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.
1986, English
Softcover, 256 pages, 21 x 13 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
North Point Press / San Francisco
$45.00 - Out of stock
First 1986 edition of Paul Celan's Last Poems, published in San Francisco by North Point Press in a bi-lingual English and German edition, translated by Katherine Washburn and Margret Guillemin.
Paul Celan is among the most important German-language poets of the century, and, in George Steiner's words, 'almost certainly the major European poet of the period after 1945.' He was born in 1920 into a Jewish family in Bukovina, a German enclave in Romania which was destroyed by the Nazis. His parents were taken to a concentration camp in 1942, and did not return; Celan managed to escape deportation and to survive. After settling in Paris in 1948, he soon gained widespread recognition as a poet with the publication of his first collection of poems in 1952. Language, Paul Celan said, was the only thing that remained intact for him after the war. His experiences of the war years and of the loss of his parents are the recurrent themes of his poetry. In the end they led as well to his suicide by drowning in 1970.
Very Good copy.
1973, English
Softcover, 575 pages, 18 x 11 cm
Out of print title / used / average
Published by
Penguin Books / Australia
$25.00 - Out of stock
1973 Penguin edition of Nobel Prize-winning author Elias Canetti's revolutionary work Crowds and Power, first published in 1960.
In Crowds and Power, one of the most extraordinary books of our time, Elias Canetti finds a new way of looking at human history and psychology. Breathtaking in its range and erudition, it explores the Rain Dances of Pueblo Indians, the Muharram Festival of the Shiites, the English Civil war, the finger exercises of monkeys and the effects of inflation in Weimar Germany. In this study of the interplay of crowds, that mysterious yet commonplace phenomenon, Canetti offers one of the most profound and startling portraits of the human condition.
Elias Canetti (1905—1994) was a German-language writer, born in Ruse, Bulgaria to a Sephardic family. They moved to Manchester, England, but his father died in 1912, and his mother took her three sons back to continental Europe. They settled in Vienna. Canetti moved to England in 1938 after the Anschluss to escape Nazi persecution. He became a British citizen in 1952. He is known as a modernist novelist, playwright, memoirist, and nonfiction writer. He won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1981, "for writings marked by a broad outlook, a wealth of ideas and artistic power". In late 1980s he started to live in Zurich permanently. He died in 1994 in Zurich. He is noted for his nonfiction book Crowds and Power, among other works.
Average copy, heavily worn and creased covers and tanning, binding solid.
1971, English
Hardcover (w. dust jacket), 464 pages, 22 x 14.5 cm
Out of print title / used / good
Published by
Jonathan Cape / London
$60.00 - In stock -
"Strange, savage, subtle, beautifully mysterious... one of the great novels of the [twentieth] century"—Iris Murdoch
"One of the most important neglected novels of our time. It is a strange, eloquent and terrifying book, which tells us as much about the madness of our age as Kafka's The Trial or Musil's Man Without Qualities."—Philip Toynbee
Hardcover 1971 Jonathan Cape printing of Nobel Prize-winning author Elias Canetti's most well-known work, Auto-Da-Fé, first published in Germany in 1935, first translation to English in 1947.
Originally published in German as "Die Blendung" in 1935 and later banned in Nazi Germany, Auto-Da-Fe did not become widely known until the publication of Canetti's "Crowds and Power" in 1960. "In Auto-da-Fé no one is spared. Professor and furniture salesman, doctor, housekeeper, and thief all get it in the neck. The remoreseless quality of the comedy builds one of the most terrifying literary worlds of the century" (Salman Rushdie). "Savage, subtle, beautifully mysterious--one of the few great novels of the century" (Iris Murdoch). "A strange, eloquent and terrifying book" (Philip Toynbee). Auto da Fé is the story of Peter Kien, a distinguished, reclusive Sinologist living in Germany between the wars. With masterly precision, Canetti builds up the elements in Kien himself, and his personal relationships, which will lead to his destruction.
Elias Canetti (1905—1994) was a German-language writer, born in Ruse, Bulgaria to a Sephardic family. They moved to Manchester, England, but his father died in 1912, and his mother took her three sons back to continental Europe. They settled in Vienna. Canetti moved to England in 1938 after the Anschluss to escape Nazi persecution. He became a British citizen in 1952. He is known as a modernist novelist, playwright, memoirist, and nonfiction writer. He won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1981, "for writings marked by a broad outlook, a wealth of ideas and artistic power". In late 1980s he started to live in Zurich permanently. He died in 1994 in Zurich. He is noted for his nonfiction book Crowds and Power, among other works.
