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.
1981, Japanese
Softcover (staple-bound), 20 pages, 29.5 x 21 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Shochiku / Tokyo
$140.00 - In stock -
Wonderful, very rare Japanese souvenir photo booklet for Faces of Death 2, the controversial straight-to-video 1981 American mondo horror documentary film directed by John Alan Schwartz, the follow-up to 1978's Faces of Death, credited under the pseudonyms "Conan Le Cilaire" & "Alan Black" respectively. Mortuaries, accidents and police work are filmed by TV crews and home video cameras. Faces of Death II contained real footage of a dead body being pulled from under a pier, Guerrilla death squads in El Salvador, napalm bombings in Vietnam, Buddhist self-immolations, the drugging of a monkey, a dolphin slaughter, a train disaster in India, Cambodian patients with leprosy, a death museum featuring Joaquin Murrieta's preserved head, a driver high on PCP and a boxer going down for his “final” count. Much like the PSA Aircraft crash, the assassination attempt on President Ronald Reagan occurred recently before the film's completion, and was included as well. Heavily illustrated throughout with glossy colour and b/w stills from the film, alongside texts in Japanese about the film, cast and production information.
Very Good copy with light wear.
1973, Japanese
Softcover (staple-bound), 12 pages, 29.5 x 21 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Toho / Tokyo
$90.00 - In stock -
Wonderful, very rare Japanese souvenir photo booklet for Autopsia (Autopsy), a 1973 Spanish Mondo-style docudrama by director Juan Logar about a war correspondent who comes back home and has a spiritual crisis about his own mortality. Surreal fantasy sequences are mixed with graphic real autopsy footage. Heavily illustrated throughout with b/w stills from the film, alongside texts in Japanese about the film, cast and production information.
Very Good copy with light wear.
1997, Japanese
Softcover, 208 pages, Softcover, 15 cm x 21 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Tom Shobo / Japan
$130.00 - Out of stock
Too Negative issue no. 8, March 1997. Now rare and highly collectible, Too Negative, the "Forbidden Picture Book", was a visceral and visually explosive glossy cult arts magazine that reflected the gory-depraved-beyond salvation-bad taste expressions visible in international subculture at the height of 1990s underground publishing, a time when art was pushing the limits of taste and morality. Edited solely by legendary Japanese publisher and gallery owner Kotaro Kobayashi and published by Tom Publication Inc. between 1994—2000, each thick, glossy volume takes on the aesthetics of a vibrant fashion magazine in the great Japanese "mook" format (the magazine book) packed cover to cover with themes of Eros and Thanatos, such as fetishism, erotica, medical/autopsy photography, death journalism, Japanese bondage, grotesque and neo-surrealist art, crime scene photography, tattooing/irezumi, piercing, and all things of the mondo, macabre, bizarro realm. Frequent collaborators and featured artists were Kiyotaka Tsurisaki, Joel-Peter Witkin, Trevor Brown, Kiyoshi Ikejiri, to name a few. With a Japanese publishing lineage that may be found in earlier bounding-pushing periodicals such as the 1920s erotic grotesque magazine Hentai Shiriou (Pervert Documents), Tasuhiko Shibusawa’s incredible 1960s avant-garde journal Le Sang Et La Rose, or Fiction Inc’s SALE2 journal published from 1980—mid 1990s, Too Negative, and affiliated periodicals such as ORG, Spiral, Schizo, etc. took their subjects to another level of extremism, even by Japanese standards.
Not for the faint hearted.
This issue, Too Negative issue no. 8, March 1997, features the photography the paintings of Manuel Ocampo, the art of Helter Skelter corpse/death photography, the art of Jake and Dinos Chapman, grotesque tabloid news, the art of Pierre Molinier, the art of Damien Hirst, the fetish photography of Hiroshi Yokoi, latex/rubber fetish photography by Uchiyama Kazunori, Kiyotaka Tsurisaki, Kiyoshi Ikejiri, loads of abnormal medical photography, autopsy, anatomical photographic/illustrated, much more.
Very Good copy.
1965, English
Hardcover (w. dust jacket), 562 pages, 24.5 x 16.5 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Weidenfeld & Nicholson / London
$110.00 - In stock -
Rare first 1965 English hardcover edition.
Fascism in Its Epoch, also known in English as TThree Faces of Fascism: Action Francaise, Italian Fascism, National Socialism, is a 1963 book by historian and philosopher Ernst Nolte. It is widely regarded as his magnum opus and a seminal work on the history of fascism.
