World Food Books' programme is largely produced on Kulin Nation land. We acknowledge the Wurundjeri people of the Kulin Nation as the first and continuing custodians of this land, and pay respect to their Elders past, present, and emerging.
World Food Books is an arts and special interests bookshop in Naarm / Melbourne. Founded in 2010, World Food Books is devoted to the presentation of a rotating, hand-selection of international art, design, literary and counterculture publications with an emphasis on the anti-traditional, the experimental, the avant-garde, the heretic, the marginal.
Presenting new titles alongside rare and out-of-print books, catalogues and journals spanning the fields of modern and contemporary art, design, photography, illustration, film, literature, poetry, cultural theory, philosophy, sexuality, popular and underground culture in its many radical forms, World Food Books wishes to encourage adventurous, thoughtful and open-minded reading, looking, writing, and exchange of publishing and ideas, both current and historical.
As well as our bookshop, located in Melbourne's historical Nicholas Building, all of our inventory is available internationally via our online mail-order service.
World Food Books semi-regularly co-ordinates "Occasions", a programme of exhibits and events at the bookshop and in partnership with other hosts (such as museums and art galleries) that develop out of the activities, relationships and content of the bookshop itself.
World Food Books
The Nicholas Building
37 Swanston Street
Room 5, Level 6
Melbourne 3000
Australia
SHOP HOURS:
THU—FRI 12—6 PM
WEB-SHOP OPEN 24/7
World Food Books
Postal Address:
PO Box 435
Flinders Lane
Victoria 8009
Australia
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All prices in AUD (Australian dollars)
Pick-Ups
Pick-up orders can be collected in our bookshop during opening hours after order date. Please collect any Pick-up orders within 2 weeks of ordering as we have limited storage space. Orders will be released back into stock if not collected within this time. No refunds can be made for pick-ups left un-collected. If you cannot make it in to the bookshop in this time-frame, please choose postage option.
Return Policy
All sales are final. We do accept returns (for refund or exchange) for items received in error. All our orders are packed with special care using heavy-duty padding and cardboard book-mailers or bubble mailers (for smaller books), using reinforcement where required. We cannot take responsibility for any lost, stolen or damaged parcels.
Insurance
Should you wish to insure your package, please email us directly after placing your order and we can organise this at a small extra expense. Although all standard/express tracked packages are very safe and dependable, we cannot take responsibility for any lost, stolen or damaged parcels. We recommend insurance on valuable orders.
Interested in selling your old books, catalogues, journals, magazines, comics, fanzines, ephemera? We are always looking for interesting, unusual and out-of-print books to buy. We only buy books in our fields of interest and specialty, and that we feel we can resell.
We base these prices on desirability, market value, in-print prices, condition and our current stock levels. We offer cash, store credit, and can take stock on consignment. All
about 25% of the price we expect to get when we sell them, or 30% in store credit. We base these prices on desirability, market value, in-print prices, condition and our current stock levels.
Sell your books any day of the week. You can drop them off and return later. If you have a lot of books, we can visit your Sydney home.
We buy books that we feel we can resell. We offer about 25 % of the price we expect to get when we sell them, or 30% in store credit. We base these prices on desirability, market value, in-print prices, condition and our current stock levels.
Philadelphia Wireman
03 August - 01 September, 2018
World Food Books is proud to announce our next Occasion, the first presentation of sculptures by Philadelphia Wireman in Australia.
The Philadelphia Wireman sculptures were found abandoned in an alley off Philadelphia’s South Street on trash night in 1982. Their discovery in a rapidly-changing neighbourhood undergoing extensive renovation, compounded with the failure of all attempts to locate the artist, suggests that the works may have been discarded after the maker’s death. Dubbed the "Philadelphia Wireman" during the first exhibition of this work, in 1985, the maker’s name, age, ethnicity, and even gender remain uncertain. The entire collection totals approximately 1200 pieces, all intricately bound together with tightly-wound heavy-gauge wire (along with a few small, abstract marker drawings, reminiscent both of Mark Tobey and J.B. Murry). The dense construction of the work, despite a modest range of scale and materials, is singularly obsessive and disciplined in design: a wire armature or exoskeleton firmly binds a bricolage of found objects including plastic, glass, food packaging, umbrella parts, tape, rubber, batteries, pens, leather, reflectors, nuts and bolts, nails, foil, coins, toys, watches, eyeglasses, tools, and jewellery.
Heavy with associations—anthropomorphic, zoomorphic, and socio-cultural responses to wrapped detritus—the totemic sculptures by Philadelphia Wireman have been discussed in the context of work created to fulfil the shamanistic needs of alternative religions in American culture. Curators, collectors, and critics have variously compared certain pieces to sculpture from Classical antiquity, Native American medicine bundles, African-American memory jugs, and African fetish objects. Reflecting the artist’s prolific and incredibly focused scavenging impulse, and despite—or perhaps enhanced by—their anonymity, these enigmatic objects function as urban artefacts and arbiters of power, though their origin and purpose is unknown. Philadelphia Wireman, whatever their identity, possessed an astonishing ability to isolate and communicate the concepts of power and energy through the selection and transformation of ordinary materials. Over the course of the past two decades, this collection has come to be regarded as an important discovery in the field of self-taught art and vernacular art.
Presented in collaboration with Fleisher-Ollman Gallery, Philadelphia, and Robert Heald, Wellington.
Susan Te Kahurangi King
02 February - 10 March, 2018
Susan Te Kahurangi King (24 February 1951 - ) has been a confident and prolific artist since she was a young child, drawing with readily available materials - pencils, ballpoint pens and felt-tip markers, on whatever paper is at hand. Between the ages of four and six Susan slowly ceased verbal communication. Her grandparents William and Myrtle Murphy had developed a special bond with Susan so they took on caring responsibilities for extended periods. Myrtle began informally archiving her work, carefully collecting and storing the drawings and compiling scrapbooks. No drawing was insignificant; every scrap of paper was kept. The King family are now the custodians of a vast collection containing over 7000 individual works, from tiny scraps of paper through to 5 meter long rolls.
The scrapbooks and diaries reveal Myrtle to be a woman of great patience and compassion, seeking to understand a child who was not always behaving as expected. She encouraged Susan to be observant, to explore her environment and absorb all the sights and sounds. Myrtle would show Susan’s drawings to friends and people in her community that she had dealings with, such as shopkeepers and postal workers, but this was not simply a case of a grandmother’s bias. She recognised that Susan had developed a sophisticated and unique visual language and sincerely believed that her art deserved serious attention.
