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.
1966/1967, German
Softcover, 21 x 16.5 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Kestner Gesellschaft / Hannover
$65.00 - Out of stock
First, only edition of this wonderful catalogue published on the occasion of a comprehensive exhibition of works by the German surrealist visionary Hans Bellmer (1902—1975) at the Kestner-Gesellschaft, Hannover, April 1966—June 1967(!). Absolutely brimming with content, profusely illustrated throughout in colour and b/w with Bellmer's magnificent drawings, paintings, photographs, doll sculptures, and an extensive overview of his graphic works, alongside many texts, inc. notes by Bellmer himself, forward to Georges Bataille's "Madame Edwarda", list of Bellmer's works, exhibitions, bibliography, unseen photographic portraits, and many adverts for Bellmer's exhibitions and lithographic editions, evidence of the immense popularity of the master of European erotica surrealism in Europe. Texts in German.
Very Good copy.
2023, English
Softcover, 24 x 17cm
Ed. of 300,
Published by
Negative Press / Melbourne
$50.00 - In stock -
From 1982–2020, Nixon produced over 500 printed images in relief, intaglio, stencil and planographic processes. While many of the works in his print oeuvre are unique, Nixon also produced works in small editions. From 2015 till his passing in 2020, Nixon worked with printer and publisher Negative Press.
Known predominantly as a painter, John Nixon was also an inventive and prolific printmaker. This new book documents two exhibitions of Nixon’s editions at Negative Press, featuring works made from across the artist's career, alongside personal responses to the prints by curator Sue Cramer, archivist & designer Elizabeth Boon and artist & publisher Trent Walter.
Published in an edition of 300 copies.
2023, English
Hardcover, 320 pages, 25.4 x 20.3 cm
Published by
The MIT Press / Massachusetts
$89.00 - Out of stock
An illuminating study of the work of artist Martin Kippenberger, whose art expressed the enthusiasms and frustrations of the West German middle class.
Martin Kippenberger: Everything Is Everywhere is the first scholarly monograph in English on West German artist Martin Kippenberger (1953–1997), one of the most prominent German artists of the 1980s. In this book, Chris Reitz shows that the condition of Kippenberger’s art was an endless, enthusiastic searching, constrained by the impossibility of fulfillment. A child during West Germany’s Wirtschaftswunder, the economic miracle of the 1950s and 1960s, and a young adult during the economic recession and political tumult of the 1970s, Kippenberger belonged to the first truly postwar generation. But, largely uninterested in the legacy of National Socialism that had occupied his predecessors, Kippenberger instead pursued a hyperproductive artistic practice that reflected the dreams and fears of the ascendent 1980s West German middle class.
Kippenberger’s ambitions took him everywhere: he founded a museum in Greece, invested in a fashion business and a restaurant, and even bought a gas station in Brazil. He made art in a dizzying range of genres, from paintings to poetry, from posters to stickers. He made art out of his appetites, too, producing art on the theme of his own alcoholism. Intensely entrepreneurial, Kippenberger carried out an artistic practice in which his diverse endeavors, and the people who joined him in them, were all connected in a sprawling network. Reitz deftly presents Kippenberger’s career as an allegory of the neoliberal networks of capital, technology, and culture that spanned Europe and America in the 1980s.
2023, English
Softcover, 188 pages, 20.5 x 13.5 cm
Published by
Self-Published / Melbourne
$20.00 - In stock -
Walking with Ghosts: Six Conversations about Painting — John Spiteri, Boedi Widjaja and Audrey Koh, Christoph Preussmann, Noor Mahnun Mohamed, Moya McKenna, and David Jolly talking with artist, independent curator and writer Jonathan Nichols, and published on the occasion of his PhD exhibition, VCA Artspace, Faculty of Fine Arts and Music, University of Melbourne, June 2022.
"These conversations originated in thinking about what happened in painting in the last few decades. I put this question to each of the artists I spoke with, except Boedi Widjaja whose art-making started later, deploying it at the outset of each conversation as a means to consider how and why the collective shape of painting during a key period has been relatively undocumented from a contemporary art perspective."—Jonathan Nichols
Designer: Matt Hinkley
1978, English
Softcover, 108 pages, 21.5 x 13.5 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Cherry Valley Editions / New York
$65.00 - Out of stock
Rare first 1978 English edition of Flash Card, an incredible collection of poetry by Egyptian-French surrealist poet and author, Joyce Mansour (1928—1986). Translated from the original French by Mary Beach. Cover (front/back) collages and introduction by French poet, translator and artist Claude Pélieu (1934—2002).
