World Food Books' programme is largely produced on Kulin Nation land. We acknowledge the Wurundjeri people of the Kulin Nation as the first and continuing custodians of this land, and pay respect to their Elders past, present, and emerging.
World Food Books is an arts and special interests bookshop in Naarm / Melbourne. Founded in 2010, World Food Books is devoted to the presentation of a rotating, hand-selection of international art, design, literary and counterculture publications with an emphasis on the anti-traditional, the experimental, the avant-garde, the heretic, the marginal.
Presenting new titles alongside rare and out-of-print books, catalogues and journals spanning the fields of modern and contemporary art, design, photography, illustration, film, literature, poetry, cultural theory, philosophy, sexuality, popular and underground culture in its many radical forms, World Food Books wishes to encourage adventurous, thoughtful and open-minded reading, looking, writing, and exchange of publishing and ideas, both current and historical.
As well as our bookshop, located in Melbourne's historical Nicholas Building, all of our inventory is available internationally via our online mail-order service.
World Food Books semi-regularly co-ordinates "Occasions", a programme of exhibits and events at the bookshop and in partnership with other hosts (such as museums and art galleries) that develop out of the activities, relationships and content of the bookshop itself.
World Food Books
The Nicholas Building
37 Swanston Street
Room 5, Level 6
Melbourne 3000
Australia
SHOP HOURS:
OPEN 12—5 THU—FRI
WEB-SHOP OPEN 24/7.
World Food Books
Postal Address:
PO Box 435
Flinders Lane
Victoria 8009
Australia
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All prices in AUD (Australian dollars)
Pick-Ups
Please note: The bookshop is closed until February 1, 2024.
Pick-up orders can be collected in our bookshop during opening hours after this date. Please collect any Pick-up orders within 3 weeks of ordering as we have limited storage space. Orders will be released back into stock if not collected within this time. No refunds can be made for pick-ups left un-collected.
Return Policy
All sales are final. We do accept returns (for refund, exchange) for items received in error. All our orders are packed with special care using heavy-duty padding and cardboard book-mailers or bubble mailers (for smaller books), using reinforcement where required. We cannot take responsibility for any lost, stolen or damaged parcels.
Insurance
Should you wish to insure your package, please email us directly after placing your order and we can organise this at a small extra expense. Although all standard/express tracked packages are very safe and dependable, we cannot take responsibility for any lost, stolen or damaged parcels. We recommend insurance on valuable orders.
Interested in selling your old books, catalogues, journals, magazines, comics, fanzines, ephemera? We are always looking for interesting, unusual and out-of-print books to buy. We only buy books in our fields of interest and specialty, and that we feel we can resell.
We base these prices on desirability, market value, in-print prices, condition and our current stock levels. We offer cash, store credit, and can take stock on consignment. All
about 25% of the price we expect to get when we sell them, or 30% in store credit. We base these prices on desirability, market value, in-print prices, condition and our current stock levels.
Sell your books any day of the week. You can drop them off and return later. If you have a lot of books, we can visit your Sydney home.
We buy books that we feel we can resell. We offer about 25 % of the price we expect to get when we sell them, or 30% in store credit. We base these prices on desirability, market value, in-print prices, condition and our current stock levels.
Philadelphia Wireman
03 August - 01 September, 2018
World Food Books is proud to announce our next Occasion, the first presentation of sculptures by Philadelphia Wireman in Australia.
The Philadelphia Wireman sculptures were found abandoned in an alley off Philadelphia’s South Street on trash night in 1982. Their discovery in a rapidly-changing neighbourhood undergoing extensive renovation, compounded with the failure of all attempts to locate the artist, suggests that the works may have been discarded after the maker’s death. Dubbed the "Philadelphia Wireman" during the first exhibition of this work, in 1985, the maker’s name, age, ethnicity, and even gender remain uncertain. The entire collection totals approximately 1200 pieces, all intricately bound together with tightly-wound heavy-gauge wire (along with a few small, abstract marker drawings, reminiscent both of Mark Tobey and J.B. Murry). The dense construction of the work, despite a modest range of scale and materials, is singularly obsessive and disciplined in design: a wire armature or exoskeleton firmly binds a bricolage of found objects including plastic, glass, food packaging, umbrella parts, tape, rubber, batteries, pens, leather, reflectors, nuts and bolts, nails, foil, coins, toys, watches, eyeglasses, tools, and jewellery.
Heavy with associations—anthropomorphic, zoomorphic, and socio-cultural responses to wrapped detritus—the totemic sculptures by Philadelphia Wireman have been discussed in the context of work created to fulfil the shamanistic needs of alternative religions in American culture. Curators, collectors, and critics have variously compared certain pieces to sculpture from Classical antiquity, Native American medicine bundles, African-American memory jugs, and African fetish objects. Reflecting the artist’s prolific and incredibly focused scavenging impulse, and despite—or perhaps enhanced by—their anonymity, these enigmatic objects function as urban artefacts and arbiters of power, though their origin and purpose is unknown. Philadelphia Wireman, whatever their identity, possessed an astonishing ability to isolate and communicate the concepts of power and energy through the selection and transformation of ordinary materials. Over the course of the past two decades, this collection has come to be regarded as an important discovery in the field of self-taught art and vernacular art.
Presented in collaboration with Fleisher-Ollman Gallery, Philadelphia, and Robert Heald, Wellington.
Susan Te Kahurangi King
02 February - 10 March, 2018
Susan Te Kahurangi King (24 February 1951 - ) has been a confident and prolific artist since she was a young child, drawing with readily available materials - pencils, ballpoint pens and felt-tip markers, on whatever paper is at hand. Between the ages of four and six Susan slowly ceased verbal communication. Her grandparents William and Myrtle Murphy had developed a special bond with Susan so they took on caring responsibilities for extended periods. Myrtle began informally archiving her work, carefully collecting and storing the drawings and compiling scrapbooks. No drawing was insignificant; every scrap of paper was kept. The King family are now the custodians of a vast collection containing over 7000 individual works, from tiny scraps of paper through to 5 meter long rolls.
