World Food Books' programme is largely produced on Kulin Nation land. We acknowledge the Wurundjeri people of the Kulin Nation as the first and continuing custodians of this land, and pay respect to their Elders past, present, and emerging.
World Food Books is an arts and special interests bookshop in Naarm / Melbourne. Founded in 2010, World Food Books is devoted to the presentation of a rotating, hand-selection of international art, design, literary and counterculture publications with an emphasis on the anti-traditional, the experimental, the avant-garde, the heretic, the marginal.
Presenting new titles alongside rare and out-of-print books, catalogues and journals spanning the fields of modern and contemporary art, design, photography, illustration, film, literature, poetry, cultural theory, philosophy, sexuality, popular and underground culture in its many radical forms, World Food Books wishes to encourage adventurous, thoughtful and open-minded reading, looking, writing, and exchange of publishing and ideas, both current and historical.
As well as our bookshop, located in Melbourne's historical Nicholas Building, all of our inventory is available internationally via our online mail-order service.
World Food Books semi-regularly co-ordinates "Occasions", a programme of exhibits and events at the bookshop and in partnership with other hosts (such as museums and art galleries) that develop out of the activities, relationships and content of the bookshop itself.
World Food Books
The Nicholas Building
37 Swanston Street
Room 5, Level 6
Melbourne 3000
Australia
SHOP HOURS:
THU—FRI 12—6 PM
WEB-SHOP OPEN 24/7
World Food Books
Postal Address:
PO Box 435
Flinders Lane
Victoria 8009
Australia
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All prices in AUD (Australian dollars)
Pick-Ups
Pick-up orders can be collected in our bookshop during opening hours after order date. Please collect any Pick-up orders within 2 weeks of ordering as we have limited storage space. Orders will be released back into stock if not collected within this time. No refunds can be made for pick-ups left un-collected. If you cannot make it in to the bookshop in this time-frame, please choose postage option.
Return Policy
All sales are final. We do accept returns (for refund or exchange) for items received in error. All our orders are packed with special care using heavy-duty padding and cardboard book-mailers or bubble mailers (for smaller books), using reinforcement where required. We cannot take responsibility for any lost, stolen or damaged parcels.
Insurance
Should you wish to insure your package, please email us directly after placing your order and we can organise this at a small extra expense. Although all standard/express tracked packages are very safe and dependable, we cannot take responsibility for any lost, stolen or damaged parcels. We recommend insurance on valuable orders.
Interested in selling your old books, catalogues, journals, magazines, comics, fanzines, ephemera? We are always looking for interesting, unusual and out-of-print books to buy. We only buy books in our fields of interest and specialty, and that we feel we can resell.
We base these prices on desirability, market value, in-print prices, condition and our current stock levels. We offer cash, store credit, and can take stock on consignment. All
about 25% of the price we expect to get when we sell them, or 30% in store credit. We base these prices on desirability, market value, in-print prices, condition and our current stock levels.
Sell your books any day of the week. You can drop them off and return later. If you have a lot of books, we can visit your Sydney home.
We buy books that we feel we can resell. We offer about 25 % of the price we expect to get when we sell them, or 30% in store credit. We base these prices on desirability, market value, in-print prices, condition and our current stock levels.
Philadelphia Wireman
03 August - 01 September, 2018
World Food Books is proud to announce our next Occasion, the first presentation of sculptures by Philadelphia Wireman in Australia.
The Philadelphia Wireman sculptures were found abandoned in an alley off Philadelphia’s South Street on trash night in 1982. Their discovery in a rapidly-changing neighbourhood undergoing extensive renovation, compounded with the failure of all attempts to locate the artist, suggests that the works may have been discarded after the maker’s death. Dubbed the "Philadelphia Wireman" during the first exhibition of this work, in 1985, the maker’s name, age, ethnicity, and even gender remain uncertain. The entire collection totals approximately 1200 pieces, all intricately bound together with tightly-wound heavy-gauge wire (along with a few small, abstract marker drawings, reminiscent both of Mark Tobey and J.B. Murry). The dense construction of the work, despite a modest range of scale and materials, is singularly obsessive and disciplined in design: a wire armature or exoskeleton firmly binds a bricolage of found objects including plastic, glass, food packaging, umbrella parts, tape, rubber, batteries, pens, leather, reflectors, nuts and bolts, nails, foil, coins, toys, watches, eyeglasses, tools, and jewellery.
Heavy with associations—anthropomorphic, zoomorphic, and socio-cultural responses to wrapped detritus—the totemic sculptures by Philadelphia Wireman have been discussed in the context of work created to fulfil the shamanistic needs of alternative religions in American culture. Curators, collectors, and critics have variously compared certain pieces to sculpture from Classical antiquity, Native American medicine bundles, African-American memory jugs, and African fetish objects. Reflecting the artist’s prolific and incredibly focused scavenging impulse, and despite—or perhaps enhanced by—their anonymity, these enigmatic objects function as urban artefacts and arbiters of power, though their origin and purpose is unknown. Philadelphia Wireman, whatever their identity, possessed an astonishing ability to isolate and communicate the concepts of power and energy through the selection and transformation of ordinary materials. Over the course of the past two decades, this collection has come to be regarded as an important discovery in the field of self-taught art and vernacular art.
Presented in collaboration with Fleisher-Ollman Gallery, Philadelphia, and Robert Heald, Wellington.
Susan Te Kahurangi King
02 February - 10 March, 2018
Susan Te Kahurangi King (24 February 1951 - ) has been a confident and prolific artist since she was a young child, drawing with readily available materials - pencils, ballpoint pens and felt-tip markers, on whatever paper is at hand. Between the ages of four and six Susan slowly ceased verbal communication. Her grandparents William and Myrtle Murphy had developed a special bond with Susan so they took on caring responsibilities for extended periods. Myrtle began informally archiving her work, carefully collecting and storing the drawings and compiling scrapbooks. No drawing was insignificant; every scrap of paper was kept. The King family are now the custodians of a vast collection containing over 7000 individual works, from tiny scraps of paper through to 5 meter long rolls.
