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.
1991, English
Hardcover (w. dust jacket), 110 pages, 20.3 x 28.3 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Peter Owen Ltd. / London
$160.00 - In stock -
First hardcover edition of this splendid collection of Jean Cocteau's Erotica Drawings, published by Peter Owen Ltd., London, published in 1991.
Although better known for his poetry, films and novels, Jean Cocteau experimented with drawing from childhood, and his caricatures have become iconic of his unique vision of people and life. This beautiful book collects four decades of his erotic drawings, many of which could not be published in the artist's lifetime. With images of some of Cocteau's famous lovers, including author Raymond Radiguet and actor Jean Marais.
Jean Maurice Eugène Clément Cocteau (1889—1963) was a French poet, playwright, novelist, designer, filmmaker, visual artist and critic. He was one of the foremost creatives of the surrealist, avant-garde, and Dadaist movements; and one of the most influential figures in early 20th-century art as a whole.
Very Good copy with VG dust jacket.
1970, Japanese
Softcover (w. slipcase and obi), 104 pages, 31 x 24 cm
1st US Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Agureman-sha / Tokyo
$550.00 - Out of stock
Super rare first major book of collected artworks by ero-guro master Toshio Saeki (1945—2019), published in 1970 by Agureman after his 1968 self-published collection. Stunning large-format softcover collection of uncompromising black and white images that would propel the career of this legendary underground artist of the comic macabre, housed in original publisher's cardboard slipcase and with the rarely preserved illustrated obi-strip.
Toshio Saeki (1945—2019) was an illusive Japanese illustrator and painter, and icon of 1970s Tokyo counterculture, known for combining Japanese folklore, Yōkai spirits and elements of Western art with his own sophisticated aesthetics to create a unique, sensational world of eros, dark humour, and horror. Given the title “Erotic Engineer” by Timothy Leary, Saeki's provocative art broke all sexual taboos, questioned Japanese ideology and traditional views on love, desire and gender roles. Saeki’s surgically-precise graphic work is closely related to the Japanese cultural phenomenon ‘Erotic, Grotesque, Nonsense’ (ero, guro, nansensu).
“Toshio Saeki conjures death with a pen”—Shūji Terayama, 1969.
Good—VG copy with tanning and wear with some light creasing, light foxing, light chipping to case spine. In remarkable, preserved shape for this title!
2002, Japanese
Hardcover in slipcase w. illustrated paste-on, unpaginated, 21.5 x 15 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / fine
Published by
Seirin Kogeisha / Tokyo
$450.00 - Out of stock
Signed copy of the first, limited, number-stamped edition of "The Earliest Works of Toshio Saeki" by the Japanese master of Ero guro, published by Seirin-Kogei-Sha in 2002 and long out-of-print. Before Saeki worked in his later palette of bright flat colours, he expressed the darker and more chaotic aspects of unbridled eroticism in stark black and white, with the occasional and dramatic splash of a single primary colour. In this lavishly illustrated book, Saeki's disturbing iconography reveals links to the past and simultaneously indicates the even more bizarre twists his work would take in the future. The Earliest Works also shows the early inspirations of Toshio Saeki, Tomi Ungerer's effect being a most clear one. Broken into three chapters: Earliest Works, Uncollected Works, and Unpublished Studies from 1969, the book also includes a chronological record and notes by Yuji Yamashita. An incredible book! Signed by Saeki in metallic silver to inside cover.
Toshio Saeki (1945—2019) was an illusive Japanese illustrator and painter, and icon of 1970s Tokyo counterculture, known for combining Japanese folklore, Yōkai spirits and elements of Western art with his own sophisticated aesthetics to create a unique, sensational world of eros, dark humour, and horror. Given the title “Erotic Engineer” by Timothy Leary, Saeki's provocative art broke all sexual taboos, questioned Japanese ideology and traditional views on love, desire and gender roles. Saeki’s surgically-precise graphic work is closely related to the Japanese cultural phenomenon ‘Erotic, Grotesque, Nonsense’ (ero, guro, nansensu).
“Toshio Saeki conjures death with a pen”—Shūji Terayama, 1969.
Perfect fine hardcover copy housed in fine slipcase, beautifully preserved.
