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:
CLOSED FOR SUMMER
RE—OPENING JAN 16
WEB-SHOP OPEN 24/7
ORDERS SHIP FROM JAN 6
World Food Books
Postal Address:
PO Box 435
Flinders Lane
Victoria 8009
Australia
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World Food Books Gift Voucher
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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.
1985, English
Softcover, 272 pages, 23.5 x 16 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / good
Published by
Yale University Press / New Haven
$25.00 - In stock -
Yale French Studies, Number 68, 1985, dedicated entirely to texts on French philosopher, novelist, political activist and existentialist Jean-Paul Sartre (1905—1980), edited by Fredric Jameson.
"Five years after Jean-Paul Sartre's death it is possible to begin the reinterpretation and reevaluation of his work. This means reopening the question of his stature in French intellectual history as, in Fredric Jameson's phrase, 'the Victor Hugo of philosophy'—a role denied him by the generation that followed him. Professor Jameson has assembled eleven stimulating essays and has arranged for the first-time publication of extracts from Sartre's notes for the unwritten fourth volume of The Family Idiot. He has also contributed a provocative and forthright introduction."
Good copy.
1990, English
Softcover, 270 pages, 23.5 x 16 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / good
Published by
Yale University Press / New Haven
$45.00 - Out of stock
Yale French Studies, Number 78, 1990, dedicated entirely to texts on the work of French philosopher Georges Bataille (1897—1962), edited by Allan Stoekl.
"During his lifetime Bataille was known mainly as the editor of Critique and as an author of erotic novels. Since his death nearly thirty years ago, however, he has become known as a major theorist in his own right. The articles in this issue of Yale French Studies discuss and rewrite Bataille's philosophy, interrogate his concepts, politics, economics, and esthetics, and attempt to revise the past and the future on the basis of his text."
Good copy.
2022, English / French
Softcover, 128 pages, 11.8 x 19 cm
Published by
Diaphanes / Zürich
$32.00 - In stock -
Translated by Clayton Eshleman
With an Introduction by Richard Hawkins
The first comprehensive collection in English of Antonin Artaud’s writings on his artworks.
The many major exhibitions of Antonin Artaud’s drawings and drawn notebook pages in recent years—at New York’s Museum of Modern Art, Vienna’s Museum Moderner Kunst, and Paris’s Centre Georges Pompidou—have entirely transformed our perception of his work, reorienting it toward the artworks of his final years. This volume collects all three of Artaud’s major writings on his artworks. “The Human Face” (1947) was written as the catalog text for Artaud’s only gallery exhibition of his drawings during his lifetime, focusing on his approach to making portraits of his friends at the decrepit pavilion in the Paris suburbs where he spent the final year of his life. “Ten years that language is gone” (1947) examines the drawings Artaud made in his notebooks—his main creative medium at the end of his life—and their capacity to electrify his creativity when language failed him. “50 Drawings to assassinate magic” (1948), the residue of an abandoned book of Artaud’s drawings, approaches the act of drawing as part of the weaponry deployed by Artaud at the very end of his life to combat malevolent assaults and attempted acts of assassination. Together, these three extraordinary texts—pitched between writing and image—project Artaud’s ferocious engagement with the act of drawing.
French dramatist, poet, essayist, actor, and theater director Antonin Artaud (1896-1948) is one of the seminal figures of twentieth century writing, art and sound experimentation, known especially for his work with the Surrealist movement, his performance theories, his asylum incarcerations, and his artworks which have been exhibited in major exhibitions, at New York's MoMA and many other art-museums.
1984, English
Softcover, 232 pages, 23 x 15 cm
Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Johns Hopkins University Press / Baltimore
$20.00 - Out of stock
Published in 1984, Lacan and Narration : The Psychoanalytic Difference in Narrative Theory, edited by Robert Con Davis, invites nine distinguished scholars to assess the influence of French psychoanalyst
Jacques Lacan on literary theory. From various perspectives, they pursue the implications for narrative theory of Lacanian reading and attempt to position Lacan's thinking in the context of current discussions of narration and narratology.
Very Good, some light cover creasing, interior like new.
1987, English
Softcover, 200 pages, 15.2 x 22.9 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Cornell University Press / New York
$25.00 - Out of stock
The influence of the French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan has extended into nearly every field of the humanities and social sciences-from literature and film studies to anthropology and social work. yet Lacan's major text, Ecrits, continues to perplex and even baffle its readers. In Reading Lacan, Jane Gallop offers a novel approach to Lacan's work based on his own theories of language.
