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—SAT 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.
1972, Japanese / English
Softcover (w. french folds and fold-out spreads), 160 pages, 22.8 x 29.8 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Ad Angen / Japan
$100.00 - In stock -
First 1972 edition of this erotic anthology from three important and provocative Japanese photographers from the time they were creating their most inspired work. Tatsuki is famous for his books Eves, Private (Mariko Kaga) and Girl (from the famous Chuo Koronsha series). Kanoh is famous for his books Shunga and the banned Fuck. Ichimura is famous for Salome and Come Up. All of these seminal works in Japanese photography were published in 1970 or 1971, as was this book, a collection that includes moments from some of the aforementioned works. The title indicates the uniting theme of the book - couples (and groups) in erotic scenes. Experts of the nude, the invited photographers here express Ukiyo-e's spring paintings through their own photographic visions of sexuality. Saturated and hypnotic, these psychedelic and dreamlike collections are joyous and occasionally confronting, surrealistic and occasionally grotesque, all vividly reproduced throughout with many gate-fold spreads. A great book.
Very Good copy.
1995, Japanese
Softcover (w. dust jacket), 150 pages, 27 x 21 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Shogakukan / Tokyo
$70.00 - In stock -
Beautiful Japanese photobook by famed Japanese photographer Kishin Shinoyama, published in 1995. This entire photographic collection is dedicated to Shinoyama's photographs of his friend, Japanese actress and model Aki Mizusawa (1954-) spanning 1975‐1995.
“It is extremely rare for a photographer to be able to shoot a single subject; one woman continuously for twenty years. Now, seeing all those images - as fleeting and instantaneous then as the magazines that carried them - revived and bound together gives that particular history a closure that weighs like marble. This book captures the twenty year photogenic evolution of a wonderful friend and subject, Aki Mizusawa."—Kishin Shinoyama
Kishin Shinoyama was born in 1940, in Tokyo, Japan. He embarked on his career while studying in the Department of Photography at Nippon University, and was awarded the Advertising Photographer’s Association prize, among others. After being employed at the Light Publicity advertising company, he started to work as a freelance photographer in 1968. His work is acclaimed for the portraits of the most famous celebrities of our day and age, such as John Lennon and Yoko Ono, Rie Miyazawa, and other major personalities. In his “Gekisha” and “Shinorama” series, he carries on capturing the times using new forms of expression and new technologies. He is also an exponent of solarization and has used it to challenge preconceived ideas of beauty and the nude.
Very Good copy in original dust jacket.
1995, English / Spanish / German
Softcover, 80 pages, 30 x 23 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / fine
Published by
Norma Editorial / Barcelona
$50.00 - In stock -
"In the adventure of her breasts, there are vines which extend themselves tangling lustfully, with powerfully cold hips. There is a dagger, iron, blood, fury... penetrating into the most hidden recesses of her flesh. Magic."
First 1995 edition of Spanish fantasy artist Luis Royo's (b. 1954) full-colour volume of artworks dedicated to "Women", published by Norma Norma Editorial in Barcelona. Packed full of his remarkable airbrush paintings and drawings of women who famously featured in the pages of Heavy Metal magazine and adorned the covers of many sci-fi paperback throughout the 1980's. From Cyber-punk to Sword and Sorcery, Royo's most iconic heroines and femme fatales are all here, alongside commentary in Spanish, English and German, biography and many unseen personal works.
Very Good—NF copy.
2002, English
Hardcover, 288 pages, 27 x 22 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Arena Editions / New Mexico
$280.00 - Out of stock
First hardcover edition of the beautiful Carlo Mollino Polaroids book, published in 2002 by Arena Editions. Now highly collectable, Carlo Mollino Polaroids is the first published book of the famed Italian designer's "decadent and hermetic" erotic photographs, selected from the roughly 1200 surviving Polaroids, never exhibited during his life, which were found following his death in 1973. This book represented the first comprehensive look at these polaroids, exquisitely reproducing over 250 examples collected within a lovely gilt, photo-inlayed cloth hardcover.