The scrapbooks and diaries reveal Myrtle to be a woman of great patience and compassion, seeking to understand a child who was not always behaving as expected. She encouraged Susan to be observant, to explore her environment and absorb all the sights and sounds. Myrtle would show Susan’s drawings to friends and people in her community that she had dealings with, such as shopkeepers and postal workers, but this was not simply a case of a grandmother’s bias. She recognised that Susan had developed a sophisticated and unique visual language and sincerely believed that her art deserved serious attention.
This was an unorthodox attitude for the time. To provide some context, Jean Dubuffet coined the term Art Brut in 1945 to describe work created by self-taught artists – specifically residents of psychiatric institutions and those he considered to be visionaries or eccentrics. In 1972 Roger Cardinal extended this concept by adopting the term Outsider Art to describe work made by non-academically trained artists operating outside of mainstream art networks through choice or circumstance. Susan was born in Te Aroha, New Zealand in 1951, far from the artistic hubs of Paris and London that Dubuffet and Cardinal operated in. That Myrtle fêted Susan as a self-taught artist who deserved to be taken seriously shows how progressive her attitudes were.
Susan’s parents Doug and Dawn were also progressive. Over the years they had consulted numerous health practitioners about Susan’s condition, as the medical establishment could not provide an explanation as to why she had lapsed into silence. Dawn educated herself in the field of homeopathy and went on to treat all twelve of her children using these principles – basing prescriptions on her observations of their physical, mental and emotional state.
Doug was a linguist with an interest in philosophy who devoted what little spare time he had to studying Maori language and culture. To some extent their willingness to explore the fringes of the mainstream made them outsiders too but it was their commitment to living with integrity and their respect for individuality that ensured Susan’s creativity was always encouraged.
Even though Susan’s family supported her artistic pursuits, some staff in schools and hospitals saw it as an impediment to her assimilation into the community and discouraged it in a variety of ways. Her family was not always aware of this and therefore did not fully understand why Susan stopped drawing in the early 1990s. However, rather than dwell on the challenges that Susan faced in pursuit of her artistic practice, they prefer to highlight her achievements. In 2008 Susan began drawing again in earnest, after an almost 20 year interruption, and her work is now shown in galleries around the world.
Susan grew up without television and has been heavily influenced by the comics she read as a child. She is absolutely fearless in the appropriation of recognizable characters, such as Donald Duck and Mickey Mouse, in her work. She twists their limbs, contorts their faces, compresses them together, blends them into complex patterned backgrounds - always imbuing them with an incredible energy. Although Susan often used pop culture characters in her work they are not naive or childlike. These are drawings by a brilliant self-taught artist who has been creating exceptional work for decades without an audience in mind.
Mladen Stilinović
"Various Works 1986 - 1999"
02 February 16 - September 10, 2016
Various works 1986 - 1999, from two houses, from the collections of John Nixon, Sue Cramer, Kerrie Poliness, Peter Haffenden and Phoebe Haffenden.
Including: Geometry of Cakes (various shelves), 1993; Poor People’s Law (black and white plate), 1993; White Absence (glasses, ruler, set square, silver spoon, silver ladel with skin photograph and wooden cubes), 1990-1996; Exploitation of the Dead (grey and red star painting, wooden painting, black spoon with red table, red plate), 1984-1990; Money and Zeros (zero tie, paintings made for friends in Australia (Sue, John, Kerrie), numbers painting), 1991-1992; Words - Slogans (various t-shirts) - “they talk about the death of art...help! someone is trying to kill me”, “my sweet little lamb”, “work is a disease - Karl Marx”; Various artist books, catalogues, monographs, videos; Poster from exhibition Insulting Anarchy; "Circular" Croatian - Australian edition; Artist book by Vlado Martek (Dostoyevsky); more.
Thanks to Mladen Stilinović and Branka Stipančić.
Jonathan Walker
Always Will Need To Wear Winter Shirt Blue + Ochre Small Check Pattern
21 August - 21 September, 2015
Untitled
I am not a great reader of poetry but I always return to the work of Melbourne poet, Vincent Buckley (1925- 1988). Perhaps I find his most tantalising piece to be not a finished poem but a fragment left on a scrap of paper discovered on his desk after the poet’s death.
The poetry gathers like oil
In the word-core, and spreads
It has its music meet,
Its music is in movement.
This fragment is more the shell left behind from a volatile thought than a finished poem. I find the last two lines honest but awkward whereas the first two lines work like an arrow. Most likely he could not find a resolution so it was left. Still, in its present form, it remains an eloquent testimony to the ultimate failure of a medium to express mobile thought and sensation, in Buckley’s case, through verbal language. It’s an important matter because this is something all artists have to deal with regardless of the medium.
I have never written a poem, however, I am forever copying fragments from books on paper scraps in a vain effort to fix certain notions in my head. At first, they function as bookmarks that are sometimes returned to when I open the book. But before long, as they accumulate, they fall out littering the table interspersed with A4 photocopies, bills, books and medications.
To return to Buckley’s fragment, the first two lines very much evoke how I paint nowadays. As you age, detail diminishes and patches of light become more luminous and float. I feel the most honest way of dealing with this is by smearing the oil paint on the canvas with the fingers and working close-up, blind. Only if the patches coalesce into an approaching image can the work gain a life.
