World Food Books' programme is largely produced on Kulin Nation land. We acknowledge the Wurundjeri people of the Kulin Nation as the first and continuing custodians of this land, and pay respect to their Elders past, present, and emerging.
World Food Books is an arts and special interests bookshop in Naarm / Melbourne. Founded in 2010, World Food Books is devoted to the presentation of a rotating, hand-selection of international art, design, literary and counterculture publications with an emphasis on the anti-traditional, the experimental, the avant-garde, the heretic, the marginal.
Presenting new titles alongside rare and out-of-print books, catalogues and journals spanning the fields of modern and contemporary art, design, photography, illustration, film, literature, poetry, cultural theory, philosophy, sexuality, popular and underground culture in its many radical forms, World Food Books wishes to encourage adventurous, thoughtful and open-minded reading, looking, writing, and exchange of publishing and ideas, both current and historical.
As well as our bookshop, located in Melbourne's historical Nicholas Building, all of our inventory is available internationally via our online mail-order service.
World Food Books semi-regularly co-ordinates "Occasions", a programme of exhibits and events at the bookshop and in partnership with other hosts (such as museums and art galleries) that develop out of the activities, relationships and content of the bookshop itself.
World Food Books
The Nicholas Building
37 Swanston Street
Room 5, Level 6
Melbourne 3000
Australia
SHOP HOURS:
THU—FRI 12—6 PM
WEB-SHOP OPEN 24/7
World Food Books
Postal Address:
PO Box 435
Flinders Lane
Victoria 8009
Australia
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All prices in AUD (Australian dollars)
Pick-Ups
Pick-up orders can be collected in our bookshop during opening hours after order date. Please collect any Pick-up orders within 2 weeks of ordering as we have limited storage space. Orders will be released back into stock if not collected within this time. No refunds can be made for pick-ups left un-collected. If you cannot make it in to the bookshop in this time-frame, please choose postage option.
Return Policy
All sales are final. We do accept returns (for refund or exchange) for items received in error. All our orders are packed with special care using heavy-duty padding and cardboard book-mailers or bubble mailers (for smaller books), using reinforcement where required. We cannot take responsibility for any lost, stolen or damaged parcels.
Insurance
Should you wish to insure your package, please email us directly after placing your order and we can organise this at a small extra expense. Although all standard/express tracked packages are very safe and dependable, we cannot take responsibility for any lost, stolen or damaged parcels. We recommend insurance on valuable orders.
Interested in selling your old books, catalogues, journals, magazines, comics, fanzines, ephemera? We are always looking for interesting, unusual and out-of-print books to buy. We only buy books in our fields of interest and specialty, and that we feel we can resell.
We base these prices on desirability, market value, in-print prices, condition and our current stock levels. We offer cash, store credit, and can take stock on consignment. All
about 25% of the price we expect to get when we sell them, or 30% in store credit. We base these prices on desirability, market value, in-print prices, condition and our current stock levels.
Sell your books any day of the week. You can drop them off and return later. If you have a lot of books, we can visit your Sydney home.
We buy books that we feel we can resell. We offer about 25 % of the price we expect to get when we sell them, or 30% in store credit. We base these prices on desirability, market value, in-print prices, condition and our current stock levels.
Philadelphia Wireman
03 August - 01 September, 2018
World Food Books is proud to announce our next Occasion, the first presentation of sculptures by Philadelphia Wireman in Australia.
The Philadelphia Wireman sculptures were found abandoned in an alley off Philadelphia’s South Street on trash night in 1982. Their discovery in a rapidly-changing neighbourhood undergoing extensive renovation, compounded with the failure of all attempts to locate the artist, suggests that the works may have been discarded after the maker’s death. Dubbed the "Philadelphia Wireman" during the first exhibition of this work, in 1985, the maker’s name, age, ethnicity, and even gender remain uncertain. The entire collection totals approximately 1200 pieces, all intricately bound together with tightly-wound heavy-gauge wire (along with a few small, abstract marker drawings, reminiscent both of Mark Tobey and J.B. Murry). The dense construction of the work, despite a modest range of scale and materials, is singularly obsessive and disciplined in design: a wire armature or exoskeleton firmly binds a bricolage of found objects including plastic, glass, food packaging, umbrella parts, tape, rubber, batteries, pens, leather, reflectors, nuts and bolts, nails, foil, coins, toys, watches, eyeglasses, tools, and jewellery.
Heavy with associations—anthropomorphic, zoomorphic, and socio-cultural responses to wrapped detritus—the totemic sculptures by Philadelphia Wireman have been discussed in the context of work created to fulfil the shamanistic needs of alternative religions in American culture. Curators, collectors, and critics have variously compared certain pieces to sculpture from Classical antiquity, Native American medicine bundles, African-American memory jugs, and African fetish objects. Reflecting the artist’s prolific and incredibly focused scavenging impulse, and despite—or perhaps enhanced by—their anonymity, these enigmatic objects function as urban artefacts and arbiters of power, though their origin and purpose is unknown. Philadelphia Wireman, whatever their identity, possessed an astonishing ability to isolate and communicate the concepts of power and energy through the selection and transformation of ordinary materials. Over the course of the past two decades, this collection has come to be regarded as an important discovery in the field of self-taught art and vernacular art.
Presented in collaboration with Fleisher-Ollman Gallery, Philadelphia, and Robert Heald, Wellington.
Susan Te Kahurangi King
02 February - 10 March, 2018
Susan Te Kahurangi King (24 February 1951 - ) has been a confident and prolific artist since she was a young child, drawing with readily available materials - pencils, ballpoint pens and felt-tip markers, on whatever paper is at hand. Between the ages of four and six Susan slowly ceased verbal communication. Her grandparents William and Myrtle Murphy had developed a special bond with Susan so they took on caring responsibilities for extended periods. Myrtle began informally archiving her work, carefully collecting and storing the drawings and compiling scrapbooks. No drawing was insignificant; every scrap of paper was kept. The King family are now the custodians of a vast collection containing over 7000 individual works, from tiny scraps of paper through to 5 meter long rolls.
