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
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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.
1989, English
Softcover, 174 pages, 21.2 x 14.5 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Atlas Press / London
$90.00 - Out of stock
Rare first English translation of this 1897 novel by French symbolist writer and 'pataphysician Alfred Jarry (1873—1907). Translated by Alexis Lykiard, with introduction by Alastair Brotchie and additional verse translations by Stanley Chapman. Preceded by Alfred Jarry’s The Other Alcestis, translated by John Harman. Illustrated by Peter Blegvad, with an afterword by Alastair Brotchie.
Alfred Jarry is chiefly known for his creation of Ubu, in a play which is acknowledged as the first "absurd" drama, but this was only one facet of a writer who is now seen as one of the most important influences on the whole of the French literature of this century. Jarry wrote his great visionary novel Days and Nights when he was only 24, and it has much in common with the works of two other youthful geniuses: Rimbaud and Lautréamont. The book is hard to describe. Its hero, an army conscript, uses various means to escape his intolerable everyday life. Eventually he is swallowed up by dreams, hallucinations, "artificial paradises." He abandons reality altogether. He also pursues a strange erotic quest: "The Double." Jarry describes this desertion in a dense prose that is lucid, complex, paradoxical and humorous. The narrative is intercut with nightmares, parables and theoretical passages where logic spirals into self-destruction.
Never translated before, due to the evident problems it poses, this novel is certainly Jarry's greatest achievement.
Days and Nights also has an historical importance. Although written in 1897, it was years ahead of its time. It was the culmination of French Symbolism, yet foresaw many of the characteristics and concerns of the "modern novel" — it profoundly influenced both Joyce and the Surrealists.
Very Good copy but with some laminate peeling from back cover corners.
1998, English
Softcover, 172 pages, 19 x 17 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Atlas Press / London
$65.00 - In stock -
First English translation, first edition of Jean Ray's masterpiece, Malpertuis, translated by Iain White published by Alastair Brotchie's mighty Atlas Press. Long out-of-print in this edition.
"A manuscript stolen from a monastery, the ancient stone house of a sea-trading dynasty, which may be haunted. These are familiar ingredients for a Gothic novel, but something far more strange and disconcerting is taking place within the walls of Malpertuis as the relatives gather for the impending death of Uncle Cassave. The techniques of H. P. Lovecraft, when transplanted into the suffocating Catholic context of a Belgium scarred by the inquisition, produce in Jean Ray's masterpiece a story of monumental intensity from which events of startling ferocity break the surface- without ever lessening the suspense of the tale's approaching apocalyptic dénouement. Terrifying, all-absorbing, this novel is one of the most celebrated examples of the modern gothic genre in Europe and should have been available in English years ago."
Good—VG copy with some corner wear/creasing, soft buckling.
2021, English
Hardcover, 192 pages, 17.2 x 19.8 cm
Published by
Atlas Press / London
$50.00 - In stock -
Unica Zürn’s celebrated autobiography, plus the greatest of her short fictional texts, edited and in a revised by translation by Malcolm Green.
In the 25 years since Atlas Press first published this account by Unica Zürn of her long history of mental crises, she has come to be recognised as a great artist at least the equal of her partner, the Surrealist Hans Bellmer.
Yet her work is barely comprehensible without the texts printed here, in which she demonstrates how her familiarity with Surrealist conceptions of the psyche allowed her to welcome the most alarming experiences as offering her access to an inner existence that was the vital source for her artistic output. The introduction here was the first study to consider her life and work from this perspective.
Zürn’s initial mental collapse was initiated when she encountered her fantasy figure “the man of Jasmine” in the real world in the person of the writer Henri Michaux. Her meeting with him plunged her into a world of hallucination in which visions of her desires, anxieties and events from her unresolved past overwhelmed her present life. Her return to “reality” was constantly interrupted by alternate visionary and depressive periods, and her description of these episodes reveals how language itself formed a part of the “divinatory” method that could aid her recovery or predict a new crisis. Her compulsion for composing anagrams allowed her to dissect everyday language so as to release from it an astonishing flood of messages, threats and evocations. This method, if such it can be called, and Zürn’s eloquent yet direct style make this book a masterpiece of literature as well as providing an acute first-hand insight into extreme psychological states.
