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.
1999, English
Softcover, 186 pages, 15.5 x 23 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Cityful Press / Seattle
$200.00 - In stock -
First, only edition of "Think of The Self Speaking : Harry Smith — Selected Interviews", published in 1998 by Cityful Press and long out-of-print. In this incredible collection you will find the flavour and texture of experimental filmmaker, music anthologist, and enigmatic polymath Harry Smith’s conversation, his rambling, obscure, luminous, cantankerous genius. This collection of interviews spans Harry Smith's long and influential life in American arts and letters. They cover a quarter-century, touching on the full range of Smith's activity as a groundbreaking experimental filmmaker, obsessive collector, folk music anthologist, visionary painter, student of Native American lore, anthropologist, cosmographer, alchemist, hermetic scholar, occultist, autodidact, classic American eccentric, and all-around explorer of the possibilities of human consciousness and creativity. Jordan Belson writes, "THINK OF THE SELF SPEAKING is the next best thing to being with Harry himself-perhaps better, certainly safer. The interviews are remarkably similar to his collage films. A brilliant mind unhinged." Includes an introduction by Allen Ginsberg.
Very Good copy with only light shelf wear.
1970, Japanese
Softcover, 300 pages, 21 x 15 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Tenjō Sajiki / Tokyo
$260.00 - In stock -
Very rare copy of Angura (Underground Theatre) issue 3, 1970, the "Dramatic Theory Magazine" published in Tokyo by Shūji Terayama's radical avant-garde theatre company Tenjō Sajiki. With gorgeous graphic design and (Aleister Crowley) cover by graphic designer Heikichi Harata, this issue's special feature is ‘Eros and Theater’, edited by Shūji Terayama and Masahiko Akuta with contributions by Terayama, photographer Hajime Sawatari, writer Taruho Inagaki, director Takahiko Iimura, anthropologist Masao Yamaguchi, playwright Yasunari Takahashi, director and cinematographer Sakumi Hagiwara, film director Nobuhiro Kawanaka, playwright Rio Kishida, and many others. A very unique periodical that not only discusses in-depth the works of Angura theatre, but also the international avant-garde, inviting diverse critical perspectives on performance and anti- and living-theatre, sharing ground with Gutai and Fluxus. Illustrated throughout with drawings, diagrams and photographs, mixing themes of pop, protest, surrealism, and eros, plus texts and scripts in Japanese. A rare printed embodiment of Tenjō Sajiki, Terayama, Tadanori Yokoo and the Japanese underground.
Tenjō Sajiki was a Japanese independent theater troupe co-founded by Shūji Terayama, Kujō Kyōko, Yutaka Higashi, Tadanori Yokoo, and Fumiko Takagi. Led by Japanese avant-garde poet, dramatist, writer, film director, and photographer Shūji Terayama, the prolific group was active between 1967 and 1983 (until Terayama's death). A major phenomenon on the Japanese Angura ("underground") theater scene, the group has produced a number of stage works marked by experimentalism, folklore influences, social provocation, grotesque eroticism and the flamboyant fantasy characteristic of Terayama's oeuvre. Tenjō Sajiki benefitted greatly from collaborations with a number of prominent artists, including musicians J. A. Seazer and Kan Mikami, and graphic designers Aquirax Uno and Tadanori Yokoo.
Shūji Terayama (1935 — 1983) was a Japanese avant-garde poet, dramatist, writer, film director, and photographer. His works range from radio drama, experimental television, underground (Angura) theatre, countercultural essays, to Japanese New Wave and "expanded" cinema. Terayama is considered one of the most productive and provocative creative artists to come out of Japan, with a wide-reaching influence on many artists from the 1970s onward.
2022, English
Softcover, 228 pages, 14 x 21 cm
Published by
Seven Stories Press / New York
$45.00 - In stock -
"One of the most important chroniclers of the modern psyche." —The Guardian
The novelist, cultural critic, and indie icon serves up sometimes bitchy, always generous, erudite, and joyful assessments from the last thirty-five years of cutting edge film, art, and literature.
Whether he's describing Tracy Emin or Warhol, the films of Barbet Schroeder ("Schroeder is well aware that life is not a narrative; that we impose form on the movements of chance, contingency, and impulse....") or the installations of Barbara Kruger ("Kruger compresses the telling exchanges of lived experience that betray how skewed our lives are..."), Indiana is never just describing. His writing is refreshing, erudite, joyful.
