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:
BOOKSHOP CLOSED FOR BREAK UNTIL NOV 10.
WEB-SHOP OPEN 24/7.
ORDERS CAN STILL BE PLACED AND WILL BE PROCESSED AFTER NOV 10.
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
Please note: The bookshop is closed until February 1, 2024.
Pick-up orders can be collected in our bookshop during opening hours after this date. Please collect any Pick-up orders within 3 weeks of ordering as we have limited storage space. Orders will be released back into stock if not collected within this time. No refunds can be made for pick-ups left un-collected.
Return Policy
All sales are final. We do accept returns (for refund, exchange) for items received in error. All our orders are packed with special care using heavy-duty padding and cardboard book-mailers or bubble mailers (for smaller books), using reinforcement where required. We cannot take responsibility for any lost, stolen or damaged parcels.
Insurance
Should you wish to insure your package, please email us directly after placing your order and we can organise this at a small extra expense. Although all standard/express tracked packages are very safe and dependable, we cannot take responsibility for any lost, stolen or damaged parcels. We recommend insurance on valuable orders.
Interested in selling your old books, catalogues, journals, magazines, comics, fanzines, ephemera? We are always looking for interesting, unusual and out-of-print books to buy. We only buy books in our fields of interest and specialty, and that we feel we can resell.
We base these prices on desirability, market value, in-print prices, condition and our current stock levels. We offer cash, store credit, and can take stock on consignment. All
about 25% of the price we expect to get when we sell them, or 30% in store credit. We base these prices on desirability, market value, in-print prices, condition and our current stock levels.
Sell your books any day of the week. You can drop them off and return later. If you have a lot of books, we can visit your Sydney home.
We buy books that we feel we can resell. We offer about 25 % of the price we expect to get when we sell them, or 30% in store credit. We base these prices on desirability, market value, in-print prices, condition and our current stock levels.
Philadelphia Wireman
03 August - 01 September, 2018
World Food Books is proud to announce our next Occasion, the first presentation of sculptures by Philadelphia Wireman in Australia.
The Philadelphia Wireman sculptures were found abandoned in an alley off Philadelphia’s South Street on trash night in 1982. Their discovery in a rapidly-changing neighbourhood undergoing extensive renovation, compounded with the failure of all attempts to locate the artist, suggests that the works may have been discarded after the maker’s death. Dubbed the "Philadelphia Wireman" during the first exhibition of this work, in 1985, the maker’s name, age, ethnicity, and even gender remain uncertain. The entire collection totals approximately 1200 pieces, all intricately bound together with tightly-wound heavy-gauge wire (along with a few small, abstract marker drawings, reminiscent both of Mark Tobey and J.B. Murry). The dense construction of the work, despite a modest range of scale and materials, is singularly obsessive and disciplined in design: a wire armature or exoskeleton firmly binds a bricolage of found objects including plastic, glass, food packaging, umbrella parts, tape, rubber, batteries, pens, leather, reflectors, nuts and bolts, nails, foil, coins, toys, watches, eyeglasses, tools, and jewellery.
Heavy with associations—anthropomorphic, zoomorphic, and socio-cultural responses to wrapped detritus—the totemic sculptures by Philadelphia Wireman have been discussed in the context of work created to fulfil the shamanistic needs of alternative religions in American culture. Curators, collectors, and critics have variously compared certain pieces to sculpture from Classical antiquity, Native American medicine bundles, African-American memory jugs, and African fetish objects. Reflecting the artist’s prolific and incredibly focused scavenging impulse, and despite—or perhaps enhanced by—their anonymity, these enigmatic objects function as urban artefacts and arbiters of power, though their origin and purpose is unknown. Philadelphia Wireman, whatever their identity, possessed an astonishing ability to isolate and communicate the concepts of power and energy through the selection and transformation of ordinary materials. Over the course of the past two decades, this collection has come to be regarded as an important discovery in the field of self-taught art and vernacular art.
Presented in collaboration with Fleisher-Ollman Gallery, Philadelphia, and Robert Heald, Wellington.
Susan Te Kahurangi King
02 February - 10 March, 2018
Susan Te Kahurangi King (24 February 1951 - ) has been a confident and prolific artist since she was a young child, drawing with readily available materials - pencils, ballpoint pens and felt-tip markers, on whatever paper is at hand. Between the ages of four and six Susan slowly ceased verbal communication. Her grandparents William and Myrtle Murphy had developed a special bond with Susan so they took on caring responsibilities for extended periods. Myrtle began informally archiving her work, carefully collecting and storing the drawings and compiling scrapbooks. No drawing was insignificant; every scrap of paper was kept. The King family are now the custodians of a vast collection containing over 7000 individual works, from tiny scraps of paper through to 5 meter long rolls.
The scrapbooks and diaries reveal Myrtle to be a woman of great patience and compassion, seeking to understand a child who was not always behaving as expected. She encouraged Susan to be observant, to explore her environment and absorb all the sights and sounds. Myrtle would show Susan’s drawings to friends and people in her community that she had dealings with, such as shopkeepers and postal workers, but this was not simply a case of a grandmother’s bias. She recognised that Susan had developed a sophisticated and unique visual language and sincerely believed that her art deserved serious attention.
This was an unorthodox attitude for the time. To provide some context, Jean Dubuffet coined the term Art Brut in 1945 to describe work created by self-taught artists – specifically residents of psychiatric institutions and those he considered to be visionaries or eccentrics. In 1972 Roger Cardinal extended this concept by adopting the term Outsider Art to describe work made by non-academically trained artists operating outside of mainstream art networks through choice or circumstance. Susan was born in Te Aroha, New Zealand in 1951, far from the artistic hubs of Paris and London that Dubuffet and Cardinal operated in. That Myrtle fêted Susan as a self-taught artist who deserved to be taken seriously shows how progressive her attitudes were.
Susan’s parents Doug and Dawn were also progressive. Over the years they had consulted numerous health practitioners about Susan’s condition, as the medical establishment could not provide an explanation as to why she had lapsed into silence. Dawn educated herself in the field of homeopathy and went on to treat all twelve of her children using these principles – basing prescriptions on her observations of their physical, mental and emotional state.
Doug was a linguist with an interest in philosophy who devoted what little spare time he had to studying Maori language and culture. To some extent their willingness to explore the fringes of the mainstream made them outsiders too but it was their commitment to living with integrity and their respect for individuality that ensured Susan’s creativity was always encouraged.
Even though Susan’s family supported her artistic pursuits, some staff in schools and hospitals saw it as an impediment to her assimilation into the community and discouraged it in a variety of ways. Her family was not always aware of this and therefore did not fully understand why Susan stopped drawing in the early 1990s. However, rather than dwell on the challenges that Susan faced in pursuit of her artistic practice, they prefer to highlight her achievements. In 2008 Susan began drawing again in earnest, after an almost 20 year interruption, and her work is now shown in galleries around the world.
Susan grew up without television and has been heavily influenced by the comics she read as a child. She is absolutely fearless in the appropriation of recognizable characters, such as Donald Duck and Mickey Mouse, in her work. She twists their limbs, contorts their faces, compresses them together, blends them into complex patterned backgrounds - always imbuing them with an incredible energy. Although Susan often used pop culture characters in her work they are not naive or childlike. These are drawings by a brilliant self-taught artist who has been creating exceptional work for decades without an audience in mind.
Mladen Stilinović
"Various Works 1986 - 1999"
02 February 16 - September 10, 2016
Various works 1986 - 1999, from two houses, from the collections of John Nixon, Sue Cramer, Kerrie Poliness, Peter Haffenden and Phoebe Haffenden.
