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
Theory / Essay
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World Food Books Gift Voucher
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Australian Art
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Fluxus
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Arte Informale / Haute Pâte / Tachism
Nouveau Réalisme / Zero / Kinetic
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Illustration / Graphic Art / Bandes Dessinées
Furniture
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Literary Theory / Semiotics / Language
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Fetishism / BDSM
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Crime / Violence
Animal Rights / Veganism
Occult / Esoterica
Ecology / Earth / Alternative Living
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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
Softcover (w. dust jacket), 76 pages, 29.7 x 29.7 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Treville / Tokyo
$85.00 - In stock -
First Japanese edition of the 1979 classic "Giger's Alien", a visually stunning and wonderfully insightful book for any fan of the art of H.R. Giger, Ridley Scott and Dan O'Bannon's Alien film or in the production of science-fiction/horror/special effects in any way. A must.
"Giger's Alien provides a complete record of the months and months of painstaking work that resulted in two hours of terrifying celluloid. Sketches, original paintings, photographs of scenery and the Alien under construction and scenes from the film are linked by Giger's detailed diary of his thoughts and actions at the time".
Very Good copy in VG original dust jacket. Only light wear/age. First edition.
1992, English
Softcover, 94 pages, 30 x 23 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Taschen / Cologne
$45.00 - Out of stock
"The more famous I get, the more I am tolerated, albeit with some head-shaking."H.R. Giger
1992 printing of A Rh+, the English edition, collecting Giger's multi-faceted career in one place: From surrealistic dream landscapes, to album cover designs, and sculpture. Lavishly illustrated with over 100 images with detailed captions, this monograph forms a detailed chronological summary of the life and oeuvre of the most leading fantasy artist and ALIEN master, H.R. Giger, covering his cultural and historical importance and a concise biography.
Very Good copy with light cover wear.
1994, Japanese
Softcover, 178 pages, 21 x 15 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Tom Shobo / Japan
$120.00 - Out of stock
A rare, special issue ORG photo book by Japanese fetish photographer Kiyoshi Ikejiri, published in 1994 by Too Negative's Kotaro Kobayashi. Ikejiri was a leading photographic contributor to all of Kobayashi's Eros and Thanatos-themed underground periodicals, and this might be his only exclusive photo book. Cover to cover with vivid reproductions of Ikejiri's experimental SM fetish photography of young Japanese and Western female models. Heavy with sadistic industrial, medical bondage themes.
ORG was a Japanese erotic fetish photo journal initiated and edited by Kotaro Kobayashi of affiliated periodicals such as Too Negative, Spiral, Schizo, etc. ORG was published between 1993 to 1997 by Tom Publication Inc. The magazine came into being while Kobayashi was working in N.Y.C. during the early to mid-nineties. Kobayashi wanted to re-ignite the dense air that had evaporated from the erotic book market in Japan. The first issue hit the streets April 1993 with Kotaro as editor-in-chief and photographer Kiyoshi Ikejiri by his side. Kotaro Kobayashi’s ORG editorial template was also utilized for his cult mondo art gallery in photo magazine format, Too Negative. The most universal fact in life is “PAIN”. There are several kinships between the two prints, the only significant difference is the lack of concept ‘Thanatos’ - death - in ORG as seen in the aforementioned magazine’s printing of cadavers and bloodlust violence. Other than that, the two prints are of equal arresting power and manipulative corrupting sadism.
Very Good copy.
