strictures of acquired speech. In this exhilarating exhortation, which meditates on Emily Brontë, Handel, Rembrandt, and the legend of Bluebeard, Quignard inspires us to resurrect the ecstatic eruption of nature through the written word.
In an introduction to this first English edition, French philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy illuminates the core question animating this debate, which has resonated within literature since its inception: Can poetry give access to the real? Quignard’s resounding answer offers a testament to the immense value of literary expression.
Pascal Quignard (b. 1948) is the French author of over sixty books of fiction, essays, and his own genre of fragmented philosophical reflection: an amalgamation of personal journal, historical narrative, and poetic theory. His books in English include The Hatred of Music, All the World’s Mornings, Sex and Terror, and The Sexual Night, as well as the multiple volumes of his ongoing book project The Last Kingdom, which to date includes The Roving Shadows, The Silent Crossing, Abysses, The Fount of Time, and Dying of Thinking.
Jean-Luc Nancy (1940–2021) was a French philosopher. The subject of a monograph by Jacques Derrida, his long career saw a wide range of books on various thinkers, art, film, and the ideas of community, justice, and freedom. Nearly all his major works have been translated into English, including The Inoperative Community, The Birth to Presence, The Experience of Freedom, The Gravity of Thought, and Being Singular Plural.
2023, English
Softcover, 344 pages, 20.9 x 15 cm
Published by
Strange Attractor / London
$45.00 - Out of stock
A revised edition of Phil Baker's critically lauded biography of artist and occultist, Austin Osman Spare.
London has harbored many curious characters, but few more curious than the artist and visionary Austin Osman Spare (1886-1956).
A controversial enfant terrible of the Edwardian art world, the young Spare was hailed as a genius and a new Aubrey Beardsley, while George Bernard Shaw reportedly said "Spare's medicine is too strong for the average man."
But Spare was never made for worldly success and he went underground, falling out of the gallery system to live in poverty and obscurity south of the river. Absorbed in occultism and sorcery, voyaging into inner dimensions, and surrounding himself with cats and familiar spirits, he continued to produce extraordinary art while developing a magical philosophy of pleasure, obsession, and the subjective nature of reality.
Today Spare is both forgotten and famous, a cult figure whose modest life has been much mythologized since his death. This groundbreaking biographical study offers wide-ranging insights into Spare's art, mind and world, reconnecting him with the art history that ignored him and exploring his parallel London; a bygone place of pub pianists, wealthy alchemists, and monstrous owls.
This richly readable and illuminating biography takes us deep into the strange inner world that this most enigmatic of artists inhabited, shedding new light while allowing just a few shadowy corners to flourish unspoiled.
Revised, updated, and with a new afterword by the author, this is the definitive edition of Phil Baker's critically lauded Austin Osman Spare: The Life and Legend of London's Lost Artist.
Industry Reviews
"Phil Baker's study is a first-rate performance, scrupulously researched, judicious and refreshingly sane... Spare comes to seem a strangely attractive figure: talented, stoical, randy, cantankerous, gentle and a magnificent English eccentric."
-The Literary Review
"[Told with] zest and insight... Ever determined to break down the barriers between reality and fantasy, Spare has finally achieved it-not by elaborate psychic exercises, but through biography."
-Matthew Sturgis, Times Literary Supplement
"I cannot recommend Austin Osman Spare too highly. Phil Baker has done a wonderful job of bringing the complexities and contradictions of Spare's life to the fore, and in making the London of Spare's time come to life vividly and richly."
-Phil Hine, enfolding.org
"Phil Baker's book is excellent; it's the one many Spare enthusiasts such as I had been waiting for."
-John Coulthart, London Society Journal
"So many of Spare's works look like sketches for a masterwork rather than the finished article. Perhaps the finished article was Spare's life itself, an extraordnary carnival of strange chacters and incidents, some of them semi-mythical. It is as good as a novel."
-Reggie Oliver, Wormwood
2023, English
Softcover, 152 pages, 12 x 19 cm
Published by
MA BIBLIOTHÈQUE / Paris
$34.00 - In stock -
If you listen very carefully in the moments when the wind drops you will hear the soft movements deeper in, far back and away from these theatres of display and bad commerce, slow movements through rooms where that other game is played, where the light is cheap and white and very bright and where every single detail is inscribed for all time in exactly the mode that it was originally conceived.
