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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World Food Books Gift Voucher
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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.
2022, English
Hardcover, 448 pages, 21.5 x 25 cm
Published by
FAB Press / UK
$120.00 - In stock -
In 2012, a book debuted that would go on to canonical status and usher in a new way of writing about film. Kier-La Janisse's HOUSE OF PSYCHOTIC WOMEN is an autobiographical exploration of female neurosis in horror and exploitation films that examines hundreds of films through a daringly personal lens. In this pioneering work, anecdotes and memories interweave with film history, criticism, trivia and confrontational imagery to create a reflective personal history and a consideration of female madness, both onscreen and off.
To mark its 10th anniversary, Kier-La Janisse and FAB Press have reteamed to produce an expanded edition the book, featuring new writing on 100 more films - many of which were inspired in part by the book itself - and hundreds of new images. This first pressing of the Expanded Edition has been issued as a large format hardcover.
Cinema is full of neurotic personalities, but few things are more transfixing than a woman losing her mind onscreen. Horror as a genre provides the most welcoming platform for these histrionics: crippling paranoia, desperate loneliness, masochistic death-wishes, dangerous obsessiveness, apocalyptic hysteria. Unlike her male counterpart - 'the eccentric' - the female neurotic lives a shamed existence, making these films those rare places where her destructive emotions get to play.
This sharply-designed book, including a 48-page full-colour section, is packed with 680 rare stills, posters, pressbooks and artwork throughout, that combine with family photos and artifacts to form a titillating sensory overload, with a filmography that traverses the acclaimed and the obscure in equal measure. Films covered include The Entity, The Corruption of Chris Miller, Singapore Sling, 3 Women, Toys Are Not for Children, Repulsion, Let's Scare Jessica to Death, The Haunting of Julia, Secret Ceremony, Cutting Moments, Out of the Blue, Mademoiselle, The Piano Teacher, Possession, Antichrist and hundreds more!
1977, German
Softcover, 128 pages, 33 x 24 cm
Out of print title / used / good
Published by
Belser Verlag / Stuttgart
$68.00 - Out of stock
Softcover edition of this wonderful over-sized publication on the unique collaboration between German artist Paul Wunderlich and photographer Karin Székessy, one of Germany's most important female photographers, who were married to each other. Published in Switzerland in 1977, this volumes collects an abundance of these iconic 'transpositions,' evocative, experimental nude photographs by Szekessy juxtaposed with Wunderlich's versions, or replies, in the form of paintings and prints. Profusely illustrated throughout in colour and b/w, the result is a fascinating dialogue of unconventional nude form. German literary critic Fritz J. Raddatz's illustrated introduction gives contextual and art historical references and background, accompanied by a full listing of works and exhibition history.
Good—VG copy with only light cover/edge wear.
2005, English / Japanese
Softcover (w. printed acetate dust jacket), 270 pages, 20 x 22.5 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Heibonsha / Tokyo
$160.00 - Out of stock
First edition of Unlimited: Comme des Garçons, a unique and lavish compilation book about Comme des Garçons and designer Rei Kawakubo, published in Japan in 2005 and edited by Sanae Shimizu and NHK. Shimizu explains in the afterword: "the present book is a compilation based on reporting for two television programs, the NHK Special, "What the World Values in Her Fashion: REI KAWAKUBO and Comme des Garçons," and the Hi-Vision Special, "Fashion Revolutinonary: REI KAWAKUBO and the World of Comme des Garçons." Single frames of video filmed with a Hi-Vision camera were captured, and transformed into static images, after which the images were digitally printed". The book combines rare collection, store interior, and Comme workshop imagery with interviews, reflections, and commentary from a range of people, including fashion designers (Alexander McQueen, Junya Watanabe, Azzedine Alaïa, Jean Paul Gaultier, Paul Smith, Walter van Beirendonck, etc.), Comme des Garçons production staff, choreographers (Merce Cunningham, etc.), photographers (Paolo Roversi, etc.), fashion journalists and editors (Vogue, Dazed, Purple, etc.) and many from Rei Kawakubo herself. One of the most insightful books on Comme and Rei, The images of Comme des Garçons workspaces and insight into the production and pattern-making process provided by staff make this an invaluable book for any fan.