The scrapbooks and diaries reveal Myrtle to be a woman of great patience and compassion, seeking to understand a child who was not always behaving as expected. She encouraged Susan to be observant, to explore her environment and absorb all the sights and sounds. Myrtle would show Susan’s drawings to friends and people in her community that she had dealings with, such as shopkeepers and postal workers, but this was not simply a case of a grandmother’s bias. She recognised that Susan had developed a sophisticated and unique visual language and sincerely believed that her art deserved serious attention.
This was an unorthodox attitude for the time. To provide some context, Jean Dubuffet coined the term Art Brut in 1945 to describe work created by self-taught artists – specifically residents of psychiatric institutions and those he considered to be visionaries or eccentrics. In 1972 Roger Cardinal extended this concept by adopting the term Outsider Art to describe work made by non-academically trained artists operating outside of mainstream art networks through choice or circumstance. Susan was born in Te Aroha, New Zealand in 1951, far from the artistic hubs of Paris and London that Dubuffet and Cardinal operated in. That Myrtle fêted Susan as a self-taught artist who deserved to be taken seriously shows how progressive her attitudes were.
Susan’s parents Doug and Dawn were also progressive. Over the years they had consulted numerous health practitioners about Susan’s condition, as the medical establishment could not provide an explanation as to why she had lapsed into silence. Dawn educated herself in the field of homeopathy and went on to treat all twelve of her children using these principles – basing prescriptions on her observations of their physical, mental and emotional state.
Doug was a linguist with an interest in philosophy who devoted what little spare time he had to studying Maori language and culture. To some extent their willingness to explore the fringes of the mainstream made them outsiders too but it was their commitment to living with integrity and their respect for individuality that ensured Susan’s creativity was always encouraged.
Even though Susan’s family supported her artistic pursuits, some staff in schools and hospitals saw it as an impediment to her assimilation into the community and discouraged it in a variety of ways. Her family was not always aware of this and therefore did not fully understand why Susan stopped drawing in the early 1990s. However, rather than dwell on the challenges that Susan faced in pursuit of her artistic practice, they prefer to highlight her achievements. In 2008 Susan began drawing again in earnest, after an almost 20 year interruption, and her work is now shown in galleries around the world.
Susan grew up without television and has been heavily influenced by the comics she read as a child. She is absolutely fearless in the appropriation of recognizable characters, such as Donald Duck and Mickey Mouse, in her work. She twists their limbs, contorts their faces, compresses them together, blends them into complex patterned backgrounds - always imbuing them with an incredible energy. Although Susan often used pop culture characters in her work they are not naive or childlike. These are drawings by a brilliant self-taught artist who has been creating exceptional work for decades without an audience in mind.
Mladen Stilinović
"Various Works 1986 - 1999"
02 February 16 - September 10, 2016
Various works 1986 - 1999, from two houses, from the collections of John Nixon, Sue Cramer, Kerrie Poliness, Peter Haffenden and Phoebe Haffenden.
Including: Geometry of Cakes (various shelves), 1993; Poor People’s Law (black and white plate), 1993; White Absence (glasses, ruler, set square, silver spoon, silver ladel with skin photograph and wooden cubes), 1990-1996; Exploitation of the Dead (grey and red star painting, wooden painting, black spoon with red table, red plate), 1984-1990; Money and Zeros (zero tie, paintings made for friends in Australia (Sue, John, Kerrie), numbers painting), 1991-1992; Words - Slogans (various t-shirts) - “they talk about the death of art...help! someone is trying to kill me”, “my sweet little lamb”, “work is a disease - Karl Marx”; Various artist books, catalogues, monographs, videos; Poster from exhibition Insulting Anarchy; "Circular" Croatian - Australian edition; Artist book by Vlado Martek (Dostoyevsky); more.
Thanks to Mladen Stilinović and Branka Stipančić.
Jonathan Walker
Always Will Need To Wear Winter Shirt Blue + Ochre Small Check Pattern
21 August - 21 September, 2015
Untitled
I am not a great reader of poetry but I always return to the work of Melbourne poet, Vincent Buckley (1925- 1988). Perhaps I find his most tantalising piece to be not a finished poem but a fragment left on a scrap of paper discovered on his desk after the poet’s death.
The poetry gathers like oil
In the word-core, and spreads
It has its music meet,
Its music is in movement.
This fragment is more the shell left behind from a volatile thought than a finished poem. I find the last two lines honest but awkward whereas the first two lines work like an arrow. Most likely he could not find a resolution so it was left. Still, in its present form, it remains an eloquent testimony to the ultimate failure of a medium to express mobile thought and sensation, in Buckley’s case, through verbal language. It’s an important matter because this is something all artists have to deal with regardless of the medium.
I have never written a poem, however, I am forever copying fragments from books on paper scraps in a vain effort to fix certain notions in my head. At first, they function as bookmarks that are sometimes returned to when I open the book. But before long, as they accumulate, they fall out littering the table interspersed with A4 photocopies, bills, books and medications.
To return to Buckley’s fragment, the first two lines very much evoke how I paint nowadays. As you age, detail diminishes and patches of light become more luminous and float. I feel the most honest way of dealing with this is by smearing the oil paint on the canvas with the fingers and working close-up, blind. Only if the patches coalesce into an approaching image can the work gain a life.
-
Jonathan Walker was born in Melbourne, Australia and brought up on a dairy farm in Gippsland. In the 1970’s he studied painting at RMIT and won the Harold Wright Scholarship to the British Museum, London. During the 1980’s he exhibited at Pinacotheca Gallery, Richmond and had work shown at the NGV and Heidi City Art Gallery. Over the same period he designed the cover for the “Epigenesi” LP by Giancarlo Toniutti, Italy and conducted a mail exchange work with Achim Wollscheid, Germany. The work with artists through the post resulted in an article published in the bicentenary issue of Art and Australia 1988. He showed in artist run spaces such as WestSpace in the 90’s and 2000’s, and until 2012, taught painting at Victoria University, which is where we (Colleen Ahern and Lisa Radford) as organisers of the exhibition, among many others, had the privilege of being his student.
Walker’s knowledge was imparted to students through the careful selection of music, literature, and artists found in books that he himself had ordered for the library. Walker’s strategy was the generosity of sharing his vast knowledge with references specific to each student and their context.
Walker’s paintings share a similar focus and intimacy.
