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.
1970, German
Softcover, unpaginated, 18 x 12 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Kiepenheuer & Witsch / Köln
$100.00 - In stock -
Scarce first 1970 German edition of Roland Topor's famous book collection Die Masochisten (The Masochists), one of the finest examples of the artist's profound command of illustrated dark humour. Almost entirely made up of wordless b/w illustrations, with a foreword in german by German designer, illustrator and typographer, Hannes Jähn.
Roland Topor (1938—1997) was one of the most unique and versatile French artists of the second half of the 20th century, working prolifically as a provocative and spirited illustrator, author, humorist, satirist, poet, painter, performer, sculptor, playwright, film and TV writer, filmmaker and actor, and much more. A founder of the Panic Movement, an art collective formed by Fernando Arrabal, Alejandro Jodorowsky, and Roland Topor in Paris in 1962, Topor was known for the surreal and absurdist nature of his work.
Very Good copy. A crisp, solidly bound copy with some foxing/tanning to pages, usual spine edge tanning to bright fluro pink boards (most often bleached out).
1993 / 1999, English
Softcover, 109 pages, 19.5 x 12.5 cm
Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
John Calder / London
$25.00 - In stock -
Antonin Artaud is now recognized as the twentieth century's most radical influence on the theatre and on performance. In this, the most famous of his writings, he redefines the nature and the purpose of drama, what the theatrical reaction of audiences should be an experience to shake their certainty of everyday existence and how actors should approach their work. Peter Brook, Grotowski, the Royal Shakespeare Company, and many others have used Artaud's theories in their work, and in drama colleges everywhere it is obligatory reading.
The Manifestos of the Theatre of Cruelty, the text of Seraphim's Theatre and other major texts are all included here.
This remarkable French playwright and poet was born in 1896. He was a leading figure in the Surrealist movement and despite a divergence of ideas remained a dedicated Surrealist all his life, devoting his time to the study of problems of conflict between man's physical and intellectual natures. He died in 1948.
Good copy.
1969, French
Hardcover (cloth bound), 106 pages, 21 x 21 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / good
Published by
Éditions Denoël / Paris
$120.00 - Out of stock
First Edition of the catalogue raisonné of the engraved work of German Surrealist Hans Bellmer, published in 1969 by Éditions Denoël, Paris. Wrapped in the publisher's debossed black covers featuring Bellmer's Céphalopode of 1965, this handsome volume opens with "Morale of Engraving", a four page introduction by author Andre Pieyre De Mandiargues (in French). The rest of the book is made up of 141 reproduced engraved works of Bellmer, including his exquisite works complimenting Georges Bataille, Marquis de Sade, Joyce Mansour, Louis Aragon, Charles Baudelaire, and others, followed by a 7 page catalogue raisonné index, including work title, date, process and technique, dimensions, printing justifications, editors and other details. An essential title in any Bellmer collection and important reference.
Very Good copy, tanning and some marks to board/page edges with age.
1997, Japanese
Softcover (w. dust jacket), 104 pages, 21 x 29.5 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / good
Published by
Treville / Tokyo
$120.00 - In stock -
Scarce copy of the now out-of-print Biomannerism book, first edition, published in Japan by Treville in 1997. An incredible selection of international artists linked through their exploration of new aesthetics of erotic metamorphosis between the organic and synthetic compiled with texts by Stéphan Lévy Kuentz. Features lavishly illustrated chapters dedicated to the works of artists Daniel Ouellette, Michel Henricot, Sibylle Ruppert, Joe Hackbarth, Tsutomu Otsuka, Beksinski, Yoshifumi Hayashi, Jean-Marie Poumeyrol, H. R. Giger.
"The erotic Biomannerism movement is a creature of the cyberage, an expression of technophobia and fear of mutation. The artists represented here come from the U.S., France, Germany, Japan, and Switzerland, but they share a Kafkaesque view of the human condition, which they express in twisting, writhing, bulging, disintegrating images of the human form. Inspiration flows from Michelangelo, Dali, da Vinci, Rubens, and Duchamp, as well as Blade Runner, Frankenstein, and Intel."
Good copy due to a small knock/closed tear to a few pages, otherwise Very Good in VG dust jacket with only light general wear.
