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.
2025, English
Softcover, 460 pages, 26 x 20.3 cm
Published by
Primary Information / New York
$85.00 - Out of stock
Started in 1989 by designer and writer Robert Ford, THING magazine was the voice of the Queer Black music and art scene in the early 1990s. Ford and his editors were part of the burgeoning House music scene, which originated in Chicago’s Queer underground, and some of the top DJs and musicians from that time were featured in the magazine, including Frankie Knuckles, Gemini, Larry Heard, Rupaul, and Deee-Lite. THING published ten issues from 1989-1993, before it was cut short by Ford’s death from AIDS-related illness. All ten issues of THING are collected and published here for the first time.
As House music thrived, THING captured the multidisciplinary nature of the scene, opening its pages to a wide range of subjects: poetry and gossip, fiction and art, interviews and polemics. The HIV/AIDS crisis loomed large in its contents, particularly in the personal reflections and vital treatment resources that it published. An essay by poet Essex Hemphill was published alongside the gossip columnist Michael Musto and Rupaul dished wisdom alongside a diary from the March on Washington for Lesbian, Gay, and Bi Equal Rights and Liberation. Joan Jett Blakk’s revolutionary presidential campaign is contained in these pages, as are some of the most underground, influential literary voices of the time, such as Dennis Cooper, Vaginal Davis, Gary Indiana, Marlon Riggs, David Wojnarowicz, and even David Sedaris.
THING was very much in dialogue with the club kids in New York and other Queer publishing ventures, but in many ways, it fostered an entirely unique perspective—one with more serious ambitions. In a moment when the gay community was besieged by the HIV/AIDS crisis and a wantonly cruel government, the influence and significance of this cheaply-produced newsprint magazine vastly exceeded its humble means, presenting a beautiful portrait of the ball and club culture that existed in Chicago with deep intellectual reflections. THING was a publication by and for its community and understood the fleetingness of its moment. To reencounter this work today, is to reinstate the Black voices who were so central to the history of HIV/AIDS activism and Queer and club culture, but which were often sidelined by white Queer discourse. In many ways, THING offered a blueprint for the fundamental role a magazine plays in bringing together a community, its tagline summing up the bold stakes of this important venture: “She Knows Who She Is.”
The magazine included contributions from Trent D. Adkins, Joey Arias, Aaron Avant Garde, Ed Bailey, Freddie Bain, Basscut, Belasco, Joan Jett Blakk, Simone Bouyer, Lady Bunny, Bunny & Pussy, Derrick Carter, Fire Chick, Chicklet, Stephanie Coleman, Bill Coleman, Lee Collins, Gregory Conerly, Mark Contratto, Dennis Cooper, Dorian Corey, Ed Crosby, The Darva, Vaginal Davis, Deee-Lite, Tor Dettwiler, Riley Evans, Evil, The Fabulous Pop Tarts, Mark Farina, Larry Flick, Robert Ford, Scott Free, David Gandy, Gemini, Gabriel Gomez, Roy Gonsalves, Chuck Gonzales, Tony Greene, André Halmon, Lyle Ashton Harris, Larry Heard, Essex Hemphill, Kathryn Hixson, Sterling Houston, Ishmael Houston-Jones, Gary Indiana, Candy J, Jamoo, Jazzmun, Gant Johnson, Owen Keehnen, Lady Miss Kier, Spencer Kincy, Iris Kit, Erin Krystle, Steve LaFreniere, Larvetta Larvon, Marc Loveless, Lypsinka, Malone, Marjorie Marginal, Terry A. Martin, Rodney McCoy Jr., Alan Miller, Bobby Miller, Michael Musto, Ultra Naté, Willi Ninja, Scott “Spunk” O’Hara, DeAundra Peek, Earl Pleasure, Marlon Riggs, Robert Rodi, Todd Roulette, RuPaul, Chantay Savage, David Sedaris, Rosser Shymanski, Larry Tee, Voice Farm, Lawrence D. Warren, Martha Wash, LeRoy Whitfield, Stephen Winter, David Wojnarowicz, and Hector Xtravaganza.
Managing Editors: James Hoff and Sam Korman
Designer: Rick Myers
Copy Editor: Allison Dubinsky
2025, English
Softcover, 89 pages, 18.8 x 14.8 cm
Published by
Pilot Press / London
$38.00 - In stock -
"All history will seem vain, insofar as it's the work of madmen. Mad was Adolpha mad Josepha mad the American elite.
Mad theology mad churches mad champions of ideologies and churches that blackmail good and stupid normal people mad revolutionaries with their righteous bourgeoise thinking who continue to be simple depositaries of the monastic blackmailing of man."