-
Jonathan Walker was born in Melbourne, Australia and brought up on a dairy farm in Gippsland. In the 1970’s he studied painting at RMIT and won the Harold Wright Scholarship to the British Museum, London. During the 1980’s he exhibited at Pinacotheca Gallery, Richmond and had work shown at the NGV and Heidi City Art Gallery. Over the same period he designed the cover for the “Epigenesi” LP by Giancarlo Toniutti, Italy and conducted a mail exchange work with Achim Wollscheid, Germany. The work with artists through the post resulted in an article published in the bicentenary issue of Art and Australia 1988. He showed in artist run spaces such as WestSpace in the 90’s and 2000’s, and until 2012, taught painting at Victoria University, which is where we (Colleen Ahern and Lisa Radford) as organisers of the exhibition, among many others, had the privilege of being his student.
Walker’s knowledge was imparted to students through the careful selection of music, literature, and artists found in books that he himself had ordered for the library. Walker’s strategy was the generosity of sharing his vast knowledge with references specific to each student and their context.
Walker’s paintings share a similar focus and intimacy.
This exhibition presents a small selection of recent paintings alongside a publication that includes Walker’s writing. Observational and analytical, Walker’s work is a type of material notation — the time of day, colour and how it is blended, the both specific and fleeting location of a reflection on lino or the question of whether a chair leg should be included in a painting.
Please join us on Friday August 21 between 6-8pm to celebrate the opening of the exhibition.
Curated by Colleen Ahern and Lisa Radford.
B. Wurtz
Curated by Nic Tammens
March 26 - April 4, 2015
B.Wurtz works from a basement studio in his home on Manhattan’s Lower East Side.
This local fact is attested to by the plastic shopping bags and newsprint circulars that appear in his work. As formal objects, they don’t make loud claims about their origins but nonetheless transmit street addresses and places of business from the bottom of this long thin island. Like plenty of artists, Wurtz is affected by what is local and what is consumed. His work is underpinned by this ethic. It often speaks from a neighborhood or reads like the contents of a hamper:
“BLACK PLUMS $1.29 lb.”
“Food Bazaar”
“USDA Whole Pork Shoulder Picnic 99c lb.”
“RITE AID Pharmacy, with us it’s personal.”
“H. Brickman & Sons.”
“Sweet Yams 59c lb."
Most of the work in this exhibition was made while the artist was in residence at Dieu Donne, a workshop dedicated to paper craft in Midtown. Here Wurtz fabricated assemblages with paper and objects that are relatively lightweight, with the intention that they would be easily transportable to Australia. This consideration isn’t absolute in Wurtz’s work, but was prescriptive for making the current exhibition light and cheap. Packed in two boxes, these works were sent from a USPS post office on the Lower East Side and delivered to North Melbourne by Australia Post.
Wurtz appears courtesy of Metro Pictures, New York.
Thanks to Rob Halverson, Joshua Petherick, Sari de Mallory, Matt Hinkley, Helen Johnson, Fayen d'Evie, Ask Kilmartin, Lisa Radon, Ellena Savage, Yale Union, and "Elizabeth".
John Nixon
"Archive"
December 15 - January 20, 2014
The presentation of John Nixon's archive offered a rare showcase of this extensive collection of the artist's own publications, catalogues, posters, ephemera, editions and more, from the mid 1980s onwards, alongside a selection of his artworks.
Organized by John Nixon, Joshua Petherick and Matt Hinkley.
"Habitat"
at Minerva, Sydney (organised by Joshua Petherick and Matt Hinkley)
November 15 - December 20, 2014
Lupo Borgonovo, Janet Burchill & Jennifer McCamley,
Lewis Fidock, HR Giger, Piero Gilardi, Veit Laurent Kurz,
Cinzia Ruggeri, Michael E. Smith, Lucie Stahl, Daniel Weil, Wols
Press Release:
“...It contained seven objects. The slender fluted bone, surely formed for flight, surely from the wing of some large bird. Three archaic circuitboards, faced with mazes of gold. A smooth white sphere of baked clay. An age-blackened fragment of lace. A fingerlength segment of what she assumed was bone from a human wrist, grayish white, inset smoothly with the silicon shaft of a small instrument that must once have ridden flush with the surface of the skin - but the thing’s face was seared and blackened.”
William Gibson, “Count Zero”, 1986
"Autumn Projects Archive"
Curated by Liza Vasiliou
March 6 - March 15, 2014
World Food Books, in conjunction with the Virgin Australia Melbourne Fashion Festival 2014, presented the Autumn Projects archive, consisting of a selection of early examples in Australian fashion with a particular interest in collecting designers and labels from the period beginning in the 1980’s, who significantly influenced the discourse of Australian Fashion.
Curated by Liza Vasiliou, the exhibition provided a unique opportunity to view pieces by designers Anthea Crawford, Barbara Vandenberg, Geoff Liddell and labels CR Australia, Covers, Jag along with early experimental collage pieces by Prue Acton and Sally Browne’s ‘Fragments’ collection, suspended throughout the functioning World Food Books shop in Melbourne.
H.B. Peace
presented by CENTRE FOR STYLE
November 14, 2013
"Hey Blinky, you say chic, I say same"
Anon 2013
H.B. Peace is a clothing collaboration between great friends Blake Barns and Hugh Egan Westland. Their pieces explore the divergences between 'character’ and ‘personality’ in garments....etc
Special Thanks to Joshua Petherick and Matt Hinkley of WFB and Gillian Mears
and a Very Special Thank you to Audrey Thomas Hayes for her shoe collaboration.
Janet Burchill & Jennifer McCamley
"Aesthetic Suicide"
May 10 - June 8, 2013
The first of our occasional exhibitions in the World Food Books office/shop space in Melbourne, "Aesthetic Suicide" presented a body of new and older works together by artists Janet Burchill & Jennifer McCamley, including videos, prints, a wall work, and publications.
During shop open hours videos played every hour, on the hour.