Lacan locates truth in the letter rather than in the spirit-in the ways statements are expressed rather than in their intended meaning. Gallop here grapples with six of Lacan's essays from Ecrits: "The Seminar on 'The Purloined Letter,' " "The Mirror Stage," "The Freudian Thing,'' "The Agency of the Letter in the Unconscious,'' "The Signification of the Phallus," and "The Subversion of the Subject." While other commentators have chosen not to confront Lacan's notoriously problematic style in their discussions of his ideas, Gallop addresses herself directly to the problem and the practice of reading Lacan. She takes her direction from Lacan's view of subjectivity and offers a deeply personal, feminist reading of Ecrits. Concentrating on the relation of desire and interpretation, she opens up the rich implications of Lacan's thought, for psychoanalytic theory, for the act of reading, and for knowledge itself.
Forceful and revealing, yet utterly candid about its own areas of uncertainty, Gallop's book will be indispensable to readers of Lacan and to scholars and students who have felt his impact.
Very Good copy of the 1987 edition, 2nd 1988 prinitng.
1988, English
Softcover, 335 pages, 12.7 x 20.3 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Verso / London
$45.00 - Out of stock
In the most comprehensive study of Jacques Lacan yet to be published in English, David Macey challenges many of the assumptions that have come to surround Lacan's work. He shows that key elements of Lacanian thought relate not to structuralism, as is often claimed, but to surrealism, Bataille and the early French phenomenologists. The famous "return to Freud" is shown to mask Lacan's adherence to a psychiatric tradition and to trends within French psychoanalysis which were opposed by Freud himself.
A detailed and challenging reading of work by Lacan and his associates on femininity reveals its reliance upon a virulently sexist discourse and upon an iconography derived from surrealism. The view that Lacanian psychoanalysis has a positive contribution to make to feminism and to theories of gender and sexual difference is contested. As well as providing a new and provocative reading of Lacan's work, Lacan in Contexts is an important contribution to psychoanalytic history and to the history of French intellectual life.
Very Good copy of the first 1988 edition.
1999, English
Softcover, 464 pages, 14.8 x 16.5 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / fine
Published by
Harvard University Press / Cambridge
$40.00 - In stock -
Are the "culture wars" over? When did they begin? What is their relationship to gender struggle and the dynamics of class? In her first full treatment of postcolonial studies, a field that she helped define, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, one of the world's foremost literary theorists, poses these questions from within the postcolonial enclave.
"We cannot merely continue to act out the part of Caliban," Spivak writes; and her book is an attempt to understand and describe a more responsible role for the postcolonial critic. A Critique of Postcolonial Reason tracks the figure of the "native informant" through various cultural practices-philosophy, history, literature-to suggest that it emerges as the metropolitan hybrid. The book addresses feminists, philosophers, critics, and interventionist intellectuals, as they unite and divide. It ranges from Kant's analytic of the sublime to child labor in Bangladesh. Throughout, the notion of a Third World interloper as the pure victim of a colonialist oppressor emerges as sharply suspect: the mud we sling at certain seemingly overbearing ancestors such as Marx and Kant may be the very ground we stand on.
A major critical work, Spivak's book redefines and repositions the postcolonial critic, leading her through transnational cultural studies into considerations of globality.
Very Good copy.
2011, English
Hardcover (w. dust jacket), 512 pages, 15.2 x 22.9 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
University of Minnesota Press / Minnesota
$70.00 - Out of stock
Scarce first English hardcover edition of Discourse, Figure by Jean-Francois Lyotard, published by the University of Minnesota Press in 2011.
Jean-François Lyotard is recognized as one of the most significant French philosophers of the twentieth century. Although nearly all of his major writing has been translated into English, one important work has until now been unavailable. Discourse, Figure is Lyotard's thesis. Provoked in part by Lacan's influential seminars in Paris, Discourse, Figure distinguishes between the meaningfulness of linguistic signs and the meaningfulness of plastic arts such as painting and sculpture. Lyotard argues that because rational thought is discursive and works of art are inherently opaque signs, certain aspects of artistic meaning such as symbols and the pictorial richness of painting will always be beyond reason's grasp. A wide-ranging and highly unusual work, Discourse, Figure proceeds from an attentive consideration of the phenomenology of experience to an ambitious meditation on the psychoanalytic account of the subject of experience, structured by the confrontation between phenomenology and psychoanalysis as contending frames within which to think the materialism of consciousness. In addition to prefiguring many of Lyotard's later concerns, Discourse, Figure captures Lyotard's passionate engagement with topics beyond phenomenology and psychoanalysis to structuralism, semiotics, poetry, art, and the philosophy of language.
