World Food Books' programme is largely produced on Kulin Nation land. We acknowledge the Wurundjeri people of the Kulin Nation as the first and continuing custodians of this land, and pay respect to their Elders past, present, and emerging.
World Food Books is an arts and special interests bookshop in Naarm / Melbourne. Founded in 2010, World Food Books is devoted to the presentation of a rotating, hand-selection of international art, design, literary and counterculture publications with an emphasis on the anti-traditional, the experimental, the avant-garde, the heretic, the marginal.
Presenting new titles alongside rare and out-of-print books, catalogues and journals spanning the fields of modern and contemporary art, design, photography, illustration, film, literature, poetry, cultural theory, philosophy, sexuality, popular and underground culture in its many radical forms, World Food Books wishes to encourage adventurous, thoughtful and open-minded reading, looking, writing, and exchange of publishing and ideas, both current and historical.
As well as our bookshop, located in Melbourne's historical Nicholas Building, all of our inventory is available internationally via our online mail-order service.
World Food Books semi-regularly co-ordinates "Occasions", a programme of exhibits and events at the bookshop and in partnership with other hosts (such as museums and art galleries) that develop out of the activities, relationships and content of the bookshop itself.
World Food Books
The Nicholas Building
37 Swanston Street
Room 5, Level 6
Melbourne 3000
Australia
SHOP HOURS:
THU—FRI 12—6 PM
WEB-SHOP OPEN 24/7
World Food Books
Postal Address:
PO Box 435
Flinders Lane
Victoria 8009
Australia
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All prices in AUD (Australian dollars)
Pick-Ups
Pick-up orders can be collected in our bookshop during opening hours after order date. Please collect any Pick-up orders within 2 weeks of ordering as we have limited storage space. Orders will be released back into stock if not collected within this time. No refunds can be made for pick-ups left un-collected. If you cannot make it in to the bookshop in this time-frame, please choose postage option.
Return Policy
All sales are final. We do accept returns (for refund or exchange) for items received in error. All our orders are packed with special care using heavy-duty padding and cardboard book-mailers or bubble mailers (for smaller books), using reinforcement where required. We cannot take responsibility for any lost, stolen or damaged parcels.
Insurance
Should you wish to insure your package, please email us directly after placing your order and we can organise this at a small extra expense. Although all standard/express tracked packages are very safe and dependable, we cannot take responsibility for any lost, stolen or damaged parcels. We recommend insurance on valuable orders.
Interested in selling your old books, catalogues, journals, magazines, comics, fanzines, ephemera? We are always looking for interesting, unusual and out-of-print books to buy. We only buy books in our fields of interest and specialty, and that we feel we can resell.
We base these prices on desirability, market value, in-print prices, condition and our current stock levels. We offer cash, store credit, and can take stock on consignment. All
about 25% of the price we expect to get when we sell them, or 30% in store credit. We base these prices on desirability, market value, in-print prices, condition and our current stock levels.
Sell your books any day of the week. You can drop them off and return later. If you have a lot of books, we can visit your Sydney home.
We buy books that we feel we can resell. We offer about 25 % of the price we expect to get when we sell them, or 30% in store credit. We base these prices on desirability, market value, in-print prices, condition and our current stock levels.
Philadelphia Wireman
03 August - 01 September, 2018
World Food Books is proud to announce our next Occasion, the first presentation of sculptures by Philadelphia Wireman in Australia.
The Philadelphia Wireman sculptures were found abandoned in an alley off Philadelphia’s South Street on trash night in 1982. Their discovery in a rapidly-changing neighbourhood undergoing extensive renovation, compounded with the failure of all attempts to locate the artist, suggests that the works may have been discarded after the maker’s death. Dubbed the "Philadelphia Wireman" during the first exhibition of this work, in 1985, the maker’s name, age, ethnicity, and even gender remain uncertain. The entire collection totals approximately 1200 pieces, all intricately bound together with tightly-wound heavy-gauge wire (along with a few small, abstract marker drawings, reminiscent both of Mark Tobey and J.B. Murry). The dense construction of the work, despite a modest range of scale and materials, is singularly obsessive and disciplined in design: a wire armature or exoskeleton firmly binds a bricolage of found objects including plastic, glass, food packaging, umbrella parts, tape, rubber, batteries, pens, leather, reflectors, nuts and bolts, nails, foil, coins, toys, watches, eyeglasses, tools, and jewellery.
