World Food Books' programme is largely produced on Kulin Nation land. We acknowledge the Wurundjeri people of the Kulin Nation as the first and continuing custodians of this land, and pay respect to their Elders past, present, and emerging.
World Food Books is an arts and special interests bookshop in Naarm / Melbourne. Founded in 2010, World Food Books is devoted to the presentation of a rotating, hand-selection of international art, design, literary and counterculture publications with an emphasis on the anti-traditional, the experimental, the avant-garde, the heretic, the marginal.
Presenting new titles alongside rare and out-of-print books, catalogues and journals spanning the fields of modern and contemporary art, design, photography, illustration, film, literature, poetry, cultural theory, philosophy, sexuality, popular and underground culture in its many radical forms, World Food Books wishes to encourage adventurous, thoughtful and open-minded reading, looking, writing, and exchange of publishing and ideas, both current and historical.
As well as our bookshop, located in Melbourne's historical Nicholas Building, all of our inventory is available internationally via our online mail-order service.
World Food Books semi-regularly co-ordinates "Occasions", a programme of exhibits and events at the bookshop and in partnership with other hosts (such as museums and art galleries) that develop out of the activities, relationships and content of the bookshop itself.
World Food Books
The Nicholas Building
37 Swanston Street
Room 5, Level 6
Melbourne 3000
Australia
SHOP HOURS:
OPEN 12—5 THU—FRI
WEB-SHOP OPEN 24/7.
World Food Books
Postal Address:
PO Box 435
Flinders Lane
Victoria 8009
Australia
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All prices in AUD (Australian dollars)
Pick-Ups
Please note: The bookshop is closed until February 1, 2024.
Pick-up orders can be collected in our bookshop during opening hours after this date. Please collect any Pick-up orders within 3 weeks of ordering as we have limited storage space. Orders will be released back into stock if not collected within this time. No refunds can be made for pick-ups left un-collected.
Return Policy
All sales are final. We do accept returns (for refund, exchange) for items received in error. All our orders are packed with special care using heavy-duty padding and cardboard book-mailers or bubble mailers (for smaller books), using reinforcement where required. We cannot take responsibility for any lost, stolen or damaged parcels.
Insurance
Should you wish to insure your package, please email us directly after placing your order and we can organise this at a small extra expense. Although all standard/express tracked packages are very safe and dependable, we cannot take responsibility for any lost, stolen or damaged parcels. We recommend insurance on valuable orders.
Interested in selling your old books, catalogues, journals, magazines, comics, fanzines, ephemera? We are always looking for interesting, unusual and out-of-print books to buy. We only buy books in our fields of interest and specialty, and that we feel we can resell.
We base these prices on desirability, market value, in-print prices, condition and our current stock levels. We offer cash, store credit, and can take stock on consignment. All
about 25% of the price we expect to get when we sell them, or 30% in store credit. We base these prices on desirability, market value, in-print prices, condition and our current stock levels.
Sell your books any day of the week. You can drop them off and return later. If you have a lot of books, we can visit your Sydney home.
We buy books that we feel we can resell. We offer about 25 % of the price we expect to get when we sell them, or 30% in store credit. We base these prices on desirability, market value, in-print prices, condition and our current stock levels.
Philadelphia Wireman
03 August - 01 September, 2018
World Food Books is proud to announce our next Occasion, the first presentation of sculptures by Philadelphia Wireman in Australia.
The Philadelphia Wireman sculptures were found abandoned in an alley off Philadelphia’s South Street on trash night in 1982. Their discovery in a rapidly-changing neighbourhood undergoing extensive renovation, compounded with the failure of all attempts to locate the artist, suggests that the works may have been discarded after the maker’s death. Dubbed the "Philadelphia Wireman" during the first exhibition of this work, in 1985, the maker’s name, age, ethnicity, and even gender remain uncertain. The entire collection totals approximately 1200 pieces, all intricately bound together with tightly-wound heavy-gauge wire (along with a few small, abstract marker drawings, reminiscent both of Mark Tobey and J.B. Murry). The dense construction of the work, despite a modest range of scale and materials, is singularly obsessive and disciplined in design: a wire armature or exoskeleton firmly binds a bricolage of found objects including plastic, glass, food packaging, umbrella parts, tape, rubber, batteries, pens, leather, reflectors, nuts and bolts, nails, foil, coins, toys, watches, eyeglasses, tools, and jewellery.
Heavy with associations—anthropomorphic, zoomorphic, and socio-cultural responses to wrapped detritus—the totemic sculptures by Philadelphia Wireman have been discussed in the context of work created to fulfil the shamanistic needs of alternative religions in American culture. Curators, collectors, and critics have variously compared certain pieces to sculpture from Classical antiquity, Native American medicine bundles, African-American memory jugs, and African fetish objects. Reflecting the artist’s prolific and incredibly focused scavenging impulse, and despite—or perhaps enhanced by—their anonymity, these enigmatic objects function as urban artefacts and arbiters of power, though their origin and purpose is unknown. Philadelphia Wireman, whatever their identity, possessed an astonishing ability to isolate and communicate the concepts of power and energy through the selection and transformation of ordinary materials. Over the course of the past two decades, this collection has come to be regarded as an important discovery in the field of self-taught art and vernacular art.
Presented in collaboration with Fleisher-Ollman Gallery, Philadelphia, and Robert Heald, Wellington.
Susan Te Kahurangi King
02 February - 10 March, 2018
Susan Te Kahurangi King (24 February 1951 - ) has been a confident and prolific artist since she was a young child, drawing with readily available materials - pencils, ballpoint pens and felt-tip markers, on whatever paper is at hand. Between the ages of four and six Susan slowly ceased verbal communication. Her grandparents William and Myrtle Murphy had developed a special bond with Susan so they took on caring responsibilities for extended periods. Myrtle began informally archiving her work, carefully collecting and storing the drawings and compiling scrapbooks. No drawing was insignificant; every scrap of paper was kept. The King family are now the custodians of a vast collection containing over 7000 individual works, from tiny scraps of paper through to 5 meter long rolls.
The scrapbooks and diaries reveal Myrtle to be a woman of great patience and compassion, seeking to understand a child who was not always behaving as expected. She encouraged Susan to be observant, to explore her environment and absorb all the sights and sounds. Myrtle would show Susan’s drawings to friends and people in her community that she had dealings with, such as shopkeepers and postal workers, but this was not simply a case of a grandmother’s bias. She recognised that Susan had developed a sophisticated and unique visual language and sincerely believed that her art deserved serious attention.
This was an unorthodox attitude for the time. To provide some context, Jean Dubuffet coined the term Art Brut in 1945 to describe work created by self-taught artists – specifically residents of psychiatric institutions and those he considered to be visionaries or eccentrics. In 1972 Roger Cardinal extended this concept by adopting the term Outsider Art to describe work made by non-academically trained artists operating outside of mainstream art networks through choice or circumstance. Susan was born in Te Aroha, New Zealand in 1951, far from the artistic hubs of Paris and London that Dubuffet and Cardinal operated in. That Myrtle fêted Susan as a self-taught artist who deserved to be taken seriously shows how progressive her attitudes were.
Susan’s parents Doug and Dawn were also progressive. Over the years they had consulted numerous health practitioners about Susan’s condition, as the medical establishment could not provide an explanation as to why she had lapsed into silence. Dawn educated herself in the field of homeopathy and went on to treat all twelve of her children using these principles – basing prescriptions on her observations of their physical, mental and emotional state.