Very Good copy in Good dust jacket with some closed tears and creasing.
1986, English
Hardcover (w. dust jacket), 620 pages, 24 x 17 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
The Hogarth Press / london
$70.00 - In stock -
Rare first hardcover English edition of Didier Anzieu's "Freud's Self-Analysis" published by The Hogarth Press, London, in 1986. Freud's Self-Analysis is an important, enormously detailed study of Freud's early life as mirrored in the dreams he chose to recount and analyze in The Interpretation of Dreams. Between 1895 and 1901, Freud discovered “psycho-analysis” through two approaches: the systematic interpretation of his own dreams; a passionate and intellectual correspondence with his friend W. Fliess. Having succeeded in dating most of Freud's dreams, Didier Anzieu reconstructs a diary of Freud's crossing of the unconscious which led to the elaboration of the first psychoanalytical notions: ternary structure of the psychic apparatus, homology of the nocturnal dream and of the neurotic symptom, importance of childhood sexual fantasies, Oedipus and castration complexes. The reader can thus follow the stages and modalities of a creative psychic process.
Translated from the French by Peter Graham; with a preface by M. Masud R. Khan.
Didier Anzieu (1923–1999) was a distinguished French psychoanalyst and theorist whose work brought the body back to the centre of psychoanalytic enquiry. He was the author of numerous books and articles, on areas ranging from Freud’s self-analysis, group psychology, and psychodrama to theories of creativity and thought; he also published short stories, literary criticism, a drama, a book of cartoons and a study of May 1968 written from the heart of Nanterre. His research was always conducted alongside his academic and clinical practice, both characterised by inclusivity, curiosity, a broad mind and a gentle manner.
Very Good copy in Good dust jacket.
1975, English
Softcover, 350 pages, 19 x 12.5 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Phaidon / London
$35.00 - In stock -
1975 edition of Ernst H. Gombrich's Symbolic Images: Studies in the Art of the Renaissance. These studies on the interpretation of images focus on the greatest artists of the Renaissance - notably Sandro Botticelli, Leonardo da Vinci, Raphael and Michelangelo - and all reflect the author's concern with standards, values and problems of method. Illustrated with 170 images.
Sir Ernst Hans Josef Gombrich, OM, CBE (1909—2001) was an Austrian-born art historian who spent most of his working life in the United Kingdom. He is the author of many works of art criticism and art history.
Very Good copy.
1982, English
Hardcover (w. dust jacket), 424 pages
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Evans Brothers / London
$200.00 - Out of stock
The monumental, now collectible, hardcover volume The Icon, by in rare English edition, published by Evans Brothers, London, 1982. A lavishly illustrated, comprehensive volume dedicated to the subject of the Icon spanning 1000 years, from 10th century Constantinople through the centuries in Greece, Russia, Crete, the Balkan peninsula, and the Holy Land. The most out-standing published study on the subject to date, examining icons of Christ, the Blessed Virgin, the great Church feasts, and the Saints and their lives, all artworks beautifully reproduced in vivid colour. Texts by Kurt Weitzman, Gaiane Alibegasvili, Aneli Volskaja, Manolis Chatzidakis, Gordana Babic, Mihail Alpatov, Teodora Voinescu. A stunning book with cloth-binding and gilded detailing.
Kurt Weitzmann (1904—1993) was a Germa-born American art historian who studied Byzantine and medieval art. He attended the universities of Münster, Würzburg and Vienna before moving to Princeton in 1935, due to Nazi persecution. He is well known for the time he spent researching the icons and architecture at Saint Catherine's Monastery in Egypt. He was elected to the American Philosophical Society in 1964 and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1978.
Very Good—Near Fine copy in VG dust jacket. Beautifully preserved.