Indiana champions shining examples of literary and artistic merit regardless of whether the individual artist or writer is famous; asserts a standard of care and tradition that has nothing to do with the ivory tower establishment; is unafraid to deliver the coup de grâce when someone needs to say the emperor has no clothes; speaks in the same breath--in the same discerning, insolent, eloquent way--about high art and pop culture. Few writers could get away with saying the things Gary Indiana does. And when the writing is this good, it's also political, plus it's a riot of fun on the page.
Here is Gary Indiana on Euro Disney resort park in Marne-la-Valée outside of Paris:
John Berger compares the art of Disney to that of Francis Bacon. He says that the same essential horror lurks in both, and that it springs from the viewer's imagining: There is nothing else. Even as a child, I understood how unbearable it would be to be trapped inside a cartoon frame.
Since 1987, Indiana has published novels, nonfiction, plays, short stories -- all with an unmistakable, sardonic voice embedded in the text ..." —Los Angeles Times
2022, English
Softcover, 120 pages, 19.5 x 13 cm
Published by
Repeater Books / London
$30.00 - In stock -
A blending of art and pop cultural criticism about people who injure themselves for our entertainment or enlightenment.
A few weeks before he died, Hunter S. Thompson left an answerphone message for Jackass’ Johnny Knoxville. “I might be coming to Baton Rouge,” he told the stuntman, “and if I do I will call you, because I will be looking to have some fun, which as you know usually means violence.”
Fun does not, of course, usually mean violence; those who choose to make a hobby, a career or an art practice out of injury are wired a little differently from most. In Which as You Know Means Violence, Philippa Snow — taking in the work of Buster Keaton, Marina Abramović, Jackass, Gina Pane, Bob Flanagan, Chris Burden, and various YouTube stunt performers — analyses the subject of pain, injury and sadomasochism in performance, from the more rarefied context of contemporary art to the considerably less rarefied context of a TV show where grown men hurl various objects at each other’s tenderest parts.
In a world where violence — the violence of climate change, say, or of capitalism — is part of our daily lives, Which as You Know Means Violence focuses on those who enact violence on themselves, for art or entertainment, and addresses the role that violence plays in twenty-first century art and culture.
Philippa Snow is a writer based in Norwich. Her reviews and essays have appeared in publications including Artforum, The Los Angeles Review of Books, ArtReview, Frieze, The White Review, Vogue, The New Statesman, The TLS, and The New Republic. She was shortlisted for the 2020 Fitzcarraldo Editions Essay Prize.
2012, English
Softcover, 120 pages, 28 x 21.5 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / as new
Published by
Creation Books / London
$45.00 - In stock -
FRACTURED EYE was a large-format annual film journal, edited by well-known authors Stephen Barber and Jack Hunter, who between them have produced around 50 books on global cinema and cultural history. FRACTURED EYE does not concern itself with either "mainstream" or "cult" cinema, but rather takes its cue from Amos Vogel's seminal 1974 study Film As A Subversive Art. Subjects covered by FRACTURED EYE Volume One include illegal film pornography in the 1970s, execution film documents of WW2, film documents of extreme performance art, subversive film documentaries, unfilmed surrealist film scenarios, revolutionary Japanese cinema of 1969, the origins of film projection technology, films of urban demolition, surgical films, and various works of renegade, politically prohibited or transgressive cinema. The book is heavily illustrated with unusual and often disquieting photographs, and is recommended for adult readers only. Subjects covered include Vienna Aktion Cinema, Tokyo 1969, Tatsumi Hijikata, Pierre Guyotat, Koji Wakamatsu, Jean Painlevé, Cosey Fanni Tutti, Jean Vigo, Luis Buñuel, Skladanowsky Brothers, Georges Franju, and much more. Only one volume was published.
1997, English
Softcover, 116 pages, 21 x 29 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Morpheus International / US
$70.00 - In stock -
First 1997 edition of H.R. Giger's Retrospective 1964-1984, presenting over 150 artworks, spanning 20 years in the career of the world's most renowned fantasy artist, gathered chronologically in this one rich and detailed volume. Carefully rendered reproductions of Giger's paintings, drawings, designs, videos, sculptures, costumes and furniture are accompanied by his own commentary and portraits of the artist at work and with Dali, Fuchs, Harry and other colleagues.
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—Very Good copy of the first 1997 English edition with light general corner/cover wear.
2008, English
Softcover, 489 pages, 15.3 x 22.8 cm
Published by
Zone Books / New York
$58.00 - In stock -
Tony Conrad is exemplary of the 1960s artist who remains inassimilable to canonic histories. Creator of the “structural” film, The Flicker, collaborator on Jack Smith’s Flaming Creatures and Normal Love, follower of Henry Flynt’s radical anti-art, member of the Theatre of Eternal Music and the first incarnation of The Velvet Underground, and early associate of Mike Kelley, Tony Oursler, and Cindy Sherman, Conrad has significantly impacted cultural developments from minimalism to underground film, “concept art,” postmodern appropriation, and the most sophisticated rock and roll. Yet Beyond the Dream Syndicate does not claim Conrad as a major but under-recognized figure.
