World Food Books' programme is largely produced on Kulin Nation land. We acknowledge the Wurundjeri people of the Kulin Nation as the first and continuing custodians of this land, and pay respect to their Elders past, present, and emerging.
World Food Books is an arts and special interests bookshop in Naarm / Melbourne. Founded in 2010, World Food Books is devoted to the presentation of a rotating, hand-selection of international art, design, literary and counterculture publications with an emphasis on the anti-traditional, the experimental, the avant-garde, the heretic, the marginal.
Presenting new titles alongside rare and out-of-print books, catalogues and journals spanning the fields of modern and contemporary art, design, photography, illustration, film, literature, poetry, cultural theory, philosophy, sexuality, popular and underground culture in its many radical forms, World Food Books wishes to encourage adventurous, thoughtful and open-minded reading, looking, writing, and exchange of publishing and ideas, both current and historical.
As well as our bookshop, located in Melbourne's historical Nicholas Building, all of our inventory is available internationally via our online mail-order service.
World Food Books semi-regularly co-ordinates "Occasions", a programme of exhibits and events at the bookshop and in partnership with other hosts (such as museums and art galleries) that develop out of the activities, relationships and content of the bookshop itself.
World Food Books
The Nicholas Building
37 Swanston Street
Room 5, Level 6
Melbourne 3000
Australia
SHOP HOURS:
OPEN 12—5 THU—FRI
WEB-SHOP OPEN 24/7.
World Food Books
Postal Address:
PO Box 435
Flinders Lane
Victoria 8009
Australia
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All prices in AUD (Australian dollars)
Pick-Ups
Please note: The bookshop is closed until February 1, 2024.
Pick-up orders can be collected in our bookshop during opening hours after this date. Please collect any Pick-up orders within 3 weeks of ordering as we have limited storage space. Orders will be released back into stock if not collected within this time. No refunds can be made for pick-ups left un-collected.
Return Policy
All sales are final. We do accept returns (for refund, exchange) for items received in error. All our orders are packed with special care using heavy-duty padding and cardboard book-mailers or bubble mailers (for smaller books), using reinforcement where required. We cannot take responsibility for any lost, stolen or damaged parcels.
Insurance
Should you wish to insure your package, please email us directly after placing your order and we can organise this at a small extra expense. Although all standard/express tracked packages are very safe and dependable, we cannot take responsibility for any lost, stolen or damaged parcels. We recommend insurance on valuable orders.
Interested in selling your old books, catalogues, journals, magazines, comics, fanzines, ephemera? We are always looking for interesting, unusual and out-of-print books to buy. We only buy books in our fields of interest and specialty, and that we feel we can resell.
We base these prices on desirability, market value, in-print prices, condition and our current stock levels. We offer cash, store credit, and can take stock on consignment. All
about 25% of the price we expect to get when we sell them, or 30% in store credit. We base these prices on desirability, market value, in-print prices, condition and our current stock levels.
Sell your books any day of the week. You can drop them off and return later. If you have a lot of books, we can visit your Sydney home.
We buy books that we feel we can resell. We offer about 25 % of the price we expect to get when we sell them, or 30% in store credit. We base these prices on desirability, market value, in-print prices, condition and our current stock levels.
Philadelphia Wireman
03 August - 01 September, 2018
World Food Books is proud to announce our next Occasion, the first presentation of sculptures by Philadelphia Wireman in Australia.
The Philadelphia Wireman sculptures were found abandoned in an alley off Philadelphia’s South Street on trash night in 1982. Their discovery in a rapidly-changing neighbourhood undergoing extensive renovation, compounded with the failure of all attempts to locate the artist, suggests that the works may have been discarded after the maker’s death. Dubbed the "Philadelphia Wireman" during the first exhibition of this work, in 1985, the maker’s name, age, ethnicity, and even gender remain uncertain. The entire collection totals approximately 1200 pieces, all intricately bound together with tightly-wound heavy-gauge wire (along with a few small, abstract marker drawings, reminiscent both of Mark Tobey and J.B. Murry). The dense construction of the work, despite a modest range of scale and materials, is singularly obsessive and disciplined in design: a wire armature or exoskeleton firmly binds a bricolage of found objects including plastic, glass, food packaging, umbrella parts, tape, rubber, batteries, pens, leather, reflectors, nuts and bolts, nails, foil, coins, toys, watches, eyeglasses, tools, and jewellery.
Heavy with associations—anthropomorphic, zoomorphic, and socio-cultural responses to wrapped detritus—the totemic sculptures by Philadelphia Wireman have been discussed in the context of work created to fulfil the shamanistic needs of alternative religions in American culture. Curators, collectors, and critics have variously compared certain pieces to sculpture from Classical antiquity, Native American medicine bundles, African-American memory jugs, and African fetish objects. Reflecting the artist’s prolific and incredibly focused scavenging impulse, and despite—or perhaps enhanced by—their anonymity, these enigmatic objects function as urban artefacts and arbiters of power, though their origin and purpose is unknown. Philadelphia Wireman, whatever their identity, possessed an astonishing ability to isolate and communicate the concepts of power and energy through the selection and transformation of ordinary materials. Over the course of the past two decades, this collection has come to be regarded as an important discovery in the field of self-taught art and vernacular art.
Presented in collaboration with Fleisher-Ollman Gallery, Philadelphia, and Robert Heald, Wellington.
Susan Te Kahurangi King
02 February - 10 March, 2018
Susan Te Kahurangi King (24 February 1951 - ) has been a confident and prolific artist since she was a young child, drawing with readily available materials - pencils, ballpoint pens and felt-tip markers, on whatever paper is at hand. Between the ages of four and six Susan slowly ceased verbal communication. Her grandparents William and Myrtle Murphy had developed a special bond with Susan so they took on caring responsibilities for extended periods. Myrtle began informally archiving her work, carefully collecting and storing the drawings and compiling scrapbooks. No drawing was insignificant; every scrap of paper was kept. The King family are now the custodians of a vast collection containing over 7000 individual works, from tiny scraps of paper through to 5 meter long rolls.
The scrapbooks and diaries reveal Myrtle to be a woman of great patience and compassion, seeking to understand a child who was not always behaving as expected. She encouraged Susan to be observant, to explore her environment and absorb all the sights and sounds. Myrtle would show Susan’s drawings to friends and people in her community that she had dealings with, such as shopkeepers and postal workers, but this was not simply a case of a grandmother’s bias. She recognised that Susan had developed a sophisticated and unique visual language and sincerely believed that her art deserved serious attention.
This was an unorthodox attitude for the time. To provide some context, Jean Dubuffet coined the term Art Brut in 1945 to describe work created by self-taught artists – specifically residents of psychiatric institutions and those he considered to be visionaries or eccentrics. In 1972 Roger Cardinal extended this concept by adopting the term Outsider Art to describe work made by non-academically trained artists operating outside of mainstream art networks through choice or circumstance. Susan was born in Te Aroha, New Zealand in 1951, far from the artistic hubs of Paris and London that Dubuffet and Cardinal operated in. That Myrtle fêted Susan as a self-taught artist who deserved to be taken seriously shows how progressive her attitudes were.