"Fascism may have ceased to be a living political force, but memories of the terror it once inspired, and the political convulsions it caused, are still very much with us. Yet, even at this distance, its place in European history remains highly controversial. One reason is that fascism's ideology is harder to define than that of most other political movements. The historical background and the personality of the individual leaders therefore assume greater importance. Professor Nolte devotes his attention to the unique features of the French, Italian and German variations on the fascist theme. He gives us superb studies of three leaders: Charles Maurras, Benito Mussolini and Adolf Hitler. Each was a provincial, a child of the Catholic petty bourgeoisie; each possessed the self-confidence of the typical self-made man; each imposed his own personal style on the movement he created. For all these similarities, however, the three leaders differed profoundly in personality, political ability, and intellectual outlook. And Professor Nolte shows that both differences and similarities correspond to their respective national traditions. Attempt- ing a general historical-philosophical interpretation of the three faces of fascism, he explains why fascism was so powerful a political force in Europe from 1919 to 1945. The 'epochal' character of the fascist movement is emphasized and the thesis put forward that Nazism represented the end of an historical era rather than a response to a particular political and economic situation. Finally, Professor Nolte offers a brilliant description of the political, social and intellectual climate which enabled fascism to develop in modern Europe."—jacket blurb
Jacket design by George Mayhew
Very Good copy in VG dust jacket (some small closed tears, wear and inner clipped flap)
1973, English
Hardcover (w. dust jacket), 388 pages, 22 x 14 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / good
Published by
Robert Hale / London
$30.00 - Out of stock
First 1973 hardcover edition.
An unlikely candidate for prestige and power within the Third Reich, Joseph Goebbels remained a frustrated 'artist' all his life, turning to politics only as a last resort. He was an excessive romantic in search of a hero and a cause until he 'discovered' Adolf Hitler.
Helmut Heiber stresses Goebbels' urgent need for a viable system of beliefs after he abandoned the security of his family and Catholicism. 'It is almost immaterial what we believe in, so long as we believe in something,' spoke the young Goebbels prophetically. Once under Hitler's tutelage, he began to shift his beliefs to fit the system. Heiber traces each shift in Goebbels' development, from the vaguely ambitious, academic Catholic to the emotionally broken Nazi official constantly forced to bend under his Führer's demands. The author suggests that Goebbels was never prepared for the role he was to play in the Reich, and was drawn to it solely to satisfy his insatiable ego. Heiber also considers Goebbels' personal intrigues, shedding new light on his early affairs, his unsatisfactory marriage, and his all-consuming passion for Lida Baarova, the fiery Czech actress who almost cost him his position in the Nazi Party. Yet even in his one real love relationship Goebbels failed, for in love, as in war, he was no more than a trumpeter who jumped when Hitler ordered. Only through his death could Goebbels achieve more notice than Hitler, for Goebbels' decision that his children should die with him and his wife was his last pathetic attempt to leave his own mark separate from that of the madman who had made him.
Dr Helmut Heiber is a leading researcher at the Institute of Contemporary History in Munich. He is also the author of many books on the Third Reich and the editor of many documentary works of the period, including Goebbels' diaries.
Good copy with some wear and tear to Good dust jacket edges, rippling to one random page, marking to block edges, general age.
1968 / 1969, Japanese / French
4 Vols., softcover, approx. 1000 pages, 23 x 18 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Tensei Shuppan / Tokyo
$350.00 - Out of stock
Complete 4 issue run of Le Sang Et La Rose — a masterpiece of the Japanese underground! Opening with Kishin Shinoyama's photographic portraits of Yukio Mishima depicted as Saint Sebastian and onward through one thousand pages exploring the outer limits of subversive human potential!
Revue de Érotologie, Homosexualité, Sadisme, Masochisme, Fétischisme, Narcissime, Infantilisme, Magie, Occultisme, Humour Noir, Complexe Psychisme. What more could you ask for? Le Sang Et La Rose was a groundbreaking, yet short-lived Japanese arts and literary journal published in Tokyo from late 1968—mid 1969, published in a total of four luxurious, now collectible, volumes. The first three issues were edited by Tatsuhiko Shibusawa (1928—1987), a legendary, controversial Japanese novelist, art critic, translator of French writers such as Jean Cocteau, Georges Bataille and Marquis de Sade, and specialist in medieval demonology. The fourth final issue, and rarest of the four, edited by critic Masaaki Hiraoka and designed by self-taught painter, graphic designer and political activist, Kiyoshi Awazu (!) The importance of this magazine to the Japanese avant-garde and radical culture cannot be overstated.
Born from a period of political, social and economical turmoil in Japan, Le Sang Et La Rose may be understood as a emblematic distillation and product of the late ‘60s student rebellion and anti-authoritarian underground culture. Wilfully politically subversive, the publication drew upon a vast range of perspectives - from criticism, literature, obscure esoteric sciences, art, eroticism, radical avant-garde and a historical-rooted Japanese counterculture; featuring literature, theory, art, photography, illustration and graphic design from the most innovative and subversive Japanese and international (predominately French) artists, authors and critics, spanning the themes above. As instigator, Tatsuhiko Shibusawa in effect formulated the magazine’s design to be a spiritual and political operative that would weaponize its readers minds. This stance was made clear in the 1969 manifesto text — "My 1969" — in which Shibusawa discuss' how he perceived the ‘60s as being the age of ideas, ideas as weapons, and outlined a distain towards systems of power, moralism, State oppression, sanitised and harmless liberalism, dogmatic academic sciences and an outright distrust for ideological, progressive literary scholars who advocate "freedom of expression", but have never caused friction with the judicial power. The magazine sketched out an aim to push towards a new kind of personal freedom, intellect, autonomy and moral compass. Here, the concept of ‘erotism’ — as discussed by Georges Bataille in his highly influential 1957 book "Erotism: Death and Sensuality" — acts as a critical force.