Rather, by drawing on Deleuzian notions of the “minor” and the Foucauldian problematization of authorship found in Conrad’s own artistic/musical project, Early Minimalism, it disperses him into an “author function.” Neither monograph nor social history, the book takes Conrad’s collaborative interactions as a guiding thread by which to investigate the contiguous networks and discursive interconnections amongst the arts of the time.
“A tour de force of both interpretative and historiographic acuity.”—Art Bulletin
2015, English
Softcover, 100 pages, 21.5 x 27.5 cm
Published by
CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts / San Francisco
MoMA PS1 / New York
Raven Row / London
Sternberg Press / Berlin
$65.00 - In stock -
Fine Arts continues Jos de Gruyter & Harald Thys’s playful and dystopic approach to depicting the human condition. The artist duo became watercolorists for the project, harping back to an early amateur pictorial tradition while basing their picture making on a range of quotidian and historical images culled from the Internet. Deadpan images of the banal and the fanciful accompany the grievous and the tragic, without comment. Nostalgia and innocence are dimly stirred and questioned. Although the genre of the watercolorist, and its association with pastoral and colonialist scenes, may be considered outdated, the contemporary mode of sourcing the images implies that these pictures might not be matters of the past. This book brings together the collection of over ninety watercolors in a glossy format reminiscent of a picture book or auction house catalogue.
Copublished with CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts, San Francisco; MoMA PS1, New York; and Raven Row, London, on the occasion of the eponymous traveling exhibition in 2015.
2021, English
Softcover, 224 pages, 13 x 20 cm
Published by
Archive Books / Berlin
$39.00 - In stock -
Intermedia and Expanded Cinema, both as critical approach and artistic practice, left an indelible mark in a period of Japanese art history that is broadly considered to be one of its most dynamic moments in the wake of its postwar reemergence.
Despite the burgeoning interest in academic and curatorial circles in this segment of Japanese art history, the paucity of readily available material in a language other that Japanese has meant the local context, particularly the ways in which the terms were critically debated, was relatively neglected.
Rather than assuming the interpretations of the terms were the same as their counterparts abroad, we decided to commission translations of a selection of key texts that we felt were instrumental in shaping the specific discourse around these terms.
Through these translations, our hope is that Japanese debates on intermedia can contribute to international discourse, and that works of Japanese Expanded cinema can be preserved, reenacted and analyzed with these discussions in mind.
Contributors: Go Hirasawa, Ann Adachi-Tasch, Julian Ross, Adachi Masao, Iimura Takahiko, Ishiko Junzō, Ishizaki Kōichirō, Jōnouchi Matoharu, Manabe Hiroshi, Matsuda Masao (a.k.a. Hirosawa Mina), Miyai Rikurō, Ōe Masanori, Satō Jūshin (Shigechika), Tone Yasunao.
Produced by Collaborative Cataloging Japan. Edited by Ann Adachi-Tasch, Go Hirasawa, Julian Ross.
1976, English
Softcover, 640 pages, 23 x 15 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / good
Published by
University of California Press / Berkley
$20.00 - In stock -
"Film teachers and students will welcome this new anthology, which makes available in one source a comprehensive selection of recent theoretical work on film, including many articles difficult to locate in the scattered literature. The contents are drawn almost entirely from the publications of the past fifteen years, and include work by the most original film thinkers—some well known to a wide public, some widely known among readers of film journals. Several important filmmakers are also represented.
The materials have been grouped in critical categories reflecting recent approaches to the medium. In place of older questions such as the relation of film to other arts, or film's ability to capture an imprint of reality, the questions emphasized in the anthology concern film's ideological operations, the nature of film genres, the role of the auteur in the creative process, the representation of social groups (such as women) in film, the logical of narrative and formal organizations in films, the treatment of films as myths, and new theoretical perspectives. Thus the contents reflect the use of political, structualist, semiological and psychoanalytic methods, as well as those of more traditional criticism. There is virtually no duplication of materials included in the Mast & Cohen anthology Film Theory and Criticism.
The editor has provided an overall general introduction, and mini-introductions to each text. A glossary of terms used in structuralist-semiological work is included, and lists of additional readings are provided.
Its scope and careful organization will make this volume a fundamental resource for film scholarship and teaching."
