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.
2021, English
Hardcover, 184 pages, 27 x 23 cm
Published by
MoMA / New York
$70.00 - Out of stock
How the celebrated Surrealist traversed the many movements of 20th-century art with a thrilling disregard for categories and constraints.
Over the course of her protean career, Meret Oppenheim produced witty, unconventional bodies of work that defy neat categorizations of medium, style and subject matter. “Nobody will give you freedom,” she stated in 1975, “you have to take it.” Her freewheeling, subversively humorous approach modeled a dynamic artistic practice in constant flux, yet held together by the singularity and force of her creative vision.
Published in conjunction with the first ever major transatlantic Meret Oppenheim retrospective, and the first in the United States in over 25 years, this publication surveys work from the radically open Swiss artist’s precocious debut in 1930s Paris, the period during which her notorious fur-lined Object in MoMA’s collection was made, through her post–World War II artistic development, which included engagements with international Pop, Nouveau Réalisme and Conceptual art, and up to her death in 1985. Essays by curators from the Kunstmuseum Bern, the Menil Collection and the Museum of Modern Art critically examine the artist’s wide-ranging, wildly imaginative body of work, and her active role in shaping the narrative of her life and art, providing the context for her creative production pre– and post–World War II.
About the Authors:
Nina Zimmer is the Director of the Kunstmuseum Bern. Natalie Dupêcher is Assistant Curator of Modern Art at The Menil Collection, TX. Anne Umland is The Blanchette Hooker Rockefeller Senior Curator of Painting and Sculpture at The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Lee Colón is a Curatorial Assistant in the Department of Painting and Sculpture, MoMA.
Meret Oppenheim was born in 1913 and lived in Germany and Switzerland during her childhood. At the age of 18, she moved to Paris to study art, and there exhibited alongside members of the Surrealist group. Oppenheim returned to Switzerland in 1937, where she trained as a conservator at the Basel School of Design. Already a storied member of the pre–World War II avant-garde, in the last two prolific decades of her life she was embraced by a younger generation of artists for her conceptual approach to art and progressive views on gender. Oppenheim died in 1985.
1979, English
Softcover, 159 pages, 28 x 23 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Harry N. Abrams / New York
$50.00 - Out of stock
Published by Abrams in 1979, Images of Horror and Fantasy by art historian Gert Schiff expanded on a major group exhibition guest curated by Schiff at the Bronx Museum in 1977. The resulting publication is a perceptive critical and psychological analyses of a variety of nineteenth-and twentieth-century art that "unfolds simultaneously on the level of historical and social reality and on the level of dreams. Its purpose is to expose some of the principal anxieties of modern man and their resolution in utopian reveries and escapist fantasies." Profusely illustrated in colour and b/w throughout with the works of Alfred Kubin, James Ensor, George Grosz, Paul Thek, Sibylle Ruppert, Henry Fuseli, Paul Delvaux, Nancy Grossman, Käthe Kollwitz, Max Beckmann, Fernand Khnopff, Rudolph von Ripper, Max Klinger, H. R. Giger, Jonah Kinigstein, Edward Keinholz, Jean Delville, Lucas Samaras, Miriam Beerman, Willem de Kooning, Man Ray, Oskar Kokoschka, Salvador Dali, Paolo Soleri, Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres, Georges Rouault, Otto Dix, Pablo Picasso, Philip Evergood, William Blake, Giorgio de Chirico, Ivan Albright, Yves Tanguy, Paul Klee, Jasper Johns, Germaine Richier, Francisco de Goya, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, Henri Matisse, Max Ernst, Francis Bacon, Rene Magritte, Illya Repin, Antoine Wiertz, Odilon Redon, Edward Burra, Larry Rivers, George Segal, Thomas Cole, Léon Frédéric, Matthias Grünewald, Rico Lebrun, Bruce Connor, Edvard Munch, and many more.
Gert Schiff (1926 — 1990, b. Oldenburg, Germany) was an art historian, critic, lecturer and professor at the Institute of Fine Arts of New York University. A specialist in the Romantic movement, particularly the work of Henry Fuseli and William Blake, Mr. Schiff was also very much involved with 20th-century art, organising many major exhibitions around his interests whilst authoring important studies on the arts from his dwellings at the Chelsea Hotel.
Very Good copy.
1979 / 2004, Japanese
Softcover, 76 pages, 29.7 x 29.7 cm
Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Treville / Tokyo
Pan-Exotica / Tokyo
$85.00 - Out of stock
Japanese edition of the classic 1979 "Giger's Alien", a visually stunning and wonderfully insightful book for any fan of the art of H.R. Giger, Ridley Scott and Dan O'Bannon's Alien film or in the production of science-fiction/horror/special effects in any way. A must.
