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:
THU—FRI 12—6 PM
WEB-SHOP OPEN 24/7
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
Pick-up orders can be collected in our bookshop during opening hours after order date. Please collect any Pick-up orders within 2 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. If you cannot make it in to the bookshop in this time-frame, please choose postage option.
Return Policy
All sales are final. We do accept returns (for refund or 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.
$.00 - Out of stock
The eternal clean out! New items weekly.
https://worldfoodbooks.com/category/sale
Published by World Food Books / Melbourne
$20.00 - In stock -
A World Food Books gift voucher is redeemable in our Melbourne bookshop or via our webshop (here). An e-voucher (printable pdf) will be sent to your purchase email address (please notify us if you wish to have the voucher sent to an alternate address and wish us to fill in the receiver's details on the card).
Gift vouchers can be purchased in increments of $20 (Australian Dollars) and the total amount can simply be added to by increasing the quantity in your shopping cart. eg. A quantity of 5 gift vouchers will result in an item total of $100 - a $100 gift voucher. Simply click "ADD TO CART" 5 times, or update your quantity in the shopping cart.
If you wish to purchase multiple, separate gift vouchers in one go, please just email us and we can personally prepare and email you a payment request.
Please note: Please select Pick-Up on gift voucher purchse to avoid any postage charges. Accidental postage charges will be refunded right away!
Thank you.
For any questions, please don't hesitate to email: [email protected]
2025, English
Softcover, 88 pages, 17 x 12 cm
Published by
Floating Opera Press / Berlin
$38.00 - In stock -
Should art be determined by political ideals? In recent decades art institutions have sought to embody liberal values of universal equality and social justice. This move toward greater inclusivity has borne witness to a countervailing trend: artworks are increasingly scrutinized for their political implications, and artists must take care not to transgress particular moral fault lines. Examining contemporary exhibitions as well as works of art and film, and the broader cultural reactions to them, Rosanna McLaughlin investigates the consequences of this moralizing approach to creative work. She invites us to rethink the connection between political values and art—and to ask whether a relationship between them should exist at all. In arguing against morality in the arts, McLaughlin lays the groundwork for a more expansive concept of difference in twenty-first-century art making.
1977, German
Hardcover (clothbound w. screen-printed vinyl dust jacket in publisher's slipcase), 1330 pages, 44.5 x 33.5 cm
1st UK Edition, Out of print title / used / fine
Published by
S. Fischer Verlag / Frankfurt am Main
$400.00 - In stock -
The stunning 1977 hard cover, slip-cased facsimile reproduction of Schmidt's epic manuscript of Zettel's Traum (Bottom's Dream), comprising 1334 leaves and published by S. Fischer Verlag, Frankfurt am Main. Since its publication in 1970 Zettel’s Traum/Bottom’s Dream has been regarded as Arno Schimdt’s magnum opus, as the definitive work of a titan of postwar German literature. Schmidt's gargantuan novel was published in this collector's facsimile folio format just as Schmidt created it — the un-type-settable story is told mostly in three shifting columns, presenting the text in the form of collages, typewritten pages and marginalia. Bound in cloth hardcover with wrap-around thick vinyl dust jacket with screen-printed colour artwork, in publisher's original cardboard slipcase with attached paper spine label, this edition of Schmidt's "superbook" presents the reader with it's true character, beautifully reproduced on warm paper stock.
Bottom's Dream (German: Zettels Traum or ZETTEL'S TRAUM as the author wrote the title) is a novel published in 1970 by West German author Arno Schmidt. Schmidt began writing the novel in December 1963 while he and Hans Wollschläger were translating the works of Edgar Allan Poe into German. The novel was inspired by James Joyce's novel Finnegans Wake, particularly Schmidt's use of columns (his "SpaltenTechnik"), which Schmidt claimed was borrowed from the Wake. It tells the love story between the aging writer Daniel Pagenstecher and the sixteen-year-old Franziska Jacobi, and also tells the life and work of Edgar Allan Poe. He develops his own literary theory in the tradition of Sigmund Freud and, as if by chance, develops a new orthography. In Zettels' Dream, Arno Schmidt's efforts to create a modern prose form and an appropriate linguistic representation of human consciousness reach their preliminary climax.
