World Food Books' programme is largely produced on Kulin Nation land. We acknowledge the Wurundjeri people of the Kulin Nation as the first and continuing custodians of this land, and pay respect to their Elders past, present, and emerging.
World Food Books is an arts and special interests bookshop in Naarm / Melbourne. Founded in 2010, World Food Books is devoted to the presentation of a rotating, hand-selection of international art, design, literary and counterculture publications with an emphasis on the anti-traditional, the experimental, the avant-garde, the heretic, the marginal.
Presenting new titles alongside rare and out-of-print books, catalogues and journals spanning the fields of modern and contemporary art, design, photography, illustration, film, literature, poetry, cultural theory, philosophy, sexuality, popular and underground culture in its many radical forms, World Food Books wishes to encourage adventurous, thoughtful and open-minded reading, looking, writing, and exchange of publishing and ideas, both current and historical.
As well as our bookshop, located in Melbourne's historical Nicholas Building, all of our inventory is available internationally via our online mail-order service.
World Food Books semi-regularly co-ordinates "Occasions", a programme of exhibits and events at the bookshop and in partnership with other hosts (such as museums and art galleries) that develop out of the activities, relationships and content of the bookshop itself.
World Food Books
The Nicholas Building
37 Swanston Street
Room 5, Level 6
Melbourne 3000
Australia
SHOP HOURS:
BOOKSHOP CLOSED FOR BREAK UNTIL NOV 10.
WEB-SHOP OPEN 24/7.
ORDERS CAN STILL BE PLACED AND WILL BE PROCESSED AFTER NOV 10.
World Food Books
Postal Address:
PO Box 435
Flinders Lane
Victoria 8009
Australia
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All prices in AUD (Australian dollars)
Pick-Ups
Please note: The bookshop is closed until February 1, 2024.
Pick-up orders can be collected in our bookshop during opening hours after this date. Please collect any Pick-up orders within 3 weeks of ordering as we have limited storage space. Orders will be released back into stock if not collected within this time. No refunds can be made for pick-ups left un-collected.
Return Policy
All sales are final. We do accept returns (for refund, exchange) for items received in error. All our orders are packed with special care using heavy-duty padding and cardboard book-mailers or bubble mailers (for smaller books), using reinforcement where required. We cannot take responsibility for any lost, stolen or damaged parcels.
Insurance
Should you wish to insure your package, please email us directly after placing your order and we can organise this at a small extra expense. Although all standard/express tracked packages are very safe and dependable, we cannot take responsibility for any lost, stolen or damaged parcels. We recommend insurance on valuable orders.
Interested in selling your old books, catalogues, journals, magazines, comics, fanzines, ephemera? We are always looking for interesting, unusual and out-of-print books to buy. We only buy books in our fields of interest and specialty, and that we feel we can resell.
We base these prices on desirability, market value, in-print prices, condition and our current stock levels. We offer cash, store credit, and can take stock on consignment. All
about 25% of the price we expect to get when we sell them, or 30% in store credit. We base these prices on desirability, market value, in-print prices, condition and our current stock levels.
Sell your books any day of the week. You can drop them off and return later. If you have a lot of books, we can visit your Sydney home.
We buy books that we feel we can resell. We offer about 25 % of the price we expect to get when we sell them, or 30% in store credit. We base these prices on desirability, market value, in-print prices, condition and our current stock levels.
Philadelphia Wireman
03 August - 01 September, 2018
World Food Books is proud to announce our next Occasion, the first presentation of sculptures by Philadelphia Wireman in Australia.
The Philadelphia Wireman sculptures were found abandoned in an alley off Philadelphia’s South Street on trash night in 1982. Their discovery in a rapidly-changing neighbourhood undergoing extensive renovation, compounded with the failure of all attempts to locate the artist, suggests that the works may have been discarded after the maker’s death. Dubbed the "Philadelphia Wireman" during the first exhibition of this work, in 1985, the maker’s name, age, ethnicity, and even gender remain uncertain. The entire collection totals approximately 1200 pieces, all intricately bound together with tightly-wound heavy-gauge wire (along with a few small, abstract marker drawings, reminiscent both of Mark Tobey and J.B. Murry). The dense construction of the work, despite a modest range of scale and materials, is singularly obsessive and disciplined in design: a wire armature or exoskeleton firmly binds a bricolage of found objects including plastic, glass, food packaging, umbrella parts, tape, rubber, batteries, pens, leather, reflectors, nuts and bolts, nails, foil, coins, toys, watches, eyeglasses, tools, and jewellery.
Heavy with associations—anthropomorphic, zoomorphic, and socio-cultural responses to wrapped detritus—the totemic sculptures by Philadelphia Wireman have been discussed in the context of work created to fulfil the shamanistic needs of alternative religions in American culture. Curators, collectors, and critics have variously compared certain pieces to sculpture from Classical antiquity, Native American medicine bundles, African-American memory jugs, and African fetish objects. Reflecting the artist’s prolific and incredibly focused scavenging impulse, and despite—or perhaps enhanced by—their anonymity, these enigmatic objects function as urban artefacts and arbiters of power, though their origin and purpose is unknown. Philadelphia Wireman, whatever their identity, possessed an astonishing ability to isolate and communicate the concepts of power and energy through the selection and transformation of ordinary materials. Over the course of the past two decades, this collection has come to be regarded as an important discovery in the field of self-taught art and vernacular art.
Presented in collaboration with Fleisher-Ollman Gallery, Philadelphia, and Robert Heald, Wellington.
Susan Te Kahurangi King
02 February - 10 March, 2018
Susan Te Kahurangi King (24 February 1951 - ) has been a confident and prolific artist since she was a young child, drawing with readily available materials - pencils, ballpoint pens and felt-tip markers, on whatever paper is at hand. Between the ages of four and six Susan slowly ceased verbal communication. Her grandparents William and Myrtle Murphy had developed a special bond with Susan so they took on caring responsibilities for extended periods. Myrtle began informally archiving her work, carefully collecting and storing the drawings and compiling scrapbooks. No drawing was insignificant; every scrap of paper was kept. The King family are now the custodians of a vast collection containing over 7000 individual works, from tiny scraps of paper through to 5 meter long rolls.