Tatsuhiko Shibusawa (1928—1987), was a well-known and controversial Japanese novelist, art critic, and translator of French writers such as Jean Cocteau, Georges Bataille and Marquis de Sade. In 1960 he and his publisher, Kyōji Ishii, were trialled for public obscenity over the publishing of Shibusawa's translation of de Sade's Juliette into the Japanese language. What was to be known as the "Sade Trial" took 9 years and although many of Japan's leading authors testified for the defense, in 1969 the Japanese Supreme Court ruled them guilty and charged. This did not deter Shibusawa, whose essays on black magic, demonology and eroticism were popular reading in Japan, and in 1981 he was awarded the 9th Izumi Kyoka Literature Prize.
All Good—VG copies with general wear and age.
Vol 1 with bumping and open chip to top of spine.
1999, Japanese
Softcover (w. dust jacket and obi), 272 pages, 21 x 15 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Tokuma Shoten / Tokyo
$65.00 - Out of stock
The ultimate, comprehensive, full-tilt book trip into the wild world of Japanese bad girl cinema.
At the dawn of the 1970s, Japanese film company Toei were at the forefront of forging a new form of exploitation cinema. Drawing together already popular movie threads of action, crime, sex, and female delinquency, Toei wove them into a new film fabric now known as “pinky violence”. With bloody gang battles, cat-fights, nudity, torture, rape and revenge, pinky violence movies were populated by a whole range of bad girl – or sukeban – icons. Female gamblers and yakuza molls, girl gang bosses and their minions, deadly women who killed by blade, bare hands or blazing guns, depraved nuns, delinquent schoolgirls, and female prisoners were the doyens of this cinematic realm, a chaotic on-screen explosion of blood, rage and naked tattooed flesh.
Published in Japan in 1999, Pinky Violence is the ultimate volume on this film phenomenon, with profusely illustrated history of Pinky Violence films, colour galleries of the original film posters and associated printed materials, rare production photographs and countless film stills, icon, director, cast, staff profiles and interviews, film indexes, and so much more, including the "Female Boss Series," "Female Prisoner Scorpion," and director Ishii Teruo's deviant love films.
Very Good —Near Fine
202?, English
Softcover (staple-bound), 40 pages, 29.7 x 21 cm
Published by
Chris Mikul / Sydney
$8.00 - Out of stock
Bizarrism is Australia’s longest-running zine, first published in 1986 when Chris Mikul begin collating information and writing about a grand parade of eccentrics, visionaries, crackpots, cult leaders, artists, theorists and outsiders of every stripe — “beacons of shining if erratic brilliance in a world of sensible conformity”. In writing their stories, Mikul does not judge, but instead celebrates these characters for their fabulous weirdness. The world would be a poorer place without them.
Bizarrism No. 18: Welcome to Larrimah; Kings Cross Wax Works; The Unfathomable Mystery of Kaspar Hauser; An Inspiration for Bacon; Somerton Man Identified; A Scandal in Academia; Thomas Griffiths Wainewright; The Odyssey of Maria Rasputin; and more....
Chris Mikul has been clipping weird stories out of newspapers for as long as he can remember. He’s been writing and publishing Bizarrism, Australia’s longest-running zine, since 1986, and also produces Biblio-Curiosa, a zine devoted to strange fiction. His other books include The Cult Files, Tales of the Macabre and Ordinary, The Eccentropedia and Bizarrism Vols 1 and 2. He lives in the Sydney suburb of Newtown, home of many an eccentric, with his partner Cath.
202?, English
Softcover (staple-bound), 40 pages, 29.7 x 21 cm
Published by
Chris Mikul / Sydney
$8.00 - Out of stock
Bizarrism is Australia’s longest-running zine, first published in 1986 when Chris Mikul begin collating information and writing about a grand parade of eccentrics, visionaries, crackpots, cult leaders, artists, theorists and outsiders of every stripe — “beacons of shining if erratic brilliance in a world of sensible conformity”. In writing their stories, Mikul does not judge, but instead celebrates these characters for their fabulous weirdness. The world would be a poorer place without them.
Bizarrism No. 17: Paying a Visit to Somerton Man; A Glamour Model Among the Headhunters; A Brief History of Embalmed Dictators; The Entrepreneur and His Nemesis: The Story of G.J.. de Garis; The Ghost of Harry Price; The Resurrection of Connie Converse and more....
Chris Mikul has been clipping weird stories out of newspapers for as long as he can remember. He’s been writing and publishing Bizarrism, Australia’s longest-running zine, since 1986, and also produces Biblio-Curiosa, a zine devoted to strange fiction. His other books include The Cult Files, Tales of the Macabre and Ordinary, The Eccentropedia and Bizarrism Vols 1 and 2. He lives in the Sydney suburb of Newtown, home of many an eccentric, with his partner Cath.
202?, English
Softcover (staple-bound), 40 pages, 29.7 x 21 cm
Published by
Chris Mikul / Sydney
$8.00 - Out of stock
Bizarrism is Australia’s longest-running zine, first published in 1986 when Chris Mikul begin collating information and writing about a grand parade of eccentrics, visionaries, crackpots, cult leaders, artists, theorists and outsiders of every stripe — “beacons of shining if erratic brilliance in a world of sensible conformity”. In writing their stories, Mikul does not judge, but instead celebrates these characters for their fabulous weirdness. The world would be a poorer place without them.