Heavy with associations—anthropomorphic, zoomorphic, and socio-cultural responses to wrapped detritus—the totemic sculptures by Philadelphia Wireman have been discussed in the context of work created to fulfil the shamanistic needs of alternative religions in American culture. Curators, collectors, and critics have variously compared certain pieces to sculpture from Classical antiquity, Native American medicine bundles, African-American memory jugs, and African fetish objects. Reflecting the artist’s prolific and incredibly focused scavenging impulse, and despite—or perhaps enhanced by—their anonymity, these enigmatic objects function as urban artefacts and arbiters of power, though their origin and purpose is unknown. Philadelphia Wireman, whatever their identity, possessed an astonishing ability to isolate and communicate the concepts of power and energy through the selection and transformation of ordinary materials. Over the course of the past two decades, this collection has come to be regarded as an important discovery in the field of self-taught art and vernacular art.
Presented in collaboration with Fleisher-Ollman Gallery, Philadelphia, and Robert Heald, Wellington.
Susan Te Kahurangi King
02 February - 10 March, 2018
Susan Te Kahurangi King (24 February 1951 - ) has been a confident and prolific artist since she was a young child, drawing with readily available materials - pencils, ballpoint pens and felt-tip markers, on whatever paper is at hand. Between the ages of four and six Susan slowly ceased verbal communication. Her grandparents William and Myrtle Murphy had developed a special bond with Susan so they took on caring responsibilities for extended periods. Myrtle began informally archiving her work, carefully collecting and storing the drawings and compiling scrapbooks. No drawing was insignificant; every scrap of paper was kept. The King family are now the custodians of a vast collection containing over 7000 individual works, from tiny scraps of paper through to 5 meter long rolls.
The scrapbooks and diaries reveal Myrtle to be a woman of great patience and compassion, seeking to understand a child who was not always behaving as expected. She encouraged Susan to be observant, to explore her environment and absorb all the sights and sounds. Myrtle would show Susan’s drawings to friends and people in her community that she had dealings with, such as shopkeepers and postal workers, but this was not simply a case of a grandmother’s bias. She recognised that Susan had developed a sophisticated and unique visual language and sincerely believed that her art deserved serious attention.
This was an unorthodox attitude for the time. To provide some context, Jean Dubuffet coined the term Art Brut in 1945 to describe work created by self-taught artists – specifically residents of psychiatric institutions and those he considered to be visionaries or eccentrics. In 1972 Roger Cardinal extended this concept by adopting the term Outsider Art to describe work made by non-academically trained artists operating outside of mainstream art networks through choice or circumstance. Susan was born in Te Aroha, New Zealand in 1951, far from the artistic hubs of Paris and London that Dubuffet and Cardinal operated in. That Myrtle fêted Susan as a self-taught artist who deserved to be taken seriously shows how progressive her attitudes were.
Susan’s parents Doug and Dawn were also progressive. Over the years they had consulted numerous health practitioners about Susan’s condition, as the medical establishment could not provide an explanation as to why she had lapsed into silence. Dawn educated herself in the field of homeopathy and went on to treat all twelve of her children using these principles – basing prescriptions on her observations of their physical, mental and emotional state.
Doug was a linguist with an interest in philosophy who devoted what little spare time he had to studying Maori language and culture. To some extent their willingness to explore the fringes of the mainstream made them outsiders too but it was their commitment to living with integrity and their respect for individuality that ensured Susan’s creativity was always encouraged.
Even though Susan’s family supported her artistic pursuits, some staff in schools and hospitals saw it as an impediment to her assimilation into the community and discouraged it in a variety of ways. Her family was not always aware of this and therefore did not fully understand why Susan stopped drawing in the early 1990s. However, rather than dwell on the challenges that Susan faced in pursuit of her artistic practice, they prefer to highlight her achievements. In 2008 Susan began drawing again in earnest, after an almost 20 year interruption, and her work is now shown in galleries around the world.