1994, Japanese
Softcover, 226 pages, 21 x 15 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Tom Shobo / Japan
$70.00 - Out of stock
Seventh issue of ORG, published in April 1994. Now rare and highly collectible, ORG was a visceral and visually explosive cult Japanese erotic photo magazine ("Bimonthly Sensual Photo Collection") initiated and edited by legendary Japanese publisher (of Too Negative) and gallery owner Kotaro Kobayashi and published by Tom Publishing between 1993—1997. After working in NYC in the early-mid 1990s, Kobayashi wanted to re-ignite the dense air that had evaporated from the erotic book market in Japan and return it to the subcultural realm of underground expression. ORG hit the shelves in 1993. In the same thick, glossy colour art-book format of Kobayashi's Too Negative, ORG shared very similar arresting and provocative themes, yet ORG focused it's densely-packed pages to erotica, less bloodlust. ORG features all manner of SM and bondage photography from Kiyoshi Ikejiri and like-minded fetish photographers, underground scene reports, an abundance of tattoo/irezumi and body art features, erotic art galleries, queer, trans, dom/slave, fem-dom, she-male, rubber, toys, alongside more traditional sensual nude female model photography and Japanese (and Euro) hardcore porn scenes. Considering it is by the same extreme publishers as Too Negative, a healthy dose of bizarre/trangressive/sado/maso/abnormal/exploitation/death/freak/medical/urolagnia/coprophilia/sodo/etc. content spices up each issue and given glamorous attention, always pushing the limits of taste and morality in the name of freedom of expression. Desire takes many forms... ORG also features some of the most creative censorship collage work of any Japanese smut we've seen.
Not for the faint hearted.
Very Good copy.
1994, Japanese
Softcover, 220 pages, 21 x 15 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Tom Shobo / Japan
$70.00 - Out of stock
Eighth issue of ORG, published in June 1994. Now rare and highly collectible, ORG was a visceral and visually explosive cult Japanese erotic photo magazine ("Bimonthly Sensual Photo Collection") initiated and edited by legendary Japanese publisher (of Too Negative) and gallery owner Kotaro Kobayashi and published by Tom Publishing between 1993—1997. After working in NYC in the early-mid 1990s, Kobayashi wanted to re-ignite the dense air that had evaporated from the erotic book market in Japan and return it to the subcultural realm of underground expression. ORG hit the shelves in 1993. In the same thick, glossy colour art-book format of Kobayashi's Too Negative, ORG shared very similar arresting and provocative themes, yet ORG focused it's densely-packed pages to erotica, less bloodlust. ORG features all manner of SM and bondage photography from Kiyoshi Ikejiri and like-minded fetish photographers, underground scene reports, an abundance of tattoo/irezumi and body art features, erotic art galleries, queer, trans, dom/slave, fem-dom, she-male, rubber, toys, alongside more traditional sensual nude female model photography and Japanese (and Euro) hardcore porn scenes. Considering it is by the same extreme publishers as Too Negative, a healthy dose of bizarre/trangressive/sado/maso/abnormal/exploitation/death/freak/medical/urolagnia/coprophilia/sodo/etc. content spices up each issue and given glamorous attention, always pushing the limits of taste and morality in the name of freedom of expression. Desire takes many forms... ORG also features some of the most creative censorship collage work of any Japanese smut we've seen.
Not for the faint hearted.
Very Good copy.
1994, Japanese
Softcover, 206 pages, 21 x 15 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Tom Shobo / Japan
$70.00 - In stock -
"Photos of inserting and going to heaven"
SPIRAL No. 2, May 1994. Now rare and highly collectible, SPIRAL was a visceral and visually explosive cult Japanese erotic photo journal series initiated and edited legendary Japanese publisher (Too Negative, ORG, etc.) and gallery owner Kotaro Kobayashi and published by Tom Publication Inc. in the mid-1990s. In the same thick, glossy art-book format of Kobayashi's Too Negative and ORG, SPIRAL shared very similar arresting and provocative themes, but with an emphasis on sex and a more sensual depravity. SPIRAL is almost cover-to-cover hardcore Japanese sex photo-stories in vivid colour and b/w, heavy on fetish, kinbaku/bondage, S&M and the joy of the impulsive and experimental. Features works by photographer Kiyoshi Ikejri and many others.
Not for the faint hearted.
Very Good copy.
1994, Japanese
Softcover, 208 pages, 15 cm x 21 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Tom Shobo / Japan
$90.00 - Out of stock
SPIRAL No. 5, August 1994. Now rare and highly collectible, SPIRAL was a visceral and visually explosive cult Japanese erotic photo journal series initiated and edited legendary Japanese publisher (Too Negative, ORG, etc.) and gallery owner Kotaro Kobayashi and published by Tom Publication Inc. in the mid-1990s. In the same thick, glossy book format of Kobayashi's Too Negative and ORG, SPIRAL shared very similar arresting and provocative themes, but with an emphasis on sex and pushing the frontiers of taste and morality through subculture. SPIRAL is almost cover-to-cover hardcore Japanese sex photo-stories in vivid colour and b/w, with an emphasis on fetish, bondage, sm and the experimental, this issue including a cover shoot by Kiyoshi Ikejiri and feature on Belgium-born American writer, critic, and artist Lucy Sante (formerly Luc Sante).