The scrapbooks and diaries reveal Myrtle to be a woman of great patience and compassion, seeking to understand a child who was not always behaving as expected. She encouraged Susan to be observant, to explore her environment and absorb all the sights and sounds. Myrtle would show Susan’s drawings to friends and people in her community that she had dealings with, such as shopkeepers and postal workers, but this was not simply a case of a grandmother’s bias. She recognised that Susan had developed a sophisticated and unique visual language and sincerely believed that her art deserved serious attention.
This was an unorthodox attitude for the time. To provide some context, Jean Dubuffet coined the term Art Brut in 1945 to describe work created by self-taught artists – specifically residents of psychiatric institutions and those he considered to be visionaries or eccentrics. In 1972 Roger Cardinal extended this concept by adopting the term Outsider Art to describe work made by non-academically trained artists operating outside of mainstream art networks through choice or circumstance. Susan was born in Te Aroha, New Zealand in 1951, far from the artistic hubs of Paris and London that Dubuffet and Cardinal operated in. That Myrtle fêted Susan as a self-taught artist who deserved to be taken seriously shows how progressive her attitudes were.
Susan’s parents Doug and Dawn were also progressive. Over the years they had consulted numerous health practitioners about Susan’s condition, as the medical establishment could not provide an explanation as to why she had lapsed into silence. Dawn educated herself in the field of homeopathy and went on to treat all twelve of her children using these principles – basing prescriptions on her observations of their physical, mental and emotional state.
Doug was a linguist with an interest in philosophy who devoted what little spare time he had to studying Maori language and culture. To some extent their willingness to explore the fringes of the mainstream made them outsiders too but it was their commitment to living with integrity and their respect for individuality that ensured Susan’s creativity was always encouraged.
Even though Susan’s family supported her artistic pursuits, some staff in schools and hospitals saw it as an impediment to her assimilation into the community and discouraged it in a variety of ways. Her family was not always aware of this and therefore did not fully understand why Susan stopped drawing in the early 1990s. However, rather than dwell on the challenges that Susan faced in pursuit of her artistic practice, they prefer to highlight her achievements. In 2008 Susan began drawing again in earnest, after an almost 20 year interruption, and her work is now shown in galleries around the world.
Susan grew up without television and has been heavily influenced by the comics she read as a child. She is absolutely fearless in the appropriation of recognizable characters, such as Donald Duck and Mickey Mouse, in her work. She twists their limbs, contorts their faces, compresses them together, blends them into complex patterned backgrounds - always imbuing them with an incredible energy. Although Susan often used pop culture characters in her work they are not naive or childlike. These are drawings by a brilliant self-taught artist who has been creating exceptional work for decades without an audience in mind.
Mladen Stilinović
"Various Works 1986 - 1999"
02 February 16 - September 10, 2016
Various works 1986 - 1999, from two houses, from the collections of John Nixon, Sue Cramer, Kerrie Poliness, Peter Haffenden and Phoebe Haffenden.
Including: Geometry of Cakes (various shelves), 1993; Poor People’s Law (black and white plate), 1993; White Absence (glasses, ruler, set square, silver spoon, silver ladel with skin photograph and wooden cubes), 1990-1996; Exploitation of the Dead (grey and red star painting, wooden painting, black spoon with red table, red plate), 1984-1990; Money and Zeros (zero tie, paintings made for friends in Australia (Sue, John, Kerrie), numbers painting), 1991-1992; Words - Slogans (various t-shirts) - “they talk about the death of art...help! someone is trying to kill me”, “my sweet little lamb”, “work is a disease - Karl Marx”; Various artist books, catalogues, monographs, videos; Poster from exhibition Insulting Anarchy; "Circular" Croatian - Australian edition; Artist book by Vlado Martek (Dostoyevsky); more.
Thanks to Mladen Stilinović and Branka Stipančić.
Jonathan Walker
Always Will Need To Wear Winter Shirt Blue + Ochre Small Check Pattern
21 August - 21 September, 2015
Untitled
I am not a great reader of poetry but I always return to the work of Melbourne poet, Vincent Buckley (1925- 1988). Perhaps I find his most tantalising piece to be not a finished poem but a fragment left on a scrap of paper discovered on his desk after the poet’s death.
The poetry gathers like oil
In the word-core, and spreads
It has its music meet,
Its music is in movement.
This fragment is more the shell left behind from a volatile thought than a finished poem. I find the last two lines honest but awkward whereas the first two lines work like an arrow. Most likely he could not find a resolution so it was left. Still, in its present form, it remains an eloquent testimony to the ultimate failure of a medium to express mobile thought and sensation, in Buckley’s case, through verbal language. It’s an important matter because this is something all artists have to deal with regardless of the medium.
I have never written a poem, however, I am forever copying fragments from books on paper scraps in a vain effort to fix certain notions in my head. At first, they function as bookmarks that are sometimes returned to when I open the book. But before long, as they accumulate, they fall out littering the table interspersed with A4 photocopies, bills, books and medications.
To return to Buckley’s fragment, the first two lines very much evoke how I paint nowadays. As you age, detail diminishes and patches of light become more luminous and float. I feel the most honest way of dealing with this is by smearing the oil paint on the canvas with the fingers and working close-up, blind. Only if the patches coalesce into an approaching image can the work gain a life.
-
Jonathan Walker was born in Melbourne, Australia and brought up on a dairy farm in Gippsland. In the 1970’s he studied painting at RMIT and won the Harold Wright Scholarship to the British Museum, London. During the 1980’s he exhibited at Pinacotheca Gallery, Richmond and had work shown at the NGV and Heidi City Art Gallery. Over the same period he designed the cover for the “Epigenesi” LP by Giancarlo Toniutti, Italy and conducted a mail exchange work with Achim Wollscheid, Germany. The work with artists through the post resulted in an article published in the bicentenary issue of Art and Australia 1988. He showed in artist run spaces such as WestSpace in the 90’s and 2000’s, and until 2012, taught painting at Victoria University, which is where we (Colleen Ahern and Lisa Radford) as organisers of the exhibition, among many others, had the privilege of being his student.
Walker’s knowledge was imparted to students through the careful selection of music, literature, and artists found in books that he himself had ordered for the library. Walker’s strategy was the generosity of sharing his vast knowledge with references specific to each student and their context.