1986, Japanese
Softcover, 160 pages, 13 x 18 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Fiction Inc. / Tokyo
$70.00 - In stock -
Issue No.28 of the great SALE2 periodical from Tokyo Japan, founded in 1984 by Makoto Orui, who later became art director for Purple magazine in France, published regularly as a sort-of fanzine/journal/catalogue/pocket-book by Fiction, Inc., a specialty bookshop and publisher of fetish and erotica in Tokyo in the 1980—90s. Each issue covers different themes and features, heavy on fetishism.
Issue No.28, the "Fetishism" issue features collected writings and images around the theme of fetish by John Willie, Bizarre Magazine, Pierre Molinier, Irina Ionesco, Bernard Faucon (his incredible Summer Camp series), Irwing Klaw, Centurians Publishing Inc. bondage catalogues, Andy Warhol and much more... What's more, this issue comes complete with a green synthetic feather to kickstart your own sensual adventures.
Very heavily illustrated throughout with erotic photography and artwork, all texts in Japanese.
1990, Japanese
Softcover, 176 pages, 13 x 18 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Fiction Inc. / Tokyo
$70.00 - Out of stock
Issue No.40 of the great SALE2 periodical from Tokyo Japan, founded in 1984 by Makoto Orui, who later became art director for Purple magazine in France and Rockin’on magazine in Japan. SALE2 was active for about 14 years during the 1980s—1990s, published regularly as a sort-of fanzine/journal/catalogue/pocket-book by Fiction, Inc., a specialty shop and publisher of fetish and erotica in Tokyo in the 1980-90s. With Orui's distinct design SALE2 developed an exclusive curated editorial set on ‘eroticism and its spiritual philosophy’, with each issue exploring different themes and features, heavy on fetishism and erotic art.
Issue No.40, the "FREAKS" issue features writings and artwork throughout by Fictcryptokrimsographs by Les Krims, Amputee Love comic by Rich and Rene, Masami Akita (Merzbow), Odilon Redon, Joel-Peter Witkin, Hiromi Itō, Masaaki Oba, Diane Arbus, Erving Goffman, Pierre Molinier, lots of mysterious vintage "freak" and erotic imagery and illustration, and catalogue/advertisments/clippings of Eric Stanton, Irving Klaw, John Willie, Bizarre Comix, and much more...
Very heavily illustrated throughout with erotic photography and artwork, all texts in Japanese.
Very Good copy, tanning to pages and some wear to cover.
1988, Japanese
Softcover, 168 pages, 13 x 18 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Fiction Inc. / Tokyo
$70.00 - In stock -
Issue No.33 of the great SALE2 periodical from Tokyo Japan, founded in 1984 by Makoto Orui, who later became art director for Purple magazine in France and Rockin’on magazine in Japan. SALE2 was active for about 14 years during the 1980s—1990s, published regularly as a sort-of fanzine/journal/catalogue/pocket-book by Fiction, Inc., a specialty shop and publisher of fetish and erotica in Tokyo in the 1980-90s. With Orui's distinct design SALE2 developed an exclusive curated editorial set on ‘erotisism and its spiritual philosophy’, with each issue exploring different themes and features, heavy on fetishism and erotic art.
Issue No.33, the "Homosex Issue" features Quentin Crisp, Herbert List, Andy Warhol, Pierre Klossowski, David Hockney, Baron Wilhelm von Gloeden, Mel Odom, Jean Cocteau, Aubrey Beardsley, Guglielmo Plüschow, Vincenzo Galdi, and much more. It also features the Fiction, Inc. section that samples a cross-section of content from catalogue publications including the work of John Willie, Bill Ward, Carlo, Guido Crepax, Eric Stanton, Ruiz, Sally Roberts, Irving Claw, Betty Page, and periodicals such as Rubber Magazine, Amateur Bondage, Bizarre Comix, Bizarre Classix, Bizarre Fotos, and much more...
Very heavily illustrated throughout with erotic photography and artwork, all texts in Japanese.
Very Good copy with tanning and age to pages.
2020, English
Softcover, 200 pages, 20.3 x 12.7 cm
Out of print title / as new
Published by
Rab-Rab Press / Helsinki
$100.00 - In stock -
Second edition, published in a run of 750 copies. All editions out-of-print.