2006, Japanese / French
Hardcover (w. slipcase), 26.5 x 19 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Seirin Kogeisha / Tokyo
$350.00 - In stock -
Now very rare out-of-print collection "1970, Toshio Saeki" by the Japanese master of Ero guro, published in 2006 by Seirin Kogeisha. Published in this hardcover, slipcased, numbered edition of 2000 copies, "1970, Toshio Saeki" reproduces a fine selection of colour and b/w works of the erotic bizarre, accompanied by captions and postface by Saeki himself, in Japanese and French.
Toshio Saeki (1945—2019) was an illusive Japanese illustrator and painter, and icon of 1970s Tokyo counterculture, known for combining Japanese folklore, Yōkai spirits and elements of Western art with his own sophisticated aesthetics to create a unique, sensational world of eros, dark humour, and horror. Given the title “Erotic Engineer” by Timothy Leary, Saeki's provocative art broke all sexual taboos, questioned Japanese ideology and traditional views on love, desire and gender roles. Saeki’s surgically-precise graphic work is closely related to the Japanese cultural phenomenon ‘Erotic, Grotesque, Nonsense’ (ero, guro, nansensu).
“Toshio Saeki conjures death with a pen”—Shūji Terayama, 1969.
Very Good copy in VG slipcase.
2019, French / English / Japanese
Hardcover, 104 pages, 30 x 20 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / fine
Published by
Cornelius / Paris
$240.00 - In stock -
Now out-of-print first French hardcover edition of this cult work by ero-guro master Toshio Saeki (1945—2019). The most famous work by Toshio Saeki, Red box (Akai Hako) brings together around fifty illustrations drawn by Toshio Saeki in 1972. A masterpiece of the erotic-grotesque, this re-print benefits from a substantial re-formatting of the original double-page spreads to seamless landscape in order to fully appreciate the fascinating work of Toshio Saeki. In addition, the preface of the book is translated into three languages (French/English/Japanese) so that the work can be fully appreciated internationally for the first time.
Toshio Saeki (1945—2019) was an illusive Japanese illustrator and painter, and icon of 1970s Tokyo counterculture, known for combining Japanese folklore, Yōkai spirits and elements of Western art with his own sophisticated aesthetics to create a unique, sensational world of eros, dark humour, and horror. Given the title “Erotic Engineer” by Timothy Leary, Saeki's provocative art broke all sexual taboos, questioned Japanese ideology and traditional views on love, desire and gender roles. Saeki’s surgically-precise graphic work is closely related to the Japanese cultural phenomenon ‘Erotic, Grotesque, Nonsense’ (ero, guro, nansensu).
“Toshio Saeki conjures death with a pen”—Shūji Terayama, 1969.
Fine, As New copy.
2007, Japanese
Softcover (w. obi), 68 pages, 27.5 x 21.5 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Wailea Publishing / Tokyo
$220.00 - Out of stock
Seldom seen Japanese facsimile of this cult classic work by ero-guro master Toshio Saeki (1945—2019), published in original over-sized slipcased edition in 1972, this 2007 edition by erotica publisher Wailea. Also long out-of-print, this deluxe edition with exquisite printing presents each full-bleed colour spread from the original as double folded bound page, creating a unique viewing experience. With original heavily printed red obi-strip in honour of the original red box. The most famous work by Toshio Saeki, Red box (Akai Hako) brings together over fifty illustrations drawn by Toshio Saeki made in 1972. Akai Hako is a masterpiece!
Toshio Saeki (1945—2019) was an illusive Japanese illustrator and painter, and icon of 1970s Tokyo counterculture, known for combining Japanese folklore, Yōkai spirits and elements of Western art with his own sophisticated aesthetics to create a unique, sensational world of eros, dark humour, and horror. Given the title “Erotic Engineer” by Timothy Leary, Saeki's provocative art broke all sexual taboos, questioned Japanese ideology and traditional views on love, desire and gender roles. Saeki’s surgically-precise graphic work is closely related to the Japanese cultural phenomenon ‘Erotic, Grotesque, Nonsense’ (ero, guro, nansensu).
“Toshio Saeki conjures death with a pen”—Shūji Terayama, 1969.
Very Good with unique obi. Some marking with white covers from obi.
2023, English
Hardcover, 76 pages, 32 x 28 cm
Published by
Baron / UK
$85.00 - In stock -
The fourth edition of The Death Book is dedicated to Japanese artist, Toshio Saeki’s (1945—2019) archive of rarely published illustration work, that explores scenes of violence, brutality, horror and what lies beneath the surface of Japanese culture.