Walker’s paintings share a similar focus and intimacy.
This exhibition presents a small selection of recent paintings alongside a publication that includes Walker’s writing. Observational and analytical, Walker’s work is a type of material notation — the time of day, colour and how it is blended, the both specific and fleeting location of a reflection on lino or the question of whether a chair leg should be included in a painting.
Please join us on Friday August 21 between 6-8pm to celebrate the opening of the exhibition.
Curated by Colleen Ahern and Lisa Radford.
B. Wurtz
Curated by Nic Tammens
March 26 - April 4, 2015
B.Wurtz works from a basement studio in his home on Manhattan’s Lower East Side.
This local fact is attested to by the plastic shopping bags and newsprint circulars that appear in his work. As formal objects, they don’t make loud claims about their origins but nonetheless transmit street addresses and places of business from the bottom of this long thin island. Like plenty of artists, Wurtz is affected by what is local and what is consumed. His work is underpinned by this ethic. It often speaks from a neighborhood or reads like the contents of a hamper:
“BLACK PLUMS $1.29 lb.”
“Food Bazaar”
“USDA Whole Pork Shoulder Picnic 99c lb.”
“RITE AID Pharmacy, with us it’s personal.”
“H. Brickman & Sons.”
“Sweet Yams 59c lb."
Most of the work in this exhibition was made while the artist was in residence at Dieu Donne, a workshop dedicated to paper craft in Midtown. Here Wurtz fabricated assemblages with paper and objects that are relatively lightweight, with the intention that they would be easily transportable to Australia. This consideration isn’t absolute in Wurtz’s work, but was prescriptive for making the current exhibition light and cheap. Packed in two boxes, these works were sent from a USPS post office on the Lower East Side and delivered to North Melbourne by Australia Post.
Wurtz appears courtesy of Metro Pictures, New York.
Thanks to Rob Halverson, Joshua Petherick, Sari de Mallory, Matt Hinkley, Helen Johnson, Fayen d'Evie, Ask Kilmartin, Lisa Radon, Ellena Savage, Yale Union, and "Elizabeth".
John Nixon
"Archive"
December 15 - January 20, 2014
The presentation of John Nixon's archive offered a rare showcase of this extensive collection of the artist's own publications, catalogues, posters, ephemera, editions and more, from the mid 1980s onwards, alongside a selection of his artworks.
Organized by John Nixon, Joshua Petherick and Matt Hinkley.
"Habitat"
at Minerva, Sydney (organised by Joshua Petherick and Matt Hinkley)
November 15 - December 20, 2014
Lupo Borgonovo, Janet Burchill & Jennifer McCamley,
Lewis Fidock, HR Giger, Piero Gilardi, Veit Laurent Kurz,
Cinzia Ruggeri, Michael E. Smith, Lucie Stahl, Daniel Weil, Wols
Press Release:
“...It contained seven objects. The slender fluted bone, surely formed for flight, surely from the wing of some large bird. Three archaic circuitboards, faced with mazes of gold. A smooth white sphere of baked clay. An age-blackened fragment of lace. A fingerlength segment of what she assumed was bone from a human wrist, grayish white, inset smoothly with the silicon shaft of a small instrument that must once have ridden flush with the surface of the skin - but the thing’s face was seared and blackened.”
William Gibson, “Count Zero”, 1986
"Autumn Projects Archive"
Curated by Liza Vasiliou
March 6 - March 15, 2014
World Food Books, in conjunction with the Virgin Australia Melbourne Fashion Festival 2014, presented the Autumn Projects archive, consisting of a selection of early examples in Australian fashion with a particular interest in collecting designers and labels from the period beginning in the 1980’s, who significantly influenced the discourse of Australian Fashion.
Curated by Liza Vasiliou, the exhibition provided a unique opportunity to view pieces by designers Anthea Crawford, Barbara Vandenberg, Geoff Liddell and labels CR Australia, Covers, Jag along with early experimental collage pieces by Prue Acton and Sally Browne’s ‘Fragments’ collection, suspended throughout the functioning World Food Books shop in Melbourne.
H.B. Peace
presented by CENTRE FOR STYLE
November 14, 2013
"Hey Blinky, you say chic, I say same"
Anon 2013
H.B. Peace is a clothing collaboration between great friends Blake Barns and Hugh Egan Westland. Their pieces explore the divergences between 'character’ and ‘personality’ in garments....etc
Special Thanks to Joshua Petherick and Matt Hinkley of WFB and Gillian Mears
and a Very Special Thank you to Audrey Thomas Hayes for her shoe collaboration.
Janet Burchill & Jennifer McCamley
"Aesthetic Suicide"
May 10 - June 8, 2013
The first of our occasional exhibitions in the World Food Books office/shop space in Melbourne, "Aesthetic Suicide" presented a body of new and older works together by artists Janet Burchill & Jennifer McCamley, including videos, prints, a wall work, and publications.
During shop open hours videos played every hour, on the hour.
1972, Italian
Softcover, 96 pages, 33 x 17 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / average
Published by
Caleidoscopio / Milan
$20.00 - In stock -
Scarce early 1972 issue of the excellent Italian magazine Caleidoscopio, "a semi-annual magazine on furniture design, image, communication, technology, and production (...) distributed free of charge". Edited by Fernanda Gaslini, with excellent graphic design and art direction by Marco Sbernadori, after the master Gianni Sassi, profusely illustrated in colour and b/w, including articles by Vilfredo C. Agnese, Giancarlo Salvioli, Giulio Crespi, Roberto Ubaldi, Franco Busnelli, Fulvio Cinti, Arturo Ferrarin, Carlo Mauri, Sergio Carpinelli, Pia Soli, Arturo Belloni, Enrico Crespi, Mario Perego.
Average—Good copy with discolouration to spine edge and some creasing.
2025, English
Softcover, 160 pages, 25 x 17.7 cm
Published by
Semiotext(e) / Los Angeles
$34.00 - In stock -
Introduction by Sylvère Lotringer
Paolo Virno on the rich concept of the “multitude” as crucial to understanding contemporary life.
