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:
OPEN 12—5 THU—FRI
WEB-SHOP OPEN 24/7.
World Food Books
Postal Address:
PO Box 435
Flinders Lane
Victoria 8009
Australia
Art
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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.
1993, Japanese
Softcover, 240 pages, 21 x 15 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Atelier Peyotl / Tokyo
$65.00 - Out of stock
"Mannequin" Special Feature Issue of cult Japanese underground magazine Yaso, published in 1993, edited by Yuichi Konno and Atelier Peyotl (publishers of Night Vision/Yaso/Peyotl/Wave/Silvester Club...). Heavily illustrated with texts in Japanese that look at the theme of the mannequin from fashion apparatus to fetish object, automatons to living dolls, including a panoramic photographic history of mannequins, a photo feature of French photographer Bernard Faucon's boy mannequin collection, a huge illustrated article on famous Japanese costume, stage and exhibition designer, and Issey Miyake collaborator Tomio Mohri, the wax anatomical models of dissected corpses by Clemente Michelangelo Susini of Florence (1754–1814) shot by Ryuji Miyamoto, Czech animator Jirí Barta's Klub odlozenych, Japanese model and actress Sayoko Yamaguchi, the living dolls of the Japanese theatre, medical mannequins, crash-test dummies, icons, "Doll Love" and erotic dolls, plus lots more and a lot more Bernard Faucon!
Very Good—Near Fine copy.
1982/1992, Japanese
Softcover, 192 pages, 21 x 14.5 cm
Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Atelier Peyotl / Tokyo
$60.00 - Out of stock
"Corpse" Special Feature Issue of cult Japanese underground magazine Yaso, first published in 1982, then re-printed in 1992, edited by Yuichi Konno and Atelier Peyotl (publishers of Night Vision/Yaso/Peyotl/Wave/Silvester Club...). Heavily illustrated with texts in Japanese that look at the theme of death and the dead in the arts, literature, occultism, ancient sciences, philosophy, mythology, poetry, film, crime, and much more. Features John Duncan, Tetsumi Kudo, Cosey Fanni Tutti, Masahisa Fukase, Franz Kafka, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Guillaume Apollinaire, Joe Potts (LAFMS), Takashi Ishii, Rudolf II — Holy Roman Emperor, Akinari Ueda, Marcel Duchamp, Chris Burden, Paul Celan, Alain Resnais, Gilyak Amagasaki, Shusaku Arakawa, Pieter Bruegel the Elder, Shuji Terayama, Andy Warhol, Charles Manson, Brian Wilson, Kyoko Endoh, Princess Yongtai, Salvador Dalí, Ono no Komachi, Kiyoshi Kasai, Caravaggio, Throbbing Gristle, Takizawa Bakin, Leno and Rosemary LaBianca, Manson Family, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Wu Zetian, Genesis P-Orridge, Yusuke Nakahara, Ranpo Lagrange, Mitsusada Fukasaku, Nakai Hideo, Richard Wagner, and many more.
Very Good copy.
1992, English
Hardcover (w. dust jacket), unpaginated, 23.5 x 19 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / fine
Published by
Treville / Tokyo
$90.00 - In stock -
Scarce first hardcover edition of Katan Amano's collection of works, published by Treville in Japan in 1992. Japanese doll and puppet artist Katan Amano (1953—1990) is well known in Japan for her tender and haunting doll works. Amano was staff at Tokyo's Pygmalion Doll Studio in the 1980's and during her short life created a universe of Hans Bellmer and Alice inspired dolls. These elegantly beautiful, otherworldly ball-jointed children are Amano's vehicles for an arresting and primal vision. She died in 1990 in a motorcycle accident. This gorgeous book is lavishly illustrated with the finest examples of her award-winning dolls shot by her collaborator Ryoichi Yoshida. In addition to her incredible doll works, the book also features her Hieronymus Bosch and Lewis Carroll inspired sculptural creatures, grotesque-baroque objects and dark fantasy paintings, all lavishly reproduced on gloss stock. A small amount of text in Japanese.
Near Fine copy in NF dust jacket.
1960, Japanese
Hardcover (w. dust jacket), 106 pages, 26.5 x 18.5 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Misuzu Shobo / Tokyo
$100.00 - In stock -
First edition of this lovely 1960 hardcover monograph published in Tokyo on the German Surrealist Max Ernst (1891—1976), as part of a Misuzu Shobo series on Modern European and American artists issued for Japanese readers. With accompanying text by Japanese poet, critic and fellow Surrealist artist Shūzō Takiguchi. A prolific and highly original painter, sculptor, graphic artist, and poet, Ernst's various works are surveyed (paintings, collages, and frottages dating upto the late 1950s) herein generously in colour and b/w reproductions. Ernst was a primary pioneer of the Dada and Surrealism movements.
Very Good copy with some internal blank stock paper tanning. Dust Jacket with some wear and tear to extremities, all preserved in mylar wrap. A lovely copy of this uncommon title.