Arno Schmidt, in full Arno Otto Schmidt, (b. 1914—1979), novelist, translator, and critic, whose experimental prose established him as the preeminent Modernist of 20th-century German literature. With roots in both German Romanticism and Expressionism, he attempted to develop modern prose forms that correspond more closely to the workings of the conscious and subconscious mind and to revitalize a literary language that he considered debased by Nazism and war. The influence of James Joyce and Sigmund Freud are apparent in both a collection of short stories, Kühe in Halbtrauer (1964; Country Matters), and, most especially, in Zettels Traum (1970; Bottom’s Dream)—a three-columned, more than 1,300-page, photo-offset typescript, centring on the mind and works of Poe. It was then that Schmidt developed his theory of “etyms,” the morphemes of language that betray subconscious desires. Two further works on the same grand scale are the “novella-comedy” Die Schule der Atheisten (1972; School for Atheists) and Abend mit Goldrand (1975; Evening Edged in Gold), a dream-scape that has as its focal point Hiëronymus Bosch’s Garden of Earthly Delights and that has come to be regarded as his finest and most mature work. Schmidt was a man of vast autodidactic learning and Rabelaisian humour. Though complex and sometimes daunting, his works are enriched by inventive language and imbued with a profound commitment to humanity’s intellectual achievements.
Near Fine copy in VG DJ, VG slipcase with light wear/toning.
BEWARE: This might be the heaviest book in our bookshop, so precise shipping costs will be applied if inaccurate.
1996, Japanese
Softcover, 30 bound postcards, 15.5 x 11.7 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / as new
Published by
Little More / Tokyo
$480.00 - In stock -
Very rare early book of portraits of Tokyo teenagers by leading Japanese photographer Takashi Homma (b. 1962 in Tokyo, Japan). This special publication features around 30 selected photographs of Homma's iconic and very influential early 1990's photography bound into one volume in the form of thick perforated postcards. These images of Tokyo teens, along with images of their bedrooms and Shibuya / Harajuku street surrounds, are emblematic of Homma's work of the period, known in the West through Purple magazine, etc. Following in the spirit of Provoke photographers such as Araki, Moriyama, and Nakahira, Homma created a new photographic expression for Tokyo at the end of the century. Homma's photography would become a great influence on the fashionable 1990's girly photo boom of Hiromix and Yurie Nagashima, etc.
Fine—As New copy, all postcards still bound, vinyl cover sticker still attached as issued.
1995, Japanese
Softcover, 80 pages, 25 x 23 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Little More / Tokyo
$120.00 - In stock -
Scarce first book by leading Japanese photographer Takashi Homma (b. 1962 in Tokyo, Japan). Babyland, published in 1995, was released in conjunction with an exhibition of the same name at Parco Gallery, Tokyo, launching the career of one of Japan's most influential and acclaimed photographers. The book collects Homma's photographs taken between 1993 and 1995, including his Tokyo Teens series and portraits of Kim Gordon, Mike Kelley and Nan Goldin, amongst others. A beautiful book of Homma's distinctively subdued, atmospheric photography that created a new photographic expression for Tokyo at the end of the century.
Very Good—Near Fine copy, complete with booklet insert and publisher's inlaid promotional materials. Text is a dialogue between Kyoko Okagaki and Homma
2025, English
Softcover, 188 pages, 29.5 x 20.5 cm
Published by
AdminAdmin / Melbourne
$45.00 - In stock -
Containing original contributions; artwork, art-historofiction, hagiofiction, critical essays, poetry and prose, some loosely centred around instinct and the mind.
This with contributions by Erik van Lieshout, Peles Duo x Rob Crosse, CAConrad, Robert McKenzie, Mark Beasley, Hany Armanious, Patrick Hartigan, Elizabeth Pulie, Anthea Behm, Luke Stettner, Skyler Brickley, Tommy Miller, Rebecca Holborn, Penelope Latté, Guy Benfield, Jason Vorhees.....and more
2025, English
Softcover (staple-bound), 16 pages, 29.7 x 21 cm
Edition of 50,
Published by
Light of Day Books / Melbourne
$10.00 - In stock -
Number 19 in the ongoing series of artist zines published by Light of Day Books, Melbourne, each in an edition of 50 copies.