Doug was a linguist with an interest in philosophy who devoted what little spare time he had to studying Maori language and culture. To some extent their willingness to explore the fringes of the mainstream made them outsiders too but it was their commitment to living with integrity and their respect for individuality that ensured Susan’s creativity was always encouraged.
Even though Susan’s family supported her artistic pursuits, some staff in schools and hospitals saw it as an impediment to her assimilation into the community and discouraged it in a variety of ways. Her family was not always aware of this and therefore did not fully understand why Susan stopped drawing in the early 1990s. However, rather than dwell on the challenges that Susan faced in pursuit of her artistic practice, they prefer to highlight her achievements. In 2008 Susan began drawing again in earnest, after an almost 20 year interruption, and her work is now shown in galleries around the world.
Susan grew up without television and has been heavily influenced by the comics she read as a child. She is absolutely fearless in the appropriation of recognizable characters, such as Donald Duck and Mickey Mouse, in her work. She twists their limbs, contorts their faces, compresses them together, blends them into complex patterned backgrounds - always imbuing them with an incredible energy. Although Susan often used pop culture characters in her work they are not naive or childlike. These are drawings by a brilliant self-taught artist who has been creating exceptional work for decades without an audience in mind.
Mladen Stilinović
"Various Works 1986 - 1999"
02 February 16 - September 10, 2016
Various works 1986 - 1999, from two houses, from the collections of John Nixon, Sue Cramer, Kerrie Poliness, Peter Haffenden and Phoebe Haffenden.
Including: Geometry of Cakes (various shelves), 1993; Poor People’s Law (black and white plate), 1993; White Absence (glasses, ruler, set square, silver spoon, silver ladel with skin photograph and wooden cubes), 1990-1996; Exploitation of the Dead (grey and red star painting, wooden painting, black spoon with red table, red plate), 1984-1990; Money and Zeros (zero tie, paintings made for friends in Australia (Sue, John, Kerrie), numbers painting), 1991-1992; Words - Slogans (various t-shirts) - “they talk about the death of art...help! someone is trying to kill me”, “my sweet little lamb”, “work is a disease - Karl Marx”; Various artist books, catalogues, monographs, videos; Poster from exhibition Insulting Anarchy; "Circular" Croatian - Australian edition; Artist book by Vlado Martek (Dostoyevsky); more.
Thanks to Mladen Stilinović and Branka Stipančić.
Jonathan Walker
Always Will Need To Wear Winter Shirt Blue + Ochre Small Check Pattern
21 August - 21 September, 2015
Untitled
I am not a great reader of poetry but I always return to the work of Melbourne poet, Vincent Buckley (1925- 1988). Perhaps I find his most tantalising piece to be not a finished poem but a fragment left on a scrap of paper discovered on his desk after the poet’s death.
The poetry gathers like oil
In the word-core, and spreads
It has its music meet,
Its music is in movement.
This fragment is more the shell left behind from a volatile thought than a finished poem. I find the last two lines honest but awkward whereas the first two lines work like an arrow. Most likely he could not find a resolution so it was left. Still, in its present form, it remains an eloquent testimony to the ultimate failure of a medium to express mobile thought and sensation, in Buckley’s case, through verbal language. It’s an important matter because this is something all artists have to deal with regardless of the medium.
I have never written a poem, however, I am forever copying fragments from books on paper scraps in a vain effort to fix certain notions in my head. At first, they function as bookmarks that are sometimes returned to when I open the book. But before long, as they accumulate, they fall out littering the table interspersed with A4 photocopies, bills, books and medications.
To return to Buckley’s fragment, the first two lines very much evoke how I paint nowadays. As you age, detail diminishes and patches of light become more luminous and float. I feel the most honest way of dealing with this is by smearing the oil paint on the canvas with the fingers and working close-up, blind. Only if the patches coalesce into an approaching image can the work gain a life.
-
Jonathan Walker was born in Melbourne, Australia and brought up on a dairy farm in Gippsland. In the 1970’s he studied painting at RMIT and won the Harold Wright Scholarship to the British Museum, London. During the 1980’s he exhibited at Pinacotheca Gallery, Richmond and had work shown at the NGV and Heidi City Art Gallery. Over the same period he designed the cover for the “Epigenesi” LP by Giancarlo Toniutti, Italy and conducted a mail exchange work with Achim Wollscheid, Germany. The work with artists through the post resulted in an article published in the bicentenary issue of Art and Australia 1988. He showed in artist run spaces such as WestSpace in the 90’s and 2000’s, and until 2012, taught painting at Victoria University, which is where we (Colleen Ahern and Lisa Radford) as organisers of the exhibition, among many others, had the privilege of being his student.
Walker’s knowledge was imparted to students through the careful selection of music, literature, and artists found in books that he himself had ordered for the library. Walker’s strategy was the generosity of sharing his vast knowledge with references specific to each student and their context.
Walker’s paintings share a similar focus and intimacy.
This exhibition presents a small selection of recent paintings alongside a publication that includes Walker’s writing. Observational and analytical, Walker’s work is a type of material notation — the time of day, colour and how it is blended, the both specific and fleeting location of a reflection on lino or the question of whether a chair leg should be included in a painting.
Please join us on Friday August 21 between 6-8pm to celebrate the opening of the exhibition.
Curated by Colleen Ahern and Lisa Radford.
B. Wurtz
Curated by Nic Tammens
March 26 - April 4, 2015
B.Wurtz works from a basement studio in his home on Manhattan’s Lower East Side.
This local fact is attested to by the plastic shopping bags and newsprint circulars that appear in his work. As formal objects, they don’t make loud claims about their origins but nonetheless transmit street addresses and places of business from the bottom of this long thin island. Like plenty of artists, Wurtz is affected by what is local and what is consumed. His work is underpinned by this ethic. It often speaks from a neighborhood or reads like the contents of a hamper:
“BLACK PLUMS $1.29 lb.”
“Food Bazaar”
“USDA Whole Pork Shoulder Picnic 99c lb.”
“RITE AID Pharmacy, with us it’s personal.”
“H. Brickman & Sons.”
“Sweet Yams 59c lb."
Most of the work in this exhibition was made while the artist was in residence at Dieu Donne, a workshop dedicated to paper craft in Midtown. Here Wurtz fabricated assemblages with paper and objects that are relatively lightweight, with the intention that they would be easily transportable to Australia. This consideration isn’t absolute in Wurtz’s work, but was prescriptive for making the current exhibition light and cheap. Packed in two boxes, these works were sent from a USPS post office on the Lower East Side and delivered to North Melbourne by Australia Post.
Wurtz appears courtesy of Metro Pictures, New York.
Thanks to Rob Halverson, Joshua Petherick, Sari de Mallory, Matt Hinkley, Helen Johnson, Fayen d'Evie, Ask Kilmartin, Lisa Radon, Ellena Savage, Yale Union, and "Elizabeth".
John Nixon
"Archive"
December 15 - January 20, 2014
The presentation of John Nixon's archive offered a rare showcase of this extensive collection of the artist's own publications, catalogues, posters, ephemera, editions and more, from the mid 1980s onwards, alongside a selection of his artworks.
