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:
CLOSED FOR SUMMER.
RE-OPENING 01.02.24
WEB-SHOP OPEN 24/7.
World Food Books
Postal Address:
PO Box 435
Flinders Lane
Victoria 8009
Australia
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World Food Books Gift Voucher
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All prices in AUD (Australian dollars)
Pick-Ups
Please note: The bookshop is closed until February 1, 2024.
Pick-up orders can be collected in our bookshop during opening hours after this date. Please collect any Pick-up orders within 3 weeks of ordering as we have limited storage space. Orders will be released back into stock if not collected within this time. No refunds can be made for pick-ups left un-collected.
Return Policy
All sales are final. We do accept returns (for refund, exchange) for items received in error. All our orders are packed with special care using heavy-duty padding and cardboard book-mailers or bubble mailers (for smaller books), using reinforcement where required. We cannot take responsibility for any lost, stolen or damaged parcels.
Insurance
Should you wish to insure your package, please email us directly after placing your order and we can organise this at a small extra expense. Although all standard/express tracked packages are very safe and dependable, we cannot take responsibility for any lost, stolen or damaged parcels. We recommend insurance on valuable orders.
Interested in selling your old books, catalogues, journals, magazines, comics, fanzines, ephemera? We are always looking for interesting, unusual and out-of-print books to buy. We only buy books in our fields of interest and specialty, and that we feel we can resell.
We base these prices on desirability, market value, in-print prices, condition and our current stock levels. We offer cash, store credit, and can take stock on consignment. All
about 25% of the price we expect to get when we sell them, or 30% in store credit. We base these prices on desirability, market value, in-print prices, condition and our current stock levels.
Sell your books any day of the week. You can drop them off and return later. If you have a lot of books, we can visit your Sydney home.
We buy books that we feel we can resell. We offer about 25 % of the price we expect to get when we sell them, or 30% in store credit. We base these prices on desirability, market value, in-print prices, condition and our current stock levels.
Philadelphia Wireman
03 August - 01 September, 2018
World Food Books is proud to announce our next Occasion, the first presentation of sculptures by Philadelphia Wireman in Australia.
The Philadelphia Wireman sculptures were found abandoned in an alley off Philadelphia’s South Street on trash night in 1982. Their discovery in a rapidly-changing neighbourhood undergoing extensive renovation, compounded with the failure of all attempts to locate the artist, suggests that the works may have been discarded after the maker’s death. Dubbed the "Philadelphia Wireman" during the first exhibition of this work, in 1985, the maker’s name, age, ethnicity, and even gender remain uncertain. The entire collection totals approximately 1200 pieces, all intricately bound together with tightly-wound heavy-gauge wire (along with a few small, abstract marker drawings, reminiscent both of Mark Tobey and J.B. Murry). The dense construction of the work, despite a modest range of scale and materials, is singularly obsessive and disciplined in design: a wire armature or exoskeleton firmly binds a bricolage of found objects including plastic, glass, food packaging, umbrella parts, tape, rubber, batteries, pens, leather, reflectors, nuts and bolts, nails, foil, coins, toys, watches, eyeglasses, tools, and jewellery.
Heavy with associations—anthropomorphic, zoomorphic, and socio-cultural responses to wrapped detritus—the totemic sculptures by Philadelphia Wireman have been discussed in the context of work created to fulfil the shamanistic needs of alternative religions in American culture. Curators, collectors, and critics have variously compared certain pieces to sculpture from Classical antiquity, Native American medicine bundles, African-American memory jugs, and African fetish objects. Reflecting the artist’s prolific and incredibly focused scavenging impulse, and despite—or perhaps enhanced by—their anonymity, these enigmatic objects function as urban artefacts and arbiters of power, though their origin and purpose is unknown. Philadelphia Wireman, whatever their identity, possessed an astonishing ability to isolate and communicate the concepts of power and energy through the selection and transformation of ordinary materials. Over the course of the past two decades, this collection has come to be regarded as an important discovery in the field of self-taught art and vernacular art.
Presented in collaboration with Fleisher-Ollman Gallery, Philadelphia, and Robert Heald, Wellington.
Susan Te Kahurangi King
02 February - 10 March, 2018
Susan Te Kahurangi King (24 February 1951 - ) has been a confident and prolific artist since she was a young child, drawing with readily available materials - pencils, ballpoint pens and felt-tip markers, on whatever paper is at hand. Between the ages of four and six Susan slowly ceased verbal communication. Her grandparents William and Myrtle Murphy had developed a special bond with Susan so they took on caring responsibilities for extended periods. Myrtle began informally archiving her work, carefully collecting and storing the drawings and compiling scrapbooks. No drawing was insignificant; every scrap of paper was kept. The King family are now the custodians of a vast collection containing over 7000 individual works, from tiny scraps of paper through to 5 meter long rolls.
The scrapbooks and diaries reveal Myrtle to be a woman of great patience and compassion, seeking to understand a child who was not always behaving as expected. She encouraged Susan to be observant, to explore her environment and absorb all the sights and sounds. Myrtle would show Susan’s drawings to friends and people in her community that she had dealings with, such as shopkeepers and postal workers, but this was not simply a case of a grandmother’s bias. She recognised that Susan had developed a sophisticated and unique visual language and sincerely believed that her art deserved serious attention.
This was an unorthodox attitude for the time. To provide some context, Jean Dubuffet coined the term Art Brut in 1945 to describe work created by self-taught artists – specifically residents of psychiatric institutions and those he considered to be visionaries or eccentrics. In 1972 Roger Cardinal extended this concept by adopting the term Outsider Art to describe work made by non-academically trained artists operating outside of mainstream art networks through choice or circumstance. Susan was born in Te Aroha, New Zealand in 1951, far from the artistic hubs of Paris and London that Dubuffet and Cardinal operated in. That Myrtle fêted Susan as a self-taught artist who deserved to be taken seriously shows how progressive her attitudes were.
Susan’s parents Doug and Dawn were also progressive. Over the years they had consulted numerous health practitioners about Susan’s condition, as the medical establishment could not provide an explanation as to why she had lapsed into silence. Dawn educated herself in the field of homeopathy and went on to treat all twelve of her children using these principles – basing prescriptions on her observations of their physical, mental and emotional state.
Doug was a linguist with an interest in philosophy who devoted what little spare time he had to studying Maori language and culture. To some extent their willingness to explore the fringes of the mainstream made them outsiders too but it was their commitment to living with integrity and their respect for individuality that ensured Susan’s creativity was always encouraged.
Even though Susan’s family supported her artistic pursuits, some staff in schools and hospitals saw it as an impediment to her assimilation into the community and discouraged it in a variety of ways. Her family was not always aware of this and therefore did not fully understand why Susan stopped drawing in the early 1990s. However, rather than dwell on the challenges that Susan faced in pursuit of her artistic practice, they prefer to highlight her achievements. In 2008 Susan began drawing again in earnest, after an almost 20 year interruption, and her work is now shown in galleries around the world.
Susan grew up without television and has been heavily influenced by the comics she read as a child. She is absolutely fearless in the appropriation of recognizable characters, such as Donald Duck and Mickey Mouse, in her work. She twists their limbs, contorts their faces, compresses them together, blends them into complex patterned backgrounds - always imbuing them with an incredible energy. Although Susan often used pop culture characters in her work they are not naive or childlike. These are drawings by a brilliant self-taught artist who has been creating exceptional work for decades without an audience in mind.