In 1970 Unica Zürn committed suicide by throwing herself from the sixth-floor apartment that she shared with Bellmer.
2013, English
Hardcover, 176 pages, 17.4 x 19.6 cm
Published by
Atlas Press / London
$46.00 - In stock -
Mystery, the marvellous, the city of Paris transmuted by love, and Sanglot the Corsair’s pursuit of the siren Louise Lame: these are the essential ingredients of this masterpiece of early Surrealism. It was originally published in 1924 to immediate and lasting acclaim — except from the public authorities who immediately censored whole sections (here restored).
How describe a novel of such virtuosity and bravura, which never behaves as one would expect? Characters appear and vanish according to whim and desire, they walk underwater, nonchalantly accept astounding coincidences. It’s a hymn to the erotic, an adventure story illumined by the shades of Sade, Lautréamont and Jack the Ripper, a dream at once violent and tender, in fact the perfect embodiment of the Surrealist spirit: joyful, despairing, and effortlessly scandalous.
Desnos was one of the earliest members of the Paris Surrealist group. His remarkable talents first emerged during the “Period of Sleeping Fits”, when the group was investigating unconscious and trance states. Able to put himself in trance at will, he would pour out sonnets, prophecies, enigmatic drawings. “Desnos more than any of us got closest to the Surrealist truth,” wrote Breton in their first manifesto.
An active member of the Resistance, Desnos died of typhus two weeks after his liberation from the Nazi concentration camp at Terezin.
Translated and introduced by Terry Hale.
1992, English
Softcover, 132 pages, 21 x 13.5 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Atlas Press / London
$50.00 - Out of stock
First 1992 English Atlas Press edition.
A literary masterpiece of early Surrealism from the virtuoso of automatic writing, Robert Desnos.
Mystery, the marvelous, the city of Paris transmuted by love, and Sanglot the Corsair's pursuit of the siren Louise Lame: these are the essential ingredients of Liberty or Love!, a masterpiece of early Surrealism written by Robert Desnos (1900-1945) and first published in 1924 to immediate acclaim. Characters appear and disappear at whim; they walk underwater and accept the most astounding coincidences with calm nonchalance. This crown jewel of Surrealist eroticism is part hymn to the erotic and part adventure story illumined by the shades of Lautréamont, Jack the Ripper and Sade. Desnos was famously lauded by André Breton--in his First Manifesto of Surrealism--for having come "closest to the Surrealist truth," and his novel is a dream at once violent and tender--the perfect embodiment, in fact, of the Surrealist spirit: joyful and despairing, and effortlessly scandalous.
Very Good copy some wear to covers.
2018, English
Hardcover, 480 pages, 17.4 x 23.2 cm
Published by
Atlas Press / London
$65.00 - In stock -
Georges Bataille's secret society, long the stuff of legend, is now revealed in its texts, meditations, rules and prohibitions.
This book recounts what must be one of the most unusual intellectual journeys of modern times, in which the influential philosopher, cultural theorist and occasional pornographer Georges Bataille (1897-1962), having spent the early 1930s in far-left groups opposing the rise of fascism, abandoned that approach in order to transfer the struggle onto "the mythological plane."
In 1937, Bataille founded two groups in order to explore the combinations of power and the "sacred" at work in society. The first group, the College of Sociology, gave lectures that were intended to reveal the hidden undercurrents within a society on the verge of catastrophe. The second group was Acéphale, a genuine secret society and anti-religion whose emblem was a headless figure that, in part, represented the death of God. Until the discovery a few years ago of the group's internal papers (which include theoretical texts, meditations, minutes of meetings, rules and prohibitions and even a membership list), almost nothing was known of its activities.