2014, English
Hardcover (w. dust jacket), 300 pages, 25.5 x 28.0 cm
Published by
JRP Ringier / Zürich
Kunsthalle Zürich / Zürich
$135.00 - Out of stock
This comprehensive publication is Kai Althoff's third monograph. It contains never-before-seen works in addition to images from every stage of the artist's career, concentrating most heavily on work since 2002. The artist considers this to be a more ideally composed retrospective than any exhibition of his work would be capable of achieving. The selection of images focuses on documenting the work in a way that addresses the character of the works as well as the artist's current and past perspectives on his oeuvre. Possessing the emotional charge of the artist's works, this book presents personal, previously unpublished photographs, paintings, and writings of "failed satire" with a deceptive sentimentality that oscillates between nostalgia and self-deprecation. This stands in contrast with the innate beauty and craftsmanship of the works, which engrossed the artist at the time of their conception. Souffleuse der Isolation is also concerned with re-evaluating past works and the emotional states in which they were spawned, and how this pertains to the act of revisiting past portrayals of oneself.
This volume also features a text by the writer Angus Cook imaginatively inspired by Althoff's work, written specifically for this monograph, which served as a vital conceptual basis to its composition. Also included is a text by Dr. Patrik Scherrer on the use of textiles in the artist's work.
A beautiful book.
Kai Althoff (born 1966 in Cologne) is a German visual artist and musician. Borrowing from moments of history, religious iconography, and counter-cultural movements, Althoff creates imaginary environments in which paintings, sculpture, drawing, video, and found objects commingle. Tapping a multitude of sources, from Germanic folk traditions to recent popular culture, from medieval and gothic religious imagery to early modern expressionism, Althoff’s characters inhabit imaginary worlds that serve as allegories for human experience and emotion. His image bank and painterly style also draw on the past, especially early-20th-century German Expressionism, reconfigured by introducing collaged technique.
2022, English
Softcover, 158 pages, 23 x 32 cm
Published by
Louisiana Museum of Modern Art / Denmark
The Danish Architectural Press / Denmark
$110.00 $70.00 - In stock -
English architect and writer Sir Peter Cook, renowned for his free-thinking spirit translated into architectural lines and shapes, is perhaps most well-known as the co-founder of the avant-garde architectural group Archigram in the 1960s. This beautiful volume presents a large selection of his works on paper as part of the exhibition series “Louisiana On Paper” at the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art in Denmark. Cook believes that visions of the future – whatever it might offer – are most clearly expressed and can best be discussed in drawings. In his work we encounter kaleidoscopic colours and spiralling shapes, voluntary architectural mutations, and twisting and turning buildings transforming into escapist dreamscapes.
1980, Japanese / English
Softcover, 29 x 22 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
A+U Publishing / Tokyo
$90.00 - Out of stock
Rare special issue the legendary Japanese architecture magazine, A+U (Architecture + Urbanism), published in 1980. Published by Yoshio Yoshida with Editor Toshio Nakamura and international advisors and correspondents including Paul Rudolph, Hans Hollein, Robert A.M. Stern... This issue is entirely dedicated to the work of Archigram's Peter Cook and Christine Hawley. Lavishly illustrated throughout in glossy full colour and b/w reproductions of Cook and Hawley's visionary architectural mixed media works on paper, plans, drawings, along with biographies, interviews, and articles. The most comprehensive publication on the collaboration between these important English architects to date, only available in Japan.
Sir Peter Cook (b. 1936) is an English architect, lecturer and writer on architectural subjects, known as a founding member of Archigram. Christine Hawley (b. 1949) is an accomplished British architect and educator. Cook and Hawley began collaborating in the 1970s, in 1975 creating the award-winning partnership Cook and Hawley Architects.
A+U (Architecture + Urbanism) is a forward thinking monthly architectural magazine from Japan which tackles a diverse range of themes, movements and discussions in the fields of architecture and urbanism. Each issue is comprehensively illustrated and accompanied by plans, maps, sections and details.
Very Good copy.
2022, English
Softcover, 96 pages, 12 x 20.3 cm
Published by
Walther König / Köln
$48.00 - Out of stock
A conversation between the artist Marc Camille Chaimowicz and the architect Roger Diener about their collaboration, The Armadillo House in Basel. Chaimowicz claims the interior as a pictorial space while also referencing the history of architecture, art and design. His agenda has been described as the celebration of domestic detritus and his spatial installations appear as painterly tableaus. From the 1970s onwards he advanced a critique of rigid, austere minimalism. For Diener, on the other hand, pictorial space is not a factor. Instead, he puts forward a modernist notion of non-expression, with architecture functioning as its raw material. In his architecture, it is not the insertion of culturally codified images but rather spatial configurations that shape the movement and circulation of inhabitants.
1978, English
Hardcover (clothbound w. dust jacket), 160 pages, 24.5 x 32 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Octopus / London
$65.00 - In stock -
English edition of the great "Surrealist Drawings", edited by František Šmejkal, designed and printed in Czechoslovakia. A beautiful clothbound hardcover folio of drawings by artists affiliated with Surrealism. What makes this lovely collection special is the inclusion of many of the Czech Surrealists, and a generally broad European scope of artists. Czech art historian František Šmejkal has collated a wonderful selection of works on paper by Toyen, Jindřich Štyrský, Wolfgang Paalen, Giorgio de Chirico, Hans Bellmer, Alfred Kubin, Francis Picabia, Jacques Hérold, Yves Tanguy, Man Ray, Josef Istler, Max Ernst, André Breton, František Muzika, Paul Delvaux, Wilfredo Lam, Richard Oelze, Mikuláš Medek, Joan Miró, Josef Sima, Kurt Seligmann, Odilon Redon, Andre Masson, Max Walter Svanberg, Salvador Dali, Arshile Gorky, Victor Brauner, Rene Magritte, and many more.
Highly recommended.
Very Good copy with light edge wear. Very Good dust jacket.
2010, English
Softcover, 160 pages, 24.9 x 29 cm
Published by
Lund Humphries / London
$85.00 - Out of stock
This book remains the definitive survey of the life and work of Surrealist artist Leonora Carrington (1917-2011).