Bizarrism No. 16: Last Days of the Olympia Milk Bar; Oneida: the Free Love Cult; The Human Bomb; High Jinks on the High Seas; Sydney Suicides of 1935, "Who do you think you are? Lady Docker?", Bokassa; A Visit to Whitby and more....
Chris Mikul has been clipping weird stories out of newspapers for as long as he can remember. He’s been writing and publishing Bizarrism, Australia’s longest-running zine, since 1986, and also produces Biblio-Curiosa, a zine devoted to strange fiction. His other books include The Cult Files, Tales of the Macabre and Ordinary, The Eccentropedia and Bizarrism Vols 1 and 2. He lives in the Sydney suburb of Newtown, home of many an eccentric, with his partner Cath.
2024, English
Softcover, 236 pages, 20.5 x 12.7 cm
Published by
Apocalypse Party / Philadelphia
$28.00 - In stock -
Stab Frenzy is a brilliant, brutal satire of the art world, but it's more than that, too: it's a work of art in itself, an ingenious and gory paean to the author's favourite artists—the shut-ins, the suicides, the spree killers, the daydreamers who dream of destroying the day. Art bleeds into bodies and bodies bleed into the book: Gary J. Shipley's an artist à la the artists he loves, a force for delightful deformation. This book deformed me, and for that I give thanks.—Derek McCormack, author of Castle Faggot
Stab Frenzy is about four members (once five) of an art collective bent on destroying their own identities, the complacency of humans, and art itself. It is a book about art and writing as art, and how our destructive impulses can sometimes be manifestations of a begrudging love.
Unrelentingly creative, Gary J. Shipley is our most important experimental writer: a true heir to J. G. Ballard, Christine Brooke-Rose, and B. S. Johnson.—David Roden, author of Posthuman Life: Philosophy at the Edge of the Human
2024, English
Softcover, 144 pages, 20.5 x 13.21 cm
Published by
New Directions / New York
$34.00 - In stock -
"A more intense realization of the horrors of the Great War has never been written."—Adam Gopnik, The New Yorker
Louis-Ferdinand Céline, as if declaiming from his grave, thunders back to life: that inimitable, scorching, and monstrously powerful voice roars at us anew in this long-lost novel.
Céline had long claimed that Death on the Installment Plan was part of a trilogy, and that the manuscripts of War and London had been stolen by the Resistance from his apartment, when he fled for his life—an abhorred collaborator—from Paris. Few believed him, but then, mysteriously, the manuscripts came to light in 2020. Greeted rapturously in France (“a miracle,” Le Monde; “the discovery of a great text,” Le Point), War is sure to generate more controversy abroad. Though much revered as “the most blackly humorous and disenchanted voice in all of French literature” (London Review of Books), Céline is also reviled for his infamous antisemitic wartime pamphlets.
War begins with Ferdinand waking in shock on the battlefield, grievously injured, with all his comrades sprawled out dead around him: it’s a scene of visceral horror, carnage, and pain.
The novel’s key idea—that trench warfare lodges itself in the soldier’s head forever, goes on destroying him, cuts him off from those who have not been on the front, and makes the hypocrisies of their safe world repugnant—drives itself under the reader’s skin, powered by the sheer velocity of Céline’s voracious, gritty, raw, graphic style.
"A more intense realization of the horrors of the Great War has never been written. The novel emerges, inevitably, to much reverberating argument over the good and evil of Celine's oeuvre and its meanings, about whether his literary value can be separated from the vile anti-Semitism of his political pamphleteering, and how we should respond to the whole. [But] the line between Celine's pamphlets and Auschwitz is direct; to pretend that it's not is to sin against history. But no one can easily forget, in this new book as in the older ones, the intensity of Celine's realization of the inexpungible human emotions of hatred and horror. When it comes to Celine, then or now, an ability to admire, a refusal to censor, and a readiness to condemn, should be-must be-part of a single compound response. Evil genius demands no less."—Adam Gopnik, The New Yorker
"The shattered imagery, the dizzying jump-cuts between scenes and the heaving, roiling rhythm of the sentences create an overwhelming sensation of nausea. But unlike the metaphysical vertigo of Jean-Paul Sartre's 'Nausea' (1938), the sickness here is viscerally present." —Sam Sacks, Wall Street Journal
Translated by Charlotte Mandell
2024, English
Softcover, 396 pages, 29.5 x 21 cm
Published by
Surrealist Research / Kent
$60.00 - In stock -
"A major work in elegant prose that will captivate and challenge anyone who thinks they know the story of Charles Manson."—Dr Stephen Harper, author of Madness, Power & The Media, University of Portsmouth
Based on thirty years of research, the story of notorious outlaw, musician and folk devil Charles Manson is revealed to be one of the most twisted and depraved cover-ups in American history.
A landmark in cultural reportage, Nikolas Schreck’s epic long-read shows with meticulous detail how a confluence of Hollywood, the music industry, organized crime and the judiciary colluded to conceal the real motives for the 1969 “Helter Skelter” killing spree.