The scrapbooks and diaries reveal Myrtle to be a woman of great patience and compassion, seeking to understand a child who was not always behaving as expected. She encouraged Susan to be observant, to explore her environment and absorb all the sights and sounds. Myrtle would show Susan’s drawings to friends and people in her community that she had dealings with, such as shopkeepers and postal workers, but this was not simply a case of a grandmother’s bias. She recognised that Susan had developed a sophisticated and unique visual language and sincerely believed that her art deserved serious attention.
This was an unorthodox attitude for the time. To provide some context, Jean Dubuffet coined the term Art Brut in 1945 to describe work created by self-taught artists – specifically residents of psychiatric institutions and those he considered to be visionaries or eccentrics. In 1972 Roger Cardinal extended this concept by adopting the term Outsider Art to describe work made by non-academically trained artists operating outside of mainstream art networks through choice or circumstance. Susan was born in Te Aroha, New Zealand in 1951, far from the artistic hubs of Paris and London that Dubuffet and Cardinal operated in. That Myrtle fêted Susan as a self-taught artist who deserved to be taken seriously shows how progressive her attitudes were.
Susan’s parents Doug and Dawn were also progressive. Over the years they had consulted numerous health practitioners about Susan’s condition, as the medical establishment could not provide an explanation as to why she had lapsed into silence. Dawn educated herself in the field of homeopathy and went on to treat all twelve of her children using these principles – basing prescriptions on her observations of their physical, mental and emotional state.
Doug was a linguist with an interest in philosophy who devoted what little spare time he had to studying Maori language and culture. To some extent their willingness to explore the fringes of the mainstream made them outsiders too but it was their commitment to living with integrity and their respect for individuality that ensured Susan’s creativity was always encouraged.
Even though Susan’s family supported her artistic pursuits, some staff in schools and hospitals saw it as an impediment to her assimilation into the community and discouraged it in a variety of ways. Her family was not always aware of this and therefore did not fully understand why Susan stopped drawing in the early 1990s. However, rather than dwell on the challenges that Susan faced in pursuit of her artistic practice, they prefer to highlight her achievements. In 2008 Susan began drawing again in earnest, after an almost 20 year interruption, and her work is now shown in galleries around the world.
Susan grew up without television and has been heavily influenced by the comics she read as a child. She is absolutely fearless in the appropriation of recognizable characters, such as Donald Duck and Mickey Mouse, in her work. She twists their limbs, contorts their faces, compresses them together, blends them into complex patterned backgrounds - always imbuing them with an incredible energy. Although Susan often used pop culture characters in her work they are not naive or childlike. These are drawings by a brilliant self-taught artist who has been creating exceptional work for decades without an audience in mind.
Mladen Stilinović
"Various Works 1986 - 1999"
02 February 16 - September 10, 2016
Various works 1986 - 1999, from two houses, from the collections of John Nixon, Sue Cramer, Kerrie Poliness, Peter Haffenden and Phoebe Haffenden.
Including: Geometry of Cakes (various shelves), 1993; Poor People’s Law (black and white plate), 1993; White Absence (glasses, ruler, set square, silver spoon, silver ladel with skin photograph and wooden cubes), 1990-1996; Exploitation of the Dead (grey and red star painting, wooden painting, black spoon with red table, red plate), 1984-1990; Money and Zeros (zero tie, paintings made for friends in Australia (Sue, John, Kerrie), numbers painting), 1991-1992; Words - Slogans (various t-shirts) - “they talk about the death of art...help! someone is trying to kill me”, “my sweet little lamb”, “work is a disease - Karl Marx”; Various artist books, catalogues, monographs, videos; Poster from exhibition Insulting Anarchy; "Circular" Croatian - Australian edition; Artist book by Vlado Martek (Dostoyevsky); more.
Thanks to Mladen Stilinović and Branka Stipančić.
Jonathan Walker
Always Will Need To Wear Winter Shirt Blue + Ochre Small Check Pattern
21 August - 21 September, 2015
Untitled
I am not a great reader of poetry but I always return to the work of Melbourne poet, Vincent Buckley (1925- 1988). Perhaps I find his most tantalising piece to be not a finished poem but a fragment left on a scrap of paper discovered on his desk after the poet’s death.
The poetry gathers like oil
In the word-core, and spreads
It has its music meet,
Its music is in movement.
This fragment is more the shell left behind from a volatile thought than a finished poem. I find the last two lines honest but awkward whereas the first two lines work like an arrow. Most likely he could not find a resolution so it was left. Still, in its present form, it remains an eloquent testimony to the ultimate failure of a medium to express mobile thought and sensation, in Buckley’s case, through verbal language. It’s an important matter because this is something all artists have to deal with regardless of the medium.
I have never written a poem, however, I am forever copying fragments from books on paper scraps in a vain effort to fix certain notions in my head. At first, they function as bookmarks that are sometimes returned to when I open the book. But before long, as they accumulate, they fall out littering the table interspersed with A4 photocopies, bills, books and medications.
To return to Buckley’s fragment, the first two lines very much evoke how I paint nowadays. As you age, detail diminishes and patches of light become more luminous and float. I feel the most honest way of dealing with this is by smearing the oil paint on the canvas with the fingers and working close-up, blind. Only if the patches coalesce into an approaching image can the work gain a life.
-
Jonathan Walker was born in Melbourne, Australia and brought up on a dairy farm in Gippsland. In the 1970’s he studied painting at RMIT and won the Harold Wright Scholarship to the British Museum, London. During the 1980’s he exhibited at Pinacotheca Gallery, Richmond and had work shown at the NGV and Heidi City Art Gallery. Over the same period he designed the cover for the “Epigenesi” LP by Giancarlo Toniutti, Italy and conducted a mail exchange work with Achim Wollscheid, Germany. The work with artists through the post resulted in an article published in the bicentenary issue of Art and Australia 1988. He showed in artist run spaces such as WestSpace in the 90’s and 2000’s, and until 2012, taught painting at Victoria University, which is where we (Colleen Ahern and Lisa Radford) as organisers of the exhibition, among many others, had the privilege of being his student.
