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.
2022, English
Hardcover (w. dust jacket), 448 pages, 15.4 x 23.5 cm
Published by
Zone Books / New York
$59.00 - Out of stock
Prehistory is an invention of the late nineteenth century. In that moment of technological progress and acceleration of production and circulation, three major Western narratives about time took shape. One after another, these new fields of inquiry delved into the obscure immensity of the past: first, to surmise the age of the Earth; second, to find the point of emergence of human beings; and third, to ponder the age of art. Maria Stavrinaki considers the inseparability of these accounts of temporality from the disruptive forces of modernity. She asks what a history of modernity and its art would look like if considered through these three interwoven inventions of the longue durée. Transfixed by Prehistory attempts to articulate such a history, which turns out to be more complex than an inevitable march of progress leading up to the Anthropocene. Rather, it is a history of stupor, defamiliarization, regressive acceleration, and incessant invention, since the “new” was also found in the deep sediments of the Earth. Composed of as much speed as slowness, as much change as deep time, as much confidence as skepticism and doubt, modernity is a complex phenomenon that needs to be rethought. Stavrinaki focuses on this intrinsic tension through major artistic practices (Cézanne, Matisse, De Chirico, Ernst, Picasso, Dubuffet, Smithson, Morris, and contemporary artists such as Pierre Huyghe and Thomas Hirschhorn), philosophical discourses (Bataille, Blumenberg, and Jünger), and the human sciences. This groundbreaking book will attract readers interested in the intersections of art history, anthropology, psychoanalysis, mythology, geology, and archaeology.
“Transfixed by Prehistory delivers a stunning reconceptualization of the relationship between time and technology in industrial capitalism.” —Devin Fore
“From Cézanne to Smithson via Paleolithic mandibles, Stavrinaki mobilizes an unlikely group of artifacts to explore the core hermeneutic questions of an Anthropocene epoch in which the symbolic and the geological have become intertwined, if not indistinguishable. Through readings that are not just anecdotally rich and methodologically exemplary but also utterly compelling formally, Transfixed by Prehistory delivers a stunning reconceptualization of the relationship between time and technology in industrial capitalism.” —Devin Fore, Princeton University
2022, English
Softcover, 480 pages, 15.2 x 22.9 cm
Published by
Wakefield Press / Cambridge
$44.00 - In stock -
Poetical biographies of six radical thinkers from Cagliostro to Restif de la Bretonne, by the leading figure of French Romanticism.
Translated, with an introduction, by Peter Valente
First published in French in 1852, on the heels of the previous year’s appearance of Journey to the Orient, The Illuminated was the first of a string of Gérard de Nerval’s major works in his final years that would culminate in his posthumous fantastical autobiography Aurélia in 1855. The “male” counterpart to his 1854 Les Filles de feu (Daughters of fire), The Illuminated collects six portraits of men whom Nerval mysteriously dubbed “precursors of socialism”—visionaries who together formed an alternative history of France and a backdrop to a mystical form of madness that Nerval ultimately claimed for himself.
Nerval here presents the reader with Raoul Spifame, a mad lawyer who imagined himself to be Henry II; the abbé de Bucquoy, a man who opposed the monarchy and whose amazing escapes suggested the possession of magical powers; Restif de la Bretonne, the eighteenth-century theosophist, sensualist, and pantheist who defined God in human terms rather than spiritual; the Count Alessandro di Cagliostro, the famous magus and alchemist; Jacques Cazotte, author of The Devil in Love who created a synthesis between hermetic ideas and Catholic thought; and Quintus Aucler, a lawyer who sought to revive paganism in the unstable world of French society in the immediate aftermath of the Revolution of 1789.
An overlooked work by Nerval, The Illuminated combines the picturesque with pathos: a peculiar gallery of portraits that blur the boundaries between mysticism and mystification, and offers an outline for a communitarian rendition of the imagination.
Gérard de Nerval (1808–1855) was a writer, poet, and translator who wedded French and German Romanticism and transformed his research into mystic thought and his bouts of mental illness into such visionary works as the posthumously published Aurélia, or Dream and Life. After his suicide, his work would grow in stature and go on to influence everyone from Marcel Proust, André Breton, Antonin Artaud, and Michel Leiris.
2018, English
Softcover, 64 pages, 10.8 x 17.8 cm
Published by
David Zwirner Books / New York
$25.00 - In stock -
Published on the fiftieth anniversary of Marcel Duchamp’s death, Duchamp’s Last Day offers a radical reading of the artist’s final hours.