Paolo Virno's A Grammar of the Multitude became the Italian theorist's best-known work in English, influencing a generation of activists and performance artists, when it was first published by Semiotext(e) in 2004. Two decades later, this new edition proves Virno's conception of contemporary life—as a cartography of virtualities made possible by post-Fordism—to have been strikingly prescient.
At the start of the twenty-first century, globalization forced a rethinking of some of the categories—such as “the people”—that had been traditionally associated with the now-eroding state. Virno argues that the category of “multitude,” elaborated by Spinoza and for the most part left fallow since the seventeenth century, is a far better tool to analyze contemporary issues than the Hobbesian concept of “people” favored by classical political philosophy. Hobbes, who detested the notion of multitude, defined it as shunning political unity, resisting authority, and never entering into lasting agreements. “When they rebel against the state,” Hobbes wrote, “the citizens are the multitude against the people.” But the multitude isn't just a negative notion; it is a rich concept that allows us to examine anew plural experiences and forms of nonrepresentative democracy. Drawing from philosophy of language, political economics, and ethics, Virno shows that being foreign, “not-feeling-at-home-anywhere,” is a condition that forces the multitude to place its trust in the intellect. In conclusion, Virno suggests that the metamorphosis of the social systems in the West during the 1980s and 1990s precipitated a paradoxical “Communism of the Capital.”
2001, English
Softcover, 236 pages, 21.5 x 14 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / good
Published by
University of Minnesota Press / Minnesota
$30.00 - In stock -
"Neither God nor Master, which resituates Robert Bresson's films in their complex relationships with literary, cinematic, and mass culture, addresses a major gap in film criticism. This exemplary book will reshape future debates about Bresson and his place not only in the French cinematic canon but in French culture."—Scott Durham, Northwestern University
The French auteur Robert Bresson, director of such classics as Diary of a Country Priest (1951), The Trial of Joan of Arc (1962), The Devil Probably (1977), and L'Argent (1983), has long been thought of as a transcendental filmmaker preoccupied with questions of grace and predestination and little interested in the problems of the social world. This book is the first to view Bresson's work in en altogether different context. Rather than a religious-or spiritual-filmmaker, Bresson is revealed as an artist steeped in radical, revolutionary politics.
Neither God nor Master shows how Bresson's early style was a model for social resis-tance. We then see how, after May 1968, his films were in fact a series of reflections on the failure of revolution in France-especially as "failure" is understood in relation to Bresson's chosen literary precursors, Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy, and Russian revolutionary culture of the nineteenth century. In restoring Bresson to the radical political culture from which he emerged; Price raises larger philosophical questions about the efficacy of revolutionary practices and issues about interpretation and metaphysical tendencies of film historical research that have, until now, gone largely untested.
Brian Price is associate professor of film and visual studies at the University of Toronto. He is coeditor of On Michael Haneke and Color: The Film Reader and a founding editor of World Picture, an online journal of critical theory.
Good copy with light edge wear/creasing and some wear-back to satin back cover finish, revealing gloss beneath.
1991, English
Hardcover (w. dust jacket), 274 pages, 24 x 16.5 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Routledge / London
$25.00 - In stock -
First hardcover edition.
In 1791, the French feminist Olympe de Gouges wrote that "as women have the right to take their places on the scaffold, they must also have the right to take their seats in government".
In Death Comes to the Maiden, Dr Camille Naish explores the issue of women's rights through the history of female execution, concentrating on three major periods of European history: the Middle Ages, the Renaissance and the French Revolution. She reveals the sexual prejudices and humiliation experienced by women condemned to death. In an attempt to uncover the historical truth behind such figures as Joan of Joan of Arc, Anne Boleyn, Manon Roland and Charlotte Corday, Dr Naish goes beyond biography to consider their deaths in symbolic terms and stresses the tragic, sacrificial and erotic literary viewpoints of such writers as Genet, Schiller, Yourcenar and Brecht.
Very Good copy in VG dust jacket.
1968, English
Hardcover (w. dust jacket), 2 volumes, 752 pages total, 23.5 x 16 cm
1st US Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
University of Chicago Press / Chicago
$45.00 - In stock -
First US 1968 hardcover edition of both volumes of Peasant Customs and Savage Myths: Selections from the British Folklorists by Richard M. Dorson, published by University of Chicago Press.
The word "folklore" was coined in 1846 by an English antiquary, William John Thoms, although Professor Dorson's intellectual history of the folklore movement shows that the study of folklore had its origins in an earlier period. Educated men and women in many fields, especially in Victorian times, succumbed to the fascination of noting curious tales and odd rituals both at home and abroad.
The British Folklorists describes how the influence of folklore extended into many fields such as literature, history, the classics, archaeology, philology, psychical research, legal and medical antiquities, Scandinavian, Germanic, and Celtic studies, and the history of religions. Interest in the collection of folklore was carried to the far corners of the British Empire by colonial administrators, missionaries, and military officers, who found that a knowledge of local folklore helped them understand the strangers they lived among.
Professor Dorson traces the historical development of folklore as a field of learning, beginning with sixteenth-century antiquarians whose studies encompassed the preservation of local customs and reaching its climax with the "Great Team" of Andrew Lang and his co-workers from the 1870's to the First World War.
Richard M. Dorson is professor of history and folklore and director of the Folklore Institute at Indiana University.
He was president of the American Folklore Society from 1966 to 1968 and is vice-president of the International Society for Ethnology and Folklore. The author and editor of many books, including American Folklore; Buying the Wind: Regional Folklore in the United States; America Begins; Davy Crockett, American Comic Legend; Bloodstoppers and Bearwalkers; America Rebels; and American Negro Fokltales, as well as the author of more than one hundred articles published in various journals, Professor Dorson is General Editor of the Folktales of the World series published by the University of Chicago Press.
VG copies both in VG dust jackets.
1995, English
Softcover, 256 pages, 15.6 x 23.4 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Pluto Press / London-Sydney
$20.00 - In stock -
Louis Althusser is one of France's foremost intellectuals of the postwar period. Controversial and influential, his writings and reputation have extended beyond the boundaries of his own country to leave a lasting mark on the ideas of others. In turn, Althusser found inspiration in many of Lenin's ideas and, in the first significant study of this association, Majumdar offers an objective reevaluation of Althusser's overt espousal of Leninism during the two decades up to the end of the 1970s. Focusing specifically on Althusser's attempt to rehabilitate Lenin as an academically respectable philosopher, rather than as a politician, Majumdar takes the assessment forward to evaluate Lenin's legacy today. Althusser's neglect of the significant contribution Lenin made to political theory and his subsequent shift away from Leninism at the end of the 1970s are also examined.