This exhibition presents a small selection of recent paintings alongside a publication that includes Walker’s writing. Observational and analytical, Walker’s work is a type of material notation — the time of day, colour and how it is blended, the both specific and fleeting location of a reflection on lino or the question of whether a chair leg should be included in a painting.
Please join us on Friday August 21 between 6-8pm to celebrate the opening of the exhibition.
Curated by Colleen Ahern and Lisa Radford.
B. Wurtz
Curated by Nic Tammens
March 26 - April 4, 2015
B.Wurtz works from a basement studio in his home on Manhattan’s Lower East Side.
This local fact is attested to by the plastic shopping bags and newsprint circulars that appear in his work. As formal objects, they don’t make loud claims about their origins but nonetheless transmit street addresses and places of business from the bottom of this long thin island. Like plenty of artists, Wurtz is affected by what is local and what is consumed. His work is underpinned by this ethic. It often speaks from a neighborhood or reads like the contents of a hamper:
“BLACK PLUMS $1.29 lb.”
“Food Bazaar”
“USDA Whole Pork Shoulder Picnic 99c lb.”
“RITE AID Pharmacy, with us it’s personal.”
“H. Brickman & Sons.”
“Sweet Yams 59c lb."
Most of the work in this exhibition was made while the artist was in residence at Dieu Donne, a workshop dedicated to paper craft in Midtown. Here Wurtz fabricated assemblages with paper and objects that are relatively lightweight, with the intention that they would be easily transportable to Australia. This consideration isn’t absolute in Wurtz’s work, but was prescriptive for making the current exhibition light and cheap. Packed in two boxes, these works were sent from a USPS post office on the Lower East Side and delivered to North Melbourne by Australia Post.
Wurtz appears courtesy of Metro Pictures, New York.
Thanks to Rob Halverson, Joshua Petherick, Sari de Mallory, Matt Hinkley, Helen Johnson, Fayen d'Evie, Ask Kilmartin, Lisa Radon, Ellena Savage, Yale Union, and "Elizabeth".
John Nixon
"Archive"
December 15 - January 20, 2014
The presentation of John Nixon's archive offered a rare showcase of this extensive collection of the artist's own publications, catalogues, posters, ephemera, editions and more, from the mid 1980s onwards, alongside a selection of his artworks.
Organized by John Nixon, Joshua Petherick and Matt Hinkley.
"Habitat"
at Minerva, Sydney (organised by Joshua Petherick and Matt Hinkley)
November 15 - December 20, 2014
Lupo Borgonovo, Janet Burchill & Jennifer McCamley,
Lewis Fidock, HR Giger, Piero Gilardi, Veit Laurent Kurz,
Cinzia Ruggeri, Michael E. Smith, Lucie Stahl, Daniel Weil, Wols
Press Release:
“...It contained seven objects. The slender fluted bone, surely formed for flight, surely from the wing of some large bird. Three archaic circuitboards, faced with mazes of gold. A smooth white sphere of baked clay. An age-blackened fragment of lace. A fingerlength segment of what she assumed was bone from a human wrist, grayish white, inset smoothly with the silicon shaft of a small instrument that must once have ridden flush with the surface of the skin - but the thing’s face was seared and blackened.”
William Gibson, “Count Zero”, 1986
"Autumn Projects Archive"
Curated by Liza Vasiliou
March 6 - March 15, 2014
World Food Books, in conjunction with the Virgin Australia Melbourne Fashion Festival 2014, presented the Autumn Projects archive, consisting of a selection of early examples in Australian fashion with a particular interest in collecting designers and labels from the period beginning in the 1980’s, who significantly influenced the discourse of Australian Fashion.
Curated by Liza Vasiliou, the exhibition provided a unique opportunity to view pieces by designers Anthea Crawford, Barbara Vandenberg, Geoff Liddell and labels CR Australia, Covers, Jag along with early experimental collage pieces by Prue Acton and Sally Browne’s ‘Fragments’ collection, suspended throughout the functioning World Food Books shop in Melbourne.
H.B. Peace
presented by CENTRE FOR STYLE
November 14, 2013
"Hey Blinky, you say chic, I say same"
Anon 2013
H.B. Peace is a clothing collaboration between great friends Blake Barns and Hugh Egan Westland. Their pieces explore the divergences between 'character’ and ‘personality’ in garments....etc
Special Thanks to Joshua Petherick and Matt Hinkley of WFB and Gillian Mears
and a Very Special Thank you to Audrey Thomas Hayes for her shoe collaboration.
Janet Burchill & Jennifer McCamley
"Aesthetic Suicide"
May 10 - June 8, 2013
The first of our occasional exhibitions in the World Food Books office/shop space in Melbourne, "Aesthetic Suicide" presented a body of new and older works together by artists Janet Burchill & Jennifer McCamley, including videos, prints, a wall work, and publications.
During shop open hours videos played every hour, on the hour.
1992, English
Softcover, 224 pages, 19.5 x 12.5 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Dedalus / Cambs
$30.00 - In stock -
First 1992 Dadalus English translation of The Green Face, Meyrink's second novel, published in Germany in 1916 to critical and commercial acclaim. With cover art by Richard Oelze.
"Its setting is Amsterdam, which is used in the novel as a symbol of European decadence, and is ultimately destroyed. "The novel has the classic Meyrink features - the mystical wedding, the galaxy of grotesque characters and the haunting atmosphere of the ghetto. Mike Mitchell's superb translation of The Green Face will help establish Gustav Meyrink's reputation as one of this century's most important authors of fantastic fiction."—book jacket
"Meyrink's The Green Face is second in visionary power only to The Golem... By creating an all-pervading atmosphere of kafkaesque mystery and uncertainty, Meyrink succeeds in suggesting inexhaustible depths and heights of meaning."—Franz Rottensteiner
Good—VG copy with light wear/toning.
1989, English
Softcover, 158 pages, 21.5 x 13.5 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Marion Boyars / London
$40.00 - In stock -
1989 English language edition of Bataille's L'ABBÉ C, translated by Philip A. Facey and published by Marion Boyars.
Told in a series of first person accounts, L'ABBÉ C is a startling narrative of the intense and terrifying relationship between twin brothers, Charles and Robert. Charles is a modern libertine dedicated to vice and depravity; Robert is a priest so devout that he is nicknamed 'L'Abbé'. As the story progresses, the suffocating atmosphere becomes increasingly permeated with illness, breakdown and eventual death. As in Blue of Noon and Story of the Eye, Bataille has succeeded in portraying the darkest and most profound aspects of human experience with amazing strength and dispassionate objectivity.