Just moments after Duchamp died, his closest friend Man Ray took a photograph of him. His face is wan; his eyes are closed; he appears calm. Taking this image as a point of departure, Donald Shambroom begins to examine the surrounding context—the dinner with Man Ray and another friend, Robert Lebel, the night Duchamp died, the conversations about his own death at that dinner and elsewhere, and the larger question of whether this radical artist’s death can be read as an extension of his work.
Shambroom’s in-depth research into this final night, and his analysis of the photograph, feeds into larger questions about the very nature of artworks and authorship which Duchamp raised in his lifetime. In the case of this mysterious and once long-lost photograph, who is the author? Man Ray or Duchamp? Is it an artwork or merely a record? Has the artist himself turned into one of his own readymades?
A fascinating essay that is both intimate and steeped in art history, Duchamp’s Last Day is filled with intricate details from decades of research into this peculiar encounter between art, life, and death. Shambroom’s book is a wonderful study of one of the greatest artists of the twentieth century.
1962, German
Softcover, 190 pages, 21 x 16.8 cm
Numbered ed. 0688/2000,
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / fine
Published by
Gerhardt Verlag / Berlin
$400.00 - Out of stock
Very scarce first numbered edition of Bellmer's "Die Puppe", published by Gerhardt Verlag in Berlin in 1962. 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. This collectable first edition (numbered of 2000 copies) of Die Puppe (The Doll) comprises a series of Bellmer's hand-painted photographs in the form of 10 monochrome and 15 coloured tipped-in plates accompanying his remarkable texts, here published for the first time. Bellmer's hand-coloured photographs subsequently acquired an iconic status as perhaps the purest exemplification of the Surrealist ideal of "convulsive beauty." Bellmer weaves a remarkably disparate set of concepts and intuitions--from fields as diverse as mathematics, morphology, optics and psychology--into a theory of eroticism that provides a totally unexpected rationale for his uncompromising art. His ideas are, in the words of poet Joë Bousquet, a "scandal to reason." The book also contains many b/w drawings by Bellmer along with prose poems by Paul Eluard. A book like no other!
Fine, perfectly preserved copy of this stunning edition with the die-cut decal cover.
2006, English
Softcover, 290 pages, 15.7 x 23.3 cm
Published by
Black Widow Press / Boston
$44.00 - Out of stock
Capital of Pain, first published in 1926, has had a lasting impression on more readers than one might expect. Young Frenchmen between the wars carried it in their backpacks; other poets were dazzled, young and old, all discussed and often argued about this remarkable book. Indeed, it has never gone out of print in France. Today this collection is thought by many to be the key to grasping what Surrealist texts are like. It clearly shows the freshness of early Surrealism, as well as the despair of postwar trauma.
Paul Eluard (1895-1952) was a founder, along with Andre Breton and Louis Aragon, of the Surrealist group and was, through the years, the most celebrated poet among that extraordinary grouping of poets. Widely regarded as one of France's most important 20th century poets, this volume, the first new translation of this work in over thirty years, presents the text of Eluard's Capital of Pain in its entirety in a bilingual format. Translator Mary Ann Caws also provides an insightful and in depth survey of Eluard's poems and writings.
Translator Mary Ann Caws is Distinguished Professor of English, French, and Comparative Literature at the Graduate School of the City University of New York. She is the author, translator, and editor of numerous books and publications on the major figures of both Dada and Surrealism. Recent publications include: "Poems of Andre Breton: A Bilingual Anthology" (with Jean-Pierre cauvin), and "Approximate Man & Other Writings of Tristan Tzara".
Translator Patricia Terry was Professor of French literature at Barnard College and the University of California San Diego. Among her many verse translations/books are "Poems of Jules Laforgue," Poems of the Elder Edda," "Renard the Fox," and "Roof Slates and Other Poems of Pierre Reverdy"(with Mary Ann Caws). A poet as well as a translator, her book of poems, "Words of Silence" was recently published. A new edition of Laforgue's poems and an anthology of the poems of Guillevic are forthcoming.
Translator Nancy Kline directs the writing Program at Barnard College and teaches in the English and the French Departments. She has published five books to date including: "Lightning: The Poetry of Rene Char," a translation of Hermann's "Les Voleuses de Langue," and a novel: "The Faithful." She is currently working on another novel and a collection of essays. Her numerous translations, essays, short stories, and reviews have appeared widely.