The Attendants is a collection of fiction, written over a five-year period, from 2017, when the author moved to London, to early 2023. All the stories in this collection were written in response to art exhibitions or works of art. They represent an attempt to develop a coherent response to art: what it does and how it functions (and occasionally ceases to function) in London now. Many of the stories are genre pieces, horror, fantasy, and science fiction, but all have the complex interrelations of the image, the city, the eye, and the body at their centre.
‘Disrobing life as much as against nakedness. No escape from the head, never more certain of moving towards the point of rupture, or is that rapture, binding, increasing lucidity, slap, binding, drill at the deserving, the body is ever present. We visualise what has been lain on the page, written, drawn, coloured and feel the pulse: abound and bound, binding, grounded.’—Paul Buck
‘Bodies between the rigid and the porous and nameless characters move through spaces—room, gallery, ruin—with the sense of being in the aftermath of a disaster, yet waiting for something, where the options are to survive or succumb. The reader is drawn through intensely physical and precise descriptions and atmospheres into strange yet plausible worlds and encounters. These stories by an artist are cinematic, sculptural, painterly, and riveting.’—Michael Newman
Louis Mason is an Australian-Polish artist and writer currently based in London. In 2018 he was a co-director of the public programme Partial Versions, and a founding member of the South London Speculative Fiction Writing Group. He is the director of ge hinnom small group love, a gallery based in South London. His work has been shown internationally, and his fiction and critical writing have been commissioned by ICA London, Art+Australia Magazine, How to Sleep Faster, Obsidian Coast, and Praz Delavallade LA, among others
2002/2004, English/Japanese/French
Softcover, unpaginated, 25 x 19.5 cm
Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Taschen / Cologne
$70.00 - Out of stock
Japanese 2004 edition of Taschen's 2-in-1 2002 re-issue of two out-of-print photo books by German photographer Wolfgang Tillmans — his self titled masterpiece from 1995 and Burg from 1998. Both classic Tillmans books are combined into one, with introductions in English/Japanese/French by Simon Watney and David Deitcher. Warning: select Japanese censorship on a few photos.
Wolfgang Tillmans (b. 1968) is a German photographer. His diverse body of work is distinguished by observation of his surroundings and an ongoing investigation of the photographic medium’s foundations. Tillmans was initially known for his seemingly casual, sometimes snapshot-like portraits of friends (most notably, fashion designer Lutz Huelle and fellow artist Alexandra Bircken) and other youth in his immediate surroundings and scene. His photos – from the Europride in London (1992) or the Love Parade in Berlin (1992), for example – appeared in magazines such as i-D, Spex, Interview, SZ Magazin and Butt, and established his reputation as a prominent witness of a contemporary social movement. He was made co-editor of Spex in 1997, and was a prominent contributor to Purple magazine in Paris, his photographs central to what has come to be known as the '90s anti-fashion moment. Tillmans was the first photographer, and first non-British person, to be awarded the Turner Prize in 2000.
Good—Very Good copy, light cover handling wear.
2013, English
Hardcover, 336 pages, 24.1 x 30.5 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
MoMA / New York
$200.00 - Out of stock
Out-of-print first edition hardcover Isa Genzken retrospective catalogue published by MoMA in 2013. Text by Sabine Breitwieser, Laura Hoptman, Michael Darling, Jeffrey Grove, Lisa Lee.
"Isa Genzken (b. 1948) is arguably one of the most important and influential female artists of the past 30 years, yet the breadth of her achievement—which spans sculptures, paintings, photographs, collages, drawings, artist’s books, films, installations and public works—is still largely unknown in the United States. Published in conjunction with the first comprehensive retrospective of the artist’s epically diverse body of work, this publication encompasses Genzken’s work in all media over the past 40 years and is the most complete monograph on the artist available in English. Genzken has been part of the artistic discourse since she began exhibiting in the mid-1970s, but over the last decade a new generation of artists has been inspired by her radical inventiveness. The past ten years have been particularly productive for Genzken, who has created several bodies of work that have redefined assemblage for a new era. The catalogue presents Genzken’s career, through essays exploring the unfolding of her practice from 1973 until today, as well as an expansive plate section that provides a chronological overview of all her most important bodies of work and key exhibitions."