Mladen Stilinović
"Various Works 1986 - 1999"
02 February 16 - September 10, 2016
Various works 1986 - 1999, from two houses, from the collections of John Nixon, Sue Cramer, Kerrie Poliness, Peter Haffenden and Phoebe Haffenden.
Including: Geometry of Cakes (various shelves), 1993; Poor People’s Law (black and white plate), 1993; White Absence (glasses, ruler, set square, silver spoon, silver ladel with skin photograph and wooden cubes), 1990-1996; Exploitation of the Dead (grey and red star painting, wooden painting, black spoon with red table, red plate), 1984-1990; Money and Zeros (zero tie, paintings made for friends in Australia (Sue, John, Kerrie), numbers painting), 1991-1992; Words - Slogans (various t-shirts) - “they talk about the death of art...help! someone is trying to kill me”, “my sweet little lamb”, “work is a disease - Karl Marx”; Various artist books, catalogues, monographs, videos; Poster from exhibition Insulting Anarchy; "Circular" Croatian - Australian edition; Artist book by Vlado Martek (Dostoyevsky); more.
Thanks to Mladen Stilinović and Branka Stipančić.
Jonathan Walker
Always Will Need To Wear Winter Shirt Blue + Ochre Small Check Pattern
21 August - 21 September, 2015
Untitled
I am not a great reader of poetry but I always return to the work of Melbourne poet, Vincent Buckley (1925- 1988). Perhaps I find his most tantalising piece to be not a finished poem but a fragment left on a scrap of paper discovered on his desk after the poet’s death.
The poetry gathers like oil
In the word-core, and spreads
It has its music meet,
Its music is in movement.
This fragment is more the shell left behind from a volatile thought than a finished poem. I find the last two lines honest but awkward whereas the first two lines work like an arrow. Most likely he could not find a resolution so it was left. Still, in its present form, it remains an eloquent testimony to the ultimate failure of a medium to express mobile thought and sensation, in Buckley’s case, through verbal language. It’s an important matter because this is something all artists have to deal with regardless of the medium.
I have never written a poem, however, I am forever copying fragments from books on paper scraps in a vain effort to fix certain notions in my head. At first, they function as bookmarks that are sometimes returned to when I open the book. But before long, as they accumulate, they fall out littering the table interspersed with A4 photocopies, bills, books and medications.
To return to Buckley’s fragment, the first two lines very much evoke how I paint nowadays. As you age, detail diminishes and patches of light become more luminous and float. I feel the most honest way of dealing with this is by smearing the oil paint on the canvas with the fingers and working close-up, blind. Only if the patches coalesce into an approaching image can the work gain a life.
-
Jonathan Walker was born in Melbourne, Australia and brought up on a dairy farm in Gippsland. In the 1970’s he studied painting at RMIT and won the Harold Wright Scholarship to the British Museum, London. During the 1980’s he exhibited at Pinacotheca Gallery, Richmond and had work shown at the NGV and Heidi City Art Gallery. Over the same period he designed the cover for the “Epigenesi” LP by Giancarlo Toniutti, Italy and conducted a mail exchange work with Achim Wollscheid, Germany. The work with artists through the post resulted in an article published in the bicentenary issue of Art and Australia 1988. He showed in artist run spaces such as WestSpace in the 90’s and 2000’s, and until 2012, taught painting at Victoria University, which is where we (Colleen Ahern and Lisa Radford) as organisers of the exhibition, among many others, had the privilege of being his student.
Walker’s knowledge was imparted to students through the careful selection of music, literature, and artists found in books that he himself had ordered for the library. Walker’s strategy was the generosity of sharing his vast knowledge with references specific to each student and their context.
Walker’s paintings share a similar focus and intimacy.
This exhibition presents a small selection of recent paintings alongside a publication that includes Walker’s writing. Observational and analytical, Walker’s work is a type of material notation — the time of day, colour and how it is blended, the both specific and fleeting location of a reflection on lino or the question of whether a chair leg should be included in a painting.
Please join us on Friday August 21 between 6-8pm to celebrate the opening of the exhibition.
Curated by Colleen Ahern and Lisa Radford.
B. Wurtz
Curated by Nic Tammens
March 26 - April 4, 2015
B.Wurtz works from a basement studio in his home on Manhattan’s Lower East Side.
This local fact is attested to by the plastic shopping bags and newsprint circulars that appear in his work. As formal objects, they don’t make loud claims about their origins but nonetheless transmit street addresses and places of business from the bottom of this long thin island. Like plenty of artists, Wurtz is affected by what is local and what is consumed. His work is underpinned by this ethic. It often speaks from a neighborhood or reads like the contents of a hamper:
“BLACK PLUMS $1.29 lb.”
“Food Bazaar”
“USDA Whole Pork Shoulder Picnic 99c lb.”
“RITE AID Pharmacy, with us it’s personal.”
“H. Brickman & Sons.”
“Sweet Yams 59c lb."
Most of the work in this exhibition was made while the artist was in residence at Dieu Donne, a workshop dedicated to paper craft in Midtown. Here Wurtz fabricated assemblages with paper and objects that are relatively lightweight, with the intention that they would be easily transportable to Australia. This consideration isn’t absolute in Wurtz’s work, but was prescriptive for making the current exhibition light and cheap. Packed in two boxes, these works were sent from a USPS post office on the Lower East Side and delivered to North Melbourne by Australia Post.
Wurtz appears courtesy of Metro Pictures, New York.
Thanks to Rob Halverson, Joshua Petherick, Sari de Mallory, Matt Hinkley, Helen Johnson, Fayen d'Evie, Ask Kilmartin, Lisa Radon, Ellena Savage, Yale Union, and "Elizabeth".
John Nixon
"Archive"
December 15 - January 20, 2014
The presentation of John Nixon's archive offered a rare showcase of this extensive collection of the artist's own publications, catalogues, posters, ephemera, editions and more, from the mid 1980s onwards, alongside a selection of his artworks.
Organized by John Nixon, Joshua Petherick and Matt Hinkley.
"Habitat"
at Minerva, Sydney (organised by Joshua Petherick and Matt Hinkley)
November 15 - December 20, 2014
Lupo Borgonovo, Janet Burchill & Jennifer McCamley,
Lewis Fidock, HR Giger, Piero Gilardi, Veit Laurent Kurz,
Cinzia Ruggeri, Michael E. Smith, Lucie Stahl, Daniel Weil, Wols
Press Release:
“...It contained seven objects. The slender fluted bone, surely formed for flight, surely from the wing of some large bird. Three archaic circuitboards, faced with mazes of gold. A smooth white sphere of baked clay. An age-blackened fragment of lace. A fingerlength segment of what she assumed was bone from a human wrist, grayish white, inset smoothly with the silicon shaft of a small instrument that must once have ridden flush with the surface of the skin - but the thing’s face was seared and blackened.”
William Gibson, “Count Zero”, 1986
"Autumn Projects Archive"
Curated by Liza Vasiliou
March 6 - March 15, 2014
World Food Books, in conjunction with the Virgin Australia Melbourne Fashion Festival 2014, presented the Autumn Projects archive, consisting of a selection of early examples in Australian fashion with a particular interest in collecting designers and labels from the period beginning in the 1980’s, who significantly influenced the discourse of Australian Fashion.