Carlo Mollino (1905–73) was an architect, designer, photographer, writer, skier, racing driver and stunt pilot. In a career that spanned more than four decades, Mollino designed buildings, homes, furniture, cars and aircraft. One of the most dashing figures of mid-century Italy, Mollino was famed for his design finesse and his elegant organicism. In 1949 he published an important book on photography: Message from the Darkroom. Sometime around 1960, he began to seek out women - mostly dancers - in his native Turin, inviting them to his villa for late-night modeling sessions. The models would pose against extraordinary backdrops, designed by Mollino, in clothing, wigs and accessories that he had carefully selected. Finally, having printed the Polaroids, Mollino would painstakingly amend them with an extremely fine brush, to attain his idealized vision of the female form. The pictures, which totalled around 1,200, remained a secret until after his death, in 1973. Only a few were ever publicly shown, until this acclaimed first edition was published by James Crump in 2002. Reviewing this book, The New Yorker declared, "This lavish selection of several hundred Polaroids preserves the essential mystery of a project both decadent and hermetic. Though clearly the product of a deep obsession, the photographs are deliberately impersonal, each baroque detail an invitation for the viewer to imagine Mollino's encounters with the women."
Very Good copy!
1991, English / Japanese
Softcover (w. acetate dust jacket), 56 pages, 30 x 20.5 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Fiction Inc. / Tokyo
$160.00 - In stock -
One of the best and earliest publications dedicated entirely to the "decadent and hermetic" erotic photography of Italian designer Carlo Mollino, this wonderful book was published by Fiction Inc. in Tokyo in 1991. Very scarce, this volume comes wrapped in printed acetate dust jacket, and is illustrated in colour throughout with Mollino's private erotic glamour photos accompanied by the essay "Body Furniture" by photography critic and founder of Déjà-vu magazine Kohtaro Iizawa. This special over-sized glossy format benefits viewing the minute details of Mollino's paint-brush edits to the photographs rarely so easily seen in other books by enlarging them dramatically from the original polaroids. Selected from the roughly 1200 surviving Polaroids, never exhibited during his life, which were found following his death in 1973, all re-touched and/or partially coloured by hand by Mollino. Also includes interior photographs.
Carlo Mollino (1905–73) was an architect, designer, photographer, writer, skier, racing driver and stunt pilot. In a career that spanned more than four decades, Mollino designed buildings, homes, furniture, cars and aircraft. One of the most dashing figures of mid-century Italy, Mollino was famed for his design finesse and his elegant organicism. In 1949 he published an important book on photography: Message from the Darkroom. Sometime around 1960, he began to seek out women - mostly dancers - in his native Turin, inviting them to his villa for late-night modeling sessions. The models would pose against extraordinary backdrops, designed by Mollino, in clothing, wigs and accessories that he had carefully selected. Finally, having printed the Polaroids, Mollino would painstakingly amend them with an extremely fine brush, to attain his idealized vision of the female form. The pictures, which totalled around 1,200, remained a secret until after his death, in 1973. Only a few were ever publicly shown, until this acclaimed first edition was published by James Crump in 2002. Reviewing this book, The New Yorker declared, "This lavish selection of several hundred Polaroids preserves the essential mystery of a project both decadent and hermetic. Though clearly the product of a deep obsession, the photographs are deliberately impersonal, each baroque detail an invitation for the viewer to imagine Mollino's encounters with the women."
Very Good copy with only light wear to plastic jacket.
1994, English
Hardcover, 96 pages, 22 x 18 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Taschen / Cologne
$100.00 - In stock -
First English edition of the early hardcover monograph dedicated entirely to the "decadent and hermetic" erotic photography of Italian designer Carlo Mollino, published by Taschen in 1994 and long out-of-print. Profusely illustrated throughout in colour and b/w, with accompanying quotes and texts from the designer, illustrated essay by Falvio Ferrari, plus illustrated biography of Mollino.
Carlo Mollino (1905–73) was an architect, designer, photographer, writer, skier, racing driver and stunt pilot. In a career that spanned more than four decades, Mollino designed buildings, homes, furniture, cars and aircraft. One of the most dashing figures of mid-century Italy, Mollino was famed for his design finesse and his elegant organicism. In 1949 he published an important book on photography: Message from the Darkroom. Sometime around 1960, he began to seek out women - mostly dancers - in his native Turin, inviting them to his villa for late-night modeling sessions. The models would pose against extraordinary backdrops, designed by Mollino, in clothing, wigs and accessories that he had carefully selected. Finally, having printed the Polaroids, Mollino would painstakingly amend them with an extremely fine brush, to attain his idealized vision of the female form. The pictures, which totalled around 1,200, remained a secret until after his death, in 1973. Only a few were ever publicly shown, until this acclaimed first edition was published by James Crump in 2002. Reviewing this book, The New Yorker declared, "This lavish selection of several hundred Polaroids preserves the essential mystery of a project both decadent and hermetic. Though clearly the product of a deep obsession, the photographs are deliberately impersonal, each baroque detail an invitation for the viewer to imagine Mollino's encounters with the women."
