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:
BOOKSHOP CLOSED FOR BREAK UNTIL NOV 10.
WEB-SHOP OPEN 24/7.
ORDERS CAN STILL BE PLACED AND WILL BE PROCESSED AFTER NOV 10.
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.
1996, English
Softcover, 144 pages, 13.2 x 20.3 cm
Published by
New Directions / New York
$38.00 - In stock -
Proper Name collects for the first time the inimitable stories of Bernadette Mayer—"one of the most original writers of her generation" (The Washington Post).
The nineteen narratives of Proper Name include "My Excellent Novel," "Ice Cube Epigrams," "Essay: How Carefully Do We Tend?" and "Juan Gave Nora a Pomegranate." Mayer's structural inventions are terrific and unique. As Fanny Howe remarked in The American Book Review, "In a language made up of idiom and lyricism, Mayer cancels the boundaries between prose and poetry."
1978, English
Softcover, 54 pages, 17.5 x 12.5 cm
Ed. of 500,
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / good
Published by
This Press / San Francisco
$80.00 - Out of stock
Rare copy of the only edition of Quartz Hearts by poet Clark Coolidge, published by This Press, San Francisco, California, in 1978; typeset by Barrett Watten and printed at The West Coast Print Center. "Quartz Hearts (a long grouping of aggregate works?) [...] meditations on the state(s) of things in other words words...".—C.C. Poetry book published in edition of 500 copies by jazz drummer Coolidge (b. 1939), associated with the Second Generation New York School and the L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poets during the 1960's, and celebrated author of written works on the weather, bebop, surrealism...
Good copy with small chip to bottom left cover corner, previous owner (Australia-based composer composer, instrument builder, sound poet, film-maker, Warren Burt — b. 1949) dated "April '87".
1997 , Japanese
Softcover (w. dust jacket), 20 x 15 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Bunkasha / Japan
$100.00 - In stock -
Rare first edition of Japanese photographer Hiroshi Maruyama's BACKS collection, published by Bunkasha in 1997. Cover-to-cover sultry studio fetish photography of female nudes and semi-nudes photographed from behind in beautiful heavy-grain colour and b/w photography, at times reminiscent of the work of Carlo Mollino, Araki, or even Irina Ionesco with a heavy crushed velvet 1990s erotic thriller atmosphere. A must for any bottom or leg enthusiast, or even women's garment fetishist (lots of stockings, socks, and heels). A very little known and rare Japanese title.
Very Good with dust jacket and obi-strip.
1998, English
Paperback, 320 pages, 12.9 x 19.8 cm
Published by
HarperCollins Publishers / London
$28.00 - Out of stock
A highly contentious, very readable and totally up-to-the-minute investigation of women's natural relationship with modern technology, an association which, Plant argues, will trigger a new sexual revolution.
Zeros and Ones is an intelligent, provocative and accessible investigation of the intersection between women, feminism, machines and in particular, information technology. Arguing that the computer is rewriting the old conceptions of man and his world, it suggests that the telecoms revolution is also a sexual revolution which undermines the fundamental assumptions crucial to patriarchal culture. Historical, contemporary and future developments in telecommunications and in IT are interwoven with the past, present and future of feminism, women and sexual difference, and a wealth of connections, parallels and affinities between machines and women are uncovered as a result. Challenging the belief that man was ever in control of either his own agency, the planet, or his machines, this book argues it is seriously undermined by the new scientific paradigms emergent from theories of chaos, complexity and connectionism, all of which suggest that the old distinctions between man, woman, nature and technology need to be radically reassessed.
1988, English
Softcover (staple-bound), 24 pages, 29.7 x 21 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Toho / Tokyo
$80.00 - Out of stock
The original Japanese film brochure for the 1988 anime movie release of Katsuhiro Otomo's Akira, published by TOHO EIGA in Tokyo. Only available in Japan in the cinema merchandise stands upon the film's release, this glossy booklet is heavily illustrated throughout with stills and production imagery, featuring an introduction to the world of Neo-Tokyo, profile on Akira's creator Otomo, timeline of the complex narrative events and all the characters in the film, cast, sound information (Shōji Yamashiro, Geinoh Yamashirogumi collective, etc.), film staff, voices, and many other productions details. Also catalogues for Akira merchandise, posters, books, models, and more... Tremendously thorough for its size! All texts in native Japanese. A wonderful piece of printed history to Otomo's dystopian cyber-punk masterpiece.