Margaret A. Majumdar teaches French Political Thought at the University of Westminster and is a member of the University of Westminster Francophone Africa Research Centre. She co-edits the Bulletin of Francophone Africa and has written widely on politics and philosophy.
Very Good—Fine copy.
2013, English
Softcover, 90 pages, 16.5 x 11.5 cm
Published by
AK Press / Edinburgh
$28.00 - Out of stock
First circulated on the streets of Greenwich Village in 1967, the SCUM Manifesto is a searing indictment of patriarchal culture in all its forms. Shifting fluidly between the worlds of satire and straightforward critique, this classic is a call to action--a radical feminist vision for a different world. This is an update of the essential AK Press edition, with a new foreword by Michelle Tea.
"To see the SCUM Manifesto's humor, to let it crack you up page after page, is not to read it as a joke. It's not. The truth of the world as seen though Valerie's eyes is patently absurd, a cosmic joke. Humor such as this is a muscle, a weapon... It was the truth, and the truth is so absurd it's painful."—Michelle Tea
"Unhampered by propriety, niceness, discretion, public opinion, 'morals', the respect of assholes, always funky, dirty, low-down SCUM gets around... You've got to go through a lot of sex to get to anti-sex, and SCUM's been through it all, and they're now ready for a new show; they want to crawl out from under the dock, move, take off, sink out."—Valerie Solanas
Valerie Solanas was a radical feminist playwright and social propagandist who was arrested in 1968 after her attempted assassination of Andy Warhol. Deemed a paranoid schizophrenic by the state, Solanas was immortalized in the 1996 film I Shot Andy Warhol.
1986 / 2005, English / Italian
Softcover, 96 pages, 12.2 x 16.1 cm
Published by
City Lights Books / San Francisco
$34.00 - In stock -
The Italian film-maker Pier Paolo Pasolini was first and always a poet—the most important civil poet, according to Alberto Moravia, in Italy in the second half of this century. His poems were at once deeply personal and passionately engaged in the political turmoil of his country. In 1949, after his homosexuality led the Italian Communist Party to expel him on charges of "moral and political unworthiness," Pasolini fled to Rome. This selection of poems from his early impoverished days on the outskirts of Rome to his last (with a backward longing glance at his native Friuli) is at the center of his poetic and filmic vision of modern Italian life as an Inferno.
"From all these refusals, we know what Pasolini stood against—political ideologies of all kinds, the complacency inherent in the established social order, the corruption of the institutions of church and state. If Pasolini could be said to have stood for anything it was for the struggles of Italy's working class—both the rural peasants and those barracked in the urban slums at the edges of Italian cities—whose humanity he evoked with great eloquence and nuance. But it is his refusals that animate his legacy with an incandescent rage, a passionate and profound fury that did not, as Zigaina suggests, cry out for death—but for just the opposite." —Nathaniel Rich, The New York Review of Books
2013, Japanese
Softcover, 212 pages, 28.2 x 21 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Amana / Japan
$160.00 - In stock -
First edition of this wonderful collection of Japanese photographers that captured 1970s Tokyo, now out-of-print. In the world of fine art photography, post-war Japanese photography is continuing to gather attention. Many Japanese photographers were active specifically during the large cultural and political development of the 70s as the country experienced rapid economic growth. At the time, new styles of expression with a strong focus on the individual viewpoint were beginning to develop, which were distinct to the social documentary photography prior to that. This also coincided with the development of photography within the fashion and advertising field, reflecting a period where the works of many unique photographers and styles began to grow. A careful selection of 160 bodies of works by 9 prominent photographers of the time, each individually portraying the excitement and rapid growth which symbolised the era. Taiji Arita, Eikoh Hosie, Daido Moriyama, Masatoshi Naito, Hajime Sawatari, Issei Suda, Yoshihiro Tatsuki, Shuji Terayama, Katsumi Watanabe.
Very Good copy with good dust jacket.
1989, English
Softcover, 213 pages, 20.5 x 18 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
City Lights Books / San Francisco
$120.00 - In stock -
First 1989 City Lights English translation, long out-of-print.
Tears of Eros is the culmination of Georges Bataille's inquiries into the relationship between violence and the sacred. Taking up such figures as Giles de Rais, Erzebet Bathory, the Marquis de Sade, El Greco, Gustave Moreau, Andre Breton, Voodoo practitioners, and Chinese torture victims, Bataille reveals their common death. This essay, illustrated with artwork from every era, was developed out of ideas explored in Death and Sexuality and Prehistoric Lascaux or the Birth of Art . In it Bataille examines death—the "little death" that follows sexual climax, the proximate death in sadomasochistic practices, and death as part of religious ritual and sacrifice. "Bataille is one of the most important writers of the century."— Michel Foucault Georges Bataille was born in Billom, France, in 1897. He was a librarian by profession. Also a philosopher, novelist, and critic he was founder of the College of Sociology. In 1959, Bataille began Tears of Eros , and it was completed in 1961, his final work. City Lights published two of his other Story of the Eye and The Impossible . Bataille died in 1962.
French essayist, philosophical theorist, and novelist, often called the "metaphysician of evil." Bataille was interested in sex, death, degradation, and the power and potential of the obscene. He rejected traditional literature and considered that the ultimate aim of all intellectual, artistic, or religious activity should be the annihilation of the rational individual in a violent, transcendental act of communion. Roland Barthes, Julia Kristeva, and Philippe Sollers have all written enthusiastically about his work.
Very Good copy, light wear to extremities/corners.
1981, English
Softcover, 176 pages, 21 x 29 cm
Signed by Virginia Fraser,
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / good
Published by
Sydney College of Arts / Sydney
$90.00 - In stock -
Australian photographer Virginia Fraser's copy of this fantastic publication from the Sydney College of Arts, 1981. Signed in red pen to the front blank page. Densely packed with essays and photo-essays focussing on photography, politics, theory, criticism, sexuality and racism. "This is the first publication in what we hope to be a continuing commitment to critical thought and practice in photography. Contributors from all over Australia were invited to participate on a collective basis for selection, layout and production." (from Foreword).