Born in Germany in 1948, Isa Genzken is one of Germany’s most important living artists. In the mid-1970s, as a student at Düsseldorf’s renowned Kunstakademie, she created geometric wood sculptures, which gained her early international acclaim (she exhibited these works at Documenta 7 and the Venice Biennale in 1982). Since then, she has made sculptures in plaster, concrete and epoxy resin. Ranging in size from maquettes to monumental, these abstract works are influenced by Minimalism, but are decidedly narrative. Paintings that examine ideas of surface and light, as well as photographs, collages, artist’s books and films, followed in the 1990s. From the late 90s on, Genzken began to create increasingly complex sculptural installations.
Good—VG copy with some light wear to extremities and corner bumping to overhung boards, not affecting content.
2021, English
Softcover, 128 pages, 24 x 29 cm
Published by
Lenz Press / Milan
$95.00 - In stock -
A series of images of Villa Santo Sospir in Saint-Jean-Cap-Ferrat, the "Tattooed Villa" transformed into an artwork by Jean Cocteau, whose Brazilian photographer Mauro Restiffe reveals the hidden details during a residency.
The Villa Santo Sospir in Saint-Jean Cap-Ferrat is not a Gesamtkunstwerk, and stands out in particular from the now-mythical realizations by Eileen Gray and Le Corbusier at Cap-Martin, just a stone's throw away. Far from a manifesto, Cocteau invests a pre-existing and rather unremarkable architecture, then conceives his intervention in the villa through a process of accumulation, mixing souvenirs and objects belonging to Francine Weisweiller or himself with the furniture of their friend Madeleine Castaing. Inspired by Greek mythology and the Mediterranean landscapes that surrounded the Villa, this late pictorial work, resolutely anti-modern, has long been ignored or vilified by historians. While Cocteau's entire literary, theatrical and cinematographic work deals with the representation of self, it always takes place in a particular setting. The interiors imagined by Cocteau provide accurate portraits of their occupants. In the 1950s, Jean Cocteau split his time between Paris, Milly la Forêt, and Saint-Jean Cap-Ferrat. It is at Santo Sospir that most of his TV interviews were made. It is above all the only house he filmed in his last two cinematographic opuses: La Villa Santo Sospir (filmée et commentée par Jean Cocteau) and Le Testament d'Orphée (Ne me demandez pas pourquoi). Santo Sospir can thus be viewed from the angle of a movie set, which allows him to introduce the world to the other Jean Cocteau—the Mediterranean poet, the craftsman.
Architecture, and Modernism in particular, has always been a source of inspiration for Brazilian photographer Mauro Restiffe. In his photographs, Restiffe has been exploring how every side of the built environment is imbued with life, all the more so in the unobserved details and even when no one is framed. In 2018, at the beginning of a multi-year restoration, he was invited to reside at the villa.
Mauro Restiffe (born 1970, lives and works in São Paulo) captures large format photographs of landscapes, modernist interiors, iconic architectures, and urban life, as well as exploring issues of representation in images that reproduce existing works of art. His work, exhibited internationally, is part is in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art (New York), SFMOMA (San Francisco), Tate Modern (London), MASP (São Paulo), among others.
2024, English
Softcover, 320 pages, 16 x 22 cm
Published by
Roma / Amsterdam
$63.00 - In stock -
When the Musée d’Art Moderne de Paris asked Ari Marcopoulos to curate an exhibition around their acquisition ‘Brown Bag’, a short film on skateboarders in New York that he made in 1993, he was given access to the museum’s collection of over 15,000 works. He looked for themes related to the body, injuries, and architecture, along with what he perceived as challenging and puzzling works. Some of the artists were already familiar, while others were new to him. The process was not so different from his process as a filmmaker and photographer: so much of his work is about finding things. This book is a new look at photographs from around the time Marcopoulos shot ‘Brown Bag’.
2024, English
Softcover, 112 pages, 21 x 30 cm
Published by
Roma / Amsterdam
$80.00 - In stock -
'The MoMA Plant Collection' displays the tradition of including plant life in the Museum of Modern Art NY. The book presents 340 photographs and drawings that pay tribute to the pairing of plants with art. What can the placement of greenery next to the works of Mark Rothko, Henri Matisse, and many others tell us about the relationship between culture and nature? A question that Meijer started to investigate in her first artist's book, 'The Plant Collection' (ROMA, 2019), on plants in the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, and continues at this museum in New York.