Selected images from the 1949 Les Jeux de la poupée (The Game of the Doll) a landmark collaborative work by Hans Bellmer and poet Paul Éluard. Features the hand-coloured photographs of Bellmer’s mutated, jointed female dolls arranged in unsettling, dreamlike poses that blur the line between desire, control, and dismemberment. The images, both tender and disturbing, exemplify Bellmer’s obsession with the fragmented female form and reflect his resistance to the fascist ideal of bodily perfection. The photographs are a key surrealist exploration of eroticism, identity, and the unconscious. Les Jeux de la poupée remains one of Bellmer’s most significant and controversial achievements.
Hans Bellmer (1902–1975) was a German artist best known for his provocative life-sized dolls and surrealist photography, which challenged ideals of beauty, authority, and fascism. Inspired by personal experiences, psychological rebellion, and literary influences, Bellmer began constructing articulated female dolls in the 1930s, photographing them in unsettling, dreamlike scenes that explored themes of eroticism, control, and fragmentation. His work was condemned by the Nazi regime as “degenerate,” prompting his move to France in 1938, where he became associated with the Surrealists. During World War II, he supported the French Resistance and was briefly imprisoned. After the war, Bellmer abandoned doll-making and focused on erotic drawings and prints. He lived in Paris with his partner Unica Zürn until her suicide in 1970, and continued working until his death in 1975.
2025, English
Softcover (staple-bound), 16 pages, 29.7 x 21 cm
Edition of 50,
Published by
Light of Day Books / Melbourne
$10.00 - In stock -
Number 20 in the ongoing series of artist zines published by Light of Day Books, Melbourne, each in an edition of 50 copies.
POSTMORTEM
The angel of death is a ubiquitous pest
A phantom that buzzes in the shadows
Then falls silent
Ready for the kill
Postmortem is about fear and revulsion
And blood and compassion
About death and beauty
About transformation
Robert Ashton, born in Melbourne in 1950, is an Australian photographer known for his distinctive documentary style that emerged in the 1970s. After studying photography at Prahran College (1969–71), he became immersed in a creative community that included Carol Jerrems, Paul Cox, and cousin Rennie Ellis, with whom he shared a studio and worked at Brummels Gallery. His 1974 book Into the Hollow Mountains, documented everyday scenes in Fitzroy with striking intimacy. It was recently republished in an expanded edition. He has exhibited widely and is known for using hand-built large format cameras and traditional printing methods such as photogravure and the Collodion process to produce his work.
2025, English
Softcover (staple-bound), 16 pages, 29.7 x 21 cm
Edition of 50,
Published by
Light of Day Books / Melbourne
$10.00 - In stock -
Number 21 in the ongoing series of artist zines published by Light of Day Books, Melbourne, each in an edition of 50 copies.
Using a technique of double exposures developed while shooting Tokyo’s Yamanote line in 2024, Train Fetish frames the contemporary rolling stock of Melbourne’s transit system as objects of obsession and desire, dwelling on moments of urban intensity. With steel carriages superimposed in front of jagged skylines, Train Fetish recalls the glorification of trains in British railway posters, the obsessiveness of the anorak brigades and the central pillar of graffiti culture. From Comengs to X’Traps, each image is a near-seemless collage of images, with the odd glitch adding elements of drama and uncertainty. Composed on the platforms of Melbourne’s train network, Train Fetish showcases the first images in a longer series that has since expanded to include Tokyo, London and Berlin.
Lachlan MacDowall is a writer, photographer and curator based in Melbourne/Naarm. His work examines the evolution of contemporary cities using a mix of genres, images and data. His recent books include Instafame: Graffiti and Street Art in the Instagram Era and Off the Grid: Invader and Street Art of the Early 2000s, as well as the Flash Forward and Skyrail series of exhibitions. He is currently Director of the MIECAT Institute in Melbourne, Australia.
2025, English
Softcover (staple-bound), 16 pages, 29.7 x 21 cm
Edition of 50,
Published by
Light of Day Books / Melbourne
$10.00 - In stock -
Number 22 in the ongoing series of artist zines published by Light of Day Books, Melbourne, each in an edition of 50 copies.