Very Good copy with light wear and usual bind issue (tightly stitch bound in perfect shape and working order, but glue of no use)
1988, English / Japanese
Softcover, oversized, loose-leaf pages, 42 x 29.7 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Comme des Garçons / Tokyo
$440.00 - Out of stock
First 1988 edition, first printing of the inaugural issue of the cult, privately distributed Comme des Garçons publication. The incredible first issue of Comme des Garçons' 'Six' magazine (1988) features the work of Hungarian photographer André Kertész, Comme des Garçons by photographer Peter Lindbergh, photography by Sachiko Kuru, features on artist Jean Cocteau, architect Eileen Gray, artist Michel Sauer, and an interview with fashion designer Yohji Yamamoto, plus additional photography by Timothy Greenfield-Sanders, Arthur Elgort, Tony Mendoza, Sachiko Kuru, Shinji Mori, Serge Lido and Gisele Freund. Beautiful first-edition printing of this over-sized magazine vision of Rei Kawakubo, including die-cut features throughout and de-bossed cover title.
Between 1988 and 1991, Comme des Garçons explored the theme of the sixth sense via eight special biannual oversized, unstapled magazines titled 'Six'. These magazines were launched to coincide with Comme des Garçons fashion collections and were privately printed and distributed by Comme. The magazine visually represented the brand in a way that no other fashion company had before. Rei Kawakubo invited Tsuguya Inoue to art direct and Atsuko Kozasu to edit the issues, whilst contributions came from a diverse array of leading designers and artists. Issues of Comme des Garçons 'Six' have become very sought after collectors items.
Very Good / Near Fine copy.
1967, German
Offset poster (double-sided), 83.5 x 59 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
$600.00 - Out of stock
Where it all started.... H.R. Giger's first ever poster! Rare vintage original and never reprinted.
Published in a limited edition to accompany the The-Telllife-No-mads-presents: Poëtenz happening/exhibition, organized by young Giger's friend and collaborator, Swiss writer, artist and publisher Urban Gwerders. Gwerders was the publisher of Swiss underground counterculture magazine Hotcha (1968—1971), to which Giger was also a contributor. The poster folds-down into a catalogue/program for the event with original cover artwork by Giger and collage contents, poems, photographs (including pics of Giger, Li, et al) and Poëtenz information, all designed in the montage style of Hotcha, and the "poster" side entirely reproducing Giger's incredible early "Astreunuchen" masterpiece, pre-dating ALIEN by over ten years.
A stunning collector's item and piece of Giger history, ready to frame.
Dimensions : 83.5 x 59 cm
Very Good condition, never mounted/pinned, well preserved in folded state as issued.
2017, English
Softcover, 124 pages, 24 x 16.5 cm
Published by
Dancing Foxes Press / Brooklyn
Queens Museum / Queens
$50.00 $30.00 - In stock -
Integrating video, photography, sculpture, writing, and performance into one expansive body of work, Los Angeles–based artist Patty Chang examines the complex way stories develop through geography, history, cultural mythology, fiction, and personal experience. Accompanying her project A Wandering Lake that was in part inspired by turn-of-the-century colonial explorer Sven Hedin’s book Wandering Lake (1938)—which tells the story of a migrating body of water in the Chinese desert—this artist’s book, combining Chang’s writings and travel photographs with historic and theoretical text excerpts as well as photographs of her sculptures and watercolors, is a personal, associative, narrative meditation on mourning, caregiving, and landscape.
Copublished with the Queens Museum in 2017
Edited by Karen Kelly and Barbara Schroeder
With an afterword by Hitomi Iwasaki
Design by Leftloft
This is a guide to mourning; but Chang widens the scope to include political conflict and environmental degradation, and argues that, despite the losses we’ve incurred, we are still collaborators in the making of our worlds.”—Erin Schwartz, The New York Review of Books
2024, English
Softcover, 214 pages, 27.5 × 22.3 cm
Published by
Pre-Echo / New York
$75.00 - In stock -
In a quest to protect the truth, the activist Marion Stokes recorded television twenty-four hours a day for thirty years on more than seventy thousand tapes. She started in 1979, during the Iran Hostage Crisis — now considered the birth of the twenty- four-hour news cycle — and ended on the day of her death, as news of the Sandy Hook Massacre first broke. In between she captured revolutions, catastrophes, talk shows, sitcoms, lies, triumphs, and commercials that tell us who we were and how television shaped our world today. Filmmaker Matt Wolf has compiled a sequence of images, culled from over seven hundred hours of Marion’s tapes, that capture the texture of the past and express the subliminal power of televisual life.
