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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World Food Books Gift Voucher
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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.
2023, English
Hardcover, 275 pages, 24.8 x 17.2 cm
Published by
Power Publications / Sydney
$40.00 - In stock -
UnAustralian Art: Ten Essays on Transnational Art History proposes a radical rethinking of Australian art. Rather than identifying a national sensibility, Rex Butler and ADS Donaldson demonstrate that Australian art and artists have always been engaged in struggles and creative exchanges with the rest of the world. Examining Australian art as much from the outside in as the inside out, Butler and Donaldson’s methods open Australian art history to an encyclopaedic multitude of hitherto excluded stories.
“This long-awaited volume is a true polemic. Its controversial arguments are squarely aimed at the practices of art museums, art historians and curators. The globalising of art in the current era requires such audacious rewriting of cultural exchanges.”—Ann Stephen, Senior Curator, Art, University of Sydney
“This book raises an important matter for artists subjected to a myopic nationalism in the arts. By proposing an ‘unAustralian art’, Butler and Donaldson show what and who is revealed with a hybrid concept of culture.”—Juan Davila
“Though its temporal and geographic scope is limited to twentieth-century Australian art, UnAustralian Art offers a striking and original model of art historiography for the global contemporary. Butler and Donaldson both critique national art history and present a new account of art on the continent now called ‘Australia’. Against ‘isolationist’ histories of national art, this is a story of connections: between artists, curators, galleries, and museums, between cities and countries. There is a political point at stake here. Reclaiming the term ‘unAustralian’ from the conservative former prime minister John Howard, who popularised it as a pejorative in the 1990s, Butler and Donaldson seek to open, not seal, Australia’s highly politicised borders.”—Helen Hughes, Monash University
2023, English
Softcover, 346 pages, 24.8 x 17.2 cm
Published by
Power Publications / Sydney
$40.00 - Out of stock
Contemporary art begins where painting ends, or so goes one of recent art history's most dominant narratives. This book is a post-mortem of the supposed death of painting in the period following World War II. In eleven essays by a global array of leading scholars, Ends of Painting offers a counter-history, showing how the practice and discourse of painting remained integral to art throughout the 1960s and 1970s.
Written by art historians from Australia, Asia, Europe and North America, each chapter captures a renewed critical approach to topics as diverse as conceptualism and anachronism, photography and autobiography, theatre and politics, nationalism and consumerism, race and modernism.
The book reveals a vast constellation in which painting’s ends are also beginnings—from Warhol’s Cow Wallpaper at the Leo Castelli Gallery in New York to Naoyoshi Hikosaka’s act of pouring latex over tatami mats on his bedroom floor in Tokyo; from the first canvas boards by Aboriginal artists at Papunya in Australia’s Western Desert to the Collective Actions Group’s documentation of people holding up arrangements of coloured envelopes in snowfields outside Moscow.
These unlikely correspondences between times and places sustain this book’s return to the medium, revealing how history is brushed by painting, and painting by history.
2001, English
Softcover, 216 pages, 29.7 x 21 cm
Published by
Power Publications / Sydney
Griffith University / Brisbane
$45.00 - Out of stock
Gordon Bennett: Selected Writings is the first publication to survey the writing practice of the late Gordon Bennett (1955–2014), giving vital insight into one of Australia’s most important contemporary artists in his own words. Bringing together nearly forty published and unpublished essays, artist’s statements, letters, and interviews from across Bennett’s nearly thirty-year career, Selected Writings profiles the importance of the written word within his art and broader intellectual practice. Through its focus on Bennett’s written voice, which shifts between scholarly debate, political argument and personal reflections, this publication reveals Bennett considered art and life to be just as entangled as words and images.
Edited by Angela Goddard and Tim Riley Walsh, Selected Writings is co-published by Power Publications, Sydney, and Griffith University Art Museum, Brisbane. The book also provides glimpses into Bennett’s personal archive via the reproduction of previously unseen notebooks, correspondence, sketches, preparatory compositions, and more. Offering new knowledge of his creative process, intellectual and artistic influences and professional relationships, this project amplifies Bennett’s already significant contribution to subjects of race and identity in national and global contexts, as well as reaffirming his centrality to postcolonial discourse in the twenty-first century.
2011, English
Softcover (die-cut), 140 pages, 26 x 18.5 cm
Published by
Experimental Art Foundation / Adelaide
Yuill—Crowley / Sydney
$50.00 $35.00 - In stock -
The rare published chronology of Australian artist John Barbour’s career beginning with the work; ‘immuredinpace’, (1988), through to his final exhibition held at the yuill|crowley gallery in Sydney, published by Australian Experimental Art Foundation, Adelaide, 2011. Edited by Ewen McDonald. Fully illustrated with essays and bibliographical references.