Akira was released in 1988 in Japan and directed by Katsuhiro Otomo, produced by Ryōhei Suzuki and Shunzō Katō, and written by Otomo and Izo Hashimoto, based on Otomo's 1982 manga of the same name. It is widely regarded by critics as one of the greatest films ever made, especially in the animation, action and science fiction genres, as well as a landmark in Japanese anime.
Very Good copy, with only light wear.
1993, English / Japanese
Softcover, 126 pages, 26 x 22 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / fine
Published by
Galerie Watari / Tokyo
$180.00 - Out of stock
Rare first full book study of this major work of the great Italian architect Carlo Scarpa, Villa "Palazzetto", the 10-year restoration of a 17th century villa at Monselice left unfinished at the time of Scarpa's death in 1978. Published in 1993 on the occasion of a major exhibition of the Villa "Palazzetto" in Tokyo, this first edition of this long out-of-print volume is profusely illustrated with colour and b/w beautiful and intimate documentation, portraits, drawings, plans, remembrances, plus an illustrated career overview documenting all of Scarpa's other major architectural works and design objects 1955—1978. Texts in both English / Japanese by Shizuko Watari, Aldo Businaro, Arata Isozaki, Guido Pietropoli, Louis Kahn, plus biography,
Carlo Scarpa (1906, Venice—1978, Sendai, Miyagi, Japan) was an Italian architect, influenced by the materials, landscape and the history of Venetian culture, and by Japan. Scarpa translated his interests in history, regionalism, invention, and the techniques of the artist and craftsman into ingenious glass and furniture design.
Near Fine copy.
1980, Italian
Hardcover, 50 pages, 32 x 24 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Casa Vogue / Milan
Edizioni Condé Nast / Milan
$80.00 - In stock -
First edition, published in 1980 by Edizioni Condé Nast / Casa Vogue (Milan), of this little known furniture book, edited by Casa Vogue editor Isa Vercelloni, who brought us the 1985 classic “Styles of Living: The Best of Casa Vogue”.
This fantastic hardcover book, the first in Casa Vogue's book library, is dedicated entirely to showcasing furniture by (amongst many other deisgners) Aldo Rossi, Gaetano Pesce, Andrea Branzi, Ettore Sottsass, Afra and Tobia Scarpa, Toshiyuki Kita, Achille Castiglioni, Alchimia, Paolo Nava, Antonio Citterio, Enzo Mari, Alessandro Mendini, B&B Italia, Cassina, Flos, Poltronova, Vico Magistretti, Artemide, Stilnovo, Mario Bellini, Josef Hoffman, Studio Driade, Poltronova, Carlo Scarpa, Gae Aulenti, Angelo Mangiarotti, Eileen Grey, Charles Rennie Mackintosh, Gerrit T. Rietveld, Le Corbusier, Charlotte Perriand, , Pierre Jeanneret, C&B Italia, Mario Ceroli, Cini Boeri, Arflex, Zanotta, Superstudio, Archizoom, Knoll, Meret Oppenheim, Max Ernst, René Magritte, Jonathan de Pas, De. Pas + D'urbino + Lomazzi, Donato d'Urbino, Paolo Lomazzi, Gufram, Giani Ruffi, Piero Gilardi, Joe Columbo, Sergio Asti, Hans Hollein...
Scarce, wonderfully compiled Italian title of 1970's-1980's furniture design and its influences.
Very Good copy.