Very Good copy
1966, French
Hardcover (clothbound w. dustjacket), 110 pages, 20.5 x 30 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Éditions Denoël / Paris
$160.00 - In stock -
Beautifully produced, scarce French hardcover monographic volume dedicated entirely to reproductions of Surrealist visionary Hans Bellmer's incredible drawings. This is the very first edition, published by Éditions Denoël, Paris, in 1966. With an introduction by Constantin Jelenski. A stunning book, and a key title in the artist's oeuvre.
German artist Hans Bellmer (13 March 1902 – 23 February 1975), was best known for the life-sized pubescent female dolls he produced in the mid-1930s. "Bellmer was born in the city of Kattowitz, then part of the German Empire (now Katowice, Poland). Up until 1926, he'd been working as a draftsman for his own advertising company. He initiated his doll project to oppose the fascism of the Nazi Party by declaring that he would make no work that would support the new German state. Represented by mutated forms and unconventional poses, his dolls were directed specifically at the cult of the perfect body then prominent in Germany. Bellmer was influenced in his choice of art form by reading the published letters of Oskar Kokoschka (Der Fetisch, 1925)."
Very Good – (in original dust jacket and protected under plastic wrap)
1989, Japanese
Softcover (w. dust jacket and original plastic wrap), 80 pages, 22.8 x 16.3 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Gakutokan / Japan
$100.00 - Out of stock
First edition of The World of Pierre Molinier, published in 1989 in Japan. An exquisite book of Molinier's fetishistic gender-bending paintings, photomontages, and drawings, fittingly wrapped in "stocking" dust jacket, with texts by André Breton, translated from French to Japanese by Kosaku Ikuta, imagery from "Molinier" (1966) film by Raymond Borde, beautifully designed and printed in Japan where Molinier's artworks had a particular resonance.
Pierre Molinier (1900—1976) was a French painter, photographer and a forerunner of gender performance art and Body Art (Art corporel). Molinier spent much of his artistic life working in isolation in Bordeaux, exiled from local and national art scenes. Born in Agen, nothing had predestined Molinier to a life as an artist. Self-taught, from a working-class background, he followed in his father’s footsteps and started out as a house painter. He got married and had two children. Tired of his infidelities and provocative behaviour, his wife left their marital home an in 1950 and Molinier begun photographing himself seriously, staging his own death and erecting a fake gravestone proudly declaring himself ‘a man without morals’. He was thrown out of the Bordeaux Salon des Indépendants as early as 1951 amidst controversy over his orgiastic painting of the same year, Le Grand Combat. Stirring up an obsessive correspondence with the anarchic poet-founder of Surrealism, André Breton, Molinier was soon integrated into the Surrealist group with a solo exhibition at Breton’s Paris gallery in 1956. Molinier’s anti-moral project appealed to the group’s interest in repressed desires, fetishism, and the transgression of bourgeois morals. In 1959, he exhibited at the Exposition International du Surrealism in Paris. From the mid-1960s Molinier chronicled the exploration of his subconscious transsexual desires in "Cent Photographies Erotiques": graphically detailed images of pain and pleasure. Cut-up, reassembled, and manipulated, Molinier painstakingly created elaborate and sensual photomontages in which he assumed the roles of dominatrix and succuba previously taken by the women of his paintings. Either alone with doll-like mannequins or with female models such as German sadomasochist Hanel Koeck, Molinier, who considered himself fundamentally androgynous, appears as a transvestite, employing his body and that of his acquaintances to create visions of hybrid identity, where stockinged multi-limbed, multi-sexed beings imitate pagan figures, Hindu gods, and Masonic symbols, in a rejection of a Christian tradition which he argued, had repressed androgyny. Designed to shock, Molinier’s artwork represented a very intimate disclosure about his own sexual ambiguity, inviting the viewer to bring to the images his or her own response of excitement or disgust. The degree of his artistic perversity and blasphemous tendencies was deemed too much for the French cultural elite, and the man Breton dubbed the “magician of erotic art” was shunned from the art world. Molinier did not participate in the 1965 International Surrealist Exhibition. For the last 11 years of his life Molinier played out his own most profound moments in the 'theatre' of his Bordeaux 'boudoir – atelier'. He committed suicide in 1976, shooting himself with a pistol, something he had foreshadowed in his artwork, time and again. Essentially a leg fetishist, but also considering himself as a shaman, facetious and provocative, anti-bourgeois and anti-religious, Molinier enjoyed transgressing gender identification : his outstanding photographs greatly influenced the European and North American Body Art in the 1970s and continue to fascinate artists today.
Very Good copy in original plastic jacket.