These photos were taken on the Camino de Santiago, a long walk across northern Spain in the northern autumn of 2024, from mid-September to late October. During the walk I took photos of numerous subjects that took my fancy along the way. Subjects included, cemeteries, playgrounds, hobbit-house-like bodegas, bridges, canals, underpasses and graffiti, haystacks, horreos (stone and timber maize storage houses on stilts in Galicia), mists and fog, pelota courts in towns and settlements in the Pyrenees, rainbows, statues and underpasses. Photographed on my phone, the lens often grimy or misted, the photos are what they are.
I decided on the pairing of the playgrounds and cemeteries, each holding their own sense of melancholy. The light was failing towards November, the path was solitary as I walked slowly, after the crowds had passed me.
Sandra Bridie's work straddles individual practice, collaboration, exhibition curation, writing, and the interview as documentation of individual and collective artistic practice in Naarm, (Melbourne) Australia. Bridie's individual practice involves the creation of fictional artists, presented via a suite of art works from a range of media.
2025, English
Softcover (staple-bound), 16 pages, 29.7 x 21 cm
Edition of 50,
Published by
Light of Day Books / Melbourne
$10.00 - In stock -
Number 23 in the ongoing series of artist zines published by Light of Day Books, Melbourne, each in an edition of 50 copies.
Robert Rooney, a pioneering Australian conceptual artist, created The Quadrangle series while studying at Swinburne Technical College between 1956 and 1958. Using a simple Box Brownie camera, these early photographs reveal his emerging interest in seriality and subversion.
Robert Rooney (1937–2017) was a Melbourne-born artist and influential art critic, known for his contributions to Australian Conceptual art. Trained at Swinburne College and later at the Preston Institute, he gained early recognition in the 1960s for his hard-edged abstract works inspired by everyday suburban imagery. In 1968, he was featured in the landmark exhibition The Field. From 1969 to 1981, he explored conceptual photography before returning to painting in the 1980s, notably with works based on printed ephemera. Rooney also wrote extensively on Australian art, serving as a critic for The Age and The Australian.
Robert Rooney The Quadrangle 1956, printed 2013, from The Box Brownie Years 1956–58 series 1956–58. National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne. Bequest of Robert Rooney, 2019 © Estate of Robert Rooney. Images courtesy National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne.
2025, English
Softcover (staple-bound), 16 pages, 29.7 x 21 cm
Published by
Light of Day Books / Melbourne
$10.00 - In stock -
Number 24 in the ongoing series of artist zines published by Light of Day Books, Melbourne, each in an edition of 50 copies.
'everyday life' takes the form and title of an outdated advertising catalog as it's starting point. A call to transform the systems at play in our lives. informally grids, lines, boxes, form in silver marker interrupt the information held in the 16 pages of the catalog. Like a newspaper being reused to house hot chips, reborn as a blank yet loaded surface. Meandering lines creating their own paths of desire, outside of the advertisers, like snails in the mailbox.
Christopher L G Hill is an artist, anarchist, collaborator, facilitator, curator, lover, friend, noise wall proprietor, gardener, Bunyip trax, walker, homebody, dancer, considerate participator, Endless Lonely Planet, Y3K, Dungeon & Meadow, slip'n, graffiti bencher, eater, exhibitor: Goya Curtain, Sutton Projects, Savage Garden, Pricilla's, Asbestos, Sydney, Physics Room, Westspace, TCB, BUS, Punk Cafe, Daine Singer, 100 Grand street, Lismore Regional Gallery, Good Press, Gambia Castle, room, Conical, GCAS, NGV, VCA, Mission Comics, Slopes, Art Beat, Papakura Gallery, Neon Parc, UQ Gallery, Tate Modern, Connors Connors, Glasgow International, Sandy Brown, OFLUXO, New Scenarios, Margaret Lawrence, Flake, Utopian Slumps, World Food Books, Sutton, Rearview, Joint Hassles, a basement, a tree, Innen publications, SAM, Chateau 2F, etc, and tweeter, twitcher, sleeper, conversationalist, gallerist, musician & DJ; who represents themself.