"Giger's Alien provides a complete record of the months and months of painstaking work that resulted in two hours of terrifying celluloid. Sketches, original paintings, photographs of scenery and the Alien under construction and scenes from the film are linked by Giger's detailed diary of his thoughts and actions at the time".
Very Good copy in VG original dust jacket of this title. 2004 edition.
2021, English
Softcover (french folds), 288 pages, 22 x 25.5 cm
Published by
Whitechapel / London
$60.00 - In stock -
A major survey of the pioneering cult British painter, collagist and photographer and her unique passage from biomorphic Surrealism to Tachist abstraction.
Painter and photographer Eileen Agar (1899–1991) was born in Buenos Aires and spent the majority of her life in Great Britain. In spite of her own pioneering contributions to painting, collage, photography and sculpture, Agar’s career has largely been appraised in relation to her connections with major male figures of European modernism such as Paul Nash, Ezra Pound, Roland Penrose and Paul Éluard. This monograph seeks to overturn that narrative and delve into Agar as a fully autonomous artist whose unique style was a crucial element in the development of European culture in the 20th century.Dense with pattern and color, Agar’s work across various media draws from Cubist and Surrealist tendencies of material juxtapositions and fractured imagery, evoking emotion through distortion. Alongside reproductions of rarely seen artworks, writer Marina Warner, poet Daisy Lafarge and Agar’s biographer Andrew Lambirth reflect on the artist’s progressive attitudes toward art, sexuality and art history. The book is published with four different colored covers.
Edited with text by Laura Smith, Grace Storey. Text by Marina Warner, Daisy Lafarge, Andrew Lambirth.
1973, Japanese
Softcover, 192 pages, 21 x 15 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / good
Published by
Art Club Monthly / Japan
$90.00 - Out of stock
Scarce January 1973 issue of Japan's monthly periodical of art criticism, featuring a cover by Japanese avant garde artist Natsuyuki Nakanishi depicting one of his “Compact Objects”. This issue also features a coloured artwork section by Tadanori Yokoo, and contributions by/about director Michio Okabe, composer John Cage, director Sergei Eisenstein, Tenjō Sajiki / Shūji Terayama, critic Yoshida Yoshie, composer Yūji Takahashi, composer Tōru Takemitsu, art critic Isamu Kurita, and many more.
Good copy with some cover wear and tanning.
1974, Japanese
Softcover, 220mm x 143mm x 16mm / 390g
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Seitosha / Tokyo
$25.00 - Out of stock
Special "Occultism" issue of cult Japanese art and literary periodical, Eureka. Published in 1974, featuring cover photography of "Alice" by Hajime Sawatari, the Occultism compendium by Eureka journal is packed with literature, poetry, and studies around the themes of Alchemy, Magic, Astrology, Tarot, Cabala, Gnosticism, et al. including work by Marshal McLuhan, Jorge Luis Borges, William Blake, Honoré de Balzac, E. T. A. Hoffmann, scientific historian Shigeru Nakayama, poet Tadao Arita, Carl Jung, literary scholar Mitsuya Kato, Kimiyoshi Yura, poet Takasuke Shibusawa, Franz Kafka, and much more. Heavily illustrated throughout in b/w, texts in Japanese!
Very Good with old sticker wear to cover.
2016, English
Hardcover (cloth), 214 pages, 14 x 19 cm
Published by
Twisted Spoon Press / Prague
$42.00 - Out of stock
The Absolute Gravedigger, published in 1937, is in many ways the culmination of Vítězslav Nezval’s work as an avant-garde poet, combining the Poetism of his earlier work and his turn to Surrealism in the 1930s with his political concerns in the years leading up to World War II. It is above all a collection of startling verbal and visual inventiveness. And while a number of salient political issues emerge from the surrealistic ommatidia, Nezval’s imagination here is completely free-wheeling and untethered to any specific locale, as he displays mastery of a variety of forms, from long-limbed imaginative free verse narratives to short, formally rhymed meditations in quatrains, to prose and even visual art (the volume includes six of his decalcomania images).
