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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Australian Art
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Animal Rights / Veganism
Occult / Esoterica
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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.
1979, Japanese
Hardcover (w. dust jacket), 120 pages, 30 x 21.5 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / good
Published by
Haga Bookstore / Japan
$100.00 - In stock -
First volume of The Best Nudes hardcover photo book series published between 1979—1982 by the mighty Haga bookstore in Tokyo. This fist volume lavishly reproduces the celebrated nude works of Hungarian photographer Andor György Ikafalvi-Dienes, known as André de Dienes (1913—1985), and innovative German—American glamour photographer Peter Basch (1921—2004).
Good copy with original publisher's printed acetate jacket. Wear and light chipping to jacket, shelf rubbing to book base.
1979, Japanese
Hardcover (w. dust jacket), 120 pages, 30 x 21.5 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Haga Bookstore / Japan
$140.00 - Out of stock
Volume 3 (the most sought after) of The Best Nudes hardcover photo book series published between 1979—1982 by the mighty Haga bookstore in Tokyo. This third volume lavishly reproduces in b/w and colour the celebrated nude works of French photographer Irina Ionesco (1930—2022) and German photographer Karin Szekessy (b. 1938). Both important European female photographers became prominent in the 1970s for their evocative, surreal painterly nude portraiture of women (and dolls). A beautiful collection of ethereal fantasies imbued with Ionesco's gothic provocations and Szekessy's arresting experimentation.
Very Good copy lacking publisher's printed acetate jacket. Light wear to dust jacket.
1984, French
Softcover (french-folds), 84 pages, 30.5 x 23.5 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Pink Star Éditions / Paris
$400.00 - In stock -
Rare, first edition of the extraordinary "Exhibition in Paris" photo book, published in 1984 by Pink Star Éditions, Paris. One woman's nude exhibitionist walk, swim and motorcycle, train, bicycle, ferry and helicopter ride through Paris, enjoying the Cimetière du Père Lachaise, the Tour Eiffel, the Seine, and the attention of many passers-by, all candidly captured by Patrick Magaud. A wonderfully liberated and cheeky collection of nudist photography like no other, printed in lush saturated colours, alongside a small interview with Elle, the star of the book. A sight-seers delight and a photobook like no other. Now very collectible.
Very Good copy.
1978, English
Hardcover (w. dust jacket), 60 pages, 23 x 29 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Sackett & Marshall / London
$160.00 - Out of stock
First hardcover edition of the one and only Yoga For Men from 1978, a book that really couldn't be from another year. John Champ, an advertising art director and Hatha Yoga practitioner, teamed up with yoga expert Pauline Donovan and photographer John Russell to re-invigorate the instructional yoga book. The result is a lively, handsomely designed, over-sized glossy nude/semi-nude photo book of female models executing basic yoga postures to "persuade more people to take up what is a rewarding way of life". A special book, and now very collectible!
Good copy w. Very Good dust jacket. Some light foxing/spotting to first and final pages and board bowing, otherwise a VG copy all-round.
1982, French
Hardcover (w. dustjacket), 25 x 33 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Love Me Tender / Paris
$280.00 - In stock -
The very sought after, first and only printing of Jean-Daniel Lorieux's "Coconuts", from 1982. Published in hardcover by Paris' Love Me Tender photography publishing house, "Coconuts", the first book of French photographer Jean-Daniel Lorieux, has certainly become one of their rarest, most prized editions. Working as a fashion photographer for Vogue, L'Officiel, Dior, Lanvin, Céline, Cardin, this strikingly designed, sun-kissed and airbrushed folio captures swimwear models and celebrities (including a young Brooke Shields, Debbie Dickinson, Kirsteen Price, Isabelle Adjani, Mireille Darc, Paulina Porizkova, Alexandra Stewart, Beverly Johnson, Glenn Ford, Marlène Jobert...) in saturated colours across sun-dreanched locations such as Monte Carlo, Mexico, Djerba, Tunis and Panama. Pure 1980s Summer fantasy, the way only Love Me Tender could capture so well in book form.
VG copy in Good dust jacket.