1975, English
Softcover, 160 pages, 28 x 21.5 cm
Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
YWCA Australia / Melbourne
$290.00 - Out of stock
Very scarce first and only edition of one of the great Australian photo-books of the 1970s. Woman 1975 was published as "a permanent record of the exhibition of photographs entitled Woman, which was the contribution made towards International Women's year, 1975, by the Young Women's Christian Association of Australia." A gorgeous and moving overview of womanhood in Australia in the 1970s through the images of countless Australian photographers of the period, including Carol Jerrems, Rennie Ellis, John Williams, Fiona Hall, Melanie Le Guay, Ingeborg Tyssen, Jacqueline Mitelman, Les Gray, Grace Lock, Reg Morrison, Phillip Quirk, Peter Tyndall, Howard Birnstihl, Juergen Hasenkopf, Richard Crawley and many more.
Very Good copy.
1978, Japanese
Softcover, 204 pages, 21 x 29.6 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Hanashi-no-Tokushu / Tokyo
$650.00 - In stock -
Exceptionally rare (signed!) 1978 first edition photobook by Michiko Matsumoto, one of post war Japan's leading photographers. As a young female photographer growing up in a period of turmoil, Matsumoto conveys the wonders of women to the viewer from the perspective of a woman. Women Come Alive is her rarest and greatest example of this. This wonderful book collects "seven years with women...", Matsumoto's front-line photographic records of the women's liberation movement in Japan in the 1970s and her "Sisters Across Borders" (New York, Paris, Los Angeles, London...), as well as portraits of female artists, activists and friends Yoko Ono, Maki Asakawa, Eiko Ishioka, Michiko Gorman, Mamako Yoneyama, Teruko Yoshitake, Tokiko Kato, Harumi Yamaguchi, Chinatsu Nakayama and others. A true time-capsule, this book visits the workshops, bookshops, marches, women's centres, lesbian bars, exhibitions, editorial offices, dances and studios of a pivotal time of great change. An incredible book of feminist protest and celebration. Virtually an impossible book to find, even without a signature from the artist! Highly recommended!!
Very Good copy in very good dust jacket. Signed in black ink and dated 1978.6.7 on title page.
1977, Japanese
Softcover (staple-bound), 28 pages, 36.5 x 26 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Nisshindo Optical Shop / Nagoya
$140.00 - In stock -
Extremely rare calendar issue from acclaimed Japanese photographer and representative of the Provoke movement, Hitomi Watanabe. Issued privately by a small eyeglasses shop in Nagoya, Nisshindo Optical Shop, this 1977 "LOOK" Calendar presents the rarely seen personal 1970s work of Watanabe. Watanabe began her career photographing in the Tokyo neighbourhood of Shinjuku, home to Japan’s 1960s counter culture. She came to prominence during the Zenkyoto student movement in the late 1960s, occupied the University of Tokyo campus in 1968-69 and participated in the 10.21 International Anti-War Day protests and 1970 Anpo protests against the renewal of the Japan-US Mutual Security Treaty. Her candid photographs of the everyday lives of the protesters, the state violence, and the aftermath of rioting from her insider’s vantage on this tumultuous moment afforded her work an undeniable, enduring power. Her famed "Kaihoku '68 / Liberated Area '68" a testament to this. When the Japan-US Mutual security treaty was renewed in 1970, Watanabe, heartbroken that they had not been able to prevent it, began her long travels through Asia, particularly India and Nepal, from which these beautiful, atmospheric colour photographs are taken. Reproduced in large format across the 12 months of 1977.
Very Good copy with some light wear and light cover tanning. Has been previously hung.