This book is the first to collect a representative selection of the writings of Bataille, and of those close to him, in the years leading up to World War II. The texts published here comprise lectures given to the College of Sociology by Bataille, Roger Caillois and Michel Leiris, essays from the Acéphale journal and a large cache of the internal papers from the secret society. A desperate narrative unfolds, wherein Bataille risked all in a wholly unreasonable quest--with a few fellow travelers, he undertook what he later described as a "journey out of this world."
Additional texts by Roger Caillois, Pierre Klossowski, Michel Leiris, and by Georges Ambrosino, Pierre Andler, Michel Carrouges, Jacques Chavy, Jean Dautry, Henri Dobier, Henri Dussat, Imre Kelemen, Jean Rollin, Patrick Waldberg.
And with drawings by André Masson
Highest recommendation!
1996, English
Softcover, 176 pages, 23 x 21 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / average
Published by
Atlas Press / London
$85.00 - Out of stock
First edition of the incredible and sadly long out-of-print Encyclopedia Acephalica, published by Atlas Press in 1996 as part of their mighty Atlas Arkhive : Documents of the Avant Garde series.
Bataille’s thought is complex, and his books make few concessions to the reader. The first series of texts here, however, were written for a wider audience by Bataille and his friends, in the form of a Critical Dictionary, and they provide a witty, poetic and concise introduction to his ideas. The Dictionary appeared in the magazine edited by Bataille, Documents, in the early 1930s, and includes entries from prominent ethnologists and cultural commentators of the day. The second series of texts here, the Da Costa Encyclopédique was published anonymously after the liberation of Paris in 1947 by members of the Acéphale group and writers associated with the Surrealists. Both cover the essential concepts of Bataille and his associates: sacred sociology; scatology, death and the erotic; base materialism; the aesthetics of the formless; sacrifice, the festival and the politics of the tumult etc: a new description of the limits of being human. Humour, albeit, sardonic, is not absent from these remarkable redefinitions of the most heterogeneous objects or ideas: Camel, Church, Dust, Museum, Spittle, Skyscraper, Threshold, Work – to name but a few.
While the Documents group was celebrated for joining together artists, authors, sociologists and ethnologists (among the most important of their time) in a literary and philosophical project, the Acéphale group was more mysterious. Until recently even its membership was only vaguely known, and its activities remained secret (these are explored in detail for the first time in English in The Sacred Conspiracy, published by Atlas Press, also available at World Food Books). The origins of the Da Costa only became known in 1993, the present volume revealed for the first time its principal compilers: Robert Lebel, Isabelle Waldberg and Marcel Duchamp, but the identity of the authors of a large part of it is still unknown.
Texts by Georges Bataille, Michel Leiris, Marcel Griaule, Carl Einstein, Robert Desnos and writers associated with the Acéphale and Surrealist groups.
Introduced by Alastair Brotchie. Translated by Iain White, Dominic Faccini, Annette Michelson, John Harman, Alexis Lykiard.
Average—Good, cover with edge and corner wear and some some damages from spine sticker removal, fuzzed corners, otherwise Good pre-loved copy throughout.
2005, English
Softcover (in card slipcase), 160 pages, 19 x 17 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / fine
Published by
Atlas Press / London
$190.00 - Out of stock
Rare first edition of this slipcased first English translation of Hans Bellmer's subversive Surrealist classic, Die Puppe (The Doll), first published in German in 1962, here translated and Introduced by Malcolm Green and published by the great Atlas Press, London.