Pilot Press is delighted to present the publication of Derek Jarman's unrealised film treatment, The Assassination of Pier Paolo Pasolini in the Garden of Earthly Delights (1984).
Jarman’s treatment takes as its subject matter the events leading up to and including the 1975 murder of the Italian film director, Pier Paolo Pasolini, following the making of his controversial last film Saló, or the 120 Days of Sodom (1975).
The setting of the film takes as its inspiration the Dutch renaissance painter Hieronymus Bosch’s triptych The Garden of Earthly Delights (1490-1500), a painting that depicts both the joys and dangers of temptation, and which Jarman encountered on a visit to the Museo de Prado in Madrid the year he began working on the project.
For the first time, the final draft of the film’s treatment is presented alongside reproductions from the film’s workbook, which show Jarman’s calligraphic notes towards the film’s sequences, themes, cinematography, lighting, sound, costume, casting and props.
The year 2025 marks fifty years since Pasolini's murder and thirty-two since Jarman’s death due to AIDS. Against a backdrop of funding cuts to the arts and the arrival of the HIV/AIDS epidemic that vanished away so many important artists and visionaries, The Assassination of Pier Paolo Pasolini in the Garden of Earthly Delights is a powerful elegy to the decadence of queer cinema and the tragedy of its last auteur.
Derek Jarman was one of the most influential British artists of the twentieth century. His practice, as diverse as it was prolific, spanned painting, sculpture, film, writing, stage design, gardening and activism. He was an outspoken campaigner for LGBTQIA+ rights, and was one of the first public figures in the UK to raise awareness for those living with HIV/AIDS, announcing his own HIV diagnosis on the radio in 1986.
2024, English
Softcover, 260 pages, 19 x 15 cm
Published by
Pilot Press / London
$50.00 - In stock -
A Garden Manifesto gathers radical visions rooted in the earth from artists, writers, gardeners and activists, among them Lubaina Himid, Derek Jarman, Jamaica Kincaid, Ana Mendieta, Dan Pearson and Wolfgang Tillmans. It’s a seed box for an uncertain future, packed with anarchic dreams of Eden-making and humming with resistance to the colonial project of homogenisation and destruction.
Featuring William Blake, Joe Brainard, Jonny Bruce, John Clare, Gerry Dalton, Ellen Dillon, Baha Ebdeir, Alys Fowler, Magdalena Suarez Frimkess, Gaylene Gould, Green Guerillas, Joy Gregory, Fritz Haeg, Lubaina Himid, Philip Hoare, Rosie Hudson, Derek Jarman, Chantal Joffe, Laura Joy, Jamaica Kincaid, Elisabeth Kley, Olivia Laing, Jeremy Lee, Siobhan Liddell, Alison Lloyd, Hilary Lloyd, Jo McKerr, Lee Mary Manning, Ana Mendieta, Bernadette Mayer, Rosemary Mayer, Huw Morgan, Eileen Myles, Hussein Omar, Palestinian Heirloom Seed Library, Ian Patterson, Dan Pearson, Jean Perréal, Charlie Porter, Pat Porter, J. H. Prynne, Claire Ratinon, Jamie Reid, Lisa Robertson, Kuba Ryniewicz, Saadi, Sui Searle, Sei Shōnagon, Colin Stewart, Tabboo!, Edward Thomasson, Wolfgang Tillmans, Scott Treleaven, John Wieners, David Wojnarowicz, Matt Wolf and Sarah Wood
2022, English
Hardcover, 352 pages, 20.3 x 14 cm
Published by
The Visible Press / London
$65.00 - Out of stock
The independent British film journal Afterimage published thirteen issues between 1970 and 1987. International in scope, it surveyed the many forms of radical cinema during an extraordinary period of film history. Having emerged in the wake of post-1968 cultural and political change, Afterimage charted contemporary developments with special issues on themes such as the avant-garde, Latin American cinema and visionary animation, and also looked back at early film pioneers. It published many of the leading critics of the period and vitally provided a forum for filmmakers’ writings and manifestos.
This indispensable collection includes texts by scholars Noël Burch, Roger Cardinal, B. Ruby Rich and Peter Wollen, filmmakers Jean Epstein, Jean-Luc Godard, Derek Jarman and Jan Švankmajer, plus extended interviews with Hollis Frampton and Raúl Ruiz, and more.
The Afterimage Reader is edited by Mark Webber and features new contributions from two of the journal’s editors, Simon Field and Ian Christie.