Good copy with some marking to the book block edges, otherwise a clean, solid copy throughout. Average dust jacket with heavy marking and some chipping.
1981, English
Hardcover (w. dust jacket), 504 pages
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Avenel Books / New York
$30.00 - In stock -
First 1981 hardcover edition of A Treasury of Fantasy: Heroic Adventures in Imaginary Lands, published in 1981, edited by Cary Wilkins. An anthology collecting eleven stories by William Morris, Mrs. Andrew Lang, Francisco de Moraes, Johann Ludwig Tieck, John Ruskin, George Mac Donald, Lord Dunsany, H.P. Lovecraft, Robert E. Howard, and Ursula K. Leguin. Illustrated throughout by various illustrators. Dust jacket illustration by Russ Hoover.
Very Good copy, Good dust jacket.
1974, English
Softcover, 567 pages, 19 x 13 cm
Out of print title / used / good
Published by
Pan / London
$25.00 - Out of stock
1974 Pan paperback edition of John Fowles' The Magus, first published in 1966.
This daring literary thriller, rich with eroticism and suspense, is one of John Fowles's best-loved and bestselling novels and has contributed significantly to his international reputation as a writer of the first degree. At the center of The Magus is Nicholas Urfe, a young Englishman who accepts a teaching position on a remote Greek island, where he befriends a local millionaire. The friendship soon evolves into a deadly game, in which reality and fantasy are deliberately manipulated, and Nicholas finds that he must fight not only for his sanity but for his very survival.
Good copy, general wear and ageing.
1978, English
Softcover, 126 pages, 20 x 13 cm
1st US Edition, Out of print title / used / good
Published by
Picador / USA
$30.00 - Out of stock
First 1978 English (US) paperback Picador edition of Italo Calvino's Castle of Crossed Destinies.
'A shamelessly original work of art'—New York Times
A group of travellers chance to meet, first in a castle, then a tavern. Their powers of speech are magically taken from them and instead they have only tarot cards with which to tell their stories. What follows is an exquisite interlinking of narratives, and a fantastic, surreal and chaotic history of all human consciousness.
Italo Calvino, (b. 1923, Cuba—1985, Italy), was an Italian journalist, short-story writer, and novelist whose whimsical and imaginative fables made him one of the most important Italian fiction writers in the 20th century.
Good—VG copy. General light wear, age.
1979, English
Softcover, 126 pages, 20 x 13 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / good
Published by
Picador / USA
$25.00 - Out of stock
First 1979 English (US) paperback Picador edition of Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities.
In Invisible Cities Marco Polo conjures up cities of magical times for his host, the Chinese ruler Kublai Khan, but gradually it becomes clear that he is actually describing one city: Venice. As Gore Vidal wrote 'Of all tasks, describing the contents of a book is the most difficult and in the case of a marvellous invention like Invisible Cities, perfectly irrelevant.'
Italo Calvino, (b. 1923, Cuba—1985, Italy), was an Italian journalist, short-story writer, and novelist whose whimsical and imaginative fables made him one of the most important Italian fiction writers in the 20th century.
Good—VG copy. General light wear, age.
1978/1984, English
Softcover, 1246 pages, 20 x 13 cm
Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Penguin Books / London
$35.00 - Out of stock
‘Great Lady of the greatest Isle, whose light
Like Phoebus lampe throughout the world doth shine’
The Faerie Queene was one of the most influential poems in the English language. Dedicating his work to Elizabeth I, Spenser brilliantly united Arthurian romance and Italian renaissance epic to celebrate the glory of the Virgin Queen. Each book of the poem recounts the quest of a knight to achieve a virtue: the Red Crosse Knight of Holinesse, who must slay a dragon and free himself from the witch Duessa; Sir Guyon, Knight of Temperance, who escapes the Cave of Mammon and destroys Acrasia’s Bowre of Bliss; and the lady-knight Britomart’s search for her Sir Artegall, revealed to her in an enchanted mirror. Although composed as a moral and political allegory, The Faerie Queene’s magical atmosphere captivated the imaginations of later poets from Milton to the Victorians.