2011, English
Hardcover, 228 pages, 23.3 x 27 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
MoMA / New York
$100.00 - In stock -
First edition of long out-of-print important catalogue published to accompany the exhibition On Line: Drawing Through the Twentieth Century, The Museum of Modern Art, New York, 21 Nov. 2010—7 Feb. 2011. On Line: Drawing through the Twentieth Century explores a radical transformation of drawing that began over a century ago and continues as a vital impulse in art today. In a revolutionary departure from traditional ideas of drawing, and from the reliance on paper as the medium's fundamental support, artists have pushed the line of drawing into real space, expanding its relationship to gesture and form and invigorating its links with painting and sculpture, photography and film, and, particularly notably, dance and performance. Through works by over 100 artists, and through essays by Cornelia Butler and Catherine de Zegher that illuminate both broad themes and individual practices, On Line presents a groundbreaking history of an art form. The great, recognized art movements, from Cubism and Futurism at the beginning of the twentieth century through Abstract Expressionism, Neo-Concretism, arte povera, Conceptualism, and many other approaches up to the diverse present, are shown from a new perspective, and are joined by a host of less familiar artworks that properly claim a place in this differently defined field. The exhibition and catalogue includes works by a wide range of artists, both familiar and relatively unknown, from different eras of the past century and from many nations, including Aleksandr Rodchenko, Alexander Calder, Karel Malich, Eva Hesse, Anna Maria Maiolino, Richard Tuttle, Mona Hatoum, and Monika Grzymala.
Very Good / As New copy.
1999, English
Softcover (w. dust jacket), 152 pages, 30.5 x 24.4 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
The MIT Press / Massachusetts
MOCA / Los Angeles
$100.00 - Out of stock
First edition of long out-of-print important catalogue published to accompany Afterimage : Draw Through Process, a major survey of conceptual / post-minimalist drawing at The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, before travelling to Texas and Washington. Co-published by the MIT Press and MOCA.
The term "process art" describes a moment of radical, a formal experimentation in postwar American sculpture. Through the medium of drawing, Afterimage revisits process art in terms of the artists who defined the movement and suggests a transitional moment when many of its practitioners anticipated the feminist and post minimalist art of the 1970s.
The term "process art" describes a moment of radical, a formal experimentation in postwar American sculpture. Through the medium of drawing, Afterimage revisits process art in terms of the artists who defined the movement and suggests a transitional moment when many of its practitioners anticipated the feminist and postminimalist art of the 1970s. Nancy Grossman's use of language, for example, suggests a kind of material abstraction, and Nancy Holt's earth works and related drawings introduced content into a minimalist vocabulary. The book also explores the drawing as a residual object in works in which the process of making dictates the form of the drawing. Examples include Gordon Matta-Clark's stacked cuttings, Robert Morris' "blind time" drawings, and Sol Lewitt's folded construction drawings. Other works, such as those by Bruce Nauman and Robert Smithson, record a particular approach to body-based and process-oriented sculpture. The book, which accompanies an exhibition, contains an essay by Cornelia H. Butler on the historical ambiguity surrounding process art and one by Pamela M. Lee on temporality in work of the late 1960s.
The artists included in the book are William Anastasi, Richard Artschwager, Mel Bochner, Agnes Denes, Nancy Grossman, Robert Grosvenor, Marcia Hafif, Eva Hesse, Nancy Holt, Barry LeVa, Sol Lewitt, Lee Lozano, Sylvia Plimack Mangold, Gordon Matta-Clark, Robert Morris, Bruce Nauman, Yvonne Rainer, Dorothea Rockburne, Alan Saret, Joel Shapiro, Robert Smithson, Michelle Stuart, Richard Tuttle, and Jack Whitten.
Very Good copy. Only very light wear to soft dust jacket, light tanning to edges.
1991, English
Softcover, 256 pages, 15.6 x 23.4 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / good
Published by
Routledge / London
$65.00 - In stock -
First 1991 Routledge edition of "Who Comes After the Subject?". Edited by Jean-Luc Nancy, Eduardo Cadava, and Peter Connor, this collectible volume offers an overview of contemporary French thought on the question of the "subject", as it is viewed in philosophy, politics, history and psychoanalysis. It represents the most recent research from a host of the foremost contemporary French figures in philosophy and theory, including essays by Deleuze, Derrida, Lyotard, Blanchot, Lacoue-Labarthe, Nancy, Descombes, Kofman, Irigaray, Badiou, Ranciere, and Balibar.
Very Good copy.