1985, Japanese
Softcover (staple-bound), 16 pages, 25.7 x 18.2 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / fine
Published by
? / Japan
$80.00 - In stock -
Very rare Japanese brochure from around 1985, promoting the release on VHS (we think!) of La Planete Sauvage (Fantastic Planet), the 1973 French/Czech experimental science fiction animated film, directed by René Laloux and written and designed by Laloux and illustrator Roland Topor. The film was animated at Jiří Trnka Studio in Prague. The allegorical story, set on the distant planet Ygam, is based on the 1957 novel Oms en série by French writer Stefan Wul. Enslaved humans called Oms are the playthings of giant blue native inhabitants, the Draags. Terr, kept as a pet since infancy, escapes from his gigantic child captor and is swept up by a band of radical fellow Oms, who are resisting the Draags’ oppression and violence. La Planete Sauvage was awarded the Grand Prix special jury prize at the 1973 Cannes Film Festival. It is one of the greatest animations ever made.
This collectible brochure gives synopsis and introduction to the film, illustrated throughout with stills, Topor's designs, Japanese texts, cast and catalogue information. A wonderful piece of printed history to René Laloux's chilling psychedelic masterpiece.
Very Good—Fine copy.
1994, English
Softcover, 632 pages, 23 x 15.5 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
University of California Press / Berkley
$35.00 - Out of stock
First 1994 edition.
Long considered "the noblest of the senses," vision has increasingly come under critical scrutiny by a wide range of thinkers who question its dominance in Western culture. These critics of vision, especially prominent in twentieth-century France, have challenged its allegedly superior capacity to provide access to the world. They have also criticized its supposed complicity with political and social oppression through the promulgation of spectacle and surveillance.
Martin Jay turns to this discourse surrounding vision and explores its often contradictory implications in the work of such influential figures as Jean-Paul Sartre, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Michel Foucault, Jacques Lacan, Louis Althusser, Guy Debord, Luce Irigaray, Emmanuel Levinas, and Jacques Derrida. Jay begins with a discussion of the theory of vision from Plato to Descartes, then considers its role in the French Enlightenment before turning to its status in the culture of modernity. From consideration of French Impressionism to analysis of Georges Bataille and the Surrealists, Roland Barthes's writings on photography, and the film theory of Christian Metz, Jay provides lucid and fair-minded accounts of thinkers and ideas widely known for their difficulty.
His book examines the myriad links between the interrogation of vision and the pervasive antihumanist, antimodernist, and counter-enlightenment tenor of much recent French thought. Refusing, however, to defend the dominant visual order, he calls instead for a plurality of "scopic regimes." Certain to generate controversy and discussion throughout the humanities and social sciences, Downcast Eyes will consolidate Jay's reputation as one of today's premier cultural and intellectual historians.
Martin Jay is Sidney Hellman Ehrman Professor Emeritus of History at the University of California, Berkeley. His books include Force Fields (1992), Marxism and Totality (California, 1984), Adorno (1984), and The Dialectical Imagination (1973).
Good—VG copy with common rippling of laminate separation to gloss boards, light handling wear. Sample image only.
1999, English
Softcover, unpaginated, 18.5 x 18.5 cm
Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Charta / Milan
$100.00 - Out of stock
The great Propo artist's book by Paul McCarthy, published by Charta in 1999. Comprised entirely of photos of everyday objects, soiled, dirtied and ruined, shot against colourful backdrops that contrast with the mysterious nature of the decontextualized objects. Children's toys, condiment bottles, latex masks, dolls ... these objects are in fact props from McCarthy's legendary performances, and their visual inventory here reads like a book of modernity's detritus. A photo book document of residual sculptural objects of performance. One of his best books, like no other!
Born in Salt Lake City in 1945, Paul McCarthy has lived and worked in the Los Angeles area since 1970. Originally formally trained as a painter, McCarthy's main interest lies in everyday activities and the mess created by them. Much of his work in the late 1960s, such as Mountain Bowling (1969) and Hold an Apple in Your Armpit (1970), are similar to the work of Happenings founder Allan Kaprow, with whom McCarthy had a professional relationship. From 1982 to 2002 he taught performance, video, installation, and performance art history at the University of California, Los Angeles. McCarthy currently works mainly in video and sculpture. His work has been widely exhibited throughout Europe and the U.S. including the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; the Whitney Museum of American Art and The Museum of Modern Art; and the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris.
Very Good copy with only light wear.
2025, English
Softcover, 120 pages, 18.4 x 13.3 cm
Published by
Magic Hour Press / New York
$49.00 - Out of stock
This volume accompanies an eponymous two-part television documentary aired in 1976 on Marguerite Duras' rhapsodic love for the spaces she has inhabited throughout her life. Her reminiscences are structured around her memories of specific locations. The transcript of the documentary was published in French two years after the documentary aired, and is now published in English for the first time, just shy of 50 years since the film’s creation, alongside photographs and film stills.