Carrington burst onto the Surrealist scene in 1936, when, as a precocious nineteen-year-old debutante, she escaped the stultifying demands of her wealthy English family by running away to Paris with her lover Max Ernst. She was immediately championed by Andre Breton, who responded enthusiastically to her fantastical, dark and satirical writing style and her interest in fairy tales and the occult. Her stories were included in Surrealist publications, and her paintings in the Surrealists' exhibitions.
After the dramas and tragic separations of the Second World War, Carrington ended up in the 1940s as part of the circle of Surrealist European emigres living in Mexico City. Close friends with Luis Bunuel, Benjamin Peret, Octavio Paz and a host of both expatriate Surrealists and Mexican modernists, Carrington was at the centre of Mexican cultural life, while still maintaining her European connections.
Leonora Carrington: Surrealism, Alchemy and Art provides a fascinating overview of this intriguing artist's rich body of work. The author considers Carrington's preoccupation with alchemy and the occult, and explores the influence of indigenous Mexican culture and beliefs on her production.
Susan L. Aberth received her PhD in Art History from the Graduate Center of the City University of New York; her dissertation was on the art of Leonora Carrington. She is currently Assistant Professor of Art History at Bard College, New York, where she specializes in Latin American Art.
2020, English
Softcover, 200 pages, 19.3 x 25.9 cm
Published by
Humanoids Inc. / Los Angeles
$48.00 $25.00 - Out of stock
From Milo Manara, one of comics' most acclaimed illustrators the world over, comes a collection of three of his most famous and sought after works—a lighthearted twist on Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels, an edge-of-your-seat thriller in collaboration with Academy Award-nominated screenwriter Vincenzo Cerami (Life is Beautiful), and a uniquely Manarian adaptation of the Roman classic The Golden Ass of Apuleius—all of which highlight the artist's ever-titillating and masterful style of storytelling. A definitive collection, here translated to the English-language from their original Italian.
"Manara is a comics artist of uncommon ability, a master of linework and layout, whose storytelling chops deserve to be mentioned in the same breath as those of Kirby, Crumb, Toth, Moebius." — ComicsAlliance.com
Maurilio Manaro (b. 1945), known professionally as Milo Manara, is an Italian comic book writer and artist. His first work appeared in the 'Genius' pocket books in 1969, and in magazines like Terror, Telerompo, and the French magazines Alter-Linus and Charlie Mensuel. He also worked for various children's magazines, collaborating with Milo Milani. Manara illustrated five issues of the collection 'L'Histoire de France en Bandes Dessinées' for the French publisher Larousse between 1976 and 1978, and continued to work illustrating similar educational publications, such as 'La Découverte du Monde en Bandes Dessinées' (Larousse, 1979), 'L'Histoire de la Chine' (1980) and 'La Storia d'Italia a Fumetti' (Mondadori, 1978). Also in 1978, he cooperated with Alfredo Castelli on 'L'Uomo delle Nevi' for Cepim and he started with the series 'Giuseppe Bergman', the anti-hero graphic novels which are an ironic deconstruction of adventure stories and comic books as a medium. Manara briefly ventured into westerns with 'Quatre Doigts, L'Homme de Papier' in Pilote (1982), before establishing himself as one of the greatest creators of erotic comics. Manara's book 'Déclic' ('Il Cioco' or 'Click' in English, 1983), initially published in Playmen in Italy and L'Écho des Savanes in France, remains one of the most iconic, notorious and widely published erotic stories of our time. Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, Manara created a vast collection of erotic comic books, however he also kept on working in other genres. With the great Italian comic book artist Hugo Pratt, Manara worked on 'L'Été Indien' (in Corto Maltese) and 'El Gaucho' (in Il Grifo). Manara also worked with the film director Federico Fellini on 'Voyage à Tulum' (Corriere della Serra, 1986) and 'Le Voyage de G. Mastorna dit Fernet' (Il Grifo, 1992). In the 1990s-2000s Manara made books for Les Humanoïdes Associés, DC/Vertigo, Marvel Comics and teamed up with writer, film director Alejandro Jodorowsky.
2021, English
Softcover, 84 pages, 28 x 22 cm
Published by
Secession / Vienna
$58.00 $20.00 - Out of stock
The artist's book to accompany the exhibition at Secession, Vienna, Austria (08.12.2020-07.02.2021), interweaving Megerle's graphic art with videos. The drawings are made in the solitude of the studio; the videos, by contrast, are the fruit of collaborations with friends. In both media, the artist tells stories of the dynamics of the body and society and raises the question: how does one live (together)?
2019, English
Softcover, 248 pages, 21 x 28 cm
Published by
Themerson Estate / London
$95.00 $40.00 - In stock -
In 1980 the late British art critic and historian Nick Wadley befriended artist Franciszka Themerson (1907–1988), whose work he had admired for many years. This first monograph about the Polish-born painter, illustrator, and print and stage designer introduces her work mainly through his words, gathering together lectures, notes, catalogue introductions, and more. The material covers 60 years of her artistic career, detailing her painting, drawing, reliefs, theatre design, and illustrations for children. More than just a tribute to her extraordinary mastery of the drawn line, it also includes a list of facts and dates which help the reader to understand the artist’s versatility and work.