Walker’s knowledge was imparted to students through the careful selection of music, literature, and artists found in books that he himself had ordered for the library. Walker’s strategy was the generosity of sharing his vast knowledge with references specific to each student and their context.
Walker’s paintings share a similar focus and intimacy.
This exhibition presents a small selection of recent paintings alongside a publication that includes Walker’s writing. Observational and analytical, Walker’s work is a type of material notation — the time of day, colour and how it is blended, the both specific and fleeting location of a reflection on lino or the question of whether a chair leg should be included in a painting.
Please join us on Friday August 21 between 6-8pm to celebrate the opening of the exhibition.
Curated by Colleen Ahern and Lisa Radford.
B. Wurtz
Curated by Nic Tammens
March 26 - April 4, 2015
B.Wurtz works from a basement studio in his home on Manhattan’s Lower East Side.
This local fact is attested to by the plastic shopping bags and newsprint circulars that appear in his work. As formal objects, they don’t make loud claims about their origins but nonetheless transmit street addresses and places of business from the bottom of this long thin island. Like plenty of artists, Wurtz is affected by what is local and what is consumed. His work is underpinned by this ethic. It often speaks from a neighborhood or reads like the contents of a hamper:
“BLACK PLUMS $1.29 lb.”
“Food Bazaar”
“USDA Whole Pork Shoulder Picnic 99c lb.”
“RITE AID Pharmacy, with us it’s personal.”
“H. Brickman & Sons.”
“Sweet Yams 59c lb."
Most of the work in this exhibition was made while the artist was in residence at Dieu Donne, a workshop dedicated to paper craft in Midtown. Here Wurtz fabricated assemblages with paper and objects that are relatively lightweight, with the intention that they would be easily transportable to Australia. This consideration isn’t absolute in Wurtz’s work, but was prescriptive for making the current exhibition light and cheap. Packed in two boxes, these works were sent from a USPS post office on the Lower East Side and delivered to North Melbourne by Australia Post.
Wurtz appears courtesy of Metro Pictures, New York.
Thanks to Rob Halverson, Joshua Petherick, Sari de Mallory, Matt Hinkley, Helen Johnson, Fayen d'Evie, Ask Kilmartin, Lisa Radon, Ellena Savage, Yale Union, and "Elizabeth".
John Nixon
"Archive"
December 15 - January 20, 2014
The presentation of John Nixon's archive offered a rare showcase of this extensive collection of the artist's own publications, catalogues, posters, ephemera, editions and more, from the mid 1980s onwards, alongside a selection of his artworks.
Organized by John Nixon, Joshua Petherick and Matt Hinkley.
"Habitat"
at Minerva, Sydney (organised by Joshua Petherick and Matt Hinkley)
November 15 - December 20, 2014
Lupo Borgonovo, Janet Burchill & Jennifer McCamley,
Lewis Fidock, HR Giger, Piero Gilardi, Veit Laurent Kurz,
Cinzia Ruggeri, Michael E. Smith, Lucie Stahl, Daniel Weil, Wols
Press Release:
“...It contained seven objects. The slender fluted bone, surely formed for flight, surely from the wing of some large bird. Three archaic circuitboards, faced with mazes of gold. A smooth white sphere of baked clay. An age-blackened fragment of lace. A fingerlength segment of what she assumed was bone from a human wrist, grayish white, inset smoothly with the silicon shaft of a small instrument that must once have ridden flush with the surface of the skin - but the thing’s face was seared and blackened.”
William Gibson, “Count Zero”, 1986
"Autumn Projects Archive"
Curated by Liza Vasiliou
March 6 - March 15, 2014
World Food Books, in conjunction with the Virgin Australia Melbourne Fashion Festival 2014, presented the Autumn Projects archive, consisting of a selection of early examples in Australian fashion with a particular interest in collecting designers and labels from the period beginning in the 1980’s, who significantly influenced the discourse of Australian Fashion.
Curated by Liza Vasiliou, the exhibition provided a unique opportunity to view pieces by designers Anthea Crawford, Barbara Vandenberg, Geoff Liddell and labels CR Australia, Covers, Jag along with early experimental collage pieces by Prue Acton and Sally Browne’s ‘Fragments’ collection, suspended throughout the functioning World Food Books shop in Melbourne.
H.B. Peace
presented by CENTRE FOR STYLE
November 14, 2013
"Hey Blinky, you say chic, I say same"
Anon 2013
H.B. Peace is a clothing collaboration between great friends Blake Barns and Hugh Egan Westland. Their pieces explore the divergences between 'character’ and ‘personality’ in garments....etc
Special Thanks to Joshua Petherick and Matt Hinkley of WFB and Gillian Mears
and a Very Special Thank you to Audrey Thomas Hayes for her shoe collaboration.
Janet Burchill & Jennifer McCamley
"Aesthetic Suicide"
May 10 - June 8, 2013
The first of our occasional exhibitions in the World Food Books office/shop space in Melbourne, "Aesthetic Suicide" presented a body of new and older works together by artists Janet Burchill & Jennifer McCamley, including videos, prints, a wall work, and publications.
During shop open hours videos played every hour, on the hour.