2008, English / French
Softcover, 320 pages, 23.1 x 15.3 cm
Published by
Black Widow Press / Boston
$59.00 - Out of stock
Joyce Mansour (1928-1986) is widely considered to be one of the most important of the female Surrealists. Born Joyce Patricia Adès in Bowden, England to Jewish-Egyptian parents, her parents soon returned with her to Cairo where she lived until she was twenty. Moving to Paris in 1953 she became one of the best known Surrealist poets, authoring sixteen books of poetry, as well as a number of important prose and theater pieces. Following the release in France of a 700 page critically acclaimed anthology (in French), this is the first major anthology of her writings to be available in English.
1977, French
Hardcover (gilt-blocked, decorated clothbound w. gold dust jacket), 294 pages, 22 x 31 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Draeger / Paris
$220.00 - In stock -
First French edition of this extravagant, lavishly illustrated book of wines and famous vineyards, created by Dalí in honor of his wife Gala and published in 1977 by Draeger, Paris. The perfect, equally surreal and sensual viticulture follow-up companion to Dalí's best-selling cookbook, Les dîners de Gala. A Dalínian take on pleasures of the grape and a coveted collectible, the book sets out to organize wines “according to the sensations they create in our very depths.” Through eclectic metrics like production method, weight, and color, the book presents wines of the world in such innovative, Dalíesque groupings as “Wines of Frivolity,” “Wines of the Impossible,” and “Wines of Light.”
Bursting with imagery, the book features more than 140 illustrations by Dalí. Many of these are appropriated artworks, including various classical nudes, all of them reconstructed with suitably Surrealist, provocative touches, like Jean-François Millet’s The Angelus, one of Dalí’s favorite points of reference over the decades. Dalí also included what is now considered one of the greatest works from his late “Nuclear Mystic” phase, The Sacrament of the Last Supper (1955), which sets the iconic biblical scene in a translucent dodecahedron-shaped space before a Catalonian coastal landscape. Dalí was by this stage a devout Catholic, simultaneously captivated by science, optical illusion, and the atomic age.
The first section is dedicated to “Ten Divine Dalí Wines,” an overview of 10 important wine-growing regions, while the second develops Dalí’s revolutionary ordering of wine by emotional experience, instead of by geography or variety. Rather than any prescriptive classification, it’s a flamboyant, free-flowing manifesto in favor of taste and feeling, as much a multisensory treat as a full-bodied document of Dalí’s late-stage oeuvre, in which the artist both reflected on formative influences and refined his own cultural legacy. Texts in French by Dalí, Max Gerard, Louis Orizet.
Very Good copy in beautiful gold dust jacket, only light wear.
1976, English
Softcover, 432 pages,
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / good
Published by
Vision / London
$55.00 - In stock -
First softcover edition of The Secret Life of Salvador Dalí, published by Vision in London in 1976. Painter, designer, and filmmaker Salvador Dalí (1904-1989) was one of the most colourful and controversial figures in twentieth-century art. A pioneer of Surrealism, he was both praised and reviled for the subconscious imagery he projected into his paintings, which he sometimes referred to as hand-painted dream photographs.
This early autobiography, first published in 1942, which takes him through his late thirties, is as startling and unpredictable as his art. On its first publication, the reviewer of Books observed: It is impossible not to admire this painter as writer. As a whole, he ... communicates the snobbishness, self-adoration, comedy, seriousness, fanaticism, in short the concept of life and the total picture of himself he sets out to portray. Dalí's flamboyant self-portrait begins with his earliest recollections and ends at the pinnacle of his earliest successes. His tantalizing chapter titles and headnotes—among them Intra-Uterine Memories, Apprenticeship to Glory, Permanent Expulsion from the School of Fine Arts, Dandyism and Prison, I am Disowned by my Family, My Participation and my Position in the Surrealist Revolution, and Discovery of the Apparatus for Photographing Thought—only hint at the compelling revelations to come.
Here are fascinating glimpses of the brilliant, ambitious, and relentlessly self-promoting artist who designed theater sets, shop interiors, and jewellery as readily as he made surrealistic paintings and films. Here is the mind that could envision and create with great technical virtuosity images of serene Raphaelesque beauty one moment and nightmarish landscapes of soft watches, burning giraffes, and fly-covered carcasses the next. For anyone interested in twentieth-century art and one of its most gifted and charismatic figures, The Secret Life of Salvador Dalí is essential reading.
Illustrated with photographs of Dalí and his works, and scores of Dalí drawings and sketches. Translated by Haakon M. Chevalier; introduction by Robert Melville.
Good copy, creasing to covers, light general wear.