1971, Japanese
Hardcover (w. slip-case) 192 pages, 24 x 18 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Shinsensha / Tokyo
$450.00 - In stock -
Gorgeous first (boxed) hardcover edition of Tadao Mitome's "protest-book masterpiece" published in 1971, documenting the Sanrizuka resistance to the building of Tokyo's Narita Airport. Photographs follow the thousands of protestors into battle against riot police and record their construction of fortresses and underground tunnels.
“A superb document about the medieval fighting that took place over a period of some five years around Narita airport. Fuelled by the spirit of protest in the late 60s this constituted the first of many often violent anti-airport protests in the region.”
“Sanrizuka documents the intense civil unrest between residents of Sanrizuka, an agricultural area located on the east side of Narita airport, and government authorities, in the run up to the construction and later expansion of the airport. Under a 1966 plan, the airport would have been completed in 1971, but due to the ongoing resettlement disputes, not all of the land for the airport was available by then. Finally, in 1971, the Japanese government began forcibly expropriating land. 291 protesters were arrested and more than 1,000 police, villagers and student militants were injured in a series of riots.“
Editing and art direction by the legendary activist designer Kiyoshi Awazu (1929–2009) with stunning deep gravure printing. Included in “The Japanese Photobook, 1912–1990” by Kaneko Ryuichi and Manfred Heiting and "The Photobook: A History, Volume III" by Martin Parr and Gerry Badger, p. 57.
Very Good copy with some age/wear/light scratching to box.
2023, English / French
Softcover, 190 pages, 25.5 x 21 cm
Published by
Lafayette Anticipations / Paris
$70.00 - Out of stock
Lafayette Anticipations presents Study for No, Issy Wood's first solo exhibition in France, featuring over 60 paintings by the English artist, most of which have never been shown before.
The body of work presented in the catalogue speaks of a refusal to accept a certain order, and expresses unease at the systems of oppression, both conscious and unconscious, that govern human beings, especially the most vulnerable. The exhibition catalogue includes an essay by art critic Barry Schwabsky, a portrait of the artist by Kaitlin Phillips, and an interview between Rebecca Lamarche-Vadel and Issy Wood.
Bilingual French / English
2022, English
Softcover, 309 pages, 20.5 x 15 cm
Published by
Woodville Press / New York
$52.00 - Out of stock
“Essential”—Indiewire
“What’s most remarkable about this volume is its transparency. Throughout, in new, rewritten and republished pieces, you can see Godfrey’s questing and questioning mind latching onto a subject for which he has a deep affinity, learning as much as he can about it—by pondering the works themselves, talking to their creators, and absorbing the culture that birthed the scene—and then figuring out a way to transmit his enthusiasm to the widest American audience possible.”—Matt Zoller Seitz
“I admire Godfrey for his strong support of Iranian cinema and his efforts to introduce Iranian films to American audiences. Although movies are shown by distributors and exhibitors, it’s really the critics who bring the audience. Godfrey’s reviews also help us in Iran by providing critical support against those who attempt to suppress us and keep us from working.”—Jafar Panahi, filmmaker
“So impressed by his first encounters with contemporary Iranian films, Godfrey Cheshire decided to do a deep dive into Iranian literature, art and society, not to mention film history. The happy result is this book, displaying an incredible range of knowledge about what is the most remarkable film movement of the past decades, while offering a deep exploration of both this cinema’s deep roots as well as its celebrated achievements.”—Richard Pena, Professor of Film and Media Studies, Columbia University
“Godfrey Cheshire has been the preeminent American critic on Iranian cinema for decades. With rare access to master filmmakers, Cheshire weaves together rich, personal stories, with history, culture and his brilliant insights. His passion is infectious. This is his definitive book.”—Ramin Bahrani, Oscar-nominated filmmaker
“There is no better way to discover Iranian cinema than to immerse yourself in Godfrey Cheshire’s beautifully written 30 year personal cinematic journey. This is an important, informative and compelling book at this global political moment. It is vital to know these filmmakers of purpose through the perception of an outsider with whom we can identify and to lose ourselves to the wonder, humanity, and artistry of a culture and cinema that demands our attention now more than ever.”—Michael Barker, Sony Pictures Classics
2022, English
Softcover, 188 pages, 19 x 12.5 cm
Published by
Woodville Press / New York
$40.00 - Out of stock
“In many respects the best book yet published on the director.”—Cineaste
“For Kiarostami’s own overview of his early career, I’d recommend Conversations with Kiarostami.”—Richard Brody, The New Yorker
Conversations with Kiarostami collects for the first time a far ranging series of interviews with the celebrated director Abbas Kiarostami by film critic, and Iranian cinema expert, Godfrey Cheshire.