2006, English
Softcover, 336 pages, 26 x 21.5 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Center for Curatorial Studies Bard College / New York
$290.00 - In stock -
First edition of this very special, now very rare catalogue published in 2006 on the occasion of the major survey exhibition Witness To Her Art, featuring the work of Adrian Piper, Mona Hatoum, Cady Noland, Jenny Holzer, Kara Walker, Daniela Rossell and the seminal magazine Eau de Cologne, published by gallerist Monika Sprüth between 1985 and 1989. Profusely illustrated throughout with artworks by all artists, reproductions of important artist publications, installation views, and many works by other related artists, alongside texts by Adrian Piper, Kara Walker, Daniela Rossell, Mona Hatoum, Cady Noland, Jenny Holzer, Monika Sprüth, Rhea Anastas, Michael Brenson, Norton Batkin, Johanna Burton, Aruna D’Souza, Pamela Franks, Janet Kraynak, David Levi Strauss, Cuauhtémoc Medina, Ann Reynolds, Hamza Walker, and many more.
Publisher's blurb:
"This radical new study aims to change the way that some of the most influential artists of the past 40 years are seen—all of them women. Emphasizing questions of autonomy, critical intelligence and artistic intention, "Witness to Her Art" presents works by Adrian Piper, Mona Hatoum, Cady Noland, Jenny Holzer, Kara Walker, Daniela Rossell and "Eau de Cologne," a magazine published by gallerist Monika Sprüth. The artworks are accompanied by original writings by the artists, contemporaneous criticism and newly commissioned essays by Pamela Franks, Aruna D'Souza, Johanna Burton, David Levi Strauss, Hamza Walker and Cuauhtémoc Medina. The ambitious works presented and interpreted herein invite us to consider the impact of the feminist revolution across generations while rendering obsolete any stigma associated with shows or catalogues limited to women artists. Taking its lead from Conceptualism, feminism, and from its included artists, "Witness to Her Art" reaches for art history's capacity as a medium of world-making."
Highly recommended. Very Good copy with light edge wear/rounding to stiff overlay boards.
1984, English
Softcover, 62 pages, 21.5 x 21.5 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / good
Published by
Kunsthalle Basel / Basel
$90.00 - Out of stock
Wonderful 1984 catalogue, Private Property Created Crime, surveying the work of American conceptual artist Jenny Holzer (b. 1950), published on the occasion of a major European exhibition at Kunsthalle Basel and Le Nouveau Musée.
"THIS IS A BOOK OF STREET WORK AND INSTALLATIONS; POSTERS, T-SHIRTS, PLAQUES, STICKERS AND ELECTRONIC SIGNS. THE PHOTOGRAPHS ARE ARRANGED IN SERIES: TRUISMS, 1977–1983; ESSAYS, 1979–1983; LIVING, 1981–1983; AND SURVIVAL, 1983-1984. THE BOOK ACCOMPANIES EXHIBITIONS AT THE KUNSTHALLE, BASEL AND LE NOUVEAU MUSÉE, VILLEURBANNE."
Profusely illustrated in b/w and colour. Introduction by Jean-Christophe Ammann, plus biography and bibliography. All in English.
Jenny Holzer (b. 1950) is an American conceptual artist best known for her text-based works, which are constructed from "truisms" such as "abuse of power comes as no surprise"and "protect me from what I want." By experimenting with the use of words visually displayed in public spaces, Holzer is able to stimulate public discussions about violence, sexuality, oppression, human rights, feminism, power, war, and death. Starting with street posters, Holzer's practice has come to incorporate LED screens that run with stock-ticker-like texts, painted signs, plaques, photographs, sound, video, and the Internet.
Until 1993, Holzer wrote her own texts, after which she began to appropriate texts by Polish Nobel laureate Wislawa Szymborska and other champions of human rights, including Elfriede Jelinek, Fadhil Al-Azawi, Yehuda Amichai, and Mahmoud Darwish. Recent works include I Was in Baghdad Ochre Fade (2007), a series of oil on linen transcriptions of torture documents from the Iraq War; Redaction Paintings (2009), which were created using recently released classified memos with texts blacked out by censors; and an installation in the lobby of 7 World Trade Center. In 1990, she was the first woman to represent the United States at the Venice Biennale, where she won the Golden Lion for the best artist.
Good—VG copy with cover wear.
1990, English
Softcover, 582 pages, 20 x 13 cm
1st UK Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Paladin / London
$100.00 - Out of stock
"A very moving, intensely fascinating literary biography from an extraordinary writer"—William Gibson
First 1990 UK edition of the incredible 'early' autobiography of science fiction author Samuel R. Delany. Winner of the 1989 Hugo Award for Non-fiction, 'The Motion of Light in Water: East Village Sex and Science Fiction Writing: 1960—1965' is the self-portrait of the artist as a young African American man, an extraordinary man, showing the roots of his commitment to writing on the cutting edge — and to energetic bisexual experimentation. This first English edition contains material not found in the American edition, featuring cover photograph of Samuel R. Delany, 1961 by Bernard Kay.