2007, English
Hardback (w. dust jacket), 242 pages, 21 x 28 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / as new
Published by
Yale University Press / New Haven
$45.00 - In stock -
As a very young artist in training at the academy in Madrid, Salvador Dalí worked in two distinct modes a highly detailed naturalism (under the influence of the return to order”) and a more avant-garde, cubist-derived style that owed much to Picasso (whom Dalí visited in Paris in 1926). Then, in 1927, the twenty-three-year-old artist, influenced by André Breton’s Surrealist Manifesto of 1924 and the paintings of such artists as Joan Miró and Yves Tanguy, began to move towards Surrealism. In the spring of 1929, to coincide with the shooting of Buñuel’s Un Chien andalou, Dalí organized his first Paris exhibition, thereby gaining acclaim as a full member of the surrealist movement.
This book offers a wealth of new material about Dalí’s formative years as a young artist in Spain and first years in Paris. Fèlix Fanés, one of the most knowledgeable Dalí scholars in the world, transforms perceptions of the artist and shows how the stage was set for the emergence of Dalí’s mature artistic personality. With a fresh and detailed assessment of Dalí’s truly revolutionary work, Fanés reveals the central role of the artist not only in the development of the Surrealist movement but also the course of 20th-century art.
Out-of-print, As New copy.
1979, English
Hardcover (w. dust jacket), 238 pages, 32 x 27 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Park Lane / New York
$65.00 - In stock -
First English hardcover edition of this monographic on Salvador Dalí by Spanish writer Ramón Gómez de la Serna, published by Park Lane in 1979.
This book is a tribute to two great Spanish personalities of our century, the painter Salvador Dali and the writer Raman Gomez de la Serna. When Raman Gomez de la Serna undertook a study of Salvador Dali, Dali himself promised to illustrate the text with original drawings. Unfortunately, the death of the writer in 1963 prevented the project from being realized until recently, when the study, almost complete, was discovered posthumously among his papers. Dali kept his word and this magnificent book is the result.
Supported by other writings, photographs, and illustrations, Dali is made up of three sections. The first of these is largely composed of the essay and the drawings, with a note by the Spanish scholar Sebastian Grasso on Ramon Gomez de la Serna, and a chronology which charts the life and works of the surrealist artist. The second section contains more than 80 color reproductions of Dali's works....
Lavishly illustrated in paintings, drawings, Dalí's home, studio, furniture, musuem, testimonials, and much more.
Painter, designer, and filmmaker Salvador Dalí (1904-1989) was one of the most colourful and controversial figures in twentieth-century art. A pioneer of Surrealism, he was both praised and reviled for the subconscious imagery he projected into his paintings, which he sometimes referred to as hand-painted dream photographs.
Ramón Gómez de la Serna y Puig (3 July 1888 in Madrid – 13 January 1963 in Buenos Aires) was a Spanish writer, dramatist and avant-garde agitator. He strongly influenced surrealist film maker Luis Buñuel.
Very Good in Good dust jacket, some edge wear.
2011, English
Softcover, 232 pages, 23 x 15 cm
Published by
Wakefield Press / Cambridge
$39.00 - In stock -
A foundational classic of Surrealist literature, The Leg of Lamb: Its Life and Works brings together the arch-Surrealist Benjamin Péret’s short prose: a smorgasbord of automatic writing and fantastical narratives that play on a medley of registers, employing everything from the cinematic antics of Buster Keaton and slapstick animation to the storytelling devices of detective novels, alchemical operations, and mythology. The Leg of Lamb consists of twenty-four delirious narratives, including the novella-length works … And the Breasts Were Dying… and There Was a Little Bakeress…. Péret’s adult fairy tales bear equal allegiance to Lewis Carroll and the Marquis de Sade, and present one of the clearest examples of Surrealist humor, in which the boundaries between character and object blur, and where a coat rack, artichoke, or a pile of manure is just as likely as Napoléon, El Cid, or Pope Pius VII to take on the role of hero and adventurer.
Péret himself edited this collection toward the end of his life. Originally published in French in 1957, almost all of the stories in this collection had been written in the 1920s, half of them even preceding André Breton’s Manifesto of Surrealism. The Leg of Lamb offers not just a highpoint of Surrealist automatic writing, but a key chapter in the genesis of the Surrealist movement. Here, Péret’s unfettered imagination does not so much represent Surrealism as constitute it, and describes a world defined by childlike delight and aggression—a world in which metamorphosis is endless and death is dream.
Benjamin Péret (1899–1959) was a Surrealist’s Surrealist, audaciously baroque and incessantly irreverent, a founding member of the Surrealist movement and its only member besides André Breton to remain a Surrealist to the end. He was Salvador Dalí’s favorite poet, an inspiration to Luis Buñuel, and a major influence on Octavio Paz. Péret fought in the Spanish Civil War as a member of the Durutti Column, but also fought every literary current he came up against in his lifetime. He was a fierce antinationalist, a true revolutionary, and a lifelong insulter of priests.