Structured like a proverbial helter skelter, this groundbreaking work cracks open the official story to reveal the interconnected aspects of Charles Manson as philosopher, musician, revolutionary and patsy.
An essential textbook for scholars and a mighty “true crime” book for the general reader, The Manson File reveals a secret history of America in a narrative as artful as a great novel.
2012, English
Softcover, 120 pages, 28 x 21.59 cm
Published by
Creation Books / London
$65.00 - Out of stock
DEATH is the first major retrospective of the work of Japanese photographer Tsurisaki Kiyotaka, whose images of death and conflict from global "hot-spots" have earned him a reputation as a leading underground photographer. This deluxe, full-sized book contains over 100 full-colour images shot between 1994 and 2011, culminating with poignant scenes of death and destruction from the recent Fukushima disaster in Japan. Also included is a new introduction by Tsurisaki, in which he provides an overview of the philosophy behind his unusual career.
Self-styled "corpse photographer", film director and writer Tsurisaki Kiyotaka was born 1966 in Toyama Prefecture, Japan. He graduated from the Faculty of Letters, Keio University and became a photographer after a brief career as a porno director in 1994. His first solo exhibition was held at NG Gallery (Ikejiri, Tokyo) in 1995. He has shot over 1,000 scenes of death in some of the world's most unregulated and lawless areas and conflict zones, including Thailand, Colombia, Mexico, Russia, and Palestine. He is also known for his autopsy documentary OROZCO THE EMBALMER.
2024, English
Hardcover (w. dust jacket), 316 pages, 21 x 15 cm
Published by
Infinity Land Press / London
$80.00 - In stock -
Necrophilia has shadowed humanity throughout its existence, from ancient Egypt, to the Moche culture of Peru, the exploits of the renowned Vampire of Montparnasse, the sexual murders of the Weimar Republic, through to serial killers such as Ted Bundy and Jeffrey Dahmer. This new edition of Grave Desire – with artworks by Karolina Urbaniak – delves unflinchingly into the myths, art and practices surrounding this taboo subject. Finding Juliet’s catatonic body and believing she had poisoned herself, it could have crossed Romeo’s mind to act out the unthinkable. Maybe Juliet, seeing Romeo’s corpse, considered a little sexual frottage before she stabbed herself with the phallic dagger. Repulsive yet real, disgusting and disturbing, this is an erotic book of the dead.
“If sex and death are two pivotal obsessions of the human species, Steve Finbow nails both of them simultaneously in his brilliantly incisive cultural and corporeal history of necrophilia. Pathologically and outlandishly good.”—Stephen Barber
“If you only read one book before you die make sure it’s Grave Desire.”—Stewart Home
Illustrated by Karolina Urbaniak
Interview conducted by Martin Bladh
Afterword by Richard Marshall
2023, Japanese
Softcover (w. dust jacket and obi), 160 pages, 19 x 15.1 cm
Published by
Atelier Third / Tokyo
$70.00 - Out of stock
The book collection of the rarely seen cruel paintings by the little known Showa era Japanese artists Shizuhiro Usui and Takashi Shiba, drawn only for one client and kept secret, accompanied by Kazunori Kanze's torture illustrations. “Here, the cruelty of human beings tormenting human beings is not glorified at all, and is depicted bare.”—Asaji Muroi. Active in the 1950s and 1960s, Shizuhiro Usui was a mysterious painter with little known about him, while Takashi Shiba was active in this period in groups such as "Kitan Club". Kazunori Kanze was active in SM magazines mainly in the 1970s. This expanded 2023 edition of Concealed Cruel Illustrations, includes 24 new pages of previously unpublished artworks, and additional colour pages. The extreme of pain aesthetics! Works collected here are preserved in Japan's only library specializing in SM and fetishism (membership only), located in Iidabashi, Tokyo.
2024, English / Japanese
Softcover (w. dust jacket + obi), 128 pages, 25.5 x 17.8 cm
Published by
Atelier Third / Tokyo
$70.00 - In stock -
Brand new artbook collection of treasured blame paintings and drawings from Seiu Ito, "the father of modern kinbaku", published in bi-lingual English and Japanese. A kidnapping, a show off... This is an art book where you can fully enjoy the beauty of fear and ecstasy, depicted with lyricism by a rare torture artist who was active in the first half of the 20th century. Profusely illustrated, this volume contains many unpublished sketches and drawings that show the freshness of the brushstrokes and the trial and error that has gone into capturing the body and facial expressions. Includes private artworks from the "Abnormal Museum", Japan's only membership-only library specializing in SM and fetishism. Located in Iidabashi, Tokyo, this museum collects and preserves valuable materials.
Seiu Ito (1891—1960) Seiu Ito, also romanised as Seiyu Itoh, was a Japanese painter, recognised today as "the father of modern kinbaku". Ito's life was the subject of director Noboru Tanaka's 1977 Nikkatsu Roman porno film Beauty's Exotic Dance: Torture!, the final entry in his "Showa Era trilogy". Ito uses his skilful technique to draw realistic torture pictures, and as a master of these paintings, he has many fans and has written masterpieces such as "The Story of Blame." On the other hand, he not only left behind many masterpieces of ghost paintings, but also loved the street customs of Edo and wrote books about Edo customs.