Rab-Rab Press announces the publication of Free Jazz Communism, a new book actualising Archie Shepp–Bill Dixon Quartet at the 8th World Festival of Youth and Students in Helsinki 1962. Including archive material and documents, commissioned theoretical and historical texts, and interviews, the book edited by Sezgin Boynik and Taneli Viitahuhta contextualizes politics of free jazz music in light of global decolonisation movements, anti-war activism, structures of racial capitalism, and forms of avant-garde music.
By focusing on concerts of Shepp–Dixon Quartet, leading avant-garde jazz musicians from the US, in the socialist anti-colonial festival in Helsinki, the book is introducing complexities in the usual Cold War stories about the sixties, and pictures politics of jazz as something transcending boundaries of nation-state and capitalist market regulations.
Apart from the theoretical and historical overview by its editors, the book includes testimonies of the collective and international spirit of the 1962 Youth Festival, translated documents from Finnish press, a new interview with Archie Shepp, commissioned text by Jeff Schwartz on the historical context of political engagement of free jazz musicians, and reproduction of three hard-to-find texts by Shepp.
The book is designed by Ott Kagovere.
As New copy.
2001, English
Hardcover (w. galssine dust jacket), 254 pages, 22.5 x 18.5 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
University of California / Berkeley
International Centre of Photography / New York
$140.00 - In stock -
First 2001 hardcover edition of Behind Closed Doors: The Art of Hans Bellmer, Therese Lichtenstein's highly original book studying the the life-size, adolescent-girl dolls created by German artist Hans Bellmer in the 1930s.
Disturbing and controversial, Bellmer's dolls with their uncanny, fragmented bodies and eroticized poseswere just as shocking during Bellmer's time as they are today. Until now there has been little available in English about Bellmer's dolls, and Lichtenstein's book will be welcomed for its fresh interpretation of the artist's work and his place in European modernism. Eighty striking photographs accompany the text. Working during a time when Nazism was on the rise, Bellmer created several dolls with fragmented bodies that could be dismantled and arranged in various configurations. Using a narrative format, he then photographed the dolls in a range of grotesque, often sexual, positions. The images he conveyed were of death and decay, abuse and longing, in stark contrast to Nazism's mythic utopian celebration of adolescence.Lichtenstein interprets Bellmer's complex expressions of eroticism as a protest against the Nazis and also against his father, a cold and repressive Nazi sympathizer. At the same time, she says, by hyperbolically flaunting a passive femininity in a theatrical manner, Bellmer's images allow us to consider how cultural representations can affect the formation of identity and alternative possibilities.
"Behind Closed Doors reveals the complex structure behind these photographs of violated female adolescence, a structure in which sadism, masochism, hermaphroditism, fetishism, utopianism, and nostalgia all play a role. Above all, Lichtenstein's study makes clear the political aspect of these transgressive images: the way in which they served to question and undermine the contemporary authoritarian Nazi image of sexual 'normalcy' by recourse to a violent return of the repressed." -Linda Nochlin, author of Representing Women "Behind Closed Doors: The Art of Hans Bellmer is a compelling gathering of the narratives around psychoanalysis, visual culture, biology, and gender. Therese Lichtenstein rigorously examines Bellmer's picturing of the body as the site of desire, confusion, and sudden disaster, and in doing so produces a telling tale of history's secrets and lies."—Barbara Kruger
Therese Lichtenstein has taught art history and museum studies at New York University, Rice University, and Mount Holyoke College.
Very Good copy in Good original glassine dust jacket with some light wear.
1997, English / Japanese
Hardcover, 100 pages, 21.5 x 30.5 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Rockin' On / Tokyo
Hysteric Glamour / Tokyo
$380.00 - In stock -
First, only edition of Hélène, the hardcover photobook/catalogue published on the occasion of an exhibition curated by Purple magazine co-founder Elein Fleiss at Tokyo gallery THE Deep in 1997. Named after actress and nineties icon Hélène Fillières, this book is the most perfect published time-capsule of what was 90s anti-fashion Paris, and probably the most brilliant fashion photobook of the decade. Published in Japan by Hysteric Glamour and Rockin' On, Hélène is cover-to-cover full-bleed gloss pages of photography by Mark Borthwick, Anette Aurell, Camille Vivier, Christophe Brunnquell, Laetitia Benat, Ronald Stoops, and Anders Edstrom, among others. Only available in Japan when published, and now very rare and sought after. This copy complete with bound-in Hysteric Glamour sticker!