Saeki’s work is notable for combining traditional Shunga and Yōkai styles with elements of Western art and is characterised by eroticism, death and gore, questioning Japanese ideology and expansionism. Historian’s often describe Saeki’s work as being closely related to the Japanese cultural phenomenon ‘Erotic, Grotesque, Nonsense’ (ero, guro, nansensu).
The book also contains an introduction by historian Euphemia Franklin.
Born 1945, Miyazaki prefecture, Japan. Saeki's drawings are created by using an original method called “chinto printing”. This technique emphasizes the "flatness" composed of "lines" and "coloured surfaces," and gives the work a unique character. In recent years, Saeki has had exhibits in New York, San Francisco, London, Paris, Tel Aviv, Hong Kong, Toronto, Japan, Taipei, all of them being received with much critical acclaim. Saeki spent his later years in the mountains of Chiba prefecture, drawing, reading, enjoying ikebana of wildflowers; treasuring and loving the activities of everyday life with his wife.
2017, English
Softcover, 144 pages, 12.9 x 19.8 cm
Published by
Bloomsbury Academic / London
$48.00 - In stock -
"I should have written you after my first reading of The Living Currency; it was already breath-taking and I should have responded. After reading it a few more times, I know it is the best book of our times."—letter to Pierre Klossowski from Michel Foucault, winter 1970.
Living Currency is the first English translation of Klossowski's La monnaie vivante. It offers an analysis of economic production as a mechanism of psychic production of desires and is a key work from this often overlooked but wonderfully creative French thinker.
Edited by Vernon W. Cisney, Nicolae Morar, Daniel W. Smith
contents :
1.Introduction: Pierre Klossowaki: From Theatrical
Pierre Klossowski (August 9, 1905, Paris – August 12, 2001, Paris) was a French writer, translator and artist. He was the eldest son of the artists Erich Klossowski and Baladine Klossowska, and his younger brother was the painter Balthus.
As a writer, Pierre Klossowski wrote full length volumes on the Marquis de Sade and Friedrich Nietzsche, a number of essays on literary and philosophical figures, and five novels. Roberte Ce Soir (Roberte in the Evening) provoked controversy due to its graphic depiction of sexuality.[1] He translated several important texts (by Virgil, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Martin Heidegger, Friedrich Hölderlin, Franz Kafka, Nietzsche, and Walter Benjamin) into French, worked on films and was also an artist, illustrating many of the scenes from his novels. Klossowski participated in most issues of George Bataille's review, Acéphale, in the late 1930s.
His 1969 book, Nietzsche and the Vicious Circle, greatly influenced French philosophers such as Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze, and Jean-François Lyotard.
1990, English
Hardcover (w. dust jacket), 144 pages, 22.5 x 15 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Dalkey Archive Press / US
$40.00 - Out of stock
Gorgeous first 1990 hardcover edition of Jacques Roubaud's Some Thing Black, translated by Rosmarie Waldrop, alongside the photographic work of Alix Cleo Roubaud, and published by Dalkey Archive Press.
In 1983 Jacques Roubaud’s wife Alix Cleo died at the age of 31 of a pulmonary embolism. The grief-stricken author responded with one brief poem (“Nothing”), then fell silent for thirty months. In subsequent years, Roubaud―poet, novelist, mathematician―composed a series of prose poems, a collection that is a profound mediation on the experience of death, the devastation it brings to the lover who goes on living, and the love that remains. Despite the universality of this experience, no other writer has so devoted himself to exploring and recording the many-edged forms of grief, mourning, bewilderment, emptiness, and loneliness that attend death. No other writer has provided a kind of solace while facing with honesty and hardness the intricate ways in which the living are affected by such a loss. Some Thing Black is an ongoing monologue from Roubaud to his wife, as death assaults the mind’s failure to comprehend absence. Roubaud both refuses to and cannot surrender his wife to the past (“I always wake up in your voice, your hand, your smell”). The death, having occurred in an instant of time, goes on in him (“But inside me your death proceeds slowly, incomprehensibly”). While acknowledging “death calls for a poetry of meditation,” Roubaud is enraged at the limitations of language and words to affect the biological reality. Rather, all that language can do is clarify the exactness of his grief and to recall precisely the image of her life and death. But such recollection―the sight of her dead body, her photographs, her things, the rooms they lived in―becomes a “memory infinitely torturous.” And his most anguished recollection is of their making love (“These memories are the darkest of all”), and a sense of guilt for somehow not having prevented her death (“I did not save you from that difficult night”). This is a brave and honest book that does not disguise that pain of loss. Its nobility, grace, and humanity rest in its refusal to falsify death’s harsh presence (“This dirty rotten life to be mixed up with death”) and in its acceptance of the mind’s limitations (“I do not understand”). This moving, compassionate, uncompromising book is one of the most significant works of our time. Included in this edition is a portfolio of photographs made by Roubaud’s wife in 1980 entitled “If Some Thing Black.”