1985, English
Hardcover (w. dustjacket), 224 pages, 30 x 22.6 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Rizzoli / New York
$200.00 - Out of stock
First edition, published by Rizzoli in 1985, of this classic interior design book, "Styles of Living: The Best of Casa Vogue"
Making appearances in these rooms: Gae Aulenti, Man Ray, Enzo Mari, Carlo Scarpa, Pablo Picasso, Josef Hoffman, Cinzia Ruggeri, Max Ernst, Wols, Matteo Thun, Ettore Sottsass, Le Corbusier, Salvador Dali, René Magritte, Lucio Fontana, Eileen Grey, Daniel Buren, Gaetano Pesce, Charles Eames, Verner Panton, Massimo Vignelli, Andy Warhol, Frank Lloyd Wright, Antoni Tàpies, Michelangelo Pistoletto, Alver Aalto.....
"Ever since the end of the Second World War, Italian style, design and decoration have maintained an unprecedented predominance in the Western World. It was in the early 1950s that a great surge of decorative talent welled up in Italy, and this resulted in the 'Italian look' in clothes and in homes - a new standard of chic inventiveness.
The Italian view of interior design has been most enterprisingly expressed in the magazine Casa Vogue, which was founded in 1968 and has consistently been one of the most admired publications of Condé Nast International.
This book, garnered from the many issues of Casa Vogue, has been written and produced under the guidance of Isa Vercellonim who has been its editor ever since its inception. The choice of picture-stories is intended to reflect the unusual and distinctive diversity of the magazine - ranging from traditional decoration to the more advance examples of minimal design, most the most significant of contemporary buildings to the spectacular reconstructions and reconversions of old palazzi and coachhouses, from the 'post modern' to the 'anti-modern' and any other 'moderns' that may have been advocated recently. Italian trends naturally provide the main focus, but Casa Vogue also includes developments in the United States, France, Switzerland - indeed, wherever unusual and meaningful designs are being created."
Very good copy in Good dust-jacket, protected under mylar wrap.
1992, English
Softcover, 288 pages, 14.6 x 22.3 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Gay Men's Press / London
$160.00 - In stock -
Very rare 1992 Gay Men's Press first printing of this pioneering historical study — the first comprehensive chronicle of the English gay community at its 18th-century roots, sporting for the first time a distinctive subculture with its "molly houses", "sodomites' walks", "maiden names" and gay slang. Rictor Norton's research into trial records and contemporary documents establishes a vital cornerstone for the reconstruction of gay history. Challenging in its demonstration that the molly subculture was primarily a working-class community of blacksmiths, milkmen, publicans and shopkeepers, Mother Clap's Molly House also records the exuberant lives of personalities such as Charles Hitchin the "thief-taker", the dramatists Samuel Foote and Isaac Bickerstaff, William Beckford of Fonthill, and Rev. John Church, prosecuted for his blessing of gay marriages. All these are set against a backdrop of persecution, blackmail and the pillory. And yes, "Mother Clap's" actually was the name of a prominent molly house!
Rictor Norton earned his Ph.D. from Florida State University for a study of homosexual themes in English Renaissance Literature, the basis for his book The Homosexual Literary Tradition, and he edited a highly-acclaimed issue of College English devoted to The Homosexual Imagination. He moved to London in 1973, and was an editor for Gay News from 1974-1978.
VG—Good copy with some light wear, tiny closed tear to cover right edge, foxing to endpapers and block edge, otherwise Very Good copy throughout, uncreased spine.
1987, English
Softcover, 14 x 22 cm, 818 pages,
Out of print title / used / good
Published by
Faber & Faber / London
$40.00 - Out of stock
The Cantos of Ezra Pound is one of the great landmarks in twentieth-century poetry. This Fourth Collected edition of 1987 includes two previously uncollected cantos, and some passages from other cantos, omitted from earlier printings, restored to the text. The additional cantos, numbered LXXII and LXXIII, were written by Ezra Pound in Italian, during the collapse of Italy at the end of the war. They belong in the sequence between the John Adams and the Pisan cantos.
Good copy with some wear and marking.
1974, English
Softcover, 304 pages, 20 x 13.5 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
New Directions / New York
$65.00 $45.00 - Out of stock
First 1974 paperback edition of Hermetic Definition by H.D. published by New Directions.