1982, English
Hardcover (w. dust jacket), 246 pages,
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Allison & Busby / London
$35.00 - Out of stock
1982 English hardcover edition of The Autobiography of George Grosz: A Small Yes and a Big No, first published by Dial Press in New York City, translated by Lola Sachs Dorin. In 1982, this new translation by Arnold Pomerans of the 1955 German edition was published by Allison and Busby in London.
The autobiography of George Grosz (1893—1959), the great German artist and satirist, is crammed with unique anecdotes and reminiscences. More than just a chronicle of his own life, it becomes in effect a history of the modern movement and is, says the Stuttgarter Zeitung, "a glorious, exciting book".
Grosz recalls his Pomeranian childhood, army life during the First World War, revolution and hunger in its aftermath, the frenzied, disjointed world of Dadaism and Nazism in the Weimar Republic. He describes the cafés, beer-cellars and studios of Paris and Berlin, a dangerous but optimistic journey to Soviet Russia and final emigration to the United States — less than a month before the Nazis came to power.
He conjures up an exciting period and the central figures, the intellectual outsiders, who were responsible for shaping it — a colourful and unforgettable crowd, the artists and writers and film people and political activists, Dali, de Chirico, Rosa Luxemburg, Thomas Mann, Lenin, Brecht, Dos Passos, Joseph von Sternberg, Trotsky, and many others.
Grosz was the most rebellious and explosive of artists, the scourge of militarism, capitalism and the bourgeoisie in the 1920s, whose lines "tore like barbed wire" and whose life and work became a legend. His autobiography is a rich, enjoyable book, here fully available in English for the first time.
Very Good copy, VG dust jacket.
1991, English
Softcover, 304 pages, 23 x 15.5 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
John Hopkins University Press / Baltimore
$45.00 - Out of stock
First 1991 John Hopkins edition.
What connects the Romantic essays of Thomas De Quincey and the violent cinema of Brian De Palma? Or the "beautiful" suicides of Hedda Gabler and Yukio Mishima? Or the shootings of John Lennon and Ronald Reagan? In The Aesthetics of Murder, Joel Black explores the sometimes gruesome interplay between life and art, between actual violence and images of violence in a variety of literary texts, paintings, and films.
Rather than exclude murder from critical consideration by dismissing it as a crime, Black urges us to ponder the killer's artistic role—and our own experience as audience, witness, or voyeur. Black examines murder as a recurring, obsessive theme in the Romantic tradition, approaching the subject from an aesthetic rather than a moral, psychological, or philosophical perspective. And he brings into his discussion contemporary instances of sensational murders and assassinations, treating these as mimetic or cathartic activities in their own right.
Combining historical documentation with theoretical insights, Black shows that the possibilities of representing violence—and of experiencing it—as art were recognized early in the nineteenth century as logical extensions of Romantic theories of the sublime. Since then, both traditional art forms and the modern mass media have contributed to the growing aestheticization of violence.
Very Good copy, light wear.
?, English
Softcover, 58 pages, 23 x 15.5 cm
Out of print title / used / fine
Published by
Unknown / Earth
$20.00 - In stock -
"People begin to see that something more goes to the composition of a fine murder than two blockheads to kill and be killed - a knife - a purse - and a dark lane..."
"On Murder Considered as one of the Fine Arts" is an essay first published in 1827 in Blackwood's Magazine by English writer, essayist, and literary critic, best known for his Confessions of an English Opium-Eater, Thomas De Quincey (1785—1859). The essay is a fictional, satirical account of an address made to a gentleman's club concerning the aesthetic appreciation of murder.
In this provocative and blackly funny essay, Thomas de Quincey considers murder in a purely aesthetic light and explains how practically every philosopher over the past two hundred years has been murdered - 'insomuch, that if a man calls himself a philosopher, and never had his life attempted, rest assured there is nothing in him'. De Quincey's innovative, idiosyncratic artistic vision found space for gruesome reportage, satire, literary criticism, and aesthetic judgments, in a work strewn with examples ranging from antiquity to his own time, including the urban serial-killer John Williams. In addition to this essay's Swiftian exercise in irony, he investigated the Williams case further in a post-script, resulting in a dramatic suspense-filled narrative that prefigures Capote's In Cold Blood and the modern true-crime genre. Specifically, "On Murder Considered as one of the Fine Arts" centers on the notorious career of the murderer John Williams, who in 1811 brutally killed seven people in London's East End. De Quincey's response to Williams's attacks turns morality on its head, celebrating and coolly dissecting the art of murder; a perverse cause de celebration creeping out of the dank London fog.
De Quincey's seminal 1827 work was greatly influential on such writers as Poe, Baudelaire and Borges, lauded by such critics as G. K. Chesterton, Wyndham Lewis and George Orwell, and the trace of its impact can still be found today in modern satire, black humour and crime and detective fiction.
Near Fine, light wear.