Texts by Susan Sontag, François Truffaut, André Bazin, Umberto Eco, Yves De Laurot, Pier Paolo Pasolini, William Rothman, Peter Wollen, Raymond Durgnat, Thomas Elsaesser, Andrew Tudor, Iew Hwa Beh, Alan Lovell, David Macdougall, Brian Henderson, Robin Wood, Stephen Koch, V F Perkins, Sam Rohdie, Daniel Dayan, and many others.
Good copy with general wear/age, tanning/creases.
1997, English
Softcover, 248 pages, 23.5 x 15.5 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Routledge / London
$15.00 - In stock -
In a fascinating account of how technology is altering our consciousness, Celia Lury shows how the manipulation of photographic images and ways of seeing can so redefine the relation between consciousness, the body and memory as to create a 'prosthetic culture' whose capacities both extend and threaten our humanity.
We live in a society in which some memories can be falsely implanted in the individual while others are stored in video archives of images, in which the powers of cartoon superheroes break through the limitations of time and space. Using the examples of photo-therapy, family albums, Benetton advertising campaigns, the phenomenon of false memory syndrome and the 'lives' of cartoon characters this book argues that the 'eyes' made available by contemporary visual technologies involve not simply specific ways of seeing, but also ways of life.
Very Good copy.
1993, English
Softcover, 368 pages, 23 x 15 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
University of California Press / Berkley
$30.00 - Out of stock
Pier Paolo Pasolini (1922-1975) was arguably the most complex director of postwar Italian cinema. His films—Accattone, The Canterbury Tales, Medea, Saló—continue to challenge and entertain new generations of moviegoers. A leftist, a homosexual, and a distinguished writer of fiction, poetry, and criticism, Pasolini once claimed that "a certain realism" informed his filmmaking.
Masterfully combining analyses of Pasolini's literary and theoretical writings and of all his films, Maurizio Viano offers the first thorough study of Pasolini's cinematic realism, in theory and in practice. He finds that Pasolini's cinematic career exemplifies an "expressionistic realism" that acknowledges its subjective foundation instead of striving for an impossible objectivity.
Focusing on the personal and expressionistic dimensions of Pasolini's cinema, Viano also argues that homosexuality is present in the films in ways that critics have thus far failed to acknowledge. Sure to generate controversy among film scholars, Italianists, and fans of the director's work, this accessible film-by-film treatment is an ideal companion for anyone watching Pasolini's films on video.
"Superb. . . . In its careful handling of the biographical and the autobiographical, the factual and the speculative, this book will become a model for how studies of individual directors should be done in the future."—Peter Brunette, author of Roberto Rossellini
Maurizio Viano is Associate Professor of Italian at Wellesley College.
VG copy.
2025, English
Softcover, 455 pages, 24 x 17 cm
Published by
Headpress / Oxford
$65.00 - In stock -
From filmmaker, former Fangoria editor-in-chief, and Corman/Poe author Chris Alexander comes ART! TRASH! TERROR! Adventures in Strange Cinema, a treasure trove of in-depth essays and edifying interviews that celebrate some of the most eccentric and unforgettable movies in cult cinema history. From recognized classics (George A. Romero's Dawn Of The Dead, David Lynch's The Elephant Man) to misunderstood masterpieces (Michael Mann's The Keep, Boris Sagal's The Omega Man) to unfairly maligned curios (Kostas Karagiannis' Land Of The Minotaur, Brett Leonard's Hideaway), the author takes an alternately serious and playful but always personal look at several strains of international horror, dark fantasy, and exploitation film -- motion pictures that transform, transgress, challenge, infuriate, shock, and entertain.
Connecting these passionate and critical essays are insightful interviews with revered talents, such as John Waters (writer/director, Cecil B. Demented), Michael Winner (director, The Sentinel), Nicolas Cage (actor, Vampire's Kiss), Gene Simmons (co-founder/bassist, KISS), William Crain (director, Blacula), William Lustig (director, Maniac), Werner Herzog (director, Nosferatu: Phantom Der Nacht) and many more, as well as witty, heartfelt memoirs charting the author's oddball experiences on the fringes of Hollywood and beyond.
Illustrated with more than 200 startling photographs!
1991, English
Softcover, 318 pages, 24.2 x 16.5 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
University Press of Colorado / Colorado
$40.00 - In stock -
"This latest book by recognized film and literature scholar Keith Cohen is a testimony to the powerful effect that cinema has played upon literature and other art forms, as well as upon nearly all aspects of life in the twentieth century. Writing in a Film Age features ten essays by some of the foremost writers of our time: Jorge Luis Borges, William Burroughs, Manuel Puig, Marguerite Duras, Alexander Kluge, Ronald Sukenick, Jonathan Baumbach, Ben Stoltzfus, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Alain Robbe-Grillet.