Jacques Roubaud (b. 1932) is a French poet, writer and mathematician. A member of the Oulipo group, he has published poetry, plays, novels, and translated English poetry and books into French such as Lewis Carroll's The Hunting of the Snark. French poet and novelist Raymond Queneau had Roubaud's first book, a collection of mathematically structured sonnets, published by Éditions Gallimard, and then invited Roubaud to join the Oulipo as the organization's first new member outside the founders.
Very Good in VG dust jacket.
2018, English
Softcover, 560 pages, 22.86 x 17.78 cm
Published by
St. Martin's Press / New York
$40.00 - In stock -
Stories from a mind-bending Australian master, "a genius on the level of Beckett" (Teju Cole)
Never before available to readers in this hemisphere, these stories—originally published from 1985 to 2012—offer an irresistible compendium of the work of one of contemporary fiction's greatest magicians.
While the Australian master Gerald Murnane's reputation rests largely on his longer works of fiction, his short stories stand among the most brilliant and idiosyncratic uses of the form since Borges, Beckett, and Nabokov. Brutal, comic, obscene, and crystalline, Stream System runs from the haunting "Land Deal," which imagines the colonization of Australia and the ultimate vengeance of its indigenous people as a series of nested dreams; to "Finger Web," which tells a quietly terrifying, fractal tale of the scars of war and the roots of misogyny; to "The Interior of Gaaldine," which finds its anxious protagonist stranded beyond the limits of fiction itself.
No one else writes like Murnane, and there are few other authors alive still capable of changing how—and why—we read.
1969, English
Softcover, 144 pages, 20 x 13.5 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / good
Published by
New Directions / New York
$25.00 - Out of stock
First 1969 edition of Earth House Hold by Gary Snyder. Both Pound and Williams have shown how a good poet can revitalize prose style. Earth House Hold (a play on the root meanings of “ecology”) drawn from Gary Snyder’s essays and journals, may prove a landmark for the new generation. “As a poet," Snyder tells us, “I hold the most archaic values on earth. They go back to the late Paleolithic; the fertility of the soil, the magic of animals, the power-vision in solitude, the terrifying initiation and rebirth; the love and Ecstasy of the dance, the common work of the tribe.” He develops, as replacement for shattered social structures, a concept of tribal tradition which could lead to “growth and enlightenment in self-disciplined freedom. Whatever is or ever was in any other culture can be reconstructed from the unconscious through meditation . . . the coming revolution will close the circle––and link us in many ways with the most creative aspects of our archaic past.”
Good—Very Good copy with tanning, previous owners name to title page.
1980, English
Softcover, 84 pages, 23 x 15.5 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / good
Published by
Burning Deck / Providence
$40.00 - Out of stock
First 1980 edition of Rosmarie Waldrop's When They Have Senses poetry collection, published by her Burning Deck imprint in an edition of 1000.
Rosmarie Waldrop (b. 1935) was born in Kitzingen am Main, Germany. At the age of ten, she spent half a year acting with a traveling theater. She has studied at Würzburg, Freiburg, Aix-Marseille, and Michigan universities, earning her PhD in 1966. She has lived in the United States since 1958. Waldrop began publishing her poetry in English in the late 1960s and, since 1968, has been co-editor and publisher of Burning Deck Press with her husband, the poet and translator Keith Waldrop. For nearly sixty years, the Waldrops have influenced multiple generations of writers through their own poetry and fiction, translations, teaching, and their press, Burning Deck, which published some of the most influential authors of late-twentieth-century avant-garde literature. Rosmarie Waldrop is the author of more than three dozen books of poetry, fiction, and criticism, most recently her trilogy Curves to the Apple: The Reproduction of Profiles, Lawn of Excluded Middle, Reluctant Gravities (New Directions, 2006), and Dissonance (University of Alabama Press, 2005), a collection of essays.
Good copy in stiff wrappers, crease to bottom-right corner, small knick to top of cover, light wear.