Though she began her career as a curator of art exhibitions, Elein Fleiss founded the seminal Purple Magazine with Olivier Zahm at the age of 24. Purple and Fleiss' other editing/curatorial activities were the primary vehicles for the aesthetics of what became referred to as 1990's anti-fashion. Purple – in its various incantations, Purple Prose, Purple Fashion, Purple Sexe, Purple Journal, etc. – has gone down in publishing history and changed the relationship between art, literature, architecture and fashion, resisting the obvious and the commercial.
Very Good copy.
1992, English / French
Softcover (staple-bound), 64 pages, 24.5 x 19 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Purple Institute / Paris
$580.00 - In stock -
The true beginning of Purple — the very rare first issue of Elein Fleiss and Olivier Zahm's Purple Prose, published in 1992. Founded as a reaction against the superficial glamour of the 1980’s, Purple Prose embraced the immediate fanzine aesthetics of what became referred to as 1990's anti-fashion, a far cry from what we now identify with Purple Fashion with.
Purple Prose 1, Automne 1992, features contributions by Dike Blair, Andrea Zittel, Joshua Decter, Henry Bond, Daniel Lemer, Jutta Koether, Andrea Zittel, Roddy Bogawa, Jon Moritsugu, Jacques Boyreau, Jan Avgikos, Martin Kippenberger, Patrick Van Caeckenbergh, Edgar Heap of Birds, David Robbins, Jean-Christophe Menu, Vitaly Glabel, Kitten (pre—Free Kitten: Kim Gordon of Sonic Youth and Pussy Galore's Julia Cafritz), Patrick Bouchitey, Jean-Luc Vilmouth, François Roche, and many more.
Soon after the birth of Purple Prose, Zahm created spin-off publications like Purple Sexe, Purple Fiction and what we now know and love, Purple Fashion. Zahm aimed at fusing together his two worlds, fashion and art, in creating Purple Fashion.
Before entering the world of fashion, Zahm worked as an art critic with widespread recognition for his work as a curator as well as his participation in over 150 exhibitions featuring international contemporary art. In 1994, Zahm and Fleiss curated “The Winter of Love,” a hit show for the Museum of Modern Art in Paris that they later took to P.S.1 in New York. In responding to the superficial glamour of the 1980s, Zahm co-founded Purple Prose magazine. In the introduction of Purple Anthology, Zahm shares why he chose to create Purple Prose:
"We launched Purple Prose in the early 1990s without any means, and without any experience, because we wanted to make a magazine that was radically different. We wanted to support the artists around us that no one else supported, much less talked about. [..] It would be a form of opposition of our own".
Very Good—Near Fine copy, light wear.
2004, English / French
Softcover (staple-bound), 21 x 27.5 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Purple Institute / Paris
$180.00 - In stock -
Rare copy of the first issue of The Purple Journal, featuring Elein Fleiss, Jeffrey Rian, Dorothée Perret, Mark Borthwick, Gérard Duguet-Grasser, Laetitia Benat, Marina Faust, Allen Ginsberg, Susan Cianciolo, Henry Roy, Lizzi Bougatsos, Anders Edström, Maurizio Cattelan, Takashi Homma, Michel Zumpf, Chikashi Suzuki, Barbet Schroeder, Alain Lacroix, Jonathan Boulting, Maison Martin Margiela, Cora Maghnaoui, Claude Lévêque, Beth Yahp, Cosmic Wonder, Angela Hill, Ferdinand Gouzon, Comme des Garçons, Curtis Winter, Beth Yahp, Ferdinand Gouzon, Curtis Winter, Manon de Boer, Christophe Brunnquell, Sébastien Jamain, Tiphaine Samoyault, Helmut Lang, Veronique Branquinho, Sébastien Jamain, Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster, Sharon Mesmer, Gérard Duguet-Grasser, and much more. Includes the special Paris supplement (16 pages).