Not for the faint hearted.
Very Good copy.
1927 / 1994, English
Softcover, 216 pages, 28 x 18.5 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Black Sparrow Press / Santa Rosa
$60.00 - In stock -
Long out-of-print 1994 facsimile reprint by Black Sparrow Press of Wyndham Lewis' radical arts and literature journal of 1927, The Enemy. British writer, artist, critic, Vorticism co-founder and BLAST editor Wyndham Lewis (1882—1957) established The Arthur Press in 1926 specifically for the purpose of publishing The Enemy, outlining in the initial volume's Editorial his intention to use the 'Review of Art and Literature' as a "serious unpartisan criticism" of society, commencing with his essay 'The Revolutionary Simpleton' in which he savages a perceived romanticism in the works of Joyce, Pound, Stein, even Charlie Chaplin. Wyndham Lewis's contributions (many essays and illustrations) dominate this first amazing issue, with contributions also by T. S. Eliot, W. Gibson and J. W. N. Sullivan, and a painting by Giorgio de Chirico. This wonderful and absolutely complete reprint by contemporary editor David Peters Corbett features additional editor's note and biography / portrait of the iconoclastic Lewis.
Percy Wyndham Lewis (1882—1957) was a British writer, painter and critic. He was a co-founder of the Vorticist movement in art and edited BLAST, the literary magazine of the Vorticists. His novels include Tarr (1918) and The Human Age trilogy, composed of The Childermass (1928), Monstre Gai (1955) and Malign Fiesta (1955). A fourth volume, titled The Trial of Man, was unfinished at the time of his death. He also wrote two autobiographical volumes: Blasting and Bombardiering (1937) and Rude Assignment: A Narrative of my Career Up-to-Date (1950).
Very Good copy with tanning and bending to top back cover corner. Otherwise a tight, clean copy throughout.
1975, Japanese
Softcover (staple-bound), 250 pages, 21 x 15 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Sun Publishing / Japan
$70.00 - Out of stock
February 1975 issue of S&M Collector, the legendary cult pioneering Japanese kinbaku magazine published monthly by Sun Publishing from 1972—1985 and founded by Shin Miyasaka and Toshiyuki Suma. Cover artwork by Haruo Shinozaki. One of the finest examples of SM publishing in Japan in the 1970s and 1980s, each issue of S&M Collector included a perfect combination of colour and b/w bondage photo features, illustrated fetish fiction, articles and a heavy selection of the most talented bondage artwork galleries, with contributors including Oniroku Dan, Ran Akiyoshi, Shoji Oki, Yoji Muku, Namio Harukawa, Tadao Chigusa, Mito Akiyoshi, Sanpei Akashi, Juan Maeda, Yoko Ozuma, Toshimi Fuji, Hakuzan Shiraishi, Ran Akiyoshi, Haruo Shinozaki, Akira Minomura, Bill Ward, Osamu Nakahara, and many more. Beautifully designed with printing on many various paper-stocks, finishes, and fold-out spreads.
Very Good copy with some loose but present central pages.
1975, Japanese
Softcover (staple-bound), 250 pages, 21 x 15 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / good
Published by
Sun Publishing / Japan
$65.00 - In stock -
May 1975 issue of S&M Collector, the legendary cult pioneering Japanese kinbaku magazine published monthly by Sun Publishing from 1972—1985 and founded by Shin Miyasaka and Toshiyuki Suma. Cover artwork by Haruo Shinozaki. One of the finest examples of SM publishing in Japan in the 1970s and 1980s, each issue of S&M Collector included a perfect combination of colour and b/w bondage photo features, illustrated fetish fiction, articles and a heavy selection of the most talented bondage artwork galleries, with contributors including Oniroku Dan, Ran Akiyoshi, Shoji Oki, Yoji Muku, Namio Harukawa, Tadao Chigusa, Mito Akiyoshi, Sanpei Akashi, Juan Maeda, Yoko Ozuma, Toshimi Fuji, Hakuzan Shiraishi, Ran Akiyoshi, Haruo Shinozaki, Akira Minomura, Bill Ward, Osamu Nakahara, and many more. Beautifully designed with printing on many various paper-stocks, finishes, and fold-out spreads.