Her house in Neauphle-le-Château; her childhood home in French Indochina, which inspired her acclaimed novel 'The Sea Wall'; the Hôtel des Roches Noires in Trouville, where she wrote 'The Ravishing of Lol Stein'; and the vast seascapes of Indochina, Bengal and Normandy, whose powerful tides compelled her art and life.
True to the original French edition, Duras’ reflections are accompanied by photographs and film stills. The complete English translation by Alison Strayer includes a new essay by writer and director Durga Chew-Bose.
Marguerite Duras (1914–96) was a filmmaker and author, and a leading figure in French postwar cinema. Her novel L’Amant won the Prix Goncourt in 1984. She was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay for the film Hiroshima mon amour (1959).
1992, English
Softcover, 148 pages, 23 x 15 cm
Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Humanities Press International / London
$15.00 - In stock -
"The book represents an original attempt at drawing together postmodernist theory and film.'—Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism
Filming and Judgment advances an unprecedented reading of judgment as filming. No longer simply descriptive of the cinematographic, "filming" is the name for a site of thinking at the end of philosophy. As such, this interdisciplinary work provides the conditions for the possibility of rethinking the foundations of hermeneutics in relation to postmodern concerns regarding the political and the aesthetic, and makes a major contribution to a new philosophy of film and post-Heideggerian thought.
Filming and Judgment develops and reinscribes the thinking of Heidegger, Adorno, Derrida, and Foucault. By reading these thinkers through and against one another, Professor Wurzer is able to address the problem of the distinction between the modern and the postmodern and to offer a specific treatment of mimesis, which makes this an important work for those concerned with literary theory. More unusual, however, is the philosophical orientation of this approach to filming, an approach that distinguishes this work as one of the very few "postmodern theory" books addressed to the film theorist-indeed, the text may be read, in its movement toward the final chapter on New German Cinema, as establishing the conditions for the possibility of a contemporary continental philosophy of film and filming. But, equally important to these aesthetic considerations, the radical reappraisal of capital, the thinking of filming outside the dialectic, and the critique of the contemporary "politics of the imagination" all make this work relevant to political theory.
Wilhelm Wurzer received his Ph.D. from the University of Freiburg, Germany. He is now Professor of Philosophy at Duquesne University.
Filming and Judgment is part of Philosophy and Literary Theory, a multidisciplinary series edited by Hugh J. Silverman.
VG copy light edge wear.
1995, English
Softcover, 274 pages, 23 x 15 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / fine
Published by
Duke University Press / North Carolina
$25.00 - In stock -
IMAGINE FREDRIC JAMESON—the world's foremost Marxist critic-kidnapped and taken on a joyride through the cultural ephemera, generational hype, and Cold War fallout of our post-post-contemporary landscape. In The Jamesonian Unconscious, a book as joyful as it is critical and insightful, Clint Burnham devises unexpected encounters between jameson and alternative rock groups, new movies, and subcultures. At the same time, Burnham offers an extraordinary analysis of Jameson's work and career that refines and extends his most important themes.
In an unusual biographical move, Burnham negotiates Jameson's major works— including Marxism and Form, The Political Unconscious, and Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism-by way of his own working-class, queer-ish, Gen-X background and sensibility. Thus Burnham's study draws upon an immense range of references familiar to the MTV generation, including Reservoir Dogs, theorists Slavoj Zizek and Pierre Bourdieu, The Satanic Verses, Language poetry, the collapse of state communism in Eastern Europe, and the indie band Killdozer. In the process, Burnham addresses such Jamesonian questions as how to imagine the future, the role of utopianism in capitalist culture, and the continuing relevance of Marxist theory. Through its redefinition of Jameson's work and compelling reading of the political present, The Jamesonian Unconscious defines the leading edge of Marxist theory.
"Burnham's smart, loud, and hedonistic tour of Fredric Jameson's writings is full of surprises and new perspectives—not just on Jameson's work but on theory, politics, and culture more generally. Self-described 'brutalist,' Burnham's almost breathless way of approaching his topics is entertainingly origi-nal. He ends with a challenging 'synoptic' version of Jameson's work that will affect not only readers of Jameson's work, but anyone interested in the politics of cultural forms in the era of 'late capitalism.'"—PAUL SMITH, Carnegie Mellon University
"Clint Burnham gives Jameson's career a fantastic and impious and appealing new life. The Jamesonian Unconscious is a young, lively, street-wise, culturally cool reappropriation of a tradition of thought often associated with graying white male modernists. It has something of that elusive style I've heard personified, wistfully, as 'Camille Paglia of the left.' People will remember it when nine-tenths of the scholarly books published are just titles in a library catalog."—BRUCE ROBBINS, Rutgers University
Clint Burnham is an independent writer living in Toronto.