Susan’s parents Doug and Dawn were also progressive. Over the years they had consulted numerous health practitioners about Susan’s condition, as the medical establishment could not provide an explanation as to why she had lapsed into silence. Dawn educated herself in the field of homeopathy and went on to treat all twelve of her children using these principles – basing prescriptions on her observations of their physical, mental and emotional state.
Doug was a linguist with an interest in philosophy who devoted what little spare time he had to studying Maori language and culture. To some extent their willingness to explore the fringes of the mainstream made them outsiders too but it was their commitment to living with integrity and their respect for individuality that ensured Susan’s creativity was always encouraged.
Even though Susan’s family supported her artistic pursuits, some staff in schools and hospitals saw it as an impediment to her assimilation into the community and discouraged it in a variety of ways. Her family was not always aware of this and therefore did not fully understand why Susan stopped drawing in the early 1990s. However, rather than dwell on the challenges that Susan faced in pursuit of her artistic practice, they prefer to highlight her achievements. In 2008 Susan began drawing again in earnest, after an almost 20 year interruption, and her work is now shown in galleries around the world.
Susan grew up without television and has been heavily influenced by the comics she read as a child. She is absolutely fearless in the appropriation of recognizable characters, such as Donald Duck and Mickey Mouse, in her work. She twists their limbs, contorts their faces, compresses them together, blends them into complex patterned backgrounds - always imbuing them with an incredible energy. Although Susan often used pop culture characters in her work they are not naive or childlike. These are drawings by a brilliant self-taught artist who has been creating exceptional work for decades without an audience in mind.
Mladen Stilinović
"Various Works 1986 - 1999"
02 February 16 - September 10, 2016
Various works 1986 - 1999, from two houses, from the collections of John Nixon, Sue Cramer, Kerrie Poliness, Peter Haffenden and Phoebe Haffenden.
Including: Geometry of Cakes (various shelves), 1993; Poor People’s Law (black and white plate), 1993; White Absence (glasses, ruler, set square, silver spoon, silver ladel with skin photograph and wooden cubes), 1990-1996; Exploitation of the Dead (grey and red star painting, wooden painting, black spoon with red table, red plate), 1984-1990; Money and Zeros (zero tie, paintings made for friends in Australia (Sue, John, Kerrie), numbers painting), 1991-1992; Words - Slogans (various t-shirts) - “they talk about the death of art...help! someone is trying to kill me”, “my sweet little lamb”, “work is a disease - Karl Marx”; Various artist books, catalogues, monographs, videos; Poster from exhibition Insulting Anarchy; "Circular" Croatian - Australian edition; Artist book by Vlado Martek (Dostoyevsky); more.
Thanks to Mladen Stilinović and Branka Stipančić.
Jonathan Walker
Always Will Need To Wear Winter Shirt Blue + Ochre Small Check Pattern
21 August - 21 September, 2015
Untitled
I am not a great reader of poetry but I always return to the work of Melbourne poet, Vincent Buckley (1925- 1988). Perhaps I find his most tantalising piece to be not a finished poem but a fragment left on a scrap of paper discovered on his desk after the poet’s death.
The poetry gathers like oil
In the word-core, and spreads
It has its music meet,
Its music is in movement.
This fragment is more the shell left behind from a volatile thought than a finished poem. I find the last two lines honest but awkward whereas the first two lines work like an arrow. Most likely he could not find a resolution so it was left. Still, in its present form, it remains an eloquent testimony to the ultimate failure of a medium to express mobile thought and sensation, in Buckley’s case, through verbal language. It’s an important matter because this is something all artists have to deal with regardless of the medium.
I have never written a poem, however, I am forever copying fragments from books on paper scraps in a vain effort to fix certain notions in my head. At first, they function as bookmarks that are sometimes returned to when I open the book. But before long, as they accumulate, they fall out littering the table interspersed with A4 photocopies, bills, books and medications.
To return to Buckley’s fragment, the first two lines very much evoke how I paint nowadays. As you age, detail diminishes and patches of light become more luminous and float. I feel the most honest way of dealing with this is by smearing the oil paint on the canvas with the fingers and working close-up, blind. Only if the patches coalesce into an approaching image can the work gain a life.
-
Jonathan Walker was born in Melbourne, Australia and brought up on a dairy farm in Gippsland. In the 1970’s he studied painting at RMIT and won the Harold Wright Scholarship to the British Museum, London. During the 1980’s he exhibited at Pinacotheca Gallery, Richmond and had work shown at the NGV and Heidi City Art Gallery. Over the same period he designed the cover for the “Epigenesi” LP by Giancarlo Toniutti, Italy and conducted a mail exchange work with Achim Wollscheid, Germany. The work with artists through the post resulted in an article published in the bicentenary issue of Art and Australia 1988. He showed in artist run spaces such as WestSpace in the 90’s and 2000’s, and until 2012, taught painting at Victoria University, which is where we (Colleen Ahern and Lisa Radford) as organisers of the exhibition, among many others, had the privilege of being his student.
Walker’s knowledge was imparted to students through the careful selection of music, literature, and artists found in books that he himself had ordered for the library. Walker’s strategy was the generosity of sharing his vast knowledge with references specific to each student and their context.
Walker’s paintings share a similar focus and intimacy.
This exhibition presents a small selection of recent paintings alongside a publication that includes Walker’s writing. Observational and analytical, Walker’s work is a type of material notation — the time of day, colour and how it is blended, the both specific and fleeting location of a reflection on lino or the question of whether a chair leg should be included in a painting.
Please join us on Friday August 21 between 6-8pm to celebrate the opening of the exhibition.
Curated by Colleen Ahern and Lisa Radford.
B. Wurtz
Curated by Nic Tammens
March 26 - April 4, 2015
B.Wurtz works from a basement studio in his home on Manhattan’s Lower East Side.
This local fact is attested to by the plastic shopping bags and newsprint circulars that appear in his work. As formal objects, they don’t make loud claims about their origins but nonetheless transmit street addresses and places of business from the bottom of this long thin island. Like plenty of artists, Wurtz is affected by what is local and what is consumed. His work is underpinned by this ethic. It often speaks from a neighborhood or reads like the contents of a hamper:
“BLACK PLUMS $1.29 lb.”
“Food Bazaar”
“USDA Whole Pork Shoulder Picnic 99c lb.”
“RITE AID Pharmacy, with us it’s personal.”
“H. Brickman & Sons.”
“Sweet Yams 59c lb."
Most of the work in this exhibition was made while the artist was in residence at Dieu Donne, a workshop dedicated to paper craft in Midtown. Here Wurtz fabricated assemblages with paper and objects that are relatively lightweight, with the intention that they would be easily transportable to Australia. This consideration isn’t absolute in Wurtz’s work, but was prescriptive for making the current exhibition light and cheap. Packed in two boxes, these works were sent from a USPS post office on the Lower East Side and delivered to North Melbourne by Australia Post.
Wurtz appears courtesy of Metro Pictures, New York.