This was an unorthodox attitude for the time. To provide some context, Jean Dubuffet coined the term Art Brut in 1945 to describe work created by self-taught artists – specifically residents of psychiatric institutions and those he considered to be visionaries or eccentrics. In 1972 Roger Cardinal extended this concept by adopting the term Outsider Art to describe work made by non-academically trained artists operating outside of mainstream art networks through choice or circumstance. Susan was born in Te Aroha, New Zealand in 1951, far from the artistic hubs of Paris and London that Dubuffet and Cardinal operated in. That Myrtle fêted Susan as a self-taught artist who deserved to be taken seriously shows how progressive her attitudes were.
Susan’s parents Doug and Dawn were also progressive. Over the years they had consulted numerous health practitioners about Susan’s condition, as the medical establishment could not provide an explanation as to why she had lapsed into silence. Dawn educated herself in the field of homeopathy and went on to treat all twelve of her children using these principles – basing prescriptions on her observations of their physical, mental and emotional state.
Doug was a linguist with an interest in philosophy who devoted what little spare time he had to studying Maori language and culture. To some extent their willingness to explore the fringes of the mainstream made them outsiders too but it was their commitment to living with integrity and their respect for individuality that ensured Susan’s creativity was always encouraged.
Even though Susan’s family supported her artistic pursuits, some staff in schools and hospitals saw it as an impediment to her assimilation into the community and discouraged it in a variety of ways. Her family was not always aware of this and therefore did not fully understand why Susan stopped drawing in the early 1990s. However, rather than dwell on the challenges that Susan faced in pursuit of her artistic practice, they prefer to highlight her achievements. In 2008 Susan began drawing again in earnest, after an almost 20 year interruption, and her work is now shown in galleries around the world.
Susan grew up without television and has been heavily influenced by the comics she read as a child. She is absolutely fearless in the appropriation of recognizable characters, such as Donald Duck and Mickey Mouse, in her work. She twists their limbs, contorts their faces, compresses them together, blends them into complex patterned backgrounds - always imbuing them with an incredible energy. Although Susan often used pop culture characters in her work they are not naive or childlike. These are drawings by a brilliant self-taught artist who has been creating exceptional work for decades without an audience in mind.
Mladen Stilinović
"Various Works 1986 - 1999"
02 February 16 - September 10, 2016
Various works 1986 - 1999, from two houses, from the collections of John Nixon, Sue Cramer, Kerrie Poliness, Peter Haffenden and Phoebe Haffenden.
Including: Geometry of Cakes (various shelves), 1993; Poor People’s Law (black and white plate), 1993; White Absence (glasses, ruler, set square, silver spoon, silver ladel with skin photograph and wooden cubes), 1990-1996; Exploitation of the Dead (grey and red star painting, wooden painting, black spoon with red table, red plate), 1984-1990; Money and Zeros (zero tie, paintings made for friends in Australia (Sue, John, Kerrie), numbers painting), 1991-1992; Words - Slogans (various t-shirts) - “they talk about the death of art...help! someone is trying to kill me”, “my sweet little lamb”, “work is a disease - Karl Marx”; Various artist books, catalogues, monographs, videos; Poster from exhibition Insulting Anarchy; "Circular" Croatian - Australian edition; Artist book by Vlado Martek (Dostoyevsky); more.
Thanks to Mladen Stilinović and Branka Stipančić.
Jonathan Walker
Always Will Need To Wear Winter Shirt Blue + Ochre Small Check Pattern
21 August - 21 September, 2015
Untitled
I am not a great reader of poetry but I always return to the work of Melbourne poet, Vincent Buckley (1925- 1988). Perhaps I find his most tantalising piece to be not a finished poem but a fragment left on a scrap of paper discovered on his desk after the poet’s death.
The poetry gathers like oil
In the word-core, and spreads
It has its music meet,
Its music is in movement.
This fragment is more the shell left behind from a volatile thought than a finished poem. I find the last two lines honest but awkward whereas the first two lines work like an arrow. Most likely he could not find a resolution so it was left. Still, in its present form, it remains an eloquent testimony to the ultimate failure of a medium to express mobile thought and sensation, in Buckley’s case, through verbal language. It’s an important matter because this is something all artists have to deal with regardless of the medium.
I have never written a poem, however, I am forever copying fragments from books on paper scraps in a vain effort to fix certain notions in my head. At first, they function as bookmarks that are sometimes returned to when I open the book. But before long, as they accumulate, they fall out littering the table interspersed with A4 photocopies, bills, books and medications.
To return to Buckley’s fragment, the first two lines very much evoke how I paint nowadays. As you age, detail diminishes and patches of light become more luminous and float. I feel the most honest way of dealing with this is by smearing the oil paint on the canvas with the fingers and working close-up, blind. Only if the patches coalesce into an approaching image can the work gain a life.
-
Jonathan Walker was born in Melbourne, Australia and brought up on a dairy farm in Gippsland. In the 1970’s he studied painting at RMIT and won the Harold Wright Scholarship to the British Museum, London. During the 1980’s he exhibited at Pinacotheca Gallery, Richmond and had work shown at the NGV and Heidi City Art Gallery. Over the same period he designed the cover for the “Epigenesi” LP by Giancarlo Toniutti, Italy and conducted a mail exchange work with Achim Wollscheid, Germany. The work with artists through the post resulted in an article published in the bicentenary issue of Art and Australia 1988. He showed in artist run spaces such as WestSpace in the 90’s and 2000’s, and until 2012, taught painting at Victoria University, which is where we (Colleen Ahern and Lisa Radford) as organisers of the exhibition, among many others, had the privilege of being his student.
Walker’s knowledge was imparted to students through the careful selection of music, literature, and artists found in books that he himself had ordered for the library. Walker’s strategy was the generosity of sharing his vast knowledge with references specific to each student and their context.
Walker’s paintings share a similar focus and intimacy.
This exhibition presents a small selection of recent paintings alongside a publication that includes Walker’s writing. Observational and analytical, Walker’s work is a type of material notation — the time of day, colour and how it is blended, the both specific and fleeting location of a reflection on lino or the question of whether a chair leg should be included in a painting.
Please join us on Friday August 21 between 6-8pm to celebrate the opening of the exhibition.