2010, English
Hardcover, 400 pages, 24 x 31 cm
Published by
Les Presses Du Reel / Paris
Mennour / Paris
$150.00 - In stock -
The Molinier bible! A mammoth, crucial 400 page book on the method and genesis of Pierre Molinier's provocative, gender-bending photos and artwork. Beautifully printed and prodigiously illustrated with over 800 pictures, mostly unpublished, numerous documents, manuscripts and letters, a complete (nearly 100-page) chronology, a critical biography, and a text by Jean-Luc Mercié.Molinier. Essential publication on Molinier, the most comprehensive to date, and a must for any fan.
Rare English edition translated from the French by Edward Penwarden.
Pierre Molinier is an unknown of worldwide renown. Every book and every exhibition on the body, gender confusion or sexual excess seems to feature at least one work by this artist whose “genius” was acclaimed by André Breton in a memorable text published in 1956. But the bulk of his work has remained inaccessible. A number of pictures have never been shown and a corpus of only 160 prints has been published. The ensemble revealed by the artist's archives is much more extensive. It includes numerous proofs made to prepare his photomontages and working prints given to friends, but also notebooks and personal letters. Here, precise links emerge between his paintings, photographs and scandalous life. The myth carefully constructed by the artist begins to crumble before the reality of the work.
An inveterate seducer, thoroughgoing fetishist, unrepentant transvestite and inadvertent bisexual, to the very last Molinier remained haunted by two obsessions: pleasure, meaning immediate access to la petite mort, and “leaving a trace in the infinity of time.” This book charts the aesthetic incarnation of his passions. Its 819 photographs, most of them never published before, reveal the method, shed light on the procedures and give details of the origin and alchemy of his latent or composed images. Finally, an exhaustive chronology offers a new biography of Molinier, based on his letters: for it is in the intimacy of these writings that the shaman's heart beats closest to the truth.
In a career shared between the university (fifteen years) and publishing (twenty) Jean-Luc Mercié has written widely on painting and photography. This monograph is his fourth book about Pierre Molinier, the master from Bordeaux.
Born 1900 in Agen (France), Pierre Molinier, surrealistic painter and photographer, a precursor to body art, died in 1976 after having thought out radical and pornographic artwork.
2025, English
Softcover, 656 pages, 20.3 x 12.7 cm
Published by
Contra Mundum Press / New York
$68.00 - In stock -
“It is said I present vice as too odious. The reason: I do not want people to be attracted to vice. I am far more moral than those who make their villains attractive. I shall only ever depict crime in the most vivid colours of hell. I want readers to see crime in all its vile nakedness, to fear it and to hate it, and so I show it in all its horror. Woe to those who dress crime in roses! Their intentions are impure, and I will never imitate them.”—The Marquis de Sade
Written in his Bastille cell in the years between 120 Days of Sodom and Justine, this is the first English translation of Marquis de Sade’s collection of short works, Stories, Tales, and Fables.
Essential reading for all Sade devotees, Stories, Tales, and Fables is an introduction for those who are not yet familiar with the work of this controversial French literary innovator. The short works in this collection range from the dramatic novella, Dorci, to comic tales such as The Duped Judge. Whether he is writing bawdy, exuberant comedies, supernatural tales, or human tragedies, Sade is essentially a moralist, and his exploration of the darker side of human nature remains as relevant to our society as it was to his own.
Psychologically perceptive and defiantly unconventional, Stories, Tales, and Fables reveals the compelling force of Sade’s narrative powers. An accomplished and artful fiction writer, Sade, like all great writers, asks penetrating questions about society, life, and humanity. This collection also includes a selection of Sade’s non-fiction, ranging from his insightful survey of the novelist's art, Some Thoughts on the Novel, to his Last Will and Testament, as well as several essays about Sade’s work by renowned authors including Apollinaire, Heine, Masson, Anatole France and Paul Ėluard.
Translated by R.J. Dent
2001, English
Softcover, 103 pages, 14 x 20.4 cm
Published by
City Lights Books / San Francisco
$28.00 - In stock -
"The caress of the eye over the skin is so utterly, so extraordinarily gentle, and the sensation is so bizarre that it has something of a rooster's horrible crowing." - G.B.
A masterpiece of transgressive, surrealist erotica, Bataille's first novel, published under the pseudonym 'Lord Auch', is still his most notorious work. Called a "metaphysician of evil, Bataille wrote the 1928 novella "Story of the Eye (French: L'histoire de l'œil) as a psychoanalytical task. In this explicit erotic fantasy, the young male narrator and his lovers Simone and Marcelle embark on a sexual quest involving sadism, torture, orgies, madness and defilement, culminating in a final act of transgression. Shocking and sacrilegious, Story of the Eye is the fullest expression of Bataille's obsession with the closeness of sex, violence and death. Yet it is also hallucinogenic in its power, and is one of the erotic classics of the twentieth century.