Organized by John Nixon, Joshua Petherick and Matt Hinkley.
"Habitat"
at Minerva, Sydney (organised by Joshua Petherick and Matt Hinkley)
November 15 - December 20, 2014
Lupo Borgonovo, Janet Burchill & Jennifer McCamley,
Lewis Fidock, HR Giger, Piero Gilardi, Veit Laurent Kurz,
Cinzia Ruggeri, Michael E. Smith, Lucie Stahl, Daniel Weil, Wols
Press Release:
“...It contained seven objects. The slender fluted bone, surely formed for flight, surely from the wing of some large bird. Three archaic circuitboards, faced with mazes of gold. A smooth white sphere of baked clay. An age-blackened fragment of lace. A fingerlength segment of what she assumed was bone from a human wrist, grayish white, inset smoothly with the silicon shaft of a small instrument that must once have ridden flush with the surface of the skin - but the thing’s face was seared and blackened.”
William Gibson, “Count Zero”, 1986
"Autumn Projects Archive"
Curated by Liza Vasiliou
March 6 - March 15, 2014
World Food Books, in conjunction with the Virgin Australia Melbourne Fashion Festival 2014, presented the Autumn Projects archive, consisting of a selection of early examples in Australian fashion with a particular interest in collecting designers and labels from the period beginning in the 1980’s, who significantly influenced the discourse of Australian Fashion.
Curated by Liza Vasiliou, the exhibition provided a unique opportunity to view pieces by designers Anthea Crawford, Barbara Vandenberg, Geoff Liddell and labels CR Australia, Covers, Jag along with early experimental collage pieces by Prue Acton and Sally Browne’s ‘Fragments’ collection, suspended throughout the functioning World Food Books shop in Melbourne.
H.B. Peace
presented by CENTRE FOR STYLE
November 14, 2013
"Hey Blinky, you say chic, I say same"
Anon 2013
H.B. Peace is a clothing collaboration between great friends Blake Barns and Hugh Egan Westland. Their pieces explore the divergences between 'character’ and ‘personality’ in garments....etc
Special Thanks to Joshua Petherick and Matt Hinkley of WFB and Gillian Mears
and a Very Special Thank you to Audrey Thomas Hayes for her shoe collaboration.
Janet Burchill & Jennifer McCamley
"Aesthetic Suicide"
May 10 - June 8, 2013
The first of our occasional exhibitions in the World Food Books office/shop space in Melbourne, "Aesthetic Suicide" presented a body of new and older works together by artists Janet Burchill & Jennifer McCamley, including videos, prints, a wall work, and publications.
During shop open hours videos played every hour, on the hour.
1993, English
Softcover, 464 pages, 15.3 x 22.7 cm
Published by
Zone Books / New York
$69.00 - In stock -
The three volumes of The Accursed Share address what Georges Bataille sees as the paradox of utility: namely, if being useful means serving a further end, then the ultimate end of utility can only be uselessness. The first volume of The Accursed Share, the only one published before Bataille's death, treated this paradox in economic terms, showing that "it is not necessity but its contrary, luxury, that presents living matter and mankind with their fundamental problems." This Zone edition includes in a single volume a reconstruction, based on the versions published in Bataille's posthumous collected works, of his intended continuation of The Accursed Share.
In the second and third volumes, The History of Eroticism and Sovereignty, Bataille explores the same paradox of utility, respectively from an anthropological and an ethical perspective. He first analyzes the fears and fascination, the prohibitions and the transgressions attached to the realm of eroticism as so many expressions of the "uselessness" of erotic life. It is just this expenditure of excess energy that demarcates the realm of human autonomy, of independence relative to "useful" ends. The study of eroticism therefore leads naturally to the examination of human sovereignty, in which Bataille defines the sovereign individual as one who consumes and does not labor, creating a life beyond the realm of utility.
Georges Bataille (1897-1962) was a French writer, essayist, and philosopher whose works include The Story of the Eye, The Blue of Noon, The Accursed Share, and Theory of Religion.
1970, Japanese
Hardcover (w. illustrated slipcase), 266 pages, 23.5 x 16 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Asahi Sonorama / Tokyo
$200.00 - In stock -
Rare first 1970 slipcased hardcover edition of manga master Shigeru Mizuki's absolute classic illustrated encyclopedia of his beloved Yōkai (Japanese supernatural beings and phenomena), published in this gorgeous hardcover edition in illustrated slipcase by Ashahi Sonorama, here for the first time in 1970 and long out-of-print. A must for any lover of the illustrated weird by a master of the genre.
Shigeru Mizuki (1922–2015) was one of Japan’s most respected artists. A creative prodigy, he lost an arm in World War II. After the war, Mizuki became one of the founders of Japan’s latest craze—manga. He invented the yokai genre with GeGeGe no Kitaro, his most famous character, who has been adapted for the screen several times, as anime, live action, and video games. In fact, a new anime series has been made every decade since 1968, capturing the imaginations of generations of Japanese children. A researcher of yokai and a real-life ghost hunter, Mizuki traveled to over sixty countries to engage in fieldwork based on spirit folklore. In his hometown of Sakaiminato, one can find Shigeru Mizuki Road, a street decorated with bronze statues of his Kitaro characters.
VG in VG dj. Beautiful copy.
1985, Japanese
Hardcover, 264 pages, 23 x 16 cm
Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Asahi Sonorama / Tokyo
$120.00 - Out of stock
1985 revised edition of manga master Shigeru Mizuki's absolute classic 1970 illustrated encyclopedia of his beloved Yōkai (Japanese supernatural beings and phenomena), published in this gorgeous hardcover clothbound edition by Ashahi Sonorama, long out-of-print. A must for any lover of the illustrated weird by a master of the genre.
Shigeru Mizuki (1922–2015) was one of Japan’s most respected artists. A creative prodigy, he lost an arm in World War II. After the war, Mizuki became one of the founders of Japan’s latest craze—manga. He invented the yokai genre with GeGeGe no Kitaro, his most famous character, who has been adapted for the screen several times, as anime, live action, and video games. In fact, a new anime series has been made every decade since 1968, capturing the imaginations of generations of Japanese children. A researcher of yokai and a real-life ghost hunter, Mizuki traveled to over sixty countries to engage in fieldwork based on spirit folklore. In his hometown of Sakaiminato, one can find Shigeru Mizuki Road, a street decorated with bronze statues of his Kitaro characters.
VG in VG dj.
1979, English
Hardcover (w. dust jacket), 127 pages, 13.5 x 22 cm
1st UK Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Marion Boyars / London
$160.00 - Out of stock
Wonderful first English hardcover edition of George Bataille's Story of the Eye, published by Marion Boyars, London, in 1979. Translated by Joachim Neugroschal with accompanying essays by Susan Sontag and Roland Barthes.
"The caress of the eye over the skin is so utterly, so extraordinarily gentle, and the sensation is so bizarre that it has something of a rooster's horrible crowing." - G.B.
A masterpiece of transgressive, surrealist erotica, Bataille's first novel, published under the pseudonym 'Lord Auch', is still his most notorious work. Called a "metaphysician of evil, Bataille wrote the 1928 novella "Story of the Eye (French: L'histoire de l'œil) as a psychoanalytical task. In this explicit erotic fantasy, the young male narrator and his lovers Simone and Marcelle embark on a sexual quest involving sadism, torture, orgies, madness and defilement, culminating in a final act of transgression. Shocking and sacrilegious, Story of the Eye is the fullest expression of Bataille's obsession with the closeness of sex, violence and death. Yet it is also hallucinogenic in its power, and is one of the erotic classics of the twentieth century.