Curated by Colleen Ahern and Lisa Radford.
B. Wurtz
Curated by Nic Tammens
March 26 - April 4, 2015
B.Wurtz works from a basement studio in his home on Manhattan’s Lower East Side.
This local fact is attested to by the plastic shopping bags and newsprint circulars that appear in his work. As formal objects, they don’t make loud claims about their origins but nonetheless transmit street addresses and places of business from the bottom of this long thin island. Like plenty of artists, Wurtz is affected by what is local and what is consumed. His work is underpinned by this ethic. It often speaks from a neighborhood or reads like the contents of a hamper:
“BLACK PLUMS $1.29 lb.”
“Food Bazaar”
“USDA Whole Pork Shoulder Picnic 99c lb.”
“RITE AID Pharmacy, with us it’s personal.”
“H. Brickman & Sons.”
“Sweet Yams 59c lb."
Most of the work in this exhibition was made while the artist was in residence at Dieu Donne, a workshop dedicated to paper craft in Midtown. Here Wurtz fabricated assemblages with paper and objects that are relatively lightweight, with the intention that they would be easily transportable to Australia. This consideration isn’t absolute in Wurtz’s work, but was prescriptive for making the current exhibition light and cheap. Packed in two boxes, these works were sent from a USPS post office on the Lower East Side and delivered to North Melbourne by Australia Post.
Wurtz appears courtesy of Metro Pictures, New York.
Thanks to Rob Halverson, Joshua Petherick, Sari de Mallory, Matt Hinkley, Helen Johnson, Fayen d'Evie, Ask Kilmartin, Lisa Radon, Ellena Savage, Yale Union, and "Elizabeth".
John Nixon
"Archive"
December 15 - January 20, 2014
The presentation of John Nixon's archive offered a rare showcase of this extensive collection of the artist's own publications, catalogues, posters, ephemera, editions and more, from the mid 1980s onwards, alongside a selection of his artworks.
Organized by John Nixon, Joshua Petherick and Matt Hinkley.
"Habitat"
at Minerva, Sydney (organised by Joshua Petherick and Matt Hinkley)
November 15 - December 20, 2014
Lupo Borgonovo, Janet Burchill & Jennifer McCamley,
Lewis Fidock, HR Giger, Piero Gilardi, Veit Laurent Kurz,
Cinzia Ruggeri, Michael E. Smith, Lucie Stahl, Daniel Weil, Wols
Press Release:
“...It contained seven objects. The slender fluted bone, surely formed for flight, surely from the wing of some large bird. Three archaic circuitboards, faced with mazes of gold. A smooth white sphere of baked clay. An age-blackened fragment of lace. A fingerlength segment of what she assumed was bone from a human wrist, grayish white, inset smoothly with the silicon shaft of a small instrument that must once have ridden flush with the surface of the skin - but the thing’s face was seared and blackened.”
William Gibson, “Count Zero”, 1986
"Autumn Projects Archive"
Curated by Liza Vasiliou
March 6 - March 15, 2014
World Food Books, in conjunction with the Virgin Australia Melbourne Fashion Festival 2014, presented the Autumn Projects archive, consisting of a selection of early examples in Australian fashion with a particular interest in collecting designers and labels from the period beginning in the 1980’s, who significantly influenced the discourse of Australian Fashion.
Curated by Liza Vasiliou, the exhibition provided a unique opportunity to view pieces by designers Anthea Crawford, Barbara Vandenberg, Geoff Liddell and labels CR Australia, Covers, Jag along with early experimental collage pieces by Prue Acton and Sally Browne’s ‘Fragments’ collection, suspended throughout the functioning World Food Books shop in Melbourne.
H.B. Peace
presented by CENTRE FOR STYLE
November 14, 2013
"Hey Blinky, you say chic, I say same"
Anon 2013
H.B. Peace is a clothing collaboration between great friends Blake Barns and Hugh Egan Westland. Their pieces explore the divergences between 'character’ and ‘personality’ in garments....etc
Special Thanks to Joshua Petherick and Matt Hinkley of WFB and Gillian Mears
and a Very Special Thank you to Audrey Thomas Hayes for her shoe collaboration.
Janet Burchill & Jennifer McCamley
"Aesthetic Suicide"
May 10 - June 8, 2013
The first of our occasional exhibitions in the World Food Books office/shop space in Melbourne, "Aesthetic Suicide" presented a body of new and older works together by artists Janet Burchill & Jennifer McCamley, including videos, prints, a wall work, and publications.
During shop open hours videos played every hour, on the hour.
2011, German
Hardcover (w. dustjacket), 252 pages, 23 x 28 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Prestel / Munich
$50.00 - In stock -
Out-of-print hardcover comprehensive monograph on the Viennese painter Hans Makart, this book presents the work of the artist known as “the magician of colour” in glorious illustrations, set alongside the art of fellow masters.
His name and his style are symbols of an era: Hans Makart. In 1869 the Emperor brought him to Vienna as a history painter, where he quickly became a sought-after painter for the up-and-coming bourgeoisie. His works, which were often perceived as lustful, find their equivalent in the decadence and brought Hans Makart the reputation as a scandal painter, but led to his international fame. His free use of color, which follows Delacroix, as well as the choice of his subjects give his painting a sensuality that is intoxicating in its effect and made him a symbol of a time, the Makart period, through its overwhelming splendor. His interest in the total work of art is expressed in the design of Nicolaus Dumba's study, as well as in his examination of the music of Richard Wagner and the architecture of Gottfried Semper. His influence on the art of the Vienna Secession, e.g. B. on Gustav Klimt, radiated far beyond his early death.
This catalog to an exhibit of Makart’s works includes his legendary room in the Palais Dumba, his monumental paintings, and his controversial and subversive erotic works. The large-scale theatric quality of Makart’s work is evident in the stunning reproductions featured in the book, which allow viewers to appreciate the brilliant palette of his oeuvre.
Agnes Husslein-Arco is Director of the Belvedere Museum in Vienna, Austria. She has published books on Schiele, Mucha, Klimt, Makart and others.
German language. Very Good copy in VG dust jacket.
1978, English
Hardcover (w. dust jacket), 96 pages, 28 x 22 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Bonfini Press / Switzerland
$48.00 - Out of stock
First English-language edition of this hardcover monographic volume on Belgian painter and printmaker James Ensor (1860 —1949), published by Bonfini Press in Switzerland in 1978 and printed in Italy. Profusely illustrated with Ensor's paintings and graphic works in colour and black and white, accompanied by text by Jacques Jansenns. Includes biography and bibliography.