Thanks to Rob Halverson, Joshua Petherick, Sari de Mallory, Matt Hinkley, Helen Johnson, Fayen d'Evie, Ask Kilmartin, Lisa Radon, Ellena Savage, Yale Union, and "Elizabeth".
John Nixon
"Archive"
December 15 - January 20, 2014
The presentation of John Nixon's archive offered a rare showcase of this extensive collection of the artist's own publications, catalogues, posters, ephemera, editions and more, from the mid 1980s onwards, alongside a selection of his artworks.
Organized by John Nixon, Joshua Petherick and Matt Hinkley.
"Habitat"
at Minerva, Sydney (organised by Joshua Petherick and Matt Hinkley)
November 15 - December 20, 2014
Lupo Borgonovo, Janet Burchill & Jennifer McCamley,
Lewis Fidock, HR Giger, Piero Gilardi, Veit Laurent Kurz,
Cinzia Ruggeri, Michael E. Smith, Lucie Stahl, Daniel Weil, Wols
Press Release:
“...It contained seven objects. The slender fluted bone, surely formed for flight, surely from the wing of some large bird. Three archaic circuitboards, faced with mazes of gold. A smooth white sphere of baked clay. An age-blackened fragment of lace. A fingerlength segment of what she assumed was bone from a human wrist, grayish white, inset smoothly with the silicon shaft of a small instrument that must once have ridden flush with the surface of the skin - but the thing’s face was seared and blackened.”
William Gibson, “Count Zero”, 1986
"Autumn Projects Archive"
Curated by Liza Vasiliou
March 6 - March 15, 2014
World Food Books, in conjunction with the Virgin Australia Melbourne Fashion Festival 2014, presented the Autumn Projects archive, consisting of a selection of early examples in Australian fashion with a particular interest in collecting designers and labels from the period beginning in the 1980’s, who significantly influenced the discourse of Australian Fashion.
Curated by Liza Vasiliou, the exhibition provided a unique opportunity to view pieces by designers Anthea Crawford, Barbara Vandenberg, Geoff Liddell and labels CR Australia, Covers, Jag along with early experimental collage pieces by Prue Acton and Sally Browne’s ‘Fragments’ collection, suspended throughout the functioning World Food Books shop in Melbourne.
H.B. Peace
presented by CENTRE FOR STYLE
November 14, 2013
"Hey Blinky, you say chic, I say same"
Anon 2013
H.B. Peace is a clothing collaboration between great friends Blake Barns and Hugh Egan Westland. Their pieces explore the divergences between 'character’ and ‘personality’ in garments....etc
Special Thanks to Joshua Petherick and Matt Hinkley of WFB and Gillian Mears
and a Very Special Thank you to Audrey Thomas Hayes for her shoe collaboration.
Janet Burchill & Jennifer McCamley
"Aesthetic Suicide"
May 10 - June 8, 2013
The first of our occasional exhibitions in the World Food Books office/shop space in Melbourne, "Aesthetic Suicide" presented a body of new and older works together by artists Janet Burchill & Jennifer McCamley, including videos, prints, a wall work, and publications.
During shop open hours videos played every hour, on the hour.
1978, Japanese
Softcover, 80 pages, 26 x 18.5 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / good
Published by
Tenjō Sajiki / Tokyo
$120.00 - In stock -
Rare copy of Angura (Underground Theatre) issue 12, 1978, the "Dramatic Theory Magazine" published in Tokyo by Shūji Terayama's radical avant-garde theatre company Tenjō Sajiki. With iconic cover photography by Shūji Terayama, this issue's special feature is ‘Body Language and the Theatrical Body’, with contributions by Terayama, philosopher Hiroshi Ichikawa, musicologist Fumio Koizumi, film critic Masao Matsuda, illustrator Ryōichi Enomoto, musician J. A. Seazer, and many others. A very unique periodical that not only discusses in-depth the works of Angura theatre, but also the international avant-garde, inviting diverse critical perspectives on performance and anti- and living-theatre, sharing ground with Gutai and Fluxus. Illustrated throughout with drawings, diagrams and photographs, mixing themes of pop, protest, surrealism, and eros, plus texts and scripts in Japanese. A rare printed embodiment of Tenjō Sajiki, Terayama, Tadanori Yokoo and the Japanese underground.
Tenjō Sajiki was a Japanese independent theater troupe co-founded by Shūji Terayama, Kujō Kyōko, Yutaka Higashi, Tadanori Yokoo, and Fumiko Takagi. Led by Japanese avant-garde poet, dramatist, writer, film director, and photographer Shūji Terayama, the prolific group was active between 1967 and 1983 (until Terayama's death). A major phenomenon on the Japanese Angura ("underground") theater scene, the group has produced a number of stage works marked by experimentalism, folklore influences, social provocation, grotesque eroticism and the flamboyant fantasy characteristic of Terayama's oeuvre. Tenjō Sajiki benefitted greatly from collaborations with a number of prominent artists, including musicians J. A. Seazer and Kan Mikami, and graphic designers Aquirax Uno and Tadanori Yokoo.
Shūji Terayama (1935 — 1983) was a Japanese avant-garde poet, dramatist, writer, film director, and photographer. His works range from radio drama, experimental television, underground (Angura) theatre, countercultural essays, to Japanese New Wave and "expanded" cinema. Terayama is considered one of the most productive and provocative creative artists to come out of Japan, with a wide-reaching influence on many artists from the 1970s onward.
1979, Japanese
Softcover, 26 x 18.5 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Tenjō Sajiki / Tokyo
$120.00 - In stock -
Rare copy of Angura (Underground Theatre) issue 14, 1979, the "Dramatic Theory Magazine" published in Tokyo by Shūji Terayama's radical avant-garde theatre company Tenjō Sajiki. With iconic cover photography by Shūji Terayama, this issue's special feature is ‘Drama Lemming / Machine Dramaturgy’, with contributions by Terayama, scenographer Nobutaka Kotake, playwright Rio Kishida, artist Panamarenko, producer Michi Tanaka, and many others. A very unique periodical that not only discusses in-depth the works of Angura theatre, but also the international avant-garde, inviting diverse critical perspectives on performance and anti- and living-theatre. Illustrated throughout with drawings, diagrams and photographs, texts, scripts in Japanese.
Tenjō Sajiki was a Japanese independent theater troupe co-founded by Shūji Terayama, Kujō Kyōko, Yutaka Higashi, Tadanori Yokoo, and Fumiko Takagi. Led by Japanese avant-garde poet, dramatist, writer, film director, and photographer Shūji Terayama, the prolific group was active between 1967 and 1983 (until Terayama's death). A major phenomenon on the Japanese Angura ("underground") theater scene, the group has produced a number of stage works marked by experimentalism, folklore influences, social provocation, grotesque eroticism and the flamboyant fantasy characteristic of Terayama's oeuvre. Tenjō Sajiki benefitted greatly from collaborations with a number of prominent artists, including musicians J. A. Seazer and Kan Mikami, and graphic designers Aquirax Uno and Tadanori Yokoo.