In his Introduction, Keith Cohen synthesizes these author's attitudes toward popular culture, their ideas about literary and film technique, and their theories about the creative process. Cohen also provides biographical details on each author before his or her essay appears.
The formative years of the writers and filmmakers featured in this brilliant volume covers the period between the Great Wars, when movies were at their peak of popularity and artistic inventiveness. Established internationally as spokespersons for interart experimentation and the avant-garde, these individuals will be regarded by the year 2000 as principal figures of the postmodernist era.
Writing in a Film Age will be of great interest to all scholars interested in the relationship between literature and film.
Keith Cohen is associate professor of comparative literature at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. His other publications include Film and Fiction: The Dynamics of Exchange (Yale University Press) and Natural Settings (Full Court Press)."
VG copy light wear.
1964, English
Softcover (staple-bound), 16 pages, 24.5 x 18.5 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Melbourne University Film Society / Melbourne
$25.00 - In stock -
This scarce brochure was published by Melbourne University Film Society on the occasion of a special season of screening of Early French Cinema Classics in 1964. Edited by Laurie Clancy and Peter Hourigan, features texts and illustrations on the films of Luis Bunuel, Jean Vigo, and Jean Cocteau, along with filmographies and a screening programme. Published in Melbourne in 1964 (we estimate, not dated).
The Melbourne University Film Society published periodicals (Annotations on Film) and guides to accompany their film programme, aimed at presenting films in Melbourne in the medium they were created and providing a critical reading of them for an independent, membership-based film society. Starting in 1948, the Melbourne University Film Society (MUFS) changed its name to Cinémathèque in 1984 and continues to this day in Melbourne. A written accompaniment to their programme can be seen in the form of the current-day online journal Senses of Cinema.
Very Good copy, light wear.
1957, English
Softcover (staple-bound), 34 pages, 26 x 20.5 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / good
Published by
Melbourne University Film Society / Melbourne
$15.00 - In stock -
Annotations on Film was a journal published by the Melbourne University Film Society to accompany their film programme, aimed at presenting films in Melbourne in the medium they were created and providing a critical reading of them for an independent, membership-based film society. Starting in 1948, the Melbourne University Film Society (MUFS) changed its name to Cinémathèque in 1984 and continues to this day in Melbourne. A written accompaniment to their programme can be seen in the form of the current-day online journal Senses of Cinema.
This scarce early journal from the Melbourne University Film Society features writings on Jean Renoir's A Day In The Country, Humphrey Jennings' Fires Were Started, Sergei Eisenstein, Glauco Pellegrini's Experience in Cubism, Frank R. Strayer's And Then Were Four, Joan Long's In Harbour, Lewis Jacob's The World That Nature Forgot, Lotte Reiniger's Papageno, Norman McLaren's Hen Hop, Vittorio De Sica's Shoe-shine, Orson Welles' The Lady From Shanghai, Joseph L. Mankiewicz's Julius Caesar, Vincente Minnelli's The Band Wagon, Robert Hamer's Kind Hearts and Coronets, G. W. Pabst's Kameradschaft, and many more, and was published in Melbourne in 1957.
Good copy, nicely preserved with only light wear, tanning and rust to staple.
1958, English
Softcover (staple-bound), 18 pages, 26 x 20.5 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / good
Published by
Melbourne University Film Society / Melbourne
$15.00 - In stock -
Annotations on Film was a journal published by the Melbourne University Film Society to accompany their film programme, aimed at presenting films in Melbourne in the medium they were created and providing a critical reading of them for an independent, membership-based film society. Starting in 1948, the Melbourne University Film Society (MUFS) changed its name to Cinémathèque in 1984 and continues to this day in Melbourne. A written accompaniment to their programme can be seen in the form of the current-day online journal Senses of Cinema.
This scarce early journal from the Melbourne University Film Society features writings on Charlie Chaplin's The Gold Rush, Abraham Polonsky's Force of Evil, Alfred Hitchcock's The Trouble with Harry, Carl Theodor Dreyer's Vampyr, Raymond Longford's On Our Selection, Humphrey Jennings' A Diary for Timothy, Terry Bishop's Daybreak in Udi, John Alderson's El Dorado, plus Charlie Chaplin's Between Showers, Dough and Dynamite, The Champion, Police, Behind the Screen, The Rink, and essays on Chaplin and Silent film and Chaplin's early works, plus more. Published in Melbourne in 1958.
Good copy, nicely preserved with only light wear, tanning and rust to staple.