Curated by Liza Vasiliou, the exhibition provided a unique opportunity to view pieces by designers Anthea Crawford, Barbara Vandenberg, Geoff Liddell and labels CR Australia, Covers, Jag along with early experimental collage pieces by Prue Acton and Sally Browne’s ‘Fragments’ collection, suspended throughout the functioning World Food Books shop in Melbourne.
H.B. Peace
presented by CENTRE FOR STYLE
November 14, 2013
"Hey Blinky, you say chic, I say same"
Anon 2013
H.B. Peace is a clothing collaboration between great friends Blake Barns and Hugh Egan Westland. Their pieces explore the divergences between 'character’ and ‘personality’ in garments....etc
Special Thanks to Joshua Petherick and Matt Hinkley of WFB and Gillian Mears
and a Very Special Thank you to Audrey Thomas Hayes for her shoe collaboration.
Janet Burchill & Jennifer McCamley
"Aesthetic Suicide"
May 10 - June 8, 2013
The first of our occasional exhibitions in the World Food Books office/shop space in Melbourne, "Aesthetic Suicide" presented a body of new and older works together by artists Janet Burchill & Jennifer McCamley, including videos, prints, a wall work, and publications.
During shop open hours videos played every hour, on the hour.
2024, English
Softcover, 96 pages, 20 x 14 cm
Published by
Semiotext(e) / Los Angeles
$34.00 - In stock -
Wild new adventures in word-infatuated flânerie from a celebrated literary provocateur.
This book of thirty-six poetic bulletins by the humiliation-advice-giver Wayne Koestenbaum will teach you how to cruise, how to dream, how to decode a crowded consciousness, how to find nuggets of satisfaction in unaccustomed corners, and how to sew a language glove roomy enough to contain materials gathered while meandering. Koestenbaum wrote many of these poems while walking around New York City. He'd jot down phrases in a notebook or dictate them into his phone. At home, he'd incorporate these fragmented gleanings into overflowing quasi sonnets. Therefore each poem functions as a coded diary entry, including specific references to sidewalk events and peripatetic perceptions. Flirting, remembering, eavesdropping, gazing, squeezing, sequestering: Koestenbaum invents a novel way to cram dirty liberty into the tight yet commodious space of the sonnet, a fourteen-lined cruise ship that contains ample suites for behavior modification, libidinal experiment, aura-filled memory orgies, psychedelic Bildungsromane, lap dissolves, archival plunges, and other mental saunterings that conjure the unlikely marriage of Kenneth Anger and Marianne Moore. Carnal pudding, anyone? These engorged lyrics don't rhyme; and though each builds on a carapace of fourteen lines, many of the lines spawn additional, indented tributaries, like hoop earrings dangling from the stanzas' lobes. Koestenbaum's poems are comic, ribald, compressed, symphonic. They take liberties with ordinary language, and open up new pockets for sensation in the sorrowing overcoat of the “now.” Imagine: the training wheels have been removed from poetry's bicycle, and the wheeling flâneur is finally allowed a word pie equal to fantasy's appetite. Stubble—a libidinal detail—matters when you're stranded on the archipelago of your most unsanctioned yet tenaciously harbored impulses.
1985, Japanese
Softcover, 260 pages, 19 x 13 cm
Published by
Data House / Tokyo
$200.00 - In stock -
Possibly the most fun you can cram into 260-odd pages! A now very collectible volume edited by none other than Japanese master of erotic superrealism, Hajime Sorayama, Pink Department Store is a wild book digest of visual sex — straight out of 1985! A compendium of remarkable erotic imagery packed into this one-stop look-book of kink compiled by Sorayama, all reproduced in full-colour on beautiful warm raw paper stock, designed by Hisao Iguchi. From the Tokyo sex clubs, phone-booths and toilet stalls, Shibari photography to pink film posters, x-rated manga to wildlife fornication, leather daddys to dominatrixes, Pink Department Store is a safari through graphic perversion and joyous visual innuendo. Alongside archival material and international works the book generously features an abundance of works by over 100 contemporary Japanese illustrators and photographers, including Aimei Ozaki, Harumi Yamaguchi, Takashi Nemoto, Yosuke Onishi, Suehiro Maruo, Hajime Sorayama, Mizumaru Anzai, Yokoyama Akira, Keiichi Ota, Akira Ishigaki, Kaoru Ueda, Teruhiko Yumura, Yoshiharu Ebisu, Arata Taga, to name but a few. There is also a directory list to contact them all!
Very Good—NF copy in VG original dust jacket and rarely preserved publisher's obi-strip.
2023, English
Hardcover, 106 pages, 21 x 14.5 cm
Published by
Amphetamine Sulphate / Austin
$44.00 - In stock -
The long-awaited new novel from a major literary talent. With cover design by Michael Salerno (KIDDIEPUNK).
“I’m so close to falling apart. Fuck it. Who isn’t?”
Thomas Moore’s latest novel Your Dreams, the follow-up to 2021’s devastating Forever, is a visceral yet contained inquiry into the endless need to be understood. Eavesdropping on a debate about cancelled bands, listening to a close friend’s explanation of his disturbing desires, facilitating a conversation about kinks at a party until it goes wrong, Moore’s narrator is less of a character than a witness of desperate disconnection. Your Dreams, despite its impulse to hide, faces the reader head-on in an intimate unmasking, still grasping for closeness in a world of limits.
“Simple words. Deep emotions … beyond prose to another plane. Openness that pours through you.”
Jack Skelley, The Los Angeles Review of Books
“Thomas Moore is one of the best writers the world has in stock.”
Dennis Cooper
2023, English
Softcover, 180 pages, 14.8 x 21 cm
Published by
Salitter Workings / New York
$35.00 - Out of stock
Number 8 of Salitter Workings' benign criminal enterprise in Lulu/Exoteric archiving.
"Like so many novels, this book is the story of a love affair. What is less usual is that Jonathan, an artist, is almost thirty when the story starts, while Serge is a boy of eight. Jonathan had got to know Serge and his mother Barbara in Paris the previous year. Tired of the city and confused by the stress of this relationship, Jonathan shut himself away in a remote village. But his retreat is disturbed when Barbara needs someone to look after Serge for the summer while she travels abroad. Like all lovers, Jonathan and Serge create their own microcosm of domestic and erotic ritual, but theirs is a world that shatters on contact with the surrounding society.
Published by Editions de Minuit, a leading literary press, Tony Duvert is respected in France for both fiction and essays, but the uncompromising motif that pervades his work has up till now barred him from reaching English readers. GMP are especially pleased to welcome Duvert to our translation series; his cool and matter-of-fact portrayal of a sensitive theme is a welcome alternative to the hysteria surrounding the age taboo in the English-speaking countries.
"One of the most intelligent, bold and subversive books of the year" - Le Monde""
2023, English
Softcover, 268 pages, 14.8 x 21 cm
Published by
Salitter Workings / New York
$35.00 - In stock -
Number 10 of Salitter Workings' benign criminal enterprise in Lulu/Exoteric archiving.
