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, Sat 12–5
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.
<a href=http://wfb.public-office.info/artist/john-nixon>All titles by John Nixon
"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.
1979, French
Hardcover (clothbound, gilt), 112 pages, 21.8 x 14 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Obliques / Paris
$170.00 - Out of stock
First edition of this beautiful clothbound album of arresting erotic photography by Pierre Molinier (1900—1976), a French painter, photographer and a forerunner of gender performance art and Body Art (Art corporel), published in 1979 by Obliques Images, Paris. Briefly associated with Breton's surrealist group, Molinier spent much of his artistic life working in isolation in Bordeaux, exiled from local and national art scenes. With an introductory essay by French man of letters, playwright, poet, writer, director, journalist, literary critic and photographer, Pierre Bourgeade entitled "La clé est chez le concierge" the rest of the book is made up of some of the most exquisite examples of Molinier's challenging monochrome erotic photography. Cent photographies erotique is the fourth of the collection "Images Obliques" produced by Roger Borderie and Michel Camus.
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.
VG copy with light foxing to block edges, initial blanks.
2004, Japanese
Softcover, 254 pages, 21 x 15 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / fine
Published by
Strange Days / Tokyo
$60.00 - In stock -
The ultimate, comprehensive artist and disc guide to the Canterbury scene (or Canterbury sound), edited by Matsui Takumi for Strange Days in 2004, only available to the Japanese market, where probably the largest Canterbury fan–base resides. Originating in the city of Canterbury, Kent, England during the late 1960s and early 1970s, Canterbury music is closely associated with progressive rock, but the term describes a loosely defined, improvisational style that blended elements of jazz, rock, and psychedelia, largely defined by a set of musicians and bands with intertwined members. Many prominent British avant-garde or fusion musicians began their career in Canterbury bands, including Hugh Hopper, Steve Hillage, Dave Stewart, Robert Wyatt, Kevin Ayers, Richard Sinclair, Tony Coe, Daevid Allen, and Mike Ratledge. Profusely illustrated in full–colour, this guide features a discography of all of these artists, their various groups and projects, from the familiar to the marginal off–shoots and affiliated. Profiles/artwork/histories of The Soft Machine, Caravan, Gong, Hatfield & the North, Egg, National Health, Henry Cow, Gilgamesh, Matching Mole, This Heat, Robert Wyatt, Lol Coxhill, Slapp Happy, Camberwell Now, Arzachel, Art Bears, Dagmar Krause, Chris Cutler, Massacre, The Work, Elton Dean, Pip Pyle, Charles Hayward, Phil Miller, Neil Ardley, Ian Carr, David Sinclair, Allan Holdsworth, Gilli Smyth, Mike Westbrook, Isotope, Quiet Sun, Phil Manzanera, Nucleus, Turning Point, 801, Dave Stewart, Pye Hastings, Barbara Gaskin, Hugh Hopper, Steve Hillage, Dave Stewart, Kevin Ayers, Richard Sinclair, Tony Coe, Daevid Allen, Mike Ratledge, Soft Heap, Polite Force, and much more... It's also packed with interviews with most of the central figures (Wyatt, Holdsworth, Ayers, Sinclair, Hastings, Allen, Smyth, Hopper, Slapp Happy, Hillage, Miller, Pyle, Manzanera, Stewart and Gaskin, and more (in Japanese).
Near Fine copy.
1994, English
Softcover, 166 pages, 20 x 12.5 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Dedalus / Cambs
$30.00 - Out of stock
Scarce first 1994 Dedalus edition. Translated by Mike Mitchell.
The White Dominican is Meyrink's most esoteric novel, and draws on the wisdom of a number of mystical traditions, the most important of which is Tao. It is set in a mystical version of the Bavarian town of Wasserburg, which sits on a promontory surrounded on three sides by the River Inn.
The novel describes the spiritual journey of the simple hero, who, guided by a number of figures, (his eccentric father, the spirit of a distant ancestor, the protecting presence of his dead lover and the mysterious figure of the White Dominican), escapes the Medusa's head' of the world to a transfiguration, through which he joins the living chain that stretches to infinity!
This is the novel which has been eagerly awaited by those who see Meyrink as not just a novelist, but as a mystic visionary who can tell them what lies on the Other Side.
Gustav Meyrink (I868-1932) found worldwide critical and commercial acclaim with his first novel The Golem (1915) It established his reputation as the master of the occult and the grotesque.(He was the German translator of Dickens).
VG copy.