"The poem is as easy to read as breathing: it could be danced, it could be sung, the clarity of image is so perfect… Tremendous suggestiveness and magnetic force radiate from the scenes… H. D.’s verse has the balance, the amplitude and the clean outlines of a Greek temple."—Nation
The fabulous beauty of Helen of Troy is legendary. But some say that Helen was never in Troy, that she had been conveyed by Zeus to Egypt, and that Greeks and Trojans alike fought for an illusion. A fifty-line fragment by the poet Stesichorus of Sicily (c. 640-555 B.C.), what survives of his Pallinode, tells us almost all we know of this other Helen, and from it H. D. wove her book-length poem. Yet Helen in Egypt is not a simple retelling of the Egyptian legend but a recreation of the many myths surrounding Helen, Paris, Achilles, Theseus, and other figures of Greek tradition, fused with the mysteries of Egyptian hermeticism.
An innovative modernist writer, Hilda Doolittle (1886–1961) wrote under her initials in a career that stretched from 1909 to 1961. Although she is most well known for her poetry—lyric and epic—H.D. also wrote novels, memoirs, short stories, essays, reviews, a children’s book, and translations. An American woman who lived her adult life abroad, H.D. was engaged in the formalist experimentation that preoccupied much of her generation. A range of thematic concerns resonates through her writing: the role of the poet, the civilian representation of war, material and mythologized ancient cultures, the role of national and colonial identity, lesbian and queer sexuality, and religion and spirituality.
Very Good copy.
1972, English
Softcover, 118 pages, 20.5 x 13 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
New Directions / New York
$45.00 - Out of stock
First 1972 paperback edition of Hermetic Definition by H.D. published by New Directions.
"With the War Trilogy and Helen of Egypt, these three poems of H. D.’s late phase bring into print the great works of a poet who is of the same order for me as Ezra Pound or William Carlos Williams: the work of an imagination that incorporates boldly the modern consciousness and aesthetic and the traditional, psychoanalytic realism and hermetic visionary experience."—Robert Duncan
H. D.’s (Hilda Doolittle, 1884—1961) late poems of search and longing represent the mature achievement of a poet who has come increasingly to be recognized as one of the most important of her generation. The title poem and other long pieces in this collection (“Sagesse” and “Winter Love”) were written between 1957 and her death four years later, and are heretofore unpublished, except in fragments. We can see now in proper context her fine ear for the free line, and understand why other poets, such as Denise Levertov, Robert Creeley, and Robert Duncan, find so much to admire in H. D.’s work. As in her earlier books, one level of H.D.’s significant poetic statement derives from her intimate knowledge of and identification with classical Greek and arcane cultures; taken together, these elements make up the poet’s own personal myth. Norman Holmes Pearson, H. D’s friend and literary executor, has contributed an illuminating foreword to this impressive collection.
An innovative modernist writer, Hilda Doolittle (1886–1961) wrote under her initials in a career that stretched from 1909 to 1961. Although she is most well known for her poetry—lyric and epic—H.D. also wrote novels, memoirs, short stories, essays, reviews, a children’s book, and translations. An American woman who lived her adult life abroad, H.D. was engaged in the formalist experimentation that preoccupied much of her generation. A range of thematic concerns resonates through her writing: the role of the poet, the civilian representation of war, material and mythologized ancient cultures, the role of national and colonial identity, lesbian and queer sexuality, and religion and spirituality.
Very Good copy.
1957, English
Softcover, 128 pages, 20.5 x 13 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Grove Press / New York
Evergreen Review Inc. / New York
$35.00 - Out of stock
First 1957 paperback edition, seventh printing, of Selected Poems of H.D., published by Evergreen/Grove Press.
H.D.'s Selected Poems demonstrates anew the enduring quality of her lyricism. Though her early poems received spontaneous praise as proof that the "Imagists" wrote memorable poetry, since 1930 it has been a misnomer to define H. D.'s poems as Imagist verse. "How-ever," she has remarked, "I don't know that labels matter very much. One writes the kind of poetry one likes. Other people put labels on it. Imagism was something that was important for poets learning their craft early in this century. But after learning his craft, the poet will find his true direction."
Like other gifted poets of individual distinction, H. D. has taken her own road beyond the limitations of a group. As the present selection of her poems shows, she has created the kind of poetry which, as she says, "has grown down into the depths ... spreading upwards to heaven."