"Hard/soft, the title of Ewen McDonald's introductory essay, traces the evolution of Barbour's practice from the late 1980s. The book includes insightful essays by Russell Smith, Michael Newall, Ian North and Linda Marie Walker on themes and projects, augmented by an interview with the artist by Anne Thompson ... an acknowledgement and celebration of John Barbour's significant contribution the visual arts over the past few decades. As the essays and reproductions of key works and installations reveal, Barbour is one of Australia's foremost contemporary artists."—Publisher.
As New.
1988, English
Softcover, 156 pages, 21 x 15 cm
$20.00 - Out of stock
The Necessity of Australian Art : An Essay About Interpretation by Ian Burn, Nigel Lendon, Charles Merewether and Ann Stephen critically examines the art historical orthodoxies which have dominated Australian art during the twentieth century.
1996, English
Softcover, 118 pages, 23 x 29.5 cm
Published by
Power Publications / Sydney
Monash University Exhibition Gallery / Victoria
$36.00 - In stock -
Artists Think: The Late Works of Ian Burn explains how it was possible for the artist to return to painting in the late 1980s. Burn, an internationally renowned conceptual artist of the 1960s, had worked for over two decades in alternative cultural practices in Art & Language, New York and later within the Australian trade union movement. His late work, made in a short, intensely productive period before his accidental death in 1993, holds in Burn's words, 'professional spaces and identities hostage to amateur values'. With an introduction and contributing chapter by Ann Stephen, the book contains Burn's essay entitled 'Notes on 'Value Added' Landscapes'. The book also included are a biography and listing of exhibitions of the artist.
Edited by Ann Stephen
Contributors: Ian Burn, Michael Corris, Elizabeth Gertsakis, Helen Grace, Sandy Kirby, Andrew McNamara, Mel Ramsden, Ann Stephen, Paul Wood.
Co-published with Monash University Gallery, Melbourne.
2023, English
Softcover (in sealed cardboard case), 110 pages, 30 x 22 mm
Ed. of 300,
Published by
Guzzler / Rosanna
$50.00 - In stock -
On Display and Questioned : Two exhibitions by Alex Vivian; two interviews with Alex Vivian, 2022, published in a limited edition of 300 copies, each sealed in cardboard mailer. Illustrated throughout with colour plates cataloguing the Victorian exhibitions FIEND? 5–20.12.2020, Guzzler, Rosanna and Porn: squared, hung, drawn, quartered. 11.3–2.4.22, Centre D’editions Melbourne, each accompanied by interviews with artist Alex Vivian by editor and art historian David Homewood. Designed by Alexandra Margetic; photographed by Luke Sands.
Keywords: aid; amyl nitrate; Arial; average gay male (AGM); baseball; bathhouse; condom; cricket; Futura; Genet, Jean; Gerry, Cheesemouth; Golub, Leon; Haring, Keith; Kentucky Fried Chicken (KFC); Kruger, Barbara; Lingard, Grant; Melbourne Wankers Club (MWC); Pettibon, Raymond; pornography; rugby; smegma; Treasury Gardens.
2019, English
Softcover, 92 pages, 27 x 18 cm
Published by
Worms / London
$33.00 - In stock -
Worms is a bi-annual literary style magazine that celebrates female/non-binary writer culture.
This inaugural issue, offers a fresh perspective on the accessibility of literature, writers and style. Here, you will find features with Chris Kraus and Ariana Reines about online writing, an exploration into Kathy Acker’s books and influence on contemporary culture, interviews with young upcoming authors and more.
2020, English
Softcover, 92 pages, 27 x 18 cm
Published by
Worms / London
$33.00 - In stock -
Worms is a bi-annual literary style magazine that celebrates female/non-binary writer culture.
Worms 2 the ‘Revolting Women’ issue looks at women who are literally disgusting, figuratively revolting. With a focus on writers who operate on the fringes of literature, ‘revolt' in a Worms context is vast-ranging. This issue includes features with Maggie Nelson, Tilly Lawless, Sarah Schulman, Amelia Abraham, Juliana Huxtable, Juliet Jacques, Olivia Sudjic and more.
2021, English
Softcover, 92 pgs, 27 x 18 cm
Published by
Worms / London
$33.00 - In stock -
Worms is a bi-annual literary style magazine that celebrates female/non-binary writer culture.