2009, English
Softcover, 156 pages, 24 x 16.8 cm
Published by
Walther König / Köln
$78.00 - In stock -
There are some artists who are never forgotten simply because other artists will constantly cite them as examples. Paul Thek (1933-1988) is one such artist. Revered for his disarming humor and irreverent handling of artworld proprieties, and much lamented for his premature death from AIDS at the age of 55, the likes of Vito Acconci, Bruce Nauman, Mike Kelley, John Miller, Paul McCarthy, Kim Gordon and Matthew Barney have all sung his praises. Tales the Tortoise Told Us is a three-part Thek compendium, composed of writing by Margit Brehm, Axel Heil and Roberto Ort (who discuss the artist's ambivalent relationship with his homeland, and Thek's odd place in the Beat and Hippie generation), a large spread of reproductions of Thek works and a chronologically-arranged survey of works from 1963 up to the artist's death in 1988.
2025, English
Softcover, 96 pages, 22.8 x 15.2 cm
Published by
Nightboat Books / New York
$40.00 - In stock -
Perverts traverses the psychic landscapes of Kay Gabriel and her community of friends, writers and organizers, piecing together a collective dream that both mirrors and transforms waking life.
Against the backdrop of the anti-trans panic, Perverts explores desire as a political problem. It asks two questions at the same time: whose desire is understood as dangerously excessive? And—a classic organizer’s question—how do we turn what we have into what we need to get what we want? Synthesizing her own dreams with those of her friends, Kay Gabriel’s Perverts is an exercise in turning private experience into shared consciousness and illicit desire into common cause.
“Kay Gabriel has written an anti-epic for our current moment, bringing contemporary queer community into being with lyric verve amid and in resistance to our ongoing catastrophe.”—John Keene
“Perverts is a gorgeous multicolored quilt of the subconscious of others, a pleasure, a riot . . . a gift.”—Hannah Black
Kay Gabriel is a writer and organizer. She’s the author of Perverts (2025), Kissing Other People or the House of Fame (2023), and A Queen in Bucks County (2022). She’s the Editorial Director at the Poetry Project in New York City.
2010, English
Softcover, 76 pages, 18 x 11.5 cm
Published by
Wakefield Press / Cambridge
$26.00 - In stock -
The first of Pierre Louÿs’s erotic works to see publication after his death, The Young Girl’s Handbook of Good Manners is also his most outrageous, and one of the few erotic classics in which humor takes precedence over arousal. By means of shockingly filthy advice and a parodic format, Louÿs turns late nineteenth-century manners roundly upon their head, with ass prominently skyward. Whether he is offering rules for etiquette in church, school, or home, or outlining a girl’s duties toward family, neighbor, or God, Louÿs manages to mock every institution, leaving no hypocrisy unexposed. The book has only grown more scandalous and subversive than when it first appeared in 1926.
Pierre Louÿs (1870–1925) was a best-selling author in his time, and a friend of and influence on such luminaries as André Gide, Paul Valéry, Oscar Wilde, and Stephane Mallarmé. He achieved instant notoriety with Aphrodite and The Songs of Bilitis, and his 1898 novel The Woman and the Puppet has been adapted for the screen in such noteworthy films as Josef von Sternberg’s The Devil Is a Woman and Luis Buñuel’s That Obscure Object of Desire. But it was only after his death that his true legacy was to be uncovered: nearly nine hundred pounds of erotic manuscripts were discovered in his home, all of them immediately scattered among collectors and many lost. The body of work that has since been gathered—manuscripts continue to be discovered—leaves little doubt: Louÿs is the greatest French writer of erotica there ever was.
“Louÿs entered eroticism the way others enter politics or religion”—Jean-Paul Goujon
“One of the great and glorious erotomaniacs of the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth”—André Pieyre de Mandiargues
“This is just the book to give your niece—if she’s a quiet, neat, straight-laced girl.”—A. D. Jameson, The Review of Contemporary Fiction
“Exuberantly naughty.”—Michael Dirda, The Washington Post
2010, English
Softcover, 72 pages, 11.5 x 18 cm
Published by
Wakefield Press / Cambridge
$33.00 - In stock -
Translated, with an afterword, by Marc Lowenthal.