Hans Bellmer (1902—1975) is one of the most illustrious names in the field of erotic art and Surrealism. The Doll comprises a series of photographs that have acquired iconic status and which exemplify the Surrealists’ conception of “convulsive beauty”. They are accompanied by a body of theoretical, poetic and speculative texts written between the 1930s and early 1960s which reveal Bellmer as one whose ideas are a “scandal for reason” (Joë Bousquet). But there is a lot more to Bellmer’s work than is at first apparent and the insights his writing provides into his work is crucial to its understanding, in particular those from the final edition of The Doll which are here translated in full. (The other editions widely available on the net mostly contain only the illustrations.) In these texts Bellmer weaves together a remarkably disparate set of concepts — covering such diverse fields as the body, psychology, anagrams, chance, the laws of optics and mathematics, the fourth dimension, hermaphroditism, the marvellous, intuition — into a theory of eroticism which forms the underlying rationale of his fearsome art.
Apart from the extensive texts by Bellmer it includes a suite of poems by Paul Éluard, 15 colour photographs, 10 in black and white, plus numerous line drawings. This English edition is based exactly upon the final edition overseen by Bellmer himself, the texts having been translated for the first time from the final German version rather than the preliminary French versions.
Near Fine copy.
1997, English
Softcover, 269 pages, 19 x 17.15 cm
Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Atlas Press / London
$65.00 - Out of stock
Writings by Arthur Cravan, Jacques Rigaut, Julien Torma & Jacques Vaché. With Introductions and biographical essays on each author. Translated by Terry Hale, Paul Lenti and Iain White, introduced by Roger Conover, Terry Hale and Paul Lenti.
These four “writers” took the nihilism of the movement to its ultimate conclusion, their works are the remnants of lives lived to the limit and then cast aside with nonchalance and disdain: Vaché died of a drug overdose, Rigaut shot himself, Cravan and Torma simply vanished, their fates still a mystery. Yet their fragmentary works — to which they attached so little importance — still exert a powerful allure and were a vital inspiration for the literary movements that followed them. Vaché’s bitter humour, Cravan’s energetic invective, Rigaut’s dandyfied introspection, and Torma’s imperturbable asperity: all had their influence.
Atlas Anti-classic 2, a corrected 2005 reprint of the edition of 1995. All prints of this wonderful anthology are long out-of-print.
Very Good copy.
1996, English
Softcover, 176 pages, 23 x 21 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / good
Published by
Atlas Press / London
$90.00 - Out of stock
First edition of the incredible and sadly long out-of-print Encyclopedia Acephalica, published by Atlas Press in 1996 as part of their mighty Atlas Arkhive : Documents of the Avant Garde series.
Bataille’s thought is complex, and his books make few concessions to the reader. The first series of texts here, however, were written for a wider audience by Bataille and his friends, in the form of a Critical Dictionary, and they provide a witty, poetic and concise introduction to his ideas. The Dictionary appeared in the magazine edited by Bataille, Documents, in the early 1930s, and includes entries from prominent ethnologists and cultural commentators of the day. The second series of texts here, the Da Costa Encyclopédique was published anonymously after the liberation of Paris in 1947 by members of the Acéphale group and writers associated with the Surrealists. Both cover the essential concepts of Bataille and his associates: sacred sociology; scatology, death and the erotic; base materialism; the aesthetics of the formless; sacrifice, the festival and the politics of the tumult etc: a new description of the limits of being human. Humour, albeit, sardonic, is not absent from these remarkable redefinitions of the most heterogeneous objects or ideas: Camel, Church, Dust, Museum, Spittle, Skyscraper, Threshold, Work – to name but a few.
While the Documents group was celebrated for joining together artists, authors, sociologists and ethnologists (among the most important of their time) in a literary and philosophical project, the Acéphale group was more mysterious. Until recently even its membership was only vaguely known, and its activities remained secret (these are explored in detail for the first time in English in The Sacred Conspiracy, published by Atlas Press, also available at World Food Books). The origins of the Da Costa only became known in 1993, the present volume revealed for the first time its principal compilers: Robert Lebel, Isabelle Waldberg and Marcel Duchamp, but the identity of the authors of a large part of it is still unknown.