“One of the most extraordinary poets of our time.”—Salvador Dalí
“Humor gushes here as if from the source.”—André Breton
“[T]he quintessential surrealist poet; his work seems to flow freely, untrammeled by any cultural effort, from a hidden source of inspiration, spontaneously recreating a wholly new and different world.”—Luis Buñuel
Translated, with an introduction, by Marc Lowenthal
2012, English
Softcover, 208 pages, 19.8 x 13 cm
Published by
Penguin Books / London
$23.00 - Out of stock
'Bataille is one of the most important writers of the twentieth century'—Michel Foucault
'Literature is not innocent,' stated Georges Bataille in this extraordinary 1957 collection of essays, arguing that only by acknowledging its complicity with the knowledge of evil can literature communicate fully and intensely. These literary profiles of eight authors and their work, including Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights, Baudelaire's Les Fleurs du Mal and the writings of Sade, Kafka and Sartre, explore subjects such as violence, eroticism, childhood, myth and transgression, in a work of rich allusion and powerful argument.
Translated by Alastair Hamilton.
'Bataille intellectualizes the erotic, as he eroticizes the intellect . . . reading him can be a disturbing kind of game'—The New York Times
2022, English
Softcover, 72 pages, 19 x 12.1 cm
Published by
Diaphanes / Zürich
$29.00 - In stock -
Translated by Clayton Eshleman. Afterword by Stephen Barber.
"Here Lies" preceded by "The Indian Culture" collects two of Antonin Artaud's foremost poetic works from the last period of his life. He wrote both works soon after his release from the psychiatric hospital of Rodez and his return to Paris, and they were published during the flurry of intensive activity and protests against his work's censorship. The Indian Culture is the first and most ambitious work of Artaud's last period. It deals with his travels in Mexico in 1936 where Artaud sets aside his usual preoccupations with peyote and the Tarahumara people's sorcerers to directly anatomize his obsessions with gods, corporeality, and sexuality. Here Lies is Artaud's final declaration of autonomy for his own body from its birth to its imminent death, won at the cost of multiple battles against the infiltrating powers amassed to steal that birth and death away from him. Both works demonstrate Artaud's final poetry as a unique amalgam of delicate linguistic invention and ferociously obscene invective.
"Here Lies" preceded by "The Indian Culture" was translated by the award-winning translator Clayton Eshleman, widely seen as the preeminent translator into English of Artaud's work, with its profound intensity and multiply nuanced language. For the first time since its first publication, this bilingual edition presents the two works in one volume, as Artaud originally intended. This edition also features a contextual afterword by Stephen Barber as well as new material, previously untranslated into English.
1994, English / French / German
Hardcover (w. die-cut foiled dust jacket), 248 pages, 34 x 25 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
$190.00 - In stock -
Rare first edition of Czech-American artist Ruth Francken's catalogue raisonné, who's cosmopolitan and nomadic life was a reflection of her work as a painter and visual artist: marginal, disparate and inseparable from the various post-war trends, whether American Abstract Expressionism, Art Informel, Surrealism or Pop Art. Published in 1994, this lavishly illustrated volume, issued in hardcover with fragile die-cut metallic silver dust-jacket, features texts by the artist, her close friend French philosopher Jean-François Lyotard, Peter Ruthenberg, Ursula Sandmann, and Ignatz Bubis, in English, French and German. Documentation of works from all periods of her oeuvre are accompanied by studio and social photography, a full catalogue of works and biography. A valuable and scarce book on a tremendous artist with little reception outside France, where she was primarily active. Francken's exploration of themes of fragmentation, incompleteness, multiplication, and decomposition in communication and image spanned the mediums of painting, sculpture, collage, textile and furniture design, and has been a large influence on artists such as Rosemarie Trockel.
Ruth Francken (1924, Prague—2006, Paris) was a Czech-American sculptor, painter, and furniture designer who was mostly active in Paris. Ruth Francken's life and career would span over six decades, two continents, and more than half a dozen countries. After studying painting from 1939-1940 at the Ruskin School in Oxford, England, she moved to New York, where she studied at the Art Students League of New York. After becoming an American citizen in 1942, she worked as a textile designer until 1949, when she left the United States for Europe. After a two-year period in Venice (1950-1952), she moved to Paris, where she lived until her death in 2006, save for two years in the 1960s and 1970s when she worked out of Berlin and Santa Barbara, California. Ruth Francken was considered an Abstract Expressionist in her early career, until around 1964. After this point she began working with object sculptures, collage, and different textiles and techniques, and her art took on a more surrealist and pop-art aesthetic. She focuses heavily on problems and disconnects in communication, a subject she shared with friend and collaborator French philosopher Jean-François Lyotard.