Born in New York City's black ghetto Harlem at the start of World War II, Samuel R. Delany married white poet Marilyn Hacker right out of high school. The interracial couple moved into the city's new bohemian quarter, the Lower East Side, in summer 1961. Through the decade's opening years, new art, new sexual practices, new music, and new political awareness burgeoned among the crowded streets and cheap railroad apartments. Beautifully, vividly, insightfully, Delany calls up this era of exploration and adventure as he details his development as a black gay writer in an open marriage, with tertiary walk-ons by Bob Dylan, Stokely Carmichael, W. H. Auden, and James Baldwin, and a panoply of brilliantly drawn secondary characters. Among incidents often outrageous and frequently shocking, Delany tells how, walking across the Brooklyn Bridge one spring afternoon, he decided to commit his full intellectual and artistic energy to writing science fiction. He describes with great candour his relationships with both men and women. As memorable and outrageous as his best fiction, The Motion of Light in Water is both a compelling picture of the 1960s East Village scene and one of the decade's most revealing, offbeat literary autobiographies.
In the chapter, "The Future Is in the Present" of the book Cruising Utopia by José Esteban Munoz, Delany's The Motion of Light in the Water serves to explain how the future, as a form of utopia, can be "glimpsed" in the present through what Delany employed as "the massed bodies" of sexual dissidence.
Samuel R. Delany has been praised by the New York Times Book Review as 'the most interesting author of science fiction writing in English today' and by Umberto Eco as 'not only one of the most important SF writers of the present generation, but a fascinating writer in general who has invented a new style'.
Very Good copy with light creasing and tanning to spine.
1977, English
Softcover, 256 pages, 18 x 11 cm
Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Pan / London
$30.00 - In stock -
1977 Pan edition of the first short story collection by Alice Sheldon (under the pen name James Tiptree, Jr.). Introduced by fellow SF writer Harry Harrison.
"A long awaited collection from a Nebula prizewinner who is one of SF's newest, brightest talents"
Fifteen scintillating voyages through space and time including:
Faithful to thee, Terra, in our fashion — "Directly in front of Raceworld's equatorial headquarters lay the major track for the most spectacular of all races- the giant armoured reptiles, general galaxy favourites"
The man doors said hello to — "You don't often see a really mean piece of furniture"
And I awoke and found me here on the cold hill's side —"Now we've met aliens we can't screw, and we're about to die trying"
Alice Bradley Sheldon (195—1987) was an American science fiction and fantasy author better known as James Tiptree Jr., a pen name she used from 1967 until her death. It was not publicly known until 1977 that James Tiptree Jr. was a woman. Tiptree's debut story collection, Ten Thousand Light-Years from Home, was published in 1973 and her first novel, Up the Walls of the World, was published in 1978. From 1974 to 1985 she also occasionally used the pen name Raccoona Sheldon. Tiptree was inducted into the Science Fiction Hall of Fame in 2012.
Good—Very Good copy with some light general wear/age, still tightly bound.
1979, English
Softcover, 312 pages, 17.5 x 11 cm
Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Berkley Medallion / Berkley
$25.00 - In stock -
1979 edition of the debut novel by Alice Sheldon (under the pen name James Tiptree, Jr.), Up The Walls of The World. First published in 1978, the book explores the possibility that telepathy and other psychic phenomena are real.
"Part-being, part-machine, the Star Destroyer was cutting a "firepath" across the galaxy, consuming whole suns in deadly storms of audible light..."
"On wind-walled Tyree the fliers were gathering in the Far High, preparing the desperate mind-transfer that was their only hope of survival"
"At Norfolk Naval Base, Dr. Dann's ESP "sensitives" were taking a break from the test-series, relaxing in the messhall, when the mindstorm struck!"
Alice Bradley Sheldon (195—1987) was an American science fiction and fantasy author better known as James Tiptree Jr., a pen name she used from 1967 until her death. It was not publicly known until 1977 that James Tiptree Jr. was a woman. Tiptree's debut story collection, Ten Thousand Light-Years from Home, was published in 1973 and her first novel, Up the Walls of the World, was published in 1978. From 1974 to 1985 she also occasionally used the pen name Raccoona Sheldon. Tiptree was inducted into the Science Fiction Hall of Fame in 2012.
Very Good copy with some light general wear/age, still tightly bound.
1978, English
Softcover, 270 pages, 17.5 x 10.5 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Del Rey SF / New York
$30.00 - Out of stock
First 1978 edition of the third short story collection by Alice Sheldon (under the pen name James Tiptree, Jr.), and the first of Tiptree's books published after the revelation that Tiptree was a female, rather than male, writer. Introduced by fellow SF writer Ursula K. Le Guin, and published by Del Rey Books (a specialized SF and Fantasy imprint of Ballantine Books).