Georges Bataille (1897-1962), French essayist and novelist, was born in Billom, France. He converted to Catholicism, then later to Marxism, and was interested in psychoanalysis and mysticism, forming a secret society dedicated to glorifying human sacrifice. Leading a simple life as the curator of a municipal library, Bataille was involved on the fringes of Surrealism, founding the Surrealist magazine Documents in 1929, and editing the literary review Critique from 1946 until his death.
1982, English
Hardcover (w. dust jacket), 154 pages, 23.5 x 16 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Syracuse University Press / New York
$50.00 - In stock -
First hardcover edition.
"In this groundbreaking, original study, J. H. Matthews, "clearly the chief scholarly explicator of surrealism today," according to Contemporary Literature, shows how the surrealists' goals and the imaginative freedom of mind are fused and diffused in the poet's creative world. Hallucination, game-playing, experimental research, and the irrational which nurtures new ways of poetical expression are all interwoven.
Out of their eagerness to share the benefits they ascribed to mental disturbance surrealists developed an approach to poetic technique which capitalized on the free association of the unconscious mind without undermining the sanity of the poets themselves.
Matthews discusses early surrealist interest in psychosis, hysteria, and insanity. This interest underlies such major works as André Breton's Nadja and Breton's and Paul Eluard's The Immaculate Conception. It is in the latter text that the issue of insanity and its relationship to poetic activity is most clearly revealed as essential to the surrealist enterprise. Also included here are chapters on insanity's poetic simulation and possession.
Matthews' work is important to anyone interested in poetry, the unconscious, and the history of twentieth-century ideas, as well as to scholars of surrealism.
Karol Baron, a Czech surrealist artist, has provided six original drawings especially for this book."—Dust jacket.
J. H. Matthews is a member of the committee appointed by the French government's Centre National de la Recherche scientifique to establish a center in Paris for documenting world-wide surrealism. He is American correspondent for Edda and Gradiva (Brussels), Phases (Paris), and Sud (Marseilles), magazines devoted to vanguard poetry and art. In 1977 the University of Wales conferred upon him its D. Litt., in recognition of his work on surrealism.
Born in Swansea, Wales, J. H. Matthews has been Professor of French at Syracuse University and editor of Symposium: A Quarterly Journal in Modern Foreign Literatures since 1965. He has edited a selection of stories by Guy de Maupassant (1959) as well as two special issues of La Revue des Lettres Modernes, and is the author of Les deux Zola (1957) and The Inner Dream: Céline as Novelist (1978) and numerous articles on nineteenth-and twentieth-century French literature.
His interest in surrealism has led him to write Péret's Score/Vingt Poèmes de Benjamin Péret
(1965); An Introduction to Surrealism (1965); An Anthology of French Surrealist Poetry (1966); Surrealism and the Novel (1966); André Breton (1967); Surrealist Poetry in France (1969); Surrealism and Film (1971); Theatre in Dada and Surrealism (1974); Benjamin Péret (1975); and The Custom-House of Desire: A Half-Century of Surrealist Short Stories (1975). He is also the author of Toward the Poetics of Surrealism (1976); Le thé-âtre de Raymond Roussel: une énigme (1977); The Imagery of Surrealism (1977); and Surrealism and American Feature Films (1979).
VG copy in VG dust jacket with light tanning/age.
1981, English
Softcover, 48 pages, 40 x 28 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Charles E. Tuttle / Tokyo
$170.00 - In stock -
Scarce first Japanese edition (entirely in English language), published in Tokyo by Charles Tuttle, of this beautifully produced over-sized 1981 book by H. R. Giger. Foreword by Timothy Leary.
In 1981, a year after being awarded the Oscar for Best Achievement for Visual Effects for Alien, the book H.R. GIGER N.Y. CITY was published. This series of post Alien works, the result of an intense period of non-stop painting, literally day and night, were inspired by Giger's trip to New York City and a template which his colleague Cornelius de Fries, brought back from one of his excursions into the electronic industry. The stencil was actually a sheet of scrap metal from which electrical components had been punched out. Alongside these incredible works are drawings, articles, press clippings, posters and polaroids from Giger's time in New York City.