Including: Geometry of Cakes (various shelves), 1993; Poor People’s Law (black and white plate), 1993; White Absence (glasses, ruler, set square, silver spoon, silver ladel with skin photograph and wooden cubes), 1990-1996; Exploitation of the Dead (grey and red star painting, wooden painting, black spoon with red table, red plate), 1984-1990; Money and Zeros (zero tie, paintings made for friends in Australia (Sue, John, Kerrie), numbers painting), 1991-1992; Words - Slogans (various t-shirts) - “they talk about the death of art...help! someone is trying to kill me”, “my sweet little lamb”, “work is a disease - Karl Marx”; Various artist books, catalogues, monographs, videos; Poster from exhibition Insulting Anarchy; "Circular" Croatian - Australian edition; Artist book by Vlado Martek (Dostoyevsky); more.
Thanks to Mladen Stilinović and Branka Stipančić.
Jonathan Walker
Always Will Need To Wear Winter Shirt Blue + Ochre Small Check Pattern
21 August - 21 September, 2015
Untitled
I am not a great reader of poetry but I always return to the work of Melbourne poet, Vincent Buckley (1925- 1988). Perhaps I find his most tantalising piece to be not a finished poem but a fragment left on a scrap of paper discovered on his desk after the poet’s death.
The poetry gathers like oil
In the word-core, and spreads
It has its music meet,
Its music is in movement.
This fragment is more the shell left behind from a volatile thought than a finished poem. I find the last two lines honest but awkward whereas the first two lines work like an arrow. Most likely he could not find a resolution so it was left. Still, in its present form, it remains an eloquent testimony to the ultimate failure of a medium to express mobile thought and sensation, in Buckley’s case, through verbal language. It’s an important matter because this is something all artists have to deal with regardless of the medium.
I have never written a poem, however, I am forever copying fragments from books on paper scraps in a vain effort to fix certain notions in my head. At first, they function as bookmarks that are sometimes returned to when I open the book. But before long, as they accumulate, they fall out littering the table interspersed with A4 photocopies, bills, books and medications.
To return to Buckley’s fragment, the first two lines very much evoke how I paint nowadays. As you age, detail diminishes and patches of light become more luminous and float. I feel the most honest way of dealing with this is by smearing the oil paint on the canvas with the fingers and working close-up, blind. Only if the patches coalesce into an approaching image can the work gain a life.
-
Jonathan Walker was born in Melbourne, Australia and brought up on a dairy farm in Gippsland. In the 1970’s he studied painting at RMIT and won the Harold Wright Scholarship to the British Museum, London. During the 1980’s he exhibited at Pinacotheca Gallery, Richmond and had work shown at the NGV and Heidi City Art Gallery. Over the same period he designed the cover for the “Epigenesi” LP by Giancarlo Toniutti, Italy and conducted a mail exchange work with Achim Wollscheid, Germany. The work with artists through the post resulted in an article published in the bicentenary issue of Art and Australia 1988. He showed in artist run spaces such as WestSpace in the 90’s and 2000’s, and until 2012, taught painting at Victoria University, which is where we (Colleen Ahern and Lisa Radford) as organisers of the exhibition, among many others, had the privilege of being his student.
Walker’s knowledge was imparted to students through the careful selection of music, literature, and artists found in books that he himself had ordered for the library. Walker’s strategy was the generosity of sharing his vast knowledge with references specific to each student and their context.
Walker’s paintings share a similar focus and intimacy.
This exhibition presents a small selection of recent paintings alongside a publication that includes Walker’s writing. Observational and analytical, Walker’s work is a type of material notation — the time of day, colour and how it is blended, the both specific and fleeting location of a reflection on lino or the question of whether a chair leg should be included in a painting.
Please join us on Friday August 21 between 6-8pm to celebrate the opening of the exhibition.
Curated by Colleen Ahern and Lisa Radford.
B. Wurtz
Curated by Nic Tammens
March 26 - April 4, 2015
B.Wurtz works from a basement studio in his home on Manhattan’s Lower East Side.
This local fact is attested to by the plastic shopping bags and newsprint circulars that appear in his work. As formal objects, they don’t make loud claims about their origins but nonetheless transmit street addresses and places of business from the bottom of this long thin island. Like plenty of artists, Wurtz is affected by what is local and what is consumed. His work is underpinned by this ethic. It often speaks from a neighborhood or reads like the contents of a hamper:
“BLACK PLUMS $1.29 lb.”
“Food Bazaar”
“USDA Whole Pork Shoulder Picnic 99c lb.”
“RITE AID Pharmacy, with us it’s personal.”
“H. Brickman & Sons.”
“Sweet Yams 59c lb."
Most of the work in this exhibition was made while the artist was in residence at Dieu Donne, a workshop dedicated to paper craft in Midtown. Here Wurtz fabricated assemblages with paper and objects that are relatively lightweight, with the intention that they would be easily transportable to Australia. This consideration isn’t absolute in Wurtz’s work, but was prescriptive for making the current exhibition light and cheap. Packed in two boxes, these works were sent from a USPS post office on the Lower East Side and delivered to North Melbourne by Australia Post.
Wurtz appears courtesy of Metro Pictures, New York.
Thanks to Rob Halverson, Joshua Petherick, Sari de Mallory, Matt Hinkley, Helen Johnson, Fayen d'Evie, Ask Kilmartin, Lisa Radon, Ellena Savage, Yale Union, and "Elizabeth".
John Nixon
"Archive"
December 15 - January 20, 2014
The presentation of John Nixon's archive offered a rare showcase of this extensive collection of the artist's own publications, catalogues, posters, ephemera, editions and more, from the mid 1980s onwards, alongside a selection of his artworks.
Organized by John Nixon, Joshua Petherick and Matt Hinkley.
"Habitat"
at Minerva, Sydney (organised by Joshua Petherick and Matt Hinkley)
November 15 - December 20, 2014
Lupo Borgonovo, Janet Burchill & Jennifer McCamley,
Lewis Fidock, HR Giger, Piero Gilardi, Veit Laurent Kurz,
Cinzia Ruggeri, Michael E. Smith, Lucie Stahl, Daniel Weil, Wols
Press Release:
“...It contained seven objects. The slender fluted bone, surely formed for flight, surely from the wing of some large bird. Three archaic circuitboards, faced with mazes of gold. A smooth white sphere of baked clay. An age-blackened fragment of lace. A fingerlength segment of what she assumed was bone from a human wrist, grayish white, inset smoothly with the silicon shaft of a small instrument that must once have ridden flush with the surface of the skin - but the thing’s face was seared and blackened.”
William Gibson, “Count Zero”, 1986
"Autumn Projects Archive"
Curated by Liza Vasiliou
March 6 - March 15, 2014
World Food Books, in conjunction with the Virgin Australia Melbourne Fashion Festival 2014, presented the Autumn Projects archive, consisting of a selection of early examples in Australian fashion with a particular interest in collecting designers and labels from the period beginning in the 1980’s, who significantly influenced the discourse of Australian Fashion.
Curated by Liza Vasiliou, the exhibition provided a unique opportunity to view pieces by designers Anthea Crawford, Barbara Vandenberg, Geoff Liddell and labels CR Australia, Covers, Jag along with early experimental collage pieces by Prue Acton and Sally Browne’s ‘Fragments’ collection, suspended throughout the functioning World Food Books shop in Melbourne.
H.B. Peace
presented by CENTRE FOR STYLE
November 14, 2013
"Hey Blinky, you say chic, I say same"
Anon 2013
H.B. Peace is a clothing collaboration between great friends Blake Barns and Hugh Egan Westland. Their pieces explore the divergences between 'character’ and ‘personality’ in garments....etc
Special Thanks to Joshua Petherick and Matt Hinkley of WFB and Gillian Mears
and a Very Special Thank you to Audrey Thomas Hayes for her shoe collaboration.
Janet Burchill & Jennifer McCamley
"Aesthetic Suicide"
May 10 - June 8, 2013
The first of our occasional exhibitions in the World Food Books office/shop space in Melbourne, "Aesthetic Suicide" presented a body of new and older works together by artists Janet Burchill & Jennifer McCamley, including videos, prints, a wall work, and publications.