This edition also includes Susan Sontag's superb study of pornography as art, 'The Pornographic Imagination', as well as Roland Barthes' essay 'The Metaphor of the Eye', which was first published in Bataille's own journal Critique, shortly after Bataille's death in 1962. Barthes' analysis focuses on the centrality of the eye to this series of vignettes, and notices that it is interchangeable with eggs, bulls' testicles and other ovular objects within the narrative. He also traces a second series of liquid metaphors within the text, which flow through tears, cat's milk, egg yolks, frequent urination scenes, blood and semen.
Georges Bataille (1897-1962), French essayist and novelist, was born in Billom, France. He converted to Catholicism, then later to Marxism, and was interested in psychoanalysis and mysticism, forming a secret society dedicated to glorifying human sacrifice. Leading a simple life as the curator of a municipal library, Bataille was involved on the fringes of Surrealism, founding the Surrealist magazine Documents in 1929, and editing the literary review Critique from 1946 until his death.
Very Good copy in original VG dust jacket, preserved under mylar wrap. Scarce in this edition with dust jacket.
1987, English
Softcover (French-fold), 169 pages, 22 x 14 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Eridanos Press / Colorado
$60.00 - Out of stock
Long out-of-print 1987 Eridanos Press edition, the first in English, of French surrealist writer and ethnographer Michel Leiris' Nights as Day Days as Night.
Nights as Day is a diary of over a hundred short dreams composed over the course of four decades. As the title implies (Nuits sans nuit, et quelques jours sans jour is literally "Nights without darkness, and a few days without light"), the texts in this volume pursue an extended pun on the porous demarcation between waking and dreaming. By transcribing the events of his daily life as if they were episodes in an ongoing dream, by recording his dreams as if they embodied the true narrative of his waking existence, Leiris in effect defuses the distinction between the two. "I have always behaved as if I were on stage," Leiris confesses in Manhood, and the roles he executes in these texts are various: he is a hero of Greek or Racinian tragedy, martyr of the French Resistance, matador, bantamweight champion of the world, Chaplinesque victim of the Eternal Feminine, Ben Turpin, Gary Cooper, but most frequently he simply plays a mild-mannered minor functionary and author beset by the usual anxieties and fantasies of the average homme moyen sensuel. One of the most striking aspects of these texts is their ordinariness, their deliberate dailiness, their eschewal of lyricism in favor of the unprepossessing prose of the world. Whatever the setting (music halls, fairgrounds, circus shows, boxing matches, museum exhibitions, exotic lands, brothels, streets of Paris or Hollywood movies), Leiris concentrates on estranging the familiar, on unsettling the commonplace, on eliciting the foreignness of the most domestic, local detail. And it is thus that Nights as Days, Days as Night rejoins Leiris's autobiographical and ethnographic enterprises: all it takes is a minor adjustment of lighting or a slight troping of rhetoric for daily life to take on the uncertain distance of dreams, and conversely, for dream to be de-mystified into the quotidian.—R.S.
Michel Leiris (1901—1990) grew up in comfortable Parisian bourgeois surroundings. The earnest student of chemistry was soon seduced by the exciting world of cafés and cabarets, and particularly by the heady stimulus of Dada and Surrealism. Introduced to surrealist circles by his lifelong friend André Masson, Leiris by the late 1920s had become one of the earlier defectors from the movement. Subsequently, he co-founded, with George Bataille, Maurice Blanchot, Pierre Klossowski and Roger Caillois the College de Sociologie. His continuing ethnographic fascination with the cultures of Africa, the Caribbean, and Central America, as well as his extensive fieldwork in Sudan and Ethiopia, have produced such literary fruits as his unique travel account L'Afrique Fantôme (1933). He is also author of a four-volume autobiography, La Règle du Jeu, of which the first volume was published in English as Manhood. Michel Leiris lived in Paris with his wife, owner of the Galérie Louise Leiris, a major art institution in the post-war period. Leiris has written extensively on major modern artists-among them Miró, Giacometti, Duchamp, Lam, and Bacon.
Richard Sieburth has translated Hölderlin's Hymns and Fragments and Benjamin's Moscow Diary, as well as works by Michaux and Guillevic. He is also the author of a study of Ezra Pound and Remy de Gourmont. He teaches French and Comparative Literature at New York University.
Good—Very Good copy with some light buggery (insect nibbles to cover edge and spine), light foxing to block edge, clean interior, uncreased spine. Stiff French-fold covers.
1971, English
Softcover, 192 pages, 17.5 x 10.5 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Berkley Medallion Books / Berkley
$65.00 - Out of stock
Very first 1971 edition of Vermilion Sands by J.G. Ballard, published by Berkley in this paperback edition 2 years before the Jonathan Cape hardcover. Vermilion Sands is a collection of surreal science fiction short stories by Ballard, one of his finest, all set in an imaginary vacation resort called Vermilion Sands which suggests, among other places, a latter-day Palm Springs. Vermillion Sands is a fully automated desert resort designed to fulfill the most exotic whims of the idle rich. But now it languishes in uneasy decay, populated only by forgotten movie stars, solitary impresarios, parasites, and artistic and literary failures, a place where love and lust pall before the stronger pull of evil.
Vermilion Sands embodies the languid decay of a tawdry dream. A desert resort designed to fulfill the most exotic whims of the sated rich, it now moulders in sleazy dilapidation, a haven for the remittance men of the artistic and literary world, and for the human lampreys that prey upon them. It is a lair for malice and hate and envy — and the more cancerous forms of madness; a place where sensitive pigments paint portraits for their masters in a grotesque parody of art; where poets press the buttons of mechanical versifiers; where sculptures grow like funguses, and plants respond to music; where psychosensitive houses are driven mad by their owners' neuroses; where love and affection, and even lust, are effete madrigals played in a minor and discordant key.
From the dark recesses of a superb imagination, J. G. Ballard has conjured up an elegant nightmare of decadence, a portrait of a future Gomorrah where a Nero might play an automated violin.
"Ballard is one of the brightest stars in post-war science fiction."—Kingsley Amis
Good copy with some previous sticker damage to top corner of cover, light wear. Tanning to pages, otherwise a tight VG copy.
2015, English
Hardcover (w. dust jacket), 144 pages, 18.7 x 12.5 cm
Published by
New Directions / New York
$42.00 - Out of stock
Translated by Susan Bernofsky, Lydia Davis and Christopher Middleton
A beautiful and elegant collection, with gorgeous full-color art reproductions, Looking at Pictures presents a little-known side of the eccentric Swiss genius: his great writings on art. His essays consider Van Gogh, Cezanne, Rembrandt, Cranach, Watteau, Fragonard, Brueghel and his own brother Karl and also discuss general topics such as the character of the artist and of the dilettante as well as the differences between painters and poets. Every piece is marked by Walser's unique eye, his delicate sensitivity, and his very particular sensibilities--and all are touched by his magic screwball wit.