1994, English
Softcover, 222 pages, 20 x 12.5 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Dedalus / Cambs
$35.00 - Out of stock
Scarce first 1994 Dedalus edition. Translated by Maurice Raraty
"Meyrink's short stories epitomised the non-plus-ultra of all modern writing. Their magnificent colour, their spine-chilling and bizarre inventiveness, their aggression, their succinctness of style, their overwhelming originality of ideas, which is so evident in every sentence and phrase that there seem to be no lacunae: all this captivated me, and seemed to me to provide the proper antidote to all the adjectival prose and shallow, false romanticism of the immediate preceding generation."–Max Brod
"Gustav Meyrink's stories recall Gogol in their black, humorous vigour."–Kathy O'Shaugnessy in The European
Gustav Meyrink (I868-1932) found worldwide critical and commercial acclaim with his first novel The Golem (1915) It established his reputation as the master of the occult and the grotesque.(He was the German translator of Dickens).
VG copy.
1988, English
Softcover, 78 pages, 30.5 x 23 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
KLF Publications / UK
$500.00 - In stock -
Extremely rare very first 1988 edition of The Manual (How to Have a Number One the Easy Way), the legendary publication by "The Timelords" ("Time Boy" and "Lord Rock", aliases of Bill Drummond and Jimmy Cauty, better known as The KLF). The Manual is a 'Zenarchistic' step-by-step guide to achieving a No.1 single with no money or musical skills, and a case study of the duo's UK novelty pop No. 1 "Doctorin' the Tardis". The Manual is an unparalleled expose of the reality behind the pop-music business and while names may have changed since its first issue, the mechanics of financing, producing and promoting a hit set out here remain absolutely relevant.
"Firstly, you must be skint and on the dole. Anybody with a proper job or tied up with full time education will not have the time to devote to see it through... Being on the dole gives you a clearer perspective on how much of society is run... having no money sharpens the wits. Forces you never to make the wrong decision. There is no safety net to catch you when you fall." "If you are already a musician stop playing your instrument. Even better, sell the junk."
Very collectible in this first, self-published large format edition (KLF009B). The following editions (also very hard to find) were much smaller in format with differing graphics and contents.
Very Good, clean copy, with only light wear to stiff covers and corners.
2015, English
Softcover, 48 pages, 21 x 14.8 cm
Ed. of 300,
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / fine
Published by
Der Konterfei / Vienna
$40.00 - In stock -
Rare first edition of 300 copies, later reprinted, all editions long out–of–print.
When it comes to pop music, conceptual art, audacious positioning, and fierce artistic independence, there is simply no way around Bill Drummond. The KLF, The Timelords, The Justified Ancients of Mu Mu (J.A.M.S.), The K Foundation, The 2K, K2 Plant Hire Ltd. – these were all projects that aimed to attack established pop practices by means of easily-acquired sampling technology.
Bill ceased being interested in the pop business a long time ago. Nonetheless, music is still at the centre of his current endeavours. The present book is a summary of his recorded lecture at Spoiler, MuseumsQuartier Vienna 2002, which for the past thirteen years has been available only as a single-copy library DVD.
Despite the fact that Bill is loath to look back at the past and always directs his focus to the here and now, or rather because of this, I deemed it necessary to highlight his vast artistic range, development, and process of the last thirty years by means of this contemporary document and to present it to a younger generation. For the concept of time plays a special role in Drummond’s work. Whether as The Timelords, or in songs like ‘What Time is Love?’ or ‘3 A.M. Eternal,’ or via metaphorical numbers like 23, 33⅓, or 45, or his current World Tour 2014-2025 Bill has always thought, planned, acted, and reacted in structural time periods.
Near Fine copy with only shelf rubbing to gloss boards.
1998, English / French / Italian
Hardcover + CD (12'23"), 40 pages, 24 x 17 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Alga Marghen / Milan
$100.00 - In stock -
First, 1998 hardcover edition, published and printed in Italy, long out-of-print.
This poem by Bernard Heidsieck starts with Vaduz, the capital of Lichtenstein, and from it, lists all the people and ethnic groups of the world: a great humanist work and an extreme experience of poetry-action. The publication features a recording of the poem, read by Bernard Heidsieck.
Composed June to December 1974 and recorded on a Revox A 700 at author's studio. Commissioned by Roberto Altman in 1974 to celebrate the inauguration of the Art Foundation in Vaduz, capital of the state of Liechtenstein. 40 pages book with CD.
Bernard Heidseick (1928-2014) was a French sound poet, associated with various movements throughout a long career: including Beat, Fluxus, and minimalism. Heidseick decided in the mid-1950s to break off from written poetry, and to bring it outside of books. He opposed passive poetry to active poetry, to an “on its feet” poetry, in his own words. Starting in 1955 he was one of the founders of Sound Poetry, and in 1962 of Action Poetry. As early as 1959 he used a tape recorder as an additional means for writing and retransmitting, opening his research to new experimental fields. While remaining concerned with semantics, Bernard Heidseick became increasingly independent from the constraints of language. He explored all its formal aspects, either by spatializing the text in his written scores, or by the presence of his body in space. He gave sound a formal dimension, notably through an exceptional diction based as much on breathing as on articulating perfectly or on constantly renewing the inflections of his voice. As the years went by he reinvented his writing in order to render our daily life more accurately. Our social, political or economical universe, through its main events, as well as through its extreme ordinariness. In 1955 he developed his first Score-Poems. He then worked continuously on series, with the 13 Biopsies between 1966 and 1969. From 1969 to 1980, he created the 29 Passe-Partout (Catch-alls). From 1978 to 1986, he wrote Derviche/Le Robert (Dervish/Le Robert) composed of 26 sound poems. Then, beginning in 1988, Respirations et brèves rencontres ( Respiration and Brief Encounters) (60 poems created from the archives of recordings of artists' breathing). He organised the first international festival of sound poetry in 1976 and the event Rencontres Internationales 1980 de poésie sonore which took place in Rennes, in Le Havre and at the Pompidou Centre in Paris.