2024, English
Hardcover (clothbound), 124 pages, 25.5 x 17 cm
Edition of 500,
Published by
Robert Heald Gallery / Wellington
$39.00 - In stock -
Deluxe limited edition clothbound artists book, Brent Harris — The Stations, published in 2024 by Robert Heald Gallery, Wellington, on the occasion of the exhibition, The Stations, 24 June—24 July, 2021.
"Brent Harris is well-known for haunting imagery that drifts between abstraction and figuration. For more than four decades, he has engaged in a sustained investigation into the human condition, producing paintings, prints and drawings that address universal themes such as intimacy, desire, spirituality, sexuality and mortality. More than thirty years ago, Harris produced a series on the stations of the cross for which he received widespread critical acclaim as a young artist. Harris returned to the subject in a new body of work he began in 2020, The Stations, 2021."—Jane Devery
In an edition of 500 copies, this artists book / monographic reference is devoted entirely to The Stations, Harris’ first major series exhibited in 1989 exploring the death of his friends to AIDS, to his return to the subject in 2021. Lavishly illustrated across various paper stocks, it features a full-colour plate section reproducing the entire 2021 Stations painting series across fold-out spreads that open to reveal the entire 2021 Stations gravure series. Edited by Linda Michael, an illustrated essay section includes illuminating new essays by Laurence Simmons, Stuart McKenzie, and a conversation between Brent Harris and Jane Devery. Also includes full-colour photographic documentation of the Robert Heald Gallery exhibition in 2021, plus catalogue and artist and contributor biographies.
Printed and bound in Germany.
Brent Harris was born in Palmerston North, Aotearoa New Zealand in 1956. He relocated to Melbourne, Australia in 1981 and received a Bachelor of Fine Arts from the Victorian College of the Arts in 1984. He is celebrated as one of Australia’s leading contemporary artists. As a painter and printmaker, Harris’s practice moves between abstraction and figuration. His works are often described as being emotionally charged, psychological and intellectual explorations of familial relationships, religiosity and sexual identity as well as his own personal experiences of living as a young, gay man during the AIDS/HIV epidemic of the 1980s. Harris has exhibited extensively in Australia and internationally and his works are held in the collections of many large Australian and New Zealand institutions, including the National Gallery of Australia, the National Gallery of Victoria, the Art Gallery of New South Wales, the Art Gallery of Western Australia, Queensland Art Gallery of Modern Art; in New Zealand his practice is represented in the collection of Christchurch Art Gallery Te Puna o Waiwhetū in addition to Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki. He lives and works in Melbourne.
1970, English
Hardcover (w. dust jacket), 478 pages, 20 x 14 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / good
Published by
Routledge / London
$75.00 - Out of stock
First 1970 hardcover edition of Sexual Heretics: Male Homosexuality in English Literature from 1850—1900, edited by Brian Reade and published by Routledge, London. The years between 1850 and 1900 were the vintage years of a discreet homosexual culture in England. In this period, educational, personal and foreign influences all contributed to the establishment of a trend expressed in the works of authors such as John Addington Symonds, Walter Pater, and A.E. Housman, and in those of lesser writers, now largely forgotten. Sexual Heretics discusses a growing clandestine literature on the topic of male homosexuality (termed "Uranianism" at the time), in English literature and the growth of a homosexual subculture in England from the 1850s, ending shortly after the trials of Oscar Wilde in 1895. Forst published in 1970, this heavy anthology has been described by E. M. Forster biographer Wendy Moffat as "the first serious attempt to recuperate a lost gay canon in print". Containing 89 selections of prose and poetry, it includes works of prose, scholarly literature and ribald poetry, either homosexual in tone or providing a vehicle for homosexual emotions, and in several examples even overtly and experimentally frank. The book includes an introduction by Brian Reade explaining the network of friendships and associations which underlay this development and tracing some of its origins. Reade attributes the emergence of a homosexual subculture to the "sexually inhibitive" and controlling matriarchs within Victorian households, as well as the rise of middle-class families who sent their sons to colleges such as Winchester and Harrow "where homosexuality flourished because it was expedient", and the rise of neoclassicism which romanticised pederasty in ancient Greece.
Includes Percy Bysshe Shelley, Alfred Lord Tennyson, John Addington Symonds, Walt Whitman, Oscar Wilde, Richard Francis Burton, Aleister Crowley, William Shakespeare, and many others, including anonymous works.
Good copy in rarely preserved dust jacket, also Good, with wear/age to extremities. Book in preserved purple cloth, tightly bound with some foxing/spotting throughout.