"Everyone who reads Walser falls in love with him."—Nicholas Lazard - The Guardian
"A Paul Klee in prose, a good-humoured, sweet Beckett, Walser is a truly wonderful, heartbreaking writer."—Susan Sontag
"Bold and idiosyncratic." —Lydia Davis
"Singular-genius."—Ben Lerner
"Written between 1902 and 1930 and, with two exceptions, previously untranslated, the pieces gathered here elaborate a nervous, slapstick sort of hack journalism that set the stage for a fabulously experimental modernist writing situation whose fans included Kafka, Musil, and Benjamin."—John Kelsey - Artforum
2012, English
Softcover, 264 pages, 14 x 21.6 cm
Published by
Princeton University Press / New York
$38.00 - Out of stock
Poet, novelist, playwright, and chess enthusiast, Raymond Roussel (1877-1933) was one of the French belle époque’s most compelling literary figures. During his lifetime, Roussel’s work was vociferously championed by the surrealists, but never achieved the widespread acclaim for which he yearned. New Impressions of Africa is undoubtedly Roussel’s most extraordinary work. Since its publication in 1932, this weird and wonderful poem has slowly gained cult status, and its admirers have included Salvador Dalì — who dubbed it the most “ungraspably poetic” work of the era — André Breton, Jean Cocteau, Marcel Duchamp, Michel Foucault, Kenneth Koch, and John Ashbery.
Roussel began writing New Impressions of Africa in 1915 while serving in the French Army during the First World War and it took him seventeen years to complete. “It is hard to believe the immense amount of time composition of this kind of verse requires,” he later commented. Mysterious, unnerving, hilarious, haunting, both rigorously logical and dizzyingly sublime, it is truly one of the hidden masterpieces of twentieth-century modernism.
This bilingual edition of New Impressions of Africa presents the original French text and the English poet Mark Ford’s lucid, idiomatic translation on facing pages. It also includes an introduction outlining the poem’s peculiar structure and evolution, notes explaining its literary and historical references, and the fifty-nine illustrations anonymously commissioned by Roussel, via a detective agency, from Henri-A. Zo.
1983, English
Softcover, 317 pages, 20 x 13 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
John Calder / London
Riverrun Press / New Jersey
$65.00 - Out of stock
First 1983 Calder / Riverrun Press US paperback edition in English of Raymond Roussel's classic, Impressions of Africa : A Novel, translated by Lindy Foord and Rayner Heppenstall.
"Although never a member of the official surrealist movement, Raymond Roussel is undoubtedly one of the most important surrealist writers. A contemporary of Marcel Proust, he is beginning to be considered a writer whose influence could well be of the same importance, and such modern innovators as Alain Robbe-Grillet and Eugene lonesco have acknowledged their debt to him as one of the principal fathers of the nouveau roman and the 'theatre of the absurd'. Raymond Roussel wrote several novels, some in verse and some in prose, and Impressions of Africa is the first of the two major prose works. It makes easy and enjoyable reading, being an adventure story put together in a highly individual fashion with an unusual time sequence, making use of fortuitous wit and jeux de mots and using all the surrealist techniques of automatic writing and private allusion, that while not spoiling the enjoyment of the casual reader add an extra dimension to the book for the student of literature.
Raymond Roussel, a man of great wealth, was born in 1877 and spent most of his life in Paris. An eccentric who made two world tours during which he hardly ever left his stateroom or hotel, he believed that a work of fiction should be a pure product of the imagination and this is certainly true of Impressions of Africa. Always impeccably dressed, he liked his clothes to be always brand new, and his conversation was as fastidious in that he avoided all general topics for fear of being involved in morbidity of any kind. This retreat from life is obvious in the fantastical nature of his work. The publication of his books was originally financed by himself, but in recent years he has had an important revival in France and he is undoubtedly one of the really unusual seminal minds of the modern movement in literature. This translation has been made by Lindy Foord and her father Rayner Heppenstall, the well-known novelist and critic. Mr Heppenstall has been a Roussel specialist for many years and was the first to bring him to the attention of the readers of British literary journals."—publisher's 1983 blurb.
Very Good copy.
1983 / 2003, English
Softcover, 254 pages, 20 x 13 cm
Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Calder and Boyars / London
Riverrun Press / New Jersey
$60.00 - Out of stock
First 1983 Calder / Riverrun Press paperback edition in English of Raymond Roussel's classic, Locus Solus (1914), translated by Rupert Copeland.
Cuningham Canterel, a scholarly scientist whose enormous wealth imposes no limits upon his prolific ingenuity, is showing a group of visitors round Locus Solus, his secluded estate near Paris. One by one he introduces, demonstrates and expounds the discoveries and inventions of his fertile, encyclopaedic mind. An African mud-sculpture representing a naked child, a road-mender's tool which, activated by the weather, creates a mosaic of human teeth, a vast aquarium in which human beings can breathe and in which a depilated cat is seen stimulating the partially decomposed head of Danton to fresh flights of oratory — by each item in Canterel's exhibition there hangs a tale, a tale such as only that amazing genius Roussel, one of the founding fathers of the modern novel, could tell. As Canterel's devices become more and more elaborate, the richness and brilliance of Roussel's stories grow to match them; the flow of his imagination becomes a flood, until the reader finds himself swept along in a torrent of mingled wonder and hilarity.
Locus Solus, first published in 1914, is perhaps Roussel's most perfect masterpiece. Based, like the earlier Impressions of Africa, on uniquely eccentric principles of composition (which the interested reader will find outlined in Rayner Heppenstall's Raymond Roussel), this book invites the reader to enter a very special world of the imagination, a hauntingly unforgettable world which in its innocence, extravagance and deep reasonableness is unlike anything in the literature of the twentieth century. This accurate yet colloquial translation by Rupert Copeland Cuningham perfectly captures the unique eccentricity of the original.
Very Good copy.
1966, English
Hardcover (w. dustjacket), 98 pages, 14 x 20 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / good
Published by
Calder and Boyars / London
$45.00 - In stock -
First hardcover edition of Raymond Roussel : A Critical Study by Rayner Heppenstall, published in 1966 by London's Calder and Boyars as part of their 'French Surrealism' series of books. This sympathetic study by Rayner Hoppenstall, a British novelist, critic and Roussel translator whose work has much in common with modern French literature, was the first to appear in the English language.
Raymond Roussel (1877-1933) was a French poet, novelist, playwright, musician, and chess enthusiast. Through his works he exerted a profound influence on certain groups within 20th century French literature, including the Surrealists, Oulipo, and the authors of the nouveau roman.
Very Good copy in Good dust jacket. Some tanning to edges.
1918 / ?, English
Softcover, 597 pages, 26.5 x 19 cm
Out of print title / used / good
Published by
Kessinger / Montana
$70.00 - Out of stock
Complete academic facsimile reprint of the original historical 1918 edition. Includes the introduction by Walter Leslie Wilmshurst.
"Alchemy is philosophy; it is the philosophy, the seeking out of the Sophia in the mind."—Walter Leslie Wilmshurst
Mary Anne wrote A Suggestive Inquiry into the Hermetic Mystery... at her father’s request, and in parallel with his own composition of a lengthy poem on the same subject. Thomas South (her father) paid for the book to be published anonymously in 1850, but without having read it, trusting his daughter’s judgement. Reading it after publication, he believed Mary Anne had revealed many hermetic secrets that were better left unpublished, and therefore bought up the remaining stock and, with his daughter, burnt them, along with the unfinished manuscript of his poem. Only a few copies of the book survived. Ms. Atwood published nothing after A Suggestive Inquiry...