Together with Nezval's prior two collections, The Absolute Gravedigger forms one of the most important corpora of interwar Surrealist poetry. Yet here his wild albeit restrained mix of absolute freedom and formal perfection has shifted its focus to explore the darker imagery of putrefaction and entropy, the line breaks in the shorter lyric poems slicing the language into fragments that float in the mind with open-ended meaning and a multiplicity of readings. Inspired by Salvador Dalí's paranoiac-critical method, to produce what he called "hand-painted dream photographs," the poems go in directions that are at first unimaginable but continue to evolve unexpectedly until they resolve or dissolve – like electron clouds, they have a form within which a seemingly chaotic energy reigns. Nezval’s language, however, is under absolute control, allowing him to reach into the polychromatic clouds of Surrealist uncertainty to form shapes we recognize, though never expected to see, to meld images and concepts into a constantly developing and dazzling kaleidoscope.
translated from the Czech by Stephan Delbos and Tereza Novická
frontispiece by Jindřich Štyrský
decalcomania by the author
1977, Italian
Softcover (with dust jacket), 182 pages, 30 x 21 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Poltronova / Italy
$390.00 - Out of stock
Beautiful, very rare volume published in 1977 by the mighty Poltronova. This valuable reference presented with notes by Poltronova founder Sergio Cammilli, surveys one of the most innovative furniture companies and exponents of Italian Radical Design, highly cited and fully illustrated with more than 500 images of projects and various creations by the artists and designers they collaborated with.
Poltronova was founded just north of Florence by Cammilli in 1957, and by 1958 a young Ettore Sottsass was hired to be the company's artistic director. Cammili had a background in art, and many believe it was the founder’s remarkable openness to bold creative expression that led the company to become one of the most daring in 20th-century Italian design. In 1966, Cammilli and Sottsass visited the Superarchitettura exhibition, presented at Galleria Jolly 2 in Pistoia. This era-defining project was organized by Superstudio and Archizoom—two counterculture student groups from the University of Florence’s Faculty of Architect; it’s now seen to be a landmark moment in the development of Radical Design movement. Cammilli and Sottsass immediately changed the direction of the Poltronova from sleek modern furniture to began working with young, iconoclastic designers, and helped to usher in the postmodern era in design. Archizoom designed the company’s new factory and programmed events at the headquarters, which included a poetry reading and meditation workshop led by poet Allen Ginsberg.
Design by Leonardo Baglioni, "Facendo mobili con Poltronova" compiles the entire history under the direction of Cammilli and Sottsass, who left Poltronova in the 1970s, presenting all the iconic works by Archizoom, Sergio Asti, Gae Aulenti, Mario Ceroli, De Pas D'Urbino Lomazzi, Max Ernst, Gianfranco Fini, Angelo Mangiarotti, Gino Marotta, Giovanni Michelucci, Ugo Nespolo, Gianni Ruffi, Ettore Sottsass, Superstudio, Lella and Massimo Vignelli, Achilli Brigidini Canella, Giampiero and Giovanni Bassi, Franco Bettonica, Sergio Cammilli, Graziella Guidoti, Luciano Nustrini, Paolo Portoghesi, Van Onck/Von Klier, Rino Vernuccio...
Very Good copy with light wear and tanning to jacket.
1992, French / Japanese
Softcover (french-folds w. parchment dust-jacket and obi-strip),
Ed. of 950, first hand-numbered ed. 19/50,
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Taito Vision / Tokyo
$200.00 - Out of stock
Stunning, very rare Japanese publication collecting the works of married Surrealist artist-couple Unica Zürn and Hans Bellmer, issued in a limited edition of 950 copies by Taito Vision in 1992. This copy scarcer still, being one of the first edition of 50 hand-numbered copies (no.19/50). Contents include colour reproductions of Unica Zürn's print series "Oracles et Spectacles", published in 1967 after a series of drawings created by Zürn during a 1960 hospitalization caused by a clinically diagnosed psychotic episode. They are accompanied here by a selection of her anagrammatic poetry and a hommage to Zürn by husband Bellmer. These are followed by colour reproductions of Hans Bellmer's "Petit Traité de Morale" print series from 1966-68. Accompanied by biographies, a series of texts in Japanese, a full catalogue and portraits of the artists. A stunning book making these wonderful print editions by two important Surrealists available together in book-form.
Very Good copy in Very Good dust jacket protected in publisher's removable parchment jacket and publisher's obi-strip (both not pictured here, both with some tanning and wear). A most complete and limited copy.