Worms 3, the ‘biomythography’ issue, looks at personal myth-making and the stories that shape us.
Featuring Michelle Tea, Moyra Davey, Lynne Tillman, Johanna Hedva, Jenny Hval, Ellen van Neervan, Caroline Calloway, Julie Enszerl and more.
2021, English
Softcover, 92 pages, 27 x 18 cm
Published by
Worms / London
$33.00 - In stock -
Worms 4 looks at psychogeography and the Situationists from a non-male perspective. Taking flâneuserie and the creative benefits of a good walk as its starting point, the issue features conversations with Eileen Myles, Alison Bechdel, Lauren Elkin, Tilly Lawless, Mckenzie Wark, Therese Estacion and Carmen Winant. 2021 was a fraught year for walking; the pandemic restricted our right to movement, while the murders of women walking in London led us to ask the question: how can the act of walking the streets spark political conversation?
2022, English
Softcover, 92 pages, 27 x 18 cm
Published by
Worms / London
$33.00 $15.00 - In stock -
Worms is a bi-annual literary style magazine that celebrates female/non-binary writer culture.
"In this issue, we explore New Narrative alongside writers working today that incorporate some of it’s themes. Our cover star Saidiya Hartman talks with Rhea Dillon about the limits and processes of creating stories from the archive, while Camille Roy and Dodie Bellamy give us insight into New Narrative from their experiences involved in the movement. Savannah Knoop tells us about her life playing the character of J.T Leroy, while Calla Henkel delves into ideas of using other people’s narratives as our own. There’s lots of gleaning, lots of stealing and lots of hard truths coming from the human body. We have poetry and fiction and all of the usual bits, as well as an experimental cut up piece demonstrating the appropriation method that Kathy Acker (via William Burroughs) used in so much of her work. Many more worms to be found in these pages."
2023, English
Softcover, 92 pages, 27 x 18 cm
Published by
Worms / London
$33.00 - In stock -
Worms is a bi-annual literary style magazine that celebrates female/non-binary writer culture.
"The themes of this issue are broad and sprawling. We look at humour, collage, and honesty - finding what’s relatable in the literature we love, and uncovering what it tells us about the present moment. Sheena Patel, our cover star, delves into the internet in all its darkness and hilarity, Elvia Wilk discusses the climate crisis and finding truth in fiction, and Chris Kraus and Ann Rower chat about everything from their influences to what a ‘career’ means as a writer. From Cosey Fanni Tutti to Lola Olufemi to Isabel Waidner, there are many more Worms to be found in these pages."
Featuring: Sheena Patel, Nada Alic, Cosey Fanni Tutti, Elvia Wilk, Ann Rower, Chris Kraus, Ghislaine Leung, Yelena Moskovich, Lola Olufemi, Sam Moore, Isabel Waidner, Cecilia Pavón, Ear Worms X Late Works
Contributors: Haydée Touitou, Nicole Della Costa, Zara Joan Miller, Erin Taylor, Jess Cole, Arcadia Molinas, Phoenix Losavio, Hope Roalfe, Hannah Pezzack, Chris Carter, Clem Macleod, Caitlin Mcloughlin, Isabel Maccarthy, Samantha Rosenwald, Elvira Garcia, Celestine Cooney, Bug Shepherd-Barron, Mary Watt, Delia Rainey
Founder & Editor In Chief: Clem Macleod; Managing Editor: Caitlin Mcloughlin; Art Direction And Design: Caitlin Mcloughlin; Features Editors: Pierce Eldridge, Arcadia Molinas; Contributing Editor: Violet Conroy
2023, English
Softcover, 80 pages, 11.2 x 17.8 cm
Published by
Silver Press / London
$33.00 - In stock -
This audacious manifesto draws on the legacies of bell hooks, Audre Lorde, Angela Davis and others to consider the ways in which Black women have been excluded from, struggled to achieve and opted to reject the category of ‘human’. Sociologist Akwugo Emejulu argues that it is only through embracing the status of the ‘fugitive’ that Black women can determine their own liberation. This title is a call for the collective process of speculative dialogue and a bold new model for action.
Humanity has always excluded Others on the basis of race and gender. What happens to people who choose to flee, following in the footsteps of those who resisted enslavement?
2023, English
Softcover, 20 x 15 cm
Published by
Pilot Press / London
$16.00 - Out of stock
A pocket-sized zine containing the CIA's entire 'Gateway Process' document, a report written in 1983, and declassified in 2003, about using a series of exercises to produce states of expanded human consciousness such as astral projection, outer body experiments, and other altered states of mind.