During shop open hours videos played every hour, on the hour.
1978, English
Softcover, 108 pages, 21.5 x 13.5 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Cherry Valley Editions / New York
$65.00 - Out of stock
Rare first 1978 English edition of Flash Card, an incredible collection of poetry by Egyptian-French surrealist poet and author, Joyce Mansour (1928—1986). Translated from the original French by Mary Beach. Cover (front/back) collages and introduction by French poet, translator and artist Claude Pélieu (1934—2002).
Biography communicated by Joyce Mansour:
Autoerotic
Autocritiques
Autodidactic
Automastication
Automasticate
Autoerotica
Joyce Mansour (1928—1986), Egyptian, was born in Bowden England in 1928. She settles down in Paris where she publishes her first collection of poems in 1953, Cris, which is acclaimed in the Surrealist review Medium. Since then she has actively participated in the life of the Surrealist movement, she became the best known surrealist female poet, author of 16 books of poetry, as well as a number of important prose and theatre pieces. Joyce Mansour who recalls "always having written" expresses herself exclusively in poetry which according to her is one with living and thinking. A singular freedom is what strikes one immediately in her poems and stories which are filled with a somber, cruel eroticism completely corroded with humour.
Very Good copy, light tanning, wear.
1991, English
Softcover, 192 pages, 21 x 14 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / fine
Published by
City Lights Books / San Francisco
$65.00 - Out of stock
First 1991 City Lights edition of The Powers of The Word : Selected Essays and Notes 1927-1943 by early 20th-century French spiritual para-surrealist writer, critic, poet, and early, outspoken practitioner of pataphysics, René Daumal (1908-1944). Edited, translated and with introduction by Mark Polizzotti.
"Since his death in 1944, Rene Daumal has come to be recognized as one of the original minds of the twentieth century French letters. Poet, essayist, philosopher and translator, Sanscrit scholar and pupil of Gurdjieff, Daumal was a founder of the Grand Jeu group. He was iconoclastic and eclectic, able to embrace simultaneously Alfred Jarry's Pataphysics and Hindu teachings.
Daumal's two major works in English translation, Mount Analogue and A Night of Serious Drinking, have long been classics in this country; but until now, readers have not had access to the full range of his thought. The Powers of the Word spans a lifetime of essays and notes-many here translated for the first time-from the earliest incitements to drug use and revolt; through Daumal's unique readings of literary works; to his more mature, but no less ardent, meditations." — publisher's blurb
Fine copy. First 1991 Ed.
1968, English
Softcover, 106 pages, 20.5 x 14 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
City Lights Books / San Francisco
$120.00 - Out of stock
Rare first City Lights 1968 English language edition of this classic allegorical adventure novel by early 20th-century French spiritual para-surrealist writer, critic, poet, and early, outspoken practitioner of pataphysics, René Daumal (1908-1944). Translated and introduced by Roger Shattuck.
A touchstone of Surrealism, Pataphysics, and Gurdjieffian mysticism, Mount Analogue was left unfinished (mid-sentence) at the author's early death from tuberculosis in 1944 and first published posthumously in French in 1952, and the book has inspired seekers of art and wisdom ever since - Alejandro Jodorowsky's 1973 film The Holy Mountain is a loose adaptation.
As Daumal writes, “Mount Analogue is the symbolic mountain—the way that unites Heaven and Earth, a way which must exist in material and human form, otherwise our situation would be without hope.”
Roger Shattuck’s 1959 translation, the first made into English, remains the best and closest in spirit to the deadly serious joking of the original.
VG copy with light tanning and foxing to book edges.
1982, English
Softcover, 108 pages, 20.2 x 13.4 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / good
Published by
New Directions / New York
$70.00 - Out of stock
Rare first New Directions 1982 edition of Rasa, or Knowledge of the Self, by early 20th-century French spiritual para-surrealist writer, critic, poet, and early, outspoken practitioner of pataphysics, René Daumal (1908-1944). Translated with an introduction by Louise Landes Levi.
Rasa, or Knowledge of the Self; is the remarkable, and now very scarce, first gathering in English translation of essays and review articles on Hindu aesthetics and translations from the Sanskrit by the French writer Rene Daumal. A member of the Simplist group associated from 1928 to 1932 with the journal Le Grand feu ("The Great Game"), he began cultivating his East Indian studies as an extension of his active pursuit of the avant-garde. In 1932, he made the acquaintance of Uday Shankar, becoming secretary to the latter's Hindu dance troupe and accompanying it that year on its premier American tour. In his efforts to make Shankar's music and dance comprehensible to Western audiences, Daumal developed into a passionate spokesman for Indian culture, and his subsequent writings on the subject are far removed from the usual dry philological speculations of academic Orientalists. "To Approach the Hindu Poetic Art" differentiates between the Indian and European views of aesthetic experience, with special emphasis on the concept of rasa—that is, "taste" or "savor"—which Daumal sees at the heart of all Hindu art. Two essays—"On Indian Music" and "Concerning Uday Shankar"—were written at the time of Shankar's Western tour, while the selection of Daumal's "Oriental Book Reviews" deals with topics, such as The Tibetan Book of the Dead, which were only to spark general interest in the West decades later. The remaining sections of the collection are translations from the Sanskrit that attempt to resonate against language's deepest core.
Good copy with insect nibbles to cover edges.
1986, English
Softcover, 118 pages, 20 x 13 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Penguin Books / London
$30.00 - Out of stock
1986 King Penguin English language edition of this classic allegorical adventure novel by early 20th-century French spiritual para-surrealist writer, critic, poet, and early, outspoken practitioner of pataphysics, René Daumal (1908-1944). Translated and introduced by Roger Shattuck.
A touchstone of Surrealism, Pataphysics, and Gurdjieffian mysticism, Mount Analogue was left unfinished (mid-sentence) at the author's early death from tuberculosis in 1944 and first published posthumously in French in 1952, and the book has inspired seekers of art and wisdom ever since - Alejandro Jodorowsky's 1973 film The Holy Mountain is a loose adaptation.
As Daumal writes, “Mount Analogue is the symbolic mountain—the way that unites Heaven and Earth, a way which must exist in material and human form, otherwise our situation would be without hope.”
Roger Shattuck’s 1959 translation, the first made into English, remains the best and closest in spirit to the deadly serious joking of the original.
Good—VG copy with tanning to pages and single pinch to spine.
2023, English
Hardcover, 432 pages, 25 x 16.8 cm
Published by
The MIT Press / Massachusetts
$89.00 - In stock -
How artists in twentieth-century Germany adapted the idea of the medical or legal case as an artistic strategy to push to the fore sexualities, scandals, and crimes that were otherwise concealed.
In early twentieth-century Germany, the artistic avant-garde borrowed procedures from the medical and juridical realms to expose and debate matters that society preferred remain hidden and unspoken. Frederic J. Schwartz explores how the evocation or creation of a “case” provided artists with a means to engage themes that ranged from blasphemy to Lustmord, or sexual murder. Shedding light on the case as a cultural form, Schwartz shows its profound effect on artists and the ways it dovetailed with methods used by these figures to exploit fundamental changes taking place across the mass media of their time.
As Schwartz shows, the case was a common denominator that connected seemingly disparate works. George Grosz and Rudolf Schlichter drew on it for their violent visual art, as did architect Adolf Loos when he equated ornament with crime. Expressionists, meanwhile, approached the question of whether the so-called “mad” shared a right of public expression with those deemed sane, and examined medical and legal approaches to what society labeled as insanity. The case also took on a personal dimension when artists found themselves confronted with, or chose to engage with, the legal system. German courts prosecuted John Heartfield and others for their provocative works, while Bertolt Brecht created publicity for himself by suing the firm to whom he sold the film rights to The Threepenny Opera. Provocative and insightful, The Culture of the Case offers a privileged view of the spaces of representation in which images—in some instances, as cases—functioned at a key moment of modernity.