2021, English
Softcover, 200 pages, 20.5 x 14 cm
Published by
Wakefield Press / Cambridge
$33.00 - Out of stock
In twenty years, drug use will have spread to every level of society, perhaps even to the countryside, and by then it will be too late to stop its advance.—from the preface to The Die Is Cast
Published in 1943 (just a year before its author would be arrested by the Gestapo), The Die Is Cast was a departure for Robert Desnos: a shift from his earlier frenetic surrealist prose to a social realism that borrowed as much from his life experience as from his career as a journalist. Drawing from his experiences with drugs in the 1920s and his doomed relationship with the chanteuse Yvonne George (the inspiration for some of his most famous poems, who would herself ultimately succumb to opium addiction and tuberculosis), Desnos here portrays a band of opium, cocaine, and heroin users from all walks of life in Paris, a motley group who share nothing but their addiction and their slow and steady descent into ruination and despair. It is a startlingly contemporary portrayal of overdoses, arrests, suicides, and the flattened solitude of the addict—yet published in occupied Paris, years before “junkie literature” would begin to establish itself as a genre with the Beat generation. In a distinct break from the “artificial paradises” explored by his predecessors in French literature, Desnos inaugurated with this novel a new era of “artificial hells.” An anomaly both in his career and for having been published under the Occupation by an active member of the Resistance who would die in the camps only a couple years later, The Die Is Cast stands as a piece of work as timely now as it had been untimely when it first appeared.
Translated, with an introduction, by Jesse L. Anderson
Robert Desnos (1900–1945) was one of the leading lights of the surrealist movement and its most accomplished practitioner of automatic writing and dictation before his break with André Breton in 1929. His busy career in journalism and radio culminated in an active role in the French Resistance. Desnos was arrested by the Gestapo in 1944, and would pass through several concentration camps until finally dying of typhoid in Terezín in occupied Czechoslovakia in 1945, a few days after the camp he was in was liberated.
2020, English
Softcover, 336 pages, 14.6 x 20.3 cm
Published by
Strange Attractor / London
$48.00 - Out of stock
This book offers the first in-depth biographical study of the British surrealist and occultist Ithell Colquhoun, situating her art within the magical contexts that shaped her imaginative life and work. After decades of neglect, Colquhoun's unique vision and hermetic life have become an object of great renewed interest, both for artists and for historians of magic.
Although her paintings are represented in such major collections as Tate Britain and the National Portrait Gallery, Colquhoun's rejection of both avant-garde and occult orthodoxies resulted in a life of relative obscurity. Her visual and written works have only recently received adequate recognition as a precursor to contemporary experiments in magical autobiography and esoteric feminism.
After rejecting the hectic social expectations and magical orthodoxies of London's art and occult scenes, Colquhoun pursued a life of dedicated spiritual and artistic enquiry embodied in her retreat to Cornwall. Genius of the Fern Loved Gully balances engaging biography with art historical erudition and critical insight into the magical systems that underscored her art and writing.
1972, Japanese / French
Softcover, 180 pages, 21 x 21 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Yomiuri Shimbun / Tokyo
$90.00 - Out of stock
Wonderful and scarcely seen Japanese catalogue on the work of Argentine artist Leonor Fini. Profusely illustrated throughout with Fini's incredible (Surrealist) paintings and drawings from 1936-1972, in colour and black and white. Includes biography and artist's introduction by Fini in French. All other texts are in Japanese.
Leonor Fini (1907–1996), an Argentine painter, designer, illustrator, and author, known for her depictions of powerful women, is considered one of the most important women artists of the twentieth century and also one of the most misunderstood. Fini had no formal artistic training. Born in Buenos Aires, she travelled extensively from a young age, living in Milan and then moving to Paris in 1931-32 where she was considered part of a pre-war generation of Parisian artists, becoming acquainted with Carlo Carrà and Giorgio de Chirico, who inspired much of her work, and also Paul Éluard, Max Ernst, Georges Bataille, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Picasso, Salvador Dalí, and André Pieyre de Mandiargues. She had her first one person show in Paris when she was twenty-five at a gallery directed by Christian Dior. Her work caught on fast and was included in the pivotal and groundbreaking Fantastic Art, Dada and Surrealism exhibition at the MOMA in 1936 while at the same time she had her first New York exhibition at the avant-garde Julien Levy Galley. Surrealist artists in France came to know her as important in the movement. She is mentioned in most comprehensive works about surrealism, although she did not consider herself a surrealist, nor a part of any particular artistic movement. Fini preferred to stake her own claim on modernism with a vision that owes more to the farthest shores of her imagination than to any affiliation with art trends, schools or movements. The originality of her art as well as her intelligence, famous wit and charisma accorded her celebrity status in the Paris art world and beyond beginning in the late thirties. Her panache and glamour, once they found a place in the collective imagination of the time, turned her into a much-publicized fashion and feminist icon. Always controversial, with as many detractors as admirers, she lived and painted consummately on her own terms.
In Paris in 1939 she curated the inaugural exhibition of her friend Leo Castelli’s first gallery (of surrealist furniture) and shortly thereafter, just before the German occupation, she traveled with André and a new lover to Arcachon in the southwest of France to begin waiting out the war. She remained there for almost a year with Salvador and Gala Dali before moving to Monte Carlo where she met the young Italian diplomat, Stanislao Lepri who became one of the great and enduring loves of her life. As the war intensified she moved with Stanislao to Rome where she lived, worked and formed close friendships with Anna Magnani, Luchino Visconti and other leading figures of world of art and letters. After the Liberation of Paris in 1946 she returned there to live and work for the remainder of her life, exhibiting extensively around the world.