"A marvelous medley of Tiptree's best"
including:
"YOUR HAPLOID HEART" — When Ian Suitlov and Pax Patton landed on Esthaa to check for humans, the job wasn't as easy as it appeared. Though the natives seemed human enough, only cross breeding would be conclusive proof. But how were they to prove anything, when sex was punishable by death?
"THE PSYCHOLOGIST WHO WOULDN'T DO AWFUL THINGS TO RATS" — Dr Tilly Lipsitz hated his name, loved his rats... and would be out of a job if he didn't come up with a real zinger of an experiment soon. He didn't have much in mind until he took a midnight trip to his lab and learned more than he would have thought possible.
"SHE WAITS FOR ALL MEN BORN" — She had eyes that could not see, but without sight she had powers that went far beyond those of all who came upon her.
Contents:
Ursula K. Le Guin Introduction
Your Haploid Heart (1969)
And So On, and So On (1971)
Her Smoke Rose Up Forever (1974)
A Momentary Taste of Being (1975)
Houston, Houston, Do You Read? (1976)
The Psychologist Who Wouldn't Do Awful Things to Rats (1976)
She Waits for All Men Born (1976)
Alice Bradley Sheldon (195—1987) was an American science fiction and fantasy author better known as James Tiptree Jr., a pen name she used from 1967 until her death. It was not publicly known until 1977 that James Tiptree Jr. was a woman. Tiptree's debut story collection, Ten Thousand Light-Years from Home, was published in 1973 and her first novel, Up the Walls of the World, was published in 1978. From 1974 to 1985 she also occasionally used the pen name Raccoona Sheldon. Tiptree was inducted into the Science Fiction Hall of Fame in 2012.
Very Good copy with some light general wear/age, still tightly bound.
2020, English
Softcover, 144 pages, 13.7 x 20.3 cm
Published by
Semiotext(e) / Los Angeles
$36.00 - In stock -
"It is really just one of the best books ever, and maybe the greatest novel ever written" - Dennis Cooper
Castle Faggot is Derek McCormack's darkest and most delicious book yet, a satire of sugary cereals and Saturday morning cartoons set in an amusement park more deranged than anything Disney dreamed up. At the heart of the park is Faggotland, a playland for gay men, and Castle Faggot, the darkest dark ride in the world. Home to a cartoon Dracula called Count Choc-o-log, the castle is decorated with the corpses of gays—some were killed, some killed themselves, all ended up as décor.
The book includes a map of Faggotland, a photobook of the castle, the instructions for a castle-shaped dollhouse, and the novelization of a TV puppet show about Count Choc-o-log and his friends—reminiscent of the classic stop-motion special Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer, but even gayer and more grotesque. As scatological as Sade but with a Hanna-Barbera vibe, Castle Faggot transmutes McCormack's love of the lurid and the childlike, of funhouses and sickhouses, into something furiously funny: as Edmund White says, “the mystery of objects, the lyricism of neglected lives, the menace and nostalgia of the past—these are all ingredients in this weird and beautiful parallel universe.”
Afterword by Dennis Cooper and Zac Farley
In Derek McCormack's home province, farm boys with growing pains enjoy a little-known meal called bed-supper—a hearty bowl of sweet breakfast cereal enjoyed as a midnight snack. Here McCormack has composed a peculiarly salacious bed-supper, where the long secret sweet-tooth of the Marquis de Sade glints as it sinks into the dirtiest of dishes. This useful book will more than stay your appetite until breakfast—Castle Faggot is also a manual of redecoration, a musical, a puppet show, a theory of cosmetics, a work of poetics, and a glorious celebration of the French decadence. - Lisa Robertson, author of The Baudelaire Fractal
1996, English
Softcover, 246 pages, 21.5 x 14 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / good
Published by
Serpent's Tail / London
$40.00 - Out of stock
First 1996 edition of this long out-of-print collection of essays by Gary Indiana, "One of the most important chroniclers of the modern psyche."—The Guardian
Gary Indiana's essays, like his fiction, take no prisoners. In his fifteen years of writing cultural criticism, he has altered the way we look at ourselves and our society. Ignoring good taste, Indiana writes discomforting home truths, because his views of home are unique and never comfortable. His insights are acute, brash, bracing, intelligent; his subjects and speculations range from Rodney King's beating to Mary McCarthy's friendship with Hannah Arendt to the presidential campaign of 1992. Let It Bleed collects for the first time some of the most engaging, provocative, and exciting writing that has been seen and produced in a long time.
Good—VG with light wear/creasing to covers.