He has organized over 540 public readings of his texts in twenty different countries.
As New, light storage wear only.
2009, French / English
Hardcover (w. audio CD), 90 pages, 21 x 15 cm
Ed. of 350, hand-numbered,
Published by
Alga Marghen / Milan
$60.00 - In stock -
Limited edition book and CD presentation of Bernard Heidsieck's Poème-Partition "X", bound in hardcover in a hand-numbered edition of 350 copies. Recorded 1960, this publication of the work plus CD of the original 1960 recording and later 1962 performance (accompanied by saxophone improvisation by American painter Larry Rivers) were issued in this deluxe volume in 2009 by Alga Marghen, Milan. Heidsieck (1928—2014) was one of the greatest French poets of the 20th century and an originator of the sound poetry movement.
Bernard Heidseick (1928-2014) was a French sound poet, associated with various movements throughout a long career: including Beat, Fluxus, and minimalism. Heidseick decided in the mid-1950s to break off from written poetry, and to bring it outside of books. He opposed passive poetry to active poetry, to an “on its feet” poetry, in his own words. Starting in 1955 he was one of the founders of Sound Poetry, and in 1962 of Action Poetry. As early as 1959 he used a tape recorder as an additional means for writing and retransmitting, opening his research to new experimental fields. While remaining concerned with semantics, Bernard Heidseick became increasingly independent from the constraints of language. He explored all its formal aspects, either by spatializing the text in his written scores, or by the presence of his body in space. He gave sound a formal dimension, notably through an exceptional diction based as much on breathing as on articulating perfectly or on constantly renewing the inflections of his voice. As the years went by he reinvented his writing in order to render our daily life more accurately. Our social, political or economical universe, through its main events, as well as through its extreme ordinariness. In 1955 he developed his first Score-Poems. He then worked continuously on series, with the 13 Biopsies between 1966 and 1969. From 1969 to 1980, he created the 29 Passe-Partout (Catch-alls). From 1978 to 1986, he wrote Derviche/Le Robert (Dervish/Le Robert) composed of 26 sound poems. Then, beginning in 1988, Respirations et brèves rencontres ( Respiration and Brief Encounters) (60 poems created from the archives of recordings of artists' breathing). He organised the first international festival of sound poetry in 1976 and the event Rencontres Internationales 1980 de poésie sonore which took place in Rennes, in Le Havre and at the Pompidou Centre in Paris.
As New.
1972 / 1975, English
Softcover, 238 pages, 21.5 x 14 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Rider and Company / London
$65.00 - In stock -
Scarce first 1972 edition, second 1975 printing, of 'Eliphas Lévi and the French Occult Revival', a seminal academic study by historian Christopher McIntosh, which explores the profound impact of the 19th-century French magician on modern Western esotericism, published by Rider & Company.
Eliphas Lévi is one of the key figures of Western occultism and the man of whom Aleister Crowley claimed to be the rein-carnation. This is the first full study in English of the life and writings of this colourful man and the occult revival of which he was part. This book not only brings out the sensational aspects of this era, but also analyses its importance in the history of occultism, giving much detailed information on some hitherto little-known magical orders. It also provides, for the first time, an objective and sympathetic assessment of Lévi's magical teaching.
•.. he was a fascinating character. McIntosh brings him to life in this fluent scholarly work.'–Psychic News
"This is a clearly-written and sympathetic account of the life and times of one of the most influential men in the history of occultism. Very few personal details have hitherto been published in English about Eliphas Lévi..."–Prediction
'The lively curiosity... is one which in my case Mr Mcintosh has satisfied and excited further with this serious, unsensational study of the arcane side of our pursuit and exercise of power.'–Country Life
VG copy. Light wear to boards.
1997, English
Softcover, 138 pages, 21.5 x 14 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Praeger Publishers Inc. / New York
$50.00 - Out of stock
First 1997 edition.