"Bataille speaks about man's condition, not his nature. Bataille has survived the death of God. In him, reality is conflict."—Jean-Paul Sartre
"Bataille is now recognized in France as one of the most challenging and original writers of our century. English translations of his work are long overdue, and one can only welcome the opportunity for English speaking readers to discover this major modern thinker."—Leo Bersani
"Essentially a psychological novel in which the emotions of the characters determine the movement of the story from beginning to end; explicit sex is absent. The style is crisp and this translation is quite remarkable... always faithful to the spirit."—New York Times Book Review
"The psychological intricacies display a graceful crisscrossing intensity."—Chicago Tribune
Georges Bataille was born in 1897 and died in 1962. He was a philosopher, novelist and critic whose startling and original ideas have influenced much modern literature and thought.
Cover design by Susi Mawani.
VG copy with light wear/light creasing to cover boards.
1992, English / French
Softcover (staple-bound), 64 pages, 24.5 x 19 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Purple Institute / Paris
$580.00 - In stock -
The true beginning of Purple — the very rare first issue of Elein Fleiss and Olivier Zahm's Purple Prose, published in 1992. Founded as a reaction against the superficial glamour of the 1980’s, Purple Prose embraced the immediate fanzine aesthetics of what became referred to as 1990's anti-fashion, a far cry from what we now identify with Purple Fashion with.
Purple Prose 1, Automne 1992, features contributions by Dike Blair, Andrea Zittel, Joshua Decter, Henry Bond, Daniel Lemer, Jutta Koether, Andrea Zittel, Roddy Bogawa, Jon Moritsugu, Jacques Boyreau, Jan Avgikos, Martin Kippenberger, Patrick Van Caeckenbergh, Edgar Heap of Birds, David Robbins, Jean-Christophe Menu, Vitaly Glabel, Kitten (pre—Free Kitten: Kim Gordon of Sonic Youth and Pussy Galore's Julia Cafritz), Patrick Bouchitey, Jean-Luc Vilmouth, François Roche, and many more.
Soon after the birth of Purple Prose, Zahm created spin-off publications like Purple Sexe, Purple Fiction and what we now know and love, Purple Fashion. Zahm aimed at fusing together his two worlds, fashion and art, in creating Purple Fashion.
Before entering the world of fashion, Zahm worked as an art critic with widespread recognition for his work as a curator as well as his participation in over 150 exhibitions featuring international contemporary art. In 1994, Zahm and Fleiss curated “The Winter of Love,” a hit show for the Museum of Modern Art in Paris that they later took to P.S.1 in New York. In responding to the superficial glamour of the 1980s, Zahm co-founded Purple Prose magazine. In the introduction of Purple Anthology, Zahm shares why he chose to create Purple Prose:
"We launched Purple Prose in the early 1990s without any means, and without any experience, because we wanted to make a magazine that was radically different. We wanted to support the artists around us that no one else supported, much less talked about. [..] It would be a form of opposition of our own".
Very Good—Near Fine copy, light wear.
2004, English / French
Softcover (staple-bound), 21 x 27.5 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Purple Institute / Paris
$180.00 - In stock -
Rare copy of the first issue of The Purple Journal, featuring Elein Fleiss, Jeffrey Rian, Dorothée Perret, Mark Borthwick, Gérard Duguet-Grasser, Laetitia Benat, Marina Faust, Allen Ginsberg, Susan Cianciolo, Henry Roy, Lizzi Bougatsos, Anders Edström, Maurizio Cattelan, Takashi Homma, Michel Zumpf, Chikashi Suzuki, Barbet Schroeder, Alain Lacroix, Jonathan Boulting, Maison Martin Margiela, Cora Maghnaoui, Claude Lévêque, Beth Yahp, Cosmic Wonder, Angela Hill, Ferdinand Gouzon, Comme des Garçons, Curtis Winter, Beth Yahp, Ferdinand Gouzon, Curtis Winter, Manon de Boer, Christophe Brunnquell, Sébastien Jamain, Tiphaine Samoyault, Helmut Lang, Veronique Branquinho, Sébastien Jamain, Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster, Sharon Mesmer, Gérard Duguet-Grasser, and much more. Includes the special Paris supplement (16 pages).
"This is our first issue: joy, hope. Starting out or beginning again (the journal Hélène and the magazine Purple)-anyway, it's a first appearance. A path we'll travel together, we, the editors, and you, the readers. We will show reality as we see it through encounters with people, places, landscapes, artworks. Writing and photographs, original voices. The journey is not mapped out in advance, we'll discover it (as it reveals itself) with the changing seasons."—the editors
In 1992 Olivier Zahm and his partner Elein Fleiss printed the first issue of Purple Prose, a Parisian literary art zine that over the years has evolved into Purple Fashion Magazine. Soon after the birth of Purple Prose, Zahm and Fleiss created spin-off publications like les cahiers purple, Purple Sexe, Purple Fiction, and of course, Purple Fashion. Zahm aimed at fusing together his two worlds, fashion and art, in creating Purple Fashion.
Very Good copy, light wear/age/rippling to page edges.
1960, English
Softcover, 160 pages, 18 x 10.5 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / good
Published by
Dell / New York
$20.00 - In stock -
First 1960 Dell paperback edition of Theodore Sturgeon's Venus Plus X, a 1961 Hugo Award finalist for Best Novel. David Pringle included it in his book Science Fiction: The 100 Best Novels.
Charlie Johns has been snatched from his home on 61 North 34th Street and delivered to the strange future world of Ledom. Here, violence is a vague and improbable notion. Technology has triumphed over hunger, overpopulation, pollution, even time and space. But there is a change Charlie finds even more gender is a thing of the past. Venus Plus X is Theodore Sturgeon's brilliant evocation of a civilization for whom tensions between male and female and the human preoccupation with sex no longer exist.