Chapters: Theory of Transmutation; The Golden Treatise; The True Subject; The Mysteries; Experimental Method; Manifestation of the Matter; Mental Requisites and Impediments; The Gross Work; The Six Keys; Rewards and Potencies.
Walter Leslie Wilmshurst, in his 1918 introduction to the reissue, laments that the thoughts of her later years did not find fruition in another work. He claims, however, that there is much to be found in her papers, of which he was then in possession.
Good copy with some general wear, fold to back cover, very light erase-able pencil marginalia from previous (almost entirely as an index to inside front cover, very little through contents).
1971, English
Softcover, 452 pages, 21.4 x 13.5 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Dover / New York
$45.00 - Out of stock
First English 1971 edition of Herbert Silberer's examinations of alchemy and the occult, and his attempts to correlate the two crafts to the pursuit of psychoanalysis. First published in 1917, this text represents the extensive investigations Herbert Silberer undertook in order to map occurrences in the occult with the ascendant psychoanalytic disciplines present in the Vienna School of which he was part. This text is marked by its depth of research, with sources such as Hermes Trismegistus, Flamel, Lacinius, Michael Meier, Paracelsus, and Boehme quoted and drawn upon in service of Silberer's thesis. The support of alchemy as a spiritual movement, on the same level as the yoga traditions of the Indian subcontinent, is also notable.
Very Good copy.
1987, English
Softcover, 522 pages, 21.5 x 13.5 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / as new
Published by
University of Chicago Press / Chicago
$55.00 - Out of stock
First 1987 edition. Translated by Alan Bass.
"You were reading a somewhat retro loveletter, the last in history. But you have not yet received it. Yes, its lack or excess of address prepares it to fall into all hands: a post card, an open letter in which the secret appears, but indecipherably.
What does a post card want to say to you? On what conditions is it possible? Its destination traverses you, you no longer know who you are. At the very instant when from its address it interpellates, you, uniquely you, instead of reaching you it divides you or sets you aside, occasionally overlooks you. And you love and you do not love, it makes of you what you wish, it takes you, it leaves you, it gives you.
On the other side of the card, look, a proposition is made to you, S and p, Socrates and plato. For once the former seems to write, and with his other hand he is even scratching. But what is Plato doing with his outstretched finger in his back? While you occupy yourself with turning it around in every direction, it is the picture that turns you around like a letter, in advance it deciphers you, it preoccupies space, it procures your words and gestures, all the bodies that you believe you invent in order to determine its outline. You find yourself, you, yourself, on its path.
The thick support of the card, a book heavy and light, is also the specter of this scene, the analysis between Socrates and Plato, on the program of several others. Like the soothsayer, a “fortune-telling book” watches over and speculates on that-which-must-happen, on what it indeed might mean to happen, to arrive, to have to happen or arrive, to let or to make happen or arrive, to destine, to address, to send, to legate, to inherit, etc., if it all still signifies, between here and there, the near and the far, da und fort, the one or the other.
You situate the subject of the book: between the posts and the analytic movement, the pleasure principle and the history of telecommunications, the post card and the purloined letter, in a word the transference from Socrates to Freud, and beyond. This satire of epistolary literature had to be farci, stuffed with addresses, postal codes, crypted missives, anonymous letters, all of it confided to so many modes, genres, and tones. In it I also abuse dates, signatures, titles or references, language itself." — J. D.
“With The Post Card, as with Glas, Derrida appears more as writer than as philosopher. Or we could say that here, in what is in part a mock epistolary novel (the long section is called “Envois,” roughly, “dispatches” ), he stages his writing more overtly than in the scholarly works. . . . The Post Card also contains a series of self-reflective essays, largely focused on Freud, in which Derrida is beautifully lucid and direct.”—Alexander Gelley, Library Journal
As New copy.
2009, English
Softcover, 728 pages, 28 x 17.4 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Routledge / London
$45.00 - In stock -
First Routledge complete edition of Michel Foucault's classic History of Madness, translated from the original French texts by Jonathan Murphy, edited by Jean Khalfa and published in 2009.
When it was first published in France in 1961 as Folie et Deraison: Histoire de la Folie a l'âge Classique, few had heard of a thirty-four year old philosopher by the name of Michel Foucault. By the time an abridged English edition was published in 1967 as Madness and Civilization, Michel Foucault had shaken the intellectual world.
This translation is the first English edition of the complete French texts of the first and second edition, including all prefaces and appendices, some of them unavailable in the existing French edition.
History of Madness begins in the Middle Ages with vivid descriptions of the exclusion and confinement of lepers. Why, Foucault asks, when the leper houses were emptied at the end of the Middle Ages, were they turned into places of confinement for the mad? Why, within the space of several months in 1656, was one out of every hundred people in Paris confined?
Shifting brilliantly from Descartes and early Enlightenment thought to the founding of the Hopital General in Paris and the work of early psychiatrists Philippe Pinel and Samuel Tuke, Foucault focuses throughout, not only on scientific and medical analyses of madness, but also on the philosophical and cultural values attached to the mad. He also urges us to recognize the creative and liberating forces that madness represents, brilliantly drawing on examples from Goya, Nietzsche, Van Gogh and Artaud.
The History of Madness is an inspiring and classic work that challenges us to understand madness, reason and power and the forces that shape them.
"Scarcely any philosopher working on the history of philosophy, or historian working on the history of institutions, social science or sexuality can avoid confronting the challenge of Foucault's books."—Michael Ignatieff, Times Literary Supplement
"Without a shadow of a doubt, the most original, influential and controversial text in this field during the last forty years. It remains as challenging now as on first publication. Its insights have still not been fully appreciated and absorbed."—Roy Porter
"Extraordinary!rich and insistent, and almost unreasonable in its necessary repetitions."—Maurice Blanchot
Very Good copy, light wear.
2017, English
Hardcover (w. dust jacket), 464 pages, 23 x 15 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
John Wiley and Sons / London
$55.00 - In stock -
"Alcibiades attempted to seduce Socrates, he wanted to make him, and in the most openly avowed way possible, into someone instrumental and subordinate to what? To the object of Alcibiades's desire - ágalma, the good object.
I would go even further. How can we analysts fail to recognize what is involved? He says quite clearly: Socrates has the good object in his stomach. Here Socrates is nothing but the envelope in which the object of desire is found.
It is in order to clearly emphasize that he is nothing but this envelope that Alcibiades tries to show that Socrates is desire's serf in his relations with Alcibiades, that Socrates is enslaved to Alcibiades by his desire. Although Alcibiades was aware that Socrates desired him, he wanted to see Socrates's desire manifest itself in a sign, in order to know that the other - the object, ágalma - was at his mercy.
Now, it is precisely because he failed in this undertaking that Alcibiades disgraces himself, and makes of his confession something that is so affectively laden. The daemon of Αἰδώς (Aidós), Shame, about which I spoke to you before in this context, is what intervenes here. This is what is violated here. The most shocking secret is unveiled before everyone; the ultimate mainspring of desire, which in love relations must always be more or less dissimulated, is revealed - its aim is the fall of the Other, A, into the other, a."—Jacques Lacan
"In this extraordinary text Lacan teaches us that to become Lacanians would be to miss the point. To understand transference, Lacan shows us with his usual wit and precision, is to understand how and why people get stuck in their relationships to people, and to ideas. This is Lacan at his breeziest and most incisive. He reveals once again, in his own inimitable way, that to talk well about psychoanalysis is always to talk about so much more than psychoanalysis."