2019, English
Softcover, 264 pages, 27 x 19.5 cm
Published by
Nero / Rome
$65.00 - Out of stock
Global Tools 1973–1975 documents and narrates the story of the eponymous experience of Radical Design and its multidisciplinary school program “without students or teachers.” The Global Tools journey began with its foundation in 1973 by groups and figures drawn from Italian Radical Architecture, Arte Povera, and Conceptual Art, and ended in 1975 after three years of intense experimentation. This book is both a commentary and an impressive visual archive that brings together essays by international authors and reproductions of many original documents—including the Global Tools bulletins, entirely republished here for the first time. This unique and definitive book marks a fundamental stage in the rediscovery of one of the most fascinating European cultural experiences of the late twentieth century.
Edited by Valerio Borgonuovo and Silvia Franceschini.
With texts by Manola Antonioli and Alessandro Vicari, Valerio Borgonuovo and Silvia Franceschini, Alison J. Clarke, Beatriz Colomina, Maurizio Lazzarato, Franco Raggi, Simon Sadler.
Published by Nero in collaboration with SALT, Istanbul.
1972, English
Softcover, 130 pages, 17.8 x 20.3 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Latimer / London
$300.00 - Out of stock
The very first 1972 UK edition of this historical publication by Cornelius Cardew, a key collection/collaborative manifesto of texts and scores by a group of British avant-garde musicians compiled and edited by the legendary experimental composer. Published by Latimer.
"Any direction modern music will take in England will come about only through Cardew, because of him, by way of him. If the new ideas in music are felt today as a movement in England, it's because he acts as a moral force, a moral centre."
This is Morton Feldman's assessment of Cardew's importance, an assessment that took on prophetic status when Cardew cofounded the Scratch Orchestra in 1969. This orchestra was a culmination of the ideals expressed in Cardew's own music in the 1960s when, working in almost total isolation from the musical establishment, he patiently drew together a large group of composers and performers into experimental music through his own compositional activities and through teaching. This group became the nucleus of the orchestra.
The draft constitution of the Scratch Orchestra opens as follows: "Definition: A Scratch Orchestra is a large number of enthusiasts pooling their resources (not primarily material resources) and assembling for action (music-making, performance, edification).
"Note: The word music and its derivatives are here not understood to refer exclusively to sound and related phenomena (hearing, etc). What they do refer to is flexible and depends entirely on the members of the Scratch Orchestra.
"The Scratch Orchestra intends to function in the public sphere, and this function will be expressed in the form of—for lack of a better word—concerts."
This lively book on the repertory the orchestra created is as much graphic and visual as it is verbal and about aural events and happenings. After all, scratch music itself is meant to be perceived by the eye and all the senses—not just by ear—so the notation used in preparing the scores for performance might be graphic, collage, verbal, or musical. The scores in Scratch Music are composed of written words, photographs, maps, graphs, diagrams, musical flow charts, conventional musical notation, whimsical drawings, playing cards, crossword puzzles, and other devices. Contemporary musicians, artists, and critics have long recognized both Cardew's music and this text as hugely influential and significant. Scratch Music demonstrates the extraordinary richness of this particular compositional matrix, giving the reader some idea of what it is like to put on a scratch music event.
Contents: Introduction; Scratch Music—Early Outlines and Later Notes; Scratch Music; Key to Scratch Music; Scratch Music Catalogue; 1001 Activities; Appendix: Four Compositions (David Ahern, Greg Bright, Michael Chant, Roger Frampton).
Cornelius Cardew (1936 – 1981) was an English experimental music composer. A student at the recently established the Studio for Electronic Music in Cologne, Cardew served as an assistant to Karlheinz Stockhausen from 1958 to 1960. Cardew was particularly prominent in introducing the works of American experimental composers such as Morton Feldman, La Monte Young, Earle Brown, Christian Wolff, and Cage to an English audience during the early to mid sixties and came to have a considerable impact on the development of English music from the late sixties onwards. In 1966, Cardew joined the free improvisation group AMM as cellist and pianist, alongside Lou Gare, Eddie Prévost, Keith Rowe, and one of his first students at the Royal Academy Christopher Hobbs. Performing with the group allowed Cardew to explore music in a completely democratic environment, freely improvising without recourse to scores. Cardew's most important scores from his experimental period are Treatise (1963–67), a 193-page graphic score which allows for considerable freedom of interpretation, and The Great Learning, a work in seven parts or "Paragraphs," based on translations of Confucius by Ezra Pound. The Great Learning instigated the formation of the Scratch Orchestra. During those years, he took a course in graphic design and he made his living as a graphic designer at Aldus Books in London. While teaching an experimental music class at London's Morley College in 1968, Cardew, along with Howard Skempton and Michael Parsons formed the Scratch Orchestra, a large experimental ensemble, initially for the purposes of interpreting Cardew's The Great Learning. He later rejected experimental music, his creative output from the demise of the Scratch Orchestra until his death reflected his political commitment as a member of the Communist Party of England (Marxist-Leninist) in the 1970s, and in 1979 as co-founder and member of the Central Committee of the Revolutionary Communist Party of Britain (Marxist-Leninist).