1994, English
Softcover, 264 pages, 23.5 x 16 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Routledge / London
$25.00 - Out of stock
There is the growing sense that irony has emerged as a mode of expression that is strangely out of vogue. The popular press has veritably written it off as a means of critique (In 1991, "squire" announced "Forget Irony—Have a Nice Decade "). Politicians and pundits seldom use it. And when they do, it tends either to miss its intended mark or, for that matter, induce widespread cognitive failure. Yet, irony is a complex rhetorical move. It depends on deep and shared levels of understanding, knowing namely, that one means what one doesn't mean and that that actually means something else completely. It produces a "scene."
In "Irony's Edge," Linda Hutcheon examines the nature of this "scene." She explores what constitutes irony, how irony functions, in what ways it is political, and how it disrupts the space between expression and understanding. She examines irony not only as an intercommunicative act, but as a discursive practice that is, in many ways, a cultural event, which happens in discrete and often sophisticated ways. She analyzes irony's logic and the way in which it operates in relations to concepts of difference and identity, intentionality and interpretation, and the inappropriate and the appropriate.
She examines these concerns vis-a-vis an array of references gathered from contemporary and modern culture. She looks at works such as the novels of Umberto Eco, the operas and symphonies of Richard Wagner, and the art of Anselm Kiefer. She focuses on popular cultural figures such as Madonna and the recent film of Shakespeare's Henry V.
Her book is one of the first synthesized theoretical accounts of the cultural phenomenology of irony. In "Irony's Edge," Hutcheon elaborates upon her earlier work on parody ("A Theory of Parody") and scutizines the mechanics of irony in fundamentally salient and critical ways.
VG copy.
2022, English
Softcover, 328 pages, 15.2 x 22.9 cm
Published by
Semiotext(e) / Los Angeles
$40.00 - In stock -
A privileged look into the life and artistic practice of the experimental filmmaker, music anthologist, and enigmatic polymath Harry Smith.
Best known during his lifetime as an experimental filmmaker and Folkways Records music anthologist, Harry Smith (1923-1991) was a spiritual outsider and one of the most original, influential artists of the mid-century American avant-garde. An avid, inspired collector of old blues and hillbilly recordings during his youth, he became a fan of such bebop jazz as Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie, and began making avant-garde film animations featuring patterns painted directly onto the negatives as visual accompaniments to jazz performances. Smith crossed paths with nearly everyone central to the cultural avant-garde; he lived for art and gnosis with little thought for practical consequences. In 1991, he received a Lifetime Achievement Award at the Grammy Awards in New York.
Five years after Smith's death, the poet Paola Igliori began conducting intimate interviews with the filmmakers, musicians, poets, and artists who knew him best. The result, American Magus Harry Smith, offers a privileged look not only into Smith's life and artistic practice, but also into his era and the informal economy of influence that operated during that time. It provides invaluable insight into the mind of one of the twentieth century's most enigmatic polymaths. This expanded edition includes photos of Smith and many other color images.
1980, English
Softcover (w. insert), 142 pages, 21 x 29 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
LIP / Melbourne
$50.00 - In stock -
The incredible book-sized 1980 edition of Melbourne's great LIP journal. Published out of Carlton between 1976-1984, LIP encapsulated Australian feminist artistic practice of the period, publishing articles and interviews by women on women in film, sound, theatre, painting, photography, poetry, criticism, activism, journalism, publishing, sculpture, design, education, and much more.