One overcast weekend in October 1974, Georges Perec set out in quest of the “infraordinary”: the humdrum, the nonevent, the everyday—“what happens,” as he put it, “when nothing happens.” His choice of locale was Place Saint-Sulpice where, ensconced behind first one café window, then another, he spent three days recording everything to pass through his field of vision: the people walking by; the buses and driving-school cars caught in their routes; the pigeons moving suddenly en masse, as if in accordance to some mysterious command; the wedding (and then funeral) at the church in the center of the square; the signs, symbols, and slogans littering everything; and the darkness that eventually absorbs it all. In An Attempt at Exhausting a Place in Paris, Perec compiled a melancholic, slightly eerie, and oddly touching document in which existence boils down to rhythm, writing turns into time, and the line between the empirical and the surreal grows surprisingly thin.
Georges Perec (1936–1982) was a French novelist, essayist, and filmmaker whose linguistic talents ranged from fiction to crossword puzzles to authoring the longest palindrome ever written. Winner of the prix Renaudot in 1965 for his first novel Things, and the prix Médicis in 1978 for his most acclaimed novel, Life A User’s Manual, Perec was also a member of Oulipo, a group of writers and mathematicians devoted to the discovery and use of constraints to encourage literary inspiration. One of their most famous products was Perec’s own novel, A Void, written entirely without the letter “e.”
2025, English
Softcover, 312 pages, 20.3 x 13.3 cm
Published by
Wakefield Press / Cambridge
$42.00 - In stock -
Joris-Karl Huysmans’s semi-autobiographical third novel, first published in French in 1881, signaled the beginning of his break from the naturalism of Émile Zola and his turn toward a “new naturalism” that laid out the negative consequences of determinism and embraced a disgust for human existence and an all-out war against respectability.
Domesticity tells the tale of novelist André Jayant and artist Cyprien Tibaille, two men struggling between the urges of their body and the urges of their soul—between the comforts of coupledom and the ideals of art—and with the failure of matrimony or the artistic endeavor to fulfill the needs of either. More than a psychological character study, though, Domesticity stands as one of the most memorable portraits of late-nineteenth-century Paris: its shops, its eateries, its apartments, and its sad, futile affairs of the heart.
Steeped in sardonic pessimism, this ode to sterility was one of the author’s own favorite novels of his career.
Earning a wage through the French civil service, Joris-Karl Huysmans (1848–1907) quietly explored the extremes of human nature and artifice through a series of books that influenced a number of literary movements: from the gray and grimy naturalism of Marthe and Downstream, to the cornerstones of the decadent movement, Against Nature and the Satanist classic Down There, to the dream-ridden surrealist favorite, Becalmed, and his Catholic novels, The Cathedral and The Oblate.
Translated, with an afterword, by George MacLennan.
2025, English
Softcover, 131 pages, 20.2 x 12.7 cm
Published by
The New York Review of Books / New York
$35.00 - In stock -
A new translation of one of the defining works of the French surrealist movement, an energetic autobiographical novel that is at once both a tumultuous romance story and an initiation into the surrealism of everyday life.
The most renowned of all surrealist literary works, Andre Breton's Nadja has been stirring passions and imaginations since its first publication in 1928. At once a poignant romance, an autobiography, a philosophical inquiry into questions of identity, and a lively illustration of the surrealist belief in life-changing chance, Nadja relates the fortuitous meeting and brief, tumultuous relationship between Breton, surrealism's founder and primary theorist, and the "wandering soul" who called herself Nadja, "because in Russian it's the beginning of the word for hope, and because it's only the beginning."
Over the course of a single breathless week, recounted with scrupulous precision and a poet's sense of drama, Breton and Nadja pursue an adventure that stands outside of societal or moral conventions, and that brings both of them to what Breton termed "the extreme limit of the surrealist aspiration." Bookending this beguiling and ultimately tragic story are a series of "petrifying coincidences," episodes that initiate the reader into the surrealism of everyday life, and a penetrating examination of Breton's own share of responsibility in Nadja's ultimate fate, ending with the shattering intrusion into the author's life of a final transformative occurrence.
In this, the first new translation of Nadja in more than sixty years, award-winning translator and surrealism scholar Mark Polizzotti brings a fresh perspective to this unique and haunting tale. Making use of the most recent research (including the revelation of Nadja's identity and life story and the discovery of Breton's original manuscript), he sets the narrative in its historical and biographical context and corrects a number of inaccuracies in the previous English version.