2012, English
Softcover, 144 pages, 160 x 240 mm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Walther König / Köln
$120.00 - Out of stock
First edition of the fast out-of-print "FESPA Digital - Fruit Logistica" photo book by Wolfgang Tillmans. In February 2011, German photographer Wolfgang Tillmans (born 1968) decided to pay a visit to Fruit Logistica, the most important convention in the international fruit trade, held annually in Berlin. More than 2,400 fresh produce companies gather at the convention, presenting a dazzling panorama of commerce-and, of course, of texture and color. "I was left open-mouthed by the crazy displays and the variety and complexity of the international fruit trade and its processing machinery," he records. "I reacted with my camera straight away, but left the pictures for a while so I could look at them with a bit of distance, although I was immediately thinking of an artist's book in the format of "Concorde"" (Tillmans' 2008 book portrait of the eponymous aircraft). The resultant 66 color photographs are published here for the first time.
Very Good—Fine copy.
1977, English
Hardcover (w. dust jacket), 400 pages, 24 x 16.5 cm
1st US Edition, Out of print title / used / fine
Published by
Viking Press / New York
$250.00 - Out of stock
Rare Fine first hardcover 1977 English language edition of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari's mighty Anti-Oedipus, published by The Viking Press in New York. With introduction by Michel Foucault.
When it first appeared in France in 1972, Anti-Oedipus was hailed as a masterpiece by some and "a work of heretical madness" by others. Anti-Oedipus was the opening explosion to the post-1968 reaction to the structuralist movement; it remains a primary text of post-structuralism. In his preface, Michel Foucault calls Anti-Oedipus an Introduction to Non-Fascist Living. He refers not just to political fascism but to the fascism that is within us, that causes us to desire our own domination. In the book, philosopher Gilles Deleuze and clinical psychoanalyst Félix Guattari set forth the following theory: Western society's innate herd instinct has allowed the government, the media, and even the principles of economics to take advantage of each person's unwillingness to be cut off from the group. What's more, those who suffer from mental disorders may not be insane, but could be individuals in the purest sense, because they are by nature isolated from society. More than twenty-five years after its original publication, Anti-Oedipus still stands as a controversial contribution to a much-needed dialogue on the nature of free thinking.
Fine copy in Fine dust jacket. Looks like clean, unread but brittle glue.
2023, English
Softcover, 96 pages, 20 x 13 cm
Published by
New Directions / New York
$29.00 - In stock -
Translated by Sam Bett.
The Flowers of Buffoonery opens in a seaside sanitarium where Yozo Oba--the narrator of No Longer Human at a younger age--is being kept after a failed suicide attempt. While he is convalescing, his friends and family visit him, and other patients and nurses drift in and out of his room. Against this dispiriting backdrop, everyone tries to maintain a lighthearted, even clownish atmosphere: playing cards, smoking cigarettes, vying for attention, cracking jokes, and trying to make each other laugh.
While No Longer Human delves into the darkest corners of human consciousness, The Flowers of Buffoonery pokes fun at these same emotions: the follies and hardships of youth, of love, and of self-hatred and depression. A glimpse into the lives of a group of outsiders in prewar Japan, The Flowers of Buffoonery is a darkly humorous and fresh addition to Osamu Dazai's masterful and intoxicating oeuvre.
2010, English
Softcover, 176 pages, 21x12.5 cm
Published by
New Directions / New York
$30.00 - In stock -
Translated by Donald Keene.
Portraying himself as a failure, the protagonist of Osamu Dazai's No Longer Human narrates a seemingly normal life even while he feels himself incapable of understanding human beings. Oba Yozo's attempts to reconcile himself to the world around him begin in early childhood, continue through high school, where he becomes a "clown" to mask his alienation, and eventually lead to a failed suicide attempt as an adult. Without sentimentality, he records the casual cruelties of life and its fleeting moments of human connection and tenderness.
1997, Japanese
Softcover, 192 pages, 15 x 23 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Heibonsha / Tokyo
$140.00 - Out of stock
First edition of one of the finest of Araki's photo books, dedicated entirely to his incredible Erotos series. Published as part of the Complete Works collection, in this work, controversial and legendary Japanese photographer Nobuyoshi Araki makes a radical departure from his usual portraits and cityscapes. A collection of arrestingly primal close-ups of parts of the body as well as various objects—pipes, fruit, wet sidewalks, flowers, snails—Erotos delves deep into the erotic subconscious. Reproduced in gorgeous glossy duotone and bound in the original jacket and publisher's obi-strip (not pictured). One our favourite bodies of work by Araki.