"This extraordinary novel introduces to the English-speaking world a notable new literary talent from France whose vision has been compared to that of William S. Burroughs and Jean Genet, and whose highly original style and theme have created a considerable stir in French literary circles.
The setting of this novel is an ancient chateau located in a fog-bound region, possibly Brittany, complete with a forbidden cellar in which hang seven bodies, all victims of horrible sexual assaults. The chatelaine is a sinister doctor and her elderly husband, aided by a depraved young henchman, Marco. The inmates in this strange castle are a gang of boys ranging in age from eight to fourteen, rounded up from various city slums and peasant hovels, and purchased from their families for the price of a fishing boat or the side of a pig. The boys are well fed and clothed and allowed every freedom, but on certain afternoons and evenings they must entertain the highly respected gentlemen who have paid well for the privilege of their company.
Strange Landscape is a luminous and haunting work which critics have called a fable of primeval innocence, in which "evil" plays as important a role as "good." The children are creatures living in an Eden before the Fall. Thus they are as innocently free to fall in love with each other as they are to sail their rafts down the river. Duvert's originality of style has been the subject of heated controversy in Paris literary circles. André Delmas, writing in Le Monde, said: "What is so utterly startling in Duvert is the way he transforms our notion of novelistic time." In France, Duvert is rapidly becoming known as one of the most important new voices on the literary horizon.
Tony Duvert was born in 1945. He completed his first novel, Récidive by the age of twenty-one, and it was published in France in 1967. Since then he has also written Le Voyageur, Interdit de séjour, and Portrait d'homme couteau. Strange Landscape, the first of his works to be published in the United States, was described by Le Nouvel Observateur as "the finest of all Duvert's books." Duvert was awarded the 1973 Prix Médicis."
2002, English
Softcover, 312 pages, 23.5 x 15.6 cm
Published by
Duke University Press / North Carolina
$49.00 - In stock -
Richard Bruce Nugent (1906—1987) was a writer, painter, illustrator, and popular bohemian personality who lived at the centre of the Harlem Renaissance. Protege of Alain Locke, roommate of Wallace Thurman, and friend of Langston Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston, the precocious Nugent stood for many years as the only African-American writer willing to clearly pronounce his homosexuality in print. Selections from his writings, paintings, and erotic art-deco drawings-mostly unpublished or scattered in rare and obscure publications-are collected here for the first time. A contributor to the landmark publication FIRE!! and resident of the notorious Niggeratti Manor, Nugent drew heavily upon his own experiences in his art. Nugent also appeared on Broadway in Porgy (the 1927 play) and Run, Little Chillun (1933).
Thomas H. Wirth, a close friend of Nugent's during the last years of the artist's life, has assembled a selection of Nugent's writings, including his best-known piece, "Smoke, Lilies, and Jade," and some of his poems and short non-fiction. The visual art selections include many of Nugent's sketches, as well as a number of his paintings. Wirth has written an introduction providing biographical information about Nugent's life and situating his art in relation to the visual and literary currents that influenced him. A foreword by Henry Louis Gates Jr. emphasises the importance of Nugent for African American history and culture. Outliving virtually all other Harlem Renaissance figures, Nugent became a valuable resource to historians during his later years and is quoted in many works about the Harlem Renaissance era. This book offers a trove of hitherto unavailable primary source material and original art.
"The list of gay and lesbian African Americans is impressive and long, but it is surely headed by Bruce Nugent...[Wirth] does us an immeasurable favor by bringing together this collection of Nugent's poems, stories, essays, and visual art, along with a biographical sketch and a thoughtful interpretation. One of the key figures in both the creative world of the Harlem Renaissance and the complex underground world of gay culture, Bruce Nugent at last speaks here for himself."-from the Foreword, by Henry Louis Gates Jr. "Nugent is one of the best-known unknowns of the Harlem Renaissance - widely quoted by its chroniclers and revered by people interested in black gay history. By restoring his place in history and making his work widely available for scrutiny, this book performs an invaluable service. Wirth's introduction also provides an extraordinary tour of the gay side of the Renaissance and vivid glimpses of bohemian life in Harlem and the arts circles Nugent moved in." - George Chauncey, author of Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture, and the Making of the Gay Male World
2023, English
Softcover, 80 pages, 21.5 x 13.9 cm
Published by
Nightboat Books / New York
$33.00 - In stock -
A textual and historigraphical odyssey imbued with queer intergenerational yearning and loss.
Don’t Leave Me This Way blends archival research with sexual fantasy to produce a series of sonnets inspired by Gaétan Dugas, named by Randy Shilts as “Patient Zero” of the AIDS epidemic in North America. Committed to the utopian possibilities of elegy and pornography, Don’t Leave Me This Way exploits the absurdist beauty of the cut-up technique to voice a chorus of lost spirits: poignant, vengeful, and ready to ball.
"Ever a lover eager for experience, Eric Sneathen queers the sonnet by placing a different kind of impossible love at its center: the dead of the AIDS era, whose archives so infuse these lines that our shared history comes alive. With the poet's 'promise to tell of thee like flesh forever,' this book of sticky blisses slips its readers the key to a room in literature's bathhouse, where the voices of gay lives past and present commingle."—Brian Teare
2015, English
Hardcover (w. dust jacket), 240 pages, 22.23 x 15.24 cm
Published by
Rizzoli / New York
$44.00 - In stock -
The long-awaited memoir from one of the most acclaimed radical writers in American literature.
Described by the London Review of Books as one of "the most brilliant critics writing in America today," Gary Indiana is a true radical whose caustic voice has by turns haunted and influenced the literary and artistic establishments.
With I Can Give You Anything but Love, Gary Indiana has composed a literary, unabashedly wicked, and revealing montage of excursions into his life and work-from his early days growing up gay in rural New Hampshire to his escape to Haight-Ashbury in the post-summer-of-love era, the sweltering 1970s in Los Angeles, and ultimately his existence in New York in the 1980s as a bona fide downtown personality. Interspersed throughout his vivid recollections are present-day chapters set against the louche culture and raw sexuality of Cuba, where he has lived and worked occasionally for the past fifteen years. Connoisseurs will recognize in this—his most personal book yet—the same mixture of humor and realism, philosophy and immediacy, that have long confused the definitions of genre applied to his writing.
Vivid, atmospheric, revealing, and entertaining, this is an engrossing read and a serious contribution to the genres of gay and literary memoir.
Gary Indiana is a writer, playwright, filmmaker, and artist. He is the author of seven novels, including Do Everything in the Dark and The Shanghai Gesture, as well as several plays, collections of poetry and nonfiction, and essays in publications from Art in America to Vice. His visual art appeared in the 2014 Whitney Biennial.
1977, English
Softcover, 192 pages, 21.5 x 15.5 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Semiotext(e) / Los Angeles
$200.00 - Out of stock
Rare copy of this remarkable issue of the original Semiotext(e) journal, published and edited by Sylvère Lotringer between 1974—1985, with later book-length issues appearing in the 1990s. This key issue, Anti-Oedipus: From Psychoanalysis to Schizopolitics, was published hot on the heels of the publication of Deleuze and Guattari's seminal "Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia", published by Viking in 1977. This issue of the journal explores the issues raised by Deleuze and Guattari, whilst searching for their practical applications. Features major contributions by Sylvère Lotringer, Gilles Deleuze, Felix Guattari, Jean-François Lyotard, Guy Hocquenghem, Antonin Artaud, Jacques Donzelot, John Rajchman, et al.