-Adam Phillips, Psychoanalyst and writer
First HC Polity edition. Very Good copy with light wear.
1984, English
Softcover, 220 pages, 23.5 x 15.5 cm
Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Indiana University Press / Indiana
$35.00 - Out of stock
1984 collection of writings by Teresa De Lauretis, Alice Doesn't : Feminism, Semiotics, Cinema, published by Indiana University Press.
"There is hardly a page in this collection of hard-thought and brilliantly written essays that does not yield some new insight. . . . The writing bristles, the thought challenges, and the analyses genuinely illuminate rather than simply reflect an accommodation to tired critical cliches."—HAYDEN WHITE
"[de Lauretis] is a major contemporary semiotician and feminist theorist, who reads together theoretical texts and narratives, challenging positions of mastery and ahistoricity and insisting on feminism's refusal of given definitions and cultural values."—ELAINE MARKS
"These essays are exciting and genuinely elegant . . . maintaining . . . a view broad and sophisticated enough to be truly feminist, semiotic, and cinematic, more precisely, to be all three at once. Teresa de Lauretis exemplifies in her rare style the obsessive topics of her book: imaging and desire."—DUDLEY ANDREW
"A work of critical intelligence that redefines an entire area of con-temporary cultural studies, Alice Doesn't will not please semioticians, feminists, or cinema specialists, but it will force them, and all of us, to think."—WLAD GODZICH
"In a sense, then, narrative and visual pleasure constitute the frame of reference of cinema, one which provides the measure of desire. I believe this statement must apply to women as it does to men. The difference is, quite literally, that it is men who have defined the ''visible things'' of cinema, who have defined the object and the modalities of vision, pleasure, and meaning on the basis of perceptual and conceptual schemata provided by partriarchal ideological and social formations. In the frame of reference of men's cinema, narrative, and visual theories, the male is the measure of desire, quite as the phallus is its signifier and the standard of visibility in psychoanalysis. The project of feminist cinema, therefore, is not so much ''to make visible the invisible'', as the saying goes, or to destroy vision altogether, as to construct another (object of) vision and the conditions of visibility for a different social subject."
Very Good with light wear and previous owner inscriber to title page. First 1984 edition, reprint.
1989, English
Softcover, 262 pages, 24 x 16 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Allen & Unwin / NSW
$45.00 - Out of stock
First 1989 edition of "Sexual Subversions" by Australian philosopher Elizabeth Grosz, introducing the works of three well known, if not well-read, French feminists: Julia Kristeva, Luce Irigaray and Michèle Le Dœuff. It provides a map of an area where there are few detailed discussion of the achievements of these difficult, yet immensely rewarding, writers. In doing so, this overview raises issues of general relevance to feminist research: it participates in debates around the nature of feminist theory, the relations feminist intellectuals have to male dominated knowledges, and the strategies appropriate for developing non patriarchal, autonomous or woman-centred knowledges. No book in French feminists would be complete without including the contributions of Kristeva and Irigaray. The inclusion of Le Deouff's work, which brings a different perspective to bear on the question of sexual difference, provides a counterbalance to literary appropriations of French feminism by Anglo-American readerships. Kristeva, Irigaray and Le Deouff are the focal points of this study, precisely because each highlights the differences of the others, revealing the frameworks to which the others are committed. Nevertheless, while these writers do not present a common political or theoretical position or form a school, each addresses the question of women's autonomy from male definition, affirms the sexual specificity of women, seeks out a femininity women can use to question the patriarchal norms and ideals of femininity and rejects the preordained positions patriarchy allots to women.
Table of Contents
1 Modern French philosophy, 2 Julia Kristeva and the speaking subject, :1 .Julia Kristeva: Abjection, motherhood and love 4 Luce Irigaray and sexual difference 5 Luce Irigaray and the ethics of alterity 6 Michele Le Doeuff and the philosophical imaginary
Elizabeth Grosz is an Australian philosopher, feminist theorist, taught philosophy at the University of Sydney at the time of publishing. Among the many works to which she has contributed are "Feminist Challenges" and "Crossing Boundaries". She is Jean Fox O'Barr Women's Studies Professor at Duke University.
Very Good copy with light cover reading wear to boards.
2023,
LP Album
Ed. of 225,
Published by
Hakkı / US
$50.00 - Out of stock
Recorded in 2022-23 and issued in a limited pressing of 225 copies, Pry is the wonderful follow-up to Kai Althoff’s 1996 LP as Engelhardt/Seef/Davis coop. It goes somewhat like this :
"Pry, played out of speakers buried beneath an inch of earth, a scratching, elegiac prayer for an ethereal dancehall. Its drums wheeze and chug, frantic in moments and determinedly cold and mechanical in others. Its sound, squeezed through a cavity almost too narrow to contain its contents, is sparsely accompanied by an enraptured voice who habitually falls out of language, though with no seeming effect on its concentration or intention.
But then there’s a drop off (first mistaken for a breakdown), stranding you in a different concert than you thought you had been in moments before.
The newfound sparseness stings and rattles in its intensity. While the vanished sounds reverberate deeper in the soil, the green, mournful hymn strokes you into a more settled, but still shaken state."
—Helena Morell
2002, English / German
Hardcover (clothbound), 197 pages, 27 x 23 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / fine
Published by
Sternberg Press / Berlin
$220.00 - Out of stock
Long out-of-print and collectible, Gebärden und Ausdruck (Gestures and Expression) is the first comprehensive publication on the work of German artist Kai Althoff (b. 1966). Fully illustrated and conceived by the artist, this beautiful clothbound hardcover book traces the evolution of the Althoff's work from the early nineties until 2002. The texts discuss Althoff’s repertoire of bohemian adolescents, revealing how his untranslatable dialect, hermetic cultural codes and twisted youth motifs are ultimately in service of the work’s epic dimension.
“What is happening here is more a question of the absorption, reduplication, and removal of the core of an existing societal dynamics where convictions, lifestyles, and attitudes previously radically opposed, or even mutually exclusive, have collapsed together into one.” —Anke Kempkes
Edited by Nicolaus Schafhausen with texts By Michaela Eichwald, Anke Kempkes, Bernd Koehler, Jutta Koether.
Fine, As New copy.