Good copy with general wear/age.
1970, Japanese
Softcover, 306 pages, 21 x 14.8 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Taiyo books / Japan
$75.00 - In stock -
December 1970 issue of SM KING, legendary Japanese SM magazine edited by Oniroku Dan (1931—2011), "the most celebrated writer of popular SM novels in Japan", published by Taiyo books between 1972—1974, with each issue featuring many colour and b/w photo features, illustrations, and fetish fiction. Regular contributors included actress Naomi Tani, Toshiyuki Suma, Norio Sugiura, Takashi Tsujimura, Yoji Muku, Gekko Hayashi (Gojin Ishihara), Tadao Chigusa and Juan Maeda. This issue featuring cover artwork by legendary erotic fantasy artist Ran Akiyoshi (1922–1982), plus the work of Tadao Chigusa, Aya Nakagawa, Takashi Ishii, Mayumi Yoshino, Yoji Muku, Akira Kito, Gekko Hayashi (Gojin Ishihara), Juan Maeda, Oniroku Dan, and many many more.
Very Good copy. Light wear/age.
1974, Japanese
Softcover, 306 pages, 21 x 14.8 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Taiyo books / Japan
$75.00 - In stock -
March 1974 issue of SM KING, legendary Japanese SM magazine edited by Oniroku Dan (1931—2011), "the most celebrated writer of popular SM novels in Japan", published by Taiyo books between 1972—1974, with each issue featuring many colour and b/w photo features, illustrations, and fetish fiction. Regular contributors included actress Naomi Tani, Toshiyuki Suma, Norio Sugiura, Takashi Tsujimura, Yoji Muku, Gekko Hayashi (Gojin Ishihara), Tadao Chigusa and Juan Maeda. This issue featuring cover artwork by legendary erotic fantasy artist Ran Akiyoshi (1922–1982), plus the work of Gekko Hayashi (Gojin Ishihara), Tadao Chigusa, Takashi Ishii, Aya Nakagawa, Shoji Oki, Oniroku Dan, and many many more. Super star actress Naomi Tani of Nikkatsu fame modeled for a handful of luxury SM King photo collections. Legendary artists Maeda Hisashiro, Tadao Chigusa, Yoji Muku, Yuzo Maeda and Toshiyuki Suma
Very Good copy with general wear/age.
1971, Japanese
Softcover, 330 pages, 21 x 14.8 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Taiyo books / Japan
$75.00 - Out of stock
October 1971 issue of SM KING, legendary Japanese SM magazine edited by Oniroku Dan (1931—2011), "the most celebrated writer of popular SM novels in Japan", published by Taiyo books between 1972—1974, with each issue featuring many colour and b/w photo features, illustrations, and fetish fiction. Regular contributors included actress Naomi Tani, Toshiyuki Suma, Norio Sugiura, Takashi Tsujimura, Yoji Muku, Gekko Hayashi (Gojin Ishihara), Tadao Chigusa and Juan Maeda. This issue featuring cover artwork by legendary erotic fantasy artist Ran Akiyoshi (1922–1982), plus the work of Tadao Chigusa, Takashi Tsujimura, Akira Minomura, Mayami Yoshino, Oniroku Dan, and many many more.
Very Good copy. Light wear/age.
1975, Japanese
Softcover, 274 pages, 21 x 15 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Sun Publishing / Japan
$75.00 - In stock -
SM Kitan December 1975 issue, featuring cover artwork by legendary erotic fantasy artist Ran Akiyoshi (1922–1982). A cult classic of vintage Japanese BDSM and Kinbaku (Japanese bondage), SM Kitan was a leading SM magazine published by the great Sun Publishing house, and was formerly known as S&M Abuhunter (changing its name to SM Kitan from August 1975). Heavy with wonderful artwork galleries in colour and bw, glossy bondage photo-features, illustrated fetish fiction, manga, fold-outs, and much more. Ran Akiyoshi (1922–1982) illustrated many of the iconic covers, with regular contributors including Sotaro Aki, Tadao Chigusa, Namio Harukawa, Yoko Ozuma, Reiko Kita, Akiyoshi Akiyoshi, Hakuzan Shiraishi, Shoji Oki, Namio Harukawa, Akira Kasuga, and Gekko Hayashi (Gojin Ishihara).