2011, English
Softcover, 128 pages, 17.5 x 13 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / as new
Published by
Seven Stories Press / New York
$20.00 - Out of stock
With her characteristic brilliance, grace and radical audacity, Angela Y. Davis has put the case for the latest abolition movement in American life: the abolition of the prison. As she quite correctly notes, American life is replete with abolition movements, and when they were engaged in these struggles, their chances of success seemed almost unthinkable. For generations of Americans, the abolition of slavery was sheerest illusion. Similarly,the entrenched system of racial segregation seemed to last forever, and generations lived in the midst of the practice, with few predicting its passage from custom. The brutal, exploitative (dare one say lucrative?) convict-lease system that succeeded formal slavery reaped millions to southern jurisdictions (and untold miseries for tens of thousands of men, and women). Few predicted its passing from the American penal landscape. Davis expertly argues how social movements transformed these social, political and cultural institutions, and made such practices untenable.
In Are Prisons Obsolete?, Professor Davis seeks to illustrate that the time for the prison is approaching an end. She argues forthrightly for "decarceration", and argues for the transformation of the society as a whole.
Angela Yvonne Davis (b. 1944) is an American Marxist and feminist political activist, philosopher, academic, and author; she is a professor emerita at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Davis was a longtime member of the Communist Party USA (CPUSA) and a founding member of the Committees of Correspondence for Democracy and Socialism (CCDS). She was active in movements such as the Occupy movement and the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions campaign.
Fine copy.
1987 / 2000s, English
Softcover, 518 + 507 pages, 22.4 x 15.3 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
University of Minnesota Press / Minnesota
$120.00 - Out of stock
First edition, mid 2000s re-prints of Theweleit's 1987 classic two-volume Male Fantasies as complete set translated from the original German. Volume 1: Women, Floods, Bodies, History; Volume 2: Male Bodies: Psychoanalyzing the White Terror.
Klaus Theweleit's two-volume work Mannerphantasien, published in the late 1970s, has become a contemporary German classic. Male Fantasies dives into the sexual, psychological and sociopolitical foundation of National Socialism as it was manifested in the Weimar Republic, arguing that fascism is not a political or economic phenomenon, but a method to manufacture a specific reality. Unlike any study before it, Male Fantasies centers upon the fantasies that preoccupied a group of men who played a crucial role in the rise of Nazism — The German Freikorps, the precursors of the SA and SS. Theweleit draws upon the novels, letters, and autobiographies of these proto-fascists and their contemporaries. There he discovered how the repudiation of one's own body—and of femininity—became a psychic compulsion associating masculinity with hardness, self-denial, and destruction.
The first volume of Male Fantasies deals primarily with the image of women in the collective unconscious of the fascist warrior—visions reflecting hatred and fear, culminating in a series of liquid metaphors—red tide, lava, mud—that threaten to engulf the male ego. In Volume 2, Theweleit shifts his attention to the male self-image. We are shown how the body becomes a mechanism for eluding the dreaded liquid and the "feminine" emotions associated with it. Armored, organized by mental and physical procedures like the military drill, the male body is transformed into "a man of steel'.' As Theweleit shows, only in war does this body find redemption from constraint.
Theweleit writes in a non orthodox, highly personal and associative style, heavily illustrating his works with incredible cartoons, advertisements, engravings, and posters of the era.
"Theweleit's book asks some key questions for those of us interested in Men's Studies. [It] takes us inside the psyches of men who, in Theweleit's analysis, are not destroying and murdering out of sublimation, but because they want to." — Men's Studies Review
"Klaus Theweleit's book, like the first volume of his massive study, usefully employs psychoanalytic insights in conjunction with the social-historical analyses of Elias, Mary Douglas, Foucault, and others to investigate the formation and nature of the fascist psyche in 1920s Germany, exploring here the male self-image, envisaged as armored against the threat and intrusion of the feminine." — Contemporary Sociology
Klaus Theweleit (b. 1942) is a German sociologist and writer. In 1977–78 he published the two volumes of Male Fantasies, now recognized as a pre-eminent work on the body, war and fascism. In 1990 he published Orpheus (und) Eurydike, the first volume of The Book of Kings, an examination of Western art through male artists’ relationship with women.
As New copies both, 2000s re-prints of first Minnesota edition.
1996, Japanese
Softcover (w. dust jacket and obi-strip), 256 pages, 21 x 14.8 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Core Magazine / Tokyo
$120.00 - Out of stock
Don't judge a book by it's cover — you've been warned! Straight out of the young nihilist 90s, the second volume of the very short-lived and absolutely demented Seikimatsu Club (End of the Century Club), published in Tokyo between 1996—2000 for a total of only five volumes. This second volume, "Deathtpia in Suburbia", has the feature theme of Horror! Bizarre! Bizarre! Cruelty! and is packed to the absolute brim with "corpses, freaks, spectacles, murders, suicides, autopsies, rapes, sickness, pain, accident, war, religious rituals, violence, forensics, foetuses. A shocking document that eliminates all fiction (all genuine)!"
With contributors to this issue including Masami Akita (Merzbow), Masaaki Aoyama (author), Kiyotaka Tsurisaki (corpse photographer), Suehiro Maruo (ero guro manga artist), Teruo Ishii (ero guro film director), Kotaro Kobayashi (Too Negative editor-in-chief), Trevor Brown (artist), you should know what you are getting yourself into.