As Charlie Johns explores Ledom and its people, he finds that the human precepts he holds dear are profane in this new world. But has Charlie learned all there is to know about this advanced society? And why are the Ledom so intent on gaining Charlie's approval? Unsettling, compelling, and no less than visionary, here is science fiction at its a novel whose wisdom and lyricism make it one of the most original and insightful speculations on gender ever produced.
Theodore Sturgeon (1918–1985) is considered one of the godfathers of contemporary science fiction and dark fantasy. The author of numerous acclaimed short stories and novels, among them the classics More Than Human, Venus Plus X, and To Marry Medusa, Sturgeon also wrote for television and holds among his credits two episodes of the original 1960s Star Trek series, for which he created the Vulcan mating ritual and the expression "Live long and prosper." He is also credited as the inspiration for Kurt Vonnegut's recurring fictional character Kilgore Trout.
Sturgeon is the recipient of the Hugo Award, the Nebula Award, and the International Fantasy Award. In 2000, he was posthumously honored with a World Fantasy Award for Life Achievement.
Good copy with general age, heavy toning, foxing, etc.
1972, English
Softcover, 160 pages, 17.7 x 11 cm
Out of print title / used / good
Published by
Corgi / London
$10.00 - Out of stock
1972 Corgi paperback edition of Theodore Sturgeon's Venus Plus X, a 1961 Hugo Award finalist for Best Novel. David Pringle included it in his book Science Fiction: The 100 Best Novels.
Charlie Johns has been snatched from his home on 61 North 34th Street and delivered to the strange future world of Ledom. Here, violence is a vague and improbable notion. Technology has triumphed over hunger, overpopulation, pollution, even time and space. But there is a change Charlie finds even more gender is a thing of the past. Venus Plus X is Theodore Sturgeon's brilliant evocation of a civilization for whom tensions between male and female and the human preoccupation with sex no longer exist.
As Charlie Johns explores Ledom and its people, he finds that the human precepts he holds dear are profane in this new world. But has Charlie learned all there is to know about this advanced society? And why are the Ledom so intent on gaining Charlie's approval? Unsettling, compelling, and no less than visionary, here is science fiction at its a novel whose wisdom and lyricism make it one of the most original and insightful speculations on gender ever produced.
Theodore Sturgeon (1918–1985) is considered one of the godfathers of contemporary science fiction and dark fantasy. The author of numerous acclaimed short stories and novels, among them the classics More Than Human, Venus Plus X, and To Marry Medusa, Sturgeon also wrote for television and holds among his credits two episodes of the original 1960s Star Trek series, for which he created the Vulcan mating ritual and the expression "Live long and prosper." He is also credited as the inspiration for Kurt Vonnegut's recurring fictional character Kilgore Trout.
Sturgeon is the recipient of the Hugo Award, the Nebula Award, and the International Fantasy Award. In 2000, he was posthumously honored with a World Fantasy Award for Life Achievement.
Good copy with general age, toning, etc. discolouration to edges/spine.
1967 / 1980, English
Softcover, 190 pages, 19.5 x 13 cm
Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
John Calder / London
$20.00 - In stock -
1980 print of 1967 English Calder edition.
"The Battle of Reichenfels has been fought and lost. The army is in flight. The enemy is expected to arrive in the town at any moment. A soldier, carrying a parcel under his arm, is erring through the snowy streets. All the streets look the same, and he cannot remember the name of the street where he was to meet the man who had agreed to take the parcel. But he must deliver the parcel, or at least get rid of it. ...
Alain Robbe-Grillet says in his prefatory note: 'This story is fiction, not a report. It describes a reality which is not necessarily that of the reader's own experience. ...
And yet the reality here in question is strictly physical, that is to say it has no allegorical significance. The reader should therefore see in it only the objects, the gestures, the words and the events that are told, without seeking to give them either more or less meaning than they would have in his own life, or is in his own death.' A leader of the literary movement that pioneered a new kind of psychological novel from the early fifties, Alain Robbe-Grillet (born 1922) with his theories of subjective reality and ability to accurately interpret the distorting characteristics of the human mind — combined with a brilliant talent for telling a good story in an unusual way
— is recognized today as an important and influential writer whose works have become modern classics, not only his nine novels, but also his film scenarios, many of which he has directed himself. His collaboration with Resnais in making Last Year At Marienbad is one of the classics of post-war cinema.
'powerful evocation and atmospherics.... Christine Brooke-Rose's translation is faultless.'—Observer
VG copy, light age/wear.
1985, English
Hardcover (w. dust jacket), 186 pages, 22.5 x 14.5 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Carcanet Press / Manchester
$20.00 - In stock -
With an afterword by Glen Cavaliero. First 1985 hardcover edition of this collection of three stories, "juvenilia of John Cowper Powys' old age", all of which are hitherto unprinted. Three stories make use of surrealism to tell the tales of two armchairs, the strange people of the Go Peninsula, and Yok Pok and his younger sister.
John Cowper Powys (1862-1963) was an English novelist, philosopher, lecturer, critic and poet born in Shirley, Derbyshire, where his father was vicar of the parish church in 1871–1879. Powys appeared with a volume of verse in 1896 and a first novel in 1915, but gained success only with his novel Wolf Solent in 1929.
VG copy. VG DJ light wear.
1966, English
Hardcover, 500 pages, 20 x 14 cm
Out of print title / used / average
Published by
Macdonald / London
$20.00 - In stock -
1966 hardcover edition of Powys' Maiden Castle, the fourth in the series of novels called 'the only novels produced by an English writer that can be fairly compared with the fictions of Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky' (—George Steiner, The New Yorker), published by Macdonald, London.
Extravagant, exuberant and introspective, 'Maiden Castle' reveals characters that struggle with perplexities of love, desire and faith while the looming fortress of Maiden Castle exerts an otherworldy force that irrevocably determines the course of their lives. '[Powys] gives not warmth nor enlightenment, but enduring vision, enduring strength, enduring courage' - Henry Miller
John Cowper Powys (1862-1963) was an English novelist, philosopher, lecturer, critic and poet born in Shirley, Derbyshire, where his father was vicar of the parish church in 1871–1879. Powys appeared with a volume of verse in 1896 and a first novel in 1915, but gained success only with his novel Wolf Solent in 1929.
Average-Good copy. Foxing/marking to block edges and cover, otherwise Good throughout. Remnants of poor dust jacket inserted.