1980, French
Softcover, unpaginated, 29.5 x 21 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / good
Published by
Chez l'auteur / Paris
$200.00 - In stock -
Extremely rare first edition of Herman Puig's Yang, the prized first photo book collection by the Cuban pioneer of male nude photography, published in 1980 by Chez l'auteur, Paris. Cover-to-cover stunning artistic males nudes shot in stark b/w. No texts. Herman Puig (1928—2021) was the founder of the first Cinemateca de Cuba and a ground-breaking photographer of the male nude. Born in Havana, Cuba, where he began his early work, his ascendance comes from Catalonia. It was in Madrid that he first started experimenting with male nudes but was arrested and charged as a pornographer under the climate of the socialist government. It was at this point that he moved to Paris in an attempt to prove to Spain and the world that he was not a pornographer but an artist and was accepted with almost universal acclaim. It was in France that Puig rose to fame, before settling in Barcelona for the remainder of his life.
Good—VG copy, light tanning and wear to extremities of cover laminate and light foxing to inside of covers.
1991 / 1994, English
Softcover (2 Vols), 192 + 126 pages, 22 x 28 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / good
Published by
Titan Books / London
$80.00 - Out of stock
First two first edition (1991 and 1994) volumes of this incredible collection of features, interviews and reviews covering the excesses of the world of exploitation cinema gathered from the pages of 1980's U.K. cult horror magazine Shock Xpress, featuring the film writings of Stephen Thrower, Anne Billson, Julian Grainger, George Kuchar, Ramsey Campbell, Kim Newman, Jack Stevenson, David Kerekes, David McGillivray, Alan Jones, and edited by Skullflower/Ascension guitarist Stefan Jaworzyn. Includes interviews with directors such as David Cronenberg, Clive Barker, and John Waters, as are features on obscure "classics" such as "Hitler's Wild Women", plus hundreds of rare photos, stills, lobby cards, posters... Georges Franju, Walerian Borowczyk, Franco Nero, Lindsay Shonteff...
"Really is the essential guide to exploitation cinema"—Film Review
Average—Good copies. Both generally Good but Vol. 2 with two loose pages, light creasing/wear to both.
2024, English
Softcover, 596 pages, 24 x 17 cm
Published by
Headpress / Oxford
$62.00 - In stock -
In the early 1980s, video technology forever changed the face of home entertainment. The videocassette - a handy-sized cartridge of magnetic tape inside a plastic shell - domesticated cinema as families across Britain began to consume films in an entirely new way. Demand was high and the result was a video gold rush, with video rental outlets appearing on every high street almost overnight. Without moderation their shelves filled with all manner of films depicting unbridled sex and violence. A backlash was inevitable. Video was soon perceived as a threat to society, a view neatly summed up in the term 'video nasties'.
CANNIBAL ERROR chronicles the phenomenal rise of video culture through a tumultuous decade, its impact and its aftermath. Based on extensive research and interviews, the authors provide a first-hand account of Britain in the 1980s, when video became a scapegoat for a variety of social ills. It examines the confusion spawned by the Video Recordings Act 1984, the subsequent witch hunt that culminated in police raids and arrests, and offers insightful commentary on many contentious and 'banned' films that were cited by the media as influential factors in several murder cases. It also investigates the cottage industry in illicit films that developed as a direct result of the 'video nasty' clampdown.
CANNIBAL ERROR, a revised and reworked edition of SEE NO EVIL (2000), is an exhaustive and startling overview of Britain's 'video nasty' panic, the ramifications of which are still felt today.
1980, Japanese
Softcover, 330 pages, 21 x 15 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Million Publishing / Tokyo
$80.00 - Out of stock
Rare FIRST issue of S&M Novel Sniper, introduced to the world by kinbaku master Dan Oniroku in April 1980, a special edition of the cutting-edge cult fetish magazine S&M Sniper, published in Japan between 1979—2009. Packed with obscene fetish stories by cutting-edge Japanese authors, illustrations and colour artwork galleries by leading Japanese erotic artists, manga, and gorgeously reproduced colour and b/w photoshoots with fold-out spreads across various paper stocks. This inaugural issue featuring the work of Tadao Chigusa, Dan Oniroku, Yōji Muku, Junichi Tate, Juan Maeda, Yoko Ozuma, "Akira", and many more... Not for the faint of heart.