2024, English
Softcover, 48 pages, 20.5 x 11.5 cm
Published by
no more poetry / Naarm
$25.00 - In stock -
no more poetry celebrate the launch of their 20th publication; the second poetry collection from Natalie Briggs titled ‘FLOWER ENGINE’. This collection of cinched, bright free-verse explores the passing locations of love and the slow, private operations of pain’s knocking counterweight. The book extends Briggs’ relay of concise universal suggestions, translating them through brief, intimate utility.—daniel ward
First signed edition of 100 copies.
nmp.20
FLOWER
ENGINE
(2024)
Natalie Briggs
on nmp.20:
2024, english — paperback
48 pages, 115 x 205 mm
first edition, edition of 100
signed
no more poetry presents nmp.20
FLOWER
ENGINE
by
Natalie Briggs
2023, English / German
Hardcover, 400 pages, 27 x 22 cm
Published by
Walther König / Köln
$90.00 - In stock -
Ursula's life and work offer an unconventional narrative of artistic independence. Her art exemplifies the idea that Surrealism is not a style, but an attitude. Ursula subverted reality and found the uncanny in the everyday, challenging the authorities of society and art by imagining new worlds in which old hierarchies are thrown overboard and new ways of life are conceivable. Ursula shared this utopian imagination with artists such as Leonora Carrington, Leonor Fini, Dorothea Tanning, and Unica Zürn. The aim of this catalogue is to present Ursula's captivating and self-assured work to a new generation of art lovers. It reveals that it is the individuality of Ursula's work that allows it to touch on so many fundamental and topical issues, including female self-determination and the challenging of established gender identities, with a worldview in which everything is interconnected and mutually dependent.
Edited by Stephan Diederich.
Contributions by Stephan Diederich, Yilmaz Dziewior, Helena Kuhlmann, Chus Martinez, Elizabeth A. Povinell.
English and German text.
"Cologne Museum Dives Into German Artist’s Once-Lost Fantastical World: Ursula Schultze-Bluhm, painter of unearthly visions was largely overlooked by the art world…"—New York Times, by Andrew Russeth, 2023.
1995 / 2001, English
Softcover, 314 pages, 20.5 x 14 cm
Published by
City Lights Books / San Francisco
$49.00 - In stock -
This complete collection of writings published for the first time in English includes “Story of a Little Girl,” about the Catholic priest who sexually molested her sister; “The Sacred,” a collection of poems and fragments on mysticism and eroticism; notes on her association with contr-attaque and acephale, and her involvement with the Spanish civil war and the early years of the Soviet Union; a compendium of correspondence with her beloved sister-in-law and tortured love letters to Bataille; and an essay by Bataille about Laure’s death of tuberculosis at the age of thirty-five.
“People describe Laure as pure, dissolute, dark, luminous. ‘I drank, I bathed in her radiant purity’ Jean Bernier says. Leiris writes about her lyrically in fourbis and frêle bruit as ‘the saint of the chasm.’ Bataille calls her uncompromising, pure, and sovereign. It is tempting to romanticize Laure – in the most sublime and violent sense – as consumptive poet, a fervent revolutionary, Bataille’s great love. But if she is radiant and dirty, she is also insolent. That, it seems, is what saves her.”—Jeanine Herman
“Colette Peignot, a.k.a. Laure, is one of the more fascinating and intense women writers of the past century. Georges Bataille and Michel Leiris described her as “one of the most vehement existences [that] ever lived, one of the most conflicted.” They summarized her volatile personality as “[e]ager for affection and for disaster, oscillating between extreme audacity and the most dreadful anguish, as inconceivable on a scale of real beings as a mythical being, she tore herself on the thorns with which she surrounded herself until becoming nothing but a wound, never allowing herself to be confined by anything or anyone.” In other words, Laure was the epitome of what Bataille would dub the “sovereign” individual.”—Jason DeBoer, Absinthe Literary Review
“By the time one emerges from this compilation of autobiographical and biographical sketches by and about her, of poems, scattered notes and fevered letters, one can’t help feeling that her true masterwork was her ability to make others react to and remember her.”—Mark Polizzotti, London Review of Books
Laure (1903-1938) was a revolutionary poet, masochist Catholic rich girl, and world traveler. Toward the end of her life she became the lover of French writer Georges Bataille. Her writings and her real life story were remarkable in their violence and intensity, and her relationships with Bataille and Michel Leiris clearly influenced their works.
2024, English
Softcover, 170 pages, 25 x 15 cm
First Edition,
Published by
Pep Talk / Los Angeles
$75.00 - In stock -
The first complete collection of Bob Flanagan’s poetry, edited by Sabrina Tarasoff and with contributions by Jack Skelley, Sheree Rose, Chiara Moioli, David Trinidad, Dodie Bellamy, and Dennis Cooper.