2016, English
Softcover, 96 pages, 27.8 x 21.4 cm
Published by
Seagull Books / London
$39.00 - In stock -
Translated by Donald Nicholson-Smith
Edited with a Preface by Évelyne Grossman
A poet, philosopher, essayist, playwright, actor, and director, Antonin Artaud was a visionary writer and a major influence within and beyond the French avant-garde. A key text for understanding his thought and his appeal, 50 Drawings to Murder Magic is rooted in the nine years Artaud spent in mental asylums, struggling with schizophrenia and the demonic, persecutory visions it unleashed. Set down in a dozen exercise books written between 1946 and 1948, these pieces trace Artaud’s struggle to escape a personal hell that extends far beyond the walls of asylums and the dark magicians he believed ran them.
The first eleven notebooks are filled with fragments of writing and extraordinary sketches: totemic figures, pierced bodies, and enigmatic machines, some revealing the marks of a trembling hand, others carefully built up from firm, forceful pencil strokes. The twelfth notebook, completed two months before Artaud’s death in 1948, changes course: it’s an extraordinary text on the loss of magic to the demonic—the piece that gives the book its title.
“Artaud matters,” wrote John Simon in the Saturday Review years ago. Nearly seventy years after his death, that remains true—perhaps more than ever.
"A gloriously reproduced edition . . . . There is something in this text that speaks to the creative process--especially to the degree to which so much of what the writer or artist commits to the page (or canvass) extends from a place beyond conscious attention, to be received actively but without specific intention."—Rough Ghosts
1972, English
Softcover, 170 pages, 18 x 11 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
New English Library / London
$35.00 - Out of stock
Lovely 1972 New English Library paperback edition of The Marquis de Sade, an essay by Simone de Beauvoir. This is a remarkable book by and about one of the most controversial figures in history, written by the famous French existentialist philosopher, writer, social theorist, and feminist activist, de Beauvoir. The essay is accompanied by ten selections from De Sade's writing, including previously unpublished pieces from such masterworks as 120 DAYS IN SODOM.
"De Sade has given his name to a perversion that is especially prevalent today. Simone de Beauvoir, in a shattering yet sober and supremely informed analysis of his work, insists that this strange man's imagination should become more widely known. Only by revealing and disseminating de Sade's long-banned words will the original ignorance that creates perversion be cleared."
Very Good copy with light wear, toned pages.
?, English
Softcover, 70 pages, 20.5 x 14 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / good
Published by
Rubberwear Press / Nunawading
$45.00 - In stock -
Privately-published, printed and distributed by Rubberwear Press in Nunawading, Return to Bondage is an anonymous Australian SM erotic novel, cheaply produced and stapled, typewritten and mimeographed, undated (presumably late 1970s-1980s), and written for "Rubber Lovers", "Bondage Fans", "Disciplinarians".
Good—Very Good copy, rusted staples, previous shop stickers, closed tear to back cover.
1973, English
Softcover, 158 pages, 19.5 x 13 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Picador / USA
$15.00 - Out of stock
1973 Picador edition of MURPHY by Samuel Beckett, with cover art by John Holmes. First published in 1938 and reissued by Picador in 1973, this early Beckett novel is a bleakly hilarious tour through madness, metaphysics, and the daily slog of simply existing.
"Followed to England by a riotous collection of Irish eccentrics, Murphy ventures disastrously from the calm of his rocking chair in a Kensington mews. He falls in love with Celia, a prostitute. Fascinated by Eastern • mysticism, he pursues swamis and fortune-tellers. His eventual employment as an orderly in a mental hospital leads to a devastatingly ironic conclusion.
Historically, Murphy forms a bridge between the novels of James Joyce and the new literature of the post-war world, in which Beckett's work occupies such a prominent place. Murphy, though revolutionary in its perceptions, is also exuberantly readable. Though imbued with its author's characteristic pessimism, it is a comic masterpiece."
"One of the greatest prose-writers of the century'—THE TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENT
"Can scarcely be matched by another living writer'—NEW STATESMAN
Very Good copy.
1967, English
Softcover, 100 pages, 23 x 15 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
North Atlantic Books / Vermont
$40.00 - In stock -
First edition of 20,000 A.D., a collection of poetry from the 1960s—70s by founder of Peace Eye Bookstore, the Fuck You Press, and the Fugs, Ed Sanders, published by North Atlantic Books, Vermont, in 1976. Deeply influenced by the work of Dylan Thomas, Ezra Pound, and Allen Ginsberg, Sanders helped bridge the concerns of Beat poetry and the countercultural movement of the 1960s. Sanders discussed his approach to investigative poetry: “Nonfiction is a kind of map of fragments of information sequenced together, like an elegant baklava with layers of meaning,” he alleged. “You have to think of different arrays of sequencing information … You have to make an apt choice, or an artistic choice, or an aesthetic choice about what you put in—and what you leave out. It’s an art form when to say no. Especially in investigative poetry, it’s a mission.”
Very Good copy, light tanning.
1957, English
Hardcover (w. dust jacket), 506 pages, 20.5 x 14.5 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / good
Published by
Weidenfeld & Nicholson / London
$45.00 - In stock -
First 1957 hardcover edition of William Fifield's first novel, The Devil's Marchioness, published by Weidenfeld & Nicolson, London, with evocative period jacket design by the remarkable Australian artist and stage designer Loudon Sainthill.
This novel is based on the life of one of history's most evil women, Madeleine d'Aubray, Marquise de Brinvilliers. The scene is France in the reign of Louis XIV—an era of intrigue, gambling, adultery and violence as well as of military glory and artistic achievement. Madeleine was a child of her time; beautiful, passionate and—above all-strong willed. She allowed nothing to interfere with her desires and no man was able to subdue her, though many tried. Her husband, a weak and effeminate son of a famous family and a reckless, unlucky gambler, was wax in her hands. Her father, the incorruptible Civil Lieutenant of Paris and her two brothers were quickly entangled in schemes fatal to their position and honour.