"To our own troubled and inquiring age this wisdom will perhaps show its most welcome aspect in the complete integration, the harmony, of Spenser's mind. His work is one, like a growing thing, a tree; like the world-ash-tree itself, with branches reaching to heaven and roots to hell ... And between these two extremes comes all the multiplicity of human life, transmuted but not falsified by the conventions of chivalrous romance. .... To read him is to grow in mental health."—CS Lewis: Allegory of Love
Good—VG copy of the 1978 edition in scarce 1984 printing.
1963, English
Hardcover (w. dust jacket), 272 pages, 20 x 13 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / fine
Published by
Secker & Warburg / London
$90.00 - Out of stock
First English edition of Yukio Mishima's 1960 novel, that The New Yorker called "the biggest and most profound thing Mishima has done so far in an already distinguished career" upon this translation into English by Donald Keene in 1963. about the relationship between a geisha and a semi-retired politician. In real life the book was at the centre of the landmark privacy ruling that became known as the After the Banquet Case, with Japanese politician Hachiro Arita successfully suing the author for violating his privacy, so real did he find the novel's detail. Translated by Donald Keene, this is the first printing of the 1963 edition published by Secker and Warburg, and is in Fine condition.
Yukio Mishima (1925—1970) was a Japanese author, poet, playwright, actor, model, Shintoist, nationalist, and founder of the Tatenokai, an unarmed civilian militia. Mishima is considered one of the most important Japanese authors of the 20th century. A controversial novelist who engaged with the contradictions within Japan’s national identity, and within his own tortured psyche, his first published book, The Forest in Full Bloom, appeared in 1944 and he established himself as a major author with Confessions of a Mask (1949). From then until his death he continued to publish novels, short stories, and plays each year. His crowning achievement, the Sea of Fertility tetralogy—which contains the novels Spring Snow (1969), Runaway Horses (1969), The Temple of Dawn (1970), and The Decay of the Angel (1971)—is considered one of the definitive works of twentieth-century Japanese fiction. In 1970, at the age of forty-five and the day after completing the last novel in the Fertility series, Mishima stood on a balcony in front of some one thousand servicemen at the Tokyo command of the Eastern Headquarters of Japan’s Ground Self-Defence Forces. Here, he exhorted them to rise up against Japan’s US-backed post-war state and constitution, berated the soldiers for their submissiveness and challenged them to return the Emperor to his pre-war position as living god and national leader. He then turned back to the room where he and four followers had barricaded themselves and proceeded to perform seppuku – ritual Japanese suicide. This involved driving a razor-sharp Japanese sword into his stomach and then having his head sliced off by a waiting friend—a spectacular death that attracted worldwide attention.
Fine copy in Very Good dust jacket.
1984, English
Hardcover (w. dust jacket), 222 pages, 19.5 x 13 cm
Out of print title / used / good
Published by
Jonathan Cape / London
$50.00 - In stock -
1984 Jonathan Cape hardcover edition of English author J.G. Ballard's The Crystal World, featuring jacket design by Brian Robbins. A science fiction masterpiece, The Crystal World is regarded as the best of Ballard's "catastrophe novels."
J. G. Ballard’s fourth novel tells the story of a physician trying to make his way deep into the jungle to a secluded leprosy treatment facility. While trying to make it to his destination, his chaotic path leads him to try to come to terms with an apocalyptic phenomenon in the jungle that crystallises everything it touches.
Ballard previously used the theme of apocalyptic crystallisation in the 1964 short story "The Illuminated Man" (included in The Terminal Beach), which is also set in the same locations.
Good copy. Very Good, unread copy but ex-libris with library covering to dust jacket and minimal library markings to front endpaper and title page. Otherwise a perfect clean copy throughout.
1975, English
Softcover, 205 pages, 18 x 11 cm
Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Panther / London
$12.00 - In stock -
Clans of the Alphane Moon is a 1964 science fiction novel by American writer Philip K. Dick. It is based on his 1954 short story "Shell Game", first published in Galaxy Science Fiction magazine.
No man in their rightful mind would kill their wife miles from home.
Chuck Rittersdorf has recruited some robot help, and now, in the madness and dysfunction of the Alphane moon, there seems no better place to carry out his cruel plans unless he too is part of a much larger conspiracy.