Very Good copy with some tanning and general wear.
1981, English
Softcover (staple-bound), 48 pages, 21 x 15 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Goethe-Institut / Münich
$28.00 - In stock -
Rare English paperback documentary film programme, "From Weimar to Hitler", published by the
Goethe-Institut, Münich, in 1981. An illustrated essay on films that deal with the history of the late phase and crisis of the Weimar Republic and the rise of National Socialism electioneering and documentary films and Germany's tradition of agitprop film. Film stills throughout texts by editor Hans Mommsen, translated to English by Peter Green.
Very Good copy.
1990, English
Softcover, 512 pages, 20 x 13 cm
Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Penguin Books / London
$20.00 - In stock -
1990 re-print of Simone de Beauvoir's 1977 autobiography, All Said and Done.
"All Said and Done... offers us ten years (1962-72) not so much of experience realised (although this is exceptionally packed with incident) as an imaginative and intellectual transmutation of such experience. It is a deeply serious, wholly absorbing, and marvellously stimulating testimony, which gives a complete feeling of maturity and confidence in the autobiographer who comes through with tremendous honesty and admirable lucidity and precision... it inspires one to live, to look again, to learn more, to know more deeply the people and social systems which constitute our world. It throws open the windows, and simultaneously enables one better to examine the room behind one."—Kay Dick in the Spectator.
Simone de Beauvoir (1908—1986) was a French existentialist philosopher, writer, social theorist, and feminist activist.
Very Good copy.
1996, English
Softcover, 585 pages, 23 x 15 cm
Out of print title / as new
Published by
W W Norton & Co / New York
$48.00 - Out of stock
1996 edition of Simone de Beauvoir's The Coming of Age, published by W W Norton & Company, New York.
As the definitive study of the universal problem of growing old, The Coming of Age is "a brilliant achievement" (Marc Slonin, New York Times).
What do the words elderly, old, and aged really mean? How are they used by society, and how in turn do they define the generation that we are taught to respect and love but instead castigate and avoid? Most importantly, how is our treatment of this generation a reflection of our society's values and priorities?
In The Coming of Age, Simone de Beauvoir seeks greater understanding of our perception of elders. With bravery, tenacity, and forceful honesty, she guides us on a study spanning a thousand years and a variety of different nations and cultures to provide a clear and alarming picture of "Society's secret shame"--the separation and distance from our communities that the old must suffer and endure.
Simone de Beauvoir (1908—1986) was a French existentialist philosopher, writer, social theorist, and feminist activist.
Fine—As New copy.
2021, English
Softcover, 232 pages, 20 x 12.5 cm
Published by
Silver Press / London
$35.00 - Out of stock
With a Foreword by Francesca Wade and an Introduction by Sophie Lewis
Diane di Prima began writing her ‘Letters’ in 1968, conjuring a potent blend of utopian visions, ecological urgency and spiritual insight. By turns a manifesto for breaking free, a manual for street protest and a feminist broadside, these poems are as relevant to the convulsions and crises of today as they were fifty years ago.
During the last years of her life, di Prima worked on the final iteration of her enduring project. This volume brings together fifteen new poems with all the previously published Letters in an expanded fiftieth anniversary edition.
"Di Prima is one of the greatest writers of her generation."—Chris Kraus
"Explosive and nourishing . . . Revolutionary Letters is a time machine towards a better future."—Ken Chen
"The real sexual liberator of the Sixties . . . A multi-hyphenate artist who writes what she wants and is taken seriously for it, and whose creativity is driven by a moral energy of the political and spiritual."—New Yorker
2017, English
Softcover, 230 pages, 20 x 12.5 cm
Published by
Silver Press / London
$33.00 - Out of stock
With a Preface by Reni Eddo-Lodge and an Introduction by Sara Ahmed.