Post-Contemporary Interventions
A Series Edited by Stanley Fish & Fredric Jameson
VG copy
1990, English
Softcover, 258 pages, 23 x 15 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Rutgers University / New Jersey
$15.00 - In stock -
"Here is a film that is wise, sad, and often funny... effective and moving... complete in the way very few movies ever are."—Vincent Canby
Memories of Underdevelopment was the first great international success of Cuban cinema.
The film provides a complex portrait of Sergio, a disaffected bourgeois intellectual who remains in Havana after the Revolution, suspended between two worlds. He can no longer accept the values of his family's reactionary past and yet boredom and the conditioning of his early life prevent him from committing himself to the new revolutionary society. Sergio's story is played out in the turbulent period of the Bay of Pigs invasion and the 1962 missile crisis, events he can only watch on his television screen or from his apartment balcony.
Sergio's dilemma is expressed in the film through its mixture of cinematic styles; documentary footage from newsreels and fictional sequences, objective and subjective camerawork create a record of a present existence governed by memories of the past. The result is a film that is densely textured in its narrative and notable in its responsiveness to the psychological condition of its hero and to the political issues that he ignores.
The film, initially banned by the U.S. government as part of its trade quarantine of Cuba, was shown here five years after its original release. But American critics responded enthusiastically to it and the National Society of Film Critics bestowed an award on its director.
This new double volume includes the complete continuity script of Memories, as well as the complete novel, Inconsolable Memories, upon which the film is based.
An interview with Alea is reproduced here, as well as documentation of the political controversy that surrounded the film in this country. Michael Chanan's introduction places the film in the context of Cuban political and cultural history. The volume also includes a biographical sketch of Alea, a chronology of the Cuban Revolution, reviews, commentary, a filmography, and a bibliography.
Michael Chanan lives in England, where he teaches and writes on film. He is the author of The Cuban Image: Cinema and Cultural Politics in Cuba.
VG copy.
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.
2025, English
Hardcover (clothbound), 124 pages, 23 x 23 cm
Published by
Drill Hall Gallery / Canberra
$45.00 - In stock -
This title brings the collection of Canberra couple Susan Taylor and Peter Jones into focus on the advent of its 25th anniversary. Seeded from an initial interest in mid-century modern design and early twentieth century avant-gardes, the collection blossomed into an embrace of non-objective and abstract art. Artists featured include General Idea, Maria Kozic, Peter Maloneyi, Elizabeth Newman, John Nixon, Robert Rooney, Janet Burchill, Jennifer McCamley and many more.It has grown to revel in the intersections between conceptual art, geometric abstraction, seriality, non-objective painting, photography, contemporary jewellery and poetics to develop conjunctions across time, place and materiality.
The publication accompanies the exhibition curated by Peter Jones at the Drill Hall Gallery, Australian National University, 19 April – 15 June 2025.
Eye to Eye delves into several of the collection’s multi-faceted and revelatory cross-sections. In his essay Peter Jones explores how the couple’s interests have been refined and extended by the art they love and the people that surround that art. In an interview with Drill Hall Gallery director Tony Oates, Susan Taylor discusses the correlations between sustainable fashion and conceptual art with a focus on jewellery. National Gallery of Australia’s curator of photography, Shaune Lakin, traces developments in local conceptual photography from the 1960s as they play out across the Taylor Jones collection. Acclaimed writer Quentin Sprague offers illuminating insight into the work of Robert Rooney and John Nixon, two stalwarts in the Taylor Jones collection. The publication touches on a vast array of local and international art historically significant developments, revealing the power of the private collection to expose perspectives that may go unnoticed in larger, public collections.
2025, English
Softcover, 208 pages, 23 x 16.6 cm
Published by
Memo Review / Naarm
$35.00 - In stock -
What happens when political art becomes indistinguishable from marketing? Catherine Liu calls it “the highest form of kitsch” — where liberal good intentions become another elite commodity. Vincent Lê sees Apple’s crushingly smooth aesthetics not as mere flattening, but as capitalism’s natural logic of “creative destruction” at work: art compressed into commodity pixels; culture remade through self-improving competition. Either way, we’ve reached peak kitsch. Slavoj Žižek spots it: Trump’s AI-generated Gaza fantasy isn’t just tasteless satire; it’s political kitsch perfected. Call it hasbara via hyperpop.
Meanwhile, Isobel D’Cruz Barnes shows how artists on Narrm’s subculture music scene recognise that the real stage isn’t sound — it’s Instagram, TikTok, and every surface of aesthetic performance. Emerging now is culture as costume, rebellion reimagined as self-design, “lazy representation politics and identity capitalism” countered by their acceleration. And maybe that is just fine.