Alpha Centauri, a star within the closest star system to earth, has several orbiting moons, among which is Alpha III M2. On this remote moon, a colony, originally set up to provide respite for the mentally ill is about to become the focus of a secret invasion plan.
Among them is Chuck Rittersdorf, a 21st century CIA robot programmer, who has decided to kill his own wife via a remote control simulacrum. He enlists the aid of a telepathic Ganymedean slime mould called Lord Running Clam, an attractive female police officer and various others both witting and unwitting.
But when Chuck finds himself in the midst of an interplanetary spy ring on the Alphane moon inhabited entirely by certified maniacs, his personal revenge plans begin to awry as the nature of reality itself is called into question in this brilliantly inventive tale of interstellar madness, murder and violence.
An astutely shrewd and acerbic tale that blurs all conventional distinctions between sanity and madness.
Philip K. Dick (1928—2007) was born in Chicago and lived most of his life in California. In 1952, he began writing professionally and proceeded to write numerous novels and short-story collections. He won the Hugo Award for the best novel in 1962 for The Man in the High Castle and the John W. Campbell Memorial Award for best novel of the year in 1974 for Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said. In addition to 44 published novels, Dick wrote approximately 121 short stories, most of which appeared in science fiction magazines during his lifetime. Although Dick spent most of his career as a writer in near-poverty, ten of his stories have been adapted into popular films since his death, including Blade Runner, Total Recall, A Scanner Darkly, Minority Report, Paycheck, Next, Screamers, and The Adjustment Bureau. In 2005, Time magazine named Ubik one of the one hundred greatest English-language novels published since 1923. In 2007, Dick became the first science fiction writer to be included in The Library of America series. Philip K. Dick died on March 2, 1982, in Santa Ana, California, of heart failure following a stroke.
Very Good copy of 1975 Panther edition.
1976, English
Softcover, 208 pages, 18 x 12 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Harper Collins / New York
$28.00 - Out of stock
First 1976 paperback edition of Philip K. Dick's Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said.
Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said grapples with many of the themes Philip K. Dick is best known for— identity, altered reality, drug use, and dystopia—in a rollicking chase story that earned the novel the John W. Campbell Award and nominations for the Hugo and Nebula.
Jason Taverner—world-famous talk show host and man-about-town—wakes up one day to find that no one knows who he is—including the vast databases of the totalitarian government. And in a society where lack of identification is a crime, Taverner has no choice but to go on the run with a host of shady characters, including crooked cops and dealers of alien drugs. But do they know more than they are letting on? And just how can a person’s identity be erased overnight?
"Dick skillfully explores the psychological ramifications of this nightmare."—The New York Times Review of Books
Very Good copy, light wear, tanning.
1986, English
Softcover, 464 pages, 18 x 11 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Grafton / UK
$28.00 - Out of stock
First 1986 Grafton paperback edition of Samuel R. Delany's Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand.
A stunning, many-layered speculation on the future of humanity, on interaction between cultures, on love and sex, on religion and politics, STARS IN MY POCKETS LIKE GRAINS OF SAND is an enduring masterpiece by one of science fiction's greatest writers.
The only survivor when his home is utterly destroyed, Rat Korga is transported to a new life on the planet Velm. Escaping a society that suppressed and enslaved him, Korga joins a vast, rich interstellar culture and finds himself sharing a world with Marq Dyeth, the person this civilization's officials have calculated to be his perfect partner.
"Sentence by sentence, phrase by phrase, Delany invites the reader to collaborate in the process of creation. The reader who accepts this invitation has an extraordinarily satisfying experience in store"—New York Times Book Review
"A rocket launch, a phoenix reborn, a new Delany novel-three wonderful, fiery events"—Ursula K. Le Guin
Very Good copy, light wear, ageing.
1977, English
Softcover, 18 x 12 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Sphere / UK
$28.00 - Out of stock
First 1977 Sphere paperback edition of Samuel R. Delany's The Einstein Intersection.
A nonhuman race reimagines human mythology.
The Einstein Intersection won the Nebula Award for best science fiction novel of 1967. The surface story tells of the problems a member of an alien race, Lo Lobey, has assimilating the mythology of earth, where his kind have settled among the leftover artifacts of humanity. The deeper tale concerns, however, the way those who are "different" must deal with the dominant cultural ideology. The tale follows Lobey's mythic quest for his lost love, Friza. In luminous and hallucinated language, it explores what new myths might emerge from the detritus of the human world as those who are "different" try to seize history and the day.