Conducted in the 1990s, these in-depth conversations offer a film-by-film account of Kiarostami’s views of his artistic development from his first short “Bread and Alley” in 1970 to the 1999 feature The Wind Will Carry Us, covering his lesser known, and seldom written about, shorts from earlier in his career, along with the masterworks that made him world famous, such as the Koker Trilogy (Where Is the Friend’s House?, And Life Goes On, Through the Olive Trees), Close-Up and Taste of Cherry. The book includes a Foreword by Ahmad Kiarostami, the director’s son, as well as an introduction from Cheshire that contextualizes the interviews and discusses his relationship with the director.
“During Godfrey’s several visits to Iran throughout a decade, he formed a relationship with my father that I had rarely seen him having with other writers. I believe this is because of Godfrey’s ability to go beyond the surface; his unique views and interpretations…It is well-known that Godfrey was one of the first people who introduced the Iranian cinema to America and, yet, there is no trace of the usual “exotic” approach…That is what you will find in this book: a refreshing conversation with Abbas that has substance, and is far from cliché.”—Ahmad Kiarostami, from his foreword.
2023, English
Softcover, 296 pages, 19 x 14 cm
Published by
Hard Wait Press / New York
$55.00 $35.00 - In stock -
Named one of the best books of 2023 by The Paris Review
Named one of the best books of 2023 by Sight & Sound
Time Tells is a grand study of time, technology, performance, the attention economy, and comedy. Using the cinematic time-jump, "a numerical shorthand for a fated intermission," to weave a narrative of chronopolitics, memoir, and cultural study, Masha Tupitsyn constructs a unique literary and visual phenomenology on the loss of time, presence, and attention in the digital age. Structured into two interlocked inquiries—Time and Acting—Time Tells focuses on the internet to talk about the ethics of presence and attention, comedy to talk about timing and the language of critique, and lying masculinity, the double, and acting to talk about performance and the reign of falsehood. Both volumes intersect to examine our inability to experience coherence and integration in the post-truth era.
In the first volume, Time, Tupitsyn covers wide-ranging cultural touchstones such as the ’90s TV show Felicity, Hitchcock’s Vertigo, Luca Guadagnino’s Call Me by Your Name, Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking, Pretty Woman, Wong Kar-wai’s 2046, David Fincher’s Zodiac, Jean-Luc Godard, the Beastie Boys, Wim Wenders, the art of style, memory and music in the post-internet age, and the lost ontology of cinema. Using what Tupitsyn terms “screen-shot criticism,” Time Tells makes innovative critical thinking accessible to anyone interested in American culture today.
Afterword by Felix Bernstein.
“Time Tells is a mesmerizing work about art, life, chronology, and magical thinking. Masha Tupitsyn is a treasure.”—Matt Zoller Seitz
“Masha Tupitsyn rescues films of our generation from the memory hole to which everything but box office is now consigned. Her writing is intimate and analytical, laced with radiant perceptions about movie stars, memory, and lost time.”—A. S. Hamrah
“I have been searching for books during the pandemic that will saddle up with me in my middle-aged sorrow. A sorrow having something to do with “before television went online, days of the week mattered.” Books about the state of the global crisis haven’t done it for me. Masha Tupitsyn’s Time Tells is the book I am looking for. I’m keeping that in the present tense to suggest my ongoing and vital relationship to an extraordinarily generous and profound hybrid text and manual that I will keep on hand at all times. As a poet, I am obsessed with how art can sequence events to expand or contract our sense of time. Mid-way through Tupitsyn’s treatise, she has placed one of the brightest and most innovative pieces of film criticism I have ever read. I would teach her writing on the film Zodiac as a list poem. She writes, ‘In Zodiac, time is forensic.’ I gasped with a little horror and a little joy.”—Stacy Szymaszek
1971, English
Hardcover (w. dust jacket), 214 pages, 20 x 13.5 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Calder and Boyars / London
$45.00 - Out of stock
First 1971 hardcover edition of the first English edition of Roberte Ce Soir and The Revocation of the Edict of Nantes, published in London by Calder and Boyars. Together these two novels comprise the most fascinating, obsessive, and erotic works of contemporary French fiction. Like the works of Georges Bataille, and those of the Marquis de Sade before him, Klossowski's fiction explores the connections between the mind and the body through a lens of sexuality. Both of these novels feature Octave, an elderly cleric; his striking young wife Roberte; and their nephew, Antoine in a series of sexual situations. But Klossowski's books are about theology as well, and this merging of the sexual with the religious makes this book one of the most painstakingly baroque and intellectual novels of our time.