Frederic J. Schwartz is Emeritus Professor of History of Art at University College London. His books include The Werkbund- Design Theory and Mass Culture before the First World War and Blind Spots- Critical Theory and the History of Art in Twentieth-Century Germany.
2021, English
Hardcover, 198 pages, 13.5 x 19 cm
Published by
Twisted Spoon Press / Prague
$33.00 - In stock -
In the summer of 1935, Vitezslav Nezval, already one of the most celebrated Czech poets of his generation, embarked on a period of manic creativity that would result in three volumes of poetry written and published in a two-year span (1935-37), mirrored by three volumes of memoir-like poetic prose. These collections would not only reshape Czech poetry, blending approaches developed by the French Surrealists with national cultural sensibilities and political concerns, taken together they are among the highest achievements of the interwar avant-garde. Each of the three volumes adopted a different principle of Surrealism as its general modus operandi. For Woman in the Plural (1936), the first volume in this loose trilogy, it was objective chance (while the third and final volume, The Absolute Gravedigger (1937), adopted the paranoiac-critical method).
Appearing in English translation for the first time, Woman in the Plural displays Nezval's prodigious talents in a variety of forms, styles, and genres as he spins images of the female form like a zoetrope to create novel and hallucinatory ways of conceiving woman's mythical, divine, and creative power. It is an eclectic collection that mixes profound free verse, at times reading like a cascade of automatic writing, with pages from Nezval's dream journal, an exuberant set of Surrealist exercises, and a full-length play of chance encounters with "a woman like any other," all the while addressing the social and political uncertainties of the 1930s. Led off by Karel Teige's original collages from the first edition, Woman in the Plural is a vibrant and volatile tour de force from one of the greatest European writers of the 20th century.
Translated by Stephan Delbos and Tereza Novicka
Illustrated by Karel Teige
2022, English
Softcover, 140 pages, 17 x 20 cm
Published by
Twisted Spoon Press / Prague
$39.00 - In stock -
Originally published in 1945 by Les Éditions de l'Oubli in Bucharest, The Passive Vampire caught the attention of the French Surrealists when an excerpt appeared in 1947 alongside texts by Jabès and Michaux in the magazine La part du sable. Luca (1913—1994), whose work was admired by Gilles Deleuze, attempts here to transmit the “shudder” evoked by some Surrealist texts, such as André Breton's Nadja and Mad Love, probing with acerbic humor the fragile boundary between “objective chance” and delirium.
Impossible to define, The Passive Vampire is a mixture of theoretical treatise and breathless poetic prose, personal confession and scientific investigation — it is 18 photographs of “objectively offered objects,” a category created by Luca to occupy the space opened up by Breton. At times taking shape as assemblages, these objects are meant to capture chance in its dynamic and dramatic forms while illuminating the nearly continual equivalence between our love-hate tendencies and the world of things.
Ghérasim Luca is a great poet, among the greatest: he invented a prodigious stammering, his own.— Gilles Deleuze, Dialogues
1968, Japanese / French
Softcover, 228 pages, 23 x 18 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Tensei Shuppan / Tokyo
$110.00 - Out of stock
Revue de Érotologie, Homosexualité, Sadisme, Masochisme, Fétischisme, Narcissime, Infantilisme, Magie, Occultisme, Humour Noir, Complexe Psychisme. What more could you ask for? Le Sang Et La Rose is a masterpiece of the Japanese underground. A groundbreaking, powerful, yet short-lived Japanese arts and literary journal published in Tokyo from late 1968—mid 1969, published in a total of four luxurious, now collectible, volumes. The first three issues were edited by Tatsuhiko Shibusawa (1928—1987), a legendary, controversial Japanese novelist, art critic, translator of French writers such as Jean Cocteau, Georges Bataille and Marquis de Sade, and specialist in medieval demonology. The importance of this magazine to the Japanese avant-garde and radical culture cannot be overstated.
Born from a period of political, social and economical turmoil in Japan, Le Sang Et La Rose may be understood as a emblematic distillation and product of the late ‘60s student rebellion and anti-authoritarian underground culture. Wilfully politically subversive, the publication drew upon a vast range of perspectives - from criticism, literature, obscure esoteric sciences, art, eroticism, radical avant-garde and a historical-rooted Japanese counterculture; featuring literature, theory, art, photography, illustration and graphic design from the most innovative and subversive Japanese and international (predominately French) artists, authors and critics, spanning the themes above. As instigator, Tatsuhiko Shibusawa in effect formulated the magazine’s design to be a spiritual and political operative that would weaponize its readers minds. This stance was made clear in the 1969 manifesto text — "My 1969" — in which Shibusawa discuss' how he perceived the ‘60s as being the age of ideas, ideas as weapons, and outlined a distain towards systems of power, moralism, State oppression, sanitised and harmless liberalism, dogmatic academic sciences and an outright distrust for ideological, progressive literary scholars who advocate "freedom of expression", but have never caused friction with the judicial power. The magazine sketched out an aim to push towards a new kind of personal freedom, intellect, autonomy and moral compass. Here, the concept of ‘erotism’ — as discussed by Georges Bataille in his highly influential 1957 book "Erotism: Death and Sensuality" — acts as a critical force.
Issue no. 1 (1968) sets the scene perfectly, opening with Japanese author Yukio Mishima depicted as Saint Sebastian by photographer Kishin Shinoyama in a pictorial feature "Les Morts Masculines", a photographic homage to Georges Bataille that also features the photography of Eikoh Hosoe, Ikkō Narahara, Masahisa Fukase, and Osamu Hayasaki, with models including Butoh founder Tatsumi Hijikata, actor Akira Mita, author Tatsuhiko Shibusawa, actor Jin Nakayama, playwright Jūrō Kara, and others. Other features include " All Japanese are Perverse" — stories by Japanese writers including Yukio Mishima, Taruho Inagaki, Yutaka Haniya, Shinji Sōya; Henry Miller's letters to Anais Nin; a colour gallery of artwork by Belgian painter Paul Delvaux; articles on Vampire fantasy in the arts (including many original illustrations; Witches (illustrated by James Ensor); Oriental Eros, Ancient Indian poetry; Kama Sutra; female bi-sexuality; the history of gay (Danshoku) theatre in Japan; the full-colour art gallery "Masturbation Machine", featuring avant-garde artists Natsuyuki Nakanishi, Masuo Ikeda, Setsu Nagasawa, Carlos Marchioli, Kuniyoshi Kaneko, Masakazu Horiuchi, Tadanori Yokoo, Koji Suzuki, Tommy Ungerer; the fully illustrated museum supplement "Pain and Pleasure : On Torture" by Tatsuhiko Shibusawa with artworks throughout history; pornographic stories by Guillaume Apollinaire and Nicolas Restif de la Bretonne (who coined the term "Pornographer"); fiction by Pierre Morion (pseudo. André Pieyre de Mandiargues); critic Jin'ichi Uekusa on the controversial writings of Roger Peyrefitte, illustrations by Ernst, Bellmer, Labisse, Fini, Lam, and much more.
Tatsuhiko Shibusawa (1928—1987), was a well-known and controversial Japanese novelist, art critic, and translator of French writers such as Jean Cocteau, Georges Bataille and Marquis de Sade. In 1960 he and his publisher, Kyōji Ishii, were trialled for public obscenity over the publishing of Shibusawa's translation of de Sade's Juliette into the Japanese language. What was to be known as the "Sade Trial" took 9 years and although many of Japan's leading authors testified for the defense, in 1969 the Japanese Supreme Court ruled them guilty and charged. This did not deter Shibusawa, whose essays on black magic, demonology and eroticism were popular reading in Japan, and in 1981 he was awarded the 9th Izumi Kyoka Literature Prize.
Good copy with some spine damage and tanning/wear.