Biography communicated by Joyce Mansour:
Autoerotic
Autocritiques
Autodidactic
Automastication
Automasticate
Autoerotica
Joyce Mansour (1928—1986), Egyptian, was born in Bowden England in 1928. She settles down in Paris where she publishes her first collection of poems in 1953, Cris, which is acclaimed in the Surrealist review Medium. Since then she has actively participated in the life of the Surrealist movement, she became the best known surrealist female poet, author of 16 books of poetry, as well as a number of important prose and theatre pieces. Joyce Mansour who recalls "always having written" expresses herself exclusively in poetry which according to her is one with living and thinking. A singular freedom is what strikes one immediately in her poems and stories which are filled with a somber, cruel eroticism completely corroded with humour.
Very Good copy, light tanning, wear.
1991, English
Softcover, 192 pages, 21 x 14 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / fine
Published by
City Lights Books / San Francisco
$65.00 - Out of stock
First 1991 City Lights edition of The Powers of The Word : Selected Essays and Notes 1927-1943 by early 20th-century French spiritual para-surrealist writer, critic, poet, and early, outspoken practitioner of pataphysics, René Daumal (1908-1944). Edited, translated and with introduction by Mark Polizzotti.
"Since his death in 1944, Rene Daumal has come to be recognized as one of the original minds of the twentieth century French letters. Poet, essayist, philosopher and translator, Sanscrit scholar and pupil of Gurdjieff, Daumal was a founder of the Grand Jeu group. He was iconoclastic and eclectic, able to embrace simultaneously Alfred Jarry's Pataphysics and Hindu teachings.
Daumal's two major works in English translation, Mount Analogue and A Night of Serious Drinking, have long been classics in this country; but until now, readers have not had access to the full range of his thought. The Powers of the Word spans a lifetime of essays and notes-many here translated for the first time-from the earliest incitements to drug use and revolt; through Daumal's unique readings of literary works; to his more mature, but no less ardent, meditations." — publisher's blurb
Fine copy. First 1991 Ed.
1968, English
Softcover, 106 pages, 20.5 x 14 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
City Lights Books / San Francisco
$120.00 - Out of stock
Rare first City Lights 1968 English language edition of this classic allegorical adventure novel by early 20th-century French spiritual para-surrealist writer, critic, poet, and early, outspoken practitioner of pataphysics, René Daumal (1908-1944). Translated and introduced by Roger Shattuck.
A touchstone of Surrealism, Pataphysics, and Gurdjieffian mysticism, Mount Analogue was left unfinished (mid-sentence) at the author's early death from tuberculosis in 1944 and first published posthumously in French in 1952, and the book has inspired seekers of art and wisdom ever since - Alejandro Jodorowsky's 1973 film The Holy Mountain is a loose adaptation.
As Daumal writes, “Mount Analogue is the symbolic mountain—the way that unites Heaven and Earth, a way which must exist in material and human form, otherwise our situation would be without hope.”
Roger Shattuck’s 1959 translation, the first made into English, remains the best and closest in spirit to the deadly serious joking of the original.
VG copy with light tanning and foxing to book edges.
1982, English
Softcover, 108 pages, 20.2 x 13.4 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / good
Published by
New Directions / New York
$70.00 - Out of stock
Rare first New Directions 1982 edition of Rasa, or Knowledge of the Self, by early 20th-century French spiritual para-surrealist writer, critic, poet, and early, outspoken practitioner of pataphysics, René Daumal (1908-1944). Translated with an introduction by Louise Landes Levi.
Rasa, or Knowledge of the Self; is the remarkable, and now very scarce, first gathering in English translation of essays and review articles on Hindu aesthetics and translations from the Sanskrit by the French writer Rene Daumal. A member of the Simplist group associated from 1928 to 1932 with the journal Le Grand feu ("The Great Game"), he began cultivating his East Indian studies as an extension of his active pursuit of the avant-garde. In 1932, he made the acquaintance of Uday Shankar, becoming secretary to the latter's Hindu dance troupe and accompanying it that year on its premier American tour. In his efforts to make Shankar's music and dance comprehensible to Western audiences, Daumal developed into a passionate spokesman for Indian culture, and his subsequent writings on the subject are far removed from the usual dry philological speculations of academic Orientalists. "To Approach the Hindu Poetic Art" differentiates between the Indian and European views of aesthetic experience, with special emphasis on the concept of rasa—that is, "taste" or "savor"—which Daumal sees at the heart of all Hindu art. Two essays—"On Indian Music" and "Concerning Uday Shankar"—were written at the time of Shankar's Western tour, while the selection of Daumal's "Oriental Book Reviews" deals with topics, such as The Tibetan Book of the Dead, which were only to spark general interest in the West decades later. The remaining sections of the collection are translations from the Sanskrit that attempt to resonate against language's deepest core.