Fantastic Swiss surrealist painter, sculptor and set designer Hans Rudolf “Ruedi” Giger was born in 1940, the son of a chemist. He spoke of a father who viewed art as a "breadless profession", and strongly encouraged his son to enter into pharmaceutics. Despite this, in 1962, he moved to Zürich, where he studied Architecture and industrial design at the School of Applied Arts until 1970. Giger's style and thematic execution have been hugely influential. His design for the Alien was inspired by his painting Necronom IV and earned him an Oscar in 1980. His books of paintings, particularly Necronomicon and Necronomicon II (1985) and the frequent appearance of his art in Omni magazine continued his rise to international prominence. Giger is also well known for artwork on several music recording albums. His most distinctive stylistic innovation is that of a representation of human bodies and machines in a cold, interconnected relationship, he described as "biomechanical". His paintings often display fetishistic sexual imagery. His main influences were painters Ernst Fuchs and Salvador Dalí. He was also a personal friend of Timothy Leary. Giger suffered from night terrors and his paintings are all to some extent inspired by his experiences with that particular sleep disorder, making his first paintings as a means of art therapy. In 1998 Giger acquired the Château St. Germain in Gruyères, Switzerland, and it now houses the H. R. Giger Museum, a permanent repository of his work.
Good copy, tight binding with some corner cover wear, tanning to page edges and foxing to preliminary pages.
1988, English
Softcover, 174 pages, 20 x 13 cm
Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Paladin / London
$35.00 - In stock -
Lovely 1988 Paladin paperback edition.
Confessions of a Mask is Yukio Mishima's most compact, powerful and unadorned novel. It tells, in an autobiographical mode, of the sado-sexual obsessions that were to dominate his life and work, beginning with the angry childhood discovery that Joan of Arc was a woman and an erotic fascination with the figure of Saint Sebastian. Here, in their starkest and most terrifying form, are the preoccupations that found their final expression in Mishima's ritual suicide as an act of political protest at the direction of modern Japanese society.
VG copy with foxing/tanning to pages, light wear.
1997, Japanese
Softcover (w. dust jacket), 154 pages, 29.7 x 21 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Treville / Tokyo
$220.00 - Out of stock
First 1997 edition collection of "The Early Works" by the Japanese master of Ero guro Toshio Saeki, published by Treville in 1997 and long out-of-print. An extensive collection of incredible works gathered from his first major book in 1970, his acclaimed 1971 Red Book, the panel-by-panel replication of an early Saeki manga story, and much more. Texts by Akira Uno, Alain Robbe-Grillet and Timothy Leary.
Toshio Saeki (1945—2019) was an illusive Japanese illustrator and painter, and icon of 1970s Tokyo counterculture, known for combining Japanese folklore, Yōkai spirits and elements of Western art with his own sophisticated aesthetics to create a unique, sensational world of eros, dark humour, and horror. Given the title “Erotic Engineer” by Timothy Leary, Saeki's provocative art broke all sexual taboos, questioned Japanese ideology and traditional views on love, desire and gender roles. Saeki’s surgically-precise graphic work is closely related to the Japanese cultural phenomenon ‘Erotic, Grotesque, Nonsense’ (ero, guro, nansensu).
“Toshio Saeki conjures death with a pen”—Shūji Terayama, 1969.
Very Good copy in VG dust jacket, light wear.
2025, English
Hardcover, 100 pages, 21 x 14.5 cm
Published by
Amphetamine Sulphate / Austin
$52.00 - In stock -
WHAT I SEE IS BEAUTIFUL, BUT I DON'T THINK IT'S ENOUGH
"I’m beyond thrilled to announce that my brand new novel, WE’LL NEVER BE FRAGILE AGAIN, is ready and waiting to enter the world. It’s my sixth novel, and a book that I’m really proud of. I feel it’s the best writing I’ve done so far and I’m excited to share it with you very soon.
"And again, I’m honoured that the incredible Michael Salerno has given me his miraculous skills and created such gorgeous, beautiful artwork for the book.
"It’s a strange, painful book about memory, regrets, art, friendship, desire and death."—Thomas Moore
Original cover photography and design throughout by Michael Salerno.
2025, English
Hardcover, 160 pages, 13 x 13 cm
Published by
kiddiepunk / Paris
$60.00 - In stock -
A series of haunted and tragic events are pieced back together in Thomas Moore’s first book of poems in 7 years. Told in shattered, three-lined verses, "I RUINED YOUR LIFE" explores guilt, mourning, regret and blame with a searingly precise economy of language.
2021, English
Softcover, 122 pages, 21.5 x 13.5 cm
Published by
Amphetamine Sulphate / Austin
$46.00 - In stock -
The paresis conquered my entire right side in a procession of patient and orderly ants. Pins and needles pulsating across my cheek, my leg, my arm, followed by a disturbing heat that flooded them intermittently; then the anesthesia took everything away. There was no pain. I let myself be occupied by your absence; I waited without trying to understand. Almost without moving.