S&M Sniper, 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, kinbakushi, 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.
Very Good copy. One spine crease and general age/spotting to edges.
1980, Japanese
Softcover, 330 pages, 21 x 15 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Million Publishing / Tokyo
$80.00 - In stock -
Rare fourth issue of S&M Novel Sniper, introduced to the world by kinbaku master Dan Oniroku in April 1980, a special edition of the cutting-edge cult fetish magazine S&M Sniper, published in Japan between 1979—2009. Packed with obscene fetish stories by cutting-edge Japanese authors, illustrations and colour artwork galleries by leading Japanese erotic artists, manga, and gorgeously reproduced colour and b/w photoshoots with fold-out spreads across various paper stocks. This issue featuring the work of Tadao Chigusa, Dan Oniroku, Yōji Muku, Junichi Tate, Juan Maeda, Yoko Ozuma, and many more... Not for the faint of heart.
S&M Sniper, 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, kinbakushi, 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.
Very Good copy. General age/wear to edges.
1981, English
Softcover, 116 pages, 28 x 21 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
PARCO / Tokyo
$90.00 - In stock -
Like no other magazine - Super Art Gocoo was the wild late 1970s—1980s art journal from art director Ryōichi Enomoto and published by the mighty Parco gallery, imprint and department-store-like-no-other in Tokyo. With a cover by Harumi Yamaguchi, this bumper issue from 1981 is also largely dedicated to "Harumi Eros" — the work of legendary Japanese airbrush queen Harumi Yamaguchi and her "Gals". Not only does it feature a heavily illustrated behind-the-scenes with Yamaguchi it also visits the studio of fellow-airbrush master Pater Sato in his New York New Wave period. There is also lots of work by the great graphic artist Tadanori Yokoo, a feature on legendary French underground magazine Façade (1976—1983), a story on American dancer/choreographer/composer/Steve Reich collaborator Laura Dean, the photography of Hiroshi Yamazaki, graphic designer Kiyoshi Awazu, graphic designer Yutaka Sugita, a discussion between Japanese pop artists Akiko Yano and Nanako Sato, Tokyo Designers Space Report, plus articles, reviews, reports on art, dance, film, fashion, music, magazines, books.... The Face, Terry Riley, etc. Parco were instrumental in exhibiting, publishing and promoting Japanese and international graphic artists and new pop culture in this period, and these journals create a wonderful time-capsule at the height of that incredible time.
Very Good - Fine copy.
1977, French
Softcover (staple-bound), 82 pages, 27 x 21.5 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Les Humanoïdes Associés / Paris
$50.00 - Out of stock
Metal Hurlant No. 16, April 1977 issue featuring comic stories/art by Romain Slocombe, Bazooka, Loulou Picasso, Mœbius, Philippe Druillet, Jacques Lob, Enki Bilal, Serge Clerc, Jean-Pierre Dionnet, Chantal Montellier, Denis Locquet, Claudine Conin, and many more, plus the usual fare of sci-fi, movies, music... Cover art by Barge Yves.
Original French editions, very scarce outside Europe.
Métal Hurlant (literal translation: "Howling Metal") was a French comics anthology of science fiction and horror comics stories, created in December 1974 by comics artists Jean Giraud (better known as Mœbius) and Philippe Druillet together with journalist-writer Jean-Pierre Dionnet and financial director Bernard Farkas. The four were collectively known as "Les Humanoïdes Associés" (United Humanoids), which became the name of the publishing house releasing Métal Hurlant. English, German and Italian editions were also licensed, including Heavy Metal, published in the US by National Lampoon. Métal hurlant was originally released quarterly with contributors including Moebius and Druillet, depicting such iconic characters as Arzach and Lone Sloane for the first time, as well as work by Richard Corben, Guido Crepax, Alejandro Jodorowsky, Enki Bilal, Caza, Serge Clerc, Alain Voss, Berni Wrightson, Nicole Claveloux, Milo Manara, Frank Margerin, Masse, Chantal Montellier, and many others.
VG—Good copy, general light wear.
1979, French
Softcover (staple-bound), 98 pages, 27 x 21.5 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / good
Published by
Les Humanoïdes Associés / Paris
$40.00 - Out of stock
Metal Hurlant No. 45, October 1979 issue featuring comic stories/art by Mœbius, Jacques Lob,
Alain Voss, Georges Pichard, René Pétillon, Pascal Poirier, Philippe Garnier, Jean-Michel Charlier, Nicole Claveloux, Baron Staff, Olivier Assayas, Frank Margerin, and many more, plus the usual fare of sci-fi, movies, music... Original French editions, very scarce outside Europe.