2021, English
Softcover, 260 pages, 20 x 15 cm
Published by
Pilot Press / London
$39.00 - In stock -
Derek McCormack is the author of fashion-inflected novels that cast luminaries such as Elsa Schiaparelli and Balenciaga as characters. This collection brings together for the first time McCormack's fashion journalism. He writes about and interviews fashion figures that fascinate him, tracing the ways they inspire and inhabit his novels. The result is a sort of memoir in essays: as he writes, "My tribute to [Judy] Blame is about him and about me—there are lots of my own tales woven in with the topics I touch on. The writing here is a sort of autobiography, a life seen through a scrim, or a life as a scrim—my moire mémoire."
Judy Blame's Obituary contains twenty years' worth of reminiscences, reviews of fashion shows and books, interviews with writers about fashion, and interviews with fashion designers about writing. He talks to Nicolas Ghesquière about perfume, and to Edmund White about which perfume he wore as a young fag in New York City. He inspects the clothes that Kathy Acker left behind when she died, and he summons the spirit of Margiela in a literary seance. He traces the history of sequins, then recounts the cursed story of Vera West, the costume designer who dressed the Bride of Frankenstein. These pieces were all previously published, some in Artforum, some in The Believer, and some in underground publications like Werewolf Express—what binds them together is a sense that though fashion victimizes us, this victimization is sometimes a sort of salvation.
Derek McCormack is a Canadian writer. His most recent novels are The Well-Dressed Wound and Castle Faggot, both published by Semiotext(e). Of Castle Faggot, Dennis Cooper said: "It is really just one of the best books ever, and maybe the greatest novel ever written."
Praise for Judy Blame's Obituary:
'Derek McCormack, Canada's most famous author as yet unsullied by Nobel Prize or television adaptation, hides in plain sight as a fashion journalist. Parallel to his writing incantatory, scatalogical fiction, he has reviewed collections and interviewed the great and good of la mode. His divagations are often darkly hilarious and always exquisitely tailored. The sublime and the ridiculous coexist in his prose, as they do in life. Fashion victims, ignore his insights at your peril.' — William E. Jones
2022, English
Softcover, 128 pages, 19 x 15 cm
Published by
Pilot Press / London
$33.00 - Out of stock
Responses to Derek Jarman's Blue is the third publication in a series of anthologies from Pilot Press seeking contemporary responses to works of art made during the AIDS crisis.
In this third iteration, responses were sought to the 1993 film Blue by the multidisciplinary artist Derek Jarman.
Contributors in order of appearance : Roelof Bakker, Jared Davis, Becca Albee, Linda Kemp, Ashleigh, A. Allen, David Nash, Sam Moore, Anton Stuebner, Gonçalo Lamas, Olivia Laing, Nate Lippens, Jason Lipeles, JP Seabright, Andrew Cummings, Sig Olson, Maria Sledmere, Cleo Henry, Jessie McClaughlin, Lars Meijer, Scott Treleaven, Declan Wiffen, Caitlin Merrett King, Harry Agius, António Manso Preto, Adriana Lazarova, Brooke Palmieri, D Mortimer, Mary Manning, Aaron James Murphy
Printed on 100% recycled paper
2021, English
Softcover, 76 pages, 19 ×x 15 cm
Published by
Pilot Press / London
$30.00 - Out of stock
The Moon and The Echo is the first in a new series of anthologies from London-based publisher Pilot Press seeking contemporary responses to works of art made during the AIDS crisis.
In the first iteration, responses were sought to the 1986 collaborative studio album The Moon and The Melodies by the late composer Harold Budd (1936-2020) and the Scottish dream pop band Cocteau Twins.