1991, Japanese
Softcover, 300 pages, 21 x 15 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Million Publishing / Tokyo
$70.00 - Out of stock
November 1991 issue of S&M Sniper, the cutting-edge cult glossy fetish magazine published in Japan between 1979—2009 that, unlike previous SM magazines, didn't centre so much around professional kinbakushi, favouring instead the exploration of new innovations of fetish and underground sex culture and emphasising the work of the models, stylists, make-up artists, and fashions designers, as much as the writers or photographers. The "new wave" of SM counterculture, embedded in 1980s underground music, fashion and visual art culture in Japan. Explicitly and profusely illustrated, each issue came wrapped in the iconic hyper-stylized airbrushed front covers of artist Yosuke Onishi, veiling the core content of non-fiction realist degradation and an eclectic, expressive editorial of kinbaku and all manner of SM, and extreme fetish photoshoots, illustrations, comics, essays, diaries, reports, exhibitions, reviews, interviews, and included regular contributors such as SM archivist and noise musician Masami Akita (Merzbow), legendary SM writer and editor Dan Oniroku ("the most celebrated writer of popular SM novels in Japan"), features by legendary SM and seppuku performer, actress, and author Hiromi Saotome, features by contributing photographers Nobuyoshi Araki, Masaaki Toyoura, Kenichi Murata, Nobuhiko Ansai, Kinichi Tanaka, Domu Kitahara, sadistic BDSM trainer Shima Shikou, and regular writings by convicted murderer and cannibal Issei Sagawa!! Including his translations of Guido Crepax comics from Italian to Japanese. This was not a magazine like the others. Each issue is also brimming with amazing Japanese advertisements and classifieds for the latest bondage clubs, boutiques, dungeons, fashion, toys, video and publication catalogues, hook-ups, phone sex, and much more. This issue includes Nobuyoshi Araki, Kinichi Tanaka, Tadao Chigusa, Guido Crepax, Kenichi Yamakawa, Sachiko Nakamura, Masaaki Toyoura, Yosuke Onishi, Shima Shikou, Kazumasa Sagawa, all the usual and more... Not for the faint of heart.
Very Good copy.
1995, Japanese
Softcover, 340 pages, 21 x 15 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Million Publishing / Tokyo
$80.00 - Out of stock
May 1995 issue of S&M Sniper, the cutting-edge cult glossy fetish magazine published in Japan between 1979—2009 that, unlike previous SM magazines, didn't centre so much around professional kinbakushi, favouring instead the exploration of new innovations of fetish and underground sex culture and emphasising the work of the models, stylists, make-up artists, and fashions designers, as much as the writers or photographers. The "new wave" of SM counterculture, embedded in 1980s underground music, fashion and visual art culture in Japan. Explicitly and profusely illustrated, each issue came wrapped in the iconic hyper-stylized airbrushed front covers of artist Yosuke Onishi, veiling the core content of non-fiction realist degradation and an eclectic, expressive editorial of kinbaku and all manner of SM, and extreme fetish photoshoots, illustrations, comics, essays, diaries, reports, exhibitions, reviews, interviews, and included regular contributors such as SM archivist and noise musician Masami Akita (Merzbow), legendary SM writer and editor Dan Oniroku ("the most celebrated writer of popular SM novels in Japan"), features by legendary SM and seppuku performer, actress, and author Hiromi Saotome, features by contributing photographers Nobuyoshi Araki, Masaaki Toyoura, Kenichi Murata, Nobuhiko Ansai, Kinichi Tanaka, Domu Kitahara, sadistic BDSM trainer Shima Shikou, and regular writings by convicted murderer and cannibal Issei Sagawa!! Including his translations of Guido Crepax comics from Italian to Japanese. This was not a magazine like the others. Each issue is also brimming with amazing Japanese advertisements and classifieds for the latest bondage clubs, boutiques, dungeons, fashion, toys, video and publication catalogues, hook-ups, phone sex, and much more. This issue includes Nobuyoshi Araki, Yosuke Onishi, Masahiko Taniguchi, Mitsuzumi Yoshiyuki, Kinichi Tanaka, Shima Shikou, Chihiro Abe, Wakao Takahashi, Kenji Nakano, Masaaki Toyoura, all the usual and more... Not for the faint of heart.
Very Good copy.
1997, Japanese
Softcover, 320 pages, 21 x 15 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Million Publishing / Tokyo
$70.00 - In stock -
January 1997 issue of S&M Sniper, the cutting-edge cult glossy fetish magazine published in Japan between 1979—2009 that, unlike previous SM magazines, didn't centre so much around professional kinbakushi, favouring instead the exploration of new innovations of fetish and underground sex culture and emphasising the work of the models, stylists, make-up artists, and fashions designers, as much as the writers or photographers. The "new wave" of SM counterculture, embedded in 1980s underground music, fashion and visual art culture in Japan. Explicitly and profusely illustrated, each issue came wrapped in the iconic hyper-stylized airbrushed front covers of artist Yosuke Onishi, veiling the core content of non-fiction realist degradation and an eclectic, expressive editorial of kinbaku and all manner of SM, and extreme fetish photoshoots, illustrations, comics, essays, diaries, reports, exhibitions, reviews, interviews, and included regular contributors such as SM archivist and noise musician Masami Akita (Merzbow), legendary SM writer and editor Dan Oniroku ("the most celebrated writer of popular SM novels in Japan"), features by legendary SM and seppuku performer, actress, and author Hiromi Saotome, features by contributing photographers Nobuyoshi Araki, Masaaki Toyoura, Kenichi Murata, Nobuhiko Ansai, Kinichi Tanaka, Domu Kitahara, sadistic BDSM trainer Shima Shikou, and regular writings by convicted murderer and cannibal Issei Sagawa!! Including his translations of Guido Crepax comics from Italian to Japanese. This was not a magazine like the others. Each issue is also brimming with amazing Japanese advertisements and classifieds for the latest bondage clubs, boutiques, dungeons, fashion, toys, video and publication catalogues, hook-ups, phone sex, and much more. This issue includes Nobuyoshi Araki, Yosuke Onishi, Shima Shikou, Katsu Yoshida, Kinichi Tanaka, Kenichi Murata, Chihiro Abe, Kenji Nakano, Ryutaro Jinno, Selfish Gene, Wakao Takahashi, all the usual and more... Not for the faint of heart.
Very Good copy.