Texts by Georges Bataille, Michel Leiris, Marcel Griaule, Carl Einstein, Robert Desnos and writers associated with the Acéphale and Surrealist groups.
Introduced by Alastair Brotchie. Translated by Iain White, Dominic Faccini, Annette Michelson, John Harman, Alexis Lykiard.
Good—Very Good copy, with edge wear to covers and corners, otherwise VG throughout. No spine creasing.
1987, English
Softcover, 118 pages, 21.5 x 13.5 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Atlas Press / London
$90.00 - Out of stock
Rare 1987 Atlas Press edition of Raymond Queneau's The Skin of Dreams. This excellent translation by H.J. Kaplan was done in collaboration with the author in 1948.
Jacques l'Aumone, the hero of 'The Skin of Dreams', en-counters within its pages — the horrors of existential ontalgia (a form of asthma but more 'posh'), the delights of lice breeding, low life and states of grace on the outskirts of Paris, and pugilism in malodorous South American ports. Later, ho incarnates the illusions of his former compatriots on the silver screen, the 'skin' of the title. Behind the slang and comedy lies a richness of meaning which, as usual, makes Queneou's novel impossible to summarise.
Raymond Qucneau, best known as the author of "Zazie in the Metro" was a man of many parts. One-time Surrealist, mathematician, encyclopaedist, philosopher—his collection of Kojeve's lectures on Hegel is now recognised as the foundation of modern French philosophy. Ho wrote 15 novels, poems, speculations, was a member of the College of Pataphysics and founder of the OuliPo. Most of his pre-occupations find their way into his novels, but always under the guise of HUMOUR.
Very Good copy.
1996, English
Softcover, 176 pages, 23 x 21 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Atlas Press / London
$65.00 - Out of stock
First edition of the incredible and sadly long out-of-print Encyclopedia Acephalica, published by Atlas Press in 1996 as part of their mighty Atlas Arkhive : Documents of the Avant Garde series..
Bataille’s thought is complex, and his books make few concessions to the reader. The first series of texts here, however, were written for a wider audience by Bataille and his friends, in the form of a Critical Dictionary, and they provide a witty, poetic and concise introduction to his ideas. The Dictionary appeared in the magazine edited by Bataille, Documents, in the early 1930s, and includes entries from prominent ethnologists and cultural commentators of the day. The second series of texts here, the Da Costa Encyclopédique was published anonymously after the liberation of Paris in 1947 by members of the Acéphale group and writers associated with the Surrealists. Both cover the essential concepts of Bataille and his associates: sacred sociology; scatology, death and the erotic; base materialism; the aesthetics of the formless; sacrifice, the festival and the politics of the tumult etc: a new description of the limits of being human. Humour, albeit, sardonic, is not absent from these remarkable redefinitions of the most heterogeneous objects or ideas: Camel, Church, Dust, Museum, Spittle, Skyscraper, Threshold, Work – to name but a few.
While the Documents group was celebrated for joining together artists, authors, sociologists and ethnologists (among the most important of their time) in a literary and philosophical project, the Acéphale group was more mysterious. Until recently even its membership was only vaguely known, and its activities remained secret (these are explored in detail for the first time in English in The Sacred Conspiracy, published by Atlas Press, also available at World Food Books). The origins of the Da Costa only became known in 1993, the present volume revealed for the first time its principal compilers: Robert Lebel, Isabelle Waldberg and Marcel Duchamp, but the identity of the authors of a large part of it is still unknown.
Texts by Georges Bataille, Michel Leiris, Marcel Griaule, Carl Einstein, Robert Desnos and writers associated with the Acéphale and Surrealist groups.
Introduced by Alastair Brotchie. Translated by Iain White, Dominic Faccini, Annette Michelson, John Harman, Alexis Lykiard.
Very Good copy, with some light edge wear.