1969, Japanese / French
Softcover, 228 pages, 23 x 18 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Tensei Shuppan / Tokyo
$110.00 - Out of stock
Revue de Érotologie, Homosexualité, Sadisme, Masochisme, Fétischisme, Narcissime, Infantilisme, Magie, Occultisme, Humour Noir, Complexe Psychisme. What more could you ask for? Le Sang Et La Rose is a masterpiece of the Japanese underground. A groundbreaking, powerful, yet short-lived Japanese arts and literary journal published in Tokyo from late 1968—mid 1969, published in a total of four luxurious, now collectible, volumes. The first three issues were edited by Tatsuhiko Shibusawa (1928—1987), a legendary, controversial Japanese novelist, art critic, translator of French writers such as Jean Cocteau, Georges Bataille and Marquis de Sade, and specialist in medieval demonology. The importance of this magazine to the Japanese avant-garde and radical culture cannot be overstated.
Born from a period of political, social and economical turmoil in Japan, Le Sang Et La Rose may be understood as a emblematic distillation and product of the late ‘60s student rebellion and anti-authoritarian underground culture. Wilfully politically subversive, the publication drew upon a vast range of perspectives - from criticism, literature, obscure esoteric sciences, art, eroticism, radical avant-garde and a historical-rooted Japanese counterculture; featuring literature, theory, art, photography, illustration and graphic design from the most innovative and subversive Japanese and international (predominately French) artists, authors and critics, spanning the themes above. As instigator, Tatsuhiko Shibusawa in effect formulated the magazine’s design to be a spiritual and political operative that would weaponize its readers minds. This stance was made clear in the 1969 manifesto text — "My 1969" — in which Shibusawa discuss' how he perceived the ‘60s as being the age of ideas, ideas as weapons, and outlined a distain towards systems of power, moralism, State oppression, sanitised and harmless liberalism, dogmatic academic sciences and an outright distrust for ideological, progressive literary scholars who advocate "freedom of expression", but have never caused friction with the judicial power. The magazine sketched out an aim to push towards a new kind of personal freedom, intellect, autonomy and moral compass. Here, the concept of ‘erotism’ — as discussed by Georges Bataille in his highly influential 1957 book "Erotism: Death and Sensuality" — acts as a critical force.
Issue no. 2 includes photographic features by Yasuhiro Yoshioka and Yoshihiro Tatsuki, the artwork of French decorator of department store mannequins and surrealist Sunday painter Clovis Trouille, Venus in Furs erotic photo shoot by Yasuhiro Ishimoto, Yokoo Tadanori, Hans Bellmer, Leonor Fini, Alberto Martini, Félicien Rops, Rene Magritte, an incredible feature "Machine for Murder" with art by Hiroshi Nakamura, Tomi Ungerer, Koichi Tanigawa, Osamu Tsukasa, Tatsuo Ikeda, Marcel Duchamp, Seiichi Horiuchi, and others, an article on the erotica of Ukiyo-e with a fold-out colour three panel poster, the fully illustrated museum supplement on Demonology by Tatsuhiko Shibusawa with artworks throughout history, texts by Apollinaire, Burroughs, Mutsuo Takahashi, articles on laws pertaining to homosexuality, Kama Sutra, shoe fetishism, and much more.
Tatsuhiko Shibusawa (1928—1987), was a well-known and controversial Japanese novelist, art critic, and translator of French writers such as Jean Cocteau, Georges Bataille and Marquis de Sade. In 1960 he and his publisher, Kyōji Ishii, were trialled for public obscenity over the publishing of Shibusawa's translation of de Sade's Juliette into the Japanese language. What was to be known as the "Sade Trial" took 9 years and although many of Japan's leading authors testified for the defense, in 1969 the Japanese Supreme Court ruled them guilty and charged. This did not deter Shibusawa, whose essays on black magic, demonology and eroticism were popular reading in Japan, and in 1981 he was awarded the 9th Izumi Kyoka Literature Prize.
Very Good copy. Light general tanning/wear.
1969, Japanese / French
Softcover, 232 pages, 23 x 18 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Tensei Shuppan / Tokyo
$110.00 - Out of stock
Revue de Érotologie, Homosexualité, Sadisme, Masochisme, Fétischisme, Narcissime, Infantilisme, Magie, Occultisme, Humour Noir, Complexe Psychisme. What more could you ask for? Le Sang Et La Rose is a masterpiece of the Japanese underground. A groundbreaking, powerful, yet short-lived Japanese arts and literary journal published in Tokyo from late 1968—mid 1969, published in a total of four luxurious, now collectible, volumes. The first three issues were edited by Tatsuhiko Shibusawa (1928—1987), a legendary, controversial Japanese novelist, art critic, translator of French writers such as Jean Cocteau, Georges Bataille and Marquis de Sade, and specialist in medieval demonology. The importance of this magazine to the Japanese avant-garde and radical culture cannot be overstated.
Born from a period of political, social and economical turmoil in Japan, Le Sang Et La Rose may be understood as a emblematic distillation and product of the late ‘60s student rebellion and anti-authoritarian underground culture. Wilfully politically subversive, the publication drew upon a vast range of perspectives - from criticism, literature, obscure esoteric sciences, art, eroticism, radical avant-garde and a historical-rooted Japanese counterculture; featuring literature, theory, art, photography, illustration and graphic design from the most innovative and subversive Japanese and international (predominately French) artists, authors and critics, spanning the themes above. As instigator, Tatsuhiko Shibusawa in effect formulated the magazine’s design to be a spiritual and political operative that would weaponize its readers minds. This stance was made clear in the 1969 manifesto text — "My 1969" — in which Shibusawa discuss' how he perceived the ‘60s as being the age of ideas, ideas as weapons, and outlined a distain towards systems of power, moralism, State oppression, sanitised and harmless liberalism, dogmatic academic sciences and an outright distrust for ideological, progressive literary scholars who advocate "freedom of expression", but have never caused friction with the judicial power. The magazine sketched out an aim to push towards a new kind of personal freedom, intellect, autonomy and moral compass. Here, the concept of ‘erotism’ — as discussed by Georges Bataille in his highly influential 1957 book "Erotism: Death and Sensuality" — acts as a critical force.
Issue no. 3 (with cover by Bronzino, 1554) includes full-colour photographic feature by Kishin Shinoyama ("Virgin In Uniform" featuring models/artists Angela Asaoka, Akaji Maro, Yoko Ashikawa) and beautiful Shomei Tomatsu photo feature ("Scoptophilia"), the artwork of the great French cross-dressing painter-photographer Pierre Molinier, texts by Jirō Kawamura, Yumiko Kurahashi, Taruho Inagaki ("Memories of Hemorrhoids or "New Tsurezuregusa"), Akiyuki Nosaka ("Dear Penis, Goodbye"), Minoru Minamihara ("The Mystic Thought of Love in the Case of Jakob Böhme"), Takiji Kobayashi, The Fictitious Garden of Babylon by Tatsuhiko Shibusawa, Tsunekazu Murata ("Witch's Ax : Concerning Heresy in Medieval Europe"), translation of Franz Kafka "Metamorphosis" illustrated by Franco Gentilini, recent research on homosexuality by film critic Jin'ichi Uekusa, Kama Sutra, more Gay (Danshoku) Japanese Theater history, Marquise de Blancvilliers by Koji Nakata, and much more.
Tatsuhiko Shibusawa (1928—1987), was a well-known and controversial Japanese novelist, art critic, and translator of French writers such as Jean Cocteau, Georges Bataille and Marquis de Sade. In 1960 he and his publisher, Kyōji Ishii, were trialled for public obscenity over the publishing of Shibusawa's translation of de Sade's Juliette into the Japanese language. What was to be known as the "Sade Trial" took 9 years and although many of Japan's leading authors testified for the defense, in 1969 the Japanese Supreme Court ruled them guilty and charged. This did not deter Shibusawa, whose essays on black magic, demonology and eroticism were popular reading in Japan, and in 1981 he was awarded the 9th Izumi Kyoka Literature Prize.