"This is our first issue: joy, hope. Starting out or beginning again (the journal Hélène and the magazine Purple)-anyway, it's a first appearance. A path we'll travel together, we, the editors, and you, the readers. We will show reality as we see it through encounters with people, places, landscapes, artworks. Writing and photographs, original voices. The journey is not mapped out in advance, we'll discover it (as it reveals itself) with the changing seasons."—the editors
In 1992 Olivier Zahm and his partner Elein Fleiss printed the first issue of Purple Prose, a Parisian literary art zine that over the years has evolved into Purple Fashion Magazine. Soon after the birth of Purple Prose, Zahm and Fleiss created spin-off publications like les cahiers purple, Purple Sexe, Purple Fiction, and of course, Purple Fashion. Zahm aimed at fusing together his two worlds, fashion and art, in creating Purple Fashion.
Very Good copy, light wear/age/rippling to page edges.
1997, Japanese / English
Hardcover (w. dust jacket), 70 pages, 26 x 21 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Rockin' On / Tokyo
$120.00 - Out of stock
The incredible first monograph that doubles as an artist's book of work by Hungarian New York-based artist Rita Ackerman spanning the years 1993—1996, edited and designed by Makoto Ohrui from Fiction Inc., published by Rockin' On in 1997 and only available in Japan. Long out-of-print, this numbered hardcover volume, with illustrated vellum dust jacket, is illustrated profusely with seventy of Ackerman's drawings, paintings and collages throughout in colour and b/w with many fold-outs and notebook scans, accompanied by essays.
New York City based artist Rita Ackerman was born in Budapest in 1968. She studied at the University of Fine Arts in Budapest and The New York Studio School of Drawing, Painting and Sculpture from the years of 1989 to 1992. Ackermann invented images that became instant sensations, perturbing young girls that are now part of the universe of global imagery. Her drawings and paintings between 1993-95 depict compositions of adolescent female figures of clonelike multiples engaging in various self-destructive and hazardous activities. Her early works with their ambiguous presence serve as bridges between high and low culture, just as the myths and folk tales which often serve as merits to Ackermann's compositions. Later, Ackerman would abandon the figure, erasing the very matter of her own work, in a complex layering of visual language oscillating between abstraction and figuration into a subconscious unfolding of form—concealed deeply in the abstraction of the omnipresence.
First edition, VG copy in VG dust jacket.
1992, English
Hardcover (w. dust jacket), unpaginated, 23.5 x 19 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / fine
Published by
Treville / Tokyo
$80.00 - 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.
1990, Japanese
Hardcover (w. dust jacket), 206 pages, 13.6 cm x 19.4 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / fine
Published by
Seikyūsha / Tokyo
$80.00 - In stock -
First hardcover edition of "Fetish Fashion", written by Merzbow's Masami Akita and published only in Japan in 1990, an in-depth exploration of the eroticisation and transformation of the body through fetish fashion that revolutionised the world of sexuality, from SM Bizarre, Transvestism, Rubber/latex, mistresses and dominatrixes, bondage clubs, male and female castration, restraints, piercing, the fascist artificial body, medical fetish/medical art (including Romain Slocombe), and much more, all subjects illustrated in b/w. Merzbow is a noise project created in Tokyo, Japan in 1979 under the direction of noise technician Masami Akita. As well as a legendary underground noise artist, Akita is a prolific writer in Japan and frequently writes on the arts, music, erotica, esoterica, modern architecture, and animal rights, with articles on emerging subcultures and underground extreme cultures appearing in publications like SM Sniper, Studio Voice and Fool's Mate. His development of the Merzbow aesthetic ran parallel with a series of investigative books in which he catalogued and introduced a vast amount of hermetic types of music, sexual practices and autonomous creativity to a fairly conservative (but not close-minded) Japanese audience. "Fetish Fashion" is one of these very books.
First edition, Japanese text, fine copy with fine illustrated dust jacket.
1996, Japanese
Softcover, 84 pages, 24 x 18.5 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / as new
Published by
Kochi Studio / Japan
$380.00 - In stock -
First edition of the incredible and exceptionally rare and collectible book on Japanese artist Sadao Hasegawa's (1945—1999) amazing male nude erotic artwork — a blend of fantasy, Asian folklore, and the homoeroticism of Yukio Mishima. Beautifully designed and printed, fully illustrated from cover to cover on heavy stock paper with metallic detailing, this long out-of-print monographic volume was the only book collection to be published only years before Hasegawa’s suicide in 1999, and has become a treasure to collector's ever since. Inspired by Nobel Prize nominee Yukio Mishima, beauty, eroticism and death are recurring themes in Hasegawa’s work, his unique vision incorporating Japanese, Indian, South-East Asian and African mythology, combined with homo-erotic depictions of hyper-masculine men, in acts of BDSM, juxtaposed with lush tropical flowers, strings of pearls, birds and animals that float through the margins of dreamy, ecstatic scenes. Hasegawa cited Tom of Finland, photographer Tamotsu Yato and his travels to Bali and Thailand as influences on his work.