"When Delany describes to us what he has seen, what he can compute, adduce, intuit or smell in the underbrush, our reaction is to sit bolt upright and cry out, 'Of course, I have that very wound myself!' The ability to produce this reaction in people is one of the commonly accepted and apparently valid appurtenances of genius... I look forward to the explosion reading this will create within you."—A. J. Budrys (Galaxy Magazine)
Very Good copy, light wear, tanning.
1997, English
Hardcover (in publisher's box, stamped book), 524 pages, 30 x 21 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / fine
Published by
American Composers Forum / Minnesota
$300.00 - In stock -
First 1997 hardcover (boxed) edition of Enclosure 3: Harry Partch, produced, compiled, designed and edited by Philip Blackburn and published in this deluxe volume by American Composers Forum in Minnesota in a limited edition of only 800 copies. Harry Partch (1901—1974) was an American composer, music theorist, and creator of unique musical instruments. This lavish coffee table bio-scrapbook is a portrait chronicle of Partch's life and work compiled from original documents, reproduced throughout. Includes over 300 photographs by Partch and others, reproductions of Partch's writings and letters - a mass of important material (corres. inc. Anais Nin, John Cage, W.B. Yeats, Martha Graham, etc), lectures, drawings, reviews, sketches... A remarkable and beautifully made artefact. Limited edition of 800 copies. A "must have" for anyone with an abiding interest in musical "alternative universes".
Composer Harry Partch created a music that by its nature led to the Harry Partch invention of a fantastic array of percussion instruments. Rejecting equal temperament and much of Western musical heritage, he developed a system based on Just tuning and conceived of a "corporeality" that demanded special instrumental resources. He spoke of himself as "a musician seduced into carpentry" and built sculpture-like instruments such as the Diamond Marimba, Bass Marimba, Cloud Chamber Bowls, Spoils of War, and Quadrangularis Reversum. His music, mostly dramatic, was influenced by, among other things, Chinese lullabies, Yaqui Indian music, Christian hymns, his experiences as a hobo, Greek philosophy and drama, and jazz. His large-scale dramas required that the percussionists become actor-dancers. Among his major works are "Delusion of the Fury," "The Wayward," "Revelation in the Courthouse Park" and "Oedipus."
Fine copy in the seldom preserved publisher's box and with the Partch signature stamp to front endpaper. A stunning collector copy.
1993, Japanese
Hardcover (w. dust jacket and obi-strip), 230 pages, 13.6 cm x 19.4 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Seikyūsha / Tokyo
$90.00 - In stock -
First hardcover edition of "Body Exotica : Sexual Atrocity", written by Merzbow's Masami Akita and published only in Japan in 1993. Covering subjects such as body manipulation and decoration, Japanese genital museums, German anarcho-pacifist Ernst Friedrich's Anti-War imagery, Daisy and Violet Hilton, amputee love, clothing and deformity, "freaks", fetishism, abnormal sex customs, corpse and medical photography, and much more, all with b/w illustrations, "Body Exotica : Sexual Atrocity" could be considered the sister book to Akita's "Terminal Body Play", issued the same year. Merzbow is a noise project created in Tokyo, Japan in 1979 under the direction of noise technician Masami Akita. As well as a legendary underground noise artist, Akita is a prolific writer in Japan and frequently writes on the arts, music, erotica, esoterica, modern architecture, and animal rights, with articles on emerging subcultures and underground extreme cultures appearing in publications like SM Sniper, Studio Voice and Fool's Mate. His development of the Merzbow aesthetic ran parallel with a series of investigative books in which he catalogued and introduced a vast amount of hermetic types of music, sexual practices and autonomous creativity to a fairly conservative (but not close-minded) Japanese audience. "Body Exotica" is one of these very books.
First edition, Japanese text, VG copy with VG "textured" and illustrated dust jacket and original publisher's obi-strip inserted (not-pictured).