Good copy with insect nibbles to cover edges.
1986, English
Softcover, 118 pages, 20 x 13 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Penguin Books / London
$30.00 - Out of stock
1986 King Penguin English language edition of this classic allegorical adventure novel by early 20th-century French spiritual para-surrealist writer, critic, poet, and early, outspoken practitioner of pataphysics, René Daumal (1908-1944). Translated and introduced by Roger Shattuck.
A touchstone of Surrealism, Pataphysics, and Gurdjieffian mysticism, Mount Analogue was left unfinished (mid-sentence) at the author's early death from tuberculosis in 1944 and first published posthumously in French in 1952, and the book has inspired seekers of art and wisdom ever since - Alejandro Jodorowsky's 1973 film The Holy Mountain is a loose adaptation.
As Daumal writes, “Mount Analogue is the symbolic mountain—the way that unites Heaven and Earth, a way which must exist in material and human form, otherwise our situation would be without hope.”
Roger Shattuck’s 1959 translation, the first made into English, remains the best and closest in spirit to the deadly serious joking of the original.
Good—VG copy with tanning to pages and single pinch to spine.
1995, English
Softcover, 152 pages, 23.2 x 15.5 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / good
Published by
State University of New York Press / New York
$35.00 - Out of stock
First edition of Agamben's Idea of Prose published by SUNY in 1995. This book consists of prose pieces that find a new form of expression for philosophy, an expression showing the inseparability of idea and prose the very form of truth.
Good copy with corner bumping, general light wear, edge wear.
1999, English
Softcover, 218 pages, 30.5 x 23 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Fine Arts Gallery - University of Maryland / Baltimore
$150.00 - In stock -
Scarce first extensive monographic catalogue published in conjunction with Adrian Piper's major survey exhibition held at the Fine Arts Gallery, University of Maryland, Baltimore, October 14, 1999 - January 15, 2000. Traveled to the New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York, October 4, 2001 - January 13, 2002. Profusely illustrated in black-and-white and colour, alongside accompanying texts by Piper, Maurice Berger, Jean Fisher, Kobena Mercer, Laura Cottingham, and Dara Meyers-Kingsley. With illustrated checklist and bibliography. Cover features her "Self-Portrait Exaggerating My Negroid Features" (1981) work.
Adrian Margaret Smith Piper (b. 1948) is an American conceptual artist and philosopher. Her work addresses ostracism, otherness, racial passing and racism by using various traditional and non-traditional media. The only African American in the early conceptual art movement of the 1960s, she has profoundly influenced the language and form of Conceptual art in America and is widely recognised today through her equally important writings.
Very Good-Fine first edition. Light tanning to edges and light bump to top-right corner.
1974, English / Italian
Softcover, 40 pages, 20.5 x 15.5 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / good
Published by
Rivolta Femminile / Rome
$300.00 - In stock -
First, extremely rare, edition of Suzanne Santoro's artist's book "Per una espressione nuova / Towards a New Expression", published in a small edition in Rome 1974 by Santaro and The Rivolta Femminile ("Women's Revolt") publishing house, founded in 1970 by Carla Lonzi. In the 1960s, Suzanne Santoro (b. 1946, Brooklyn New York), after training at the School of Visual Arts in New York and NYU and being affiliated with the minimalist and conceptual New York context of the 1960s, moved to Rome where she studied classical sculpture. Here her artistic path crossed with the experience of feminist militancy, through her connection to Rivolta Femminile and Carla Lonzi and co-founded the Beato Angelico Cooperative (CBA) and exhibition space. Her research immediately focused on restoring those characteristics of the female image that had been intentionally hidden or transformed by the patriarchal tradition of visual arts, culminating in this artist’s libretto. Mysterious, beautiful and fiercely feminist, Towards a New Expression articulates, through a photographic collection of images, a critical stance towards the "subordinate and unclarified" portrayal of women's genitalia in art from classical to contemporary times. Santoro's book generated some controversy when it was censored by The Institute of Contemporary Arts in London.