1981, English / French
Hardcover (w. dust jacket), 160 pages, 33 x 27.5 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Love Me Tender / Paris
$280.00 - In stock -
First and only printing 1981 hardcover edition of the very sought after cult photo book "Seven In New York", published by Love Me Tender, Paris. This over-sized photographic volume illustrates the work of seven professional photographers, Sacha, Uli Rose, Denis Piel, Pierre Houles, Arthur Elgort, Alex Chatelain, and Patrick Demarchelier, who were transferred from Paris to New York to explore new horizons in fashion photography. Produced in collaboration with Kodak Pathé France, the results, which include shoots with models Gia Carangi and Patti Hansen, amongst others, coupled with Love Me Tender's bold 80s graphic design, encapsulate all that makes this period of fashion photography so fantastic. A very special book.
A very good copy in good dust jacket with foxing to reverse of jacket, block edges, and first and last book pages only. Otherwise VG throughout.
2023, English
Softcover, 200 pages, 21.6 x 15.2 cm
Published by
The Song Cave / New York
$55.00 - In stock -
Mystical and everyday reveries from the visionary American modernist.
In the early years of the 20th century, Charles Burchfield painted mystic and visionary landscapes, and with some of his contemporaries, including Edward Hopper, Georgia O'Keeffe and Grant Wood, can be seen to have built the foundations of a particularly North American sensibility that critic Dave Hickey said "continues to evoke an unrepentant, gnostic vision of this vast, rolling, abandoned continent—America without Europe—America without Americans—a massive, alluring kingdom."
For nearly his entire life, Burchfield also kept a journal. Over 54 years, he filled nearly 10,000 pages. To call this journal epic would be an understatement. A masterpiece whose bulk has remained unread, it is a handwritten tome that combines elements of the American nature journal with a dash of 19th-century spiritual autobiography. It is a record of a man who spent much of his life looking at and considering the sky.
In this comparatively small selection pulled from the original 62 volumes, we find Burchfield writing about sitting in the grass with his wife to nap and watch the sunset. He writes about the elation he feels at seeing the first flowers in the spring. He writes about the rain, wind and sun. There's the resentment of having a job; the depression that sneaks in as he gets older; sometimes, too, he writes about the state of human progress; and occasionally, thoughts about God. It is the tender record of a life devoted to the essences of earthly beauty.
"Burchfield would be proud"—Robert Gober
Best known for his romantic, often fantastic depictions of nature, watercolorist Charles Burchfield (1893-1967) developed a unique style of watercolor painting that reflected distinctly American subjects and his profound respect for nature.
2024, English
Softcover, 272 pages, 21.6 x 14.6 cm
Published by
The New York Review of Books / New York
$34.00 - Out of stock
A moving story about love, AIDS, grief, and memory by one of the most adventurous writers to come out of San Francisco's LGBTQ+ scene.
“I was a writer, but not the writer I needed to be. For that I had to become a different person,” Robert Glück, widely acclaimed as a novelist and as a theorist of “the new narrative,” recently told the Paris Review, in which a section of About Ed has appeared. About Ed is Glück’s portrait of the artist Ed Aulerich-Sugai, his sometime lover, met in the seventies in San Francisco, when gay life emerged unabashedly from the closet. “I wanted to find in Ed something to latch on to that was outside my egotism and fear, my threadbare relation to the world—a leap through Ed into lyric time,” Glück has said, and in this book that is both “a novel and my version of an AIDS memoir” he wanted to capture the full range of his feelings for Ed: “estranged from Ed, bored by him, moved by him.”
It is a book about the life they lived together—art and writing and family and sex and death—and, composed over many decades, it is also a book about how the past continues to change in memory and to charge the present. “What is the right question to ask about a life?” Glück asks, describing About Ed as a “collaborative project,” since “Ed helped me write this book.” Ed gave him “notes to fashion a chapter about the day he was diagnosed so I could describe his experience from the inside,” and “after Ed died, Daniel, Ed’s partner, lent me Ed’s dream journals. . . . He started writing them in 1970, the year that we met. We both used his journals, not as puzzles to solve the truth of a self but as a commons producing images that we harvested for paintings and poems. And fifty years later, there I was reading and copying out and running away from his dreams. Are they a condensed version of Ed? Shorthand? Distillation? Is he knowable and unknowable in the same degree sleeping or waking?”
About Ed is a challenging and beautiful book by one of America's finest and most adventurous writers.