A few days after the first rush of desire – my mouth on your lips, seeking your tongue – after those words that lodged themselves in the pit of my being and yet held no meaning for me, when all I wanted was for your body to never leave me in peace, came the waiting, the endless putting off of things. What was so repugnant about me that your hand wouldn’t venture to touch my breasts, to reach under my sweater or stroke my stomach? That you wouldn’t make the slightest attempt to undress me or lead me to your place?
What was electric in our joining turned aseptic, doctored, calculated as our depravity played itself out. And if you bit the back of my neck, it was with such effort that I wondered if you hadn’t sensed, nearby, a sudden decompensation: a collapsing building, an accident, a scream...
Isabelle Nicou is a French writer (b.1969)
Studying philosophy at Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne, Isabelle began researching phenomenology and the works of Martin Heidegger and Jacques Derrida, eventually working with Derrida for some years during her studies. She published her first novel, Paresis, in 2002 and her second, Genesis 0, in 2007. In 2015, Isabelle played the role of Nora in the movie Love by Gaspar Noé, selected for the Cannes Film Festival the same year. She is currently finishing her third book, Stricture.
2021, English
Softcover, 108 pages, 21.5 x 13.5 cm
Published by
Amphetamine Sulphate / Austin
$46.00 - In stock -
“As soon as my eyes close, I’m besieged by waves of blood. A piece of flesh floats in with the tide. No panic, only silence and then the sound of the bloody debris when it comes crashing into my wall. I’m a rampart. An enclosure. A stronghold. Very strong, and I’m afraid of nothing. Certainly not of blood, of its stench of warm entrails and iron dust.
Tomorrow I’ll gain what life will lose: defeat of my body – of the teeming power of the body – that will disgorge its excess of blood and return me to myself, alone, cut off from all lineage and with no line of descent. Being done with this tension in my breasts. Done with the stigmata of your existence and all those that pass through me in the place where you cling. Done with being possessed like this, double-stitched, overlocked, woven into a web that covers me like a shroud. Tomorrow, it’s the women in my family, their tide of hemoglobin A, that I’ll abort. Once the pills are absorbed, I would wait to be delivered. Alone. Free of all lineage and with no line of descent. Eternal. The genesis and the lack. The apocalypse and its angel. Now and forever. The point zero. O.”
Isabelle Nicou is a French writer (b.1969)
Studying philosophy at Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne, Isabelle began researching phenomenology and the works of Martin Heidegger and Jacques Derrida, eventually working with Derrida for some years during her studies. She published her first novel, Paresis, in 2002 and her second, Genesis 0, in 2007. In 2015, Isabelle played the role of Nora in the movie Love by Gaspar Noé, selected for the Cannes Film Festival the same year. She is currently finishing her third book, Stricture.
2022, English
Softcover, 168 pages, 20.5 x 12.5 cm
Published by
Amphetamine Sulphate / Austin
$48.00 - In stock -
Isabelle Nicou returns with her fiercely imaginative new novel Stricture.
A dizzying, kaleidoscopic work of filial obligation, literary mentorship and childhood dreams of alien abduction.
"In Harry’s suburban house, cluttered with books and stacks of papers, time was bending in an elliptical orb that never failed to constrain me during the few months broken by vacations and interruptions—several, for Harry was often invited abroad—where I went once a week to, as my famous mentor put it, “assist” him.
"Around 9:30 in the morning, after he had come—often still in pajamas over which he put on a putty-colored raincoat—to look for me at the train station in his white Fiat Panda, after we had a cup of coffee in the kitchen and greeted his wife who was leaving for her job in Paris, in the fifth arrondissement, just a few streets over from my studio, I had to climb the stairs and get started."
Suffused with eroticism and troubling despair, Stricture is the work of a major talent at the very height of her considerable powers.
1996, Japanese
Softcover, 86 pages, 30 x 30 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Treville / Tokyo
$80.00 - Out of stock
First Japanese edition of the official companion book to the 1995 American sci-fi horror film Species (directed by Roger Donaldson and written by Dennis Feldman) and the film's artistic designer H.R. Giger, famous for his creations for the Alien film. This profusely illustrated "Making of" book is packed with reproductions of Giger's incredible conceptual drawings and models as well as photographs of special effects processes, Giger's set-design, animatronics, and creature fabrication, detailing all the work involved in bringing the science fiction creature Sil to the screen. Includes fold-out illustration of the famous "Ghost Train" and much more.
Very Good copy in VG dust jacket.