Very Good copy. Light wear/age.
1980, Japanese
Softcover (staple-bound), 250 pages, 21 x 15 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Sun Publishing / Japan
$65.00 - In stock -
SM Kitan August 1980 issue, featuring cover artwork by legendary erotic fantasy artist Ran Akiyoshi (1922–1982). A cult classic of vintage Japanese BDSM and Kinbaku (Japanese bondage), SM Kitan was a leading SM magazine published by the great Sun Publishing house, and was formerly known as S&M Abuhunter (changing its name to SM Kitan from August 1975). Heavy with wonderful artwork galleries in colour and bw, glossy bondage photo-features, illustrated fetish fiction, manga, fold-outs, and much more. Ran Akiyoshi (1922–1982) illustrated many of the iconic covers, with regular contributors including Sotaro Aki, Tadao Chigusa, Namio Harukawa, Yoko Ozuma, Reiko Kita, Akiyoshi Akiyoshi, Hakuzan Shiraishi, Shoji Oki, Namio Harukawa, Akira Kasuga, and Gekko Hayashi (Gojin Ishihara).
Very Good copy. Light wear/age.
1980, Japanese
Softcover (staple-bound), 250 pages, 21 x 15 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Sun Publishing / Japan
$65.00 - In stock -
SM Kitan September 1980 issue, featuring cover artwork by legendary erotic fantasy artist Ran Akiyoshi (1922–1982). A cult classic of vintage Japanese BDSM and Kinbaku (Japanese bondage), SM Kitan was a leading SM magazine published by the great Sun Publishing house, and was formerly known as S&M Abuhunter (changing its name to SM Kitan from August 1975). Heavy with wonderful artwork galleries in colour and bw, glossy bondage photo-features, illustrated fetish fiction, manga, fold-outs, and much more. Ran Akiyoshi (1922–1982) illustrated many of the iconic covers, with regular contributors including Sotaro Aki, Tadao Chigusa, Namio Harukawa, Yoko Ozuma, Reiko Kita, Akiyoshi Akiyoshi, Hakuzan Shiraishi, Shoji Oki, Namio Harukawa, Akira Kasuga, and Gekko Hayashi (Gojin Ishihara).
Very Good copy. Light wear/age.
2023, English
Softcover, unpaginated, 29.5 x 20.5 cm
Published by
Self-Published / Melbourne
$90.00 - In stock -
"The story of an ordinary mouse taken by an ordinary cat. Occupied by a rodent"
Long awaited gloss compendium of texual works by Guy Benfield, I Say Fuck It (Volume 1), published in an open edition in 2023, collates the illustrated psycho-sprawl of "The New Reich IV", "Cory Night", "The Story of Joseph Beuys", "LA Take Down", "Blood Lust 1949", "Bad Anne Frank The Nazi Hunter"...
"Vasectomy The Movie Coming out never"
2023, English
Softcover, unpaginated, 29.5 x 20.5 cm
Published by
Self-Published / Melbourne
$110.00 - In stock -
"Down stairs past the mink coat, tiled floor and cut shin, bleeding out"
The almost immediate second volume gloss compendium of texual exploitation by Guy Benfield, I Say Fuck It (Volume 2, "The House of Dragon"), published in an open edition in 2023, collates the illustrated neuro-scapes and fever dreams of Bishop X** and the Nazi Medical Pleasurists, "The North Zone Outside Chino" Part I and II, "John Wick 5 : Ditched to Die", "Blow Off", "All Pleasure 2", Defe Fnsive", "Draculear's Touch 2", "At Italian Night Clubs Bad Zervice XATAT PALAISE Grand Omega 3, "Repetition of the the the Michael Werner generation", "Network", "Jailed Kremlin", "New Vader", "Newar Redact", "Militarization Ate The Cat", "FUCK WEEK The Movie", "Club Nepenthe", "The Funeral", "Heat Jam"...