1997, English / Japanese
Hardcover, 100 pages, 21.5 x 30.5 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Rockin' On / Tokyo
Hysteric Glamour / Tokyo
$300.00 - Out of stock
First, only edition of Hélène, the hardcover photobook/catalogue published on the occasion of an exhibition curated by Purple magazine co-founder Elein Fleiss at Tokyo gallery THE Deep in 1997. Named after actress and nineties icon Hélène Fillières, this book is the most perfect published time-capsule of what was 90s anti-fashion Paris, and probably the most brilliant fashion photobook of the decade. Published in Japan by Hysteric Glamour and Rockin' On, Hélène is cover-to-cover full-bleed gloss pages of photography by Mark Borthwick, Anette Aurell, Camille Vivier, Christophe Brunnquell, Laetitia Benat, Ronald Stoops, and Anders Edstrom, among others. Only available in Japan when published, and now very rare and sought after. This copy complete with bound-in Hysteric Glamour sticker!
Though she began her career as a curator of art exhibitions, Elein Fleiss founded the seminal Purple Magazine with Olivier Zahm at the age of 24. Purple and Fleiss' other editing/curatorial activities were the primary vehicles for the aesthetics of what became referred to as 1990's anti-fashion. Purple – in its various incantations, Purple Prose, Purple Fashion, Purple Sexe, Purple Journal, etc. – has gone down in publishing history and changed the relationship between art, literature, architecture and fashion, resisting the obvious and the commercial.
Very Good copy with some shelf-scratches to bottom edge, general light wear, light foxing to endpapers.
2000, Japanese
Hardcover, 222 pages, 28 x 20 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / fine
Published by
Oita City Art Museum / Oita
$160.00 - Out of stock
Scarce copy of the stunning hardcover survey of Japanese doll artist Simon Yotsuya, published on the occasion of a major retrospective that travelled Japan between 2000—2002. All the works of Simon Yotsuya are included, from his earliest examples to his latest works — his "Innocent Things: Young Boys and Girls," "Tempting Things: Women," "Automatic Things: Mechanical Devices," "Heavenly Things: Angels and Christ," "Creations of the Self: Simon," "Unfinished Things and Homage to Bellmer" — all beautifully photographed by Japan's leading photographers, including most by Simon's friend and master photographer Kishin Shinoyama, along with many photos of Simon Yotsuya in his parallel career as a female (doll) actor in the 1960s-70s Japanese avant-garde theatre scene. Along with essays, biography, bibliography, chronology, this comprehensive book includes important articles, magazines, and posters. A gorgeous book that will appeal to any fan. Despite his popularity in Japan, Simon Yotsuya's monographic books are surprisingly few in number.
Simon Yotsuya (b. 1944, Tokyo) started making dolls as a child, visiting exhibitions of dolls, and reads all the books he can find on the subject. In his mid-teens he visited Puppe Kawasaki, a doll maker and animator he greaty admired, devoting himself to the craft and becoming a poor high school student. In the early '60s, while working at a jazz coffee shop in Shinjuku, Yotsuya earned the nickname "Simon" (pronounced “Simone”), after his love for singer Nina Simone. He befriends Kuniyoshi Kaneko (painter) and Junko Koshino (fashion designer) and joins in the arts and literary scene. In 1965, he discovers the work of German Surrealist Hans Bellmer through an article authored by Tatsuhiko Shibusawa in the magazine “Shinfujin”, promptly abandoning his previous methods of doll-making to find his way as an artist, incorporating ball-joints into his dolls. Thereafter he becomes an admirer of Surrealism and immerses himself in the controversial Shibusawa's litterary works. In 1965, he also goes to see Tatsumi Hijikata's Butoh Performance for the first time. In the late 60s—early 70s Yotsuya pursued a parallel career to his doll-making as an actor and member of Juro Kara's legendary underground theater company Jokyo Gekijo, Situation Theater, regularly portraying a female doll. He appears in the movie "Diary of a Shinjuku Thief" directed by Nagisa Oshima with the actors of the Situation Theater, but by 1971 he leaves the stage to concentrate on his own work. Simon exhibited at Expo 1970 in Osaka, the Tokyo Biennale in 1974 and by the end of the decade had opened his own doll-making school in Harajuku.