Very Good copy with Good dust-jacket. Some general wear to foiled covers and common small damages to the fragile die-cut lettering. Preserved in mylar wrap.
2020, English
Softcover, 80 pages, 11.4 x 17.8 cm
Published by
Wakefield Press / Cambridge
$29.00 - In stock -
Originally published in French in 1979, Rogomelec was the third of Leonor Fini’s novels. All the qualities of the paintings for which she is famed can be found in it: an undermining of patriarchy, the ambiguities of gender and the slipperiness of desire, along with darker hints of cruelty and the voluptuousness of fear. This novella’s ambiguous narrator sets off for the isolated locale of Rogomelec—where a crumbling monastery serves as a sanatorium and offers a cure involving a diet of plants and flowers—and moves through a waking dream involving strangely scented monks, vibratory concerts in a cavernous ossuary, and ritualist pomp with costumes of octopi and shining beetles. As the days unfold, the narrator discovers that the “the celebration of the king” is approaching, the events of which will lead to a shocking discovery in Rogomelec’s Gothic ruins. This first English translation includes 14 drawings by Fini that accompanied the novella’s original publication.
Translated by William Kulik and Serena Shanken Skwersky, with an introduction by Jonathan P. Eburne
Born in Argentina and raised in Italy, Leonor Fini (1907–1996), concluded a rebellious youth with a move to Paris and a career in painting. Her six decades of work as artist, illustrator, designer, and author bore close ties to the Surrealist movement, but though the Surrealists saw her as one of them, she herself never identified as a Surrealist. Rejecting the role of muse, her work focused on portrayals of women as subjects with desire as opposed to objects of desire, and was groundbreaking in its explorations of mythology, androgyny, death, and life as Mannerist theater.
2015, English
Hardcover (w. dust jacket), 160 pages, 27 x 31 cm
Published by
Marot / Brussels
$90.00 - Out of stock
From the start, the Belgian Surrealists—among them René Magritte, Paul Delvaux, Paul Nougé, E.L.T. Mesens and Marcel Mariën—distinguished themselves from their Parisian counterparts with their dry wit, brilliant conceptualism and knack for combining the fantastical and the everyday (e.g., Magritte's bowler-hatted men, or Marcel Mariën's iconic single-lensed spectacle), and their disinclination to issue Breton-style manifestos.
This revelatory volume celebrates the Surrealist movement in Belgium through a group of more than 250 paintings, drawings, photographs, prints and books by artists such as Rachel Baes, Paul Delvaux, Camille Goemans, Jane Graverol, Tom Gutt, Jacques Lacomblez, René Magritte, Marcel Mariën, Jacques Matton, Edouard (E.L.T.) Mesens, Paul Nougé, Gilbert Senecaut, Louis Scutenaire, Max Servais, Armand Simon, André Stas Raoul Ubac, Louis Van de Spiegele, Rogier Van de Wouwer and Robert Willems.
1999, English
Softcover, 192 pages, 19.8 x 13 cm
Published by
Penguin Books / London
$23.00 - Out of stock
Nadja, Andre Breton's most frankly autobiographical book, is the quintessential Surrealist romance. With its blend of intimate confession and sense of the marvellous, Nadja weaves a mysterious and compelling tapestry of daily life as seen through a uniquely magical perspective. The core of Nadja is Breton's complex relationship with an unpredictable and unconventional young woman, 'the extreme limit of the Surrealist aspiration'. Combining autobiographical fact with memory and imagination, Breton spins one of the most unusual love stories in modern literature and illustrates the notion of 'petrifying coincidence', a cornerstone of Surrealist thought.
First published in 1928, Nadja has long been regarded as the most important and influential work to emerge from Surrealism. This edition features Richard Howard's masterful translation and a new introduction by Breton biographer Mark Polizzotti that details the circumstances of the book's composition.
Andre Breton, poet and writer, was the founder of the Surrealist movement in France, and is remembered as being its heart and soul. He died in 1966. Mark Polizzotti is a writer and translator, and also works in an editorial capacity for David Godine Publishers in the US.