"What would they think of my body?
D
on't know
They will think your bodies shit"
1974, Italian / French / English
2 Vol., hardcovers (w. dust jackets in slipcase), 148 / 242 pages, 33 x 24 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
La Connaissance / Brussels
$340.00 - Out of stock
Fine copy of the spectacular, original Lucio Fontana 2 volume Catalogue Raisonné , cloth-bound and housed in cardboard slipcase. Published by Archivio Lucio Fontana, Milan, and La Connaissance, Brussels, each volume comes wrapped in the great Ugo Mulas Fontana portrait dust jacket, with Volume 1 tracing the career of Fontana through in-depth essays by Italian art critic Enrico Crispolti and curator Jan van der Marck. Illustrated throughout in colour and b/w and closing with Fontana's "Manifestes de l'Art Spatial". Volume 2 is the Catalogue Raisonné "des Peintures, Sculptures, et Environements Spatiaux", comprehensively and chronologically illustrated with all of Fontana's works, listing texts relating to each on the facing pages. Also includes an extensive listing of the work inscriptions, bibliography and exhibition history, all edited by Enrico Crispolti. Texts in Italian, French and English.
Lucio Fontana (1899–1968) is one the most innovative artists of the 20th century. A major figure of postwar European art and a binational resident of Argentina and Italy, Fontana blurred numerous boundaries in his life and art, crossing borders both literally and figuratively. The founder of Spatialism, a movement focused on the spatial qualities of sculpture and paintings with the goal of breaking through the two-dimensionality of the traditional picture plane, he pushed the painterly into the sculptural and redefined the relationship between the arts. He was best known for his monochrome canvases known as Concetti Spaziale that he would cut or puncture, leaving distinctive gaping slash marks and holes that imbued the finished work with an almost violent energy. In his seminal writing, White Manifesto (1946), the artist traced ideas for creating a new medium that blended architecture, painting, and sculpture. “I do not want to make a painting; I want to open up space, create a new dimension, tie in the cosmos, as it endlessly expands beyond the confining plane of the picture,” he said of his work. Fontana had widespread impact on the following generation of artists, who began to use installation media more aggressively to address the dynamics of space in gallery environments and Land Art. Fontana died on September 7, 1968 in Varese, Italy at the age of 69, just two years after being awarded the Grand Prize for painting at the Venice Biennale.
Both near fine in NF dust jackets. Good slipcase with tanning and wear.
1991, English
Hardcover (w. dust jacket), 184 pages, 22.23 x 14.61 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / fine
Published by
Penn State University / Pennsylvania
$50.00 - Out of stock
“In many ways, like its subject, marvelously idiosyncratic and playful, this book will make an important contribution to our understanding of the rhetoric of mannerism.”—Ernest B. Gilman New York University
First 1991 hardcover edition of Giancarlo Maiorino's The Portrait of Eccentricity : Arcimboldo and the Mannerist Grotesque. In this companion to his The Cornucopian Mind and the Baroque Unity of the Arts, Maiorino examines the links between Renaissance and the modern versions of the Groteseque.
In this interdisciplinary study, the term "eccentricity" refers to styles of playful extravagance. Maiorino focuses on the rhetorical figures of excess employed by a critic-historian (Giorgio Vasari), on the willful artificiality of a painter (Giuseppe Arcimboldo), and on the programmatic and interpretive commentary of a theorist (Gregorio Comanini).
Maiorino draws subtle and persuasive connections between the images he discusses and the grotesque "face" of sixteenth-century poetics and rhetoric. He sets the mannerist and the grotesque against the philosophical seriousness of Renaissance humanism, interpreting them as a celebration of the ludic and fantastic possibilities of art itself. Aiming at pleasure rather than instruction, this art plays on the boundaries of the natural and the artificial, the credible and the impossible, taking delight in parody, excess, disjunction, and exaggeration.
Fine copy in Near Fine dust jacket.
1965 / 2001, English
Softcover, 253 pages, 13.9 x 20.3 cm
Published by
City Lights Books / San Francisco
$36.00 - Out of stock
"I am the man," wrote Artaud, "who has best charted his inmost self."