Métal Hurlant (literal translation: "Howling Metal") was a French comics anthology of science fiction and horror comics stories, created in December 1974 by comics artists Jean Giraud (better known as Mœbius) and Philippe Druillet together with journalist-writer Jean-Pierre Dionnet and financial director Bernard Farkas. The four were collectively known as "Les Humanoïdes Associés" (United Humanoids), which became the name of the publishing house releasing Métal Hurlant. English, German and Italian editions were also licensed, including Heavy Metal, published in the US by National Lampoon. Métal hurlant was originally released quarterly with contributors including Moebius and Druillet, depicting such iconic characters as Arzach and Lone Sloane for the first time, as well as work by Richard Corben, Guido Crepax, Alejandro Jodorowsky, Enki Bilal, Caza, Serge Clerc, Alain Voss, Berni Wrightson, Nicole Claveloux, Milo Manara, Frank Margerin, Masse, Chantal Montellier, and many others.
VG—Good copy, general light wear.
1977, French
Softcover (staple-bound), 100 pages, 27 x 21.5 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / good
Published by
Les Humanoïdes Associés / Paris
$50.00 - Out of stock
Metal Hurlant No. 21, May 1977 issue featuring comic stories/art by H.R. Giger, Moebius, Jacques Lob, Alain Voss, Jean-Michel Nicollet, Serge Clerc, Chantal Montellier, Michel Jakubowicz, Jean-Pierre Dionnet, Hervé Tanquerelle, Marc Duveau, and many more, plus the usual fare of sci-fi, movies, music... Cover art by H.R. Giger. Original French editions, very scarce outside Europe.
Métal Hurlant (literal translation: "Howling Metal") was a French comics anthology of science fiction and horror comics stories, created in December 1974 by comics artists Jean Giraud (better known as Mœbius) and Philippe Druillet together with journalist-writer Jean-Pierre Dionnet and financial director Bernard Farkas. The four were collectively known as "Les Humanoïdes Associés" (United Humanoids), which became the name of the publishing house releasing Métal Hurlant. English, German and Italian editions were also licensed, including Heavy Metal, published in the US by National Lampoon. Métal hurlant was originally released quarterly with contributors including Moebius and Druillet, depicting such iconic characters as Arzach and Lone Sloane for the first time, as well as work by Richard Corben, Guido Crepax, Alejandro Jodorowsky, Enki Bilal, Caza, Serge Clerc, Alain Voss, Berni Wrightson, Nicole Claveloux, Milo Manara, Frank Margerin, Masse, Chantal Montellier, and many others.
1978, French
Softcover (staple-bound), 98 pages, 27 x 21.5 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / good
Published by
Les Humanoïdes Associés / Paris
$35.00 - Out of stock
Metal Hurlant No. 35, November 1978 issue featuring comic stories/art by Chantal Montellier, Mœbius, Alain Voss, McKie Angus, Barge Yves, Serge Clerc, Jean-Pierre Dionnet, Jacques Goimard, and many more, plus the usual fare of sci-fi, movies, music... Cover art by Barge Yves. Original French editions, very scarce outside Europe.
Métal Hurlant (literal translation: "Howling Metal") was a French comics anthology of science fiction and horror comics stories, created in December 1974 by comics artists Jean Giraud (better known as Mœbius) and Philippe Druillet together with journalist-writer Jean-Pierre Dionnet and financial director Bernard Farkas. The four were collectively known as "Les Humanoïdes Associés" (United Humanoids), which became the name of the publishing house releasing Métal Hurlant. English, German and Italian editions were also licensed, including Heavy Metal, published in the US by National Lampoon. Métal hurlant was originally released quarterly with contributors including Moebius and Druillet, depicting such iconic characters as Arzach and Lone Sloane for the first time, as well as work by Richard Corben, Guido Crepax, Alejandro Jodorowsky, Enki Bilal, Caza, Serge Clerc, Alain Voss, Berni Wrightson, Nicole Claveloux, Milo Manara, Frank Margerin, Masse, Chantal Montellier, and many others.
VG—Good copy, general light wear.