James Sidney Edouard, Baron Ensor (1860 —1949) was a Belgian painter and printmaker, an important influence on expressionism and surrealism who lived in Ostend for almost his entire life. He was associated with the artistic group Les XX. While Ensor's early works, such as Russian Music (1881) and The Drunkards (1883), depict realistic scenes in a somber style, his palette subsequently brightened and he favoured increasingly bizarre subject matter. Such paintings as The Scandalized Masks (1883) and Skeletons Fighting over a Hanged Man (1891) feature figures in grotesque masks inspired by the ones sold in his mother's gift shop for Ostend's annual Carnival. Subjects such as carnivals, masks, puppetry, skeletons, and fantastic allegories are dominant in Ensor's mature work. Ensor dressed skeletons up in his studio and arranged them in colourful, enigmatic tableaux on the canvas, and used masks as a theatrical aspect in his still lifes. Attracted by masks' plastic forms, bright colours, and potential for psychological impact, he created a format in which he could paint with complete freedom. James Ensor is considered to be an innovator in 19th-century art. Although he stood apart from other artists of his time, he significantly influenced such 20th-century artists as Paul Klee, George Grosz, Wols, and many expressionist and surrealist painters of the 20th century.
Very Good in VG dust jacket preserved under mylar wrap.
2019, English
Softcover, 144 pages, 18 x 11 cm
Published by
David Zwirner Books / New York
$25.00 - Out of stock
In The Critic as Artist, arguably the most complete exploration of his aesthetic thinking, and certainly the most entertaining, Oscar Wilde harnesses his famous wit to demolish the supposed boundary between art and criticism.
Introduction by Michael Bracewell.
Subtitled Upon the Importance of Doing Nothing and Discussing Everything, the essay takes the form of a leisurely dialogue between two characters: Ernest, who insists upon Wilde’s own belief in art’s freedom from societal mandates and values, and a quizzical Gilbert. With his playwright’s ear for dialogue, Wilde champions idleness and contemplation as prerequisites to artistic cultivation. Beyond the well-known dictum of art for art’s sake, Wilde’s originality lays argument for the equality of criticism and art. For him, criticism is not subject to the work of art, but can in fact precede it: the artist cannot create without engaging his or her critical faculties first. And, as Wilde writes, “To the critic the work of art is simply a suggestion for a new work of his own.”
The field of art and criticism should be open to the free play of the mind, but Wilde plays seriously, even prophetically. Writing in 1891, he foresaw that criticism would have an increasingly important role as the need to make sense of what we see increases with the complexities of modern life. It is only the fine perception and explication of beauty, Wilde suggests, that will allow us to create meaning, joy, empathy, and peace out of the chaos of facts and reality.
About the Author
Oscar Wilde (1854–1900) was an Irish poet and playwright who became one of London’s most popular writers in the early 1890s. Graduating from Trinity College, Dublin, and later Magdalen College, Oxford, Wilde embarked on a hugely successful lecture tour of America in 1882. Two early melodramatic tragedies, Vera; or, The Nihilists (1880) and The Duchess of Padua (1883), were written during these years, paving the way for later stage classics such as A Woman of No Importance (1893), An Ideal Husband (1895), and The Importance of Being Earnest (1895).
Wilde also continued to write prose and criticism for popular daily newspapers such as The Pall Mall Gazette, as well as The Woman’s World, a Victorian women’s magazine that he edited between 1887 and 1889. Though often controversial, his flair for journalism and nose for scandal ensured these writings were widely read. His bold essays on aesthetic philosophy, published together in the collection Intentions (1891), were known for their wit and play with motif. Together with his plays and poems, these writings on art remain important and influential meditations of the nature of art criticism itself.
2020, English
Softcover, 329 pages, 12.6 x 19.8 cm
Published by
Dedalus / Cambs
$32.00 - Out of stock
Là-Bas, translated as Down There or The Damned, and first published in 1891, is French writer Joris-Karl Huysmans's most famous work after À rebours. Controversial when it first appeared in print, Là-Bas deals with the subject of Satanism in contemporary France, and is the first of Huysmans's books to feature the character Durtal, a thinly disguised portrait of the author himself — a writer obsessed with the life of one of the blackest figures in history, Gilles de Rais — child murderer, sadist, necrophile, and practitioner of all the black arts. The book's authentic, extraordinarily detailed descriptions of the Black Mass have never been surpassed.
A precursor to the horror fiction of HP Lovecraft and the nihilism of Michel Houellebecq, Huysman's fascination with evil and gore, history and the gothic is clear, although one can be left with the impression of gutter press themes cloaked in a literary veil. As the first, and the darkest, in a tetralogy about conversion to Catholicism there is at least the hope of redemption to follow.'—Sophia Martelli in The Observer
Translated by Brendan King
2012, English
Softcover, 136 pages, 12 x 18 cm
Published by
Wakefield Press / Cambridge
$30.00 - Out of stock
When Marcel Schwob published The Book of Monelle in French in 1894, it immediately became the unofficial bible of the French symbolist movement, admired by such contemporaries as Stephane Mallarmé, Alfred Jarry, and André Gide. A carefully woven assemblage of legends, aphorisms, fairy tales, and nihilistic philosophy, it remains a deeply enigmatic and haunting work over a century later, a gathering of literary and personal ruins written in a style that evokes both the Brothers Grimm and Friedrich Nietzsche. The Book of Monelle was the fruit of Schwob’s intense emotional suffering over the loss of his love, a “girl of the streets” named Louise, whom he had befriended in 1891 and who succumbed to tuberculosis two years later. Transforming her into Monelle, the innocent prophet of destruction, Schwob tells the stories of her various sisters: girls succumbing to disillusion, caught between the misleading world of childlike fantasy and the bitter world of reality. This new translation reintroduces a true fin-de-siècle masterpiece into English.
Marcel Schwob (1867–1905) was a scholar of startling breadth and an incomparable storyteller. A secret influence on generations of writers, from Guillaume Apollinaire and Jorge Luis Borges to Roberto Bolaño, Schwob was as versed in the street slang of medieval thieves as he was in the poetry of Walt Whitman. His allegiances were to Rabelais and François Villon, Robert Louis Stevenson and Edgar Allan Poe. Paul Valéry and Alfred Jarry both dedicated their first books to him, and in doing so paid tribute to the author who could evoke both the intellect of Leonardo da Vinci and the anarchy of Ubu Roi. He was also the uncle of Lucy Schwob, better remembered today as the Surrealist photographer Claude Cahun.