Tatsuhiko Shibusawa (1928—1987), the author of the influential Bellmer article (and novelist, editor, art critic, and translator of Bataille and Marquis de Sade), become a life-long friend of Yotsuya's and his most important advocate, editing the first major book of Yotsuya's work, entitled Pygmalionisme, in 1985. Devastated by Shibusawa's death in 1987, Yotsuya found it impossible to work for nearly two years. He eventually found solace in the Eastern Orthodox Church and was inspired to make a series of angels, which he dedicated to Shibusawa, and straightforward images of Christ. Having carved out his own masterful and unique form of expression, today Yotsuya enjoys international renown as the first ball-jointed doll maker in Japan.
Very Good—Fine copy.
1976, English
Softcover, 84 pages, 28.5 x 21 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / good
Published by
Dover / New York
$35.00 - Out of stock
Perhaps the most famous of Grosz's collections is Ecce Homo (Berlin: Malik Verlag, 1923). The title echoes Pilate's presentation of Jesus as King of the Jews, beaten, with a crown of thorns, bloody and ready for crucifixion, and clearly not the Messiah he had been proclaimed to be six days earlier when he was greeted by rapturous crowds. Just so, the image of the heroic German, brave in war and moral in peacetime, took such a beating in Grosz's drawings, watercolors, and paintings, that he was prosecuted for "offences against public morality and for besmirching the values of the German people" (Kranzfelder, 59). Offering an unsparing vision of human nakedness, lust, greed and cruelty, Ecce Homo was found to be a slanderous attack upon the army, which won damages and the removal of 5 color plates and 17 black and white plates from the portfolio in a law suit. Grosz was also fined 6000 marks. Since Grosz had been attacking the Nazis since the early 1920s and since he had singled out Hitler in particular, it is not surprising that after the Nazi's took power in Germany, his works were singled out for ridicule and destruction. 285 of his works were removed from German collections and destroyed and the 1937 Munich Exhibition of Nazi-labelled "Degenerate Art" included five of his paintings, two watercolours, and thirteen drawings. After relocating to the U.S., Grosz wrote to J. B. Neuman concerning his own place in the history of art: "My drawings will naturally stay true–they are fireproof. They will later be seen as Goya's work [is]. They are not documents of the class struggle, but eternally living documents of human stupidity and brutality"
1976 Dover Edition.
Average—Good copy with previous owner gift inscription to front endpaper. General wear/marks.
2023, English
Softcover, 320 pages, 17.6 x 12.2 cm
Published by
Archway Editions / New York
$38.00 - In stock -
A gripping, unforgettable memoir from one of the best, most original writers of the 21st century. Blake Butler has changed the world of language with his mind-melting literary thrillers, and now he brings his abilities to bear on the emotional world.
“The most immediate feeling of life I've ever had reading a book—a life lived at the desk and out in the world, a life of openness and secrets. "Make art for me," Molly wrote to Blake. "I will read it all." I breathed along with every word.”—PATRICIA LOCKWOOD
"How to praise a book of such wounded beauty as Blake Butler's phenomenal Molly? The same way one would a life lost early: with love and sincerity and anger and wonder and lithely elegant and observant insights that remind us and inspire us, as Butler precisely does, to live and to love ourselves."—JOHN D'AGATA
“Molly is a brilliant and brutal book. Blake Butler fearlessly takes on love and grief and the mysteries of this world and the next.”—EMMA CLINE
“A dark miracle—actual evidence that what we can never know, what we could never imagine about the one we love, is what binds us to them, beyond death.”—MICHAEL W. CLUNE
"I was gripped from the start by this memoir's urgent honesty. Blake Butler turned a story that was almost unspeakable into a narrative at once brutal and loving, broken and solid."—CATHERINE LACEY
Blake Butler and Molly Brodak instantly connected, fell in love, married and built a life together. Both writers with deep roots in contemporary American literature, their union was an iconic joining of forces between two major and beloved talents.
Nearly three years into their marriage, grappling with mental illness and a lifetime of trauma, Molly took her own life. In the days and weeks after Molly’s death, Blake discovered shocking secrets she had held back from the world, fundamentally altering his view of their relationship and who she was.
A masterpiece of autobiography, Molly is a riveting journey into the darkest and most unthinkable parts of the human heart, emerging with a hard-won, unsurpassedly beautiful understanding that expands the possibilities of language to comprehend and express true love.