Very rare, especially in this first edition. Good copy, well preserved, only with notable but attractive ex-libris "Moon Books" rubber stamp mark on back cover and another to the front end page. The title is written on the blank spine for filing into the collection. It is believed this was from a community library in Berkley. General light wear/marking.
2021, French / English
Softcover, 224 pages (w. English insert), 18.5 x 27.3 cm
Published by
CAC / Brétigny
<o> future <o> / Paris
$90.00 - In stock -
Back in print, this time with English translation insert, the wonderful French catalogue that offers a unique insight into the life and work of the French artist, sculptor and ceramist Valentine Schlegel. This richly illustrated, hugely popular volume (now sold out in multiple French editions) forms the most comprehensive monograph on Schlegel ever published, featuring a large iconography, archives, and texts (in French) by sculptor and Schlegel specialist Hélène Bertin. Published on the occasion of the exhibition “Cette femme pourrait dormir dans l'eau – Valentine Schlegel par Hélène Bertin” at CAC Brétigny, from September 30 to December 09, 2017.
Valentine Schlegel (born 1925 in Sète, South of France) was trained at the Beaux-Art in Montpellier before settling in Paris, where she dedicated herself to ceramics. Schlegel conceived her works as sculptures inspired by nature. Her ceramics, primitive but sophisticated at the same time, made Valentine Schlegel one of the most important ceramists of 1950s.
Hélène Bertin (born 1989 in Petruis, lives and works in Paris and Cucuron) develops a practice which connects the activities of artist, curator and historian.
Edited by Hélène Bertin and Charles Mazé & Coline Sunier.
Text by Hélène Bertin.
Graphic design: Charles Mazé & Coline Sunier.
2013 , Dutch / French / English
Softcover, 624 pages, 23 x 24 cm
Published by
Voetnoot / Amsterdam
$55.00 - In stock -
As a frequent visitor to concerts at Paradiso, Amsterdam’s long-running music venue, in the early 1980s, Dutch photographer Max Natkiel encountered all manner of subcultures: punks, new-wavers, rockers, mods, Rastafarians, squatters, and metal and skinheads. Eventually he decided to bring along his camera and started making portraits of the fascinating people he found; a collection eventually numbering over 1000. A selection of about 600 of these black and white photographs appears here, reflecting the explosion of pure youth culture and fierce desire for individuality he experienced in the decade between 1980-1990. With an introduction by philosopher Dirk van Weelden.
Cover may differ due to 4 versions available.
2023, English
Softcover, 240 pages, 20.32 x 13.97 cm
Published by
Wakefield Press / Cambridge
$32.00 - In stock -
Translated, with an afterword, by Scott Nicolay
Published in occupied Belgium in the dark year of 1943 a few months after his celebrated novel Malpertuis, The City of Unspeakable Fear remains one of Jean Ray’s most curious works. Haunting an ambiguous interzone between detective novel, horror fiction, and Anglophile parody, it follows the misadventures of presumed police officer Sidney Terence Triggs upon his retirement to the sleepy English country town of Ingersham. A cast of characters worthy of Charles Dickens awaits his transplantation, from the sympathetic old clerk Ebenezer Doove and the three haberdashing Pumkins ladies to the druggist Theobold Pycroft, the eccentric department store owner Gregory Cobwell, the autocratic Major Chadburn, the feared Lady Florence Honnybingle, and a motley collection of other humorously humdrum inhabitants.
The emphatically commonplace quickly gives way to haunted melodrama as Triggs’s new neighbors begin to die violently or vanish. His false identity as a detective is put to the test under the threat of murderous phantoms as city and citizens come apart at the seams. In The City of Unspeakable Fear, Miss Marple meets H. P. Lovecraft to create a compellingly curious atmosphere in which F stands for both Fear and Fake.
Jean Ray (1887–1964) is the best known of the multiple pseudonyms of Raymundus Joannes Maria de Kremer. Alternately referred to as the “Belgian Poe” and the “Flemish Jack London,” Ray delivered tales and novels of horror under the stylistic influence of his most cherished authors, Charles Dickens and Geoffrey Chaucer. A pivotal figure in the “Belgian School of the Strange,” Ray authored some 6,500 texts in his lifetime, not including his own biography, which remains shrouded in legend and fiction, much of it his own making. His alleged lives as an alcohol smuggler on Rum Row in the prohibition era, an executioner in Venice, a Chicago gangster, and hunter in remote jungles in fact covered over a more prosaic, albeit ruinous, existence as a manager of a literary magazine that led to a prison sentence, during which he wrote some of his most memorable tales of fantastical fear.