Cause for celebration: Bob Flanagan’s tortured, elegant poetry is finally back in print! Alive with carnality, love, abjection, relentless self-exposure and fatalist laughs, these poems are as fresh and stunning as when they were first written. Bob's work lays bare the eroticism of punishment and the punishing possibilities of the erotic. Every meticulously chosen word between these covers drips with blood, cum and tears.—Amy Gerstler, author of Index of Women, Bitter Angel, and Early Heaven
Bob Flanagan makes me sick and I love it. Is there a right way to be ill? I dunno. Probably you’re meant to keep quiet or frighten anybody too much, just be a strung-out angel in waiting, please. This is very much fucking not what Bob Flanagan did. He took his wrecked body, his pain, his urges and, yup, his death, everything that he was supposed to keep to himself, and he turned it into work that’s ferociously alive, hilarious, strange. In these poems, he’s singing to you in the back of the ambulance while the dogs prowl outside and ‘the sky glows orange like a match.’ It’s beautiful, it hurts.—Charlie Fox, author of This Young Monster
Bob Flanagan (1952—1996) was an American poet and performance artist known for his work on sadomasochism and lifelong struggle with cystic fibrosis. Flanagan's first volumes came into being in the context of a small contemporary poetry and art scene orbiting the Beyond Baroque Literary Arts Center in Venice, CA in the early 1980s, which included poets and writers such as Dennis Cooper, Amy Gerstler, Ed Smith, Jack Skelley, and David Trinidad, amongst others. Flanagan's body of work came to occupy a unique position within their cohort as the poems evoked a personal vocabulary of illness, death and restraint through the poet's edgy, endearing, quirky sense of humor and mischievous spirit. Spirit Halloween, Americana, and pop culture act as the inexpressible backdrop for a performative, comic poetic practice in close dialogue with poets such as Charles Bukowski Ted Berrigan, John Ashbery, Frank O'Hara, and Ron Koertge. Though a portion of the work remains unfinished in the wake of Flanagan's death in 1996, the legacy left by these poems is undoubtedly one of the more important, surprising, heartbreaking, wacky, and profoundly original contributions to American verse of the period.
2022, English
Softcover, 256 pages, 21 x 26 cm
Published by
Prestel / Munich
$70.00 - In stock -
Now available in paperback, this book on the celebrated Dada artist Hannah Höch explores her use of collage as the artistic medium of choice for both satire and poetic beauty.
World-renowned for her work during the Weimar period, Hannah Höch was a pioneer in many aspects, both artistic and cultural. She was the lone woman of the Berlin Dada movement - the riotous form of art that deconstructed sound, language, and images to re-assemble them into new objects, texts and meanings. Höch was a pivotal force in the development of collage, paving the way for today's ubiquitous image editing techniques. A determined believer in women's rights, Höch questioned conventional concepts of partnership, beauty and the making of art, her work presenting acute critiques of racial and social stereotypes, particularly that of her native Germany.
Focusing on Höch's collages, this book examines the artist's career from the 1920s to the 1970s, charting her oeuvre from early works influenced by fashion and mass media, through to her later compositions of lyrical abstraction. It reveals her rapid development of a personal style, which was both humorous and often moving, but also offered critical commentary on society at a time of tremendous social change.
Included are essays that examine themes such as the concept of the "New Woman" and the legacy of German colonialism. Featuring international scholarship on a groundbreaking artist, this volume brings together important source texts and reference material, which were first translated into English for the original edition of this book.
Dawn Ades is Professor Emerita of the History and Theory of Art at the University of Essex, and Professor of Art History at the Royal Academy. She is a former Trustee of Tate and Fellow of the British Academy.
Daniel F. Herrmann is Curator of Modern and Contemporary Projects, The National Gallery.
Emily Butler is a curator, writer and translator, currently Mahera and Mohammad Abu Ghazaleh Curator at the Whitechapel Gallery.
1983, Japanese / German / English
Softcover, 164 pages, 24 x 25 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / good
Published by
Yomiuri Shimbun / Tokyo
$60.00 - In stock -
Scarce Japanese catalogue on the work of German artist Max Ernst, published to accompany the major retrospective exhibition that travelled Japan 1983—1984.
With an introduction by German art historian Werner Spies, in German and Japanese, this profusely illustrated book is quite a valuable volume on Ernst as it concentrates its pages on a huge collection of his lithography, frottage, collage, etching, and other graphic works, rather than his more well-known works in painting and sculpture, bringing to the surface many lesser-seen works of the artist. Over 300 colour and black and white reproductions, including biography and bibliography. Texts in Japanese and German, with titles and introduction in English.
Max Ernst (1891—1976) was a German painter, sculptor, graphic artist, and poet. A prolific artist, Ernst was a primary pioneer of the Dada movement and Surrealism.
Good copy with wear and creasing to corners, general wear and tear to cover extremities. Spine uncreased and tightly bound.
1975, Italian / French
Hardcover (linen bound), 277 pages, 30 x 30 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Nuova Prearo Editore / Milan
$190.00 - Out of stock
First edition of the wonderful (in progress) catalogue raisonné of Piero Manzoni — General Catalogue — edited by Germano Celant and published by Nuova Prearo Editore, Milan, 1975. This heavy, richly illustrated book provided the first overview of Piero Manzoni’s oeuvre. Illustrated exclusively with black and white photographs, the book featured an extensive text by Germano Celant, divided into chapters, a selection of writings by the artist and the register of works “ordered chronologically by groups, determined by type” and the appendices with exhibitions and bibliography. It was later re-printed and expanded in 1989. Texts in Italian and French.