But no one slices open this tension between image and impact like artist Maria Kozic, whose visceral pop provocations twist kitsch into something uncomfortable, even violent—like Warhol thrown into a meat-grinder. Here kitsch doesn’t comfort but “pops.”
Khaled Sabsabi’s Venice controversy crystallises the stakes: Creative Australia recoiled from his political ambiguities, preferring art to neatly market their own virtue. Adorno (via Benjamin and Greenberg) knew all along: kitsch is the aestheticisation of politics. Or was it fascism? Or is art best when it risks being misunderstood or ambivalent, or, even better, wrong?
1989, Japanese
Softcover (w. dust jacket + ephemera), 96 pages, 42.5 x 30.5 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Treville / Tokyo
$200.00 - In stock -
Rare first 1989 Japanese edition of H. R. Giger's Biomechanics. In his classic series of oversized and visually immersive early art volumes, this book comprises a retrospective showcase, from 1964—88, of Giger's work, designed by and with running commentary by Giger himself, with over 200 drawings, paintings, and sculptures, and including concept art for the film Poltergeist II, and design paintings for Emerson, Lake, and Palmer albums, his lost film work and early cartoons. With a foreword by legendary Science Fiction author and longtime Giger fan Harlan Ellison, who dubs him "our latter-day Hieronymus Bosch."
Note: the Japanese editions of these books often had better reproductions from the original plates than the German and English language editions.
Includes Treville publisher ephemera inserted as issued, including an illustrated advert for Giger poster editions, etc.
Very Good in Very Good dust jacket. Excellent, well-preserved copy.
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.
2025, English
Softcover, 216 pages, 21.5 x 13.9 cm
Published by
University of Minnesota Press / Minnesota
$58.00 - Out of stock
A foray through the wilds where experimental films and animals collide
Like the flash of a tropical bird’s iridescent wing, cinema can be furtive and intensely beautiful—and it can leave a viewer craving more. Cinemal is Tessa Laird’s passionate inquiry into the ways that films mimic the majesty, mystery, and movements of animals,her field notes from countless hair-raising encounters with films in their natural habitat.
Part of a growing focus on nonhuman animals in film, Cinemal ventures to the “furry underbelly” of global experimental film practice, focusing on films from New Zealand, Australia, and South America. Laird examines how animals are depicted in film and analyzes the various animal qualities of cinema, like scratching and sniffing, vibrant colors, and voices (barking, howling, or echolocation). Burrowing into the work of filmmakers such as Arthur and Corinne Cantrill, Sriwhana Spong, and Ana Vaz, Laird’s energetic prose embodies the films she discusses, seamlessly combining personal anecdotes with art theory and philosophy to spread a wide sensory buffet.
Lively and optimistic, Laird uses cinematic animal tropes to encourage readers to rethink what it means to be human. She argues that, in a time of ecological collapse, such an impulse is a necessary means of imagining other, healthier ways of being in this world. Connecting us with the more-than-human, Cinemal lures us toward the beastly becomings of film and, ultimately, our own animal natures.
"Cinemal is a sparkling, engaging book, a virtuosic and thrilling interleaving of experimental cinema, philosophies of the more-than-human, and stories of animal encounters. Celebrating the variety and inventiveness of cinematic experimentation, Tessa Laird calls for us to remake our human senses in order to align better with the needs of the planet."—Laura U. Marks, author of The Fold: From Your Body to the Cosmos
"Original, erudite, and playful all in one, Cinemal is not only a joy to read but estranges the very idea of cinema, and therefore of life, in ways wondrous and wise."—Michael Taussig, Columbia University
Tessa Laird is an artist, writer, and senior lecturer at the Victorian College of the Arts, University of Melbourne. Her books include a fictocritical exploration of color, A Rainbow Reader, and a cultural history of bats, Bat, in Reaktion Books’s celebrated Animal series.
2009, English / Spanish
Hardcover (w. dust jacket), 199 pages, 31 x 26 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / as new
Published by
MoMA / New York
Museo Nacional Centro De Arte Reina Sofia / Madrid
$65.00 $50.00 - In stock -
First edition hardcover comprehensive catalogue on the avant-garde Latin American artists León Ferrari and Mira Schendel, published on the occasion of the major travelling exhibition organised by Luis Pérez-Oramas at MoMA, New York; Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid; and the Fundação Iberê Camargo, Porto Alegre, 2009—2010. Profusely illustrated with essays by Luis Perez-Oramas, Andrea Giunta, and Rodrigo Naves.