Translated, with an afterword, by Kit Schluter
“[A]n utterly heartbreaking book, beautiful in the torment and suffering that is manifested through its words.” — Janice Lee, HTML Giant
“[The Book of Monelle] is an unsettling work, a triptych in which the singular is transformed into the universal." — Stephen Sparks, 3:AM Magazine
“It is a work of poetic force and intuitive form, and the book Schwob was best known for during his lifetime.” — Martin Riker, The Wall Street Journal
A "Best of the Small Press" selection by CAConrad.
2003, English
Softcover, 288 pages, 13 x 19.8 cm
Published by
Penguin Books / London
$23.00 - Out of stock
Introduction by Patrick Mcguiness
Translated by Robert Baldick
Notes by Patrick Mcguiness
Infamous as the inspiration for the novel which slowly corrupts Oscar Wilde's "Dorian Gray", Joris-Karl Huysmans' "Against Nature" is the original handbook of decadence. A wildly original fin-de-siecle novel, Against Nature contains only one character. Des Esseintes is a decadent, ailing aristocrat who retreats to an isolated villa where he indulges his taste for luxury and excess. Veering between nervous excitability and debilitating ennui, he gluts his aesthetic appetites with classical literature and art, exotic jewels (with which he fatally encrusts the shell of his tortoise), rich perfumes and a kaleidoscope of sensual experiences. Against Nature, in the words of the author, exploded 'like a grenade' and has enjoyed a cult following to this day. This revised edition of Robert Baldick's lucid translation features a new introduction and a chronology, and reproduces Huysmans' original 1903 preface as well as a selection of reviews from writers including Mallarme, Zola and Wilde.
Joris-Karl Huysmans (1848-1907) is now recognized as one of the most challenging and innovative figures in European literature and an acknowledged principal architect of the fin-de-siecle imagination. He was a career civil servant who wrote ten novels, most notably "A Rebours and La-Bas". Huysmans died in 1907.
Robert Baldick (d.1972) translated widely from the French and wrote a biography of Huysmans. Patrick McGuinness is a Fellow and Tutor in French at St Anne's College, Oxford, and editor of Symbolism, Decadence and the Fin de Siecle (Exeter UP, 2000).
1981, English
Softcover, 212 pages, 12.5 x 19.5 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Methuen Publishing / London
$20.00 - Out of stock
Published in 1981, this study argues against vague interpretations of fantasy as mere escapism and seeks to define it as a distinct kind of narrative. A general theoretical section introduces recent work on fantasy. notably Tzvetan Todorov's The Fantastic A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre (1973). Dr Jackson. however, extends Todorov's ideas to include aspects of psychoanalytic theory seeing fantasy as primarily an expression of unconscious drives, she stresses the importance of the writings of Freud and subsequent theorists when analysing recurrent themes, such as doubling or multiplying selves, mirror images, metamorphosis and bodily disintegration. Gothic fiction, classic Victorian fantasies, the 'fantastic realism' of Dickens and Dostoevsky, tales by Mary Shelley, James Hogg, E. T. A. Hoffman, George Eliot, Henry James, Joseph Conrad, R L. Stevenson, Franz Kafka, Mervyn Peake and Thomas Pynchon are among the texts covered. Through a reading of these frequently disquieting works Dr Jackson moves towards a definition of fantasy as a historically determined form, whose ambiguities are seen as expressing cultural unease. These issues are discussed in relation to a wide range of fantasies with varying images of desire and disenchantment.
Very Good copy.
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.
2019, English
Hardcover (w. dust jacket), 336 pages, 25 x 29 cm
Published by
Ludion / Brussels
$100.00 - Out of stock
The first English edition of the ultimate monograph on painter Léon Spilliaert.
Leon Spilliaert (1881-1946) was one of the most important Flemish Symbolist painters. Although he was embedded in the Symbolist tradition, he was also drawn to the avant-garde. He was, in fact, an einzelganger, or loner, balancing on the fault line between two centuries, a transitional figure between Symbolism and Surrealism.
Spilliaert, like James Ensor, was born and raised in Ostend. And like Ensor, he was also driven by ridicule and irony, non-conformism and the urge to look at the world from a different perspective. He created his own spiritual imagery, experimented with pastel and gouache, and played with purified areas of colour and graceful lines. The sea under a cool moon, lonely figures with a vacant gaze, desolate beaches, empty rooms and stylised silhouettes in backlight: Spilliaert was always able to evoke an atmosphere of mystery, magic and alienation in abstract lines and colour.
Anne Adriaens-Pannier, former curator at the Royal Museums of Fine Arts in Brussels, has been working on the catalog raisonné of his oeuvre since 1995 at the Spilliaert family's request. She pays tribute to the artist with this beautifully illustrated book, in which she describes his drawings and paintings, as well as referring to his book illustrations and lithographs. The author presents Spilliaert as a link between the major art movements in the fascinating era in which he lived and worked. A unique book about an exceptional artist.
2018, English / French / Dutch
Hardcover, 192 pages, 24.5 x 29.7 cm
Published by
Pandora / Brussels
$130.00 - In stock -
For a long time, the graphic oeuvre of Leon Spilliaert (1881-1946) was, if not neglected, then at least
discussed little or summarily. It was only in 1982 that the first exhibition fully devoted to his prints was held. The prints of Spilliaert are perhaps less known than his original works on paper but they are equally mysterious, attractive and varied on topic: portraits, figures, land- and cityscapes, forests and parks...
Together with fellow citizen of Ostend James Ensor, Leon Spilliaert is considered one of the pioneers of Belgian modern art.
Over 35 years on from that first exhibition, this new and updated edition of the catalogue raisonne of the prints of Leon Spilliaert by Xavier Tricot showcases the visionary work of this Belgian artist.
Text in English, French, and Dutch.
2021, English
Softcover, 172 pages, 10.8 x 17.8 cm
Published by
David Zwirner Books / New York
$28.00 - Out of stock
In his introduction to Charles Baudelaire’s Salon of 1846, the renowned art historian Michael Fried presents a new take on the French poet and critic’s ideas on art, criticism, romanticism, and the paintings of Delacroix.