2015, English
Hardcover, 192 pages, 17.5 x 19.5 cm
Published by
Atlas Press / London
$52.00 - Out of stock
This book collects the writings of a radical group of writers close to Paris Surrealism—principally René Daumal and Roger Gilbert-Lecomte—as published in their now legendary magazine, Le Grand Jeu (The Great Game). Le Grand Jeu ran to three issues between 1928 and 1930, before collapsing due to its editors' infighting, drug use and vehemently unreasonable aspirations for both art and life. The Grand Jeu is often associated with Surrealism (they were invited to join the group), but their ideas were far more extreme. The magazine was the public face of a group of artists and writers who systematically attacked their perceptions of reality through narcotics, anaesthesia and near-death experiences.
Le Grand Jeu describes a politico-mystical outlook which combined a critique of the apathy and repression of contemporary Western society with a quest to take leave of the individual ego and to reconnect with a collective Universal Mind. The group's esoteric program united narcotic and parapsychological practices with asceticism, revolutionary politics (the Russian Revolution was barely a decade old) and a prophetic mode of poetry which they identified in antecedents such as Rimbaud and Mallarmé. In this definitive collection, the theories of the Grand Jeu are presented in the group's own words for the first time, through the essays and articles which formed the bulk of their magazine.
2013, English
Softcover, 184 pages, 19.6 x 17.5 cm
Published by
Atlas Press / London
$46.00 - Out of stock
In a novel of extremes, whose disgust with “things as they are” includes the whole idea of “novels”, Michel Leiris pursues his heroine, Aurora, through a visionary landscape shot through with catastrophes — and his lucid yet baroque language, with its incredible descriptions and ever more extravagant metaphors, is only just able to keep pace. Leiris himself, looking back on this novel from his youth, exactly described its tone:
… despite the “black” or “frenetic” style of its blustering prose, what I like about this work is the appetite it expresses for an unattainable purity, the faith it places in the untamed imagination, the horror it manifests with regard to any kind of fixity — in fact, the way almost every page of it refuses to accept that human condition against which some will never cease to rebel, however reasonably society may be ordered.
Aurora is one of the high-points of literary Surrealism, and Leiris was an early member of the group. Close to Georges Bataille, Picasso and Jean-Paul Sartre, he was a pivotal figure in post-war Paris. A director of the Musée de l’Homme, Leiris wrote important studies in the fields of ethnology and anthropology, as well as a sequence of autobiographical works regarded as classics of modern French literature.
Aurora translated and introduced by Anna Warby, Cardinal Point translated by Terry Hale.
2017, English
Softcover, 160 pages, 14.4 x 16.8 cm
Published by
Atlas Press / London
$30.00 - In stock -
Written in early 1922, this is the first prose work by Surrealist poet and exemplary practitioner of automatic writing Robert Desnos (preceding Mourning for Mourning and Liberty or Love!, also published by Atlas Press).
Its protagonists are swept into violent journeys through Paris by train and steamship; fabulous events consume their everyday lives; oracles spout nonsense or wisdom. All of Desnos' friends in the Paris Dada movement--André Breton, Louis Aragon and Benjamin Péret, among others--make an appearance, and all find a grave in the "cemetery" toward the end of the book, for the past must be buried (even though most of these now legendary names were then in their 20s and had barely made their mark).
By the time this book was written, the Dada movement seemed played out, killed off by a mixture of public success, internal dissent and boredom with the predictability of its scandals. The Punishments of Hell lies between Dada and Surrealism, harking back to the belligerent obfuscation of, say, Tristan Tzara and overwhelming it with the savage lyricism for which Desnos would become known.
Robert Desnos (1900-45) was one of the most celebrated and celebratory of the writers allied to the Paris Dada and Surrealist groups. He effortlessly combined mystery, eroticism and an irrepressible joi de vivre in a flood of poetry, prose fiction, radio plays and even children's verse. An active member of the French resistance, he died of typhoid just days after his liberation from the Terezin concentration camp.