The predominant themes in Leonor Fini’s art are sexual tensions, mysteries and games. One of her favored subjects is the interplay between the dominant female and the passive male, and in many of her most powerful works the female takes the form of the sphinx to which she felt a strong identification. She was also a renowned portraitist, and among her subjects were such friends as writers André Pieyre de Mandiargues, Jean Genet, Klaus Mann (son of Thomas), such actresses as Anna Magnani and Suzanne Flon, ballerina Margot Fonteyn, film director Luchino Visconti and artists Meret Oppenheim and Leonora Carrington.
Her genius for stage and screen design is evident in her numerous ground breaking theater decors with their elaborate conception, costumes and phantasmagorical masks. She designed for the Paris Opera, George Balanchine’s ballet Palais de Crystal, and choreographer Roland Petit’s company Ballets de Paris, for Maria Callas at the La Scala theater in Milan, as well as over seventy productions at theaters in Paris between 1946 and 1969. She had a unique talent for film design and created costumes for Fellini's 8 ½ as well as for Renato Castellani's Romeo and Juliet and John Huston’s A Walk with Love and Death.
In the 1970s, she wrote three novels, Rogomelec, Moumour, Contes pour enfants velu and Oneiropompe. Her friends included Jean Cocteau, Giorgio de Chirico, and Alberto Moravia, Fabrizio Clerici and most of the other artists and writers inhabiting or visiting Paris. She illustrated many works by the great authors and poets, including Edgar Allan Poe, Charles Baudelaire and Shakespeare, as well as texts by new writers. She was very generous with her illustrations and donated many drawings to writers to help them get published. She is, perhaps, best known for her graphic illustrations for Histoire d'O.
The provocative and much-publicized life of Leonor Fini was pure theater. Her story is that of a hard-won struggle to forge her life as a woman artist in a man’s world and to invent herself on her own terms. It is the story of a woman possessing exceptional independence, a highly original vision and great personal magnetism who lived passionately through her art and friendships and in the process became a feminist role model.
1984, Japanese
Softcover, 224 pages, 21 x 15 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / fine
Published by
Night Vision / Japan
$55.00 - Out of stock
First 1984 edition of cult Japanese underground magazine Night Vision, a special edition dedicated to Surrealism. Packed with content, including many important Surrealist texts translated to Japanese, this heavily illustrated book includes features on Hans Bellmer and Unica Zürn, Yves Tanguy, Remedios Varo, Max Ernst, Belgian Surrealism, female Surrealist artists and poets (Remedios Varo, Mimi Parent, Valentine Penrose, Gisèle Prassinos, Dorothea Tanning, Bona de Mandiargues, Isabelle Walberg, Lise Deharme, Leonora Carrington, Dora Maar, Aube Elléouët, Jane Graverol, Nelly Kaplan (Belen), Joyce Mansour, Nora Mitrani, Unica Zürn, Valentine Hugo, Marianne Van Hirtum, Leonora Fini, Marie-Laure de Noailles, Kay Sage, Toyen, Annie Le Brun, Meret Oppenheim), Latin American Surrealism and Frida Kahlo-Diego Rivera, Surrealist literature and activities (Artaud, Picabia, Apollinaire, Bataille, Duchamp, Satie, Breton, etc.) plus much more, text contributions by Georges Bataille, Paul Eluard, Midori Wakakuwa, Kuniharu Akiyama, Takashi Tanyuya, Shigeo Goto, Takahiko Okada, Octavio Paz, André Breton, Kunio Iwaya, Gonzalo Cerorio, Yuichi Konno, Satoshi Takamura, and much more. Illustrated in b/w throughout (with many more artists than mentioned above) in that great Night Vision semi-fanzine/cheap reader quality.
Very Good - Fine copy.
1999, English
Softcover, 140 pages, 14 x 21.6 cm
Published by
Dufour Editions / US
$32.00 - Out of stock
Published in 1999, this is the first collected English translation of Bataille's poems. Bataille's poetry is definitely the poetry of a philosopher, but it is also a poetry with an obsessively erotic, often scatological edge, frequently pushing the boundary of what is or isn't obscene. Bataille believed that everything relates to the workings of desire and death in sexuality, but he also believed that poetry was the product of "hate" (and other extreme emotions), just as much as erotic pleasure accedes to self-annihilation. But Bataille was interested in actual action, not just disengaged hypothesis concerning the sexual act. Dufour Editions is pleased to bring Bataille's poetry to print in English.