Founded in 1974, Semiotext(e) began as a journal that emerged from a semiotics reading group led by Sylvère Lotringer at the Columbia University philosophy department. Initially, the magazine was devoted to readings of thinkers like Nietzsche and Saussure. In 1978, Lotringer and his collaborators published a special issue, Schizo-Culture, in the wake of a conference of the same name he had organized two years before at Columbia University. The magazine brought together artists and thinkers such as Gilles Deleuze, Kathy Acker, John Cage, Michel Foucault, Jack Smith, Martine Barrat and Lee Breuer. Schizo-Culture brought out connections between high theory and underground culture that had not yet been made, and forged the "high/low" aesthetic that remains central to the Semiotext(e) project.
Very Good copy with some wear and usual tanning to the spine, raw paper stock edges. Spine and binding undamaged.
2024, English
Softcover, 68 pages, 22 x 14 cm
Published by
Primary Information / New York
$44.00 - In stock -
Self-published in 1968, Footprints, Poems, and Leaves collects dozens of poems written by Martin Wong between 1966 and 1968. Hand-written in a signature calligraphic style that he was just beginning to develop, the poems ebb and flow visually across the page, much like the fluctuating characters, scenes, and moods that inhabit them. This was Wong’s first book of poetry and it contains a double cover showcasing intricate drawings of skeletal angels and other tableaux, as well as a folded, looseleaf broadsheet containing two poems and a drawing of a boney leaf.
The poems were written during a relatively free period for the artist, shortly after he dropped out of Berkeley and began exploring San Francisco at the height of the hippy movement. The poems range from surrealist and pastoral descriptions of the urban subculture that surrounded him to downtrodden, travel-weary biographical entries that are both lonely and tender. Footprints, Poems, and Leaves functions like a journal capturing Wong’s tumultuous life in this period, which included being arrested at a queer, drug-fueled house party (along with Rudolf Nureyev and Dame Margot Fonteyn) and a stay in a mental institution in late 1967 and early 1968. Around the time of the book’s publication, Wong enrolled in Humboldt State University to finish his degree, beginning a new chapter for the artist.
Despite the dark backdrops of many of the works, the writing displays a playfulness with form and language and a sense of humor that can be seen throughout Wong’s later work as well. Altogether, Footprints, Poems, and Leaves creates a rich tapestry of visual poetry that is both a product of its time and the budding artistic mind of a young Martin Wong.
Martin Wong (1946-1999) was born in Portland, Oregon and raised in San Francisco, California. He studied ceramics at Humboldt State University, graduating in 1968. Wong was active in the performance art groups The Cockettes and Angels of Light before moving to New York in 1978. He exhibited for two decades at notable downtown galleries including EXIT ART, Semaphore, and P·P·O·W, among others, before his passing in San Francisco from an AIDS related illness. His work is represented in the collections of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY; Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY; The Bronx Museum of the Arts, New York, NY; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY; Cleveland Museum of Art, Cleveland, OH; Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, IL; and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco, CA, among others. Human Instamatic, a comprehensive retrospective, opened at the Bronx Museum of The Arts in November 2015, before traveling to the Wexner Center for the Arts in 2016 and the UC Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive in 2017. In 2022, the first extensive, touring exhibition of Wong’s work in Europe, Martin Wong: Malicious Mischief, opened at Museo Centro de Arte Dos de Mayo in Madrid before traveling to KW Institute of Contemporary Art (Berlin), Camden Art Centre (London), and Stedelijk Museum (Amsterdam).
Managing Editor (2024): James Hoff
Managing Designer (2024): Rick Myers
2024, English
Softcover (staple-bound), 16 pages, 10.5 x 7 cm
Published by
Primary Information / New York
$22.00 - In stock -
Das Puke Book is a small chapbook self-published by Martin Wong in 1977. Written in the early 1970s, the publication contains thirteen chapters of handwritten micro-fictions filled with cringeworthy stories unfolding in San Francisco and beyond.
Subtitled Da Otto Biography of Otto Peach Fuzz, the publication is populated with a cadre of colorful characters, some of who are obscure underground figures such as George “Hibiscus” Harris from the Cockettes and Angels of Light and Rodney Price and Debra “Beaver” Bauer from Angels of Light, while others such as Paul Gauguin, Vincent van Gogh, and God, are more well known. Although lighthearted, Wong paints unforgettably vivid scenes, such as Van Gogh attacking Gauguin with a razor, Beaver eating so many hot dogs she explodes, and God coming to San Francisco only to find a notebook that makes him so sick to his stomach that he vomits endlessly until the world ends. Written during his days working on the flyers and theatrical backdrops for the Angels of Light Free Theater and published just before his move to New York, these stories capture Wong’s playfulness and the absurdist, kaleidoscopic milieu of the moment in which they were written.
Many of these stories appeared before the book’s publication in Wong’s now-iconic calligraphic scrolls. Possessing a lifelong fascination with language and its representation, Wong began writing in a flickering, calligraphic style in the sixties that found a natural home in the psychedelic movement. During the period that Das Puke Book was written, the artist traveled to Nepal, India, and Afghanistan (which makes an appearance in chapter twelve) to take a mosaic workshop in Herat and study calligraphy and tantric painting. Upon his return, he referred to himself as a tantric set designer until concluding his work with the Angels of Light in 1973–the same year that he finished the work in this book.
Martin Wong (1946-1999) was born in Portland, Oregon and raised in San Francisco, California. He studied ceramics at Humboldt State University, graduating in 1968. Wong was active in the performance art groups The Cockettes and Angels of Light Free Theater before moving to New York in 1978. He exhibited for two decades at notable downtown galleries including EXIT ART, Semaphore, and P·P·O·W, among others, before his passing in San Francisco from an AIDS related illness. His work is represented in the collections of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY; Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY; The Bronx Museum of the Arts, New York, NY; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY; Cleveland Museum of Art, Cleveland, OH; Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, IL; and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco, CA, among others. Human Instamatic, a comprehensive retrospective, opened at the Bronx Museum of The Arts in November 2015, before traveling to the Wexner Center for the Arts in 2016 and the UC Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive in 2017. In 2022, the first extensive, touring exhibition of Wong’s work in Europe, Martin Wong: Malicious Mischief, opened at Museo Centro de Arte Dos de Mayo in Madrid before traveling to KW Institute of Contemporary Art (Berlin), Camden Art Centre (London), and Stedelijk Museum (Amsterdam).
Managing Editor (2024): James Hoff
Managing Designer (2024): Rick Myers
2015, English
Softcover, 336 pages, 21 x 14 cm
Published by
Other Press / US
$40.00 - In stock -
The Guilt Project examines the way in which the law has failed to anticipate the contemporary culture that creates, defines, and punishes rape.