2019, English
Hardcover, 192 pages, 17.5 x 19.5 cm
Published by
Atlas Press / London
$49.00 - In stock -
Translated and introduced by John Walker, afterword by Alastair Brotchie. Foreword by Italo Calvino, translated by Martin McLaughlin.
In Manganelli’s innumerable universes, beyond the gods we know or suspect we know is an endless array of other gods. Everything that is seemingly finite or known in our world becomes infinite and unknown. We die, we find ourselves among the other dead, and we die again, only to find ourselves somewhere even more unknown and with death still awaiting. We are both monarch and victim in a gothic simulation illuminated by sombre flashes of sardonic rhetoric that reveal only an astounding desolate wreck. Something of this landscape’s significance can be inferred from Manganelli’s manifesto “Literature as Deception” (1967), which elucidates the author’s notions of the literary “object”, whose devious nature is embodied and mirrored in the elaborate “lies” he constructs here in a style even more lush than the English Romantics he so admired. Manganelli’s paradoxically optimistic fatalism is founded upon a defiance of all the gods — in the knowledge that when they too perish, we are fated to invent others to replace them.
Giorgio Manganelli (1922-1990) is a writer almost unknown in English. He was a central member, with the likes of Eco and Sanguineti, of the Italian avant-garde Gruppo 63, named after its date of formation, and one of the editors of its collective publications. Ever the awkward member of this squad, his writing was greatly admired by Calvino. Manganelli’s theoretical and creative works are deeply intertwined and never more so than with his notorious manifesto (also translated here), which, so it seems, underpins the entire book in a wholly unexpected and original way.
2019, English
Softcover, 80 pages, 14.8 x 17 cm
Published by
Atlas Press / London
$26.00 - In stock -
Illustrated by Roland Topor. Translated and introduced by Andrew Hodgson.
The works of the French author and artist Roland Topor, who died 20 years ago, are currently undergoing a major reassessment in his homeland. Major exhibitions have been mounted and all his books are being brought back into print. This is the first of them to be translated into English for some 50 years, and more will certainly follow. Topor was something of an all-round maverick, known for his paintings and drawings as much as for his novels (The Tenant was filmed by Polanski), plays and short stories. He was also a film-maker, actor and the co-founder, with Arrabal and Jodorowsky, of the Panic movement, whose violently orgiastic performances provoked widespread condemnation.
Topor’s works are dominated by a sense of irrational everyday menace that could be interpreted as humour, but a form of humour pushed deep into discomfort, almost to the point of total horror. The reader slowly becomes aware that, alongside preoccupations that some might think morbid, all is being orchestrated by a distinctively optimistic sensibility. From the collision of these factors, rooted in the author’s experiences and his irrepressible personality, come works increasingly seen as unique in European art and writing of the late 20th century. The present text is perhaps a fable, perhaps a love story of enormous tenderness, or it may be a sequence of ever more sinister events that culminate in horror and atrocity. It all depends on your point of view. The central event in this narrative cannot be revealed here, but its sheer implausible reality is utterly convincing and the effect is unforgettable.
2015, English
Softcover, 96 pages, 15 x 17 cm
Published by
Atlas Press / London
$35.00 - Out of stock
Illustrated by Rosa Rosa. Translated and introduced by John Walker and winner of an Italian Institute translation prize.
Sam Dunn is Dead, described by its author as a “Futurist Novel”, was first published in book form by Filippo Marinetti’s Edizioni Futuriste. However, one will search in vain for any mention of this work in anthologies or histories of Futurism. This is doubtless because it is so unlike anything else produced by Futurism (so ardent, so masculine, so positive and so absurdly serious). Sam Dunn is none of these, above all else it is a miniature masterpiece of black humour — the last thing likely to be associated with the posturings of Marinetti and his acolytes. Not only is Sam Dunn funny, despairing, cerebral and ludicrous, it also traces a history of the modern spirit. Its eponymous hero, a poet in languid 1890s mould, unleashes a thoroughly contemporary apocalypse upon the world. Subsequent chapters could be taken for Dadaist or Surrealist texts (but written a decade before their time), and then the whole edifice is fatally undermined by forces that are both banal and… unusual.