2022, English
Softcover, 614 pages, 21.6 x 16.5 cm
Limited edition with signed/stamped postcard,
Published by
Amphetamine Sulphate / Austin
$65.00 - In stock -
Over 600 pages of original SF novellas and stories by Thomas Moore, Audrey Szasz, Christopher Zeischegg, Simon Morris (his final completed novella), Blake Butler, Kenji Siratori, SJXSJC, Alexandrine Ogundimu, David Cotner, Ian Haig and Philip Best, plus Adam Lehrer on Crypto-Transgression in Art and Jarett Kobek interviewed by Grant Maierhofer. With a selected bibliography, 1967-1978.
Edited by Philip Best
Illustrated throughout by Steven Purtill
Cover design by Sarah Froelich
Editorial Assistance by Audrey Szasz
Limited edition copies with A.S. postcard signed/numbered by editor and publisher Philip Best.
2022, English
Softcover, 294 pages, 21 x 14 cm
Published by
Amphetamine Sulphate / Austin
$55.00 - In stock -
A forensic survey embracing the cinematic delirium of Tobe Hooper. A heady and queer collation of confession, ultraviolence and countless paraphilias. Radical in every way.
2022, English
Softcover, 160 pages, 19.9 x 13.3 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / fine
Published by
Continuum / London
$50.00 - In stock -
From the preface by Alain Badiou: It is no exaggeration to say that Quentin Meillassoux has opened up a new path in the history of philosophy, understood here as the history of what it is to know ... This remarkable "critique of critique" is introduced here without embellishment, cutting straight to the heart of the matter in a particularly clear and logical manner. It allows the destiny of thought to be the absolute once more.
"This work is one of the most important to appear in continental philosophy in recent years and deserves a wide readership at the earliest possible date ... Apres la finitude is an important book of philosophy by an authnted emerging voices in continental thought. Quentin Meillassoux deserves our close attention in the years to come and his book deserves rapid translation and widespread discussion in the English-speaking world. There is nothing like it."—Graham Harman in Philosophy Today
Quentin Meillassoux's remarkable debut makes a strikingly original contribution to contemporary French philosophy and is set to have a significant impact on the future of continental philosophy. Written in a style that marries great clarity of expression with argumentative rigour, After Finitude provides bold readings of the history of philosophy and sets out a devastating critique of the unavowed fideism at the heart of post-Kantian philosophy.
The exceptional lucidity and the centrality of argument in Meillassoux's writing should appeal to analytic as well as continental philosophers, while his critique of fideism will be of interest to anyone preoccupied by the relation between philosophy, theology and religion.
Meillassoux introduces a startlingly novel philosophical alternative to the forced choice between dogmatism and critique. After Finitude proposes a new alliance between philosophy and science and calls for an unequivocal halt to the creeping return of religiosity in contemporary philosophical discourse.
"Rarely do we encounter a book which not only meets the highest standards of thinking, but sets up itself new standards, transforming the entire field into which it intervenes. Quentin Meillassoux does exactly this."—Slavoj Zizek
Fine copy of first 2008 edition.
2023, English / Arabic
Softcover, 216 pages, 19 x 25.4 cm
Ed. of 350,
Published by
Sonntag Press / Narrm—Melbourne
$55.00 - In stock -
Hot Air is the first comprehensive book surveying the work of Egyptian-born, Naarm/Melbourne-based artist Raafat Ishak. Rethinking the linearity of the monographic format, Hot Air navigates Ishak’s practice through a sequence of themes and motifs that occupy his art: NUDITY/ SQUARE/ LANGUAGE/ AIR/ SUN/ BLACK/ PAINTING/ ARCHITECTURE. The final chapter, HEIDE, is dedicated to the artist’s major solo exhibition in the celebrated modernist building at Heide Museum of Modern Art, 2023.