Charles Baudelaire, considered a father of modern poetry, wrote some of the most daring and influential prose of the nineteenth century. Prior to publishing the international bestseller Les Fleurs du mal (1857), he was already notable as a forthright and witty critic of art and literature. Captivated by the Salons in Paris, Baudelaire took to writing to express his theories on modern art and art philosophy.
The Salon of 1846 expands upon the tenets of romanticism as Baudelaire methodically takes his reader through paintings by Delacroix and Ingres, illuminating his belief that the pursuit of the ideal must be paramount in artistic expression. Here we also see Baudelaire caught in a fundamental struggle with the urban commodity of capitalism developing in Paris at that time. Baudelaire’s text proves to be a useful lens for understanding art criticism in mid-nineteenth-century France, as well as the changing opinions regarding the essential nature of romanticism and the artist as creative genius.
Acclaimed art historian and art critic Michael Fried’s introduction offers a new reading of Baudelaire’s seminal text and highlights the importance of his writing and its relevance to today’s audience.
Charles Baudelaire
Known for his equal skill in poetry and prose, Charles Baudelaire (1821–1867) was one of the most distinctive writers of the nineteenth century. Operating within the French literary scene, his provocative theories on contemporary art remain relevant today. His poetry collections include Les Fleurs du mal (1857) and Petits poèmes en prose (1868). Notable criticisms can be found in Baudelaire: Selected Writings on Art and Artists (1995).
Michael Fried
Michael Fried is a poet, art critic, art historian, and literary scholar. His many books include Absorption and Theatricality: Painting and Beholder in the Age of Diderot (1980), Art and Objecthood: Essays and Reviews (1998), and The Moment of Caravaggio (2010). Previous books of poems are Powers (1973), To the Center of the Earth (1994), The Next Bend in the Road (2004), and Promesse du Bonheur (David Zwirner Books, 2016). Fried is Professor Emeritus of the Humanities at Johns Hopkins University.
2021, English
Hardcover, 350 pages, 27.4 x 13.6 cm
Published by
Repeater Books / London
$40.00 - In stock -
A selection of Repeater authors choose their favourite horror stories for this new anthology, with each writing a critical introduction for the story of their choice.
Edited by novelist and Repeater publisher Tariq Goddard and “horror philosopher” Eugene Thacker, The Repeater Book of the Occult is a new anthology of horror stories that explores the ever-shifting boundaries between the natural and supernatural, between the real and the unreal. As the editors note, “In the grey zone between what appears and what is, lies horror. But horror writing is also a certain disposition, a way of thinking based on a suspicion regarding the world as it is given to us, and a doubt regarding the accepted ways of explaining that world to us – and for us.”
The Repeater Book of the Occult includes introductions by Repeater authors such as Leila Taylor, Carl Neville, Rhian E Jones, and Elvia Wilk, and features horror classics by Algernon Blackwood, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, and Edgar Allan Poe, as well as forgotten gems by authors such as W.W. Jacobs, Mark Twain, and Sheridan Le Fanu.
Eugene Thacker is the author of several books, including In The Dust Of This Planet (Zero Books, 2011), and Cosmic Pessimism (Univocal, 2015). He is Professor at The New School in New York City.
Tariq Goddard was born in London in 1975. He read Philosophy at King’s College London. His first three novels were shortlisted for various awards including Whitbread (Costa) First Novel Award, Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize and the Commonwealth Writer’s Prize. His fourth and fifth books won the Independent Publishers Gold medal for Horror Writing and Silver medal for Literary Fiction respectively. He lives on a farm in Wiltshire with his wife and children.
1970 / 1975, Japanese
Softcover (w. dust jacket), 100 pages, 26 x 18 cm
Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Iwasaki Art Co. / Japan
$70.00 - Out of stock
Lovely 1975 Japanese monograph on the work of Aubrey Beardsley, first published in 1970. Profusely illustrated throughout with 155 works, illustrated biography, biography and list of works, wrapped up in textured stock cover and dust jacket. Texts by Tadayuki Omori.
Aubrey Vincent Beardsley (1872 – 1898) was an English illustrator and author. His black ink drawings were influenced by Japanese woodcuts, and emphasized the grotesque, the decadent, and the erotic. He was leading figure in the aesthetic movement, the British counterpart of Decadence and Symbolism. He produced extensive illustrations for books and magazines such as The Studio, The Yellow Book, and The Savoy. Beardsley was a public as well as private eccentric. He said "I have one aim—the grotesque. If I am not grotesque, I am nothing." Oscar Wilde said Beardsley had "a face like a silver hatchet, and grass green hair." Wilde's irreverent wit and work reflected the decadence of his era and his influence was enormous, despite his early death from tuberculosis at age 25. His influence is clearly visible in the work of the French Symbolists, the Poster Art Movement of the 1890s, the work of many later-period Art Nouveau artists such as Papé and Clarke and 20th fantasy illustration.
Very Good copy in VG original dust jacket.
2001, French / Japanese
Hardcover, 174 pages, 25 x 20 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Tokyo Station Gallery / Tokyo
$90.00 - Out of stock
First edition of this wonderful hardcover catalogue surveying the engravings of James Ensor, published to accompany a major travelling exhibition in Japan in 2001. Beautifully printed and lavishly illustrated throughout with 175 graphic works reproduced in crisp detail, alongside many other illustrations of Ensor's life and paintings, accompanying texts in French and Japanese, including text by Ensor himself, biography, bibliography, catalogue and portraits of the artist in Ostend. Contains a wealth of fine examples of Ensor's fantastic grotesque engravings in both their black line print form alongside their over-painted colour editions, many with additional related sketches and historical references. Highly recommended.
Very Good copy, perfectly preserved interior with only light wear to illustrated hardcover boards.