"This is the audacious, frightful side of surrealism." - Library Journal
Translated by M. Dalwood
2019, English
Softcover, 112 pages, 14 x 19.1 cm
Published by
The Song Cave / New York
$38.00 - Out of stock
Raymond Roussel (1877-1933) is one of the most distinctive and compelling French writers of the twentieth century, yet many aspects of Roussel's life remain shrouded in mystery. An extremely wealthy and always exquisitely dressed homosexual dandy, Roussel was also a compulsive writer. Despite the strangeness of his work, he was convinced that it would make him as popular as Victor Hugo or Shakespeare. His suicide at the age of 56 was in part prompted by the continual disappointment of his hopes for fame.
The full extent of Roussel's writing only became clear in 1989 when a trunk was unearthed in a furniture warehouse containing a vast trove of his manuscripts. The most exciting discoveries were the full draft of Locus Solus (over twice as long as the published version) and the typescript of what would have been his third novel, The Alley of Fireflies, which is translated here for the first time into English by the leading Roussel scholar, Mark Ford. Ford has also translated two haunting extracts from the drafts of Locus Solus, and versions of two of the young Roussel's most intriguing short stories, Chiquenaude and Among the Blacks.
Roussel's work was vociferously championed by Surrealist writers and painters such as André Breton, Marcel Duchamp and Salvador Dalì, and later proved a significant influence on Oulipians (particularly Georges Perec), on nouveaux romanciers like Alain Robbe-Grillet, as well as on John Ashbery and Harry Mathews, who named their pioneering magazine of the 1960s Locus Solus, after Roussel's second novel.
Translated from French by Mark Ford.
2016, English
Softcover, 168 pages, 18 x 12 cm
Published by
Wakefield Press / Cambridge
$32.00 - Out of stock
Life in the Folds, originally published in French in 1949, is the Belgian-born author and artist Henri Michaux’s (1899-1984) most direct exploration of the many forms of suffering, a laboratory of fantastical, destructive energies in which the poet presents his methods for dealing with the world around him. The first two sections offer such items as the Slapping Gun and the Man Sling and present scenarios that call for defensive measures such as the "Constellation of Jabs" or “The Trepanned Patient.” Also included is one of Michaux's more complex fantastical-anthropological travelogues, “Portrait of the Meidosems,” an account of the ways and manners of a population of vague ectoplasmic figures, anguished filaments of sorts that struggle to exist but are never allowed to sit still. This volume charts a turning point in Michaux's life and in the world, where his earlier depictions of visualized psychology and suffering found representation in a traumatized Europe. Imbued by the war years, the Occupation and the horror of the concentration camps, Life in the Folds also bears the scars of Michaux’s own personal catastrophe—the loss of his wife, who had died of “atrocious burns” the previous year—and concludes with the autobiographical text, “Old Age of Pollagoras,” a wearied testament uttered before a haunted “plain of death.”
Through travel journals, prose poems, and incantatory exorcisms, Henri Michaux (1899–1984) built an unsettling world of aggression, fear, hostility, and paranoia, whose fantastical landscapes and fabulist beings delineate a space of psychological and cognitive discomfort all too contemporary. In 1956 he continued his controlled explorations of the self with a series of mescaline experiments, which he documented in a series of books over the next decade. Michaux’s writing was paralleled by his lifelong commitment to painting and drawing.
Translated, with an introduction, by Darren Jackson
“[A] masterpiece of concision and pain. It is a literary achievement that can stand with the best works of Samuel Beckett, Jean Genet, and Louis-Ferdinand Céline.” — Karl Wolff, New York Journal of Books
2002, English
Softcover, 200 pages, 12.7 x 20.3 cm
Published by
The New York Review of Books / New York
$42.00 - In stock -
In Miserable Miracle, the great French poet and artist Henri Michaux, a confirmed teetotaler, tells of his life-transforming first encounters with a powerful hallucinogenic drug. At once lacerating and weirdly funny, challenging and Chaplinesque, his book is a breathtaking vision of interior space and a piece of stunning writing wrested from the grip of the unspeakable. Includes forty pages of black-and-white drawings by Michaux.
"This book is an exploration. By means of words, signs, drawings. Mescaline, the subject explored."
Translated by Louise Varese
Introduction by Octavio Paz
Through travel journals, prose poems, and incantatory exorcisms, Henri Michaux (1899–1984) built an unsettling world of aggression, fear, hostility, and paranoia, whose fantastical landscapes and fabulist beings delineate a space of psychological and cognitive discomfort all too contemporary. In 1956 he continued his controlled explorations of the self with a series of mescaline experiments, which he documented in a series of books over the next decade. Michaux’s writing was paralleled by his lifelong commitment to painting and drawing.