1978 / 1979, Japanese
Softcover, 127 pages + 144 pages, 22.5 x 29 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Visual Message / Tokyo
$150.00 - Out of stock
First (1978) and second (1979) issues of Visual Message, the "comprehensive magazine of the visual age", published in Japan for a short period at the end of the 1970s. This explosive inaugural issue, co-edited by graphic designers Ikko Tanaka and Kazuya Uegami, and copywriter Shinya Nishimura and themed "Visual Scandal" is cover-to-cover packed with leading graphic artists, photographers, architects, textile designers, etc. from Japan and overseas including Tadanori Yokoo, Masao Saito, Harumi Yamaguchi, Masamichi Oikawa, Eiko Ishioka, Shigeo Fukuda, Tomi Ungerer, Masayuki Kurokawa, SITE, Tsunehisa Kimura, Tenmei Kano, Raymond Savignac, Katsumi Asaba, Ken Mori, Andy Warhol, Jean-Michel Folon, Asai Shinpei, Marcel Duchamp, Rene Magritte, Herb Lubalin, Osamu Nagahama, M.C. Escher, Shiro Tatsumi, Hiroki Hayashi, Masayoshi Nakajo, Hiroshi Yoda, Hipgnosis, and many more.
Second 1979 issue of Visual Message is structured around the themes "Before/After" and "Scale" and again is cover-to-cover packed with leading graphic artists, photographers, architects, textile designers, etc. from Japan and overseas including Tadanori Yokoo, Philip Johnson, Hideo Yamashita, Seiji Takada, Takahisa Kamijō, Haruo Takino, Takenobu Igarashi, Akira Yokoyama, Hisaki Hiramatsu, Takamichi Ito, Tomoya Nakano, Shōji Yamagishi, and many more.
V.M. 1. Good copy. Some cover/spine wear/creases/small closed tear to edge.
V.M. 2. Very Good copy. Light general wear.
1999, German / English
Softcover (w. mini-cd), 246 pages, 21 x 15 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Auf Abwegen / Bochum—Cologne
$120.00 - Out of stock
"We are surrounded by ghostly things"
The Asmus Tietchens monograph, first hand-numbered limited edition of 500 copies with mini cd, published in autumn of 1999, edited by Kai U. Jürgens. Opening with a quote from E. M. Cioran, this long out-of-print, wonderful publication dedicated to the prolific German avant-garde composer, published by Auf Abwegen in Bochum/Cologne and co-edited by Guido Sprenger and Till Kniola, features a wealth of information in the form of collected texts by Kai U. Jürgens, producer Okko Bekker, Asmus Tietchens, Ditterich von Euler-Donnersperg, Guido Sprenger and Till Kniola, accompanied by a comprehensive discography and bibliography. Bi-lingual texts in English and German. Also includes the original 4-track limited edition mini-cd, "Phosphor", recorded in Hamburg in 1999. A must for any fan of the illusive, prolific experimental artist.
Asmus Tietchens (b. 1947, Hamburg) is a German composer of avant-garde music. Tietchens became interested in experimental music and musique concrète as a child, and began recording sound experiments in 1965 with electronic musical instruments, synthesizers and tape loops. In the 1970s he met producer Okko Bekker, and the two formed a decades-long partnership. Peter Baumann (of Tangerine Dream) heard a recording of Tietchens' music and offered to produce an album; the result was Nachtstücke, Tietchens' 1980 offering on Egg Records. His early recordings feature more accessible synthesized music, but beginning with Formen Letzer Hausmusik, his 1984 release for Nurse With Wound's label United Dairies, he began moving toward more abstract sound collages. He has taught acoustics in Hamburg since 1990.
Very Good copy, hand-numbered "410" of 500. Tiny amount of rubbing to back cover due to cd inserted into back french-fold.
1973, English
Softcover, 96 pages, 18 x 24 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / good
Published by
Sun Books / Melbourne
$80.00 - Out of stock
First printing from 1973 of this photo-book dedicated entirely to the streets of the suburb of Carlton, Melbourne, by Australian photographer Les Gray (1920 - 2013). With an introduction by poet Garrie Hutchison (b. 1949) titled "Canning Street, Carlton, August 1973", this handsome little landscape album of snapshots captures the people, terraces, and shopfronts of early 1970s Drummond, Rathdowne, Cardigan, Faraday, Lygon, Gratton, Station, Canning, and Elgin streets. Published by Sun Books.
Good copy. Ex-libris copy with only stamps to title page and inside back cover, otherwise no markings. Corner, edge wear.