The publication is richly illustrated with artwork images and reference material alongside newly commissioned essays in English and Arabic by Lisa Radford, Robert Schubert, Stephen Zagala and Melissa Keys. Publication coordinator: Brigid Moriarty. Design: Alex Ward. Translation: Muhammad Y Gamal. Copy editor: Sarah Gory (English) and Salma Harland (Arabic)
2013, English
Softcover, 264 pages, 21.5 x 14 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Nine-Banded Books / West Virginia
$180.00 - Out of stock
Rare first edition copy of Mine by Peter Sotos, published by Nine-Banded Books in 2013 and long out-of-print.
Against a densely imbricated skein of documentary fragments and confessional annotation, Mine advances a sustained, interlocutory investigation into the ulterior etiologies and malignant narcissism of underground pornography.
An excerpt:
I have to pin the words down, cut them out and place them as far as possible from the dunce economy. I’m not an exegete. But I take the words and ideas and stutters and stick them somewhere far more successful. You’ll understand this, finally, when I demean myself enough to tell you what I do with the words that these mouthy pigs just repeat often enough to tell you that they stand behind them. It’s not what I take, or who I take them away from. But where I put them. Not rewrite them. Not change or charge the context. I identify them. I don’t, idiot, masturbate with them. I can’t imagine wanting to do anything without having these words fully included. I wouldn’t even consider doing anything without them. The cunts that make cartoons out of their ideas. Little collages and signatures and slack versions. Strippers and songwriters and female’d max factors. I live all over them. I write through them, use them, come away with little more than a dangling possible.
What I do is inescapable.
"Peter Sotos is one of those rare writers who can say, ‘The words I write are me,’ or at least as close as anyone can come to communicating who they are in words."—Thomas Ligotti
"We do not find in Sotos the customary delusions about childhood misery and wounded lives. For this latter-day homo sacer, wounds are not to be healed but poked and worried until they bleed. Sotos is literature’s outcast, carrying stigma like a rat carries plague."—Mikita Brottman
WARNING.
Very Good—Near Fine copy.
2023, English
Hardcover, 432 pages, 25 x 16.8 cm
Published by
The MIT Press / Massachusetts
$89.00 - In stock -
How artists in twentieth-century Germany adapted the idea of the medical or legal case as an artistic strategy to push to the fore sexualities, scandals, and crimes that were otherwise concealed.
In early twentieth-century Germany, the artistic avant-garde borrowed procedures from the medical and juridical realms to expose and debate matters that society preferred remain hidden and unspoken. Frederic J. Schwartz explores how the evocation or creation of a “case” provided artists with a means to engage themes that ranged from blasphemy to Lustmord, or sexual murder. Shedding light on the case as a cultural form, Schwartz shows its profound effect on artists and the ways it dovetailed with methods used by these figures to exploit fundamental changes taking place across the mass media of their time.
As Schwartz shows, the case was a common denominator that connected seemingly disparate works. George Grosz and Rudolf Schlichter drew on it for their violent visual art, as did architect Adolf Loos when he equated ornament with crime. Expressionists, meanwhile, approached the question of whether the so-called “mad” shared a right of public expression with those deemed sane, and examined medical and legal approaches to what society labeled as insanity. The case also took on a personal dimension when artists found themselves confronted with, or chose to engage with, the legal system. German courts prosecuted John Heartfield and others for their provocative works, while Bertolt Brecht created publicity for himself by suing the firm to whom he sold the film rights to The Threepenny Opera. Provocative and insightful, The Culture of the Case offers a privileged view of the spaces of representation in which images—in some instances, as cases—functioned at a key moment of modernity.
Frederic J. Schwartz is Emeritus Professor of History of Art at University College London. His books include The Werkbund- Design Theory and Mass Culture before the First World War and Blind Spots- Critical Theory and the History of Art in Twentieth-Century Germany.
1986, English
Softcover, 360 pages, 22 x 28 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Strength Through Joy / Seattle
$200.00 - Out of stock
The incredibly rare 1986 bible of Come Organisation (1979—1985) — a 350+ page collection of Come Org. and Whitehouse material, including all issues of Kata (the official organ publication of Come Org.), "The Story of Come Organisation", Live Action booklets, interviews, the complete Come Org. discography, littered with b/w reproductions of photos, posters, flyers, ephemera, and lots of serial killers. Features Come, Whitehouse, Sutcliffe Jugend, Leibstandarte SS MB (Maurizio Bianchi), Consumer Electronics, Nurse With Wound, Heinrich Himmler, Etat Brut, DDV, P.16D.4, Ramleh, Esplendor Geometrico, Kleistwahr, Krang, Aleister Crowley, William Bennett, Peter McKay, Paul Reuter, Philip Best, Glenn Michael Wallis, John Murphy, Kevin Tomkins, Steven Stapleton, Gary Mundy, Ted Bundy, Ed Kemper, Charles Manson, Ed Gein, Peter Sutcliffe... The Come Organisation was a record label founded in London in 1979, initially as a vehicle for founder William Bennett's group Come, then Whitehouse, issuing many now legendary records and cassettes (and publications) that shaped experimental noise, industrial and power electronics to come.