Perfect As New copy, beautifully preserved.
2025, English
Softcover, 640 pages, 24 x 16.99 cm
Published by
Intellect Ltd / US
$110.00 - Out of stock
Industrial music has long been recognized for its sonic innovations, but the radical visual culture that accompanied this underground movement has remained largely unexplored. Shock Factory: The Visual Culture of Industrial Music presents the first comprehensive examination of how industrial artists created a coherent aesthetic language across multiple media—from xerox art and mail art to installation and performance—fundamentally challenging modernist utopias while prophetically anticipating contemporary discourse about media manipulation and technological control.
Emerging in mid-1970s Britain from the post-punk underground before expanding globally throughout the 1980s, artists like Throbbing Gristle, Cabaret Voltaire, SPK, Test Dept, Laibach, Einstürzende Neubauten, Nurse With Wound, Current 93, Coil, Psychic TV, Boyd Rice, Whitehouse, Merzbow, Hijokaidan, Hunting Lodge, Controlled Bleeding, Hafler Trio, Z'EV, Nocturnal Emissions, 23 Skidoo, Clock DVA, Master/Slave Relationship, and Monte Cazazza developed sophisticated visual strategies that matched their abrasive soundscapes with equally confrontational imagery.
At 640 pages, this award-winning monograph reveals how industrial artists systematically appropriated reprographic techniques—particularly xerox art and photocollage—to create disturbing visual narratives investigating mind control, criminality, occultism, pornography, psychiatry, and totalitarianism. Through détournement strategies borrowed from Situationist theory, they exposed the coercive mechanisms of mass media and technological society, creating a visual vocabulary that challenged viewers to confront uncomfortable truths about modern power structures. What emerges is a movement that perceptively anticipated contemporary concerns about surveillance, media manipulation, and collective psychological control. Industrial artists' exploration of these themes through deliberately provocative imagery served not as mere provocation but as sophisticated critique of the very media systems they inhabited. Their radical aesthetic choices—degraded reproduction quality, found imagery manipulation, shock tactics—created hybrid forms that defied traditional categorization while establishing independent networks that bypassed conventional art world structures.
Shock Factory positions industrial music's visual culture within broader art historical narratives, revealing connections to Dada, Surrealism, and conceptual art while demonstrating the movement's unique contributions to contemporary visual culture. The book arrives at a moment when questions about technology, media manipulation, and social control have never been more urgent, demonstrating how these artists' radical visual strategies continue to offer valuable insights for our digital age.
For scholars of contemporary art, music history, and media studies, this book provides essential documentation of an overlooked movement that significantly influenced subsequent artistic developments. For readers interested in underground culture and avant-garde aesthetics, Shock Factory reveals the sophisticated visual thinking that accompanied one of the most innovative musical movements of the past half-century.
"A history of industrial music needed to be written. Nicolas Ballet has accomplished this. Thoroughly. This is the book's greatest strength. It explores the significance of noise as a reflection of a world in decay and screaming as a need. And doing it so it reveals a significant connection between industrial music and contemporary art. This is also what makes it an essential book: its contribution to dismantling categories and rethinking history from mixed creative territories."—David G. Torres
Nicolas Ballet is an art historian and assistant curator at the Centre Pompidou in the New Media Department. He is the author of books and articles exploring the visual and sonic contributions of countercultures and experimental artistic practices.
2024, English
Softcover, 144 pages, 224 x 17 cm
Published by
Korm Plastics / Netherlands
$45.00 - In stock -
English cassette and record label Broken Flag was founded in 1982, and whilst not having released anything for a long time, it has never officially ceased to exist. Their primary interest was radical music, noise and power electronics. They first released music by label boss Gary Mundy’s project, Ramleh, but later also by Le Syndicat, MB, Controlled Bleeding, Giancarlo Toniutti and various Mundy solo projects.