Contributors: Michelle Hannah, David Nash, Ellen Dillon, Gabriel Ross, Maria Sledmere, Jack Jacques, Nick Blackburn, Harry Agius, Lauren de Sá Naylor, Femke Zwiep, Ondo Fudd, Richard Porter, Freya Johnson Ross, Paul Lee, Nina Ines Ward, James Dearlove, James Rance, Fred Carter, Jane Cope, Tom Benford, Mary Manning, Simon Moretti, Rosa Jones, Ishika Ball, Oliver Ridings, Nat Raha, Kevin McAleese
2022, English
Softcover, 143 pages, 19 x 12 cm
Published by
Pilot Press / London
$33.00 - In stock -
"What a blistering book—with My Dead Book, Nate Lippens has created something truly fucking great. It's as if the storied stars of Lou Reed's 'Walk on the Wild Side' overshot Manhattan and wound up in Wisconsin, broke and blue with cold and depressed beyond belief by the thought that this nowhere is now home. It's a bitter pill, but I love bitterness, and who doesn't love pills?" — Derek McCormack
“There’s no doubt to this book. You’d think that was a flaw but it’s been burned away. My Dead Book is not short though it is brief. It’s loving, bittersweet, and actually courageous because it tells a story that is slightly unbearable because it’s all secret, awful hard bad secrets and funny as hell. Nate’s balancing act works because the heart of it (this novel) is true even though it’s often heartless. It’s simple. He knows what things are worth. When you need the sea or a bird they’re there like they never were before.” — Eileen Myles
“This book by Nate Lippens is really moving and beautifully written. Not one superfluous sentence. It’s razor tight. The phantom limbs of what has been excised remains. But still there is so much love and sadness and all the randomness of what makes a life, and who you meet along the way. My ghosts are summoned by his ghosts.” — Hedi El Kholti
Nate Lippens is a writer from Wisconsin. His fiction has appeared in the anthologies Little Birds (Filthy Loot, 2021), Responses to Derek Jarman’s Blue (Pilot Press, 2022), and Pathetic Literature, edited by Eileen Myles (Grove, 2022). My Dead Book is his first novel.
2022, English
Softcover, 62 pages, 19 x 21 cm
Published by
Pilot Press / London
$20.00 - In stock -
Edited by Nate Lippens, Truant features writing and art that addresses queer self-exile: the stories of dropouts, throwaways and runaways; how withdrawal can be a matter of survival, refusal and renewal; what we will not do, allow or accept, personally, politically and artistically; and the power of absence as presence.
Contributors: jimmy cooper, Neil Davies, Matthew Gallaway, Zach Grear, Jason Haaf, Matthew Kinlin, Katie Kurtz, Lindsay Lerman, Nate Lippens, Fisher Main, Erik Moore, Eileen Myles, Elle Nash, Golnoosh Nour, Matthew Stadler, Ranee Zaporski
Nate Lippens is a writer from Wisconsin. His fiction has appeared in the anthologies Little Birds (Filthy Loot, 2021), Responses to Derek Jarman’s Blue (Pilot Press, 2022), and Pathetic Literature, edited by Eileen Myles (Grove, 2022). His debut novel, My Dead Book, was published in 2022.
1991, Japanese
Softcover, unpaginated, 26 x 21 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Fiction Inc. / Tokyo
$120.00 - Out of stock
Stunning special edition of the great SALE2 periodical from Tokyo Japan, dedicated to the theme of Bondage Fantasy. With cover design by Tadanori Yokoo and design by Makoto Ohrui and edited by Japanese novelist Mari Akasaka, this 1991 volume is profusely illustrated throughout showcasing the erotic illustration and photography of artists John Willie, Irving Klaw, Eric Stanton, ENEG, Jim, Bill Ward, Jay, Tealdo, Europa, Gilles Berquet, Wolfgang Eicher. Perfectly compiled in the way SALE2 did so well, with elegant scrapbook style, dense with imagery, blown-up, full-bleed reproductions from many publications, and although a primarily visual volume packed cover-to-cover with illustrations, it also features a number of interviews with the artists in Japanese. Highly recommended!
Published regularly as a sort-of fanzine/journal/catalogue/pocket-book by Fiction, Inc., a specialty shop and publisher of fetish and erotica in Tokyo in the 1980-90s. Each issue covers different themes and features, heavy on fetishism.
Mari Akasaka (b. 1964) is a Japanese novelist born in Suginami, Tokyo, and studied Politics in the Law Department at Keio University. In 1999 her novel Vibrator was nominated for the Akutagawa Prize, which was adapted into a 2003 film directed by Ryūichi Hiroki. She was again nominated for the Akutagawa prize in 2000 for her novel, Muse, and won the Noma Literary Prize for New Writers for the same novel.
Very Good copy, with some light wear to cover, inc. one crease to cover corner.