2000, English / Spanish
Softcover, 152 pages, 28 x 21.6 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
National Museum of Women in the Arts / Washington
$250.00 - Out of stock
Rare catalogue published the first major exhibition of Varo's art in the United States hosted by the National Museum of Women in the Arts in Washington, DC., studies the full range of Varo's work. Lavishly illustrated, presenting 77 of the finest paintings by one of Mexico's foremost modern artists and leading practitioners of surrealism and focusing on the main aspects of Varo's career over twenty-five years, this volume affords a rare opportunity to appreciate the full scale of her artistic vision. It considers her formal artistic training in the rigid academic atmosphere of the Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando in Madrid, and her sojourns in Paris in 1930 and 1937, which brought Varo into contact with the surrealist movement of Andre Breton that was to define her artistic expression for the rest of her career. The main part of the book is devoted to the period following her exile in Mexico in 1940. It was here that Varo's art became fully defined, and where she was recognized and championed by leading intellectual figures, such as the poet Octavio Paz.
Bilingual text in English and Spanish, with essay by Luis-Martin Lozano and text by Elizabeth Goldson. Includes exhibition checklist, biographical sketch and selected bibliography.
Very Good copy with only light wear.
2022, English
Hardcover, 200 pages, 29.5 x 27.5 cm
$95.00 - In stock -
FAMILY: THE SOURCE FAMILY SCRAPBOOK provides an immersive view into the public and private world of the Southern California occult commune The Brotherhood of the Source. This lavishly illustrated book reproduces 200 original scrapbook pages assembled by family historian Isis Aquarian from 1972-1977, documenting the group's dramatic rise and fall, from their time living together in the Hollywood Hills operating their wildly popular Source vegetarian restaurant on the Sunset Strip to their exodus to Hawaii and San Francisco as the group began to unravel. Copious unpublished photographs, newspaper clippings, letters, manifestos, album art and flyers, augmented by descriptive captions by Isis Aquarian, reveal the Source Family's astonishing trajectory, from controversial leader Father Yod's spiritual awakening to the group's wild musical and social experimentations, to the provocations that led to the group's paradise lost. These pages provide a revelatory, firsthand view into the widely misunderstood phenomenon of new religious movements and cults of the 1960s and 70s.
2006, English / French
Softcover, 318 pages, 22.8 x 16.3 cm
Published by
Black Widow Press / Boston
$48.00 - Out of stock
André Breton (1896—1966) was the founder of Surrealism and a major leader of the avant-garde movement in France following World War I. This exceptional volume brings together the most comprehensive selection of poems by Breton available in the English language. Here, in a bilingual French-English format are 73 poems representing all styles and stages of the writer's career.
2023, English
Softcover, 114 Pages, 18 x 11 cm
Published by
Imperium Press / Perth
$45.00 - Out of stock
Neoreaction is not your grandfather's conservatism, but the web 2.0 era marriage between modern engineering principles and classical anti-democratic thought. Its central tenet is that the Enlightenment was a mistake, and in The Dark Enlightenment, Nick Land burns progressivism to the ground, salts the earth around its ashes, and raises an altar to anti-humanism in its place.
Land explicates the main ideas of neoreaction — the Cathedral, neocameralism, formalism, etc. — always viewing democracy, liberalism, and politics in general through the lens of Darwinism. The result is something like Thomas Hobbes as ghostwritten by H. P. Lovecraft. Included in this volume is an unreleased essay by Land on the writing and impact of The Dark Enlightenment.
Absolutely none of this incendiary work has been proven wrong in the ten years since it was written. No doubt it will remain relevant for many years to come.
1992, English
Softcover, 248 pages, 14 x 21.6 cm
Published by
Routledge / London
$160.00 - Out of stock
An important literary and philosophical figure, Georges Bataille has had a significant influence on other French writers, such as Foucault, Derrida and Baudrillard. The Thirst for Annihilation is the first book in English to respond to Bataille's writings. In no way, though, is Nick Land's book an attempt to appropriate Bataille's writings to a secular intelligibility or to compromise with the aridity of academic discourse - rather, it is written as a communion. Theoretical issues in philosophy, sociology, psychodynamics, politics and poetry are discussed, but only as stepping stones into the deep water of textual sacrifice where words pass over into the broken voice of death. Cultural modernity is diagnosed down to its Kantian bedrock with its transcendental philosophy of the object, but Bataille's writings cut violently across this tightly disciplined reading to reveal the strong underlying currents that bear us towards chaos and dissolution - the violent impulse to escape, the thirst for annihilation.
Nick Land (born 17 January 1962) is an English philosopher, short-story horror writer, blogger, and "the father of accelerationism". His writing is credited with pioneering the genre known as "theory-fiction". A cofounder of the 1990s collective Cybernetic Culture Research Unit (CCRU), his work has been tied to the development of accelerationism and speculative realism.
2001, English / Japanese
Hardcover (w. dust jacket and obi-strip), 27 x 20 cm
Published by
Amus Arts Press / Japan
$120.00 - Out of stock
First hardcover edition of this essential single vibrant monograph capturing the psychedelic graphic work (spanning 1963-1974) by Japanese artist, Keiichi Tanaami. Concert posters, protest posters, comic strips, films, animations, record jackets, pop advertising, and much more, all vividly illustrated throughout, with commentary by the artist in English.
Keiichi Tanaami is one of the leading pop artists of postwar Japan, and has been active as a multi-genre artist since the 1960s as a graphic designer, illustrator, video artist and fine artist.
Very Good copy with Very Good dust jacket and original printer's obi-strip.
2023, English (w. German / Arabic)
Softcover (w. dust jacket) 304 pages, 16 x 20 cm
Published by
Sternberg Press / Berlin
$54.00 - In stock -
Sibyl's Mouths is the most recent in a series of publications by Pure Fiction, a writing and performance group with shifting members active since 2011. From February 12 to March 6, 2022, Pure Fiction presented an exhibition and performance program at the Kölnischer Kunstverein in Cologne titled “Shifting Theater: Sibyl's Mouths”. The starting point was a collective reading of Mary Shelley's 1826 novel The Last Man, in which the narrator discovers a collection of scribbled oak leaves scattered in a cave outside Naples. Alleged prophecies of the Cumean Sibyl, the textual fragments inscribed on the leaves foretell the story of an epidemic that ravages the globe in the 2100's—a period where solitude, intimacy, and the perception of time is radically renegotiated.