Her first lover, the sinister Godin de Sainte-Croix was a gambler, trafficker in poisons and worshipper at black masses where the naked body of a young woman was used as an altar. He persuaded his mistress to try out one of his poisons on an old woman, chosen at random from the teeming mass of poor patients in a Paris hospital. This started her down the path that was to lead her to the dungeons of the Conciergerie prison, the rack, the water torture and the scaffold. William Fifield's narrative, based on Madeleine's own papers and on other contemporary sources, brings the scenes and characters vividly to life. While some readers may be shocked by its frankness, few will put it down until they have followed Madeleine to the end of her terrible journey.
William Fifield was born in Chicago in 1916 and started selling short stories, articles and radio scripts while he was still at college. He is married and now lives in France.
Good—Very Good copy, well-preserved with some wear and mild chipping to DJ extremities, toning, foxing to book block edges and preliminaries.
1964, English
Softcover, 48 pages, 18 x 12 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / good
Published by
Faber & Faber / London
$15.00 - In stock -
First 1964 Faber paperback edition of Beckett's PLAY (and Two Short Pieces for Radio).
"It is totally fascinating and satisfying because, in its smaller scale, its polyphonic dialogue uses much the same astonishing intervals of resonance and echo and discovery as "Godot"; and because it shows Beckett at his most carelessly masterful, using comedy to scour the tragic, to put flesh upon our lies, and to give the lie to our flesh."—Anne Duchene, The Guardian
Good copy with general cover wear and foxing.
1962, English
Hardcover (w. dust jacket), 48 pages, 20.5 x 14 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / good
Published by
Faber & Faber / London
$80.00 - In stock -
Scarce first hardcover edition of Beckett's Happy Days, published by Faber & Faber, 1962. Red cloth boards and dust jacket.
In Happy Days, Samuel Beckett's first full-length play since Endgame, things are stripped once again to their barest essentials. There are only two characters: Winnie, a woman of about fifty, and Willie, a man of about sixty. In the first act Winnie is buried up to her waist in a mound of earth, but still has the use of her arms and a few earthly possessions a toothbrush, tube of tooth paste, small mirror, revolver, handkerchief, spectacles; in the second act she is imbedded up to her neck and can move only her eyes.
Willie lives and moves-on all fours— behind the mound, appearing intermittently and replying only occasionally to Winnie's long monologue, but the knowledge of his presence is a source of comfort and inspiration to her, and apparently the prerequisite for all her 'happy days'.
A characteristic tour de force, Happy Days is a worthy successor to Waiting for Godot, Endgame, All that Fall and Krapp's Last Tape.
With jacket design featuring photograph from the first performance of the play-Beckett's first since Endgame-at New York's Cherry Lane Theatre in 1961, directed by Alan Schneider.
Good ex-library copy in Good dust jacket. Associated stampings to colophon and end-blank, no library marking to dust jacket, clipped with mild age/wear, also to red boards and pages.
1996, English
Softcover, 142 pages, 13.2 x 20.3 cm
Published by
New Directions / New York
$32.00 - In stock -
Anne Carson’s poetry––characterized by various reviewers as “short talks,” “essays,” or “verse narratives”––combines the confessional and the critical in a voice all her own. Known as a remarkable classicist, Anne Carson in Glass, Irony and God weaves contemporary and ancient poetic strands with stunning style. This collection includes “The Glass Essay,” a powerful poem about the end of a love affair, told in the context of Carson’s reading of the Brontë sisters, “Book of Isaiah,” which evokes the deeply primitive feel of ancient Judaism, and “The Fall of Rome,” about her trip to “find” Rome and her struggle to overcome feelings of terrible alienation there.
ANNE CARSON was born in Canada and has been a professor of Classics for over thirty years. Her awards and honors include the Lannan Award, the Pushcart Prize, the Griffin Trust Award for Excellence in Poetry, and fellowships from the Guggenheim and MacArthur Foundations.
2025, English
Softcover, 130 pages, 20.3 x 17.8 cm
Published by
The New York Review of Books / New York
$34.00 - Out of stock
Ancient Mesopotamia, the Zodiac, and the land of the dead feature in this wildly surrealistic adventure story—Leonora Carrington's revolutionary second novel, long out of print.
The Stone Door is an omen, an incantation, and an adventure story rolled into one. Built in layers like a puzzle box, it is the tale of two people, of love and the Zodiac and the Kabbalah, of Transylvania and Mesopotamia converging at the Caucasus, of a mad Hungarian King named Böles Kilary and of a woman's discovery of an initiatory code that leads to a Cyclopean obstacle, to love, self and awareness, to the great stone door of Kescke and beyond.
Written at the end of World War II but not published until 1977 and long unavailable, The Stone Door is at once a celebration of the union of the surrealist painter Leonora Carrington and her husband, the Hungarian-born photographer Chiki Weisz, and an argument for the unification of the male and the female as a means of liberating the human race.
1983, English
Softcover, 18 pages, 26.5 x 19 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Black Sparrow Press / Santa Rosa
$85.00 - In stock -
First 1983 first printing softcover edition of Bukowski's short story illustrated by Robert Crumb, Bring Me Your Love, published by Black Sparrow Press, Santa Rosa. Charles Bukowski's acerbic wit shines through in this dark short story about a cheating lover who visits his lover in a mental asylum, accompanied by the illustrations of the mighty R. Crumb.
The American writer Charles Bukowski and the infamous cartoon illustrator Robert Crumb collaborated on two books during the early 1980s. Bring me your Love was the first of these publications, and was followed the following year by There’s no Business, which was also published by the Black Sparrow Press in 1984. Bring Me Your Love focuses on a protagonist common to many Bukowski stories - a man named Harry whose wife is in a mental hospital, and who spends his free time drinking and having sex. Crumb’s comic and graphic drawings compliment Bukowski’s short tale with illustrations showing Gloria punching herself in the face; Harry and Nan ‘going good’ in the motel room, and the same pair grappling on the floor, semi-clothed, both reaching for the telephone receiver. Crumb and Bukowski later came together for a third and final time in 1998, with a posthumous collection of Bukowski’s previously unpublished diaries. “He was a very difficult guy to hang out with in person” Crumb once wrote of Bukowski, “but on paper he was great.” Bring Me Your Love is must-have for every Bukowski collection.
“The Walt Whitman of Los Angeles.”―Joyce Carol Oates, bestselling author
“He brought everybody down to earth, even the angels.”―Leonard Cohen, songwriter
Published in a limited edition of 5000 copies with the pink endpapers. Re-printed many times by Harper Collins, Ecco, etc. but this was the first Black Sparrow run.