Themerson collaborated with her husband, the writer Stefan Themerson on many experimental films and illustrated books for children, and in 1948 they founded the adventurous publishing company, Gaberbocchus Press, of which she was the art director. The press was named after a Latinisation of 'Jabberwocky', from Lewis Carroll's 'Alice' coined by Carroll's uncle, Hassard Dodgson. In 31 years the Gaberbocchus Press published over sixty titles, including works by Alfred Jarry, Kurt Schwitters, Bertrand Russell, Raymond Queneau, and the Themersons themselves. Alfred Jarry’s Ubu Roi was its flagship publication, published in many editions and still in print. The Gaberbocchus edition is a most apposite evocation of the spirit of Jarry's grotesque fable. The text, which was hand-written directly onto lithographic plates by the translator, Barbara Wright - interspersed with Themerson's conte crayon illustrations - is printed on loud yellow pages. Themerson's contributions as illustrator contributed enormously to the autograph originality of design of Gaberbocchus books. Apart from appearing in many journals worldwide, several collections of her drawings have been published as books: Forty Drawings for Friends, London 1940-42 (1943), The Way It Walks (1954), Traces of Living (1969) and Music (1998). Themerson's theatre designs included marionette productions of Ubu Roi, Ubu Enchainé and the Threepenny Opera, mostly made for the Marionetteatern in Stockholm, in the 1960s, which toured worldwide for decades, and were rewarded with international acclaim. Many of these were exhibited at the National Theatre in 1993.
1972, English
Softcover, 160 pages, 18.5 x 12.5 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / good
Published by
Studio Vista / London
E P Dutton / New York
$30.00 - Out of stock
First edition of the Futurism volume of Studio Vista / Dutton's great paperback series. Published in 1971 and written by Jane Rye, this heavily illustrated overview spans Futurism's beginnings as an aggressively modern style in art and literature in the 1920 and 1930s, its activities and developments via central protagonists such as Italian poet Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, who coined the term, Giacomo Balla, Carlo Carrà, Umberto Boccioni, Gino Severini, etc.
Includes chapters on all major Futurist disciplines : Painting and Sculpture, Architecture, Literature, Theatre, plus chapters on Futurism and politics, Futurism within Italy and Futurism outside Italy, a book list, index, and more.
Good copy.
1970, English
Softcover, 168 pages, 18.5 x 12.5 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / good
Published by
Studio Vista / London
E P Dutton / New York
$30.00 - Out of stock
First edition of the Dada volume of Studio Vista / Dutton's great paperback series. Published in 1970 and written by Kenneth Coutts-Smith, this heavily illustrated overview spans Dada's activities via central locations and protagonists such as Picabia, Janco, Duchamp, Schwitters, Ernst, Grosz, Man Ray, Arp, etc.
Chapters : "Zürich - the beginning", "Anti-art and the irrational", "The roots of Dada", "New York - Duchamp and philosophical irony", "Berlin - political commitment", "Cologne - Ernst and the hallucinatory vision", "Hanover - Schwitters, freedom through lyricism", "Paris - last fling and obsequies", "Dada is dead-long live Dada", "Book list", "Index".
1984, German
Hardcover (w. dust jacket), 408 pages, 32 x 26 cm
Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
DuMont / Köln
$35.00 - In stock -
Over-sized hardcover catalogue published on the occasion of the exhibition Edgar Degas: Pastelle, Ölskizen, Zeichnungen, January 14 — March 25, 1984 in the Kunsthalle Tübingen and in the Nationalgalerie Berlin, April 5 — May 20, 1984. Profusely illustrated throughout with 227 pastels, oil sketches and drawings from numerous European, American and Japanese collections, some of which have been published for the first time. Includes biography, bibliography, index and text by Götz Adriani.
Very Good copy of the 8th printing, with VG dust jacket protected under mylar wrap. Cut to front endpaper corner, presumably to remove previous owner name.
1974, English
Hardcover (w. dust jacket), 288 pages, 33 x 24 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Thames and Hudson / London
$75.00 - In stock -
First hardcover UK edition of this comprehensive volume, published in 1974. Degas: The Complete Etchings, Lithographs and Monotypes collects and beautifully reproduces almost 300 graphic works by one of most celebrated French Impressionists, Degas, compiled and accompanied by text from Jean Adhémar and Françoise Cachin, along with a foreword by John Rewald. An important reference on the artist.
Very Good copy in original dust jacket, preserved under mylar wrap.
1981, English
Softcover, 80 pages, 28 x 21 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / good
Published by
Scala / Florence
$25.00 - In stock -
Raphael Sanzio was born in Urbino on 6th April 1483. Around the beginning of the 16th Century Raphael met Pietro Perugino, who influenced his painting perhaps more than any other painter: Peruginesque motifs can be identified in one of Raphael's earliest works, the altarpiece for the Church of Sant'Agostino in Citta di Castello, on which he collaborated with Evangelista da Pian di Meleto. From 1509 he was in Rome, where his first major undertaking was the decoration of the Stanza della Segnatura, commissioned by Pope Julius II. In Raphael, a monographic study published in Florence in 1981, Bruno Santi examines the works produced by this painter throughout his life, from his beginnings in Urbino, to his period in Florence, and his time in Rome. Raphael's work on the Stanza della Signatura is examined in some detail.
Good copy with crease to cover, light wear.
2021, English
Hardcover, 196 pages, 22.9 x 26.2 cm
Published by
Guggenheim Museum / New York
$99.00 - In stock -
One of the foremost artistic innovators of abstraction in the 20th century, Vasily Kandinsky sought to liberate painting from its ties to the natural world and promote the spiritual in art. This richly illustrated publication looks at Kandinsky anew, through a critical lens, reframing our understanding of this vital figure of European modernism, who was also a prolific aesthetic theorist and writer.
A series of thematic essays considers his engagement with avant-garde artistic communities including the Bauhaus, his relationship to improvisation and music, his travels in Europe and Russia, and the influences behind his self-declared anarchist mode of abstraction, among other topics. Tracing Kandinsky’s life and work through his years in Moscow, several cities in Germany, and Paris, the texts offer striking new insights into an artist whose creative production and style were intimately tied to a sense of place—and displacement—and evolved amid the political and social upheavals catalyzed by the Russian Revolution and World Wars I and II.