Features contributions from Fiona Hall, Terry Smith, Experimental Art Foundation, Sue Ford, John Williams, Ted Colless, Mimmo Cozzolino, Jacki Redgate, Violet Hamilton, Kris Hemensley, Charles Merewether, Martyn Jolly, Robyn Stacey, Esther Faerber, Anne Zahalka, Catherine De Lorenzo, Anne-Marie Willis, Christine Godden, and many more.
Good copy with some wear to extremities, sticker to front cover, light foxing to block edge.
2025, English
Softcover, 28 pages, 14.7 x 10.5 cm
Published by
Everyday Analysis / UK
$18.00 - In stock -
Feminist Fatwas traces how Muslim feminists are resisting misogynistic interpretations of the Quran (like the verse male clerics have used to condone wife-beating).
For centuries, the translators and interpreters of the Holy Quran have been men. This is changing now as more and more Muslim feminists cast their eye on the patriarchal contexts of these interpretations. Feminist Fatwas tells the story of Verse 34 in Chapter 4 which has been interpreted by male clerics as condoning a husband beating his wife. This essay traces the groundbreaking work of knocking down this misogynist Quranic interpretations. The story of how Muslim feminists are doing this work is a chronicle of the slow and quiet feminist revolution taking place within Islam as women take on significant and powerful roles
Rafia Zakaria is a Pakistani-American attorney, feminist, journalist, and author. She has written for The Nation, Guardian Books, The New Republic, The Baffler, Boston Review, and Al Jazeera. In 2021, she published Against White Feminism, in which she critiques the emphasis that conventional feminist thought places on the experiences of white women while excluding women of color
2025, English
Softcover, 88 pages, 17 x 12 cm
Published by
Floating Opera Press / Berlin
$38.00 - Out of stock
Should art be determined by political ideals? In recent decades art institutions have sought to embody liberal values of universal equality and social justice. This move toward greater inclusivity has borne witness to a countervailing trend: artworks are increasingly scrutinized for their political implications, and artists must take care not to transgress particular moral fault lines. Examining contemporary exhibitions as well as works of art and film, and the broader cultural reactions to them, Rosanna McLaughlin investigates the consequences of this moralizing approach to creative work. She invites us to rethink the connection between political values and art—and to ask whether a relationship between them should exist at all. In arguing against morality in the arts, McLaughlin lays the groundwork for a more expansive concept of difference in twenty-first-century art making.
2020, English
Softcover, 200 pages, 20.3 x 12.7 cm
Out of print title / as new
Published by
Rab-Rab Press / Helsinki
$100.00 - In stock -
Second edition, published in a run of 750 copies. All editions out-of-print.
Rab-Rab Press announces the publication of Free Jazz Communism, a new book actualising Archie Shepp–Bill Dixon Quartet at the 8th World Festival of Youth and Students in Helsinki 1962. Including archive material and documents, commissioned theoretical and historical texts, and interviews, the book edited by Sezgin Boynik and Taneli Viitahuhta contextualizes politics of free jazz music in light of global decolonisation movements, anti-war activism, structures of racial capitalism, and forms of avant-garde music.
By focusing on concerts of Shepp–Dixon Quartet, leading avant-garde jazz musicians from the US, in the socialist anti-colonial festival in Helsinki, the book is introducing complexities in the usual Cold War stories about the sixties, and pictures politics of jazz as something transcending boundaries of nation-state and capitalist market regulations.
Apart from the theoretical and historical overview by its editors, the book includes testimonies of the collective and international spirit of the 1962 Youth Festival, translated documents from Finnish press, a new interview with Archie Shepp, commissioned text by Jeff Schwartz on the historical context of political engagement of free jazz musicians, and reproduction of three hard-to-find texts by Shepp.
The book is designed by Ott Kagovere.
As New copy.
1963, English
Softcover, 558 pages, 18 x 11 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Penguin Books / London
$25.00 - Out of stock
First 1963 softcover edition.
From the burning of witches and the disembowelling of traitors...
The long, lurid story of crime, detection, conviction, and punishment; of murder as a lust and murder as a trade; of mutilation, torture, lynching, and flogging; of guillotine, gallows, and gas; of outlaws in the forest and gangsters in the streets; of police work, from Vidocq to Scotland Yard and the F.B.I.; of trial by ordeal and trial by jury; and of the slow, measured steps of progress and reform
...to forensic science and prisons without bars
Good copy with light general wear/age/toning.
2025, English
Softcover, 96 pages, 17.7 x 11.4 cm
Published by
Semiotext(e) / Los Angeles
$35.00 - In stock -
A foundational work of queer theory.
First published anonymously in the notorious "Three Billion Perverts" issue of Félix Guattari's journal Recherches—banned by French authorities upon its release in 1973—The Screwball Asses was erroneously attributed to Guy Hocquenghem when it was first published in English in 2009. This second edition of that translation, with a new preface by Hocquenghem biographer Antoine Idier that clarifies the different theoretical positions within France's Front Homosexuel d'Action Révolutionaire, returns the text to its true author: writer, journalist, and activist Christian Maurel.
In this dramatic treatise on erotic desire, Maurel takes on the militant delusions and internal contradictions of the gay-liberation movement. He vivisects not only the stifled mores of bourgeois capitalism, but also the phallocratic concessions of so-called homophiles and, ultimately, the very act of speaking desire. Rejecting any “pure theory” of homosexuality that would figure its “otherness” as revolutionary, Maurel contends that the ruling classes have invented homosexuality as a sexual ghetto, splitting and mutilating desire in the process. It is only when nondesire and the desire of desire are enacted simultaneously through speech and body that homosexuality can finally be sublimated under the true act of “making love.” There are thousands of sexes on earth, according to Maurel, but only one sexual desire. The Screwball Asses is a revelatory disquisition.