Following the trajection of fellow Japanese abnormal subculture magazines such as Kotaro Kobayashi's notorious Too Negative, Ultra Negative, ORG, etc., and in the spirit of a new wave of 90's nihilist publishing around the world (Answer Me!, Killing Times, Fuck!, AMOK, Feral House, etc.) End of the Century Club stares directly into the dark recesses of humanity and presents its viewers with the uncompromising extremes of our global culture. The real stuff. Where Too Negative presents itself as a glossy colour photo/art magazine, End of the Century Club is almost like a Whole Earth Catalog to the authentic macabre. With articles, interviews, reports, catalogues and hundreds of images spanning all manner of medical/autopsy/corpse photography, death journalism, serial killers, formalihide babies, war/shock accident/crime scenes, hara-kiri, murder, rape, slaughterhouse, forensic books, international underground magazines, Photobook of World Diseases, City of Sodom, corpses on the internet, Underground Baby Contest, Atlas of Dermatology, complete guide to Freaks movies, the Garbage Pail Kids, religious ceremonies, animal deformities, Interview with "The King of Cult" ero guro film director Teruo Ishii, bizarro sex, acrotomophila, artist Joel Peter Witkin's world, interview with Masaaki Aoyama, interview with corpse photographer Kotaro Kobayashi (Death, Hardcore Works, Too Negative, Billy, etc.), photography of George Dureau, interview with fetish film director and producer Kaoru Adachi, interview with experimental film director Shozin Fukui (Metal Days, Gerorisuto, Caterpillar, 964 Pinocchio, Rubber's Lover...), article on "Serial Killers & Record Junkies" by Toshihiko Hironaka (of Boris, Balzac, Hellbent fame), and all sorts of other curios from the mondo, bizarro realm.
Includes "gorgeous" 24-page high-quality corpse photo booklet feature and cover art by Trevor Brown.
Not for the fain-hearted. You'll feel like a shower after.
Very Good copy with dust jacket and obi.
1997, Japanese
Softcover (w. dust jacket and obi-strip), 256 pages, 21 x 14.8 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Core Magazine / Tokyo
$120.00 - Out of stock
Don't judge a book by it's cover — you've been warned! Straight out of the young nihilist 90s, the third volume of the very short-lived and absolutely demented Seikimatsu Club (End of the Century Club), published in Tokyo between 1996—2000 for a total of only five volumes. This third volume, "The World You Don't Know", has the feature theme of exposing "a reality erased from everyday life", which sums it up... packed to the absolute brim with "freaks, corpses, bestiality, autopsies, fetal executions, lynchings, traffic accidents, plane crashes, amputee, heteromorphic animals, freak shows, corpse museums, shemales, etc. A shocking document that eliminates all fiction (all genuine)!"
With contributors to this issue including Masami Akita (Merzbow), Masaaki Aoyama (author), Kiyotaka Tsurisaki (corpse photographer), Hideshi Hino (horror manga artist / Guinea Pig director), Kotaro Kobayashi (Too Negative editor-in-chief), Trevor Brown (artist), you should know what you are getting yourself into.
Following the trajection of fellow Japanese abnormal subculture magazines such as Kotaro Kobayashi's notorious Too Negative, Ultra Negative, ORG, etc., and in the spirit of a new wave of 90's nihilist publishing around the world (Answer Me!, Killing Times, Fuck!, AMOK, Feral House, etc.) End of the Century Club stares directly into the dark recesses of humanity and presents its viewers with the uncompromising extremes of our global culture. The real stuff. Where Too Negative presents itself as a glossy colour photo/art magazine, End of the Century Club is almost like a Whole Earth Catalog to the authentic macabre. With articles, interviews, reports, catalogues and hundreds of images spanning all manner of medical/autopsy/corpse photography, death journalism, serial killers, formalihide babies, war/shock accident/crime scenes, human intersection, murder art show, lobster boy, 3D stereo photography hall of horrors, donkey fucker (please no!), strange diseases of the world, amputee lovers, siamese twins, deformed children, amazing Photo Press historical stories, animal deformities, huge Hideshi Hino art gallery, book guide and interview, ALARMA! photo gallery, Trevor Brown art gallery, corpse photography, columns and features on and by Kiyotaka Tsurisaki (Death, Hardcore Works, Too Negative, Ultra Negative, Billy, etc.), Father Yod (YaHoWha 13) record guide, Medical Atlas by Naruhiko Tanaka, lots of noise record reviews by Masami Akita (Merzbow) inc. Smell & Quim, M.B., Lustmord, Ramleh, Genocide Organ, Richard Ramirez, Agoraphobic Nosebleed, Whitehouse, Extreme Hair Stench, Genital Masticator, Traci Lords Loves Noise, Morder, etc., interview with artist Wes Benscoter (heavy metal illustrator for Slayer, Mortician, Kreator, Deceased, Cattle Decapitation, etc) on the occasion of his NG Gallery body painting show, complete Freak book library, and all sorts of other curios from the mondo, bizarro realm. Lots of full colour gore.
Not for the fain-hearted. You'll feel like a shower after.
Very Good copy with dust jacket and obi.