James Sidney Edouard, Baron Ensor (13 April 1860 – 19 November 1949) was a Belgian painter and printmaker, an important influence on expressionism and surrealism who lived in Ostend for almost his entire life. He was associated with the artistic group Les XX. While Ensor's early works, such as Russian Music (1881) and The Drunkards (1883), depict realistic scenes in a somber style, his palette subsequently brightened and he favoured increasingly bizarre subject matter. Such paintings as The Scandalized Masks (1883) and Skeletons Fighting over a Hanged Man (1891) feature figures in grotesque masks inspired by the ones sold in his mother's gift shop for Ostend's annual Carnival. Subjects such as carnivals, masks, puppetry, skeletons, and fantastic allegories are dominant in Ensor's mature work. Ensor dressed skeletons up in his studio and arranged them in colourful, enigmatic tableaux on the canvas, and used masks as a theatrical aspect in his still lifes. Attracted by masks' plastic forms, bright colours, and potential for psychological impact, he created a format in which he could paint with complete freedom. James Ensor is considered to be an innovator in 19th-century art. Although he stood apart from other artists of his time, he significantly influenced such 20th-century artists as Paul Klee, George Grosz, Wols, and many expressionist and surrealist painters of the 20th century.
1982, English / French
Softcover, 145 pages, 13.2 x 20.5 cm
Published by
New Directions / New York
$35.00 - In stock -
Selected Poetry and Prose of Stéphane Mallarmé presents what can be considered the essential work of the renowned "father of the Symbolists." Mallarmé's major elegies, sonnets, and other verse, including excerpts from the dialogue "Hériodiade," are all assembled here with the French and English texts en face. Also included (not bilingually) are the visual poem "Dice Thrown Never Will Annul Chance" and the drama "Igitur," as well as letters, essays, and reviews.
Although his primary concern was with poetry, the aesthetics of Stéphane Mallarmé (1842-98) has touched all the arts. During the last twenty years of his life, his Paris apartment was a major literary gathering place. Every Tuesday evening, standing beneath the portrait of himself by his friend Edouard Manet, the poet addressed reverent gatherings which included at various times Paul Valery and André Gide, among many others. The American painter James Whistler was influenced by these "Mardis," and one of the best-known poems in the present collection, "The Afternoon of a Faun," inspired Claude Debussy's famous musical composition. In translation, the subtle and varied shades of Mallarmé's oeuvre may best be rendered by diverse hands. Editor Mary Ann Caws, the author of books on René Char, Robert Desnos, and various aspects of modern French writing, has brought together the work of fourteen translators, spanning a century, from the Symbolists and the Bloomsbury group (George Moore and Roger Fry) to Cid Corman, Brian Coffey, and other contemporary poets and writers.
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.‘
1989, English
Softcover, 448 pages, 12.8 x 19.5 cm
Published by
New Directions / New York
$33.00 - Out of stock
Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du Mal, which in successive editions contained all of his published poems, has for over a hundred years now opened new vistas for man’s imagination and quickened the sensibilities of poets everywhere. The greatest French poet of the 19th century, Baudelaire was also the first truly modern poet, and his direct and indirect influence on the literature of our time has been immeasurable.
Here in this volume are selections from _Les _Fleurs du Mal as chosen by Marthiel and Jackson Mathews from their complete bilingual edition published by New Directions in 1955 — “undoubtedly the best single collection of Baudelaire’s verse in English” (St. Louis Post Dispatch).
Flowers of Evil: A Selection contains fifty-three poems which the Mathews feel best represent the total work and which have been most successfully rendered into English. The French texts as established by Yves Gerard Le Dantec for the Pleiade edition are printed en face. Included are Baudelaire’s “Three Drafts of a Preface” and brief notes on the nineteen translators whose works is represented.
1970 / 1991, Japanese
Softcover (w. dust jacket), 100 pages, 26 x 18 cm
Out of print title / used / fine
Published by
Iwasaki Art Co. / Japan
$45.00 - Out of stock
Lovely Japanese monograph on the work of Aubrey Beardsley, first published in 1970 and here in facsimile printed by Iwasaki Art Co. in 1991. Profusely illustrated throughout with 155 works, illustrated biography, biography and list of works. Texts by Tadayuki Omori.
Aubrey Vincent Beardsley (1872 – 1898) was an English illustrator and author. His black ink drawings were influenced by Japanese woodcuts, and emphasized the grotesque, the decadent, and the erotic. He was leading figure in the aesthetic movement, the British counterpart of Decadence and Symbolism. He produced extensive illustrations for books and magazines such as The Studio, The Yellow Book, and The Savoy. Beardsley was a public as well as private eccentric. He said "I have one aim—the grotesque. If I am not grotesque, I am nothing." Oscar Wilde said Beardsley had "a face like a silver hatchet, and grass green hair." Wilde's irreverent wit and work reflected the decadence of his era and his influence was enormous, despite his early death from tuberculosis at age 25. His influence is clearly visible in the work of the French Symbolists, the Poster Art Movement of the 1890s, the work of many later-period Art Nouveau artists such as Papé and Clarke and 20th fantasy illustration.
Fine crisp copy in Very Good original dust jacket.
1983, English /Japanese / Flemish
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Nippon Television Network Corporation / Japan
$85.00 - Out of stock
First edition hardcover Japanese catalogue published by the Nippon Television Network Corporation (!) in 1983 on the occasion of a major travelling retrospective of James Ensor's work in Japan. Through Ensor's (1860-1949) various depictions of masks, monsters, and skeletons, the somewhat shocking expression he employed to explore the human spirit had a significant influence on the Expressionist and Surrealist artists to come. Here over 140 works dating from early on in his career to his late years and consisting of oil paintings, drawings, and prints are presented in largely three sections. Beginning with his period of Realism and ending with his prolific graphic and painterly works of the grotesque, where Ensor's critical mentality toward religious or social themes was incisive and remorseless, yet witty. The special middle section focuses on the influence of the Orient on Ensor. The series of pictures known as the Hokusai mangwa, illustrated by Japanese artist Katsushika Hokusai, is considered to have influenced Ensor's art. "There are a series of drawings in which Ensor copied these sketches and pictures depicting Chinese ceramics or Japanese fans. Ensor's family ran a souvenir shop, where there were all sorts of unusual things imported from the Orient and carnival masks. In recent years, the influence of such objects brought from the Orient has been focused on as part of the background to this artist's production of grotesque characters." Includes photographs from his life in Ostend, essays, descriptions of works, bibliography, biography, and much more. Texts in English, Flemish and Japanese.