"The Last Modernist's strength lies in its melange of critical thought. The seven essays and one interview present compelling judgments about Andropoulos's art, and the cultural, historical, and political processes that it involves.... essential reading."–Cineaste
"Theo Angelopoulos is widely regarded as one of the most distinctive of contemporary filmmakers and a highly idiosyncratic film stylist. His work, from the early 1970s to The Beekeeper, Landscape in the Mist, The Suspended Step of the Stork and the recent Cannes prize-winner, Ulysses' Gaze, demonstrates a unique sensibility, and a preoccupation with form (notably the long take, space and time) and with content, particularly Greek politics and history, and notions of the journey, border-crossing, exile and nostalgia.
This new collection of essays, including contributions from David Bordwell and Fredric Jameson, surveys Angelopoulos' entire cinematic output, and presents an intelligent and articulate discussion of his major films, themes and concerns. The authors argue that Angelopoulos' sustained œuvre has kept alive the tradition of postwar modernism - the cinema of Antonioni, Jancsó and Ozu - in the largely hostile climate of the 1980s and 1990s. In Bordwell's words, "at a moment when European cinema, both popular and elitist, seems to be breathing its last, Angelopoulos' work can endow our world of snack bars, video clips and ethnic wars with an astringent, contemplative beauty"."
Andrew Horton teaches in the English Department at Loyola University, and has written about Angelopoulos since 1975. Among his most recent books are Russian Critics On the Cinema of Glasnost (with Michael Brashinsky) and Writing the Character-Centered Screenplay (both 1994).
VG copy, light wear/age to boards.
2013, English
Flexibound (debossed leather), 768 pages, 22 x 17 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / fine
Published by
MACK / London
$320.00 - In stock -
2013 first edition, second printing, of the highly sought after Holy Bible by Adam Broomberg & Oliver Chanarin, published by MACK in deluxe debossed leather flexibinding.
Violence, calamity and the absurdity of war are recorded extensively within The Archive of Modern Conflict, the largest photographic collection of its kind in the world. For their most recent work, Holy Bible, Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin mined this archive with philosopher Adi Ophir's central tenet in mind: that God reveals himself predominantly through catastrophe and that power structures within the Bible correlate with those within modern systems of governance. The format of Broomberg and Chanarin's illustrated Holy Bible mimics both the precise structure and the physical form of the King James Version. By allowing elements of the original text to guide their image selection, the artists explore themes of authorship, and the unspoken criteria used to determine acceptable evidence of conflict. Inspired in part by the annotations and images Bertolt Brecht added to his own personal bible, Broomberg and Chanarin's publication questions the clichés at play within the visual representation of conflict.
Includes 8 page booklet attached to inside back cover, "Divine Violence."
NF—Fine copy.
1966, English
Softcover, 254 pages, 18.5 x 11 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
E P Dutton / New York
$25.00 - In stock -
First 1966 softcover edition of The New Art, the seminal anthology edited by Gregory Battcock, featuring contributing essays from prominent mid-century artists, critics, and art historians: Lucy R. Lippard, Marcel Duchamp, Alan Solomon, Ad Reinhardt, Allen Leepa, Clement Greenberg, Dore Ashton, E. C. Goossen, Gregory Battcock, Henry Geldzahler, John Cage, Kenneth King, Lawrence Alloway, Leo Steinberg, Martin Ries, Max Kozloff, Nicolas Calas, Sam Hunter, Samuel Adams Green, Susan Sontag, Thomas B. Hess. Illustrations of works by Henri Matisse, Jasper Johns, Frank Stella, Marcel Duchamp, Robert Morris, Paul Brach, Andy Warhol, Paul Thek.
"Today's critic is beginning to seem almost as essential to the development-indeed, the identification-of art as the artist him-self. The purpose of this volume is to bring together some of the best recent critical essays on the new art in the United States.
Most of these articles date from after 1960, and were originally published in periodicals and museum catalogues. But in keeping with the new role of the critic as interpreter, the pieces included in this anthology do more than simply describe, or even define their subject; their authors are actively and consciously engaged in the preparation of a new aesthetic. This is a unique collection that will be indispensable to all who wish to understand more about the new art in America."
VG copy with board/block tanning and some wear to board extremities.
1965 / 1972, English
Softcover, 278 pages, 20.2 x 13.5 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Beacon Press / Boston
$40.00 - In stock -
First 1965 Beacon Press paperback edition (fifth 1972 print) of influential 20th-century American art critic Clement Greenberg's seminal 1961 book, Art and Culture: Critical Essays. This widely read collection cemented his legacy as a defining voice in American modern art theory establishing the theoretical framework for modernist art, championing the separation of "high art" from mass culture and advocating for Abstract Expressionism and the rise of the New York School, promoting artists like Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning as the true successors to the European modernist tradition.
"Clement Greenberg is, internationally, the best-known American art critic popularly considered to be the man who put American vanguard painting and sculpture on the world map. . . . An important book for everyone interested in modern painting and sculpture."—The New York Times
G—VG copy with some light wear to boards, tanning, previous owner's name to title page, erasereable light pencil underling to first few pages of first text.