Unrelentingly clear, honest and concise, Molly approaches the impossible directly, with a total empathy that has no parallel or precedent. A supremely important work that will be taught, loved, relied on and passed around for years to come, Blake Butler affirms now beyond question his position at the very top rank of writers.
2023, English
Softcover (staplebound in sleeve),
Ed. of 150,
Published by
Animal House Books / Melbourne
$30.00 - In stock -
ZED is an artist book by Tim Woodward. The book documents an ongoing series of sculptures made from the steel components of an office desk called the Zed. The Zed was a Freedom Furniture product imported from Taiwan and sold in Australia and New Zealand from 1996 to 2011, a 15 year span aligned with the generation Z birth years.
Woodward’s sculptures re-code the Zed, turning it into a zigzagged orientation point of dense redirection. As George Egerton-Warburton writes in the essay ‘Z’, “...“Z” is a line in indecision, a line that changes course two times”. Through cutting channels and sinking legs into new formations, Woodward’s steel sculptures evoke the onomatopoeic limits of language and the comic book snooze. Desks are restructured and worker profiles ascend like confused drop shadows. Tempered tops are laid off, reflecting from the floor.
ZED is published by Animal House Books and designed by Ned Shannon. Incorporating the Zed desk’s original colourway, the book references the Zed desk as object, instruction, product catalogue and marketplace image. Each uniquely stamped edition includes documentation of Woodward’s exhibition ‘Z’, presented at Darren Knight Gallery, Sydney (2021) and ‘Inheritance’, at Animal House Fine Arts, Melbourne (2023). ZED features essays by George Egerton-Warburton and Rowan McNaught.
Edition of 150 copies.
2012, English
Softcover, 144 pages, 29.3 x 20.8 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / as new
Published by
Mousse / Milan
$180.00 - Out of stock
Out-of-print first edition of the first major book survey of American artist Leigh Ledare, edited by Elena Filipovic, with texts by Elena Filipovic and Nicolas Guagnini, and an interview with Leigh Ledare by David Joselit.
American artist Leigh Ledare uses photography, archival material and text to explore human agency, social relationships, taboos and the photographic, in equal turns. Formally trained in photography, this erstwhile assistant of Larry Clark has, in a relatively short time, developed a body of work that is coherent, complex, biting in its intelligence and decidedly provocative. Emphasizing the central role that others—mother, family members, ex-lover, collectors, anonymous patrons, etc.—play in his work, and the slippage of authorship and agency that he often deliberately gives them, the artist has entitled his first institutional solo exhibition organized by WIELS Contemporary Art Centre, Brussels, and the catalogue that accompanies it: Leigh Ledare, et al. The richly illustrated full-colour publication, including two newly commissioned essays and an interview with the artist, features examples from nearly all his photographic series to date, as well as stills of video works, text-based pieces, and a number of newly produced pieces never shown before.
As New.
2015, English
Softcover, 264 pages, 16.5 x 23 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / fine
Published by
A.R.T. Press / New York
$140.00 - In stock -
Now out-of-print, the book Double Bind pivots around an extensive conversation between artist Leigh Ledare and art historian Rhea Anastas concerning Ledare’s project of the same name. As an installation, Double Bind puts in play a series of overlaying comparative structures: over one thousand photographs of the artist’s ex-wife (half taken by Ledare, the other half by her current husband, according to a script conceived by Ledare) and an ample collection of printed mass media. Through a critical and wide-ranging dialog, Ledare and Anastas probe the complexities of the viewing experience of the work and the consequences of its provocations. Ordered according to six sections, the conversation addresses key concepts and methodologies that structure the work: viewing, systemic conditions, enactment, installation and mass media, genealogy, and affect. Taken by Ledare exclusively for this book, installation views of the New York exhibition (Mitchell-Innes & Nash, 2014) foreground the subjective experience of the work and anchor the coauthors’ testing of models of aesthetic and social critique within an ethics of actually looking. The dialogue also appears with an introduction by Anastas, a preface by Ledare, and a chronology of Double Bind exhibitions and publications to date.