Antonin Artaud was a great poet who, like Poe, Holderlin, and Nerval, wanted to live in the infinite and asked that the human spirit burn in absolute freedom. To society, he was a madman. Artaud, however, was not insane but in luciferian pursuit of what society keeps hidden. The man who wrote "Van Gogh the Man Suicided by Society" raged against the insanity of social institutions with insight that proves more prescient with every passing year. Today, as Artaud's vatic thunder still crashes above the "larval confusion" he despised, what is most striking in his writings is an extravagant lucidity. This collection gives us quintessential Artaud on the occult, magic, the theater, mind and body, the cosmos, rebellion, and revolution in its deepest sense.
Antoine Marie Joseph Artaud, better known as Antonine Artaud, was a French dramatist, poet, essayist, actor, and theatre director, widely recognized as one of the major figures of twentieth-century theatre and the European avant-garde.
Jack Hirschman (1933 – 2021) was an American poet and social activist who has written more than 50 volumes of poetry. Dismissed from teaching at UCLA for anti-war activities in 1966, he moved to San Francisco in 1973, and was the city's present poet laureate. Hirschman translated nine languages and edited The Artaud Anthology.
1981, Japanese
Softcover (w. dust jacket), 365 pages, 28.5 x 21 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Kodansha Int / Tokyo
$140.00 - In stock -
Huge photographic compendium of nudes direct from the pages of the famous French erotica magazine Lui, collected and published in Japan in 1981! Cover to cover, full-bleed, vivid colour reproductions of all the models featured in Lui spanning the mid(?) 1970s - start of the 1980s. All photographs, virtually no text. Although Lui featured "soft" erotic photography, a small handful of the 360 plus pages of images herein have amusingly undergone the Japanese airbrush treatment for being still a little too European for the Japanese publishing censors, barely any.
Lui ("Him") was a French adult entertainment magazine founded in Paris in 1963 by fashion photographer turned publisher and Surrealist art collector, Daniel Filipacchi, with Jacques Lanzmann, a jack of all trades turned novelist, and Frank Ténot, a press agent, pataphysician and prominent jazz critic, with the objective to bring some charm "à la française" to the market of men's magazines. Each issue included in-depth interviews and cultural articles alongside its staple nude photography and erotic cartoons.
Very Good copy. Tanning to spine edge.
1986, English / Japanese
Softcover (w. dust jacket), 300 pages, 28.5 x 21 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Kodansha Int / Tokyo
$120.00 - In stock -
Huge photographic compendium of nudes direct from the pages of the famous French erotica magazine Lui, collected and published in Japan in 1986. Cover to cover, full-bleed, vivid colour reproductions of all the models featured in Lui in the early—mid 1980s. All photographs, virtually no text.
Lui ("Him") was a French adult entertainment magazine founded in Paris in 1963 by fashion photographer turned publisher and Surrealist art collector, Daniel Filipacchi, with Jacques Lanzmann, a jack of all trades turned novelist, and Frank Ténot, a press agent, pataphysician and prominent jazz critic, with the objective to bring some charm "à la française" to the market of men's magazines. Each issue included in-depth interviews and cultural articles alongside its staple nude photography and erotic cartoons.
Very Good copy.
1986, English / Japanese
Softcover (w. dust jacket), 300 pages, 28.5 x 21 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Kodansha Int / Tokyo
$120.00 - Out of stock
Huge photographic compendium of nudes direct from the pages of the famous French erotica magazine Lui, collected and published in Japan in 1986. Cover to cover, full-bleed, vivid colour reproductions of all the models featured in Lui spanning the mid(?) 1970s - mid 1980s. All photographs, virtually no text. Although Lui featured "soft" erotic photography, a small handful of the 200-plus images herein have amusingly undergone the Japanese airbrush treatment for being still a little too European for the Japanese publishing censors.
Lui ("Him") was a French adult entertainment magazine founded in Paris in 1963 by fashion photographer turned publisher and Surrealist art collector, Daniel Filipacchi, with Jacques Lanzmann, a jack of all trades turned novelist, and Frank Ténot, a press agent, pataphysician and prominent jazz critic, with the objective to bring some charm "à la française" to the market of men's magazines. Each issue included in-depth interviews and cultural articles alongside its staple nude photography and erotic cartoons.
Very Good copy.