Very Good copy. Light general tanning/wear.
1969, Japanese
Softcover, 286 pages, 23 x 18 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Tensei Shuppan / Tokyo
$140.00 - Out of stock
Revue de Érotologie, Homosexualité, Sadisme, Masochisme, Fétischisme, Narcissime, Infantilisme, Magie, Occultisme, Humour Noir, Complexe Psychisme. What more could you ask for? Le Sang Et La Rose was a groundbreaking, powerful, yet short-lived Japanese arts and literary journal published in Tokyo from late 1968—mid 1969, in a total of four luxurious, now collectible, volumes. The first three issues were edited by Tatsuhiko Shibusawa (1928—1987), a well-known and controversial Japanese novelist, art critic, and translator of French writers such as Jean Cocteau, Georges Bataille and Marquis de Sade, and this, the fourth final issue, and rarest of the four, edited by critic Masaaki Hiraoka and especially designed by self-taught painter, graphic designer and political activist, Kiyoshi Awazu (!)
Born from a period of political, social and economical turmoil in Japan, Le Sang Et La Rose may be understood as a emblematic distillation and product of the late ‘60s student rebellion and anti-authoritarian underground culture. Wilfully politically subversive, the publication drew upon a vast range of perspectives - from criticism, literature, obscure esoteric sciences, art, eroticism, radical avant garde and a historical-rooted Japanese counterculture; featuring literature, theory, art, photography, illustration and graphic design from the most innovative Japanese and international (predominately French) artists, authors and critics, spanning the themes above. Much like an instigator, Tatsuhiko Shibusawa in effect formulated the magazine’s design as principally to be a spiritual and political operative that would weaponize its readers minds. This stance was made clear in the 1969 manifesto text — "My 1969" — in which Shibusawa discuss' how he perceived the ‘60s as being the age of ideas, ideas as weapons, and outlined a distain towards systems of power, moralism, State oppression, sanitised and harmless liberalism, dogmatic academic sciences and an outright distrust for ideological, progressive literary scholars who advocate "freedom of expression", but have never caused friction with the judicial power. The magazine sketched out an aim to push towards a new kind of personal freedom, intellect, autonomy and moral compass. Here, the concept of ‘erotism’ — as discussed by Georges Bataille in his highly influential 1957 book "Erotism: Death and Sensuality" — acts as a critical force.
Issue no. 4 includes photographic features by cinematographer Yasuhiro Yoshioka (Woman in the Dunes, Kwaidan, The Face of Another, Diary of a Shinjuku Thief), work by pioneering, self-taught visual artist and designer, Kiyoshi Awazu, Hans Bellmer, illustrations by the incredible Hiroshi Nakamura, sadomasochism in cinema, Ukiyo-e and Shunga art (erotic Japanese prints), writings by Tatsuhiko Shibusawa, Yukio Mishima, Taruho Inagaki, Jun’nosuke Yoshiyuki, Kôichi Iijima, Jûrô Kara, Ikuya Kato, Minoru Yoshioka, Masaaki Hiraoka, Tadanori Yokoo, and Ryûichi Tamura. Much more....
Very Good copy.
1982, English
Softcover, 272 pages, 23 x 30.4 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / good
Published by
Pan / Sydney
$45.00 - Out of stock
First 1982 softcover edition of Art of The Holocaust, edited by Janet Blatter and Sybil Milton. A powerful collection of over 350 works of art created in ghettos, concentration camps, and in hiding by victims of the Nazis. Jewish, Communist and "degenerate", exiled, enemy-of-the-State avant-garde German artists, whose art was an "insult to German feeling", present here an arresting collective portrait of horror and the indomitable struggle to survive. Paintings and drawings reproduced throughout in colour and b/w with extensive biographies on the artists. Preface by Irving Howe.
Good copy.
2023, English
Hardcover (w. dust jacket), 416 pages, 20.5 x 14 cm
Published by
Random House / New York
$59.00 - Out of stock
The first English-language translation of an essential, early work key to understanding the French philosopher's later thought.
In the decade prior to the publication of Inner Experience (L'experience interieure), the twentieth-century French philosopher Georges Bataille produced a nascent masterwork containing some of his most original and extensive reflections on a range of subjects. With thoughts on ritual sacrifice and military conquest, the nature of laughter, and the mechanisms of capitalism, The Limit of the Useful, as Bataille had planned to title the work, illuminates the philosopher's later corpus, yet it remained unfinished and unpublished in his lifetime, and untranslated until now.
This is the first English-language translation of what Cory Austin Knudson and Tomas Elliott argue is one of Bataille's most structurally consistent works. Paired with draft essays and plans for The Accursed Share, along with over a hundred pages of appendixes and notes, the volume distinctively elaborates Bataille's thought. The Limit of the Useful spans a decade of rich intellectual ferment in Bataille's life as he first formulated his challenge to capitalism, engaging with concepts and ideas in ways not seen in his other published works. The volume bridges the gap between Bataille's surrealist literary writings and later scientific pretensions, drawing attention to, and filling in, an overlooked lacuna in his oeuvre.
2023, English
Hardcover, 256 pages, 25.4 x 18 cm
Published by
Fulgur Press / UK
$84.00 - In stock -
Essays on the art and writings of the long-neglected British occultist and Surrealist.
Straddling the worlds of Surrealism, occultism and modernist literature, Ithell Colquhoun (1906-88) was widely respected in her lifetime, but her transgressive, esoteric and poetic paintings and writings were long neglected until Richard Shillitoe's 2009 book Ithell Colquhoun: Magician Born of Nature initiated her revaluation--followed by Fulgur's 2016 publication Decad of Intelligence, the Tate's 2019 acquisition of more than 5,000 Colquhoun works and Amy Hale's 2020 biography. Colquhoun occupies a unique place within the lineage of occult Surrealist painters such as Leonora Carrington and Remedios Varo, as her presence in the 2022 Venice Biennale exhibition Milk of Dreams demonstrated.
This volume is the first critical examination of her diverse legacy, compiling papers from a 2018 conference on Colquhoun and her contemporaries Leonora Carrington, Leonor Fini and Stella Snead. Contributors explore themes of authorship and agency, Colquhoun's drawing practice, her Celtic motifs, British Surrealism and alchemy.
1985, English
Softcover, 176 pages, 13.5 x 21 cm
Out of print title / used / good
Published by
John Calder / London
$30.00 - Out of stock
This collection of essays remains the most radical text on performance in print today. This volume contains the famous Manifestos of the Theatre of Cruelty and the definitions of this theatre; the underlying impulses of performance (described by Artaud as its 'metaphysics'); some suggestions on a physical training method for actors and actresses; a long appreciation of the expressive values of Eastern dance drama. Also included is Seraphim's Theatre, in which Artaud attempts an actor's application of the Taoist principles of fullness and emptiness. "We cannot go on prostituting the idea of the theater, the only value of which is in its excruciating, magical relation to reality and danger," Artaud wrote. He fought vigorously against an encroaching conventionalism he found anathema to the very concept of theater. He sought to use theater to transcend writing, "to break through the language in order to touch life." The Theatre and Its Double is widely read throughout the world as a source of inspiration for new drama, for those in search of the meaning of the theatre, as well as for the beauty of its lines. This remarkable French playwright and poet was born in 1896. He was a leading figure in the Surrealist movement and despite a divergence of ideas remained a dedicated Surrealist all his life, devoting his time to the study of problems of conflict between man's physical and intellectual natures. He died in 1948.
Very Good copy of 1985 English edition.