In this issue:
Editorial; MEDIA : Heralding Women : A Visual Essay by Lesley Dumbrell, Freda Freiberg and Elizabeth Gower; The Women At Work Kit - a discussion with Judy Munro, Sylvie Shaw and Ponch Hawkes, by Jeannette Fenelon; Shoulder to Shoulder and Up Hill; The Way by Julie Copeland; The Coming Out Show : Five Years On by Julie Rigg; Nancy Dexter : In Her Own Accent by Elizabeth Owen; Fiona McDougall press photographer; Child's Image, Women's Hands by Barbara Hall; ART : Memories of Grace Crowley by Janine Burke, Ian North, Frank and Margel Hinder; "Mothers' Memories, Others' Memories" by Vivienne Binns; The Dinner Party - Introduction by Isabel Davies; Judy Chicago And The Dinner Party by Ailsa O'Connor; 'The Coming Out Show' discusses 'The Dinner Party'. Transcribed and edited by Isabel Davies; The Adelaide Women's Art Movement by Jane Kent and Anne Marsh; Adelaide Women's Performance Month, November 1979; River Murray Project by Bonita Ely; Joy Hester by Janine Burke; Janet Dawson - Painter, interviewed by Lesley Dumbrell; Monday To Monday by Maxienne Foote; Ethel Carrick (Mrs. E. Phillips Fox) by Margaret Rich; The Male Nude, Margaret Walters interviewed by Julie Copeland; Stella Sallman photographs; Don't Believe I'm An Amazon - Ulrike Rosenbach talking with Elizabeth Gower, Margaret Rose and Janine Burke, transcribed by Margaret Rose; Tertiary Visual Arts Education Study and Report by Alison Fraser; Holos - Whole, Graphos - Picture, The Work Of Margaret Benyon by Catherine Peake; Ceramic Sculpture - Maggie May; Artist-Decorated Trams - Statements by Erica McGilchrist and Mirka Mora on the tram design project, Melbourne and Metropolitan Tramways Board; THEATRE/PERFORMANCE : At Home - A series of Five Solo Performances by Lyndal Jones (1977-80) documentation by Lyndal Jones and Suzanne Spunner; Beyond Glitter - The Role Of The Female Performer as seen by Robyn Archer in "A Star is Tom" by Suzanne Spunner; Wimmin's Circus by Katie Noad; Jeannie Lewis interviewed by Christine Johnston; Failing In Love by Ruth Maddison; By A Bamboo Blind : Jenny Kemp, writer and director of Sheila Alone interviewed by Suzanne Spunner; Brisbane Womens Theatre Group by Barbara Allen; FILM : The Women's Film In The Post-Haskell Era by Freda Freiberg; Making A Career Of Feminism by Suzanne Spurner; How Will We Learn To Remember Tomorrow? 'A Catalogue of Independent Women's Films' reviewed by Barbara Hall; The Problems Of Pluralism : Women's Films And Feminist Films by Kate Legge; Interview With Norma Disher; Margot Nash & Margot Oliver; Roma 'Just An Ordinary Life' by Jan Macdonald
Insert : Crosswords by Elizabeth Gower
Front Cover : Erica Mc Gilchrist
Back Cover : Mirka Mora
Co-ordinator : Elizabeth Gower
LIP Collective members: Annette Blonski, Janine Burke, Isabel Davies, Suzanne Davies, Lesley Dumbrell, Jeannette Fenelon, Freda Freiberg, Elizabeth Gower, Barbara Hall, Christine Johnston, Elizabeth Owen, Cathy Peake, Suzanne Spunner.
VG copy.
2023, English
Hardcover (w. dust jacket), 224 pages, 29 x 29 cm
Published by
George Schwarz and Charis / East Sydney
$190.00 - In stock -
Powerful Paradise the Art of George Schwarz and Charis is an artists book, a collaboration between George Schwarz, his partner Charis, Linda Dement and Craig Judd. It is an introduction to a wonderful life and to beautiful, complex and intriguing art. Ernest Georg Schwarz and Charis Elizabeth McKittrick enjoy a unique partnership beginning 1964. The word collaborators in this case is an inadequate descriptor. In their presence one is witness to but a force of nature, a swirling vortex of creative mutuality. Simultaneously lovers, artists, apiarists, activists, authors, film and wine makers, 'Powerful Paradise' is a celebration and a legacy.
This extremely limited hardcover edition is the first survey of the couple's life in art, the last survivors of bohemian Kings Cross. Creators of the first Australian hardcore sex films to be passed by the censors (and also refused classification), George and Charis were ahead of the curve in every aspect of their practice. This volume features the only writing covering their film output, extensive photographic work and global travels. Simultaneously erotic, taboo, progressive, liberated; lives dedicated to their work and one another and perhaps too provocative/evocative for the Australian art establishment.
1984, Japanese
Softcover (w. dust jacket), 98 pages (w. fold-outs), 42 x 30 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Treville / Tokyo
$220.00 - Out of stock
First Japanese edition of H.R. Giger's Necronomicon from 1984. Beginning with a hommage from Salvador Dali and introduction by Clive Baker, the first in this series of oversized and visually overwhelming Giger-designed volumes takes us through the early history of one of the most brilliant fantasy artists of the century. From his "Passegen" series, his work for theatre, posters, album artwork, environments, personal works, is designs for Alejandro Jodorowsky's DUNE, and much more, all beautifully reproduced in full-colour and black and white, full-bleed spreads, including fold-out pages. These Giger folio books have become very desirable, collectable editions in their various printings around the world, the series encompassing the work of one of the world's most unique and influential visionaries of the macabre. This is volume 1 of 2 of "HR Giger's Necronomicon" where Al Azred's legendary magical book of the most wonderful abominations and perversions, "Necronomicon" (made infamous in the pages of HP Lovecraft's "Cthulhu" mythology), becomes a visual reality!