"Rape is culture. There is no separate "rape culture" bubbling beneath our otherwise sunny American society, just as there is no rape culture that is not Indian culture, or British culture, or Mexican culture, at least not at this point. Fraternity culture is rape culture, celebrity culture is rape culture, sports culture is rape culture, university culture is rape culture, military culture is rape culture - even literary culture is rape culture."—from the author's new preface
"A sophisticated, brave look at a topic that too often provokes merely panic, prejudice, and posturing."—Kirkus Reviews
An English court in 1736 described rape as an accusation “easily to be made and hard to be proved, and harder to be defended by the party accused, though never so innocent.” To prove the crime, the law required a woman to physically resist, to put up a “hue and cry,” as evidence of her unwillingness. Beginning in the 1970s, however, feminist and victim-advocacy groups began changing attitudes toward rape so the crime is now seen as violent in itself: the legal definition of rape now includes everything from the sadistic serial rapist to the eighteen-year-old who has consensual sex with a fourteen-year-old.
This inclusiveness means there are now more rapists among us. And more of rape’s camp followers: the prison-makers, the community watchdogs, law-and-order politicians, and the real-crime/real-time entertainment industry. Vanessa Place examines the ambiguity of rape law by presenting cases where guilt lies, but lies uneasily, and leads into larger ethical questions of what defines guilt, what is justice, and what is considered just punishment. Assuming a society can and must be judged by the way it treats its most despicable members, The Guilt Project looks at the way the American legal system defines, prosecutes, and punishes sex offenders, how this Dateline NBC justice has transformed our conception of who is guilty and how they ought to be treated, and how this has come to undo our deeper humanity.
Vanessa Place is an artist, poet, author and criminal appellate attorney practicing in Los Angeles. She has worked on the appeals of more than one thousand indigent felons, specializing in sex offenders and sexually violent predators. She is also a cofounder of Les Figues Press, an independent, nonprofit literary press. Vanessa Place was the first poet to perform in the Whitney Biennial, and has published numerous books of poetry and prose. She is the author of Dies: A Sentence, La Medusa, Exposé des Faits, Statement of Facts, and, with coauthor Robert Fitterman, Notes on Conceptualisms. Her performance venues include the Getty Villa (Los Angeles); Museum of Modern Art (New York); Museum of Contemporary Art (Los Angeles); Detroit Museum of Contemporary Art; Mestno Musej (Ljubljana, Slovenia); New Holland (Saint Petersburg, Russia); Garage Museum (Moscow); Kunstverein, (Köln, Germany); Swiss Institute (New York); Silencio (Paris); and Whitechapel Gallery (London). Her art work has been exhibited at MAK Center/Schindler House (Los Angeles); Denver Museum of Contemporary Art; the Broad Museum (East Lansing, MI); the Kitchen (New York), Cage Gallery (New York), and Various Small Fires (Los Angeles).
2023, English
Softcover, 284 pages, 23.5 x 15.7 cm
Published by
Routledge / London
$90.00 - In stock -
This is a timely update of a seminal text which re-interprets key films of the horror genre, including Carrie, The Exorcist, The Brood and Psycho.
In the first edition, Creed draws on Julia Kristeva’s theory of abjection to challenge the popular view that women in horror are almost always victims, and argues that patriarchal ideology constructs women as monstrous in relation to her sexuality and reproductive body to justify her subjugation. Although a projection of male fears and paranoid fantasies, the monstrous-feminine is nonetheless a terrifying figure. Creed’s argument contests Freudian and Lacanian theories of sexual difference to offer a provocative rereading of classical and contemporary horror.
This updated edition includes a new section examining contemporary feminist horror films in relation to nonhuman theory. Creed proposes a new concept of radical abjection to reinterpret the monstrous-feminine as a figure who embraces abjection by reclaiming her body and re-defining her otherness as nonhuman – while questioning patriarchy, anthropocentrism, misogyny and the meaning of the human. Films discussed include Ginger Snaps, Teeth, Atlantics, The Girl with All the Gifts, Border and Titane.
Barbara Creed’s classic remains as relevant as ever and this edition will be of interest to academics and students of feminist theory, nonhuman theory, critical animal studies, race, and queer theory.
Barbara Creed is Redmond Barry Distinguished Professor Emeritus at the University of Melbourne. She is the author of seven books, including Darwin’s Screens: Evolutionary Aesthetics, Time and Sexual Display in the Cinema (2009); and Stray: Human- Animal Ethics in the Anthropocene (2017). She is the director of the Human Rights and Animal Ethics Research Network (HRAE). She has been on the boards of Writers Week, the Melbourne International Film Festival and the Melbourne Queer Film Festival.
2023, English
Softcover, 196 pages, 19 x 14 cm
Published by
Pilot Press / London
$40.00 - In stock -
For this volume of Pilot Press' Responses series, responses were sought to the painting Untitled (eye with comet) by Paul Thek. The work was found in his storage after his death from AIDS in 1988.
Contributors: E.R. De Siqueira, Ben Estes, João Motta Guedes, Lucy Swan, Jon Rainford, Louis Shankar, Amy Evans Bauer, Hattie Morrison, Sammy Paloma, AN Grace, James Horton, Nick Wood, Sophie Paul, Jae Vail, Elizabeth Zvonar, Lars Meijer, Clay AD, Michel Kessler, Pablo Miguel Martínez, Emma Harris, Dylan McNulty-Holmes, Kitya Mark, Katherine Franco, Ainslie Templeton, Alistair McCartney, John Brooks, Jesse Howarth, jimmy cooper, Felix Pilgrim, Nicholas Chittenden Morgan, Murphy O’Neir, Rachel Cattle, Isabel Nolan, Susan Finlay, Ted Simonds, Brooke Palmieri, Kate Morgan, Ashleigh A. Allen, Diogo Gama, JP Seabright, Hugo Hagger, Amanda Kraley, Brendan Cook, Matt Bailey, Charlotte Flint, Rodney Schreiner, Lucy Price, Morgan Melhuish, Jordan Weitzman, Jaakko Pallasvuo, Alex Fiorentino, Harald Smart, Marguerite Carson, loll jung, Richard Porter. Nicholas Kalinoski, Hedi El Kholti, Edmund Francis English, Ted Bonin
1992, Japanese
Softcver (w. dust jacket), 190 pages, 14.5 x 10.5 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Fiction Inc. / Tokyo
Futami Shobo / Japan
$70.00 - Out of stock
Amazing pocket art book of fetish masters John Willie and Eric Stanton. Bondage Comix was edited by Makoto Ohrui and Japanese novelist Mari Akasaka (both editors of SALE2/Fiction Inc.) and published in Tokyo Japan by Futami Shobo in 1992. Packed cover-to-cover with colour and b/w reproductions of classic artworks by Willie and Stanton, from "Sweet Gwendoline" to "From Girl to Pony" to "Beached", Fetish and Bizarre publications, John Willie's bondage photography, Stanton fashions, and much more. Perfectly compiled in the way SALE2 did so well, with elegant scrapbook style, dense with imagery, blown-up, full-bleed reproductions from many publications. Cover artwork and postcard insert by John Willie.
John Alexander Scott Coutts (1902—1962), better known by the pseudonym John Willie, was an artist, fetish photographer, editor and the publisher of the first 20 issues of the fetish magazine Bizarre, featuring his characters Sweet Gwendoline and Sir Dystic d'Arcy.
Eric Stanton (1926—1999) was an American underground cartoonist and fetish art pioneer. While Stanton began his career as a bondage fantasy artist for Irving Klaw, the majority of his later work depicted gender role reversal and proto-feminist female dominance scenarios.