Piero Manzoni (1933—1963) was an Italian artist best known for his ironic approach to avant-garde art. Often compared to the work of Yves Klein, his own work anticipated, and directly influenced, the work of a generation of younger Italian artists brought together by the critic Germano Celant in the first Arte Povera exhibition held in Genoa, 1967. Manzoni is most famous for a series of artworks that call into question the nature of the art object, directly prefiguring Conceptual Art. His work eschews normal artist's materials, instead using everything from rabbit fur to human excrement in order to "tap mythological sources and to realize authentic and universal values". His work is widely seen as a critique of the mass production and consumerism that was changing Italian society (the Italian economic miracle) after World War II. Italian artists such as Manzoni had to negotiate the new economic and material order of post-war Europe through inventive artistic practices which crossed geographic, artistic, and cultural borders.
Very Good copy. Book is Near Fine in every way, yet missing dust jacket, therefore VG.
2020, English
Flexicover, 265 pages, 22 x 16.5 cm
Published by
Hauser & Wirth / Zurich
$95.00 - Out of stock
Featuring a luxurious faux-leather binding, Piero Manzoni: Writings on Art features 25 texts by the Italian artist Piero Manzoni (1933-63), spanning from 1956 to 1963, the year of the artist's premature death by heart attack. Writing during the Italian economic miracle of the '50s and '60s, Manzoni's essays and manifestos represent his response to the state of midcentury Italian art and art writing. Selected by art historian Gaspare Luigi Marcone, all writings have been either translated into English for the first time or newly translated. Each text is accompanied by extensive archival images and contextualized with editorial commentary. The book features a foreword by the Piero Manzoni Foundation's director, Rosalia Pasqualino di Marineo, and a newly commissioned essay by one of today's best-known art historians, Benjamin H.D. Buchloh.
2024, English
Softcover, 290 pages, 18 x 11 cm
Published by
Discipline / Melbourne
$35.00 - Out of stock
Edited by Olga Bennett and Helen Hughes.
Designed by James Vinciguerra.
Published by Discipline.
Screenic is an anthology of Philip Brophy’s writing on art, published from 2000 onwards.
The focus of the selection is on art that involves screens: projected as film in museums, digitised for installations in galleries, curated as documents within exhibitions, presented as outdoor illuminations on buildings, utilised for the production of VR and AI-generated content, and even wall murals derived from televisual screens. The driver for the writing of these articles over two decades is an interest in media literacy within fine art contexts.
Together, the articles reinforce the view that ongoing changes taking place in the mediascape over the last two decades create challenges for artists, producers, curators, viewers, and critics—sometimes resulting in a rejuvenation of how media art can be imagined and presented, other times evidencing an anaemic grasp of the contemporary mediascape that whorls outside the white cube.
2019, English
Softcover, 400 pages, 15.2 x 24.1 cm
Published by
Turtle Point Press / New York
$40.00 - Out of stock
The irreverent, tweetable, ludicrous, painful, wondrous work of the L.A. punk poet—widely available for the first time.
In Punk Rock Is Cool for the End of the World, David Trinidad brings together a comprehensive selection of Ed Smith's (1957–2005) work: his published books; unpublished poems; excerpts from his extensive notebooks; photos and ephemera; and his timely "cry for civilization," "Return to Lesbos" put down that gun / stop electing Presidents.
Ed Smith blazed onto the Los Angeles poetry scene in the early 1980s from out of the hardcore punk scene. The charismatic, nerdy young man hit home with his funny/scary off-the-cuff-sounding poems, like "Fishing" This is a good line. / This is a bad line. This is a fishing line.
Ed's vibrant "gang" of writer and artist friends—among them Amy Gerstler, Dennis Cooper, Bob Flanagan, Mike Kelley, and David Trinidad—congregated at Beyond Baroque in Venice, on LA's west side. They read and partied and performed together, and shared and published each others' work.
Ed was more than bright and versatile: he worked as a math tutor, an animator, and a typesetter. In the mid-1990s, he fell in love with Japanese artist Mio Shirai; they married and moved to New York City. Despite productive years and joyful times, Ed was plagued by mood disorders and drug problems, and at the age of forty-eight, he took his own life.
Ed Smith's poems speak to living in an increasingly dehumanizing consumer society and corrupt political system. This "punk Dorothy Parker" is more relevant than ever for our ADD, technology-distracted times.
Writer Bruce Hainley refers to Ed’s poems as “toy time bombs.”