Pierre Klossowski (August 9, 1905, Paris – August 12, 2001, Paris) was a French writer, translator and artist. He was the eldest son of the artists Erich Klossowski and Baladine Klossowska, and his younger brother was the painter Balthus.
As a writer, Pierre Klossowski wrote full length volumes on the Marquis de Sade and Friedrich Nietzsche, a number of essays on literary and philosophical figures, and five novels. Roberte Ce Soir (Roberte in the Evening) provoked controversy due to its graphic depiction of sexuality.[1] He translated several important texts (by Virgil, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Martin Heidegger, Friedrich Hölderlin, Franz Kafka, Nietzsche, and Walter Benjamin) into French, worked on films and was also an artist, illustrating many of the scenes from his novels. Klossowski participated in most issues of George Bataille's review, Acéphale, in the late 1930s.
His 1969 book, Nietzsche and the Vicious Circle, greatly influenced French philosophers such as Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze, and Jean-François Lyotard.
Very Good copy in VG dust jacket, preserved under mylar wrap.
2020, English
Softcover, 76 pages, 21 x 14 cm
Published by
Small Press / New York
$30.00 - Out of stock
Made available in English for the very first time by NY based Small Press, Pierre Klossowski's debut novel from 1950, The Suspended Vocation, fictionalizes and satirizes the great erotic artist, philosopher, and iconoclast's brief, wartime flirtation with the priesthood, portraying the Church as a haven for conspiracy, idolatry, perversion, and even atheism.
Written in the form of a disapproving monograph on an anonymous, confessional novel (itself titled The Suspended Vocation), it is the story of the hapless Jérôme, whose lust for holiness leads him astray in a cloistered world full of ideological and physical temptations.
Sometimes a knowing critique of "religious fiction," sometimes a wicked self-parody of Klossowski's own lifelong obsessions, and sometimes a sacerdotal spy novel, The Suspended Vocation is one of the strangest and most audacious debuts in twentieth-century literature.
Translated by Jeremy M. Davies and Anna Fitzgerald, with an introduction by Brian Evenson.
2023, English
Hardcover, 386 pages, 22.5 x 14.5 cm
Published by
Amphetamine Sulphate / Austin
$58.00 - In stock -
The long-awaited 3rd novel from a truly untamed literary talent.
Exquisitely printed with colour & b&w illustrations. First edition. Limited numbers.
Audrey Szasz’s epic third novel is her most ambitious trip yet. A 400-page psychic assault course journeying through the delirious present and harrowed hellscapes of futures past. This truly encyclopaedic outsider vision of ecstasy and, until now, unimaginable horror will surely warp your pretty little mind forever.
File under: Sex (Deviant). Violence (Frequent). Psychology (Experimental). Literature (Radical). Counter (Illumination).
We can confidently say you will have never read anything remotely like this before.
No spoilers: the complete Zutka Reconstruction Kit.
CAUTION: Adult Themes throughout
2023, English
Hardcover, 106 pages, 21 x 14.5 cm
Published by
Amphetamine Sulphate / Austin
$44.00 - In stock -
The long-awaited new novel from a major literary talent. With cover design by Michael Salerno (KIDDIEPUNK).
“I’m so close to falling apart. Fuck it. Who isn’t?”