Introduction by Antoine Idier
Translated by Noura Wedell
1971, English
Softcover, 465 pages, 20.5 x 13.5 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / good
Published by
Schocken Books / New York
$50.00 - In stock -
"In the famous eleventh edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, "anarchism" is defined as "the name given to the principle or theory of life and conduct under which society is conceived without government." To write the article on this subject, which customarily evoked lurid images of chaos in the public mind, the editors wisely chose. Peter Alexeivich Kropotkin, the noblest and best of all the anarchists that ever were.
Born in 1842 into an ancient military family of Russian princes, Peter Kropotkin was selected as a child for the elite Corps of Pages by Tsar Nicholas I himself. Shortly before his death in 1921, he had moved so far from his aristocratic beginnings and attained such stature as a libertarian leader that he could write with impunity to Lenin, "Vladimir Ilyich, your concrete actions are completely unworthy of the ideas you pretend to hold."
THE ANARCHIST PRINCE details the life that flowed between these two points in time-Kropotkin's rejection of an army career, his awakening to anarchist principles, his arrest and daring escape from Russia to the West, his impressive scientific achievements, his exile in England, and, most of all, his unfailing devotion to humanity.
The recent works of George Woodcock, a well-known Canadian author, include Anarchism, The British in the Far East, and biographies of Godwin and Proudhon. Ivan Avakumovic is Professor of History at the University of British Columbia and the author of History of the Communist Party of Yugoslavia (Vol. I, 1964)."
Good copy, general wear covers, spine, page toning.
1977, English
Softcover, 210 pages, 21 x 13 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Peregrine Books / UK
$35.00 - In stock -
First 1977 Peregrine Books re-issue of Claude Lévi-Strauss' this epoch-making book, Structural Anthropology. Translated from the French by Claire Jacobson and Brooke Grundfest Schoepf.
Claude Levi-strauss regards Structural Anthropology as the most representative of his works. Containing seventeen papers, written before 1958 and selected by himself, it demonstrates his application of the structural method to a wide range of anthropological concerns, including kinship, social organization, religion, mythology and art.
"No other anthropologist has ever aroused a similar measure of general interest combined with so eminent a place in the esteem of his colleagues ... The essays and articles collected in this volume have the merit of illustrating the phenomenal breadth of Lévi-Strauss's interests and competence and the development of his theoretical contribution to the study of human society and culture"—Spectator
Claude Lévi-Strauss has been Professor of Social Anthropology at the Collège de France since 1959 and director of studies at the École Pratique des Hautes Études in Paris since 1950. Professor Lévi-Strauss has been honoured by many countries and is a recipient of the Prix Paul Pelliot (1949) and the Huxley Memorial Medal (1965). He has been a member of the French Academy since 1973. His more recent publications are La Pensée sauvage (1962), Le Cru et le cruit (1964), Du miel aux cendres (1967), L'Origine des manières de table (1968), Totemism (1969), L'Homme nu (1971) and Anthropologie structurale deux (1973).
VG copy with light wear/toning. Crossed out dedication to title page.
2014, English
Softcover, 106 pages, 20.32 x 12.7 cm
Published by
Contra Mundum Press / New York
$34.00 - In stock -
Written between 1963 and 1967, The Divine Mimesis, Pasolini's imitation of the early cantos of the Inferno, offers a searing critique of Italian society and the intelligentsia of the 1960s. It is also a self-critique by the author of The Ashes of Gramsci (1957) who saw the civic world evoked by that book fading absolutely from view.
By the mid-1960s, Pasolini theorized, the Italian language had sacrificed its connotative expressiveness for the sake of a denuded technological language of pure communication. In this context, he projects a 'rewrite' of Dante's Commedia in which two historical embodiments of Pasolini himself occupy the roles of the pilgrim and guide in their underworld journey. Densely layered with poetic and philological allusions, and illuminated by a parallel text of photographs that juxtapose the world of the Italian literati to the simple reality of rural Italian life, this narrative was curtailed by Pasolini several years before he sent it to his publisher, a few months prior to his murder in 1975. Yet, many of Pasolini's projects took the provisional form of "Notes toward..." an eventual work, such as Sopralluoghi in Palestina (Location Scouting in Palestine), Appunti per una Oresteiade africana (Notes for an African Oresteia), and Appunti per un film sull'India (Notes for a Film on India). The Divine Mimesis has a kinship to these filmic works as Pasolini himself ruled it 'complete' though still in a partial form. Written at a turning point in his life when he was wrestling with his poetic 'demons, ' the true center of gravity of Pasolini's Dantean project is the potential of poetry to teach and probe, ethically and aesthetically, in reality. "I wanted to make something seething and magmatic," Pasolini declared, "even if in prose."
In this first English translation of Pasolini's La divina mimesis, Italianist Thomas E. Peterson offers historical, linguistic, and cultural analyses that aim to expand the discourse about an enigmatic author considered by many to be the greatest Italian poet after Montale. Published by Contra Mundum Press one year in advance of the 40th anniversary of Pasolini's death.
1962, English
Hardcover, 90 pages, 32.3 x 24.9 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / good
Published by
Eros Magazine / New York
$50.00 - Out of stock
Volume One, No. 1, Spring 1962 issue of the legendary, short-lived and controversial Eros magazine, published by Ralph Ginzburg and art director Herb Lubalin, a quarterly and revolutionary hardbound periodical containing articles and photo-essays on love and sex. Besides the learned introductions and publication of classical erotica, Eros covered stories about sexual practices that were until then piously hidden from the public eye. Although there was hardly a hint of pornography in the journal, it was explicit enough to trigger fatally the puritanical reflexes rooted so deeply in American culture. Eros was beset by legal and financial problems. The magazine closed down after four issues, partly because it was so expensive to produce, but primarily because Ginsburg, as editor, was absurdly convicted under federal obscenity laws for the fourth issue, which featured a naked, bi-racial couple embracing.
Eros was one of a group of vanguard publications created by Ginzberg and Lubalin in the 1960s-1970s, including fact: and Avant-Garde, that became iconic in the history of graphic design, ushering in a new generation of artistic publishing that was intelligent, humorous and caustically critical of American society and government via the bold and sensitive typographical approach synonymous with the work of the great Lubalin.