"In the very early ‘80s Ed was intimidatingly skinny and gorgeous and as reckless and charismatic as that guy in The Libertines who got caught doing coke with Kate Moss, but very, very talented and massively intelligent, and even when he was a little too wild, he was always so kind and heartbreakingly sweet and smart. Saying he was our Rimbaud is way too lazy, but there was that. I thought of him as LA’s John Wieners. Ed’s poetry has Wieners’s deep melancholy and low-key, note-perfect lyricism, mixed with Ed’s strange, bright ideas and his dead-pan, startling sense of humor. I‘m one of the many people who misses his poetry a lot."―Dennis Cooper
"Ed Smith was this brilliant, handsome, charismatic, disarming, hedonistic, wounded math and science nerd who discovered punk music and art and poetry and was swept away, besotted with all three, and never looked back. He loved drugs and bands and science fiction and science and Sappho and poets and poetry. He liked to give people a little treatise by Alfred North Whitehead on mathematics for a gift. He loved being part of a cool scene. He introduced me to Prince’s music when his first album came out. I think he would have described himself as bi-sexual. He was intense and sensitive and wild. He burned hotly."—Amy Gerstler
2018, English
Hardcover (clothbound), 390 pages, 22 x 14 cm
Published by
Oxford University Press / UK
$44.00 - In stock -
"Something pushed out from the body there on the floor, and stretched forth a slimy, wavering tentacle..."
Perhaps no figure better embodies the transition from the Gothic tradition to modern horror than Arthur Machen. In the final decade of the nineteenth century, the Welsh writer produced a seminal body of tales of occult horror, spiritual and physical corruption, and malignant survivals from the primeval past which horrified and scandalized late-Victorian readers. Machen's "weird fiction" has influenced generations of storytellers, from H. P. Lovecraft to Guillermo Del Toro - and it remains no less unsettling today.
This new collection, which includes the complete novel The Three Impostors as well as such celebrated tales as The Great God Pan and The White People, constitutes the most comprehensive critical edition of Machen yet to appear. In addition to the core late-Victorian horror classics, a selection of lesser-known prose poems and later tales helps to present a fuller picture of the development of Machen's weird vision. The edition's introduction and notes contextualize the life and work of this foundational figure in the history of horror, including a chronology and bibliography.
Edited by Aaron Worth
Arthur Machen is a significant figure in supernatural literature of the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. His work, which mixes Gothic horror with fin-de-siecle mysticism, has influenced writers and film-makers (notably H. P. Lovecraft, Jorge Luis Borges, Stephen King, and Alan Moore). From the beginning of his literary career, Machen espoused a mystical belief that the humdrum ordinary world hid a more mysterious and strange world beyond. His gothic and decadent works of the 1890s concluded that the lifting of this veil could lead to madness, sex, or death, and usually a combination of all three. Machen's later works became somewhat less obviously full of gothic trappings, but for him investigations into mysteries invariably resulted in life-changing transformation and sacrifice.
Aaron Worth is Associate Professor of Rhetoric at Boston University, having previously taught courses in English and American literature at Brandeis University. His book Imperial Media: Colonial and Information Systems in the British Literary Imagination, 1857-1918 was published by Ohio State UP in 2014 (reviewed in TLS and widely in scholarly journals; paperback edition in 2016). He has published essays on Victorian literature and culture in leading journals including Victorian Studies, Victorian Literature and Culture, and Victorian Poetry, as well as original horror fiction in magazines including Cemetery Dance and Aliterate. Worth is the author of the entry on Horror Fiction in the recent Blackwell's Encyclopedia of Victorian Literature (2015).
2003, English / Japanese
Softcover (w. dust jacket and obi), 176 pages, 21 x 30 cm
1st US Edition, Out of print title / used / fine
Published by
Treville / Tokyo
Pan-Exotica / Tokyo
$280.00 - Out of stock
The very quickly out-of-print "Chimusi II" of the Chimusi set of two volumes, a lavishly illustrated book collection of every darkest sexual depravity rendered in vibrant colour by Japanese master of Ero guro, Toshio Saeki, published by Treville and Pan-Exotica in 2003 and now a very collectible volume. In the introduction, Timothy Leary writes, "We salute the style and grace with which you tease our secret sensualities. And teach us how our dark, twisted images and fearful fantasies are created by our own minds."
Toshio Saeki (1945—2019) was an illusive Japanese illustrator and painter, and icon of 1970s Tokyo counterculture, known for combining Japanese folklore, Yōkai spirits and elements of Western art with his own sophisticated aesthetics to create a unique, sensational world of eros, dark humour, and horror. Given the title “Erotic Engineer” by Timothy Leary, Saeki's provocative art broke all sexual taboos, questioned Japanese ideology and traditional views on love, desire and gender roles. Saeki’s surgically-precise graphic work is closely related to the Japanese cultural phenomenon ‘Erotic, Grotesque, Nonsense’ (ero, guro, nansensu).
“Toshio Saeki conjures death with a pen”—Shūji Terayama, 1969.
As new—Fine copy, with only the lightest wear.