1979, English
Softcover, unpaginated, 24 x 18 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Bill McAuley / Carlton
$45.00 - In stock -
Rare signed copy of the first photo book of Australian photographer Bill McAuley (1920—2011), Faces and Places: A Pictorial Essay of the Seventies. McAuley began his career in newspapers and magazines in 1969 as a cadet photographer at The Age in Melbourne. For the next forty years he worked in Melbourne, Sydney, London and Canberra. "A press photographer is a visual historian, his role is to record history. Even if it ugly and violent, it is still a valid example of society at that point in time"—Bill McAuley. "Thus this book preserves a small piece of history and hopefully, given the sensitivity of the work it contains, those who turn its pages in the future will not judge us too unkindly"—Don Sharpe (from the introduction) Includes portraits of horticulturalist and artist Neil Douglas, Gough Whitlam, Queenie Paul, Barry Humphries, Frank Zappa, and many more characters captured (most notably the Australian cultural landscape c. 1970's) alongside quotes, notes, and lyrics. Dedicated to "late nights at King's Cross, Marlboro cigarettes, pool tables, crazy artists and tradesmen, beautiful bush, beautiful children."
Very Good copy, signed "Bill McAuley" to opening page in blue (biro) ink.
1982, English
Softcover, unpaginated, 30 x 21 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
The Amazing Aquarian Dream Factory / Sydney
$40.00 - In stock -
First 1982 edition of erotic photobook Touch Love, with photography by Sigurd Olivier and prose by Jeanette Gorrie on the tenderness of human touch and sexuality. Published by The Amazing Aquarian Dream Factory in Sydney.
Very Good copy with some light foxing to first page, light cover wear.
2022, English
Softcover, 130 pages, 17 x 13 cm
Published by
Masala Noir / Paris
$40.00 - Out of stock
A collection of 250+ BDSM magazine covers from Japan between 1950—1990s compiled by Shinzo Noda.
2022, English
Softcover, 240 pages, 13 x 17 cm
Published by
Masala Noir / Paris
$42.00 - Out of stock
A visual compilation of 200+ Punk Flyers. Crime, Smegma, M.D.C., Disorder, Black Flag, White Flag, Negative Approach, J.F.A., Void, Ramones, G.G. Allin, Youth of Today, The Adolescents, T.S.O.L., The Weirdos, Discharge, Jerry's Kids, Fear, Gang Green, Minutemen, F.U.'s, G.B.H, The Stiffs, Descendents, Minor Threat, Gorilla Biscuits, Circle Jerks, Flipper, Pure Hell, The Weirdos, Meat Puppets, Crucifix, The Dickies, Poison Idea, Dead Boys, Throbbing Gristle, Antisect, Disfear, Chaos U.K., Necros, Doom, Government Issue, Bad Brains, Dead Kennedys, Meatmen, The Dils, Suicidal Tendencies, Social Distortion, Siege, Melvins, Middle Class, Bored Youth, Hüsker Dü, Sonc Youth, Minimal Man, Septic Death, Crucifucks, Cro-Mags, Screamers, Tuxedomoon, 7 Seconds, Germs, D.R.I., SSD, Rites of Spring, Butthole Surfers..... to name few....
Limited edition.
2022, English
Hardcover, 224 pages, 22 x 29 cm
Published by
Masala Noir / Paris
$89.00 - Out of stock
A visual archive of Noise vinyl and cassette covers, 1980—1990. Merzbow, Bourbonese Qualk, Maurizio Bianchi (MB), Controlled Bleeding, The Haters, Whitehouse, Le Syndicat, Broken Flag, Anti-Music, Borbetomagus, Sonic Youth, Sonic Death, ZSF Produkt, Ramleh, P16.D4, Area Condizionata, Kleistwahr, Masonna, DD. Records, Alto Stratus, Boredoms, Pussy Galore, Septiembre Negro, GG Allin, Lokomotiv S.S., Giancarlo Toniutti, The New Blockaders, Club Moral, Coup De Grace, H.N.A.S., Come Organisation, Birthbiter, Consumer Electronics, Minamata, Mauthausen Orchestra, Pain Teens, S·Core, The Gerogerigegege, Psychic T.V., Sonic Violence, Epitapes, ZG Music, Recloose Organisation, Con-Dom, Deviant & the Clones, Skullflower, Pure, Thee Un-Kommuniti, Skullflower, Putrefier, Ethnic Acid, and many many more.......