Makoto Ohrui founded the publishing house Fiction Inc. (later Radical Silence Production), the magazine SALE2, the gallery THE deep in Tokyo, and the magazine THE International. Ohrui was art director for SALE2, Purple, Rockin' On, and designed many books.
Mari Akasaka (b. 1964) is a Japanese novelist. In 1999 her novel Vibrator was nominated for the Akutagawa Prize, which was adapted into a 2003 film directed by Ryūichi Hiroki. She was again nominated for the Akutagawa prize in 2000 for her novel, Muse, and won the Noma Literary Prize for New Writers for the same novel.
Very Good copy.
1992, Japanese
Softcover, 192 pages, 13 x 18 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Fiction Inc. / Tokyo
$80.00 - Out of stock
Issue No.42 of the great SALE2 periodical from Tokyo Japan, founded in 1984 by Makoto Orui, who later became art director for Purple magazine in France and Rockin’on magazine in Japan. SALE2 was active for about 14 years during the 1980s—1990s, published regularly as a sort-of fanzine/journal/catalogue/pocket-book by Fiction, Inc., a specialty shop and publisher of fetish and erotica in Tokyo in the 1980-90s. With Orui's distinct design SALE2 developed an exclusive curated editorial set on ‘erotisism and its spiritual philosophy’, with each issue exploring different themes and features, heavy on fetishism and erotic art.
Issue No.42, the "Transformation" issue features collected writings and images around the themes of body transformation, transsexuality, including Pierre Molinier, Mari Akasaka, Kyoko Okazaki, Toyen, Hans Bellmer and Unica Zürn, Henri Maccheroni, Robert Chouraqui, Greybuck's The Equestrians illustrations, Sophia Lamar, plus loads of other images/catalogues of bondage and fetish related arts, and much more...
Very heavily illustrated throughout with erotic photography and artwork, all texts in Japanese.
Very Good copy with tanning to pages.
1989, Japanese
Softcover, 208 pages, 13 x 18 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Fiction Inc. / Tokyo
$80.00 - In stock -
Issue No.36 of the great SALE2 periodical from Tokyo Japan, founded in 1984 by Makoto Orui, who later became art director for Purple magazine in France and Rockin’on magazine in Japan. SALE2 was active for about 14 years during the 1980s—1990s, published regularly as a sort-of fanzine/journal/catalogue/pocket-book by Fiction, Inc., a specialty shop and publisher of fetish and erotica in Tokyo in the 1980-90s. With Orui's distinct design SALE2 developed an exclusive curated editorial set on ‘erotisism and its spiritual philosophy’, with each issue exploring different themes and features, heavy on fetishism and erotic art.
Issue No.36, the "Female Foot Fetishism Special Issue" with the wonderful wraparound Pierre Molinier cover is packed with imagery and essays around the theme of "Foot and Fetish Heel" throughout history, literature, film and fetish publishing, etc. profusely illustrated with drawings, photography, bondage illustrations, film stills, catalogue clippings, and artworks, including works by Bill Ward, Pierre Molinier, Nobuyoshi Araki, and so many more. It also features the Fiction, Inc. section that samples a cross-section of content from catalogue publications including the work of John Willie, Bill Ward, Carlo, Eric Stanton, Irving Claw, Betty Page, and periodicals such as Rubber Magazine, Amateur Bondage, Bizarre Comix, Bizarre Classix, Bizarre Fotos, Stiletto, and much more... Very heavily illustrated throughout with erotic photography and artwork, all texts in Japanese.
Very Good copy.
1987, Japanese
Softcover, 168 pages, 13 x 18 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Fiction Inc. / Tokyo
$80.00 - In stock -
Issue No.30 of the great SALE2 periodical from Tokyo Japan, founded in 1984 by Makoto Orui, who later became art director for Purple magazine in France and Rockin’on magazine in Japan. SALE2 was active for about 14 years during the 1980s—1990s, published regularly as a sort-of fanzine/journal/catalogue/pocket-book by Fiction, Inc., a specialty shop and publisher of fetish and erotica in Tokyo in the 1980-90s. With Orui's distinct design SALE2 developed an exclusive curated editorial set on ‘erotisism and its spiritual philosophy’, with each issue exploring different themes and features, heavy on fetishism and erotic art.
Issue No.30, the "Special Issue" features Hans Bellmer, Leonor Fini, Richard Cerf, Gilles Deleuze, Michel Foucault, Paul Wunderlich, Robert Maplethorpe, Andy Warhol, Man Ray, Lewis Carroll, John Willie, Bernard Montorgueil, Guido Crepax, Van Rod, Carlo, Betty Page, Tealdo, clippings from periodicals such as Amateur Bondage, Bondage Life, Bondage Fantasies, Bizarre Comix, Bizarre Classix, Bizarre Fotos, and much more...
Very heavily illustrated throughout with erotic photography and artwork, all texts in Japanese.
Very Good copy with tanning to pages.
1986, Japanese
Softcover, 160 pages, 13 x 18 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Fiction Inc. / Tokyo
$80.00 - Out of stock
Issue No.28 of the great SALE2 periodical from Tokyo Japan, founded in 1984 by Makoto Orui, who later became art director for Purple magazine in France, published regularly as a sort-of fanzine/journal/catalogue/pocket-book by Fiction, Inc., a specialty bookshop and publisher of fetish and erotica in Tokyo in the 1980—90s. Each issue covers different themes and features, heavy on fetishism.
Issue No.28, the "Fetishism" issue features collected writings and images around the theme of fetish by John Willie, Bizarre Magazine, Pierre Molinier, Irina Ionesco, Bernard Faucon (his incredible Summer Camp series), Irwing Klaw, Centurians Publishing Inc. bondage catalogues, Andy Warhol and much more... What's more, this issue comes complete with a green synthetic feather to kickstart your own sensual adventures.
Very heavily illustrated throughout with erotic photography and artwork, all texts in Japanese.
1988, Japanese
Softcover, 208 pages, 13 x 18 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Fiction Inc. / Tokyo
$80.00 - In stock -
Issue No.35 of the great SALE2 periodical from Tokyo Japan, founded in 1984 by Makoto Orui, who later became art director for Purple magazine in France and Rockin’on magazine in Japan. SALE2 was active for about 14 years during the 1980s—1990s, published regularly as a sort-of fanzine/journal/catalogue/pocket-book by Fiction, Inc., a specialty shop and publisher of fetish and erotica in Tokyo in the 1980-90s. With Orui's distinct design SALE2 developed an exclusive curated editorial set on ‘erotisism and its spiritual philosophy’, with each issue exploring different themes and features, heavy on fetishism and erotic art.
Issue No.35, the "EROTIK!!" issue features erotic writings and artwork throughout by Hans Bellmer, Dorothea Tanning, André Berg, Pierre Molinier, Max Ernst, Armando Calvelli, articles on vintage stag films, nude French postcards, interspersed with lots of mysterious vintage erotic imagery, bondage illustration, and catalogue/advertisments/clippings of Eric Stanton, Irving Klaw, Jim, John Willie, Bizarre Comix, and much more...
Very heavily illustrated throughout with erotic photography and artwork, all texts in Japanese.
Very Good copy, tanning to pages.