Through a multiplicity of textual genres and writerly approaches, contributors examine the questions and forms that emerge from prophecy: the role of the voice in text, writing and performance; fragmentary heterogeneous narratives. The mouth is consulted, not only as a mouthpiece or as a cavernous instrument for vocalization but as an essential part of the digestive tract. Processes in the gut, such as assimilation, excretion, and regurgitation involve multiple temporal directionalities, and may function as metaphorical gateways to intuitive truths.
Contributions by Rosa Aiello, Gerry Bibby, Coleman Collins, Ayanna Dozier, Annie Ernaux, Amelia Groom, Michèle Graf & Selina Grüter, Monilola Olayemi Ilupeju, Ellen Yeon Kim, Bitsy Knox, Dan Kwon, Erika Landström, Enad Marouf, Katrin Mayer, Aislinn Mcnamara, Kamila & Jasmina Metwaly, Luzie Meyer, Vera Palme, Theresa Patzschke, Georgia Sagri, Mahsa Saloor, Elif Saydam, Mark Von Schlegell, Simon Speiser, Elaine Tam, C.S. Tolan, Mikhail Wassmer, Anna Zacharoff.
2023, English
Softcover, 128 pages , 21 x 13.2 cm
Published by
Sternberg Press / Berlin
$48.00 - Out of stock
Isabelle Graw's latest book reflects on the purposes and struggles of friendship in competitive social milieus. By focusing on her own social milieu—the art world—Graw demonstrates how friendships are neither totally disinterested nor reduceable to their use. Written in the intimate form of a fictional diary, this book laments useful friendships while praising true friendship in all its forms. For Graw, friendship is an existential necessity--if only because it points to how we relate to and depend on others. Friendship, she finds, is as important as the air we breathe—with it, we are able to fully live.
Isabelle Graw is the publisher of the journal Texte zur Kunst, which she cofounded with Stefan Germer (1958–1998) in 1990, and professor of art history and art theory at the Hochschule für Bildende Künste–Städelschule, Frankfurt am Main. Her previous books include In Another World: Notes, 2014–2017, The Love of Painting: Genealogy of a Success Medium, and High Price: Art Between the Market and Celebrity Culture.
"On the Benefits of Friendship strangely calls to mind the fictional schoolboy-diary format Robert Walser staged to deliver his first novel. Aware of its own performance while successfully assuming its desired voice, Graw's diaristic story is a clever vehicle for social critique of utility friendships."—Stephanie LaCava, author of I Fear My Pain Interests You
Cover by Elaine Sturtevant.
2011 / 2014, English
Softcover, 359 pages, 17 x 22cm
Published by
IMA / Brisbane
Power Publications / NSW
$50.00 - Out of stock
Edited and introduced by Ian McLean.
How Aborigines Invented the Idea of Contemporary Art is the first anthology to chronicle the global critical reception of Aboriginal art since the early 1980s, when the art world began to understand it as contemporary art. Featuring ninety-six authors—including art critics and historians, curators, art centre co-ordinators and managers, artists, anthropologists, sociologists, philosophers and novelists—it conveys a diversity of thinking and approach. Together with editor Ian McLean’s important introductory essay and epilogue, the anthology argues for a re-evaluation of Aboriginal art’s critical intervention into contemporary art since its seduction of the art world a quarter-century ago.
What lies behind the indigenousness of Aboriginal art is a return of the repressed with a vengeance, an enhanced creativity capable of challenging the colonial order. In this anthology, Ian McLean has brilliantly put together a theoretical discourse that examines critically this multilayered—though sometimes contradictory—complexity of Aboriginal art.—Rasheed Araeen
Ian McLean is one of Australia’s leading art historians and the first to write broadly and inclusively about the place of Aboriginal art in contemporary Australian art theory and practice. The anthology guides us through the complex recent literature on Aboriginal art and provides a context for understanding current debates and emergent interpretations of the significance of this exciting new intervention in world art.—Howard Morphy
IAN MCLEAN is a well-known commentator on Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal Australian art and the intersection of Indigenous and settler cultures. He is the author of The Art of Gordon Bennett and White Aborigines: Identity Politics in Australian Art. He is a member of the Advisory Council of Third Text, and professor of Australian art history at the University of Wollongong.
2023, English
Hardcover (w. dust jacket), 240 Pages, 19.8 x 12.9 cm
Published by
And Other Stories / UK
$49.00 - In stock -
From being caught having their first orgasm by their mum’s best friend to being stalked and propositioned by a fundamentalist pastor; from soliciting spanking dates over the Internet to scoring a coveted invitation to a threesome with some elf fetishist neighbours, art rock darling (Xiu Xiu) Jamie Stewart’s journey of fleshy self-discovery and queer awakening makes for an extraordinary, cringy, unputdownable epic in miniature, burning always with radical and often shocking self-criticism.
A one-of-a-kind exploration of abasement, depravity, joy, and embarrassment (and even joy in embarrassment), Anything That Moves is a series of comic, tragic X-rays of sex. It is funny, erotic, anti-erotic, honest, brave, icky, and hauntingly sad by turns. It demonstrates too how love and forgiveness can percolate around the edges of even the most traumatic relationships.
Stewart’s band Xiu Xiu has been called ‘self-flagellating’, ‘brutal’, ‘shocking’ and ‘perverse’, but also ‘genius’, ‘brilliant’, ‘unique’, ‘imaginative’ and ‘luminous’. Readers can expect nothing less from Anything That Moves.
2022, English
Softcover, 192 pages, 12.9 x 19.8 cm
Published by
Verso / London
$32.00 - In stock -
An absurdist novel about fame, culture and connections, bodies and breakdowns from the author of The Superrationals.