1997, English
Softcover, 116 pages, 21 x 29 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / good
Published by
Morpheus International / US
$80.00 - Out of stock
First 1997 edition of H.R. Giger's Retrospective 1964-1984, presenting over 150 artworks, spanning 20 years in the career of the world's most renowned fantasy artist, gathered chronologically in this one rich and detailed volume. Carefully rendered reproductions of Giger's paintings, drawings, designs, videos, sculptures, costumes and furniture are accompanied by his own commentary and portraits of the artist at work and with Dali, Fuchs, Harry and other colleagues.
Fantastic Swiss surrealist painter, sculptor and set designer Hans Rudolf “Ruedi” Giger was born in 1940, the son of a chemist. He spoke of a father who viewed art as a "breadless profession", and strongly encouraged his son to enter into pharmaceutics. Despite this, in 1962, he moved to Zürich, where he studied Architecture and industrial design at the School of Applied Arts until 1970. Giger's style and thematic execution have been hugely influential. His design for the Alien was inspired by his painting Necronom IV and earned him an Oscar in 1980. His books of paintings, particularly Necronomicon and Necronomicon II (1985) and the frequent appearance of his art in Omni magazine continued his rise to international prominence. Giger is also well known for artwork on several music recording albums. His most distinctive stylistic innovation is that of a representation of human bodies and machines in a cold, interconnected relationship, he described as "biomechanical". His paintings often display fetishistic sexual imagery. His main influences were painters Ernst Fuchs and Salvador Dalí. He was also a personal friend of Timothy Leary. Giger suffered from night terrors and his paintings are all to some extent inspired by his experiences with that particular sleep disorder, making his first paintings as a means of art therapy. In 1998 Giger acquired the Château St. Germain in Gruyères, Switzerland, and it now houses the H. R. Giger Museum, a permanent repository of his work.
Good—Very Good copy of the first 1997 English edition with light general corner/cover wear.
2004, English
Softcover, 200 pages, 21.6 x 14 cm
Published by
Stanford University Press / Palo Alto
$48.00 - Out of stock
In Lautréamont and Sade, originally published in 1949, Maurice Blanchot forcefully distinguishes his critical project from the major intellectual currents of his day, surrealism and existentialism. Today, Lautreamont and Sade, these unique figures in the histories of literature and thought, are as crucially relevant to theorists of language, reason, and cruelty as they were in post-war Paris.
"Sade's Reason," in part a review of Pierre Klossowski's Sade, My Neighbor, was first published in Les Temps modernes. Blanchot offers Sade's reason, a corrosive rational unreasoning, apathetic before the cruelty of the passions, as a response to Sartre's Hegelian politics of commitment.
"The Experience of Lautreamont," Blanchot's longest sustained essay, pursues the dark logic of Maldoror through the circular gravitation of its themes, the grinding of its images, its repetitive and transformative use of language, and the obsessive metamorphosis of its motifs. Blanchot's Lautreamont emerges through this search for experience in the relentless unfolding of language. This treatment of the experience of Lautreamont unmistakably alludes to Georges Bataille's "inner experience."
Republishing the work in 1963, Blanchot prefaced it with an essay distinguishing his critical practice from that of Heidegger.
Maurice Blanchot (1907-2003) was a French writer, philosopher, and literary theorist. His work had a strong influence on later post-structuralist theorists such as Jacques Derrida. He is one of the most enigmatic and influential figures in modern French writing yet no interview, no biographical sketch, and hardly any photographs have ever been published of him.
1980, Japanese
Softcover, 200 pages (plus poster insert), 21 x 15 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Night Vision / Japan
$80.00 - Out of stock
First 1980 edition of cult Japanese underground magazine Night Vision, a special edition dedicated to the work of German artist Hans Bellmer (1902-1975). ("the doll = the human form - the body"). Nowhere in the world has Bellmer's "Die Puppe" has such a lasting effect than in Japan. This volume compiles many of the artist's texts, translated to Japanese, with many illustrations of Bellmer's graphic works, drawings nad photography, alongside contributions by Miyoko Nakano, Yuichi Konno, Shuzo Takiguchi, Hideo Nakai and others. This book also comes with an inserted copy of Japanese doll artist Nori Doi's four-fold poster
German artist Hans Bellmer (1902-1975) was one of the most subversive artists associated with Surrealism, famous--notorious, even--for his erotic engravings, objects and photographs. Best known for the life-sized pubescent female dolls he produced in the mid-1930s. "Bellmer was born in the city of Kattowitz, then part of the German Empire (now Katowice, Poland). Up until 1926, he'd been working as a draftsman for his own advertising company. He initiated his doll project to oppose the fascism of the Nazi Party by declaring that he would make no work that would support the new German state. Represented by mutated forms and unconventional poses, his dolls were directed specifically at the cult of the perfect body then prominent in Germany. Bellmer was influenced in his choice of art form by reading the published letters of Oskar Kokoschka (Der Fetisch, 1925)."
Very Good copy.
1951, German
Softcover, 98 pages, 27.5 x 20 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Self Published / Brühl
$70.00 - Out of stock
Lovely publication produced in 1951 on the occasion of a special exhibition of Max Ernst held in the Augustusburg Castle, organised by Karl Seibt and the city of Brühl in Germany on the 60th birthday of the artist. Illustrated throughout with many fine examples of Ernst's paintings, collages, frottages, prints and drawings, alongside two essays by Ernst (including "What is Surrealism?"), plus writings on Ernst by fellow Surrealist artists and writers Andre Breton, Nicolas Calas, Hans Arp, and Paul Eluard, amongst others, essay by Lothar Pretzell. All texts in German.
Good-Very Good copy with general wear, tanning.
1976, French
Softcover, 360 pages, 27 x 21 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Obliques / Paris
$100.00 - Out of stock
The landmark, over-sized Obliques special double issue dedicated to Antonin Artaud, published in Paris in 1976. The French literary journal Obliques (who published special issues on Bellmer, Kafka, Klossowski, Vian, Sartre, Robbe-Grillet, Strindberg, Genet, Female Surrealists...) published this extensive study and portrait of the extreme and provocative life of Antonin Artaud (1896—1948), French writer, poet, dramatist, artist, essayist, actor, theatre director and major figure of the European avant-garde. From his volatile alliance with the Surrealist movement to his legendary Theatre of Cruelty, this heavily illustrated (including many photographs and Artaud's drawings) documents his writings, letters and artworks, his cinema, theatre and esotericism, biography and bibliography, with contributions by Michel Sicard, Michel Camus,
Jerome Peignot, Guy Rosolato, Jean Domeneghini, Jerome Prieur, Jean Cocteau, Françoise Buisson, Alfred Jarry, Marc Fumaroli, Jean Thibaudeau, Alain Jouffroy, Jean-Michel Heimonet, Jean-Paul Morel, Pierre Courtens, Georges-Arthur Goldschmidt, Charles Bachat, Ronald Hayman, Jacques Prevel, Anie Besnard, Bruno Chabert, Claude Reichler, Florence De Meredieu, Daniel Giraud, Camille Bryen, J.M.G. Le Clezio, Jacques Derrida, Gilles Deleuze, Henri Thomas, Philippe Sollers, Paule Thevenin, Camille Bryen, Michel Butor, Jean-Claude Grosjean, Gerard Mace, Jose Quiroga, Roger Caillois, and more. Texts in French.
was the first publisher to present a comprehensive list of the literary and plastic production of Surrealist women with this gorgeous volume, long before the works of surrealist women, as a corpus, began to be more widely studied in the 1980s. Featuring well known names, but also many female artists neglected and seldom mentioned in the recent (strangely narrow-minded) re-evaluation of this period, this beautifully printed issue of Obliques is an incredibly valuable reference on a movement that was decidedly ‘feminine’. Edited by Roger Borderie with Michel Camus, it features profiles on the work and writing of Belen, Maya Bell, Bona, Leonora Carrington, Lise Deharme, Jacqueline Duprey, Aube Elléouët, Josette Exandier, Leonor Fini, Aline Gagnaire, Giovanna, Jane Graverol, Marianne Van Hirtum, Rozeta Hum, Valentine Hugo, Karskaya, Greta Knutson, Laure, Gina Pane, Annie Lebrun, Georgette Magritte, Manina, Joyce Mansour, Nora Mitrani, Meret Oppenheim, Mimi Parent, Valentine Penrose, Gisele Prassinos, Karina Raeck, Remedios Varo, Sibylle Ruppert, Colette Thomas, Toyen, Isabelle Waldberg, Unica Zurn, Cécile Reims, Dorothea Tanning, Greta Knutson, and more. Additional texts and works by Beatrice Didier, Cécile Reims, Michel Butor, Michel Sicard, Andre Pieyre De Mandiargues, Jean Roudaut, Rene Micha, Gerard Legrand, Jean Pfeiffer, Jacques Laurans, Michel Carassou, Annie Lebrun, Charles Bachat, Olivier Milliard, Robert Brechon, Jules Michelet, Jerome Prieur, Xaviere Gauthier, Elsa Thoresen Gouveia, plus a gallery by Titi Parant and Henri Maccheroni's Portraits Corrigés. Profusely illustrated with artworks, mostly in b/w with some colour sections.