León Ferrari (Argentine, b. 1920) and Mira Schendel (Brazilian, b. Switzerland, 1919–1988) are considered among the most significant artists working in Latin America during the second half of the twentieth century. Their works address language as a major visual subject matter: the visual body of language, the embodiment of voices as words and gestures, and language as a metaphor of the worldly aspect of human existence through the eloquence of naming and writing. They produced their works in the neighboring countries of Argentina and Brazil throughout the 1960s and 1980s, when the question of language was particularly central to Western culture due to the central role taken by post-structuralism, semiotics, and the philosophy of language. Although their drawings, sculptures, and paintings are contemporary with the birth of Conceptualism, they are distinctively different, and have not yet been exhibited in their entirety in the United States.
As New.
1997, English
Softcover, 288 pages, 28 x 22 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
UNSW Press / Sydney
$140.00 - In stock -
First and only edition of the book of the Ubu Films group. Formed by Albie Thoms, David Perry, Aggy Read and John Clark in Sydney 1965, it was Australia's first group devoted to making, exhibiting and distributing experimental films. Throughout the 1965-1970 period, Ubu produced Australia's first lightshows, published this country's first underground newspaper (Ubunews), and persistently advocated for the reform of censorship laws and the need for government support for the arts.
Flamboyant, controversial and resolutely independent, Ubu Films instigated an extensive network of Australia's underground activity at aa time when Australia's cultural and political landscape was in transition. For only a brief period, Ubu established a viable proposition that film, performance, painting and political action could coalesce into a vibrant interactive community. What follows is the story of its rise and fall.
Reproducing Ubu ephemera (posters, programmes, handbills, Ubunews articles and newspaper pages), countless newspaper and magazine articles, reviews and cartoons advocating and denouncing the many activities (film, performance, music, publishing, etc.) of Ubu, legal documents, behind the scenes photography, film-stills, biographies, film lists and intimate reflections - this amazing, visually-dense and informative chronological volume that is essential reading for anyone interested in Australia's history of underground film, but also for independent film-making in general.
Edited by Peter Mudie.
Peter Mudie is a Canadian born filmmaker, artist and academic. Previously a member of filmmaker cooperatives in London, Toronto and Vienna, he has exhibited his work in galleries and film festivals around the world since 1980. He has written a number of monographs on avant-garde and experimental film (including Dusting the Other; Albie Thoms and David Perry: Films/Dialogues; Below the Centre/ Unterhalb des Mittelpunkts; and Michael Snow: Filmworks). He has presented a number of international touring film exhibitions, in Australia and overseas ―― currently he lives in Perth and lectures in Fine Arts at the University of Western Australia.
Very Good copy.
1982, Japanese
Softcover (w. obi), 198 pages, 21.2 x 14.7 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
JICC Publishing Bureau / Japan
$200.00 - In stock -
Very rare copy of the 1982 Japanese-only LONDON BOOK, researched and photographed by Naoya Nakamura, published in Japan by JICC shuppan. Wrapped in bi-lingual cover adorned with Annabella Lwin of Bow Wow Wow, the London Book is a rare time capsule and guide-book of photographs and interviews (Derek Jarman, Anton Corbijin, Malcolm McLaren, etc.) covering the London post punk scene, divided in various essential categories — film, music, fashion, art, drugs, sex — introducing all the record stores, fashion boutiques, sex shops, night clubs, pubs, markets, cafes, magazines, etc. (Rough Trade, Club for Heroes, World's End, Frisco...) and snapping all the shop assistants, punters, protagonists and London youth, from Oxford Street, Hackney, Notting Hill.... Packed with clippings, archival artwork, advertising, behind the scene photographs (shop interiors, design studios...), maps and directories.
Very Good copy with light tanning/discolouration with rarely preserved publisher's obi (Good with some spine wear and fading)
2013, English
Hardcover (w. dust jacket), 376 pages, 16.5 x 22.9 cm
Published by
Yale University Press / New Haven
$120.00 - In stock -
ince the 19th century, dolls have served as toys but also as objects of obsession, love, and lust. That century witnessed the emergence of the term "heterosexual" and of modern concepts of fetishism, perversity, and animism. Their convergence, and the demands of a growing consumer society resulted in a proliferation of waxworks, shop-window dummies, and customized love dolls, which also began to appear in art. Oskar Kokoschka commissioned a life-sized doll of his former lover Alma Mahler; Hans Bellmer crafted poupées; and Marcel Duchamp fabricated a nude figure in his environmental tableau Etant donnés. The Erotic Doll is the first book to explore men's complex relationships with such inanimate forms from historical, theoretical, and phenomenological perspectives. Challenging our commonsense grasp of the relations between persons and things, Marquard Smith examines these erotically charged human figures by interweaving art history, visual culture, gender, and sexuality studies with the medical humanities, offering startling insights into heterosexual masculinity and its discontents.