The Greek quality of her poems has been noted by her early critics, yet this quality has also been infused with her memories of the New England seacoast where she spent her girlhood holidays. Whatever her imagination has gathered from other sources is within the heritage of a twentieth-century American poet. Readers of her Selected Poems will be given the opportunity to rediscover a lyric poet of excellent temper and perception.
An innovative modernist writer, Hilda Doolittle (1886–1961) wrote under her initials in a career that stretched from 1909 to 1961. Although she is most well known for her poetry—lyric and epic—H.D. also wrote novels, memoirs, short stories, essays, reviews, a children’s book, and translations. An American woman who lived her adult life abroad, H.D. was engaged in the formalist experimentation that preoccupied much of her generation. A range of thematic concerns resonates through her writing: the role of the poet, the civilian representation of war, material and mythologized ancient cultures, the role of national and colonial identity, lesbian and queer sexuality, and religion and spirituality.
Very Good copy.
1973, English
Hardcover (w. dust jacket), 172 pages, 21 x 14.5 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Carcanet Press / Cheshire
$90.00 - In stock -
Very rare first 1973 hardcover edition of H.D.'s classic war Trilogy (The Walls Do Not Fall (1944), Tribute to the Angels (1945) and The Flowering of the Rod (1946), collected for the first time and published together by Carcanet Press, Cheshire. American first editions followed the following year.
"…this ecstasy, ecstasy in language, in beautiful language, is what carries me through the entire trilogy, not only content with her trick…not only content with these high-handed fictions but enchanted with her whole poem, not to say enraptured."—Hayden Carruth, Hudson Review
HD's war Trilogy ranks with Eliot's Four Quartets, Pound's Pisan Cantos and poems like Edith Sitwell's 'Still Falls the Rain' as civilian war poetry in a war which tore apart so many of the cities of Europe. The outer violence of the scene touches the deepest nerves, bringing together a remarkable range of human experience and response.
The Walls Do Not Fall (1944), Tribute to the Angels (1945) and The Flowering of the Rod (1946) were first published in small editions which became collectors' items. They were brought together for the first time in 1973 and recognised as a major poem of our time in which HD decisively transcends the purism of her early styles. With deft indirection she uncovers, through modulation and subversion of a language burdened with history, the very heart of her concerns as a woman of this century carrying the songs and silences of earlier centuries in her bones.
An innovative modernist writer, Hilda Doolittle (1886–1961) wrote under her initials in a career that stretched from 1909 to 1961. Although she is most well known for her poetry—lyric and epic—H.D. also wrote novels, memoirs, short stories, essays, reviews, a children’s book, and translations. An American woman who lived her adult life abroad, H.D. was engaged in the formalist experimentation that preoccupied much of her generation. A range of thematic concerns resonates through her writing: the role of the poet, the civilian representation of war, material and mythologized ancient cultures, the role of national and colonial identity, lesbian and queer sexuality, and religion and spirituality.
Very Good copy in Good distjacket with some chipping/small tears (preserved in mylar wrap)
1991, English
Hardcover (w. dust jacket), 288 pages, 23 x 14 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Virago / London
$40.00 - In stock -
First hardcover edition of The Haunting Of Sylvia Plath by Jacqueline Rose, published by Virago, London, 1991.
Since her suicide in 1963 at the age of 30, Sylvia Plath has become a strange icon. Rose offers an interpretation of Sylvia Plath's writing, claiming that previous interpretations - both feminist and psychoanalytic - have been too polarized. The book also asks why Sylvia Plath has, since her death, become the object of intense speculation, of fantasy, repulsion and desire. The author argues that without a concept of fantasy we can understand neither Plath's work nor what she has come to represent. She proposes that no writer demonstrates more forcefully than Plath the importance of inner psychic life for the wider sexual and political world. By the author of Sexuality in the Field of Vision.
Very Good in Good DJ.
1966/1974, English
Softcover, 258 pages, 18.5 x 12.5 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / good
Published by
Faber & Faber / London
$70.00 - In stock -
First edition from 1966 of The Bell Jar, Sylvia Plath's only novel, originally published under a pseudonym in 1963.