Corra later considered his novel a failure, but he was mistaken. His sensitivity to the great undertows of history that were then working their way to the surface seems alarmingly prescient — and anyway his opinion does nothing to inhibit the reader’s simple enjoyment of the book’s deliriously ebullient nihilism.
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
Hardcover, 210 pages, 17.6 x 19.8 cm
Published by
Atlas Press / London
$55.00 - In stock -
This novel, much of it written amidst the horror of the trenches when Louis Aragon was a medical orderly during the First World War, demonstrates the chasm that separates the works of the artists and writers of what would become Dadaism and those, say, of the English war poets.
In a world of moral destitution beyond any rational forbearance, what can remain? How can one write at all, let alone something as absurd as a novel? Anicet or the Panorama is both a roman à clef (Aragon’s friends, including André Breton, are recognisable) and a novel of the total liquidation of a culture that had allowed this to come to pass: even literary heroes must be confronted and superseded. As fast-paced, funny and surprising as a Hollywood silent movie, its narrative of fabulous crimes and scandals sweeps through a panorama of Parisian society as its protagonist Anicet becomes subordinated to the mysterious Mire, a woman who is the incarnation of “modern beauty”. Anicet is seduced into a life of crime, which he accepts with nonchalance and an ironic integrity that he maintains to the bitter end of his journey of self-immolation.
Aragon’s precisely crafted and sardonic prose reveals a world that is no more than a tragic puppet show, with every scene self-evidently staged. This furious tempest of a book launched Aragon’s career and is one of the cornerstones of the Paris Dada movement. Despite the fact that he went on to become one of the most prolific and influential French writers of the twentieth century, it is not at all unreasonable to consider this book to be his greatest work.
Translated and introduced by Antony Melville, and the runner-up to the 2017 Scott-Moncrieff Translation Prize.
2014, English
Harcover, 224 pages, 17.6 x 23.4 cm
Published by
Atlas Press / London
$69.00 - Out of stock
Dismissed as an eccentric by many, Satie has come to be seen as a key influence on 20th- and 21st-century music. His compositions include, among other works, the ubiquitous Gymnopédies, the Three Pieces in the Form of a Pear and the Dadaist opera Relâche. In later life he gathered about him Les Six, the cream of the new generation of French composers, and his influence has since continued to widen; John Cage and the New York School composers hailed him as “indispensable”, and more recently certain of his pieces have been seen as prefiguring both minimalist and ambient music.
The appeal of his writings, however, goes far beyond their musical value. He is revealed as one of the most beguiling of absurdists, in the mode of Lewis Carroll or Edward Lear, but with a strong streak of Dadaism (a movement with which he collaborated to some extent). These poignant, sly and witty texts, often as short as his briefer musical pieces, embody all his contradictions. Included here are his “autobiographical” Memoirs of an Amnesic; the gnomic annotations to his musical scores (For the Shrivelled and the Dimwits, I have written a suitably ponderous chorale… I dedicate this chorale to those who do not like me); the publications of his private church; his absurdist play Medusa’s Snare; advertising copy for his local suburban newspaper; and the mysterious and elaborately calligraphed “private advertisements” found stuffed behind his piano after his death.
Satie referred to himself as “a man in the manner of Adam (he of Paradise)”, and added: “My humour is reminiscent of Cromwell’s. I am also indebted to Christopher Columbus, as the American spirit has sometimes tapped me on the shoulder, and I have joyfully felt its ironically icy bite.” He died as he lived: “without quite ceasing to smile.” This is the largest selection of the writings of Erik Satie yet to appear in English.
Edited and introduced by Ornella Volta, translated by Antony Melville.
The smallest work by Satie is small the way a keyhole is small. Everything changes when you put your eye to it. — Jean Cocteau