Margot’s on her way to Montana, with blood on her face and a jeweled cigarette case full of pills. She’s fresh from a bad break-up and fleeing the cold comforts of her famous family – legendary punk parents and an overbearing show business scion of a grandmother.
But while the eyes of the world are elsewhere for the first time in Margot's life, a graveyard encounter with a disgraced doctor and the discovery of a dozen old film reels leads to a troubling new subjecthood, as her congenital inability to feel pain puts her center stage for one man’s desire and ambition.
A jarringly sensual book about the peculiarities of our bodies and the impossibilities of our families, and a young woman trying to find a way forward with both.
“I Fear My Pain Interests You is meticulously constructed, with each part supporting and supported by the others. Controlled self-awareness like this in novels makes me pay close attention, enriching my experience.”—Tao Lin, The New York Times
“The cool girl book of the year”—Jordan Richman, 032c
2023, English
Hardcover (w. dust jacket), 288 Pages, 21.59 x 14.61 cm
Published by
Grove Press / New York
$49.00 - Out of stock
From "one of the essential voices in American poetry" (New York Times) comes a rich new collection of expansive, light-footed, and cheerfully foreboding poems oddly in tune with our strange and evolving present
The first new collection since Evolution from the prolific poet, activist, and writer Eileen Myles, a "Working Life" unerringly captures the measure of life. Whether alone or in relationship, on city sidewalks or in the country, their lyrics always engage with permanence and mortality, danger and safety, fear and wonder.
a "Working Life" is a book transfixed by the everyday: the "sweet accumulation" of birds outside a window, a cup of coffee and a slice of pizza, a lover's foot on the bed. These poems arise in the close quarters of air travel, the flashing of a landscape through a train window, or simply in a truck tooling around town, or on foot with a dog in all the places that held us during the pandemic lockdowns. Myles's lines unabashedly sing the happy contradictions of love and sex, spill over with warnings about the not-so future world threatened by climate change and capitalism, and also find transcendent wonder in the landscapes and animals around us, and in the solitary and collective act of caring for one another and our world.
With intelligence, heart, and singular vision, a "Working Life" shows Eileen Myles working at a thrilling new pitch of their poetic and philosophical powers.
2023, English
Softcover, 224 Pages, 23.5 x 18 cm
Published by
Semiotext(e) / Los Angeles
$39.00 - Out of stock
Edited by Robert Leonard
Foreword by Chris Kraus
Artist, gallerist, and writer Giovanni Intra's inventive approach to art writing provides a guide to the New Zealand and Los Angeles art scenes of his era.
Everything you read about Los Angeles is true. The city adapts to its own mythology. It's such a ludicrously discussed place that I always feel slightly idiotic in my attempts to produce a serious discourse about it. Raves in the desert, however, are superb. And ecstasy is a great drug. Also, if you hadn't heard, music sounds better when you're high. And the desert surrounding LA is wondrous.—Giovanni Intra, "LA Politics"
Before his early death in 2002, Giovanni Intra enjoyed a rollercoaster ride through the art world. He was an artist and gallerist-cofounding two legendary galleries, the artist-run space Teststrip in Auckland and China Art Objects Galleries in Los Angeles-as well as a writer. Clinic of Phantasms provides a guide to the New Zealand and Los Angeles art scenes of the day, including texts on key artists from New Zealand (John Hurrell, Fiona Pardington, Denise Kum, Ava Seymour, Ann Shelton, Gavin Hipkins, Daniel Malone, and Slave Pianos) and Los Angeles (Charles Ray, Mike Kelley, Paul McCarthy, Dave Muller, Evan Holloway, John McCracken, and Julia Scher).
What makes Intra's work of enduring significance is his inventive approach to art writing, which was informed by his interest in punk, surrealism, and Daniel Paul Schreber, the famous case study in paranoia and hallucination. This volume features writing on Intra from Chris Kraus and Mark von Schlegell, Andrew Berardini, Roberta Smith, Tessa Laird, Will Bradley, Joel Mesler, and Robert Leonard.
"He emerged the radically elegant punk, whip-crack smart and charming as hell . . . The hilarious honesty and sharp intelligence of Giovanni was to me a breeze, a knife, a wonder."—Andrew Berardini, "Everything You Read About Giovanni Intra is True"
Published by Bouncy Castle and Semiotext(e).
1990, English
Softcover, 400 pages, 22.5cm x 15 cm
Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
University of Minnesota Press / Minnesota
$65.00 - Out of stock
1990 English language edition of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari's mighty Anti-Oedipus, published by University of Minnesota Press. With introduction by Michel Foucault.
When it first appeared in France in 1972, Anti-Oedipus was hailed as a masterpiece by some and "a work of heretical madness" by others. Anti-Oedipus was the opening explosion to the post-1968 reaction to the structuralist movement; it remains a primary text of post-structuralism. In his preface, Michel Foucault calls Anti-Oedipus an Introduction to Non-Fascist Living. He refers not just to political fascism but to the fascism that is within us, that causes us to desire our own domination. In the book, philosopher Gilles Deleuze and clinical psychoanalyst Félix Guattari set forth the following theory: Western society's innate herd instinct has allowed the government, the media, and even the principles of economics to take advantage of each person's unwillingness to be cut off from the group. What's more, those who suffer from mental disorders may not be insane, but could be individuals in the purest sense, because they are by nature isolated from society. More than twenty-five years after its original publication, Anti-Oedipus still stands as a controversial contribution to a much-needed dialogue on the nature of free thinking.
Very Good copy of this scarce earlier English edition.
1969, English
Softcover, 226 pages
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / good
Published by
A. S. Barnes / USA
$20.00 - Out of stock
First 1969 edition of The Cinema of Fritz Lang by Paul M. Jensen, written in 1969, whilst Lang was still alive, although no longer making films, this gives a detailed insight into the Director's work and an indication of his influence. Illustrated throughout with black and white photographs and a full chronology of works.
Good copy.