1962, French
Sofcover, 40 pages, 30 x 13 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Galerie Daniel Cordier / Paris
$90.00 - Out of stock
Beautiful and scarce catalogue published on the occasion of the 1962 exhibition of Henri Michaux at Galerie Daniel Cordier, Paris. Illustrated throughout, including fold-outs with text by Henri Michaux and Geneviève Bonnefoi.
"Michaux excels in making us feel… the strangeness of natural things and the naturalness of strange things."—André Gide
Henri Michaux (1899–1984) was a highly idiosyncratic Belgian-born poet, writer, and painter who wrote in French. Through travel journals, prose poems, and incantatory exorcisms, Michaux built an unsettling world of aggression, fear, hostility, and paranoia, whose fantastical landscapes and fabulist beings delineate a space of psychological and cognitive discomfort all too contemporary. In 1956 he continued his controlled explorations of the self with a series of mescaline experiments, which he documented in a series of books over the next decade. Michaux’s writing was paralleled by his lifelong commitment to painting and drawing.
Very Good copy, well preserved, tight and clean.
1981, Japanese
Hardcover (in foil-printed cardboard slipcase) 31 x 22.5 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Asahi Shimbun / Japan
$160.00 - Out of stock
Exquisite and scarce Japanese volume on the (mostly) photographic work of Man Ray, published in 1981 by Asahi Shimbun. Issued only in Japan in hardcover form, wrapped in a foil-stamped/printed black cardboard sleeve, this beautifully designed book features 165 stunningly gravure reproduced images honest to the original photographic works of Man Ray, including his abstract work, portraits, photographs of fellow artists, artworks, studios and living spaces (including many collaborations with Marcel Duchamp). Many of these photographs are rarely documented in other Man Ray publications. Text is entirely in Japanese, although there is very little of it as this is primarily a photo book, and one of the most beautiful on the work of Man Ray.
Very Good in Good slipcase with some wear.
2015, English
Softcover, 256 pages, 21 x 29.7 cm
Published by
Sun Vision Press / New York
$50.00 - Out of stock
I Am the First Consciousness of Chaos collects the key noirs' (lithographs, etchings and charcoals) of Odilon Redon, perhaps the most enigmatic and esoteric figure in the artistic lineage that leads directly from Symbolism to Surrealism. Never previously available in a single trade volume, the majority of Redon’s noirs (over 250 illustrations) are finally collected here, including the illuminating excerpts from the decadent texts which inspired their creation. Authors featured include J-K Huysmans, Gustave Flaubert, Charles Baudelaire, Edgar Allan Poe and others.‘
2020, English
Hardcover (w. dust jacket), 296 pages, 19.1 x 26 cm
Published by
Princeton University Press / New York
National Gallery of Art / Washington
$69.00 - Out of stock
How artists created an aesthetic of "positive barbarism" in a world devastated by World War II, the Holocaust, and the atomic bomb.
In Brutal Aesthetics, leading art historian Hal Foster explores how postwar artists and writers searched for a new foundation of culture after the massive devastation of World War II, the Holocaust, and the atomic bomb. Inspired by the notion that modernist art can teach us how to survive a civilization become barbaric, Foster examines the various ways that key figures from the early 1940s to the early 1960s sought to develop a "brutal aesthetics" adequate to the destruction around them.
With a focus on the philosopher Georges Bataille, the painters Jean Dubuffet and Asger Jorn, and the sculptors Eduardo Paolozzi and Claes Oldenburg, Foster investigates a manifold move to strip art down, or to reveal it as already bare, in order to begin again. What does Bataille seek in the prehistoric cave paintings of Lascaux? How does Dubuffet imagine an art brut, an art unscathed by culture? Why does Jorn populate his paintings with "human animals"? What does Paolozzi see in his monstrous figures assembled from industrial debris? And why does Oldenburg remake everyday products from urban scrap?
A study of artistic practices made desperate by a world in crisis, Brutal Aesthetics is an intriguing account of a difficult era in twentieth-century culture, one that has important implications for our own.
Published in association with the National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC.
2011, English
Hardcover (w. dust jacket), 296 pages, 21 x 26 cm
Published by
Siglio Press / Los Angeles
$88.00 - Out of stock
It Is Almost That collects is a phenomenal collection of twenty-six visionary image+text works by women artists and writers. Supremely imaginative in their use of word and image, these hybrid works are steeped in narrative play and subversion, inviting readers to engage in multiple modes of reading. It Is Almost That features substantial excerpts or the works in their entirety—many previously unpublished, difficult to find, or long out-of-print—by renown, little known, forgotten, and emerging artists.