Nobuyoshi Araki was born in Tokyo in 1940. Given a camera by his father at the ripe age of twelve, Araki has been taking pictures ever since. He studied photography and film at Chiba University and went into commercial photography soon after graduating. In 1970 he created his famous Xeroxed Photo Albums, which he produced in limited editions and sent to friends, art critics, and people selected randomly from the telephone book. Over the years, his bold, unabashed photographs of his private life have been the object of a great deal of controversy and censorship (especially in his native Japan), a fact that has not fazed the artist nor diminished his influence. To date, Araki has published over 400 books of his work.
Very Good in VG dust jacket and obi.
1966, English
Softcover (staple-bound), 18 pages
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / good
Published by
Auckland City Art Gallery / Auckland
$25.00 - In stock -
Catalogue published in 1966 on the occasion of the exhibition Eight New Zealand Artists, Auckland City Art Gallery, February 1966, featuring Don Binney, Robert Ellis, Patrick Hanly, Colin McCahon, Milan Mrkusich, Ross Ritchie, Greer Twiss, Tim Garrity. Illustrated throughout with work by the artists, introductory essay by Hamish Keith, biographical information on each artist, including exhibition chronologies. Catalogue lists 40 works executed in the years just prior to 1966 when the exhibition was held.
Good copy with age/tanning.
2011, English
Softcover, 670 pages, 11.5 x 17.5 cm
$59.00 - In stock -
Fanged Noumena assembles for the first time the writings of Nick Land, variously described as ‘rabid nihilism’, ‘mad black Deleuzianism’, ‘accelerationism’, and ‘cybergothic’.Wielding weaponized, machinically-recombined versions of Deleuze and Guattari, Reich and Freud, in the company of fellow ‘werewolves’ such as Nietzsche, Bataille, Artaud, Trakl and Cioran, to a cutup soundtrack of Bladerunner, Terminator and Apocalypse Now, Land plotted a rigorously schizophrenic escape route out of academic philosophy, and declared all-out war on the Human Security System. Despite his ‘disappearance’, Land’s output has been a crucial underground influence both on recent Speculative Realist thought, and on artists, writers, musicians and filmmakers invigorated by his uncompromising and abrasive philosophical vision.Long the subject of rumor and vague legend, Land’s turbulent post-genre theory-fictions of cybercapitalist meltdown smear cyberpunk, philosophy, arithmetic, poetics, cryptography, anthropology, grammatology and the occult into unrecognizable and gripping hybrids. Beginning with Land’s radical rereadings of Heidegger, Nietzsche and Kant, Fanged Noumena terminates in Professor Barker’s cosmic theory of geo-trauma and neo-qabbalistic attempts to formulate a numerical anti-language.Fanged Noumena is a dizzying trip through land’s rigorous, incisive and provocative work, establishing it as an indispensable resource for radically inhuman thought in the twenty-first century.
Edited and with an Introduction by Ray Brassier and Robin Mackay
Contents: Editors' Introduction / Kant, Capital and the Prohibition of Incest / Narcissism and Dispersion in Heidegger's 1953 Trakl Interpretation / Delighted to Death / Art as Insurrection / Spirit and Teeth / After the Law / Making it with Death / Shamanic Nietzsche / Circuitries / Machinic Desire / Cybergothic / Cyberrevolution / Hypervirus / No Future / Cyberspace Anarchitecture as Jungle-War / Meat (or How to Kill Oedipus in Cyberspace) / Meltdown / A ZiiGothic X-Coda (Cooking Lobsters with Jake and Dinos) / KatasoniX / Barker Speaks / Mechanomics / Cryptolith / Non-Standard Numeracies: Nomad Cultures / Occultures / Origins of the Cthulhu Club / Introduction to Qwernomics / Tic-Talk / Qabbala 101 / Critique of Transcendental Miserablism----
Land had the most brilliantly seductive and meteoric mind, endlessly imaginative and capable of adopting, inhabiting and discarding any philosophical position. With him - and rightly so - philosophy infected every area of life, and sheer vitality of life reverberated in his thinking.