1999, Japanese
Softcover (w. dust jacket), 210 pages, 21 x 14.8 cm
Out of print title / used / fine
Published by
World Comics / Japan
Kubo Shoten / Japan
$160.00 - In stock -
Rare 1999 edition of the first Japanese book collection of the infamous cult classic eromanga "Bondage Fairies" by Kondom, published by Kubo Shoten way back in 1993. This was the first ever book collecting over 200 pages of the first of the original series from the early 1990s, in the original Japanese language, as they appeared in the pages of Kubo Shoten's Young Lemon magazine for the first time as "Bondage Fairies". Includes colour artwork galleries.
Created by manga artist Teruo Kakuta under the pen name "Kondom", a multilingual pun, meaning "little insect" in Japanese and "condom" in English, Bondage Fairies is an erotic series about highly sexual female forest fairies, who work as police officers protecting the forest, whilst engaging in a wild array of anthropomorphized, inter-species sexual acts. The series began in Japan in 1990 as Insect Hunter, but it was quickly banned from sale by the Tokyo Metropolitan Ordinance. Under a new title, the manga was serialized in manga magazine Lemon Kids. The series is among the earliest sexually explicit manga (eromanga) commercially translated and published uncensored in the United States where the earliest editions date from 1994 (Venus Press). Eros Comix subsequently published a multi-volume series of the collected Bondage Fairies, and subsequent stories, now all very collectible. Translated to Swedish, German, French, and Italian, Bondage Fairies is one of the most popular underground adult Japanese comics outside Japan.
Near Fine copy in original NF dust jacket.
1999, Japanese
Softcover (w. dust jacket), 162 pages, 21 x 14.8 cm
Out of print title / used / fine
Published by
World Comics / Japan
Kubo Shoten / Japan
$140.00 - In stock -
Rare 1999 edition of Volume 2 of the first Japanese book collection of the infamous cult classic eromanga "Bondage Fairies" by Kondom, published by Kubo Shoten way back in 1993. Volume 2 of the first ever book collection bringing together over 160 pages of the the original series from the early 1990s, in the original Japanese language, as they appeared in the pages of Kubo Shoten's Young Lemon magazine for the first time as "Bondage Fairies". Includes colour artwork galleries.
Created by manga artist Teruo Kakuta under the pen name "Kondom", a multilingual pun, meaning "little insect" in Japanese and "condom" in English, Bondage Fairies is an erotic series about highly sexual female forest fairies, who work as police officers protecting the forest, whilst engaging in a wild array of anthropomorphized, inter-species sexual acts. The series began in Japan in 1990 as Insect Hunter, but it was quickly banned from sale by the Tokyo Metropolitan Ordinance. Under a new title, the manga was serialized in manga magazine Lemon Kids. The series is among the earliest sexually explicit manga (eromanga) commercially translated and published uncensored in the United States where the earliest editions date from 1994 (Venus Press). Eros Comix subsequently published a multi-volume series of the collected Bondage Fairies, and subsequent stories, now all very collectible. Translated to Swedish, German, French, and Italian, Bondage Fairies is one of the most popular underground adult Japanese comics outside Japan.
Near Fine copy in original NF dust jacket.
1999, Japanese
Softcover (w. dust jacket), 164 pages, 21 x 14.8 cm
Out of print title / used / fine
Published by
World Comics / Japan
Kubo Shoten / Japan
$140.00 - In stock -
Rare 1999 edition of the Volume 3 Japanese book collection of the infamous cult classic eromanga "Bondage Fairies" by Kondom, published by Kubo Shoten way back in 1993. Volume 3 of the first ever book collection bringing together over 160 pages of the first of the original series from the early 1990s, in the original Japanese language, as they appeared in the pages of Kubo Shoten's Young Lemon magazine for the first time as "Bondage Fairies". Includes colour artwork galleries.
Created by manga artist Teruo Kakuta under the pen name "Kondom", a multilingual pun, meaning "little insect" in Japanese and "condom" in English, Bondage Fairies is an erotic series about highly sexual female forest fairies, who work as police officers protecting the forest, whilst engaging in a wild array of anthropomorphized, inter-species sexual acts. The series began in Japan in 1990 as Insect Hunter, but it was quickly banned from sale by the Tokyo Metropolitan Ordinance. Under a new title, the manga was serialized in manga magazine Lemon Kids. The series is among the earliest sexually explicit manga (eromanga) commercially translated and published uncensored in the United States where the earliest editions date from 1994 (Venus Press). Eros Comix subsequently published a multi-volume series of the collected Bondage Fairies, and subsequent stories, now all very collectible. Translated to Swedish, German, French, and Italian, Bondage Fairies is one of the most popular underground adult Japanese comics outside Japan.
Near Fine copy in original NF dust jacket.
1987, English
Softcover, 284 pages, 20.2 x 12.2 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
University of California / Berkeley
$80.00 - In stock -
Rare first 1987 edition of this wonderful book of urban ecology, documenting the ecosystems of (not so) vacant lots, weedy waysides and roadways.