Shūji Terayama (1935 — 1983) was a Japanese avant-garde poet, dramatist, writer, film director, and photographer. His works range from radio drama, experimental television, underground (Angura) theatre, countercultural essays, to Japanese New Wave and "expanded" cinema. Terayama is considered one of the most productive and provocative creative artists to come out of Japan, with a wide-reaching influence on many artists from the 1970s onward.
1996, Japanese
Softcover (staple-bound), unpaginated, 21.5 x 14 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Uplink / Japan
$80.00 - In stock -
Issued in 1997 and long out-of-print, this tremendous little publication collects and reproduces every issue of 天井桟敷 "Ceiling Pier" newspaper, published by Shūji Terayama's experimental theatre troupe Tenjō Sajiki between 1967—1983. Ceiling Pier (a term for the cheap seats in a theatre, furthest from the stage) was the voice-piece for the "Theatre Laboratory" activities of Tenjō Sajiki and their associates, published throughout their entire existence, now all impossibly rare. Lovely document of this printed history, from issue No. 1 May 3, 1967 through to No. 26 March 15, 1983, all pages, all reduced to the size of a jacket pocket. Includes the work of collaborators musician J. A. Seazer, graphic artists Aquirax Uno and Tadanori Yokoo, playwright Yutaka Higashi, actress Eiko Kujo, art director Ryōichi Enomoto, illustrator Makoto Wada, playwright Jūrō Kara, and many more. Texts in Japanese.
Tenjō Sajiki was a Japanese independent theater troupe co-founded by Shūji Terayama, Kujō Kyōko, Yutaka Higashi, Tadanori Yokoo, and Fumiko Takagi. Led by Japanese avant-garde poet, dramatist, writer, film director, and photographer Shūji Terayama, the prolific group was active between 1967 and 1983 (until Terayama's death). A major phenomenon on the Japanese Angura ("underground") theater scene, the group has produced a number of stage works marked by experimentalism, folklore influences, social provocation, grotesque eroticism and the flamboyant fantasy characteristic of Terayama's oeuvre. Tenjō Sajiki benefitted greatly from collaborations with a number of prominent artists, including musicians J. A. Seazer and Kan Mikami, and graphic designers Aquirax Uno and Tadanori Yokoo.
Shūji Terayama (1935 — 1983) was a Japanese avant-garde poet, dramatist, writer, film director, and photographer. His works range from radio drama, experimental television, underground (Angura) theatre, countercultural essays, to Japanese New Wave and "expanded" cinema. Terayama is considered one of the most productive and provocative creative artists to come out of Japan, with a wide-reaching influence on many artists from the 1970s onward.
Very good with light wear and one fold to cover.
1967, Japanese
Softcover (w. dust jacket), 310 pages, 21 x 15 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / good
Published by
Haga Bookstore / Japan
$250.00 - In stock -
Rare and iconic book, Throw Away Your Books, Rally in the Streets (1967) is a collaboration between legendary Japanese underground theater and film director Shuji Terayama, graphic designer Tadanori Yokoo and photographer/cinematographer Yasuhiro Yoshioka. As a precursor to Terayama's first audacious feature-length film of the same title, from 1971, this beautiful softcover book is filled with collages, photographs, graphics, drawings and texts (in Japanese), housed in an elaborate dust-jacket (with amazing Beatles homage lipstick collage on verso) typical of the bold and vibrant pop design style of Yokoo, establishes Terayama as a multi-talented avant-garde poet, dramatist, writer, film director, editor and photographer, and one of the central figures of the runaway movement in 1960s Japan. In the same year as this book was published, Terayama (in collaboration with Tadanori Yokoo and others) formed the Tenjo Sajiki, a major phenomenon on the Japanese Angura ("underground") theater scene, the prolific group was known for their stage works marked by experimentalism, folklore influences, social provocation, grotesque eroticism and the flamboyant fantasy characteristic of Terayama's oeuvre. An amazing and rare early example of their published collaborative work, wrapped in one of Yokoo's most iconic graphic works.
Shūji Terayama (1935 — 1983) was a Japanese avant-garde poet, dramatist, writer, film director, and photographer. His works range from radio drama, experimental television, underground (Angura) theatre, countercultural essays, to Japanese New Wave and "expanded" cinema. Terayama is considered one of the most productive and provocative creative artists to come out of Japan, with a wide-reaching influence on many artists from the 1970s onward.
Good copy with Good dust jacket. General tanning and foxing, with edge wear and surface wear to jacket.
1978 / 1979, Japanese
Softcover, 127 pages + 144 pages, 22.5 x 29 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / good
Published by
Visual Message / Tokyo
$150.00 - Out of stock
First (1978) and second (1979) issues of Visual Message, the "comprehensive magazine of the visual age", published in Japan for a short period at the end of the 1970s. This explosive inaugural issue, co-edited by graphic designers Ikko Tanaka and Kazuya Uegami, and copywriter Shinya Nishimura and themed "Visual Scandal" is cover-to-cover packed with leading graphic artists, photographers, architects, textile designers, etc. from Japan and overseas including Tadanori Yokoo, Masao Saito, Harumi Yamaguchi, Masamichi Oikawa, Eiko Ishioka, Shigeo Fukuda, Tomi Ungerer, Masayuki Kurokawa, SITE, Tsunehisa Kimura, Tenmei Kano, Raymond Savignac, Katsumi Asaba, Ken Mori, Andy Warhol, Jean-Michel Folon, Asai Shinpei, Marcel Duchamp, Rene Magritte, Herb Lubalin, Osamu Nagahama, M.C. Escher, Shiro Tatsumi, Hiroki Hayashi, Masayoshi Nakajo, Hiroshi Yoda, Hipgnosis, and many more.
Second 1979 issue of Visual Message is structured around the themes "Before/After" and "Scale" and again is cover-to-cover packed with leading graphic artists, photographers, architects, textile designers, etc. from Japan and overseas including Tadanori Yokoo, Philip Johnson, Hideo Yamashita, Seiji Takada, Takahisa Kamijō, Haruo Takino, Takenobu Igarashi, Akira Yokoyama, Hisaki Hiramatsu, Takamichi Ito, Tomoya Nakano, Shōji Yamagishi, and many more.
V.M. 1. Good copy. Some cover/spine wear/creases/small closed tear to cover edge.
V.M. 2. Very Good copy. Light general wear, bumping.
2001, English
Softcover, 256 pages, 13 x 20.5 cm
Published by
Vintage Books / New York
$33.00 - Out of stock
A hilarious story of one man's obsession and a brilliant reckoning of a nation's cultural confusion-from a master Japanese novelist.
Na-o-mi. The three syllables of this name, unusual in 1920s Japan, captivate a 28-year-old engineer, who soon becomes infatuated with the girl so named, a teenaged cafe waitress. Drawn to her Eurasian features and innocent demeanor, Joji is eager to whisk young Naomi away from the seamy underbelly of post-World War I Tokyo and to mold her into his ideal wife. But when the two come together to indulge their shared passion for Western culture, Joji discovers that Naomi is far from being the naive girl of his fantasies. And, in Tanizaki's masterpiece of lurid obsession, passion quickly descends into comically helpless masochism.