This vibrant, emotionally resonant translation breathes new energy and urgency into a book that has long been recognized as one of the seminal masterpieces of twentieth-century modernism.
2023, English / French
Softcover, 219 pages, 15.2 x 21.5 cm
Published by
City Lights Books / San Francisco
$40.00 - In stock -
Erotic-macabre poetry by an overlooked Surrealist woman from the Middle East.
"You know very well, Joyce, that you are for me—and very objectively too—the greatest poet of our time. Surrealist poetry, that's you."—André Breton
"Your poems know the essential cries, those which speak of passion in its vertigo."—Gaston Bachelard, author of The Poetics of Space
The most significant Surrealist poet to emerge in 1950s Paris was a woman, Joyce Mansour. Mansour was a Syrian Jewish exile from Egypt whose fierce, macabre, erotically charged works gave André Breton's Surrealist group a much-needed jolt after the ravages of the Second World War. Among new adherents, only Mansour wrote poems commensurate with those of Robert Desnos, René Char, Benjamin Péret, and other poets from the movement's heyday. Yet she remains curiously neglected in English translation, and even her posthumous reputation in France suffers from the patriarchal and chauvinist biases of the French literary establishment.
Emerald Wounds: Selected Poems by Joyce Mansour is a much-needed corrective to this state of affairs, a compact yet career-spanning, bilingual anthology of this incendiary poet. With a biographical introduction by translator Emilie Moorhouse, Emerald Wounds showcases the entire arc of Mansour's trajectory as a poet, from the at-once gothic and minimalist fragments of her first collection in 1953, Screams, to the serpentine power of her final poems of the 1980s. Juxtaposing the original French poems with their English translations, Mansour's voice surges forward uncensored and raw, communicating the frustrations, anger, and sadness of an intelligent, worldly woman who defies the constraints and oppression of a male-dominated society that sees women as superficial objects of desire rather than multidimensional, autonomous subjects. Mansour is a poet the world needs today.
2018, English
Softcover, 224 pages, 14 x 21.8 cm
Published by
Seven Stories Press / New York
$35.00 - In stock -
Introduction by Tobi Haslett
"This story, if it is one, deserves the closure of a suicide, perhaps even the magisterial finality of what is usually called a novel, but the remnants of that faraway time offer nothing more than a taste of damp ashes, a feeling of indeterminacy, and the obdurate inconclusiveness of passing time." So writes the unnamed narrator of Horse Crazy, looking back on a season of madness and desire. The first novel from the brilliant, protean Gary Indiana, Horse Crazy tells the story of a thirty-five-year-old writer for a New York arts and culture magazine whose life melts into a fever dream when he falls in love with the handsome, charming, possibly heroin-addicted, and almost certainly insane Gregory Burgess. In the derelict brownstones of the Lower East Side in the late eighties, among the coked out restauranteurs and art world impresarios of the supposed "downtown scene," the narrator wanders through the fog of passion. Meanwhile, the AIDS epidemic is spreading through the city, and New York friendships sputter to an end. Here is a novel where the only moral is that thwarted passion is the truest passion, where love is a hallucination and the gravest illness is desire.
“Horse Crazy is a sad, insane journey of infatuation and love. Frustrating to the bitter end—where all that is left is truth.” – Tracey Emin
“An archetypical story, expertly told. Fascinating to every man, no matter what his sexual tastes—like the characters in Genet.” – William S. Burroughs
“Sex, hypocrisy, solitude, loss, the punitive affinities that swallow the self—these are Gary Indiana’s themes, jingling through his books like money in Balzac. But rumbling beneath the malice is a melancholy yearning, a mind groping vulnerably for a human link.” – Tobi Haslett, from the introduction
2018, English
Softcover, 240 pages, 21 x 14 cm
Published by
Seven Stories Press / New York
$35.00 - In stock -
“A novel too weird and perverted and frankly minacious to stay in print, too unforgettable not to be reissued.”—Sarah Nicole Prickett, from the introduction
The narrator of Gone Tomorrow is an actor who has been cast in an unlikely art film set in Colombia. But from the moment he arrives at the airport in Bogota, only to witness a policeman beat a beggar half to death for no apparent reason, it becomes clear that this will not be the story of gritty bohemians triumphing against the odds. The director, Paul Grasvenor, seems more interested in manipulating his cast than shooting film. The cult star, Irma Irma, is a vamp too bored and boring to draw blood. And the incomparably beautiful Michael Simard doesn't seem to be putting out. Meanwhile, the film's shady financier appears to be sleeping with his mother, and a serial killer is skulking around the area killing tourists. Everything comes to a head when the carnaval celebration comes to nearby Cali. But once the fiesta comes to an end, all that's left is the memory and the narrator's insistence on telling the tale. "Unlike the majority of pointedly AIDS-era novels," writes Dennis Cooper, "Gone Tomorrow is neither an amoral nostalgia fest nor a thinly veiled wake-up call hyping the religion of sobriety. It's a philosophical work devised by a writer who's both too intelligent to buy into the notion that a successful future requires the compromise of collective decision and too moral to accept bitterness as the consequence of an adventurous life."