Audre Lorde (1934-92) described herself as ‘Black, lesbian, mother, warrior, poet’. Her extraordinary belief in the power of language – of speaking – to articulate selfhood, confront injustice and bring about change in the world remains as transformative today as it was then, and no less urgent.
Your Silence Will Not Protect You brings Lorde's poetry and prose together for the first time.
2018, English
Softcover, 240 pages, 20 x 12.5 cm
Published by
Silver Press / London
$28.00 - Out of stock
With an introduction by Ali Smith and a new Afterword by Nell Dunn
In 1964, Nell Dunn spoke to nine of her friends over a bottle of wine about sex, work, money, babies, freedom and love. The novelist Ann Quin says she appears to be a 'singular girl, singular and single’ but questions the use she makes of her freedom. The Pop artist Pauline Boty reveals she married 'the first man I could talk very freely to’ ten days after meeting him. Kathy Collier, who worked with Dunn in a Battersea sweet factory, talks about what it takes to 'get out’ of a life that isn’t fulfilling. Edna O’Brien tells us about the time she inadvertently stole a brown georgette scarf and the lesson she took from it: 'Morality is not the same thing as abstinence.’ After more than fifty years out of print, Talking to Women is still as sparkling, honest, profound, funny and wise as when it was first published.
2023, English
Softcover, 288 pages, 18 x 12 cm
Published by
After 8 Books / Paris
$53.00 - Out of stock
This third printing of Faux Pas is expanded by new drawings and texts, including the previously unpublished lecture on drawing. The volume gathers a significant selection of Sillman’s essays, reviews and lectures, most of them made specially for the book. It aims at revealing the originality of Sillman’s reflection as she addresses the possibilities of art today, favouring wrestling over dandyism, forms over symbols, with critical sense and humour.
Since the 1970s, Sillman – a beloved and key figure of the New York art scene – has developed a singular body of work that includes large-scale gestural paintings blending abstraction with representation, as well as zines and iPad animations.
Over the past decade, Sillman has also produced stimulating essays on the practice of art or the work of other artists: for example, re-evaluating the work of the abstract expressionists with a queer eye; elaborating on the role of awkwardness and the body in the artistic process; and discussing in depth the role and meanings of colour and shape.
Based in New York City, Amy Sillman (born 1955) is an artist whose work consistently combines the visceral with the intellectual. She began to study painting in the 1970s at the School of Visual Arts and she received her MFA from Bard College in 1995. Her work has been exhibited internationally, including at the Whitney Biennial in 2014 and the Venice Biennale in 2022; her writing has appeared in Bookforum and Artforum, among other publications. She is currently represented by Gladstone Gallery, New York.
1991, English
Hardcover (w. dust jacket), 210 pages, 24 x 16.5 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / fine
Published by
Indiana University Press / Indiana
$70.00 - Out of stock
First edition of Paul Celan : Holograms of Darkness by Amy Colin, published in 1991 by Indiana University Press.
Paul Celan, one of the greatest poets of the post-Holocaust decades, strove to utter the unspeakable. In his literary struggle to respond to the Holocaust, he exploded literary traditions and, out of their residue, created a new poetry.
" ... Colin's brilliant new book ... demonstrates how deeply linked Celan's work is to the Romanian Jewish experience of the 1930s and '40s... A landmark in Celan studies and a major contribution to the study of contemporary poetry and theory."—Choice
"Unquestionably this book has much to offer: its discussion of the early Celan, especially his Roumanian poems; its survey of the cultural milieu out of which he came; and its valuable explications of hitherto unexplored Celan poems are excellent contributions to scholarship."—Alfred Hoelzel
"A wide ranging examination of the multifarious cultural background of one of the most important poets of this century and a brilliant analysis of his work."—Magill's Literary Annual
"In a hauntingly urgent voice, Amy Colin ... unravels and connects for the Celan scholar some of the intricacies of his early and his late poetic creations."—Modern Judaism
Work praised by Beda Allemann and Peter Demetz for the profound depth of background knowledge of Romanian, Ukrainian and Yiddish culture. Awarded "the outstanding book of 1992" by the American magazine "Choice".
Very Good—Fine copy in VG—Fine dust jacket.