"It is a fine novel, as bitter and remorseless as her last poems.... The world in which the events of this novel take place is a world bounded by the cold war on one side and the sexual war on the other. We follow Esther Greenwood's personal life from her summer job in New York with "Ladies' Day" magazine, back through her days at New England's largest school for women, and forward through her attempted suicide, her bad treatment at one asylum and her good treatment at another, to her final re-entry into the world like a used tyre: "patched, retreaded, and approved for the road".... This novel is not political or historical in any narrow sense, but in looking at the madness of the world and the world of madness it forces us to con-sider the great question posed by all truly realistic fiction: What is reality and how can it be confronted? Esther Greenwood's account of her year in the bell jar is as clear and readable as it is witty and disturbing."—Robert Scholes in the New York Times Book Review
"It has magnificent sections whose candour and revealed suffering will haunt anyone's memory."—M. L. Rosenthal in the Spectator
Good copy of first edition in 1974 printing, with some foxing/tanning to block edges.
1971 / 1975, English
Softcover, 64 pages, 19.5 x 13 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Faber & Faber / London
$35.00 - Out of stock
First 1971 paperback edition in 1975 print of Crossing the Water by Sylvia Plath.
In this volume Ted Hughes has collected a number of poems written by Sylvia Plath in the transitional period between the publication of The Colossus (1960) and before the composition of the poems in Ariel.
'Crossing the Water is full of perfectly realised works. Its most striking impression is of a front-rank artist in the process of discover-ing her true power. Such is Plath's control that the book possesses a singularity and certainty which should make it as celebrated as The Colossus or Ariel. It's capable of bearing the full weight of the grand style while staying true to the sharpest observation of reality.'—Peter Porter in the New Statesman
'Miss Plath's poems chronologically fall between The Colossus (1960) and the posthumous volume Ariel (1965), and to my mind they are her best. ... These poems are an almost perfect marriage of strength and elegance.'—Lyman Andrews in the Sunday Times
'Sustained poems of great quality are gathered in this book. . . . Crossing the Water is an indispensable book, and Sylvia Plath is one of that handful of modern poets whom intelligent readers will feel, more and more, that they have no option but to try and understand.'—Douglas Dunn in Encounter
Very Good copy.
1971 / 1975, English
Softcover, 56 pages, 19.5 x 13 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Faber & Faber / London
$25.00 - Out of stock
First 1971 softcover edition in 1975 print of Winter Trees, a poetry collection by Sylvia Plath.
The poems in this collection were all written in the last nine months of Sylvia Plath's life, and form part of the group from which the Ariel poems were chosen. Her radio play Three Women, also included here, was written slightly earlier, in the transitional period between The Colossus and Ariel.
Winter Trees was the Poetry Book Society's Choice for Autumn 1971.
'A book that anyone seriously interested in poetry now must have ... Sylvia Plath's immense gift is evident throughout.'—Martin Dodsworth in the Guardian
'Nearly all the poems here have the familiar Plath daring, the same feel of bits of frightened, vibrant, indignant conciousness translated instantly into words and images that blend close, experienced horror and icy, sardonic control.'—Alan Brownjohn in the New Statesman
Very Good copy, light cover wear
1992, English
Softcover, 410 pages, 23.17 x 16.66 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
University of Chicago Press / Chicago
$45.00 - Out of stock
From incest to infanticide, from breast-feeding and women's sexuality to female prostitution, from pornography to reproductive politics, and from the first homosexual rights movement to AIDS—this anthology addresses these and other crucial questions concerning the regulation of sexuality: How have society's values and attitudes toward sexuality and morality changed over the centuries? Why and how has the state sought to criminalize certain forms of sexual behavior and to control reproduction? How have churches tried to influence the state in its regulation of sexuality?