2010, English
Hardcover, 400 pages, 24 x 31 cm
Published by
Les Presses Du Reel / Paris
Mennour / Paris
$150.00 - In stock -
The Molinier bible! A mammoth, crucial 400 page book on the method and genesis of Pierre Molinier's provocative, gender-bending photos and artwork. Beautifully printed and prodigiously illustrated with over 800 pictures, mostly unpublished, numerous documents, manuscripts and letters, a complete (nearly 100-page) chronology, a critical biography, and a text by Jean-Luc Mercié.Molinier. Essential publication on Molinier, the most comprehensive to date, and a must for any fan.
Rare English edition translated from the French by Edward Penwarden.
Pierre Molinier is an unknown of worldwide renown. Every book and every exhibition on the body, gender confusion or sexual excess seems to feature at least one work by this artist whose “genius” was acclaimed by André Breton in a memorable text published in 1956. But the bulk of his work has remained inaccessible. A number of pictures have never been shown and a corpus of only 160 prints has been published. The ensemble revealed by the artist's archives is much more extensive. It includes numerous proofs made to prepare his photomontages and working prints given to friends, but also notebooks and personal letters. Here, precise links emerge between his paintings, photographs and scandalous life. The myth carefully constructed by the artist begins to crumble before the reality of the work.
An inveterate seducer, thoroughgoing fetishist, unrepentant transvestite and inadvertent bisexual, to the very last Molinier remained haunted by two obsessions: pleasure, meaning immediate access to la petite mort, and “leaving a trace in the infinity of time.” This book charts the aesthetic incarnation of his passions. Its 819 photographs, most of them never published before, reveal the method, shed light on the procedures and give details of the origin and alchemy of his latent or composed images. Finally, an exhaustive chronology offers a new biography of Molinier, based on his letters: for it is in the intimacy of these writings that the shaman's heart beats closest to the truth.
In a career shared between the university (fifteen years) and publishing (twenty) Jean-Luc Mercié has written widely on painting and photography. This monograph is his fourth book about Pierre Molinier, the master from Bordeaux.
Born 1900 in Agen (France), Pierre Molinier, surrealistic painter and photographer, a precursor to body art, died in 1976 after having thought out radical and pornographic artwork.
1989, Japanese
Softcover (w. dust jacket and original plastic wrap), 80 pages, 22.8 x 16.3 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Gakutokan / Japan
$100.00 - In stock -
First edition of The World of Pierre Molinier, published in 1989 in Japan. An exquisite book of Molinier's fetishistic gender-bending paintings, photomontages, and drawings, fittingly wrapped in "stocking" dust jacket, with texts by André Breton, translated from French to Japanese by Kosaku Ikuta, imagery from "Molinier" (1966) film by Raymond Borde, beautifully designed and printed in Japan where Molinier's artworks had a particular resonance.
Pierre Molinier (1900—1976) was a French painter, photographer and a forerunner of gender performance art and Body Art (Art corporel). Molinier spent much of his artistic life working in isolation in Bordeaux, exiled from local and national art scenes. Born in Agen, nothing had predestined Molinier to a life as an artist. Self-taught, from a working-class background, he followed in his father’s footsteps and started out as a house painter. He got married and had two children. Tired of his infidelities and provocative behaviour, his wife left their marital home an in 1950 and Molinier begun photographing himself seriously, staging his own death and erecting a fake gravestone proudly declaring himself ‘a man without morals’. He was thrown out of the Bordeaux Salon des Indépendants as early as 1951 amidst controversy over his orgiastic painting of the same year, Le Grand Combat. Stirring up an obsessive correspondence with the anarchic poet-founder of Surrealism, André Breton, Molinier was soon integrated into the Surrealist group with a solo exhibition at Breton’s Paris gallery in 1956. Molinier’s anti-moral project appealed to the group’s interest in repressed desires, fetishism, and the transgression of bourgeois morals. In 1959, he exhibited at the Exposition International du Surrealism in Paris. From the mid-1960s Molinier chronicled the exploration of his subconscious transsexual desires in "Cent Photographies Erotiques": graphically detailed images of pain and pleasure. Cut-up, reassembled, and manipulated, Molinier painstakingly created elaborate and sensual photomontages in which he assumed the roles of dominatrix and succuba previously taken by the women of his paintings. Either alone with doll-like mannequins or with female models such as German sadomasochist Hanel Koeck, Molinier, who considered himself fundamentally androgynous, appears as a transvestite, employing his body and that of his acquaintances to create visions of hybrid identity, where stockinged multi-limbed, multi-sexed beings imitate pagan figures, Hindu gods, and Masonic symbols, in a rejection of a Christian tradition which he argued, had repressed androgyny. Designed to shock, Molinier’s artwork represented a very intimate disclosure about his own sexual ambiguity, inviting the viewer to bring to the images his or her own response of excitement or disgust. The degree of his artistic perversity and blasphemous tendencies was deemed too much for the French cultural elite, and the man Breton dubbed the “magician of erotic art” was shunned from the art world. Molinier did not participate in the 1965 International Surrealist Exhibition. For the last 11 years of his life Molinier played out his own most profound moments in the 'theatre' of his Bordeaux 'boudoir – atelier'. He committed suicide in 1976, shooting himself with a pistol, something he had foreshadowed in his artwork, time and again. Essentially a leg fetishist, but also considering himself as a shaman, facetious and provocative, anti-bourgeois and anti-religious, Molinier enjoyed transgressing gender identification : his outstanding photographs greatly influenced the European and North American Body Art in the 1970s and continue to fascinate artists today.
Very Good copy in original plastic jacket.
2023, English
Softcover, 76 pages, 12 x 17 cm
Published by
Floating Opera Press / Berlin
$38.00 - Out of stock
How queer theory can wed its critically anti-normative impulses to the empirical need for a state.
Queer theory has often been hesitant to align itself with a politics of the state, approaching it with a negative or pragmatic framework. A Queer Theory of the State offers a more optimistic perspective. Rather than eschew engagement with democratic theorizing, the historian Samuel Clowes Huneke asks how queer theory can wed its critically anti-normative impulses to the empirical need for a state. In answering this question, Huneke shows how the state is an integral component of a politics that seeks to subvert and undo the oppression of queer lives.
Samuel Clowes Huneke is assistant professor of history at George Mason University. His first book, States of Liberation: Gay Men Between Dictatorship and Democracy in Cold War Germany (2022), won the Charles E. Smith Award for best book in European History from the European History Section of the Southern Historical Association. Huneke has written for Boston Review, the Washington Post, The Point, and the Los Angeles Review of Books.
2021, English
Hardcover, 88 pages, 12 x 17 cm
Published by
Floating Opera Press / Berlin
$35.00 - Out of stock
Queer Formalism: The Return expands upon William J. Simmons’s original, influential essay Notes on Queer Formalism from 2013, offering novel ways of thinking about queer-feminist art outside of the critical-complicit and abstract-representational binaries that continue to haunt contemporary queer art. It therefore proposes a new kind of queer art writing, one that skirts the limits imposed by normative histories of art and film.
Artists addressed in Queer Formalism: The Return include: Sally Mann, David Lynch, Lars von Trier, Math Bass, Lorna Simpson, Laurie Simmons, Alex Prager, Lana Del Rey, Jessica Lange, and Louise Lawler, among others.