2021, English
Softcover, 155 pages, 22.1 x 15 cm
Published by
Black Widow Press / Boston
$34.00 - Out of stock
This international anthology takes us to the seldom discussed and anthologized beginnings of the prose poem. It gathers the foundational writings of William Blake, Charles Baudelaire and Max Jacob alongside lesser-known practitioners such as Judith Gautier, Elena Guro, Renée Vivien, Mizuno Yōshū, Dino Campana, Liu Bannong and Marcel Lecomte. The writers presented here celebrate the diversity of a genre that, perhaps more than any other poetic form, has cultivated hybridity and in-betweenness at many levels, be they aesthetic, cultural or political. This volume should be indispensable to anyone interested in modern and contemporary poetics as well as, more generally, the permutations of literary tradition and innovation.
Edited and with an introduction by Mary Ann Caws and Michel Delville. With over 20 translators from around the world.
Mary Ann Caws (born 1933) is an American author, art historian and literary critic. She is currently a Distinguished Professor of English, French and Comparative Literature at the Graduate School of the City University of New York. She is an expert on Surrealism and modern English and French literature, having written biographies of Marcel Proust, Virginia Woolf, and Henry James. She works on the interrelations of visual art and literary texts, has written biographies of Pablo Picasso and Salvador Dalí, edited the diaries, letters, and source material of Joseph Cornell. She has also written on André Breton, Robert Desnos, René Char, Yves Bonnefoy, Robert Motherwell, and Edmond Jabès. She served as the senior editor for the HarperCollins World Reader, and edited anthologies on Manifestos - Isms, Surrealism, Twentieth Century French Literature. Among others, she has translated Stéphane Mallarmé, Tristan Tzara, Pierre Reverdy, André Breton, Paul Éluard, Robert Desnos, and René Char.
Michel Delville is a Belgian musician, writer and critic. Delville teaches literature at the University of Liège. He is the author of books about comparative poetics and interdisciplinary studies.He was awarded the 1998 SAMLA Book Award, the Choice Outstanding Book Award, the Léon Guérin Prize, the 2001 Alumni Award of the Belgian American Educational Foundation, the rank of Officer of the Order of Leopold (2009), and the 2009 Prix Wernaers pour la recherche et la diffusion des connaissances. Besides his extensive discography, he has over 30 books published to date.
1994, English
Softcover, 352 pages, 20.5 x 15 cm
Published by
Exact Change / Boston
$38.00 - In stock -
Andre Breton described Maldoror as "the expression of a revelation so complete it seems to exceed human potential." Little is known about its pseudonymous author, aside from his real name (Isidore Ducasse), birth in Uruguay (1846) and early death in Paris (1870). Lautreamont bewildered his contemporaries, but the Surrealists modeled their efforts after his black humor and poetic leaps of logic, exemplified by the oft-quoted line, "As beautiful as the chance meeting on a dissecting table of a sewing machine and an umbrella." Maldoror's shocked first publisher refused to bind the sheets of the original edition--and perhaps no better invitation exists to this book, which warns the reader, "Only the few may relish this bitter fruit without danger."
This is the only complete annotated collection of Lautreamont's writings available in English, in Alexis Lykiard's superior translation. For this latest edition, Lykiard updates his introduction to include recent scholarship.
1992, English
Hardcover, 144 pages, 24 x 18 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Arkady / Warsaw
$600.00 - Out of stock
Signed copy of the long out-of-print and collectible hardcover monograph on Polish artist Zdzisław Beksiński, published in 1992 by Arkady, Warsaw. Profusely illustrated throughout with colour reproductions of Beksiński's surreal dystopian paintings spanning his entire career, alongside an introductory text in Polish by Tadeusz Nyczek.
Already a scarce title on Beksiński, this copy is extra special with signature by the master himself in pen on first blank page after his ("Beksinski"). Rarely does a signed book appear by this artist.
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.
According to Mexican film director Guillermo del Toro "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."
"Beksinski's powerfully unique paintings are such as I have never before seen" H.R. Giger
Very Good copy in Very Good dust jacket.
1997, English
Hardcover (w. dust jacket), 240 pages, 31 x 25 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Taschen / Cologne
$150.00 - Out of stock
First hardcover English-language edition of this exceptionally in-depth and comprehensive book by H.R. Giger, published by Taschen in 1997.
“I paint what frightens me,” says H.R. Giger, who compiled and designed this comprehensive retrospective himself, documenting and describing his work from the early 1960s to the late 1990s. Lavishly illustrated with reproductions of his biomechanical visions, accompanied by his own detailed commentaries offering privileged insight into a uniquely imaginative mind. The book cover Giger's life and working methods, followed by page after page of Giger's artworks and various lesser-seen creations from the deepest recesses of the mind and of the Giger personal archives — from his early oil experiments to the Giger Bar in Tokyo to his killer condoms to his nightmare garden train! Includes an extensive illustrated chronology. An uncommon book in the original, long out-of-print foiled hardcover issue with English text (not a later reprint). Highly recommended resource for any Giger fan.