Very Good copy, light wear.
2025, English
Softcover, 312 pages, 20.3 x 13.3 cm
Published by
Wakefield Press / Cambridge
$42.00 - In stock -
Joris-Karl Huysmans’s semi-autobiographical third novel, first published in French in 1881, signaled the beginning of his break from the naturalism of Émile Zola and his turn toward a “new naturalism” that laid out the negative consequences of determinism and embraced a disgust for human existence and an all-out war against respectability.
Domesticity tells the tale of novelist André Jayant and artist Cyprien Tibaille, two men struggling between the urges of their body and the urges of their soul—between the comforts of coupledom and the ideals of art—and with the failure of matrimony or the artistic endeavor to fulfill the needs of either. More than a psychological character study, though, Domesticity stands as one of the most memorable portraits of late-nineteenth-century Paris: its shops, its eateries, its apartments, and its sad, futile affairs of the heart.
Steeped in sardonic pessimism, this ode to sterility was one of the author’s own favorite novels of his career.
Earning a wage through the French civil service, Joris-Karl Huysmans (1848–1907) quietly explored the extremes of human nature and artifice through a series of books that influenced a number of literary movements: from the gray and grimy naturalism of Marthe and Downstream, to the cornerstones of the decadent movement, Against Nature and the Satanist classic Down There, to the dream-ridden surrealist favorite, Becalmed, and his Catholic novels, The Cathedral and The Oblate.
Translated, with an afterword, by George MacLennan.
English
Softcover,
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Gollancz / London
$20.00 - In stock -
"The corpus of science fiction written by Theodore Sturgeon is the single most important body of science fiction by an American to date"—Samuel R Delany
1986 British Gollancz edition of More Than Human, a 1953 science fiction fix-up novel by American writer Theodore Sturgeon, one of the godfathers of contemporary science fiction and dark fantasy. It is a revision and expansion of his 1952 novella Baby Is Three, which is bracketed by two additional parts written for the novel, "The Fabulous Idiot" and "Morality". It won the 1954 International Fantasy Award, as well as winner of the Hugo and Nebula Awards.
In this genre-bending novel-among the first to have launched sci-fi into the arena of literature-one of the great imaginers of the twentieth century tells a story as mind-blowing as any controlled substance and as affecting as a glimpse into a stranger's soul.
There's Lone, the simpleton who can hear other people's thoughts and make a man blow his brains out just by looking at him. There's Janie, who moves things without touching them, and there are the teleporting twins, who can travel ten feet or ten miles. There's Baby, who invented an antigravity engine while still in the cradle, and Gerry, who has everything it takes to run the world except for a conscience. Separately, they are talented freaks. Together, they compose a single organism that may represent the next step in evolution, and the final chapter in the history of the human race.
As the protagonists of More Than Human struggle to find out who they are and whether they are meant to help humanity or destroy it, Theodore Sturgeon explores questions of power and morality, individuality and belonging, with suspense, pathos, and a lyricism rarely seen in science fiction.
"Sturgeon's caviar dish"—Brian Aldiss
"He brought things to science fiction that had never been there before: eloquence, passion, a love for life, and a fiery poetry that found its natural expression in prose"—Robert Silverberg
VG copy, general wear.
1973, English
Hardcover (w. dust jacket), 224 pages, 21 x 14 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Farrar Straus & Giroux / New York
$300.00 - In stock -
First US hardcover edition of English author J.G. Ballard's Crash, published in 1973 by Farrar Straus & Giroux, New York, in hardcover with dust jacket illustrated by Lawrence Ratzkin and portrait of Ballard (verso).
Crash is a story about symphorophilia; specifically car-crash sexual fetishism: its protagonists become sexually aroused by staging and participating in real car-crashes. It was a highly controversial novel: one publisher's reader returned the verdict "This author is beyond psychiatric help. Do Not Publish!". In 1996, the novel was made into a film of the same name by David Cronenberg.
Original jacket blurb :
"This brilliant, startlingly original novel opens with the narrator recovering in the hospital after a car crash in which he has killed the husband of a young woman doctor. In his pain-filled dreams he finds himself dominated by strange sexual fantasies, and he determines to find the real meaning of this horrific experience. When he leaves the hospital, he revisits the scene of the crash, and meets the woman doctor. During their affair they begin an exploration of the motorcar in all its forms, conducting a variety of sexual experiments on the motorways spreading around London. They meet a violent and aggressive figure called Vaughan, a "hoodlum scientist" who seems determined to die in a car crash with a famous film actress.
Terrified of Vaughan, and yet under his spell, the narrator joins his entourage of racing drivers, drug addicts, and airport prostitutes. They take part in stock-car races, watch test vehicles being crashed at the Road Research Laboratory, and all the time are being carried closer to the sinister climax of the novel, a disquieting vision of the future in which sex and technology form a nightmare marriage.
Violent and frightening, but always true to its subject, Crash is a visionary portrait of the brutal, erotic, and overlit future that beckons ever more powerfully from the margins of the technological landscape. Mr. Ballard has written a compulsively readable tour de force, as hypnotic and baleful in its own way as was A Clockwork Orange is."
Very Good copy in VG dust jacket some small chipping to spine tips, tiny closed tears. Tanning to cover edges, marking to book block edges, pages crisp and clean.
1967, English
Softcover, 506 pages, 17.5 x 11 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / good
Published by
Panther / London
$15.00 - Out of stock
1967 Panther edition of Leduc's La Bâtarde, with preface by Simone de Beauvoir.
An obsessive and revealing self-portrait of a remarkable woman humiliated by the circumstances of her birth and by her physical appearance, La Bâtarde relates Violette Leduc's long search for her own identity through a series of agonising and passionate love affairs with both men and women. When first published, La Bâtarde earned Violette Leduc comparisons to Jean Genet for the frank depiction of her sexual escapades and immoral behaviour. A confession that contains portraits of several famous French authors, this book is more than just a scintillating memoir - like that of Henry Miller, Leduc's brilliant writing style and attention to language transform this autobiography into a work of art.
Average-Good copy w. general cover wear/creasing, toning to pages.