1985, Japanese
Softcover (w. dust jacket), 204 pages, 21 x 15 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Rock Magazine / Osaka
$160.00 - Out of stock
Nurse with Wound, Cocteau Twins, Smegma, Clair Obscur, Death In June, Asmus Tietchens, Current 93, Bladder Flask, Sex Gang Children, Deux Filles, Maurizio Bianchi (M.B.), In The Nursery, Mnemonists, Dead Can Dance, The Camberwell Now, Ian Elms, O Yuki Conjugate, Danse Macabre, Coil, Iron In Flesh, Cindytalk, Christian Death, The Hafler Trio, Severed Heads, Ghedalia Tazartes, Bushido, Jac Berrocal, AMM, Alien Sex Fiend, Foetus, Gene Loves Jezebel, Organum, Crime & the City Solution, Anima, This Mortal Coil, Anne Clark, Zoviet:France, Bruce Gilbert (Wire), Esquisses, Anne Gillis, Certain General, Konstruktivits, Sema, The Birthday Party, Intimate Obsessions, Hula, Fetus Productions, Swans, Rowland S. Howard, The Legendary Pink Dots, And Also The Trees, Eric Random, Hanstings Of Malawi, Hélène Sage, Biting Tongues, The Veil, In Excelsis, Test Dept., Mark Stewart, The Jesus And Mary Chain, Kiem, Savage Republic, Lustmord, Soviet Sex, The March Violets, SPK, The Danse Society, Virgin Prunes, Skeletal Family, The Haters, Lydia Lunch, The Wolfgang Press, Siglo XX, Red Lorry Yellow Lorry, Operating Theatre, The Sisters Of Mercy, Martyn Betes, 23 Skidoo, Clan of Xymox, Penny Rimbaud, Thierry Zaboitzeff, Danielle Dax, This Mortal Coil, Boyd Rice, The Nocturnal Emissions, Un Drame Musical Instantané, 3 Teens Kill 4, William S.Burroughs, Psychic TV, Xmal Deutschland, Robert Haigh, Enski Boski, and many more....
Very rare, highly collectible first ever issue of EGO magazine, founded in 1985 by music critic, "Rock Magazine" editor and Vanity Records label owner Yuzuru Agi. EGO (1985—1987) was Agi's follow-up magazine to the highly influential Rock Magazine (1976—1984), spurred on by a new music underground developing in the wake of underground cassette tape networks, independent experimental labels and the influence of post-punk/cold-wave/gothic/industrial culture in the UK/Europe. A seminal magazine in Japan, EGO introduced this new wave of music via exclusive interviews, articles, key writings, manifestos, obsessive illustrated cataloguing of discographies and family-trees mapping the lineage, reviews, profiles, artwork, and by embodying the very philosophies and aesthetics of this subculture in one of the most beautifully produced magazines of the period. More like a book, EGO 01 features all the artists listed above, plus illustrated articles such as "The Post Industrial Strategy : Exposing the Cathedral of Death", "Message From The Temple" (Psychic TV), "How To Destroy Angels", "Too Many Humans", "Burning Under The Name of God", "A Circular Argument of The Disease of Art", "The Horror of Reality & The Beauty of Ugliness", further texts, writings, interviews, by/with J.G. Ballard, William S. Burroughs, Alistair Crowley, Current 93, Psychic TV, Jean-Pierre Turmel (Sordide Sentimental), Frank Wedekind, Lustmord, Swans, Sisters of Mercy, Dead Can Dance, etc. texts on ritual rites, Sadomasochism, lyrics by Coil, Current 93, Christian Death, Bushido, etc., all elaborately printed on many different paper stocks. Nothing else like it.
Very Good copy in VG dustjacket.
1995, English
Softcover, 314 pages, 23 x 18 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
The MIT Press / Massachusetts
October Books / New York
$65.00 - Out of stock
First 1995 edition of this long out-of-print study by Hal Foster, published The MIT Press and October Books. In Compulsive Beauty, Foster reads surrealism from its other, darker side: as an art given over to the uncanny, to the compulsion to repeat and the drive toward death.
Surrealism has long been seen as its founder, André Breton, wanted it to be seen: as a movement of love and liberation. In Compulsive Beauty, Foster reads surrealism from its other, darker side: as an art given over to the uncanny, to the compulsion to repeat and the drive toward death. To this end Foster first restages the difficult encounter of surrealism with Freudian psychoanalysis, then redefines the crucial categories of surrealism—the marvelous, convulsive beauty, objective chance—in terms of the Freudian uncanny, or the return of familar things made strange by repression. Next, with the art of Giorgio de Chirico, Max Ernst, and Alberto Giacometti in mind, Foster develops a theory of the surrealist image as a working over of a primal fantasy. This leads him finally to propose as a summa of surrealism a body of work often shunted to its margins: the dolls of Hans Bellmer, so many traumatic tableaux that point to difficult connections not only between sadism and masochism but also between surrealism and fascism. At this point Compulsive Beauty turns to the social dimension of the surrealist uncanny. First Foster reads the surrealist repertoire of automatons and mannequins as a reflection on the uncanny processes of mechanization and commodification. Then he considers the surrealist use of outmoded images as an attempt to work through the historical repression effected by these same processes. In a brief conclusion he discusses the fate of surrealism today in a world become surrealistic. Compulsive Beauty not only offers a deconstructive reading of surrealism, long neglected by Anglo-American art history, but also participates in a postmodern reconsideration of modernism, the dominant accounts of which have obscured its involvements in desire and trauma, capitalist shock and technological development.
Very Good copy.
1972 / 1983, English
Softcover, 166 pages, 20 x 13 cm
Out of print title / used / very good
$18.00 - Out of stock
'Seeing comes before words. The child looks and recognizes before it can speak.'
'But there is also another sense in which seeing comes before words. It is seeing which establishes our place in the surrounding world; we explain that world with words, but word can never undo the fact that we are surrounded by it. The relation between what we see and what we know is never settled.'
John Berger's Ways of Seeing is one of the most stimulating and influential books on art in any language. First published in 1972, it was based on the BBC television series about which the Sunday Times critic commented: 'This is an eye-opener in more ways than one: by concentrating on how we look at paintings . . . he will almost certainly change the way you look at pictures.' By now he has.
John Peter Berger (1926 – 2017) was an English art critic, novelist, painter and poet. He is well known for his novels and stories as well as for his works of nonfiction, including several volumes of art criticism. His first novel, A Painter of Our Time, was published in 1958, and since then his books have included Ways of Seeing, the fiction trilogy Into Their Labours, and the novel G., which won the Booker Prize in 1972. In 1962 he left Britain permanently and moved to a small village in the French Alps. He died in 2017.
'Berger has the ability to cut right through the mystification of professional art critics ... he is a liberator of images: and once we have allowed the paintings to work on us directly, we are in a much better position to make a meaningful evaluation'
Peter Fuller, Arts Review
'One of the most influential intellectuals of our time'
Observer
1977, Japanese
Softcover, 100 pages, 27.5 x 20.5 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
PARCO / Tokyo
$65.00 - Out of stock
Second issue (1977) of Parco's wild Surprise House magazine. Like Super Art Gocoo, Surprise House was a crazy late 1970s-1980s graphic art journal published by the mighty Parco gallery, imprint and department-store-like-no-other in Tokyo. A celebration of psycho graphic visual language and advertising provocation (MADVERTISING) from the new (and old) of Japan's avant-garde, this issue of SUPER, with covers by airbrush superstars Pater Sato (front) and Harumi Yamaguchi (back), features everything from Ghetto Sesame Street to "Nazi products" in a series of Japanese responses to works from America's legendary National Lampoon magazine, the work of Tsunehisa Kimura, Shūji Terayama, Teruhiko Yumura, Genpei Akasegawa, Hajime Sawatari, Iku Akiyama, Osamu Harada, Nobuhiro Kawanaka, Kenji Kawamoto, more Harumi Yamaguchi, more Sato, manga by Shinta Chō, and much more. Parco were instrumental in exhibiting, publishing and promoting Japanese and international graphic artists and new pop culture in this period, and these journals create a wonderful time-capsule at the height of that incredible time.
Very Good - Fine copy.