Contributions from a diverse group of prominent scholars representing a variety of disciplines are included in this anthology that spans European history. Essays by Randolph Trumbach on "Sex, Gender, and Identity in Modern Culture: Male Sodomy and Female Prostitution in Enlightenment London"; Ruth Perry on "Colonizing the Breast: Sexuality and Maternity in Eighteenth Century England"; Theo van der Meer on "Female Same-Sex Offenders in Late Eighteenth Century Amsterdam"; Robin Ann Sheets on "Pornography, Fairy Tales, and Feminism: Angela Carter's 'The Bloody Chamber'"; and James W. Jones on "Discourses on and of AIDS in West Germany, 1986-1990." Offering the most up-to-date scholarship from a significant and growing field, this collection is essential for both students and faculty in social history, family history, women's and gender studies, gay studies, sociology and literature. These essays were originally published in the Journal of the History of Sexuality.
John C. Fout is professor of history at Bard College. He is the founding editor of the Journal of the History of Sexuality, and general editor of The Chicago Series on Sexuality, History, and Society, a book series published by the University of Chicago Press.
Very Good copy.
1998, English
Softcover, 240 pages, 23 x 15.24 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Cornell University Press / New York
$60.00 - In stock -
Scarce first paperback edition of Suzanne R. Stewart's Sublime Surrender : Male Masochism at the Fin-de-siècle, published in 1998.
When Heinrich Heine left his sick bed in 1848 and stumbled to the Louvre to fall before a statue of the goddess of beauty and lie in the pitying, cold glance she seemed to cast on his prostrate body, he defined a recurring motif of the second half of the nineteenth century, according to Suzanne R. Stewart. Directing her attention to the voice of the shriveled male body at beauty's feet, she investigates the discourse by and about men that took hold in the German-speaking world between 1870 and 1940 and that articulated masculinity as and through its own marginalization. Male masochism, she suggests, was a rhetorical strategy through which men asserted their cultural and political authority paradoxically by embracing the notion that they were (and always had been) wounded and suffering.
Stewart demonstrates and develops her contentions through close readings of the work of Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, Richard Wagner, and Sigmund Freud, in each case showing that the very act through which men sacrificed themselves to women comprised the essence of the new male subject "deeply penetrated by relations of political and sexual power." Masochistic scenarios, whether in literature, music, the visual arts, or medicalized diagnoses of the fin-de-siècle malaise, stage the male as one who submits, as Stewart explains, "to an aestheticized and eroticized gaze and voice."
Very Good copy with light general wear.
1989, English
Softcover, 174 pages, 13 x 20 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Faber & Faber / London
$25.00 - Out of stock
'One day there is life . . . And then, suddenly, it happens there is death.'
So begins Paul Auster's moving and personal meditation on fatherhood, The Invention of Solitude. The first section, 'Portrait of an Invisible Man', reveals Auster's memories and feelings after the death of his father. In 'The Book of Memory' the perspective shifts to Auster's role as a father. The narrator, 'A.', contemplates his separation from his son, his dying grandfather and the solitary nature of writing and story-telling.
With all the keen literary intelligence familiar from The New York Trilogy or Sunset Park, Paul Auster crafts an intensely intimate work from a ground-breaking combination of introspection, meditation and biography.
1989 first paperback Faber and Faber edition. Very Good copy.
2023, English
Softcover, 194 pages, 14.6 x 22.23 cm
Published by
Roof Books / New York
$48.00 - In stock -
Robert Glück's new book I, Boombox is a long poem fashioned from the author's misreadings. In that sense, it's a queer autobiography in which Glück dreams on the page. Winner of the Gertrude Stein Award for Innovative Poetry in English.