THE resource. Very Good copy with light tanning and only light wear.
1969, English
Softcover, 206 pages, 21.5 x 13.5 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Dover / New York
$25.00 - Out of stock
Full, unabridged Dover 1969 English paperback edition of Huysmans' famous "A Rebours" from 1884, with Huysmans' original 1903 preface and introduction by Havelock Ellis.
"Because of his extreme sensitivity to the absurd and grotesque in human affairs, the protagonist of this masterpiece of decadence has estranged himself from society and savors the most bizarre aspects of human existence in his quest for novelty. This landmark novel is filled with weird images and biting wit."
Infamous as the inspiration for the novel which slowly corrupts Oscar Wilde's "Dorian Gray", Joris-Karl Huysmans' A Rebours ("Against The Grain" or "Against Nature") is the original handbook of decadence. A wildly original fin-de-siecle novel, Against Nature contains only one character. Des Esseintes is a decadent, ailing aristocrat who retreats to an isolated villa where he indulges his taste for luxury and excess. Veering between nervous excitability and debilitating ennui, he gluts his aesthetic appetites with classical literature and art, exotic jewels (with which he fatally encrusts the shell of his tortoise), rich perfumes and a kaleidoscope of sensual experiences. Against Nature, in the words of the author, exploded 'like a grenade' and has enjoyed a cult following to this day.
Joris-Karl Huysmans (1848-1907) is now recognized as one of the most challenging and innovative figures in European literature and an acknowledged principal architect of the fin-de-siecle imagination. He was a career civil servant who wrote ten novels, most notably "A Rebours and La-Bas". Huysmans died in 1907.
VG with tanned spine, light wear/age.
2018, English
Hardcover, 198 pages, 17 x 20 cm
Published by
Twisted Spoon Press / Prague
$44.00 - In stock -
For his “portrait painting firm,” Witkiewicz established rules and types for his portrait work, marking the paintings and pastels with corresponding symbols and abbreviations of the substances he had either taken or, in the case of alcohol and nicotine, not taken at the time. Type C were created under the influence of alcohol and “narcotics of a superior grade” to produce abstract compositions he called “Pure Form.” A variety of drugs and their combinations were taken to produce a variety of distortions and effects, and often this would be the portrait subject’s choice. And in some instances a given portrait might be marked with symbols denoting how many days he had gone without smoking or without drinking (and type D were executed to achieve the same results without any artificial means). Different substances resulted in different color combinations or brought out different aspects of the subject’s features or psyche. One stunning series of self-portraits, for example, was executed while on a combination of moderate amounts of beer and cocaine.
In the vein of the well-known drug writings of De Quincey and Baudelaire from a century earlier and those of his contemporaries Walter Benjamin and Jean Cocteau – and foreshadowing the later writings of Aldous Huxley and Carlos Castaneda on psychoactive drugs – Witkacy composed Narcotics in 1930 to discuss and document not only his own experimentation with different substances but the nature of addiction itself and the prevailing social attitude toward drugs, particularly those that were considered “acceptable.” As life became increasingly mechanized, Witkacy felt that a sense of the metaphysical could only be achieved by artificial means, and like Henri Michaux, he produced an extensive oeuvre of singular visual art while under the influence of a variety of substances.
Meandering, acerbic, and burlesque, rife with neologisms and expressions from German, French, English, and Russian, Witkacy dissects Polish society and the art world as well as himself via the hypocrisy surrounding drug use. Since it was first published in the 1930s, Narcotics has achieved a cult status in Poland where it is considered both a modernist classic and a paragon of Witkiewiczian madness. This edition, the first complete translation in English, includes a second appendix written later, passages from the novel Farewell to Autumn, and 34 color reproductions of a cross section of portraits to show how various substances impacted Witkacy’s art.
translated from the Polish by Soren Gauger
artwork by the author.