A literary masterpiece that helped to establish Junichiro Tanizaki as Japan's greatest novelist, Naomi is both a hilarious story of one man's obsession and torment, and a brilliant evocation of a nation's cultural confusion.
"In a class with Lady Chatterley's Lover and Lolita... Powerfully erotic, directly funny, a great novelist's masterpiece."—Booklist
Junichiro Tanizaki was born in Tokyo in 1886 and lived in the city until the earthquake of 1923, when he moved to the Kyoto-Osaka region, the scene of one of his most well-known novels, The Makioka Sisters (1943-48). The author of over twenty books, including Naomi (1924), Some Prefer Nettles (1928), Arrowroot (1931), and A Portrait of Shunkin (1933), Tanizaki also published translations of the Japanese classic, The Tale of Genji in 1941, 1954, and 1965. Several of his novels, including Quicksand (1930), The Key (1956), and Diary of a Mad Old Man (1961) were made into movies. He was awarded Japan's Imperial Prize in Literature in 1949, and in 1965 he became the first Japanese writer to be elected as an honorary member of the American Academy and the National Institute of Arts and Letters. Tanizaki died in 1965.
2001, English / Italian
Softcover, 96 pages, 12.2 x 16.1 cm
Published by
City Lights Books / San Francisco
$32.00 - In stock -
The Italian film-maker Pier Paolo Pasolini was first and always a poet—the most important civil poet, according to Alberto Moravia, in Italy in the second half of this century. His poems were at once deeply personal and passionately engaged in the political turmoil of his country. In 1949, after his homosexuality led the Italian Communist Party to expel him on charges of "moral and political unworthiness," Pasolini fled to Rome. This selection of poems from his early impoverished days on the outskirts of Rome to his last (with a backward longing glance at his native Friuli) is at the center of his poetic and filmic vision of modern Italian life as an Inferno.
"From all these refusals, we know what Pasolini stood against—political ideologies of all kinds, the complacency inherent in the established social order, the corruption of the institutions of church and state. If Pasolini could be said to have stood for anything it was for the struggles of Italy's working class—both the rural peasants and those barracked in the urban slums at the edges of Italian cities—whose humanity he evoked with great eloquence and nuance. But it is his refusals that animate his legacy with an incandescent rage, a passionate and profound fury that did not, as Zigaina suggests, cry out for death—but for just the opposite." —Nathaniel Rich, The New York Review of Books
2023, English
Hardcover (w. dust jacket), 264 pages, 22.8 x 15.2 cm
Published by
Zone Books / New York
$56.00 - Out of stock
Essays on media systems and contemporary art by a leading theorist of modern visual culture.
Tricks of the Light brings together essays by critic and art historian Jonathan Crary, internationally known for his groundbreaking and widely admired studies of modern Western visual culture. This collection features a compelling selection of Crary's responses to modern and contemporary art and to the transformations of twentieth-century media systems and urban/technological environments. These wide-ranging and provocative texts explore the work of painters, performance artists, writers, architects, and photographers, including Allan Kaprow, Eleanor Antin, Ed Ruscha, John Berger, Bridget Riley, J.G. Ballard, Rem Koolhaas, Gretchen Bender, Dennis Oppenheim, Paul Virilio, Robert Irwin, and Uta Barth. There are also reflections on filmmakers Fritz Lang, Stanley Kubrick, Jean-Luc-Godard, David Cronenberg, and others. The book is enhanced by several expansive essays on the unstable status of television, both amid its beginnings in the 1930s and then during its assimilation into new assemblages and networks in the 1980s and 90s. These assess its many-sided role in the reshaping of subjectivity, temporality, and the operation of power. Like all of Crary's work, his writing here is grounded in the acuteness of his engagement with perceptual artifacts of many kinds and in his nuanced reading of historical processes and their cultural reverberations.
2020, English
Softcover, 137 pages, 13.5 x 19 cm
Published by
Twisted Spoon Press / Prague
$36.00 - In stock -
Launched in 1931 by Jindřich Štyrský, Edition 69 consisted of six volumes of erotic literature and illustration that followed the path marked out by Louis Aragon’s Irene’s Cunt and Georges Bataille’s Story of the Eye. Including the first Czech translation of Marquis de Sade’s Justine and Pietro Aretino (both illustrated by Toyen), three volumes in the series were from Czech avant-garde artists, and these were all illustrated by Štyrský himself, who also contributed the text for the series' final volume. Brought together here in original English translations, Edition 69 comprises: Nezval’s “Sexual Nocturne”; Halas’s erotic poetry collection “Thyrsos”; and Štyrský’s “Emilie Comes to Me in a Dream,” including the original postscript from psychoanalyst and fellow Surrealist Bohuslav Brouk. For each, Štyrský chose a different technique for the artwork, from pen and ink drawings to graphic collages to pornographic photomontages. Influenced by Max Ernst’s collage-novels, André Masson’s illustrations, and the book as object, Štyrský’s overall conception for the Edition 69 series rank it among the notable achievements of European Surrealism, representing as well a sustained attempt by the interwar Czech avant-garde to investigate the taboos of bourgeois culture.
2023, English
Softcover, 288 pages, 20.9 x 13 cm
Published by
Verso / London
$32.00 - In stock -
A new collection of stories from the cult author of Terminal Boredom.
Izumi Suzuki had ideas about doing things differently, ideas that paid little attention to the laws of physics, or the laws of the land. In this new collection, her skewed imagination distorts and enhances some of the classic concepts of science fiction and fantasy.
A philandering husband receives a bestial punishment from a wife with her own secrets to keep; a music lover finds herself in a timeline both familiar and as wrong as can be; a misfit band of space pirates discover a mysterious baby among the stars; Emma, the Bovary-like character from one of Suzuki’s stories in Terminal Boredom, lands herself in a bizarre romantic pickle.
Wryly anarchic and deeply imaginative, Suzuki was a writer like no other. These eleven stories offer readers the opportunity to delve deeper in this singular writer's work.
Translated by Sam Bett, David Boyd, Daniel Joseph and Helen O'Horan
"Extraordinary. To use one of her own coolly illuminating formulations, Suzuki is steward of a new anxiety"—China Miéville
"Brilliant and often bleak … all shot through with a camp ethos, dark humour and kitchen-sink realism … in their brio and jagged urgency, these stories have, if anything, only gained in their alarming immediacy."— Times Literary Supplement
2021, English
Softcover, 208 pages, 20.9 x 13 cm
Published by
Verso / London
$32.00 - In stock -
The first English-language publication of the work of Izumi Suzuki, a legend of Japanese science fiction and a countercultural icon.
In a future where men are contained in ghettoised isolation, women enjoy the fruits of a queer matriarchal utopia—until a boy escapes and a young woman’s perception of the world is violently interrupted. The last family in a desolate city struggles to approximate twentieth- century life on Earth, lifting what notions they can from 1960s popular culture. But beneath these badly learned behaviours lies an atavistic appetite for destruction. Two new friends enjoy drinks on a holiday resort planet where all is not as it seems, and the air itself seems to carry a treacherously potent nostalgia. Back on Earth, Emma’s not certain if her emotionally abusive, green-haired boyfriend is in fact an intergalactic alien spy, or if she’s been hitting the bottles and baggies too hard. And in the title story, the tyranny of enforced screen-time and the mechanisation of labour foster a cold-hearted and ultimately tragic disaffection among the youth of Tokyo.