“Ledare’s Double Bind project examines social process of habitual enactment, such as what it means “to be a wife,” emotional and material terms of exchange, thresholds of public and private imagination, gender normativity and symbolic boundaries of relationships—all through the lens of a camera. Ledare suggests a kind of unraveling of these habituations and carries this logic over to his discussion of the work with Rhea Anastas. Here, Double Bind functions not simply as an object of analysis but instead as a rubric through which the two extend the work itself through a dialectic of articulation and dis-articulation. In line with the radical (and often suppressed) premises of conceptual art, here Ledare and Anastas challenge and override conventional distinctions between artwork, viewer, artist, critic and art historian. In this way this book serves as a vital part of Double Bind’s progressive unfolding.” – John Miller, artist and critic
As New—Near Fine.
2004, English / German
Softcover (stapled), 30 pages, 14.5 x 21cm
Published by
Daniel Buchholz Galerie / Köln
$55.00 - In stock -
Xeroxed artist book by Josef Strau that was published on the occasion of the exhibition "Teil I: Müllberg" at Galerie Daniel Buchholz in Cologne. The brochure contains the second part of a narrative written by the artist under the title "Dear Little Tiger". The first part "White Nights" has been published in 2003 by the Danish publisher Pork Salad Press.
Out-of-print. As New.
2017, English
Softcover, 112 pages, 21 x 27.5 cm
Edition of 750,
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Cabinet Gallery / London
Galerie Neu / Berlin
Dépendance / Brussels
$200.00 - Out of stock
Catalogue published in 2017 in an edition of 750 copies by Cabinet, London, dépendance, Brussels, and Galerie Neu, Berlin, in response to "Where the Energy Comes From", the first comprehensive institutional solo shows by Jana Euler (born in Friedberg, Germany in 1982, lives and works in Brussels), at Kunsthalle Zürich and Bonner Kunstverein. Illustrated throughout in colour and black and white with Euler's paintings, sculptures, texts, and their installations. Text by Catherine Chevalier. Editing by Jay Chung.
Design by Boy Vereecken (with assistance of Antoine Begon)
Three different covers.
Jana Euler’s work encompasses a variety of artistic media, aesthetic decisions and discursive practices. Her paintings, sculptures and texts explore the possibilities of digital and analogue images and respond to our contemporary conditions of experience with optical, cognitive and sensual models and vehicles of reflection.
The real material and hyperreal states of objects and subjects carry equal weight in Euler’s works. Through their dynamic interplay in her works, figurative, abstract and surreal forms of representation shift our perception and the definition of reality and image. The figures in the artist’s paintings are simultaneously physis and bearers of wide-ranging social and cultural-historical relationships.
As New, with only light corner bump.
1989, German
Softcover, fold-out brochure, 58.5 x 19.5 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / good
Published by
Nordico Stadtmuseum / Linz
$8.00 - In stock -
Fold-out catalogue published to accompany the 1989 exhibition, Computer Art from Yugoslavia, Poland and Hungary, held at the Nordico Stadtmuseum, Linz, Austria. Text by Predrag Šidjanin, with illustrations (in colour and b/w) and biographies of featured artists János Vetö, Tamás Waliczky, Jozef Rácz, László Neumann, Franz Curk, Vojko Pogačar, Predrag Šidjanin, Svetislav Nikoličić...
Average—Good copy with storage wear.
1977, English
Softcover (staple-bound), 12 pages, 19 x 22 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
George Paton Gallery / Parkville
$35.00 - Out of stock
Catalogue published in 1977 on the occasion of the exhibition Videotapes by Women from the Los Angeles Women's Video Centre, October 26—November 3, George Paton Gallery, University of Melbourne, Parkville. Texts on each video work, screening program, with introduction by Kiffy Rubbo and Meredith Rogers, essay by Candace Compton. Works by Martha Roler, Candace Compton, Nancy Angelo, Anne Prutzman, Eileen Griffin, Jennifer Kotter, Holly O'Konski, Suzanne Lacy, Barbara Smith, Leslie Carslon, Claudia Queen, Adele Shaules, Linda Henry, Ilene Segalove Linda Montana, Nancy Heath Angelo, Marge Dean, Sandra Tabori, Susan Roberta Mogul, Sheila Ruth, Jan Zimmerman.
Los Angeles Women's Video Center founded in 1976 by Nancy Angelo, Candace Compton, and Annette Hunt in 1976 and joined by Jerri Allyn in 1977, was committed making video production accessible to women artists. Through its productions about socially concerned video art, documentation of WB programs, the LAWVC was active in informing the public about women's issues and concerns.
Very Good copy, light pinching to spine.