The works include a painted autobiographical novel by a young artist who died in the Holocaust (Charlotte Salomon); the transformation of the front pages of newspapers into alchemical drawings (Suzanne Treister); a computer-generated chance operation that “imagines” houses and their inhabitants (Alison Knowles); the pseudo-scientific examination of mother-daughter conversations (Eleanor Antin); and drawings called “body maps,” inscribed with stories of HIV-positive South African women (Bambanani Women’s Group), among almost two dozen others.
Arranged as a constellation with various kinds of connective tissue, It Is Almost That eschews traditional categories in order to reorient the reader to see the works outside or beyond their recognizable affiliations. Both literary and art audiences will discover new works, new artists and writers, as well as new ways of reading.
"Because the frame is image+text, we’re reminded that all of us generally do more. Female artists don’t just stay in their disciplines; we experience, we forage, we play. Intuitively and practically speaking, It Is Almost That is, in effect, a handbook. It, by presenting female art history, shows us how to be an artist."—EILEEN MYLES, The Poetry Foundation
CONTRIBUTORS: Eleanor Antin, Bambanani Women’s Group, Fiona Banner, Louise Bourgeois, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Cozette de Charmoy, Ann Hamilton, Jane Hammond, Susan Hiller, Dorothy Iannone, Bhanu Kapil & Rohini Kapil, Helen Kim, Alison Knowles, Ketty La Rocca, Bernadette Mayer, Adrian Piper, Charlotte Salomon, Geneviéve Seillè, Molly Springfield, Cole Swensen & Shari DeGraw, Suzanne Treister, Erica Van Horn & Laurie Clark, Carrie Mae Weems, Hannah Weiner, Sue Williams, and Unica Zürn.
1955, Japanese
Hardcover (w. dust jacket), 92 pages, 19 x 13.4 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / good
Published by
Bungeishunju Shinsha / Japan
$120.00 - Out of stock
Rare first 1955 edition of the first monographic art book on the work of Japanese lyrical painter and illustrator Rokurō Taniuchi (1921–1981). A monumental, beautifully printed book that won the 1st Bungeishunju Manga Award, collecting the work of Taniuchi, an illustrator like no other. Lauded by Japanese artists, Taniuchi is little known outside of Japan, although visitors of Tokyo may have experienced the charm of his mosaic murals, "Most Star Hole of Umbrella" (1975) at the busy intersection of Omotesando and Aoyama-dori or “Sand Mountain” (1954) at Akabane-Iwabuchi, Kita. Taniuchi's unique, dream-like visions capture the nostalgic banality of everyday life in Shōwa period Japan, caught between folk tradition and modernisation. Chasing the Japanese seasons, Taniuchi's enchanted landscapes of factories on the outskirts of town, village streets and hillsides at dusk are littered with apparitions of dancing devils, leaf-people, ramune bottles, paper dolls and Lucky Strike cigarettes appearing before the child inhabitants, creating a sense of fantastic wonder and haunting melancholy. One of the great surrealists of the illustrated world.
Good copy in original dust jacket. Some wear to Good dust jacket.
1975 / 1979, Japanese
Hardcover (cloth) in hard illustrated slipcase, 124 pages, 27 x 19 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / good
Published by
Shinchosha / Japan
$80.00 - Out of stock
1979 edition of this monumental collection of works by Japanese lyrical painter and illustrator Rokurō Taniuchi (1921–1981), first issued in 1975. Illustrated throughout with Taniuchi's works of the seasons, alongside their original texts, as well as many earlier works and photographs. Lauded by Japanese artists, Taniuchi is little known outside of Japan, although visitors of Tokyo may have experienced the charm of his mosaic murals, "Most Star Hole of Umbrella" (1975) at the busy intersection of Omotesando and Aoyama-dori or “Sand Mountain” (1954) at Akabane-Iwabuchi, Kita. Taniuchi's unique, dream-like visions capture the nostalgic banality of everyday life in Shōwa period Japan, caught between folk tradition and modernisation. Chasing the Japanese seasons, Taniuchi's enchanted landscapes of factories on the outskirts of town, village streets and hillsides at dusk are littered with apparitions of dancing devils, ramune bottles, paper dolls and Lucky Strike cigarettes appearing before the child inhabitants, creating a sense of fantastic wonder and haunting melancholy. One of the great surrealists of the illustrated world.
Good copy in original illustrated slipcase. Some age spotting and wear to hard slipcase and cloth covers, VG book.