“Horribly refreshing, like an ice-cold glass of acid on a sweltering summer day . . . Indiana writes with an art critic’s eye for detail and a poet’s ear for language.” –Philadelphia Inquirer
“A disturbing, vivid, and brutal novel that succeeds in its dizzy mix of genres and influences. Not for the prudish, though.” –Kirkus Reviews
“Amazingly perverse, savagely amusing, unflinchingly serious. It may be in fact be the first really serious work of the imagination to come out of the AIDS catastrophe.” –Michael Herr, author of Dispatches
2025, English
Softcover, 130 pages, 20.3 x 17.8 cm
Published by
The New York Review of Books / New York
$34.00 - In stock -
Ancient Mesopotamia, the Zodiac, and the land of the dead feature in this wildly surrealistic adventure story—Leonora Carrington's revolutionary second novel, long out of print.
The Stone Door is an omen, an incantation, and an adventure story rolled into one. Built in layers like a puzzle box, it is the tale of two people, of love and the Zodiac and the Kabbalah, of Transylvania and Mesopotamia converging at the Caucasus, of a mad Hungarian King named Böles Kilary and of a woman's discovery of an initiatory code that leads to a Cyclopean obstacle, to love, self and awareness, to the great stone door of Kescke and beyond.
Written at the end of World War II but not published until 1977 and long unavailable, The Stone Door is at once a celebration of the union of the surrealist painter Leonora Carrington and her husband, the Hungarian-born photographer Chiki Weisz, and an argument for the unification of the male and the female as a means of liberating the human race.
2018, English
Softcover, 80 pages, 11.4 x 17.8 cm
Published by
Wakefield Press / Cambridge
$28.00 - In stock -
First published in 1839, Honoré de Balzac's Treatise on Modern Stimulants is a meditation on five stimulants – tea, sugar, coffee, alcohol and tobacco – by an author very conscious of the fact that his gargantuan output of work was driven by an excessive intake (his bouts of writing typically required 10 to 15 cups of coffee a day) that would ultimately shorten his life. Balzac here describes his "terrible and cruel method" for brewing a coffee that can help the artist and author find inspiration; explains why tobacco can be credited with having brought peace to Germany; and describes his first experience of alcoholic intoxication (which required seventeen bottles of wine and two cigars). Beyond its braggadocio and whimsy, though, this treatise ultimately speaks to Balzac's obsession with death and decline, and attempts to confront in capsule form the broader implications of dissipating one's vital forces. This edition includes illustrations to an earlier French edition by Pierre Alechinsky.
Honoré de Balzac was a French novelist and playwright. The novel sequence La Comédie humaine, which presents a panorama of post-Napoleonic French life, is generally viewed as his magnum opus. Owing to his keen observation of detail and unfiltered representation of society, Balzac is regarded as one of the founders of realism in European literature. He is renowned for his multi-faceted characters; even his lesser characters are complex, morally ambiguous and fully human. Inanimate objects are imbued with character as well; the city of Paris, a backdrop for much of his writing, takes on many human qualities. His writing influenced many famous writers, including the novelists Émile Zola, Charles Dickens, Gustave Flaubert, Jack Kerouac, and Henry James, filmmakers Akira Kurosawa, Eric Rohmer and François Truffaut as well as important philosophers such as Friedrich Engels and Karl Marx. Many of Balzac's works have been made into films, and they continue to inspire other writers.