Vacant lots aren't really vacant: a surprising number of plants and animals live in the left-over spaces in our cities. In this fascinating guide, authors Vessel and Wong provide a broad introduction to the unique ecosystems that can survive in the urban environment.—publisher
"An imaginative introduction to the tenacious plants and animals that battle people and pollution to survive. Anyone concerned with the natural environment will be delighted by Vessel and Wong's guided tour of this unexpected territory."–Tim Larimer, San Jose Mercury News
"Placed in the right hands, this book could help fuel another generation of environmentalists. ... In topical chapters and species accounts the authors introduce us to more than 300 denizens of ignored urban places. They do so in clear, straightforward prose, accompanied by good line drawings and photos. Their inclusions and exclusions are selected with care and intelligence."–Gary Mozel, Naturalist Review
"The book contains very good and useful descriptions of plants and animals regularly found in neglected lots throughout California... Part of the value of a little book like this is that it opens your eyes to things you would otherwise miss."–Lee Dembart, Los Angeles Times
Matthew F. Vessel is Professor Emeritus of Natural Science at San Jose State University. Herbert H. Wong was formerly Professor of Environmental Education at Western Washington State University and Lecturer at the University of California, Berkeley.
Very Good copy, tightly bound, light wear to board extremities.
2002, English
Softcover, 224 pages, 21.5 x 13.5 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Creation Books / London
$150.00 - Out of stock
Rare first 2002 edition of Kenji Siratori's cyberpunk cult classic, published by Creation Books, London.
A fatal collusion of drag embryos and DNA angels in Cadaver City ignites the circuitry of the ADAM Doll... dogs of zero waging gene war in Placenta World, chaos unleashed by the digital vampires of Sato Corporation, nano-junk virus pandemic. On the pink ash planet EVOL, ADAM and ANTI-ADAM clash in terminal zodiac burn... enter robo-succubus Super Cherry 666, hunting for the grotesque nova skulls of Sato Corporation napalm torture victims.
Vividly evoking the coming to consciousness of an artificial intelligence Blood Electric is a devastating loop of language from the Japanese avant-garde which breaks with all existing writing traditions. With unparalleled stylistic terrorism fully embracing the image mayhem of the internet/multimedia/digital age, Kenji Siratori unleashes his first literary Sarin attack.
"Contemporary Japan is exploding in slow-motion, and Kenji Siratori arranges the blood- and semen-encrusted debris with the finesse of a berserk Issey Miyake. Rendering English-language cyberpunk instantly redundant with his relentless, murderous prose-drive, Siratori transmits his authentic, category-A hallucinogenic product direct to his reader's cerebellum. A virulently warped amalgam of Tetsuo and cut-up era William Burroughs."–Stephen Barber (author, Tokyo Vertigo)
"Blood Electric is the black reverb of soft machine seppuku, a molten unspooling of sheet metal entrails and crucified memory banks into the howling void of violence. It is a cyborg crash nightmare of the new flesh, a final dispatch from mutant Hell where the embryo hunts in secret."–Jack Hunter (author, Eros In Hell)
"A Finnegans Wake for the postdigital millennium, Kenji Siratori’s Blood Electric is probably the foundational text of the language-horror sub-genre: an evasive, esoteric and ultraexperimental writing style produced by the convergence of poetics and methods borrowed from avantgarde literature, electronic/noise music, synthetic abstract image generation, and severe—yet delicate—syntactic deconstruction. Siratori’s unique writing technique results in a hardcore-cyberpunk material account of a bio-techno singularity network in which flesh-code wetware and silicon-thriving software infold together into wave-multitudes of text-organisms. While most contemporary authors exploring the possibility of the blending of humans and machines focus on the extrapolation of logical and transcendental interactions (as in classical cyberpunk, from which Blood Electric initiates a radical breakup), Siratori’s language emanates directly from the contingent, rhizomatic, non-teleological, reciprocal disruption of several unstable and immanent modes of embodied (in)existence. In Blood Electric the text becomes an incantation demanding full abandonment, generating its own unpredictable rhythms as it enraptures you beyond reading, beyond yourself, like when participating in a rave."—Germán Sierra
"… Blood Electric is unreadable in anything other than short, migraine-inducing bursts."—The Guardian
"Following the publication of Kenji Siratori's Blood Electric, the Japanese cyberpunk writer perhaps pioneered a movement among all non-English speaking writers whose languages are radically dissociated from the dominant Latin-Anglo-Franco-German linguistic germ-line on the one hand, and are, on the other, enthusiastically seeking to contribute to the diversification of the English language whose centrality has already been sabotaged in the wake of emerging cyber-societies."—Reza Negarestani, in 3:AM Magazine
"Kenji is making rather more sense than usual. Perhaps the lad is finally coming into his own as the literary avatar of our times."—Bruce Sterling
"Kenji is a madman for sure, but if you scan his hallucinatory textual mashups in just the right frame of mind, they begin to make sense. And that's the scary part."—Douglas Rushkoff
"Siratori’s hypermodern project articulates the nonarticulation that currently dominates the substratum of much current discourse. Without the intense atomization of the individual, Siratori’s work does not resound. Yet, if we take pause, Siratori’s work resonates at a fever pitch, blaring at the limitless informational realm of our minds as it bursts the parameters of the skull. As a kind of accelerationist aesthetic, Siratori critiques technology by pushing it beyond its sensible potentiality; he cultivates alien cognitions where alternatives thrive, where semantic derangement is revolt, where epistemology uncoils. Ultimately, he uncompromisingly forces us to pause on the chaos of the glitch, to claim the instance where embodying the unquantifiable amounts to insurgency."—Andrew C. Wenaus, Author of The Literature of Exclusion: Dada, Data, and the Threshold of Electronic Literature
Very Good copy. Light edge wear to boards, some foxing to block edges. No spine creases, overall a great copy.