Steve Underwood’s text appeared in a 2010 magazine, As Loud As Possible, but it is expanded here with additional interviews; updates; a reprint of two issues of Broken Flag’s fanzine, Even When It Makes No Sense; and reproductions of many of the label’s cassette covers.
2002, Japanese / English
Hardcover (w. die-cut dust jacket and boards), unpaginated, 26.5 x 19 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / as new
Published by
Pan-Exotica / Tokyo
$120.00 - In stock -
First 2002 limited hardcover edition of celebrated Japanese doll artist Ryo Yoshida's Articulated Doll artist's book, with the original die-cut dust-jacket and cloth boards to reveal the eyeball. Lavishly illustrated with Yoshida's exquisite dolls, this unique book explores the anatomy of ball-jointed dolls through the eyes of the artist and author, who, like the practices of Simon Yotsuya and Hans Bellmer before him, creates elaborate and beautiful photographs of the dolls in various poses. Like fellow contemporary Japanese doll artist Katan Amano, Yoshida's fetishistic and macabre 1990's work is steeped in gothic and decadent reference. The photographs are divided into the following themes: Good Friends, Young Kimono-Clad Girls, Girls, Nightmare, The Anatomy of Beauties, Alice's Adventures, Siesta, Girl in the Case, Fetish, Belle de Jour, Articulated Girl, Masochists, Captive, Femme Fatale, Nymphomania.
Includes bilingual (Japanese/English) biography and essay "Dissection Play" written by Ryo Yoshida.
Fine—As New copy.
2016, English
Softcover, 96 pages, 27.8 x 21.4 cm
Published by
Seagull Books / London
$39.00 - In stock -
Translated by Donald Nicholson-Smith
Edited with a Preface by Évelyne Grossman
A poet, philosopher, essayist, playwright, actor, and director, Antonin Artaud was a visionary writer and a major influence within and beyond the French avant-garde. A key text for understanding his thought and his appeal, 50 Drawings to Murder Magic is rooted in the nine years Artaud spent in mental asylums, struggling with schizophrenia and the demonic, persecutory visions it unleashed. Set down in a dozen exercise books written between 1946 and 1948, these pieces trace Artaud’s struggle to escape a personal hell that extends far beyond the walls of asylums and the dark magicians he believed ran them.
The first eleven notebooks are filled with fragments of writing and extraordinary sketches: totemic figures, pierced bodies, and enigmatic machines, some revealing the marks of a trembling hand, others carefully built up from firm, forceful pencil strokes. The twelfth notebook, completed two months before Artaud’s death in 1948, changes course: it’s an extraordinary text on the loss of magic to the demonic—the piece that gives the book its title.
“Artaud matters,” wrote John Simon in the Saturday Review years ago. Nearly seventy years after his death, that remains true—perhaps more than ever.
"A gloriously reproduced edition . . . . There is something in this text that speaks to the creative process--especially to the degree to which so much of what the writer or artist commits to the page (or canvass) extends from a place beyond conscious attention, to be received actively but without specific intention."—Rough Ghosts
1973, English
Softcover, 158 pages, 19.5 x 13 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Picador / USA
$15.00 - Out of stock
1973 Picador edition of MURPHY by Samuel Beckett, with cover art by John Holmes. First published in 1938 and reissued by Picador in 1973, this early Beckett novel is a bleakly hilarious tour through madness, metaphysics, and the daily slog of simply existing.
"Followed to England by a riotous collection of Irish eccentrics, Murphy ventures disastrously from the calm of his rocking chair in a Kensington mews. He falls in love with Celia, a prostitute. Fascinated by Eastern • mysticism, he pursues swamis and fortune-tellers. His eventual employment as an orderly in a mental hospital leads to a devastatingly ironic conclusion.
Historically, Murphy forms a bridge between the novels of James Joyce and the new literature of the post-war world, in which Beckett's work occupies such a prominent place. Murphy, though revolutionary in its perceptions, is also exuberantly readable. Though imbued with its author's characteristic pessimism, it is a comic masterpiece."
"One of the greatest prose-writers of the century'—THE TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENT
"Can scarcely be matched by another living writer'—NEW STATESMAN
Very Good copy.
1999, English
Softcover, 272 pages, 23 x 21.6 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Atlas Press / London
$200.00 - In stock -
First 1999 edition of the long collectible English-language anthology of Writings of the Vienna Actionists, published by the legendary Atlas Press.