With an introduction by Clive Baker and numerous texts by HR Giger as well as texts by Fritz Billeter and Simon Vinkenoog and a tribute from Salvador Dali. Note: Japanese language edition.
First Japanese edition, published by Treville, Tokyo, in 1984. Very good copy throughout with Very Good dust jacket. Some edge wear with fragile, oversized edition.
1987, Japanese
Softcover (w. dust jacket), 98 pages (w. fold-outs), 42 x 30 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Treville / Tokyo
$220.00 - In stock -
First Japanese edition of H.R. Giger's Necronomicon II, the second oversized and visually overwhelming Giger-designed collection that takes us further through the incredible history of one of the most brilliant fantasy artists of the century. Reproducing Giger's award-winning work for the film ALIEN, his paintings, environments, sculptural works, his work for never shot film "The Tourist", collaborations with Blondie's Debbie Harry, his "New York City" series from the late 1970's and much more, all beautifully reproduced in full-colour and black and white, full-bleed spreads, including fold-out pages. Also includes interviews, texts, biography. These Giger folio books have become very desirable, collectable editions in their various printings around the world, the series encompassing the work of one of the world's most unique and influential visionaries of the macabre. This is volume 2 of 2 of "HR Giger's Necronomicon" where Al Azred's legendary magical book of the most wonderful abominations and perversions, "Necronomicon" (made infamous in the pages of HP Lovecraft's "Cthulhu" mythology), becomes a visual reality!
First Japanese edition, published by Treville, Tokyo, in 1987. Very good copy throughout with Very Good dust jacket. Some light wear to over-sized book.
1979, English / Polish
Hardcover (w. dust jacket), 216 pages, 27.5 x 26 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / fine
Published by
Krajowa Agencja Wydawnicza / Warsaw
$180.00 - In stock -
Rare first edition of this wonderful hardcover volume, published in 1979 by Krajowa Agencja Wydawnicza in Warsaw. Beautifully designed by one of the leading graphic artists in the field of Polish posters, Hubert Hilscher, this 200+ page book remains the finest document dedicated to the "Plakat Polski" (Polish Poster) of the 1970s - an exceptional period for the medium. Lavishly illustrated throughout in colour and b&w with over 400 of the best examples spanning 1970-1978, the book opens with an introduction in both Polish and English, English captions throughout, and includes detailed artist and work indexes in the back. Includes Political and Social Posters, Theatre and Concert Posters, Film Posters, Exhibition and Commercial Posters, Tourist and Sports Posters, and Circus Posters. This stunning book is a must for anyone interested in the subject, or graphic design and illustration from this period in general.
Features the work of Maciej Urbaniec, Franciszek Starowieyski, Józef Mroszczak, Leszek Hołdanowicz, Karol Śliwka, Romuald Socha, Elzbieta Procka, Jan Młodożeniec, Włodzimierz Terechowicz, Wiktor Górka, Roman Cieślewicz, Jerzy Czerniawski, René Mulas, Maria Ihnatowicz, Jan Lenica, Janusz Grabiański, Mieczysław Wasilewski, Hubert Hilscher, Jan Kotarbinski, Waldemar Świerzy, Tomasz Rumiński, Jerzy Treliński, Roman Rosyk, Tadeusz Piskorski, Andrzej Krajewski, Danuta Żukowska, Jan Jaromir Aleksiun, Marcin Mroszczak, Jan Sawka, Henryk Tomaszewski, Doroty Kabiesz, Tomasz Jura, Jerzy Flisak, Marek Freudenreich, Marian Stachurski, Witold Janowski, and many more.
Beginning in the 1950s and through the 1980s, the Polish School of Posters combined the aesthetics of painting with the succinctness and simple metaphor of the poster. It developed characteristics such as painterly gesture, linear quality, and vibrant colours, as well as a sense of individual personality, humour, and fantasy. It was in this way that the Polish poster was able to make the distinction between designer and artist less apparent. Posters of the Polish Poster School significantly influenced the international development of graphic design in poster art. Their major contribution is in their use of the power of suggestion through allusion. Using strong and vivid colours from folk art, they combine printed slogans, often hand-lettered, with popular symbols, to create a concise inventive metaphor. As a hybrid of words and images, these posters created a certain aesthetic tension that projected the art form in this period on European design. In addition to aesthetic aspects, these posters were able to reveal the artist's emotional involvement with the subject. They did not solely exist as an objective presentation, rather they were also the artist's interpretation and commentary on the subject and on society.
To this day, "Plakat Polski" remain as influential as ever on the world of graphic design, typography, illustration and even painting, and are widely collected and exhibited around the world.
Very Good—NF copy in VG—NF dust jacket.