Thomas Moore’s latest novel Your Dreams, the follow-up to 2021’s devastating Forever, is a visceral yet contained inquiry into the endless need to be understood. Eavesdropping on a debate about cancelled bands, listening to a close friend’s explanation of his disturbing desires, facilitating a conversation about kinks at a party until it goes wrong, Moore’s narrator is less of a character than a witness of desperate disconnection. Your Dreams, despite its impulse to hide, faces the reader head-on in an intimate unmasking, still grasping for closeness in a world of limits.
“Simple words. Deep emotions … beyond prose to another plane. Openness that pours through you.”
Jack Skelley, The Los Angeles Review of Books
“Thomas Moore is one of the best writers the world has in stock.”
Dennis Cooper
2000, English
Hardcover (w. dust jacket), 190 pages, 19.6 x 13 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / fine
Published by
University of Minnesota Press / Minnesota
$100.00 - In stock -
First hardcover edition of the first English translation of the essential work on Proust.
In a remarkable instance of literary and philosophical interpretation, the incomparable Gilles Deleuze reads Proust’s work as a narrative of an apprenticeship of a man of letters. Deleuze traces the network of signs laid by Proust (those of love, art, or worldliness) and moves toward an aesthetics that culminates in a meditation on the literary work as a sign-producing “machine”—an operation that reveals the superiority of “signs of art” in a world of signs.
"Deleuze conducts readers on a corollary search that leads to a new and deeper understanding of the network of signs laid down by Proust."—Translation Review
Translated by Richard Howard
Fine copy in Fine dust jacket.
2023, English
Softcover, 189 pages, 28 x 20.5 cm
Ed. of 700,
Published by
The Manhattan Art Journal / New York
$55.00 - Out of stock
The long-awaited premiere issue of The Manhattan Art Journal, the printed edition of The Manhattan Art Review. Edited by Sean Tatol and designed by Becca Abbe, Vol. 1, Issue 1 features writings, letters, interviews, reviews, The Melbourne Art Review, comics, and literary quotes, with contributions by Jessica Almereyda, Anthony Atlas, Brian Block, Chris Camperchioli, Noah Dillon, Marguerite Duras, Michael Eby, Andy Giannakakis, Laszlo Horvath, Ella Howells, Cameron Hurst, Domenic Hutchins, Carmen-Sibha Keiso, Bill Kemmler, Eydís Klej, Adam Lehrer, Mathieu Malouf, Marc Matchak, Lucas Matheson, Christian Oldham Tannon Reckling, Libby Rothfeld, Jake S., Audrey Schmidt, Sophy Schulman, Mitzi Sfarzada, Myles Starr, Sean Tatol, Dylan Taylor, Luka Usmiani, Adrian Wilson, and Jarrod Zlatic, interviews by Ryan Cullen, Famous Art Guy, Carmen-Sibha Keiso, and Ross Simonini, and comics by Andrew Newell Walther.
Edition of 700 copies.
2015, English
Hardcover (w. dust jacket), 592 pages, 24 x 18.5 cm
Published by
The MIT Press / Massachusetts
$89.00 - Out of stock
Essays spanning three decades by one of the most rigorous art thinkers of our time grapple with formal and historical paradigms in twentieth century art.
These influential essays by the noted critic and art historian Benjamin Buchloh have had a significant impact on the theory and practice of art history. Written over the course of three decades and now collected in one volume, they trace a history of crucial artistic transitions, iterations, and paradigmatic shifts in the twentieth century, considering both the evolution and emergence of artistic forms and the specific historical moment in which they occurred.
Buchloh's subject matter ranges through various moments in the history of twentieth-century American and European art, from the moment of the retour à l'ordre of 1915 to developments in the Soviet Union in the 1920s to the beginnings of Conceptual art in the late 1960s to the appropriation artists of the 1980s. He discusses conflicts resulting from historical repetitions (such as the monochrome and collage/montage aesthetics in the 1910s, 1950s, and 1980s), the emergence of crucial neo-avantgarde typologies, and the resuscitation of obsolete genres (including the portrait and landscape, revived by 1980s photography). Although these essays are less monographic than those in Buchloh's earlier collection, Neo-Avantgarde and Culture Industry, two essays in this volume are devoted to Marcel Broodthaers, whose work remains central to Buchloh's theoretical concerns. Engaging with both formal and historical paradigms, Buchloh situates himself productively between the force fields of formal theory and historical narrative, embracing the discrepancies and contradictions between them and within individual artistic trajectories.