Günter Brus, Otto Mühl, Hermann Nitsch, and Rudolf Schwarzkogler. These four artists from the sixties created a form of performance art which has become legendary for the extreme violence of its expression. Fined, gaoled, forced into exile, they were ignored by the art establishment of the day only to now be hailed as one of Europe's most outstanding contributions to post-war art. This anthology of their writings and documentation, brought together with the collaboration of the artists, Brus, Nitsch and Muehl, illustrates their intentions for the first time and shows how they established and explored a new territory for art.
Günter Brus, Otto Mühl, Hermann Nitsch, and Rudolf Schwarzkogler. "Four artists who, during the Sixties, became notorious for pushing the definition of art to an extreme which has yet to be surpassed.
Variously fined, gaoled, and forced into exile, they were ignored by the art establishment of the day, only to be hailed in recent years as one of the most outstanding and unique contributions to post-war art in Europe. Exaggeration and myth still obscure their activities, however, and their actual motives for an art centred on the examination of taboos, the "hidden" secrets of the body, the aesthetics of destruction and the possibilities of regeneration have remained elusive. Subsequent generations of artists have claimed them as their forefathers or unscrupulously borrowed their ideas (but without approaching the intensity of their actions), and while international exhibitions have reclaimed their work for the visual arts, their writings have remained largely unpublished since they first appeared in small mimeographed editions, or are long since out of print.
This anthology of photo-documentation and writings - which includes manifestos, theoretical texts, action scores, even police and psychiatric reports - has been assembled in collaboration with the three surviving artists. It provides the first comprehensive survey of their work, and for the first time illuminates their differing intentions. These texts employ humour and vitriol to elaborate a position in total opposition to contemporary social, political and aesthetic mores. A lucid narrative emerges of a determined exploration of these conditioning factors, by means of an art that used life itself as its material.
The Vienna Actionists were indeed unique - at the very outset of post-war performance art they trod a path very different from the "Happenings" in the USA or the belated neo-Dada pranks of many of their contemporaries. They not only established a new territory for art but they explored it so thoroughly as to make most subsequent "body art" simply irrelevant.
Very Good—Near Fine copy.
1964, English
Softcover, 48 pages, 18 x 12 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / good
Published by
Faber & Faber / London
$15.00 - In stock -
First 1964 Faber paperback edition of Beckett's PLAY (and Two Short Pieces for Radio).
"It is totally fascinating and satisfying because, in its smaller scale, its polyphonic dialogue uses much the same astonishing intervals of resonance and echo and discovery as "Godot"; and because it shows Beckett at his most carelessly masterful, using comedy to scour the tragic, to put flesh upon our lies, and to give the lie to our flesh."—Anne Duchene, The Guardian
Good copy with general cover wear and foxing.
1962, English
Hardcover (w. dust jacket), 48 pages, 20.5 x 14 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / good
Published by
Faber & Faber / London
$80.00 - In stock -
Scarce first hardcover edition of Beckett's Happy Days, published by Faber & Faber, 1962. Red cloth boards and dust jacket.
In Happy Days, Samuel Beckett's first full-length play since Endgame, things are stripped once again to their barest essentials. There are only two characters: Winnie, a woman of about fifty, and Willie, a man of about sixty. In the first act Winnie is buried up to her waist in a mound of earth, but still has the use of her arms and a few earthly possessions a toothbrush, tube of tooth paste, small mirror, revolver, handkerchief, spectacles; in the second act she is imbedded up to her neck and can move only her eyes.
Willie lives and moves-on all fours— behind the mound, appearing intermittently and replying only occasionally to Winnie's long monologue, but the knowledge of his presence is a source of comfort and inspiration to her, and apparently the prerequisite for all her 'happy days'.
A characteristic tour de force, Happy Days is a worthy successor to Waiting for Godot, Endgame, All that Fall and Krapp's Last Tape.
With jacket design featuring photograph from the first performance of the play-Beckett's first since Endgame-at New York's Cherry Lane Theatre in 1961, directed by Alan Schneider.
Good ex-library copy in Good dust jacket. Associated stampings to colophon and end-blank, no library marking to dust jacket, clipped with mild age/wear, also to red boards and pages.