Nonchalantly hip and full of deranged prescience, Suzuki’s singular slant on speculative fiction would be echoed in countless later works, from Neuromancer to The Handmaid’s Tale. In these darkly playful and punky stories, the fantastical elements are always grounded in the universal pettiness of strife between the sexes, and the gritty reality of life on the lower rungs, whatever planet that ladder might be on.
Izumi Suzuki was born in 1949. After dropping out of high school she worked in a factory before finding success and infamy as a model and actress. She was a member of Shuji Terayama's independent underground theater troupe Tenjo Saijiki, and acted in both "pink" films and classics of 1970s Japanese cinema. Izumi was the subject of many of Nobuyoshi Araki's most famous photographs and this photobook is one of his most sought after.. When the father of her children, the jazz musician Kaoru Abe, died of an overdose, Suzuki’s creative output went into hyperdrive and she began producing the irreverent and punky short fiction, novels and essays that ensured her reputation would outstrip and outlast that of the men she had been associated with in her early career. She took her own life in 1986, leaving behind a decade’s worth of groundbreaking and influential writing.
1994, Japanese
Softcover (w. dust jacket and obi), 240 pages, 21.5 x 14 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / good
Published by
Bunyusha / Tokyo
$65.00 - Out of stock
Rare first 1994 edition of this gorgeous book-document of the life and work of acclaimed Japanese sci-fi author and countercultural icon, Izumi Suzuki, published by Bunyusha, Tokyo, and illustrated with Nobuyoshi Araki's photographs. "Towards the love of speed, told by people who were around. A record of an amazing life. Actress, writer, wife of Kaoru Abe"
Long out-of-print, this book portrait documents the singular, but tragically short, biography and bibliography of this Japanese sci-fi iconoclast who debuted as a writer at the age of 20, having written stories since her childhood. Edited by Tamami Nishimura and Kenichi Yamada, commemorative chapters on Suzuki by her friends, collaborators and colleagues trace her life on the stage (as a member of Shuji Terayama's underground theater troupe Tenjo Saijiki), the screen (as "pink" film actress), the image (as model and muse to photographer Nobuyoshi Araki), the page (as celebrated pop culture essayist and proto-cyberpunk author), through the life between with marriage to free jazz alto-saxophonist Kaoru Abe and suicide at age 36 — a life as adventurous and tumultuous as the art they made and the counterculture they inhabited. Illustrated throughout with Nobuyoshi Araki's intimate colour and b/w photographs of Suzuki. Includes comprehensive bibliography of Suzuki's writings, many magazine articles and works of fiction.
Izumi Suzuki was born in 1949. After dropping out of high school she worked in a factory before finding success and infamy as a model and actress. She was a member of Shuji Terayama's independent underground theater troupe Tenjo Saijiki, and acted in both "pink" films and classics of 1970s Japanese cinema. Izumi was the subject of many of Nobuyoshi Araki's most famous photographs and this photobook is one of his most sought after. When the father of her children, the jazz musician Kaoru Abe, died of an overdose, Suzuki’s creative output went into hyperdrive and she began producing the irreverent and punky short fiction, novels and essays that ensured her reputation would outstrip and outlast that of the men she had been associated with in her early career. She took her own life in 1986, leaving behind a decade’s worth of groundbreaking and influential writing.
Good copy in dust jacket and obi. Most complete copy, with some buckling.
2006, German / English
Softcover, 72 pages, 30 x 24 cm
Out of print title / used / good
Published by
Secession / Vienna
Walther König / Köln
Galerie im Taxispalais / Innsbruck
$200.00 - Out of stock
Rare 2006 catalogue published on the occasion of the exhibition Isa Genzken at Galerie im Taxispalais, Innsbruck and Secession, Wien, by Walther Koenig. Profusely illustrated throughout with Genzken's works and installation views, accompanied by texts by Benjamin H.D. Buchloh, Manfred Hermes, Anette Freudenberger, Silvia Eiblmayr, and Barbara Holub in both English and German.
"For more than thirty years, Isa Genzken has been developing a versatile oeuvre, continually extending it by adding new aspects. Her settings, her unusual combinations of materials, and the fragile but monumental character of her constructions reflect the surrounding world and the fragility of human existence. Her work—which includes sculptures and installations as well as photography, collage, and film—explores the space between public claims and private artistic autonomy, thus defining an interface where the personal and the universal meet. The formal and conceptual rigor at the root of Isa Genzken’s approach is tempered by unrestricted freedom, producing works that can be interpreted and experienced on very different levels. A central role is played by the choice and combination of materials with different connotations which the artist finds at home depots, builders’ suppliers, and department stores: whereas in the past Genzken used wood, plaster, epoxy resins, and above all concrete, the material of Modernism, her main materials today are plastic, synthetics, and a wide range of mirrors, as well as everyday items and consumer goods such as chairs—design classics alongside cheap camping chairs—garments, and plastic dolls and animals.
For her exhibition in the Hauptraum at the Secession, Isa Genzken has devised an installation with new sculptures and pieces on the wall: wheelchairs and seats draped in various textiles, ribbons, and sheets, walking frames, anthropomorphic figures, and wall-filling collages made from mirrors, photos, and adhesive tape create a carefully arranged image. Warholesque baby dolls with their outsize glasses look like prematurely aged children or, conversely, like infantilized adults, waiting under tattered parasols on a Hollywood set for shooting to recommence. But less than this bizarre scene, what is disconcerting here is the cool precision with which, for all the piece’s figurativeness, no story is told. Dolls and animals form heterogeneous abstract surfaces, but they are not deployed to narrative ends, and neither are other materials such as the mirrors, plastic sheeting, or the paint dripped or sprayed over many of the sculptures.
The new works relate to Genzken’s recent Empire/Vampire series. But while these works were presented on plinths at eye level, at the Secession, the entire space turns into a kind of plinth and the visitors become part of this scenario that is both beguilingly beautiful and disturbing at the same time. The works turn an imaginary inner space outwards, but rather than being something merely invented, the space always refers to the real—a comparative moment against which all the pieces can be measured. In an interview with Wolfgang Tillmans, Isa Genzken describes the way she thinks a sculpture should look: “It must have a certain relation to reality. I mean, not airy-fairy, let alone fabricated, so aloof and polite. [...] Rather, a sculpture is really a photo – although it can be shifted, it must still always have an aspect that reality has too.”
Good copy, due to bumps/creases to corners and previous owners inscription to title page, otherwise a Very Good copy throughout.
2023, English
Fold-out, double-sided poster, 16 panels, 30 x 21 cm (folded)
Edition of 200,
Published by
Self-Published / Melbourne
$10.00 - In stock -
TEMPLATES by Melbourne/Naarm based artists Rose Nolan and Augusta Vinall Richardson is a conversation and fold-out archive of artworks, published in an edition of 200, designed by Yanni Florence, text edited by Madeline Simm.