2003, English
Softcover, 310 pages, 21.5 x 13.5 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Creation Books / London
$150.00 - Out of stock
Rare first 2003 English Edition of Antonin Artaud’s evil simulacrum of The Monk, the only work of sustained fiction by the infamous literary provocateur. Taking Matthew Gregory Lewis's gothic novel of 1794 as the raw material for an astonishing exploration of the far edges of death, sexuality, terror, language and the body, Artaud conducted an aberrant evisceration of the original novel, discarding entire chapters, recreating others and stamping his own distinctive identity on the work in his avowed aim to accentuate the story's violence and atrocity to the maximal degree.
In Artaud's The Monk, sexual obsession is irrepressibly crushed together with murder, cruelty and blasphemy. The result is a searing narrative of massacred nuns, raped virgins and satanic retribution which will leave the reader simultaneously ensnared, gratified and abused.
Best known for his Theatre of Cruelty manifestoes, experimental film projects and corporeal poetry, Artaud created The Monk in France in 1930, to the acclaim of such figures as Jean Cocteau, at a time when Artaud's explicit purpose in his work was to cancel out all existing social and moral systems. This is the first time ever that the book has appeared in English. With an introduction by Stephen Barber.
"A great masterpiece of fantastic literature... marvels burst out at the reader, burning with a thousand fires... the spirit of the supernatural inflames this book to the very core"—André Breton
Very Good—NF copy.
2003, English
Softcover, 310 pages, 21.5 x 13.5 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Creation Books / London
$150.00 - Out of stock
Rare first 2003 English Edition of Artaud's Heliogabalus, published by Creation Books.
Translated into English for the first time, this novelized biography of the 3rd-century Roman Emperor Heliogabalus is simultaneously Artaud’s most accessible and his most extreme book. Written in 1933, at the time when Artaud was preparing to stage his legendary Theatre of Cruelty, Heliogabalus is a powerful concoction of sexual excess, self-deification and terminal violence. Reflecting its author’s preoccupations with the occult, magic, Satan, and a range of esoteric religions, this account of Heliogabalus’ reign invents incidents in the Emperor’s life in order to make the print of the author’s own passionate denunciations of modern existence.
Heliogabalus is Artaud’s greatest and most revolutionary masterpiece: an incendiary work that reveals both the divine cruelty of the Roman Emperor and that of Artaud himself.–Stephen Barber
Very Good copy.
2003, English
Softcover, 164 pages, 14 x 21.5 cm
Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Creation Books / London
$150.00 - Out of stock
Rare 2003 English edition of Eden, Eden, Eden - Pierre Guyotat's masterpiece of atrocity and obscenity.
The most subversive French novelist of the later 20th century, Pierre Guyotat (b. 1940) was the uncompromising heir of De Sade, Artaud, Rimbaud and Genet. Published in France in 1970 by Gallimard, with a preface by Michel Leiris, Roland Barthes and Philippe Sollers, Eden, Eden, Eden was greeted by both furore and acclaim. The book was immediately banned by the French government as pornographic. A campaign of international support for the book was signed by the like of Pier Paolo Pasolini, Jean-Paul Sartre, Pierre Boulez, Joseph Beuys, Pierre Dac, Jean Genet, Simone de Beauvoir, Joseph Kessel, Maurice Blanchot, Max Ernst, Italo Calvino, Jacques Monod, and Nathalie Sarraute. François Mitterrand and Georges Pompidou tried to get the ban lifted but failed until 11 years later when a newly elected President Mitterrand personally intervened to lift the ban in 1981.
Today Eden, Eden, Eden is recognised as one of the major works of the last century. In literally a single sentence, a desert-like, polluted, apocalyptic landscape of unending civil war unfolds without any morality (and therefore also without evil). This delirious, lacerating novel of startling innovation brings scenes of brutal carnage into intimate collision with relentless acts of prostitutional sex and humiliation.