Very Good copy in VG dust jacket.
2021, English
Softcover, 224 pages, 20.3 x 17.8 cm
Published by
The New York Review of Books / New York
$36.00 - In stock -
"Reading The Hearing Trumpet liberates us from the miserable reality of our days."—Luis Buñuel, Spanish-Mexican filmmaker.
Afterword by Olga Tokarczuk
Leonora Carrington (1917 – 2011), painter, playwright, and novelist, was a surrealist trickster par excellence, and The Hearing Trumpet is the witty, celebratory key to her anarchic and allusive body of work. The novel begins in the bourgeois comfort of a residential corner of a Mexican city and ends with a man-made apocalypse that promises to usher in the earth’s rebirth. In between we are swept off to a most curious old-age home run by a self-improvement cult and drawn several centuries back in time with a cross-dressing Abbess who is on a quest to restore the Holy Grail to its rightful owner, the Goddess Venus. Guiding us is one of the most unexpected heroines in twentieth-century literature, a nonagenarian vegetarian named Marian Leatherby, who, as Olga Tokarczuk writes in her afterword, is “hard of hearing” but “full of life.”
"The Hearing Trumpet . . . reads on its parodic surface like an Agatha Christie domestic mystery, but one melted, dissolved by extreme heat into something unthinkably other, and reconstructed as the casebook of an alchemist. . . . It asks its readers to allow the dark, allow the wild and rethink how power works. It is a work of massive optimism. . . . One of the most original, joyful, satisfying, and quietly visionary novels of the twentieth century."—Ali Smith, Scottish author, playwright, academic and journalist.
2017, English
Softcover, 112 pages, 12.8 x 20.4 cm
Published by
The New York Review of Books / New York
$32.00 - Out of stock
A stunning work of memoir and an unforgettable depiction of the brilliance and madness by one of Surrealism’s most compelling figures
In 1937 Leonora Carrington—later to become one of the twentieth century’s great painters of the weird, the alarming, and the wild—was a nineteen-year-old art student in London, beautiful and unapologetically rebellious. At a dinner party, she met the artist Max Ernst. The two fell in love and soon departed to live and paint together in a farmhouse in Provence.
In 1940, the invading German army arrested Ernst and sent him to a concentration camp. Carrington suffered a psychotic break. She wept for hours. Her stomach became “the mirror of the earth”—of all worlds in a hostile universe—and she tried to purify the evil by compulsively vomiting. As the Germans neared the south of France, a friend persuaded Carrington to flee to Spain. Facing the approach “of robots, of thoughtless, fleshless beings,” she packed a suitcase that bore on a brass plate the word Revelation.
This was only the beginning of a journey into madness that was to end with Carrington confined in a mental institution, overwhelmed not only by her own terrible imaginings but by her doctor’s sadistic course of treatment. In Down Below she describes her ordeal—in which the agonizing and the marvelous were equally combined—with a startling, almost impersonal precision and without a trace of self-pity. Like Daniel Paul Schreber’s Memoirs of My Nervous Illness, Down Below brings the hallucinatory logic of madness home.
1974, English
Hardcover (w. dust jacket), 126 pages, 23.6 x 31.4 cm
Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Grove Press Inc. / New York
$60.00 - Out of stock
First edition of this classic volume on the work of one of the great elusive erotic-fantasy artists from Europe, Raymond Bertrand. Published in New York in 1974, this edition is one of the few publications on Bertrand outside France or Germany. A wonderful collection wrapped in hardcover with an introduction by Emmanuelle Arsan.
"This beautiful volume presents a comprehensive selection of the drawings and paintings of a contemporary French artist whose sensuous fantasy and surrealistic obsession have paid homage to the female body in a series of works which has no equal in modern art. 'The body,' says Emmanuelle Arsan in her introduction, 'is beautiful only if it is invented.' In this collection of drawings and paintings, Raymond Bertrand invents a female unlike any ever beheld by human eyes." (from dust jacket)
Along with Leonor Fini, Raymond Bertrand became acknowledged as one of the major new artists dealing with the modern sexuality in a highly personal fashion in the late 1960s-early 1970s, a period that seemed to encapsulate the entire published work of this little-known artist. Bertrand's work became known through his incredible illustrations for French SF journals Fiction, Galaxie, illustrations for the erotic Emmanuelle novels, and Eric Losfeld published collections. Bertrand is a somewhat elusive and shadowy figure about whom it is hard to find biographical information, and it is sadly unknown whether he continued his work after this period.