Softcover, 112 pages, Engish
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / good
Published by
Lorrimer / London
$25.00 - In stock -
First 1973 edition of M by Fritz Lang, of the now scarce and collectible Lorrimer Classical Film Scripts series. Illustrated throughout with film stills, with complete film script and credits of M, the classic German thriller, in which Hans Beckert (Peter Lorre), a serial killer who preys on children, becomes the focus of a massive Berlin police manhunt. Beckert's heinous crimes are so repellant and disruptive to city life that he is even targeted by others in the seedy underworld network. With both cops and criminals in pursuit, the murderer soon realizes that people are on his trail, sending him into a tense, panicked attempt to escape justice.
Good copy.
1973, English
Softcover, 132 pages
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / good
Published by
Lorrimer / London
$45.00 - Out of stock
First 1973 edition of Metropolis by Fritz Lang (and Thea von Harbou), of the now scarce and collectible Lorrimer Classical Film Scripts series. Illustrated throughout with film stills, with complete film script and credits of Metropolis, the 1927 German expressionist science-fiction film directed by Fritz Lang and written by Thea von Harbou in collaboration with Lang, adapted from von Harbou's 1925 novel of the same name (which was intentionally written as a treatment). This influential German science-fiction film presents a highly stylized futuristic city where a beautiful and cultured utopia exists above a bleak underworld populated by mistreated workers. When the privileged youth Freder (Gustav Fröhlich) discovers the grim scene under the city, he becomes intent on helping the workers. He befriends the rebellious teacher Maria (Brigitte Helm), but this puts him at odds with his authoritative father, leading to greater conflict.
Good copy.
1984, English
Softcover, 232 pages
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Johns Hopkins University Press / Baltimore
$25.00 - In stock -
First published in 1982. Aside from Jacques Derrida's own references to the "possible articulation" between deconstruction and Marxism, the relationship between the two has remained largely unexplored. In Marxism and Deconstruction, Michael Ryan examines that multifaceted relationship but not through a mere comparison of two distinct and inviolable entities. Instead, he looks at both with an eye to identifying their common elements and reweaving them into a new theory of political practice. To accomplish his task, Ryan undertakes a detailed comparison of deconstruction and Marxism, relating deconstruction to the dialectical tradition in philosophy and demonstrating how deconstruction can be used in the critique of ideology. He is a forceful critic of both the politics of deconstruction and the metaphysical aspect of Marxism (as seen from a deconstructionist perspective). Besides offering the first book-length study of Derrida in this context, Ryan makes the first methodic attempt by an American scholar to apply deconstruction to domains beyond literature. He proposes a deconstructive Marxism, one lacking the metaphysical underpinnings of conservative "scientific" Marxist theory and employing deconstructive analysis both for Marxist political criticism and to further current anti-metaphysical developments within Marxism. Marxism and Deconstruction is an innovative and controversial contribution to the fields of literary criticism, philosophy, and political science.
"A powerful riposte, both to Marxists who revile deconstructionism for its supposed liberal-bourgeois quietism, and to those among the current deconstructors who seem to invite that charge."—Christopher Norris, Times Literary Supplement.
G—VG copy.
1972, English
Softcover, 686 pages
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / good
Published by
W W Norton & Co / New York
$40.00 - In stock -
This first 1972 edition of the leading anthology provides the essential writings of Marx and Engels -- those works necessary for an introduction to Marxist thought and ideology. The volume is arranged to show both the chronological and the thematic development of the two great thinkers. Selections range in coverage from history, society, and economics, to politics, philosophy, and the strategy and tactics of social revolution.
Friedrich Engels was born in 1820, in the German city of Barmen. He died in London in 1895 while editing the fourth volume of Capital.
Karl Marx studied law and philosophy at the universities of Bonn and Berlin, completing his doctorate in 1841. Expelled from Prussia in 1844, he took up residence first in Paris and then in London where, in 1867, he published his magnum opus Capital. A co-founder of the International Workingmen's Association in 1864, Marx died in London in 1883.
Robert C. Tucker is professor of politics emeritus at Princeton University and past president of the American Association for the Advancement of Slavic Studies.
G—VG copy. General wear from age, light creases.
1983, English
Hardcover (w. dust jacket),
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / good
Published by
Columbia University Press / New York
$25.00 - Out of stock
If Catherine Clément took to writing the Lives and Legends of Jacques Lacan, it was not only to reconnect with her lost youth. It was an act of fidelity. She set out to portray her own private Lacan, the figure she kept behind other people's gloss and commentary.
Catherine Clément is a French philosopher, novelist, feminist, and literary critic, born in Boulogne-Billancourt. She received a degree in philosophy from the École Normale Supérieure, and studied under its faculty Claude Lévi-Strauss and Jacques Lacan, working in the fields of anthropology and psychoanalysis.
First hc edition, 1983.
1996, English
Softcover, 400 pages, 22.89 x 15.3 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
University of California / Berkeley
$25.00 - Out of stock
Mimesis, the notion that art imitates reality, has long been recognized as one of the central ideas of Western aesthetics and has been most frequently associated with Aristotle. Less well documented is the great importance of mimetic theories of literature, theater, and the visual arts during the Renaissance and the Enlightenment. In this book, the most comprehensive overview of the theory of mimesis since Auerbach's monumental study, Gunter Gebauer and Christoph Wulf provide a thorough introduction to the complex and shifting meanings of the term. Beginning with the Platonic doctrine of imitation, they chart the concept's appropriation and significance in the aesthetic theories of Aristotle, Molière, Shakespeare, Racine, Diderot, Lessing, and Rousseau. They examine the status of mimesis in the nineteenth-century novel and its reworking by such modern thinkers as Benjamin, Adorno, and Derrida. Widening the traditional understanding of mimesis to encompass the body and cultural practices of everyday life, their work suggests the continuing value of mimetic theory and will prove essential reading for scholars and students of literature, theater, and the visual arts.
Gunter Gebauer and Christoph Wulf are Professors in the Center for Historical Anthropology at the Free University of Berlin and the authors of several works of literary and cultural criticism. Don Reneau is a translator and writer in Berkeley, California.
Very Good copy.