Kandinsky’s history is closely linked to that of the Guggenheim Museum. Solomon R. Guggenheim began collecting the artist’s work in 1929; a year later, they met at the Bauhaus, in Dessau. This book features more than half of the museum’s deep holdings of works by Kandinsky, presenting the full arc of his artistic development and career. Included are paintings in oil and oil with sand, reverse-glass paintings, as well as woodcuts, watercolors and drawings on paper. An illustrated chronicle of Kandinsky’s life and career, including selected exhibitions and publications, rounds out the volume.
Edited with text by Tracey Bashkoff, Megan Fontanella. Text by Mark Antliff, Patricia Leighten, George E. Lewis.
1982, German
Hardcover (w. dust jacket), 198 pages, 28.5 x 23 cm
Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Prestel / Munich
$60.00 - In stock -
Hardcover volume of drawings by German master draftsman Horst Janssen (1929—1995), edited by Walter Koschatzky and published on the occasion of the exhibition in the Albertina, Vienna, April 1—May 2, 1982. Due to its great popularity, this heavy catalogue was repeatedly published in expanded form. This edition is the 3rd, from 1984. Profusely illustrated throughout with beautiful reproductions of Janssen's drawings in colour and b/w, accompanied by text by German author Wolfgang Hildesheimer. Includes a biography, list of exhibitions and bibliography.
Horst Janssen (1929—1995) was a German draftsman, printmaker, poster artist and illustrator. He had a prolific output of drawings, etchings, woodcuts, lithographs and wood engravings. His life was marked by numerous marriages, outspoken opinions, alcoholism, and selfless dedication to the art of printmaking. In 1966, shortly after his first retrospective of drawings and graphic works in 1965, he was awarded Hamburg's Edwin Scharff Prize,. In 1968 he received the Grand Prize in graphic art at the Venice Biennale; in 1977, his works were shown at the documenta VI in Kassel. His work is held in major museums internationally.
Walter Koschatzky (1921—2003) was an Austrian art historian, curator and art history author.
Very Good copy in Good dust jacket with edge wear and some small tears, now preserved under mylar wrap.
1960, English
Hardcover (clothbound w. dust jacket), 166 pages, 28 x 22 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Arts Inc. / New York
$65.00 - Out of stock
First edition of this, the first and only comprehensive collection of Grosz' works ever published in the English-language, by Arts Inc. in New York, 1960. It presents the paintings and drawings of his two worlds—Germany after World War I, and the America of New York, Cape Cod and Huntington, Long Island—in all their fascinating variety and complexity. Many of these, especially from the artist's American period, are published here for the first time. Illustrated in colour and b/w. Known for his politically charged paintings and caricatural depictions of Berlin life in the 1920s, included are not only those items which fully reveal his familiar, passionate, social-protest artistry, but also works which for pure draftsmanship rank him with the masters. An essay by Grosz himself illuminates brilliantly the philosophy behind his works, particularly those of his later, American, period. Includes a bibliography, catalogue of plates, biography, memoirs, autobiography, introduction by Ruth Berenson and Norbert Muhlen. Edited By Herbert Bittner.
Long out-of-print and the less common English-language edition, good copy with some wear, tanning, good dust-jacket with a few small chips and tears.
2022, English
Hardcover, 128 pages, 22 x 17 cm
Published by
After 8 Books / Paris
$65.00 - In stock -
An artist’s book by New York–based author and artist Sam Pulitzer, this volume combines photographs with ethical and existential questions addressed to the viewer, in an allegory of the contemporary condition. These photographs of everyday things, ambiguous details, nondescript landscapes and cityscapes were mostly taken in New York, although the city appears as the pale reflection of a model city. The montages offer a complex, personal, at times satirical image of the present.An original essay by Pulitzer unfolds the project’s philosophical and political issues, notably discussing a key reference for the project, Ernst Bloch’s The Principle of Hope.
1967, English
Softcover, 196 pages, 23 x 28 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / average
Published by
The MIT Press / Massachusetts
$18.00 - Out of stock
William Ivins, probably more than anyone else, has been responsible for the twentieth-century reconsideration of the significance of the significance of graphic techniques. As the first Curator of Prints at the Metropolitan Museum of Art he prepared in 1929 a ground-breaking exhibition of prints, of which Notes on Prints is the book form. The work presented ranges in time and style from anonymous religious pieces, to Pollaiuolo and Mantegna, to the German school of the late fifteenth century. At the time of the exhibition, Ivins had written short but pointed introductory comments which accompanied the prints; with minor changes, they also appear here.
Includes the works of Albrecht Dürer, Andrea Mantegna, Hendrick Goltzius, William Blake, Goya, Giovanni Battista Tiepolo, Pieter Bruegel the Elder, William Hogarth, Jacques Callot, Eugène Delacroix, Manet, Degas, Francesco Bartolozzi, Jean Duvet, J. M. W. Turner, John Constable, Paul Gauguin, Whistler, Jean Morin, Peter Paul Rubens, Christoffel Jegher, Marcantonio Raimondi, Antonio del Pollaiuolo, Lucas van Leyden, Lambrecht Hopfer, Martin Schongauer, and many more.
Average/Fair, worn copy of the 1967 MIT Press edition of this classic title.
2000, German
Softcover, 55 pages, 24 × 28 cm
Published by
Galerie Ascan Crone / Hamburg
$65.00 - Out of stock
Wonderful early artist's book by German artist Kai Althoff, published in 2000 on the occasion of his solo exhibition at Galerie Ascan Crone, Hamburg, and long out-of-print. Illustrated throughout in colour and black and white with Althoff's paintings, drawings, installations and assorted imagery, alongside a text by German painter Michaela Eichwald.
As New.