"Rimbaud infamously claimed that I is an other, but for Bob I is a flicker of error, or a wandering ear that invents. He has made a home for several decades of errant listening in this sinuous long poem, which light heartedly teases the modernist tradition it also subverts. In true mock-heroic manner, Bob reveals from his gay marble desk how God's laughter glides in and out of garden festival, action film, and sublet alike. I have been waiting for this book for years and it sweetly exceeds all of my hopes."—Lisa Robertson
"In I, Boombox, Robert Glück makes it clear that dreams are as real as the spurts of sentences we use to discover them. Scoring the 'umbilical/indescribabilia' that accompanies unconscious feeling into a thin strip of thickly montaged verse, the 'invisible speakers' that populate Glück's poem--their misreadings and cant half-truths, their headlines and lies--turn dream's content into poetic foam. In this mind's eye--the 'suburb' is blithely rendered into a thing 'superb, ' and 'loneliness' roars with the face of a 'lioness /and intimacy.' I, Boombox is a poem of frothy divinations tempered by the slapstick of speech. It suggests that desire without sense is desire nevertheless--and this is a delight to understand."—Shiv Kotecha
Robert Glück served as director of San Francisco State University's The Poetry Center, co-director of Small Press Traffic Literary Center, and associate editor at Lapis Press. His books include two novels, Jack the Modernist and Margery Kempe, two books of stories, ELEMENTS OF A COFFEE SERVICE and Denny Smith, a book of poems, Reader, and with Kathleen Fraser, a book of prose poems, In Commemoration of the Visit. With Bruce Boone, Glück translated La Fontaine for a book of that name. With Camille Roy, Mary Berger, and Gail Scott, he edited Biting the Error: Writers on Narrative. Glück prefaced Between Life and Death, a volume of Frank Moore's paintings, and, with artist Dean Smith, made the film Aliengnosis, based on readings from I, Boombox. Other books include Communal Nude: Collected Essays, and Parables, an editioned artist book with Cuban artists José Angel Toirac and Meira Marrero D'az. Margery Kempe was republished by NYRB Classics in 2020 and his novel About Ed by NYRB in 2023.
2014, English
Hardcover, 320 pages 25 x 18 cm
Published by
University of Chicago Press / Chicago
$65.00 - In stock -
German writer, critic, and theorist Paul Scheerbart (1863–1915) died nearly a century ago, but his influence is still being felt today. Considered by some a mad eccentric and by others a visionary political thinker in his own time, he is now experiencing a revival thanks to a new generation of scholars who are rightfully situating him in the modernist pantheon.
Glass! Love!! Perpetual Motion!!! is the first collection of Scheerbart’s multifarious writings to be published in English. In addition to a selection of his fantastical short stories, it includes the influential architectural manifesto Glass Architecture and his literary tour-de-force Perpetual Motion: The Story of an Invention. The latter, written in the guise of a scientific work (complete with technical diagrams), was taken as such when first published but in reality is a fiction—albeit one with an important message. Glass! Love!! Perpetual Motion!!! is richly illustrated with period material, much of it never before reproduced, including a selection of artwork by Paul Scheerbart himself. Accompanying this original material is a selection of essays by scholars, novelists, and filmmakers commissioned for this publication to illuminate Scheerbart’s importance, then and now, in the worlds of art, architecture, and culture.
Coedited by artist Josiah McElheny and Christine Burgin, with new artwork created for this publication by McElheny, Glass! Love!! Perpetual Motion!!! is a long-overdue monument to a modern master
1981, German
Hardcover (w. dust jacket), 164 pages, 20 x 24.7 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
$100.00 - Out of stock
Beautiful album collecting the graphic works of the eccentric, Danzig-born poet, architectural prophet, and proto-surrealist Paul Scheerbart, edited by Machthild Rausch and published by Verlag Klaus G. Renner, Münich. "Beyond Gallery", reproducing his phenomenal illustrations, alongside texts in German, is a comprehensive overview of the visionary "first Expressionist" and master of the fantastique. Highly recommended.
Paul Karl Wilhelm Scheerbart (1863—1915) was a German author of speculative fiction literature and drawings, best remembered through obscure citations from Walter Benjamin, Walter Gropius, and Bruno Taut. From the late 1880s to his premature death in 1915, he wrote prolifically on science, urban planning and design, space travel, and gender politics, often in the course of a single text. His most celebrated treatise, Glass Architecture (Glasarchitektur, 1914) foretold of a sublime, technocratic civilization whose peaceful world-order was borne from the proliferation of crystal cities and floating continents of chromatic glass, a vision summed up in his aphorism: “Colored glass destroys all hatred at last.” Like his French contemporaries Camille Flammarion, Villiers de L’Isle-Adam, Raymond Roussel, and Alfred Jarry, Scheerbart’s prophetic oeuvre oscillated between themes of technology and aesthetics in a genre known in the Francophone world as fantastique.
Very Good copy with VG dust jacket.