This publication was produced in conjunction with TEMPLATE/SKETCH, Augusta Vinall Richardson solo presentation at CAVES Gallery, Melbourne 20 October 11 November, 2023
2022, English
Softcover (thread-bound), 28 pages + A3 insert, 29.7 x 21 cm
Ed. of 100, hand-initialed and numbered.,
Published by
Rose Nolan / Melbourne
$50.00 - In stock -
Working Models For / From Someone's Life is a new artist's book by Melbourne-based artist Rose Nolan, published in a limited edition of 100 copies, each hand-numbered and initialed by Nolan, designed by the artist with Warren Taylor. The volume comprises photographic documentation by Christian Capurro of Nolan's "models", accompanied by text by Ingrid Periz. "Rose Nolan calls the constructions pictured here working models, taking the name of similar objects used in the architectural design process where they are used to check proportion, volume and shape. Occasionally this process of checking prompts a rethink, and a drawing is corrected. Unlike their namesakes, Nolan's models won't prompt any design rethink or correction.Theirs may be a harder task.As she tells me, electronically: "My small models don't have to function (in Real Life) in anyway, other than to stand up for themselves:""—from text by Periz.
"We can think of the models as Cubist "portraits" of fictitious buildings; they are additionally self-portraits of Rose Nolan, Rose Nolan the architect of the buildings and Rose Nolan the consumer, buyer of Apple products, fine French candles, Chanel, Marimekko and Fab, the laundry detergent."
Includes A3 insert of all models as folded poster / catalogue.
Rose Nolan (b. 1959) is an Australian visual artist based in Melbourne working across painting, installation, sculpture, photography, prints and book production. Her practice regularly oscillates between the discrete and the monumental and is informed by a strong interest in architecture, interior and graphic design – combining formal concerns with the legacies of modernism. Nolan’s practice is known for its investigation of the formal and linguistic qualities of words, directly using language to transform the architectural space they inhabit. By making language concrete in this way meaning is allowed to be approached differently.
Nolan employs a radically reduced palette of red and white, and simple utilitarian materials and methods, in an exploration of personal, playful and often self-effacing narratives. Each work describes a concern for economy; a desire to be responsive to site; an interest in seriality and repetition; and the importance of language, interactivity, and the experience of the viewer.
2023, English
Softcover (staple-bound), 16 pages, 29.7 x 21 cm
Published by
Light of Day Books / Melbourne
$10.00 - In stock -
Eliza Hutchison 2002-2004 portraits from the series The Ancestors and The Entertainers were taken by hanging the subjects upside down.
“In this work, Hutchison explores the construction of the imagery solely through her subjects. Here we are confronted by the effect of a prop on a body. We do not see the prop in the portraits, but merely the uncanny effects on the subjects after they have been placed into this prop and then relocated in space. This is examined by Hutchison through the lens of a large format camera and recorded onto photographic plates, reminiscent of daguerreotype photography. Also evocative of this early photography is the stiff nature of Hutchinson’s portraiture (due in the early daguerreotype photography to the long exposures sitters had to endure).”
“…the theatricality is encapsulated in the forensic detail and through the performance undertaken in the production of each image. Once relocated in space, the staging of Hutchison’s sitters is further exaggerated, extending and relocating the boundaries of traditional portraiture. Ultimately, although the photographs are the product of careful, time-consuming staging, the experience of the sitter placed within the prop is fleeting and dangerous. Unlike early portraiture, the stakes are much higher and the effect more radical.”—Ruth Learner, The Ancestors, Un Magazine, 2005
Eliza Hutchison was born in Johannesburg, South Africa 1965 and currently lives and works in Naarm Naarm. Her interest is in exploring our complex and psychological relationship to the photographic image. Her image making practice has extend to use experimental in camera process to develop a biographical record of her life and creative practice. Hair in the Gate, a biograph, 2013 and Family Photos 2021, her first monograph where the biographical as point of departure was used to explore the broader social political context.
@lightofdaybooks. Photography. Sometimes work that has never been shown or published before. Sometimes work that has not been seen for years. Sometimes work that may otherwise never be seen. Mainly just photographs but sometimes with text.
2023, English
Softcover (staple-bound), 16 pages, 29.7 x 21 cm
Edition of 50,
Published by
Light of Day Books / Melbourne
$10.00 - In stock -
Stain Pictures features works from Jane Burton’s A Temptation to Ships, 2018, hand printed, toned and painted gelatin silver photograph, unique 1/1 and Devil’s Playground, 2015, hand printed, toned and painted gelatin silver photograph, unique 1/1
“But in the cosmos there is balm as well as bitterness, and that balm is nepenthe. In the supreme horror of that second I forgot what had horrified me, and the burst of black memory vanished in a chaos of echoing images. In a dream I fled from that haunted and accursed pile, and ran swiftly and silently in the moonlight. When I returned to the churchyard place of marble and went down the steps I found the stone trap-door immovable; but I was not sorry, for I had hated the antique castle and the trees. Now I ride with the mocking and friendly ghouls on the night-wind, and play by day amongst the catacombs of Nephren-Ka in the sealed and unknown valley of Hadoth by the Nile. I know that light is not for me, save that of the moon over the rock tombs of Neb, nor any gaiety save the unnamed feasts of Nitokris beneath the Great Pyramid; yet in my new wildness and freedom I almost welcome the bitterness of alienage.”—H. P. Lovecraft (1890-1937), an excerpt from The Outsider (1921)
Jane Burton is an artist working with photography, film, and more recently, painting. Her work explores mortality, desire, and isolation and is often darkly ambiguous, enigmatic and provocative. Burton’s work is held in the collections of prominent state and publicly funded galleries, including the National Gallery of Victoria, Art Gallery of New South Wales, National Gallery of Australia, Museum of Australian Photography, and the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery. She has been the recipient of artist residencies in Paris (School of Art, University of Tasmania; Art Gallery of New South Wales), London (Australia Council for the Arts), and Beijing (24HRArt). Two monographs of her photographs have been published by M.33, Melbourne: ‘It is Midnight, Dr. ’, in 2017, and ‘Other Stories’, in 2011.
@lightofdaybooks. Photography. Sometimes work that has never been shown or published before. Sometimes work that has not been seen for years. Sometimes work that may otherwise never be seen. Mainly just photographs but sometimes with text.
2023, English
Softcover (staple-bound), 16 pages, 29.7 x 21 cm
Edition of 50,
Published by
Light of Day Books / Melbourne
$10.00 - Out of stock
The paintings on interior design magazine photos developed after a hiatus from art making while immersed in family life and domesticity. Creative energies were subsumed into home living spaces, the inside and the garden. I looked at interior design magazines, photos of daydream spaces that were untroubled by the presence of humans; their/my containers of curated longings. Mise-en-sènes, often the realm of the English country house suffused with a collective and projected psychic energy. Rooms and furniture, dense with intangible latent energies that are now interacted with marks of paint, pen and pastel. Scribbling and smudging, tracing the imagined residue of projected desires while responding to the armature of the image in colour, shape and texture. These errant energies enlivened by paint make an intimate liminal interface between magazine and gaze. The emergent interactions are conversational, interventional and absurd. Aloof and amorphous, unconscious spaces become corporeal, thresholds are invaded with the scribbled and smudged paint, claiming a messy subjective presence of painterly process, interaction and decorative hijacking.