Kai Althoff (born 1966 in Cologne) is a German visual artist and musician. Borrowing from moments of history, religious iconography, and counter-cultural movements, Althoff creates imaginary environments in which paintings, sculpture, drawing, video, and found objects commingle. Tapping a multitude of sources, from Germanic folk traditions to recent popular culture, from medieval and gothic religious imagery to early modern expressionism, Althoff’s characters inhabit imaginary worlds that serve as allegories for human experience and emotion. His image bank and painterly style also draw on the past, especially early-20th-century German Expressionism, reconfigured by introducing collaged technique.
2011, English
Hardcover (w. dust jacket), 320 pages, 21.9 x 28.4 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / as new
Published by
Yale University Press / New Haven
$90.00 - In stock -
Adolf Menzel was one of the most important German artists of the 19th century, yet he is scarcely known outside his native land. In this study a leading art historian argues that Menzel deserves to be recognized not only as one of the greatest painters and draftsmen of his century but also as a master realist whose work engages profoundly with an extraordinary range of issues - artistic, scientific, philosophical and socio-political.
Michael Fried explores Menzel's large and fascinating oeuvre, and in so doing seeks to make the artist's achievement accessible to a wide audience. Fried compares Menzel's art with that of the 19th-century's two other great realist painters, Courbet and Eakins. Analyzing paintings, drawings and prints from all stages of Menzel's long career, he asserts that the distinctive quality of Menzel's realism is found in his concern with evoking the multi-sensory, fully-embodied relationships of persons with the universe of physical objects, tools and situations.
Fried establishes connections between Menzel's work and a broad array of extra-artistic contexts, among them the writings of the empathy theorists, Kierkegaard on reflection and the everyday, Helmholtz on vision, Fontane's "Effi Briest", Duranty's art criticism, Simmel on modern urban life, E.T.A. Hoffmann's "art of seeing", and Benjamin on traces. He also explores the complex relationship between Menzel's version of "extreme" realism and the exactly contemporary technology of photography. The resulting work establishes Menzel as a key artist of modernity.
Out-of-print, Fine—As New copy.
2022, English / French
Softocver, 160 pages, 25.5 x 18 cm
Published by
Walther König / Köln
$57.00 - Out of stock
Published on occasion of Thea Djordjadze's first exhibition in a museum in France at the Musée d’art moderne et contemporain de Saint-Étienne (MAMC+), 5 Feb – 15 May 2022. Entitled ‘Remember and Witness’ (‘Se souvenir et témoigner’ in French), this eponymous catalogue unveils materials, archives and writings from the artist in the first part, while the second combines exhibition views from the Gropius Bau in Berlin and MAMC+ to apprehend her sense of installation and composition in two opposite spaces. An interview with the artist by MAMC+ director, Aurélie Voltz, and an essay by the art historian, Thomas Boutoux, question her practice, influences and works.
English and French text.
1962, German
Softcover, 190 pages, 21 x 16.8 cm
Numbered ed. 0688/2000,
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / fine
Published by
Gerhardt Verlag / Berlin
$400.00 - Out of stock
Very scarce first numbered edition of Bellmer's "Die Puppe", published by Gerhardt Verlag in Berlin in 1962. German artist Hans Bellmer (1902-1975) was one of the most subversive artists associated with Surrealism, famous--notorious, even--for his erotic engravings, objects and photographs. This collectable first edition (numbered of 2000 copies) of Die Puppe (The Doll) comprises a series of Bellmer's hand-painted photographs in the form of 10 monochrome and 15 coloured tipped-in plates accompanying his remarkable texts, here published for the first time. Bellmer's hand-coloured photographs subsequently acquired an iconic status as perhaps the purest exemplification of the Surrealist ideal of "convulsive beauty." Bellmer weaves a remarkably disparate set of concepts and intuitions--from fields as diverse as mathematics, morphology, optics and psychology--into a theory of eroticism that provides a totally unexpected rationale for his uncompromising art. His ideas are, in the words of poet Joë Bousquet, a "scandal to reason." The book also contains many b/w drawings by Bellmer along with prose poems by Paul Eluard. A book like no other!
Fine, perfectly preserved copy of this stunning edition with the die-cut decal cover.
1994, Japanese
Softcover in die-cut, foiled slipcase w. obi-strip, 162 pages,
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Treville / Tokyo
$200.00 - Out of stock
First edition of the rare, long out-of-print first major monograph on Japanese artist Yoshifumi Hayashi, published only in Japan in this slipcased edition in 1994. Profusley illustrated throughout, chronologically surveying self-taught Hayashi's work from his mid-1970s De Chirico-inspired sci-fi-scapes quickly evolving into his life's-work of grotesque, disembodied eroticism rendered masterfully in graphite. All the artist’s deepest and darkest paranoias, fetishes, and obsessions are laid bare here, tracing the development of various themes and subjects throughout in a delirium of convulsing legs, breasts, vulvas, intestines, brains and modernist architectural interiors. This book is a must for anyone interested in Hayashi's work. Accompanying texts by Roger Borderie, Gilbert Bellquet, Issei Sagana, Hiroshi Fujita. Also includes a rare portrait of the reclusive Hayashi.
Contemporary Japanese erotic artist Yoshifumi Hayashi (b. 1948, Fukuoka, Japan) dropped out of Chuo University Department of Philosophy in 1972, moving to Paris in 1974, where he began to produce pencil drawings through self study. At first his main influence was the metaphysical world of De Chirico, but soon his focus shifted to the lower half of the female anatomy. Exhibiting and publishing his drawings in France in the late 1970's, Hayashi gained a cult following for his dark explorations of fetishized female physiology and mutating genitalia, rendered masterfully in pencil. Often mentioned in relation to the likes of Hans Bellmer, H.R. Giger, and even David Cronenberg, Hayashi's drawings were featured in specialist fetish magazines, and director Walerian Borowczyk even made a film in 1980 of the artist at work, yet still little is known about Hayashi, who continues to work and exhibit internationally.
Very Good copy. Some edge wear to slipcase and damage to obi-strip.