James Sidney Edouard, Baron Ensor (13 April 1860 – 19 November 1949) was a Belgian painter and printmaker, an important influence on expressionism and surrealism who lived in Ostend for almost his entire life. He was associated with the artistic group Les XX. While Ensor's early works, such as Russian Music (1881) and The Drunkards (1883), depict realistic scenes in a somber style, his palette subsequently brightened and he favored increasingly bizarre subject matter. Such paintings as The Scandalized Masks (1883) and Skeletons Fighting over a Hanged Man (1891) feature figures in grotesque masks inspired by the ones sold in his mother's gift shop for Ostend's annual Carnival. Subjects such as carnivals, masks, puppetry, skeletons, and fantastic allegories are dominant in Ensor's mature work. Ensor dressed skeletons up in his studio and arranged them in colorful, enigmatic tableaux on the canvas, and used masks as a theatrical aspect in his still lifes. Attracted by masks' plastic forms, bright colors, and potential for psychological impact, he created a format in which he could paint with complete freedom. James Ensor is considered to be an innovator in 19th-century art. Although he stood apart from other artists of his time, he significantly influenced such 20th-century artists as Paul Klee, George Grosz, Wols, and many expressionist and surrealist painters of the 20th century.
Very Good copy.
2013, English
Hardcover, 176 pages, 17 x 19 cm
Published by
Atlas Press / London
$52.00 - In stock -
Had The Tutu appeared when it was written in 1891 it would have been one of the defining works of late nineteenth-century French literature. Juan Goytisolo is among its admirers, and noted that: “The Tutu has been described as the most mysterious novel of the nineteenth century, it is probably one of the strangest, and certainly one of the most fascinating… We find in it a clear presentiment (one cannot say influence, since no one read this book) of the audacities of Jarry, Roussel, Breton, Ionesco and Queneau…”
Its author, the publisher Léon Genonceaux (1856–?), is as much of an enigma as the two legendary enfants terribles whom he was the first to publish: Arthur Rimbaud and the Comte de Lautréamont. When he brought out The Tutu he was already in trouble with the police for “immoral publishing”, and realised that sending it to bookstores would certainly land him in jail. The book disappeared for nearly 100 years, and its author likewise — after 1905 nothing is known of him. Finally republished in the 1990s, The Tutu was hailed by reviewers as the bastard child of J.-K. Huysmans and Antonin Artaud.
Genonceaux appears to have been intent on outraging just about everyone, and The Tutu is gleefully Nietzschean in its dismemberment of contemporary morality. It is simultaneously a sort of ultimate “decadent novel” and outlandishly modern; it is also repellent, infantile and deeply cynical. Yet despite all its absurdities and extravagances, in the end it somehow manages to appear compassionate, poetic, funny, and even — most absurdly of all — rational.
Translated and introduced by Iain White.
2018, English
Softcover, 212 pages, 13 x 19 cm
Published by
Strange Attractor / London
$47.00 - In stock -
A lost poet of the decadent era, Lionel Johnson is the shadow man of the 1890s, an enigma "pale as wasted golden hair." History has all but forgotten Johnson, except as a footnote to the lives of more celebrated characters like W. B. Yeats and Oscar Wilde.
Johnson should have been one of the great poets of the age but was already drinking eau-de-cologne for kicks while a teenager at Winchester College. His attraction to absinthe damaged his fragile health and cast him forever into a waking dream of haunted rooms and spectral poetry. A habitual insomniac, he haunted medieval burial grounds after dark, jotting down the epitaphs of the gone-too-young, as if anticipating his own early demise at the age of 35 -- falling from a bar stool in a Fleet Street pub.
It was rumoured that Johnson performed "strange religious rites" in his rooms at Oxford and experimented with hashish in the company of fellow poet Ernest Dowson. Moving to London, he fell in with Simeon Solomon, Oscar Wilde, and Aubrey Beardsley, and would contribute to the leading decadent publications of the day, including The Chameleon, The Yellow Book, and The Savoy.
Like a glimmering of a votive candle in one of Johnson's dream churches, Incurable sheds new light on one of the most gifted, if reclusive, poets of the fin de siècle. Containing a detailed biography, illustrations, rare and unusual material including previously unseen letters, poetry, and essays, Incurable pays tribute to this enchanting and eccentric poet while providing fresh insight into an era that continues to fascinate.
1936, English
Hardcover (w. dust jacket), 308 pages, 21 x 14 cm
1st UK Edition, Out of print title / used / good
Published by
Chatto & Windus / London
$200.00 - In stock -
Very rare first English edition of Some Poems of Mallarmé, published in 1936 by Chatto & Windus, London. This hardcover (blue cloth with gilt lettering) presents for the first time the excellent translations by Roger Fry, with commentaries by French translator and critic Charles Mauron and features the very uncommon dust jacket illustrated by English painter, interior designer, sister of Virginia Woolf and member of the Bloomsbury Group, Vanessa Bell, printed in Great Britain by T. & A. Constable Ltd. at the University Press, Edinburgh. Bilingual with original French and translated English on facing pages.
Stéphane Mallarmé (1842 – 1898), pen name of Étienne Mallarmé, was a French poet and critic. He was a major French symbolist poet, and his work anticipated and inspired several revolutionary artistic schools of the early 20th century, such as Cubism, Futurism, Dadaism, and Surrealism.
Good copy (still tightly bound w. light discolouring to edges from age), in Fair dust jacket (w. some browning and brittled with age/chips to jacket).
1957 / Revised Reprint, English
Softcover, 228 pages, 13.2 x 20.3 cm
Published by
New Directions / New York
$32.00 - Out of stock
The prose poems of the great French Symbolist, Arthur Rimbaud (1854-1891), have acquired enormous prestige among readers everywhere and have been a revolutionary influence on poetry in the twentieth century. They are offered here both in their original texts and in superb English translations by Louise Varèse. Mrs. Varèse first published her versions of Rimbaud's Illuminations in 1946. Since then she has revised her work and has included two poems which in the interim have been reclassified as part of Illuminations. This edition also contains two other series of prose poems, which include two poems only recently discovered in France, together with an introduction in which Miss Varèse discusses the complicated ins and outs of Rimbaldien scholarship and the special qualities of Rimbaud's writing.
Rimbaud was indeed the most astonishing of French geniuses. Fired in childhood with an ambition to write, he gave up poetry before he was twenty-one. Yet he had already produced some of the finest examples of French verse. He is best known for A Season in Hell, but his other prose poems are no less remarkable. While he was working on them he spoke of his interest in hallucinations--"des vertiges, des silences, des nuits." These perceptions were caught by the poet in a beam of pellucid, and strangely active language which still lights up--now here, now there--unexplored aspects of experience and thought.