I see Fanged Noumena as a kind of righteous revenge. Nick was dismissed by professional philosophers because they simply didn't want to think and preferred their turgid academic complacency. I always admired him for his unwavering desire to take thought to its absolute limit and then see how much harder one could push. - Simon Critchley
These extraordinary texts, superheated compounds of severe abstraction and scabrous wit, testify to a uniquely penetrating intelligence, fusing transcendental philosophy, number theory, geophysics, biology, cryptography and occultism into startlingly cohesive but increasingly delirious theory-fictions. - Ray Brassier
This is theory as cyberpunk fiction: Deleuze-Guattari's concept of capitalism as the virtual unnameable Thing that haunts all previous formations pulp-welded to the timebending of the Terminator films. Land's machinic theory-poetry parallelled the digital intensities of 90s jungle, techno and doomcore, anticipating 'impending human extinction becoming accessible as a dance-floor'. - Mark Fisher (K-Punk)
In the last half of the twentieth century, academics talked endlessly about the outside, but no-one went there. Land, by exemplary contrast, made experiments in the unknown unavoidable for a philosophy caught in the abstractive howl of post-political cybernetics. Fanged Noumena demonstrates how Land ruined a generation of intellectuals for merely academic philosophy, by opening a speculative singularity where the future used to be. - Iain Hamilton Grant
2019, English
Softcover, 320 pages, 17.1 x 23.5 cm
Published by
Urbanomic / Cornwall
$49.00 - Out of stock
Tracing the the potential of sound, infrasound, and ultrasound to access anomalous zones of transmission between the realms of the living and the dead.
Contributors:
Lawrence Abu Hamdan, Lendl Barcelos, Charlie Blake, Lisa Blanning, Brooker Buckingham, Al Cameron, Erik Davis, Kodwo Eshun, Matthew Fuller, Kristen Gallerneaux, Lee Gamble, Agnes Gayraud, Steve Goodman, Anna Greenspan, Olga Gurionova, S. Ayesha Hameed, Tim Hecker, Julian Henriques, Toby Heys, Eleni Ikoniadou, Amy Ireland, Nicola Masciandaro, Ramona Naddaff, Anthony Nine, The Occulture, Luciana Parisi, Alina Popa, Paul Purgas, Georgina Rochefort, Steven Shaviro, Jonathan Sterne, Jenna Sutela, Eugene Thacker, Dave Tompkins, Shelley Trower, and Souzana Zamfe.
For the past seven years the AUDINT group has been researching peripheral sonic perception (unsound) and the ways in which frequencies are utilized to modulate our understanding of presence/non-presence, entertainment/torture, and ultimately life/death. Concurrently, themes of hauntology have inflected the musical zeitgeist, resonating with the notion of a general cultural malaise and a reinvestment in traces of lost futures inhabiting the present.
This undead culture has already spawned a Lazarus economy in which Tupac, ODB, and Eazy-E are digitally revivified as laser-lit holograms. The obscure otherworldly dimensions of sound have also been explored in the sonic fictions produced by the likes of Drexciya, Sun Ra, and Underground Resistance, where hauntology is virtually extended: the future appears in the cracks of the present.
The contributions to this volume reveal how the sonic nurtures new dimensions in which the real and the imagined (fictional, hyperstitional, speculative) bleed into one another, where actual sonic events collide with spatiotemporal anomalies and time-travelling entities, and where the unsound serves to summon the undead.
1983, English
Softcover, 27 pages, 22 x 14 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
The MIT Press / Massachusetts
$48.00 - In stock -
Prisms, essays in cultural criticism and society, is the work of a critic and scholar who has had a marked influence on contemporary American and German thought. It displays the unusual combination of intellectual depth, scope, and philosophical rigor that Adorno was able to bring to his subjects, whether he was writing about astrology columns in Los Angeles newspapers, the special problems of German academics immigrating to the United States during the Nazi years, or Hegel's influence on Marx.
In these essays, Adorno explores a variety of topics, ranging from Aldous Huxley's Brave New World and Kafka's The Castle to Jazz, Bach, Schoenberg, Proust, Veblen's theory of conspicuous consumption, museums, Spengler, and more. His writing throughout is knowledgeable, witty, and at times archly opinionated, but revealing a sensitivity to the political, cultural, economic, and aesthetic connections that lie beneath the surfaces of everyday life.
Prisms is included in the series, Studies in Contemporary German Social Thought, edited by Thomas McCarthy.
Theodor W. Adorno (1903-1969) was a student of philosophy, musicology, psychology, and sociology at Frankfurt where he later became Professor of Philosophy and Sociology and Co-Director of the Frankfurt School. During the war years he lived in Oxford, in New York, and in Los Angeles, continuing to produce numerous books on music, literature, and culture.