2004, Japanese
Hardcover (w. slipcase), 48 pages, 27 x 19 cm
Signed and numbered edition,
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Seirin Kogeisha / Tokyo
$350.00 - In stock -
Very rare first Japanese edition of Picture Scroll of Pathos by ero-guro master Toshio Saeki (1945—2019), limited to only 1000 copies, numbered and this special copy signed by Saeki inside the cover! A gorgeous and rarely seen collection of Saeki's early manga works and picture stories that were originally published in the early 70's and thought to be lost, here reproduced impeccably in black and white with stunning multi-panel colour fold-out spreads. Hardcover bound in illustrated slipcase. Most complete.
Toshio Saeki (1945—2019) was an illusive Japanese illustrator and painter, and icon of 1970s Tokyo counterculture, known for combining Japanese folklore, Yōkai spirits and elements of Western art with his own sophisticated aesthetics to create a unique, sensational world of eros, dark humour, and horror. Given the title “Erotic Engineer” by Timothy Leary, Saeki's provocative art broke all sexual taboos, questioned Japanese ideology and traditional views on love, desire and gender roles. Saeki’s surgically-precise graphic work is closely related to the Japanese cultural phenomenon ‘Erotic, Grotesque, Nonsense’ (ero, guro, nansensu).
“Toshio Saeki conjures death with a pen”—Shūji Terayama, 1969.
Fine copy with Fine dj, slipcase. Signed in bold silver pen by Saeki.
1971, Japanese
Rigid softcover (in illustrated slipcase), 64 pages, 30 cm x 21 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Gakugei Shorinsha / Tokyo
$400.00 - In stock -
Super rare and bookshop favourite early collection of artworks by ero-guro master Toshio Saeki (1945—2019), published in 1971 by Gakugeishorin. Stunning large-format softcover collection of exquisitely printed saturated full-bleed colour and b/w artworks on warm matte paper stock capturing this legendary underground artist at the height of his powers, housed in original publisher's cardboard slipcase. His third book collection featuring so many of his finest works. Postface by Hiraoka Masaaki in Japanese. A must!
Toshio Saeki (1945—2019) was an illusive Japanese illustrator and painter, and icon of 1970s Tokyo counterculture, known for combining Japanese folklore, Yōkai spirits and elements of Western art with his own sophisticated aesthetics to create a unique, sensational world of eros, dark humour, and horror. Given the title “Erotic Engineer” by Timothy Leary, Saeki's provocative art broke all sexual taboos, questioned Japanese ideology and traditional views on love, desire and gender roles. Saeki’s surgically-precise graphic work is closely related to the Japanese cultural phenomenon ‘Erotic, Grotesque, Nonsense’ (ero, guro, nansensu).
“Toshio Saeki conjures death with a pen”—Shūji Terayama, 1969.
Very Good copy. Very complete copy with slipcase and obi present. Some wear/marking to a VG slipcase.
2022, English
Softcover, 304 pages, 13.3 x 20.3 cm
Published by
Semiotext(e) / Los Angeles
$38.00 - In stock -
The first collected edition of legendary writer, actress, and adventurer Cookie Mueller's stories, featuring the entire contents of her 1990 book Walking through Clear Water in a Pool Painted Black, alongside more than two dozen others, some previously unpublished.
Legendary as an underground actress, female adventurer, and East Village raconteur, Cookie Mueller's first calling was to the written word: I started writing when I was six and have never stopped completely, she once confessed. Muellerís 1990 Walking through Clear Water in a Pool Painted Black, the first volume of the Semiotext(e) Native Agents series, was the largest collection of stories she compiled during her life. But it presented only a slice of Mueller's prolific work as a writer. This new, landmark volume collects all of Mueller's stories: from the original contents of Clear Water, to additional stories discovered by Amy Scholder for the posthumous anthology Ask Dr. Mueller, to selections from Mueller's art and advice columns for Details and the East Village Eye, to still new stories collected and published here for the first time. Olivia Laing's new introduction situates Mueller's writing within the context of her life--and our times.
Thanks to recent documentaries like Mallory Curley's A Cookie Mueller Encyclopedia and Chloé Griffin's oral biography Edgewise, Mueller's life and work have been discovered by a new generation of readers. Walking through Clear Water in a Pool Painted Black: Collected Stories returns essential source material to these readers, the archive of Mueller's writing itself. Mueller's many mise en scènes--the Baltimore of John Waters, post-Stonewall Provincetown, avant-garde Italy, 1980s New York, an America enduring Reagan and AIDS--patches together a singular personal history and a primer for others. As Laing writes in her introduction, Collected Stories amounts to a how-to manual for a life ricocheting joyously off the rails . . . a live corrective to conformity, conservatism, and cruelty.