‘Ladies and gents, welcome to the museum of the erotic doll. Step right up and feast your eyes on modern man’s curious contraptions. If the saucy blow-up doll makes you squeamish, brace yourself for the Dutch Wife (a sailor’s delight!), lubricating robot ladies, surrealist brides stripped bare, state-of-the-art RealDolls, and the iDollators who love them. Marquard Smith is the curator of this collection of men's dolls, rendered in a lavishly illustrated volume.’—Laura Frost, Times Higher Education
'This book is platypus-like, unclassifiable.'—Marina Warner, London Review of Books
“[An] intriguing book . . . Smith teases out the history of these sex objects to provide a thorough genealogy of today’s erotic mannequins.”—Shelly Ronen, Public Books
1979 / 2004, Japanese
Softcover, 76 pages, 29.7 x 29.7 cm
Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Treville / Tokyo
Pan-Exotica / Tokyo
$80.00 - Out of stock
Japanese edition of the classic 1979 "Giger's Alien", a visually stunning and wonderfully insightful book for any fan of the art of H.R. Giger, Ridley Scott and Dan O'Bannon's Alien film or in the production of science-fiction/horror/special effects in any way. A must.
"Giger's Alien provides a complete record of the months and months of painstaking work that resulted in two hours of terrifying celluloid. Sketches, original paintings, photographs of scenery and the Alien under construction and scenes from the film are linked by Giger's detailed diary of his thoughts and actions at the time".
Very Good copy in VG original dust jacket of this title. 2004 edition.
1996, English
Softcover (staple-bound), 82 pages, 29.5 x 21 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / good
Published by
Immerse / London
$40.00 - In stock -
Rare first issue of Immerse magazine from London, featuring Controlled Bleeding, Autechre, Tomato vs Underworld, Shinjuku Thief, Meat Beat Manifesto, Staalplaat, Download, Jenny Randles (former British UFO Research Association), Stan Brakhage, cryptozoology, CM von Hausswolff, Black Lung, Carl Stone, filmmaker Nigel Wingrove, and much more.
London's Immerse "sound(e)scapes" magazine lasted only three issues, was published by a group of enthusiasts on a limited budget, and yet it perfectly encapsulates a moment when esoteric counterculture, experimental electronic music, weird literature, irreverent"techno chaos" graphic design, and even fortean paranormal experience and conspiracy theory collided and mutated from the depths of the 1980s industrial underground via 1990s cyber-punk toward the spectre of Y2K. Collectively edited by Mathew F. Riley, Leigh Neville, and Neil Gardner, the "(sub)cultural" magazine was first and foremost an incredible music magazine devoted to techno, ambient, atmospherica, industrial, noise, jazz, electronica, but also covered film, fiction, design, subculture, the paranormal, basically anything that took the collective's fancy. Sleek (and occasionally schizo) design with guest design features from Tomato, The Designers Republic, v23, etc. each issue's cover features photography by Toby McFarlan Pond of sensory enhancement technology – respiratory equipment, nightvision binoculars, audio monitoring equipment. The covers really set the tone. Packed with in-depth features on artists and labels — interviews, discographies, profiles, artist pages, film and literature features, esoterica, loads of reviews, and much more.
Good—VG copy with some edge wear/spine pinching.
1996, English
Softcover (staple-bound), 82 pages, 29.5 x 21 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Immerse / London
$40.00 - In stock -
Rare second issue of Immerse magazine from London, featuring Alter Ego, Mego, Thomas Ligotti, Blast First, T.Power, Witchman, v23, New Albion Records, Kenneth Anger vs Alistair Crowley, and much more.
London's Immerse "sound(e)scapes" magazine lasted only three issues, was published by a group of enthusiasts on a limited budget, and yet it perfectly encapsulates a moment when esoteric counterculture, experimental electronic music, weird literature, irreverent"techno chaos" graphic design, and even fortean paranormal experience and conspiracy theory collided and mutated from the depths of the 1980s industrial underground via 1990s cyber-punk toward the spectre of Y2K. Collectively edited by Mathew F. Riley, Leigh Neville, and Neil Gardner, the "(sub)cultural" magazine was first and foremost an incredible music magazine devoted to techno, ambient, atmospherica, industrial, noise, jazz, electronica, but also covered film, fiction, design, subculture, the paranormal, basically anything that took the collective's fancy. Sleek (and occasionally schizo) design with guest design features from Tomato, The Designers Republic, v23, etc. each issue's cover features photography by Toby McFarlan Pond of sensory enhancement technology – respiratory equipment, nightvision binoculars, audio monitoring equipment. The covers really set the tone. Packed with in-depth features on artists and labels — interviews, discographies, profiles, artist pages, film and literature features, esoterica, loads of reviews, and much more.
VG copy