Shierry Weber Nicholsen teaches environmental philosophy and psychology in Antioch University Seattle's M.A. Program on Environment and Community and is a psychoanalytic psychotherapist in private practice in Seattle. She has translated several works by Theodor Adorno and Jürgen Habermas.
Very Good copy.
1992, English
Softcover (unbound), 28 pages
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Discipline Produzioni / Udine
$90.00 - Out of stock
Rare first issue of Suffer, an excellent early Italian fanzine devoted to industrial/dark ambient/harsh noise, published by Gianfranco Santoro (L.S.D.) of FinalMuzik and the legendary Discipline Produzioni label (Whitehouse, The Grey Wolves, Zona Industriale, Ethnic Acid, etc.). Gianfranco interviews Nocturnal Emissions and Rudolf Eb.er and Joke Lanz of Schimpfluch Gruppe (Sudden Infant, Runzelstirn & Gurgelstøck, Psychic Rally....), plus loads of news and extensive reviews of Death In June, Genocide Organ, Smell & Quim, Club Moral, Brume, Coil, De Fabriek, Lycia, Attrition, Sol Invictus, Dive, Black Tape for a Blue Girl, Sol Niger, Laibach, Current 93, Clock DVA, Suckdog, Dominator, Trance, The State, loads more. illustrated throughout. All texts in English.
Very Good copy, lightly tanned, light wear.
1997, Japanese
Softcover (w. dust jacket), 154 pages, 29.7 x 21 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Treville / Tokyo
$220.00 - In stock -
First 1997 edition collection of "The Early Works" by the Japanese master of Ero guro Toshio Saeki, published by Treville in 1997 and long out-of-print. An extensive collection of incredible works gathered from his first major book in 1970, his acclaimed 1971 Red Book, the panel-by-panel replication of an early Saeki manga story, and much more. Texts by Akira Uno, Alain Robbe-Grillet and Timothy Leary.
Toshio Saeki (1945—2019) was an illusive Japanese illustrator and painter, and icon of 1970s Tokyo counterculture, known for combining Japanese folklore, Yōkai spirits and elements of Western art with his own sophisticated aesthetics to create a unique, sensational world of eros, dark humour, and horror. Given the title “Erotic Engineer” by Timothy Leary, Saeki's provocative art broke all sexual taboos, questioned Japanese ideology and traditional views on love, desire and gender roles. Saeki’s surgically-precise graphic work is closely related to the Japanese cultural phenomenon ‘Erotic, Grotesque, Nonsense’ (ero, guro, nansensu).
“Toshio Saeki conjures death with a pen”—Shūji Terayama, 1969.
Very Good copy in VG dust jacket, light wear.
1964, Spanish
Softcover (staple-bound), 36 pages, 21.5 x 21.5 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Museo de Arte Moderno / Mexico City
Instituto Nacional de Bellas Artes / Mexico City
$300.00 - In stock -
Very rare 1964 catalogue of surrealist Remedios Varo (1908—1963), recorded as the first book devoted solely to the work of Varo, published on the occasion of the major survey exhibition presented by the Museo Nacional de Arte Moderno and Instituto Nacional de Bellas Artes, Mexico City, August 3—31, 1964. Profusely illustrated throughout with the paintings of Varo reproduced in colour and b/w, plus portrait of the artist. Introduction by Horacio Flores-Sanchez, essays by Raul Flores Guerrero and Carlos Pellicer. Texts in Spanish. A wonderful historical document of a visionary artist.
Remedios Varo (1908—1963)
During her childhood in Spain, Varo was influenced by her engineer father, who taught her to draw, and her strict Catholic schooling, against which she rebelled. Following her graduation from art school, she pursued Surrealism and political change. She moved to Paris in 1937, later finding that she could not return to Spain following the Spanish Civil War. Varo associated and exhibited with the Surrealists, exploring magic, alchemy, and analytical psychology. As World War II threatened Paris, Spanish refugees came under threat. Varo was arrested and held in early 1940. After her release, she fled Paris in the face of the Nazi invasion, and by late 1941 had secured passage to Mexico. In Mexico, Varo remained friends with fellow refugees from her European Surrealist circle, including artist Leonora Carrington, who became her closest friend and collaborator. In the late 1940s, as she supported herself through commercial illustration, Varo began to develop her mature personal style. During succeeding decades, she devoted increased time and energy to her art, and she delved further into the fantastical sources that captured her imagination. Her death of a heart attack in 1963 occurred as she was reaching new renown.
Very Good copy with light wear to boards. Previous owner inscription to inside front cover.