2023, English
Softcover, 152 pages, 17.5 x 11 cm
Published by
Index Journal / Melbourne
$30.00 - Out of stock
Norman Lindsay (1879–1969) was a prolific, popular and controversial Australian artist. He is best known for his children’s book The Magic Pudding and his skilled prints, which mostly draw on Greek and Roman mythology and nineteenth century literature and philosophy. The Australian cultural consciousness is indelibly marked by Lindsay’s output, his prominence in the Sydney bohemian intellectual scene and by The Magic Pudding, which entrances the imagination of generation after generation of Australian children. This consciousness is marked too by the paradoxical conjunctions of Lindsay’s life: artistic bohemia and fascistic tendencies, avant-gardism and a fervour for the rule of law, libertinism and conservatism, worship and denigration.
This collection of essays examines Lindsay’s current position in Australian art history. The authors’ opinions are erudite, varied and often incendiary; few figures are as divisive as Lindsay.
Film critic Adrian Martin writes alongside Ian McLean, the Hugh Ramsay Chair of Australian Art History at the University of Melbourne, art historian Cameron Hurst, and literary critic Jeremy George. Art historian Soo-Min Shim responds to a video work by artist James Nguyen.
The project develops research conducted during an exhibition of the University of Melbourne’s Norman Lindsay collection, also titled Venus in Tullamarine, held at the George Paton Gallery in 2022.
1969, French
Hardcover (cloth bound), 106 pages, 21 x 21 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Éditions Denoël / Paris
$100.00 - Out of stock
First Edition of the catalogue raisonné of the engraved work of German Surrealist Hans Bellmer, published in 1969 by Éditions Denoël, Paris. Wrapped in the publisher's debossed black covers featuring Bellmer's Céphalopode of 1965, this handsome volume opens with "Morale of Engraving", a four page introduction by author Andre Pieyre De Mandiargues (in French). The rest of the book is made up of 141 beautifully reproduced engraved works of Bellmer, including his exquisite works complimenting Georges Bataille, Marquis de Sade, Joyce Mansour, Louis Aragon, Charles Baudelaire, and others, followed by a 7 pages complete catalogue raisonné index, including work title, date, process and technique, dimensions, printing justifications, editors and other details. An essential title in any Bellmer collection and important reference.
Very Good copy, tanning to board/page edges with age.
2016/2017, Japanese
3 softcover publications (staple-bound), plus flyer, 70 pages, 26 x 18 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Vanilla Gallery / Tokyo
$160.00 - Out of stock
Rare collected documents from the first exhibitions of Serial Killer Art at Vanilla Gallery, Ginza, Tokyo, in 2016 and 2017, from the HN collection. From John Wayne Gacy, Ed Gein, Ted Bundy, Henry Lee Lucas, and Ronnie Clay, these exhibitions featured artworks, self-portraits, letters, and documents of serial killers in Europe and America whose heinous personalities and numerous crimes have served as models for novels and films, becoming known the world over.
"The world portrayed by murderers who committed crimes that make you want to look away is like a dreadful, lonely, impermanent feeling that looks into the depths of the viewer's heart, and is like when confronted with something unknown. It's full of tension."
Collected by Mr. HN (H. Nakajima), over 200 items were displayed in Tokyo on the occasion of these exhibits, with these pamphlets available at the exhibitions only. Illustrated with examples throughout in colour and b/w, texts in Japanese by film critic Kiichirō Yanashita, Orihara Ichi, and collector/curator H. Nakajima.
Killers included in the exhibitions: John Wayne Gacy, Henry Lee Lucas, Peter Sutcliffe, Danny Rowling, Keith Jasperson, James Earl Ray, Thomas Pitera, Henry Hill, Nicholas Crowe, Dorothy Puente, Haddon Clarke, Gerald Shaffer, Anthony Shore, James Munro, Gary Ray Balls, Hudson Graham, Carroll Bundy, Otis Toole, Charles Watson, Lawrence Bittaker, Herbert Mullin, Arthur Shawcross, Rod Ferrell, Ted Bundy, Jim Jones, Christa Pike, Harvard Baumeister, David Berkowitz, Richard Ramirez, Ronnie Clay, Irene Wuornos, Wayne Low, Dana Sue Gray, Roy Norris, Kenneth Bianchi, Michael Alig, Veronica Compton, Joe Roy Metheny, Gary Heidnik, Charles Manson, Jeremy Jones, Jack Trawick, Carl Drew, Wayne Harton, Rosemary West, Theodore Kaczynski, Thomas Heyer, Ed Gein, Ferrell Mykers, Douglas Clark, Richard Clarey, Ian Brady, Jack Kevorkian, Bonnie & Clyde, Philip Jacobinski, Daniel Siebert, Tommy Lynn Sells.
Very Good with only light wear. Includes flyer for the 2017 exhibition, folded as issued.