Contents
Formalism and Historicity (1977) • Marcel Broodthaers: Allegories of the Avant-Garde (1980) • Figures of Authority, Ciphers of Regression: Notes on the Return of Representation in European Painting (1981) • Allegorical Procedures: Appropriations and Montage in Contemporary Art (1982) • The Museum Fictions of Marcel Broodthaers (1983) • From Faktura to Factography (1984) • Readymade, Objet Trouvé, Idée Reçue (1985) • The Primary Colors for the Second Time: A Paradigm Repetition of the Neo-Avantgarde (1986) • Cold War Constructivism (1986) • Conceptual Art 1962–1969: From the Aesthetics of Administration to the Critique of Institutions (1989) • Residual Resemblance: Three Notes on the Ends of Portraiture (1994) • Sculpture: Publicity and the Poverty of Experience (1996)
2001, English
Softcover, 216 pages, 23 x 15.6 cm
Published by
Northwestern University Press / Evanston
$52.00 - Out of stock
"Trakl's poetry is for me a thing of sublime existence."—Rainer Maria Rilke
A comprehensive English-language edition of verse by the Austrian poet.
An undeniable aura surrounds the name of Georg Trakl, a poet of intense inner vision and originality whose work stands alongside that of Yeats, Valéry, and T. S. Eliot. Besides Rilke, his more famous admirers include Karl Kraus and Martin Heidegger. The distinctive tone of Trakl's work-especially admired by his patron Ludwig Wittgenstein-is autumnal and melancholy. Trakl was writing at a time of spiritual and social disintegration on the eve of the First World War, when personal values and perceptions tended to be subsumed in a more generalized anguish and exaltation. Neo-romantic, early modernist, his rich, vitally sensuous poetry can be seen to mark the transition from impressionism to expressionism, but at the same time transcends such categories. Trakl's poetry has previously only been available in English in short selections or in anthologies. This bilingual edition, the most comprehensive to date, gives readers the chance to get to know Trakl's work more fully than ever before.
Georg Trakl (1887–1914) was born into a middle-class family in Salzburg, Austria. He trained as a pharmacist at the University of Vienna where he started to experiment with drugs and began writing. The patronage of a periodical publisher and the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein enabled Trakl to concentrate on his poetry and he brought out his first volume in 1913. The following year he enlisted as a lieutenant in the army medical corps, however, he became very distraught after witnessing the agony of the seriously wounded soldiers. He was sent for observation to a military hospital, where he died of an overdose of cocaine, possibly inadvertently.
Alexander Stillmark is Emeritus Reader in German at University College London. He is the author of numerous comparative studies and articles, especially on Austrian nineteenth and twentieth century literature. Stillmark was awarded the translation prize by the Austrian Federal Chancellors office for Trakl's Poems and Prose.
1993 / 2022, English
Softcover, 115 pages, 14 x 20.3 cm
Published by
Post Apollo Press / US
$44.00 - Out of stock
Etel Adnan's novel PARIS, WHEN IT'S NAKED amazes our retinas, ears, lips, fingertips, and noses with sensing, talking, and envisioning the city of Baudelaire and Delacroix, Mallarme and Picasso, Sartre and Djuna Barnes, Miller and Nin, Vietnamese and African refugees, revolutions and Bohemia. This tale of the Creative Now is told through the fine-tuned sensibility of Etel Adnan, the expatriate poet-painter who knows the French Capital as wholly as she does Beirut and San Francisco, her other homes. She is also the author of SITT MARIE-ROSE, an underground novel of the Lebanese Civil War, and many books of poetry. Her new work is a philosophically charged lyric in prose. The elan vital of every word evokes the eternal present of this wise woman. A highly personal, life-enhancing masterpiece in a deathly age of impersonality.
An indespensable book by an indispensable writer — Morgan Gibson.