Good copy with light wear to hardcovers, some wear to board edges, light foxing/toning.
1962, English
Hardcover, 90 pages, 32.3 x 24.9 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Eros Magazine / New York
$50.00 - In stock -
Volume One, No. 2, Summer 1962 issue of the legendary, short-lived and controversial Eros magazine, published by Ralph Ginzburg and art director Herb Lubalin, a quarterly and revolutionary hardbound periodical containing articles and photo-essays on love and sex. Besides the learned introductions and publication of classical erotica, Eros covered stories about sexual practices that were until then piously hidden from the public eye. Although there was hardly a hint of pornography in the journal, it was explicit enough to trigger fatally the puritanical reflexes rooted so deeply in American culture. Eros was beset by legal and financial problems. The magazine closed down after four issues, partly because it was so expensive to produce, but primarily because Ginsburg, as editor, was absurdly convicted under federal obscenity laws for the fourth issue, which featured a naked, bi-racial couple embracing.
Eros was one of a group of vanguard publications created by Ginzberg and Lubalin in the 1960s-1970s, including fact: and Avant-Garde, that became iconic in the history of graphic design, ushering in a new generation of artistic publishing that was intelligent, humorous and caustically critical of American society and government via the bold and sensitive typographical approach synonymous with the work of the great Lubalin.
Very Good copy with light foxing/toning.
1962, English
Hardcover, 90 pages, 32.3 x 24.9 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Eros Magazine / New York
$50.00 - Out of stock
Volume One, No. 4, Winter 1962 issue of the legendary, short-lived and controversial Eros magazine, published by Ralph Ginzburg and art director Herb Lubalin, a quarterly and revolutionary hardbound periodical containing articles and photo-essays on love and sex. Besides the learned introductions and publication of classical erotica, Eros covered stories about sexual practices that were until then piously hidden from the public eye. Although there was hardly a hint of pornography in the journal, it was explicit enough to trigger fatally the puritanical reflexes rooted so deeply in American culture. Eros was beset by legal and financial problems. The magazine closed down after four issues, partly because it was so expensive to produce, but primarily because Ginsburg, as editor, was absurdly convicted under federal obscenity laws for the fourth issue, which featured a naked, bi-racial couple embracing.
Eros was one of a group of vanguard publications created by Ginzberg and Lubalin in the 1960s-1970s, including fact: and Avant-Garde, that became iconic in the history of graphic design, ushering in a new generation of artistic publishing that was intelligent, humorous and caustically critical of American society and government via the bold and sensitive typographical approach synonymous with the work of the great Lubalin.
Very Good copy with light foxing/toning.
1984 / 1995, Japanese
Softcover (w. dust jacket), 144 pages, 21.3 x 15 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / fine
Published by
Rippu Shobo / Japan
$140.00 - Out of stock
First 1984 edition of this seldom seen photo book by Japanese photographer Kazuo Kenmochi, These Are Drugs: A Photographic Look at the Roots of Modern Disease. Kazuo Kenmochi, an extraordinary figure in Japanese photography, published three ground-breaking photo books that rank as some of the most comprehensive books on drug addiction ever published — Narcotic Photographic Document, Narcotic '61-'72, and Narcotic Damage in Japan (published 1963 through to 1975). These illuminating books of frontline photo-reportage detail the drug culture in Japan in the early 1960s that was spread by U.S. soldiers after the war. A photo artist with direct access as photographer for the Ministry of Health and Welfare and the National Police Agency, Kenmochi captures all the aspects of the culture from drug production, to distribution, to use, addiction, withdrawal, overdose, raids, seizure, arrests, incarceration, all in great detail. Alongside incredible photo documents of addicts in varying states of disarray, the books photographically documents the seizures, identifies the drug types/variations, paraphernalia, the methods of use, the signs of use on the body, and charts their origins in nature and distribution. Kenmochi's comprehensive observations, ingeniously utilising methods of identity abstraction and provocative photographic techniques used in erotic photography (a field he was active in), to confidentially capture drug use through stark and very intimate moments with users. This 1984 volume collects a selection of the images (vivid colour and b/w) from these highly sought after books into one concise softcover volume.
First 1984 edition, 1995 printing.
Fine—As New in NF dust jacket, preserved under mylar dust jacket, light creasing.
1992, English
Hardcover (w. dust jacket), 238 pages, 24.5 x 16 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Princeton University Press / New York
$80.00 - In stock -
First 1992 HC edition.
"Through his study of Bergsonism as a cultural phenomenon, Mark Antliff significantly enhances our understanding various art styles, articulating their social, political, and philosophical connotations and setting them coherently into a context. This book is particularly rewarding because it explores the full spectrum of interpretation and application of Bergson's theories. Many well-known artists emerge from this study making much more sense than before; and a number of interesting 'forgotten' artists come back to life in a pan-European cultural drama."—RICHARD SHIFF, University of Texas, Austin
At the turn of the century the philosophy of Henri Bergson captivated France, and Bergson's theories of intuition and élan vital influenced artistic and political notions of the supreme individual, the collective consciousness of a class or race, and the esprit of the nation itself. Here Mark Antliff demonstrates how various artists in prewar France positioned themselves and their art in this plurality of political discourse. By interrelating such movements as Futurism, Cubism, and Fauvism, he elucidates the pervasive impact of Bergson on modernism in Europe, especially in terms of theories of organic form.
Antliff defines the anarcho-individualism of Gino Severini as it relates to the anarcho-syndicalism of other Futurists, and contrasts both to the Puteaux Cubists, who embraced a leftist discourse of celtic nationalism. All these groups, including the "Rhythmists," an international group of Fauve painters, defined their Bergsonism in reaction to the campaign against Bergson launched by the royalist organization L'Action Française. Antliff shows that the organicism central to the Bergsonism of these leftist groups had a postwar legacy in fascist ideologies in France and Italy, and charts the transformation of an anticapitalist critique into the politics of reaction. Thus Antliff relates the Bergsonism of these movements to the larger political culture confronted by the Parisian avant-garde, exposing the volatile relation of art and culture to ideology in prewar France.
MARK ANTLIFF is Assistant Professor of Art History at The Johns Hopkins University.
Near Fine in Near Fine dust jacket.