Very Good copy of the rarer hardcover edition in VG dust jacket with signs of ageing and some wear/small tears
1977, French
Hardcover (w. dust jacket), 352 pages, 28 x 22 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Obliques / Paris
$180.00 - Out of stock
The landmark, over-sized Obliques special double issue, "La Femme Surréaliste", published in Paris in 1977. The French literary journal Obliques (who published special issues on Artaud, Bellmer, Kafka, Klossowski, Vian, Sartre, Robbe-Grillet, Strindberg, Genet...) was the first publisher to present a comprehensive list of the literary and plastic production of Surrealist women with this gorgeous volume, long before the works of surrealist women, as a corpus, began to be more widely studied in the 1980s. Featuring well known names, but also many female artists neglected and seldom mentioned in the recent (strangely narrow-minded) re-evaluation of this period, this beautifully printed issue of Obliques is an incredibly valuable reference on a movement that was decidedly ‘feminine’. Edited by Roger Borderie with Michel Camus, it features profiles on the work and writing of Belen, Maya Bell, Bona, Leonora Carrington, Lise Deharme, Jacqueline Duprey, Aube Elléouët, Josette Exandier, Leonor Fini, Aline Gagnaire, Giovanna, Jane Graverol, Marianne Van Hirtum, Rozeta Hum, Valentine Hugo, Karskaya, Greta Knutson, Laure, Gina Pane, Annie Lebrun, Georgette Magritte, Manina, Joyce Mansour, Nora Mitrani, Meret Oppenheim, Mimi Parent, Valentine Penrose, Gisele Prassinos, Karina Raeck, Remedios Varo, Sibylle Ruppert, Colette Thomas, Toyen, Isabelle Waldberg, Unica Zurn, Cécile Reims, Dorothea Tanning, Greta Knutson, and more. Additional texts and works by Beatrice Didier, Cécile Reims, Michel Butor, Michel Sicard, Andre Pieyre De Mandiargues, Jean Roudaut, Rene Micha, Gerard Legrand, Jean Pfeiffer, Jacques Laurans, Michel Carassou, Annie Lebrun, Charles Bachat, Olivier Milliard, Robert Brechon, Jules Michelet, Jerome Prieur, Xaviere Gauthier, Elsa Thoresen Gouveia, plus a gallery by Titi Parant and Henri Maccheroni's Portraits Corrigés. Profusely illustrated with artworks, mostly in b/w with some colour sections.
Very Good copy of the rarer hardcover edition in VG dust jacket with signs of ageing and some wear/small tears
2022, English / Japanese
Softcover (w. dust jacket), 21 x 30 cm
Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Treville / Tokyo
$90.00 - Out of stock
"Beksinski's powerfully unique paintings are such as I have never before seen" — H.R. Giger
Comprehensive collection Zdzisław Beksiński's apocalyptic fantastic paintings, sculptures and reliefs, mostly never published before, issued in Japan as part of Treville's series of volumes on the Polish master of introvert fantasy. Profusely illustrated in colour and b/w, accompanied by texts in English and Japanese.
Zdzisław Beksiński (1929 – 2005) was a Polish painter, photographer and sculptor. Beksiński had no formal training as an artist. Born in Sanok, he studied architecture in Kraków and worked as a construction site supervisor before turning to his passion for art, sculpting with construction site materials for his medium. His early photography would be a precursor to his paintings, often referred to as dystopian surrealism. Beksiński claimed, "I wish to paint in such a manner as if I were photographing dreams". Beksiński undertook painting with a passion, working intensely whilst listening to classical music and quickly becoming a leading figure in contemporary Polish art. In the late 1960s, Beksiński entered what he himself called his "fantastic period", which lasted up to the mid-1980s, during which he created his famed images of desolate, surrealistic landscapes with intricate depictions of anxious, abstracted figures and architecture in states of decay, mutation and decomposition. Although Beksiński's art was often dark, he himself was known to be a pleasant person with a keen sense of humour. Modest and somewhat shy, he avoided public events such as the openings of his own exhibitions and almost never visited museums or exhibitions in general. He always credited music as his main source of inspiration. Beksiński avoided concrete analysis of the content of his work, saying "I cannot conceive of a sensible statement on painting". Beksiński was stabbed to death at his Warsaw apartment in February 2005 by a 19-year-old acquaintance from Wołomin, reportedly because he refused to lend the teenager money.
"In the medieval tradition, Beksinski seems to believe art to be a forewarning about the fragility of the flesh – whatever pleasures we know are doomed to perish – thus, his paintings manage to evoke at once the process of decay and the ongoing struggle for life. They hold within them a secret poetry, stained with blood and rust." — Guillermo del Toro, Mexican film director
As New copy of the revised 2020 edition.
1985, English
Softcover, 160 pages, 23 x 15.5 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
University of Minnesota Press / Minnesota
$45.00 - Out of stock
First edition of Allan Stoekl's Politics, Writing, Mutilation, published in 1985 by Minnesota Press.
Five twentieth-century French writers played, and continue to play, a pivotal role in the development of literary-philosophical thinking that has come to be known in the United States as post-structuralism. The work of Georges Bataille, Maurice Blanchot, Raymond Roussel, Michel Leiris, and Francis Ponge in the 1930s and 1940s amounts to a prehistory of today's theoretical debates; the writings of Foucault and Derrida in particular would have been unthinkable outside the context provided by these writers. In Politics, Writing, Mutilation, Allan Stoekl emphasizes their role as precursors, but he also makes clear that they created a distinctive body of work that must be read and evaluated on its own terms.
Stoekl's critical readings of their work-selected novels, poems, and autobiographical fragments-reveal them to be battlegrounds not only of disruptive language practices, but of conflicting political drives as well. These irreconcilable tendencies can be defined as progressive political revolution, on the one hand with its emphasis on utility, conservation, and labor; and, on the other hand, a notion of dangerous and sinister production that stresses orgiastic sexuality and delirious expenditure. Caught between these forces is the intellectual of Bataille's time (and indeed of ours), locked in impotence, self-betrayal, and automutilation.
Stoekl develops his critique through dual readings of each writer's central work-the first reading deconstructive, the second a search for the political meaning excluded by a deconstructive approach. Repeating this process on a larger scale, he shows how Derrida and Foucault are indebted to their precursors even while they have betrayed them by stripping their work of political conflict and historical specificity. And he acknowledges that one of the most painful questions faced in prewar and Occupied France-that of the unthinkable guilt and duplicity of the intellectual-may not be as remote from contemporary theoretical concerns as some would have us believe.
"Allan Stoekl teaches french and comparative literature at Yale University. He edited and translated Vision of Excess: Selected Writings of Georges Bataille, 1997-1939, also published by Minnesota. "
VG copy.