1968, English
Softcover (stapled), 20 pages, 20.4 x 20.2 cm
Edition of 1000,
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / good
Published by
Seth Siegelaub / New York
$360.00 - In stock -
Very rare artist book by Douglas Huebler, published in 1968 by Seth Siegelaub, New York. This important historical catalog is the 1st for a show in which the catalog was the show itself.
First and only printing, in an edition of 1000 copies.
“The existence of each sculpture is documented by it’s documentation.
The documentation takes the form of photographs, maps, drawings and descriptive language.
The marker “material“ and the shape described by the location of the markers have no special significance, other than tot o demark the limits of the piece.
The permanence and destiny oft he markers have no special significance.
The duration pieces exist only in the documentation of the marker’s destiny within a selected period of time.
The proposed projects do not differ from the other pieces as idea, but do differ to he extent of their material substance." - from introduction by Douglas Huebler.
Very Good copy with light wear to covers, rubbing to bottom right corner.
1926, German
Hardcover, 84 pages, 15.5 x 12 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / good
Published by
Kurt Wolff Verlag / Münich
$90.00 - In stock -
1927 hardcover edition of Die Sonne: 63 Holzschnitte Von Frans Masereel / The Sun: 63 Woodcuts by Frans Masereel, published by Kurt Wolff Verlag, Münich, Germany. With an introduction by German art historian Carl Georg Heise (1890—1979), Die Sonne is one of the most celebrated books by Belgian painter and graphic artist, Frans Masereel (1889—1972), known especially for his expressionistic sociocritical woodcuts, confronting themes of war and capitalism. He completed over 40 wordless novels in his career, among them were the wordless novels 25 Images of a Man's Passion (1918), Passionate Journey (1919), The Sun (1919), The Idea (1920), Story Without Words (1920), and Landscapes and Voices (1929). At that time Masereel also drew illustrations for famous works of world literature by Thomas Mann, Émile Zola, and Stefan Zweig. He also produced a series of illustrations for the classic Legend of Thyl Ulenspiegel and Lamme Goedzak by his fellow Belgian Charles De Coster; these illustrations followed the book in its translations to numerous languages. 63 full-page woodcut prints pressed heavily on warm thick paper stock in hardcover boards.
Good—VG copy with general tanning, wear to spine. No dust jacket. Internally well-preserved.
1975, English
Softcover (glassine covers, staple-bound), 30 x 11 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Arts Council of Great Britain / London
$55.00 - In stock -
Scarce copy of Order and Experience — a guide to the exhibition of American minimalist prints, published by Arts Council of Great Britain in 1975 in the occasion of a group exhibition featuring the works of Agnes Martin, Sol LeWitt, Robert Ryman, Robert Mangold, Brice Marden, Edda Renouf, Dorothea Rockburne. Authored by Norbert Lynton (1927—2007), professor of the History of Art at the University of Sussex, this handsomely designed oblong catalogue, with printed glassine covers, is illustrated by works by the featured artists, Lynton provides two introductions, a discourse upon "Minimalism" in print-making.
Very Good copy.
1976, English
Softcover (staple-bound), 48 pages, 15 x 10.5 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Fruit Market Gallery / Edinburgh
Scottish Arts Council / Edinburgh
$55.00 - Out of stock
Lovely, rare catalogue published on the occasion of Inscape, a survey of Scottish landscape art at the Fruit Market Gallery, Edinburgh curated by critic Paul Overy in 1976. Illustrated throughout with examples of works by the featured artists — Ian Hamilton Finlay, Eileen Lawrence, Will Maclean, Glen Onwin, Fred Stiven and Ainslie Yule, accompanied by texts and biographies. Errata slip pasted to front end paper.
Very Good copy.
1998, English
Softcover (staple-bound), 40 pages, 21 x 15 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / good
Published by
Monash University Exhibition Gallery / Victoria
$10.00 - In stock -
Catalogue published on the occasion of the group exhibition, Private Parts, curated by Natalie King at Monash University Gallery, 22 April—23 May, 1998, featuring the work of Jane Burton, Bonita Ely, Deej Fabyc, Brent Harris, Lyndal Jones, Deborah Ostrow, David Rosetsky, Brett Vallance, Jenny Watson. Illustrated in colour and b/w throughout with text by Natalie King and artist biographies.
Good copy with cover rubbing, general wear.