Amanda Florence is an artist born in Melbourne/Naarm. She studied BA Fine Arts Joint Hons at Camberwell College of Art, London, UK; Post grad at VCA, Melbourne and MA Creative Arts Therapy, LaTrobe University, Melbourne. She currently makes art at home, gardens and works as a Creative Arts Therapist.
@lightofdaybooks. Photography. Sometimes work that has never been shown or published before. Sometimes work that has not been seen for years. Sometimes work that may otherwise never be seen. Mainly just photographs but sometimes with text.
2023, English
Softcover (staple-bound), 16 pages, 29.7 x 21 cm
Edition of 50,
Published by
Light of Day Books / Melbourne
$10.00 - In stock -
A collection of images I made on film, between 1999-2005, across Australia, Taiwan and Germany. In the photographs are: friends, animals, oceans, one Baxter Immigration Detention Centre protest image, one anti-Woolworths protest image, one lover, one river, one photographic experiment, some trees, and plants.
Katrin Koenning lives and works in Naarm, on unceded Wurundjeri Country.
2023, English
Softcover (staple-bound), 16 pages, 29.7 x 21 cm
Edition of 50,
Published by
Light of Day Books / Melbourne
$10.00 - In stock -
Rose Nolan’s photographs taken in New York in 2010.
Rose Nolan is an artist based in Naarm / Melbourne working across painting, installation, sculpture, photography, prints and book production.
@lightofdaybooks. Photography. Sometimes work that has never been shown or published before. Sometimes work that has not been seen for years. Sometimes work that may otherwise never be seen. Mainly just photographs but sometimes with text.
2023, English
Softcover (staple-bound), 16 pages, 29.7 x 21 cm
Edition of 50,
Published by
Light of Day Books / Melbourne
$10.00 - In stock -
Taken in and around various locations on the Mornington Peninsula this zine of photographs by Emma Phillips reveals a curiosity of place, texture, light, and embodiment. The portraits were early forays into the domain of portraiture, and present as encounters in a skewed and slightly strange world. Just beyond the horizon lies a promise, if only we could reach out and touch it.
Emma Phillips b.1989 Sorrento, Australia Lives and works in Melbourne, Australia Represented by ReadingRoom.
@lightofdaybooks. Photography. Sometimes work that has never been shown or published before. Sometimes work that has not been seen for years. Sometimes work that may otherwise never be seen. Mainly just photographs but sometimes with text.
1990, English
Softcover, 80 pages, 30 x 23 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Janssen Verlag / Berlin
$200.00 - Out of stock
First 1990 edition of The Art of George Quaintance, the first comprehensive art book survey of George Quaintance's work. Profusely illustrated throughout with beautiful reproductions of Quaintance's stunning homo-erotic artworks and book illustrations, alongside many press clippings, magazine articles, advertisements for Studio Quaintance, texts in English and German by George Quaintance, Volker Janssen, and Tora Lillstrom. George Quaintance (1902—1957) was an important Arizonan American artist, famous for his "idealized, strongly homoerotic" depictions of men in mid-20th-century physique magazines, such as the influential Physique Pictorial. Using historical settings and folklore such as the Wild West, or the mythology of ancient Greece and Rome, George Quaintance distanced his subjects from modern society, his world of legends made glorious with muscular, semi-nude or nude male figures, helping establish the stereotype of the homosexual "macho stud". A pioneer of a gay aesthetic, George Quaintance's work would influence many later homoerotic artists, including, most notably Tom of Finland.
Very Good copy.
1996, English
Softcover (w. dust jacket), 70 pages, 33.5 x 24 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / average
Published by
Janssen Verlag / Berlin
$80.00 - Out of stock
Rare first and only edition of Ed Cervone's Phantasies Of Gay Sex, published in an edition of 1500 copies in 1996 by Janssen Verlag in Berlin, and long out-of-print. Ed's fantastical, whimsical and always joyous colour depictions of homo-erotica fill this over-sized volume, "thirty-one brightly coloured paintings (plus a back cover image), printed on one side of heavy paper to assist pinning up, covering the gamut of the best gay fantasies imaginable. There is no text, just men enjoying each other, by the pool, on the bed, at the drive-in movie theater, on the football field."(—honesterotica)
Born in a refugee camp in Germany during the war's aftermath to a Latvian mother and German soldier, Edmund Cervone (1945 – 2001) and his mother soon found their way to the US. It was in New York City in the 1970's that Ed emerged as an erotic artist and achieved notoriety. Sometimes referred to as Ed of Manhattan, Ed disliked the moniker, an allusion to Tom of Finland. And indeed, his original voice displayed little of the bulked-up stylized figures. Instead, he headed out in another direction, one of more suppleness and litheness. His painterly approach and the motion in his artworks owed as much to his love of landscape painting as it did to the dynamic of the people he would see in the streets of Manhattan. Eschewing models, he would draw from memory from this wealth of characters, matching the joy of his erotic subjects with vibrant, fantastic use of colour. Internationally known as an illustrator for the male erotic press his artwork is part of the permanent collection at the Leslie-Lohman Gay Art Foundation in New York City.
Average—Good copy due to moisture rippling/marking to the bottom of the front cover and first book pages, lessening throughout. Light corner bumping, otherwise this would be a VG—Near Copy all other regards.
2023, English
Softcover, 216 pages, 20.2 x 13.7 cm
Published by
Semiotext(e) / Los Angeles
$36.00 - In stock -
A remarkable time capsule of Simi Valley, 1979, written before the author would become one of LA's most influential artists of subsequent decades.
When Sean DeLear died prematurely in Vienna in 2017, his friends discovered-among other treasures-an extensive diary kept at the age of fourteen. Still living with his Christian parents in the notoriously racist Los Angeles suburb of Simi Valley, Sean wrote almost every day about crushes and hustling, waterbeds, blackmail, Donna Summer, gloryholes, racism, and shoplifting gay porn.
DeLear would go on to become the frontman for the Los Angeles punk/powerpop band Glue. He was a punk musician, visual artist, intercontinental scenester, video vixen, party host, marijuana farmer, and sometime-collaborator of artists such as Kembra Pfahler and Vaginal Davis.
DeLear's forgotten diaries capture a moment in Los Angeles underground and queer history when, as his friend the writer Cesar Padilla notes, "It wasn't cool at all to be trans, gay, queer or whatever. Those words weren't even in the vocabulary." I Could Not Believe It, Padilla continues, "is a raw fearless innocent gay Black kid's journey coming out into life at an incredible pre-AIDS period. It's not cognizant of being literature. It's as naïve and forthcoming as it gets. It wasn't written with the desire to be published so Sean didn't hold back. Sean's goal was to be true to himself."
"What I love about this 'potent historical artifact of Black youth,' as Brontez Purnell describes it in his introduction, are its notes of uncertainty, lack of pretention and its persistent faith in tomorrow."—Andrew Durbin, Frieze