'a new landmark and starting-point for new writing'—Roland Barthes
'I have never read anything like it in any stream of literature'—Michel Foucault
Good–Very Good copy. Some light general wear, board wear and some scratching to the middle of the back cover. Sample images only.
1997, English
Softcover, 418 pages, 22 x 14 cm
Out of print title / used / good
Published by
John Calder / London
$35.00 - In stock -
1997 reprint of this 1959 Calder collection of Beckett's classic trilogy of novels: Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnamable. Awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature 1969.
The trilogy has always been considered the central work of Samuel Beckett's fiction, the three novels that have been most admired and have received the greatest amount of critical comment, just as Waiting for Godot, written in the same period of concentrated creativity between 1947 and 1949, is central to Beckett's drama. After Proust's great many-volumed novel, Joyce's Ulysses and the masterworks of Kafka, it dominates twentieth-century literature, and much as Beckett's pre-war fiction and the late minimalist novellas are admired, it is on the trilogy that the author's reputation will chiefly depend.
Molloy was a new departure for Samuel Beckett; written in the first person, it consists of two monologues, that of bedridden Molloy on his odyssey towards his mother, lost in town and country and finally emerging from the forest, and that of Moran, a private detective who is sent to find him. The two narrowly miss each other, but the contrast between their characters, and the similarity of their decline give the reader much ground to speculate and much humour towards understanding both the grimness and the comedy of the human situation.
Malone Dies pictures the decrepit Malone, also bedridden, waiting to die and filling his mind and his remaining time with memories, stories and bitter comment, while waiting for 'the throes'. The novel disintegrates as the protagonist does.
The Unnamable seems to contain and encompass its predecessors and the characters of earlier Beckett novels. Its power of language and breadth of imagination make it a tour de force that recalls Dante as it moves into an ever greater void of despair and panic, a metaphysical work that must take its place among the very greatest works of literature. Its dramatic power has been proved by the successful endeavours of those actors who have specialised in Beckett's work to bring it, and earlier parts of the trilogy, to the stage, or to life on the radio. Patrick Magee, Jack Magowran, Jack Emery, Barry McGovern and Max Wall are only a few of the actors who have become closely associated, with all or parts of the trilogy.
G—VG copy. Very light wear/very light rippling to a few initial page edges.
1974, Japanese
Softcover (staple–bound), 90 pages, 21 x 15 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Spin / Tokyo
$45.00 - Out of stock
Rare copy of Dabu–dabo No. 24, published in Tokyo in 1974, with original cover art painted by Aquirax Uno (Akira Uno). Dabu-dabo was wild countercultural lifestyle magazine ("A Lifestyle Catalog of Dawn Culture") that featured artwork, photography, manga and articles that proposed "new human life materials for the global village." This issue features Japanese jazz and blues singer/composer Maki Asakawa, actress/singer/politician Chinatsu Nakayama, pink actress Chiho Yuki, photography by Masaaki Nakagawa, Araki Nobuyoshi, illustration galleries by Yōji Kuri, Shizuichi Hayashi, Ryuzan Aki, folk singer Itsuro Shimoda (of Shimonsai and Tokyo Kid Brothers), Ryōhei Uchida, singer Mari Natsuki, Yonin Bayashi (rock group), singe/director Morio Agata, articles on how to grow marijuana, how to improve your jeans, how to make a lie detector, how to find out about psychic abilities, how to cure men's (sexual) illnesses, how to cure women's (sexual) illnesses, how to make candles, how to make shoes, how to raise chickens, how to make a flying horse, and how to spend time well in jail, and much more. Like Goro meets CoEvolution Quarterly via Oz!
VG with light wear to extremities, rusted staples.
1974, Japanese
Softcover (staple–bound), 90 pages, 21 x 15 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Spin / Tokyo
$45.00 - Out of stock
Rare copy of Dabu–dabo No. 25, published in Tokyo in 1974, with original cover art painted by Aquirax Uno (Akira Uno). Dabu-dabo was wild countercultural lifestyle magazine ("A Lifestyle Catalog of Dawn Culture") that featured artwork, photography, manga and articles that proposed "new human life materials for the global village." This issue features an interview with author/model/actress/icon Izumi Suzuki, photography by Hajime Sawatari, jazz musician Sadao Watanabe, illustration galleries by avant–garde artist and author Genpei Akasegawa, Ayumi Ohashi and Teruya Harada, Hiro Tsunoda of the Sadistic Mika Band and psych legends Jacks, nude photography by Kenji Hiruma, poet and folk singer Shigeru Izumiya, a host of informative feature articles on "Commune Practices": developing commune practices, including the use of geodesic domes and inflatable housing, the farming practices of Japanese folk singer Masato Minami, DIY solar thermal devices, and much more. Like Goro meets CoEvolution Quarterly via Oz!
VG with light wear to extremities, rusted staples.