Susan grew up without television and has been heavily influenced by the comics she read as a child. She is absolutely fearless in the appropriation of recognizable characters, such as Donald Duck and Mickey Mouse, in her work. She twists their limbs, contorts their faces, compresses them together, blends them into complex patterned backgrounds - always imbuing them with an incredible energy. Although Susan often used pop culture characters in her work they are not naive or childlike. These are drawings by a brilliant self-taught artist who has been creating exceptional work for decades without an audience in mind.
Mladen Stilinović
"Various Works 1986 - 1999"
02 February 16 - September 10, 2016
Various works 1986 - 1999, from two houses, from the collections of John Nixon, Sue Cramer, Kerrie Poliness, Peter Haffenden and Phoebe Haffenden.
Including: Geometry of Cakes (various shelves), 1993; Poor People’s Law (black and white plate), 1993; White Absence (glasses, ruler, set square, silver spoon, silver ladel with skin photograph and wooden cubes), 1990-1996; Exploitation of the Dead (grey and red star painting, wooden painting, black spoon with red table, red plate), 1984-1990; Money and Zeros (zero tie, paintings made for friends in Australia (Sue, John, Kerrie), numbers painting), 1991-1992; Words - Slogans (various t-shirts) - “they talk about the death of art...help! someone is trying to kill me”, “my sweet little lamb”, “work is a disease - Karl Marx”; Various artist books, catalogues, monographs, videos; Poster from exhibition Insulting Anarchy; "Circular" Croatian - Australian edition; Artist book by Vlado Martek (Dostoyevsky); more.
Thanks to Mladen Stilinović and Branka Stipančić.
Jonathan Walker
Always Will Need To Wear Winter Shirt Blue + Ochre Small Check Pattern
21 August - 21 September, 2015
Untitled
I am not a great reader of poetry but I always return to the work of Melbourne poet, Vincent Buckley (1925- 1988). Perhaps I find his most tantalising piece to be not a finished poem but a fragment left on a scrap of paper discovered on his desk after the poet’s death.
The poetry gathers like oil
In the word-core, and spreads
It has its music meet,
Its music is in movement.
This fragment is more the shell left behind from a volatile thought than a finished poem. I find the last two lines honest but awkward whereas the first two lines work like an arrow. Most likely he could not find a resolution so it was left. Still, in its present form, it remains an eloquent testimony to the ultimate failure of a medium to express mobile thought and sensation, in Buckley’s case, through verbal language. It’s an important matter because this is something all artists have to deal with regardless of the medium.
I have never written a poem, however, I am forever copying fragments from books on paper scraps in a vain effort to fix certain notions in my head. At first, they function as bookmarks that are sometimes returned to when I open the book. But before long, as they accumulate, they fall out littering the table interspersed with A4 photocopies, bills, books and medications.
To return to Buckley’s fragment, the first two lines very much evoke how I paint nowadays. As you age, detail diminishes and patches of light become more luminous and float. I feel the most honest way of dealing with this is by smearing the oil paint on the canvas with the fingers and working close-up, blind. Only if the patches coalesce into an approaching image can the work gain a life.
-
Jonathan Walker was born in Melbourne, Australia and brought up on a dairy farm in Gippsland. In the 1970’s he studied painting at RMIT and won the Harold Wright Scholarship to the British Museum, London. During the 1980’s he exhibited at Pinacotheca Gallery, Richmond and had work shown at the NGV and Heidi City Art Gallery. Over the same period he designed the cover for the “Epigenesi” LP by Giancarlo Toniutti, Italy and conducted a mail exchange work with Achim Wollscheid, Germany. The work with artists through the post resulted in an article published in the bicentenary issue of Art and Australia 1988. He showed in artist run spaces such as WestSpace in the 90’s and 2000’s, and until 2012, taught painting at Victoria University, which is where we (Colleen Ahern and Lisa Radford) as organisers of the exhibition, among many others, had the privilege of being his student.
Walker’s knowledge was imparted to students through the careful selection of music, literature, and artists found in books that he himself had ordered for the library. Walker’s strategy was the generosity of sharing his vast knowledge with references specific to each student and their context.
Walker’s paintings share a similar focus and intimacy.
This exhibition presents a small selection of recent paintings alongside a publication that includes Walker’s writing. Observational and analytical, Walker’s work is a type of material notation — the time of day, colour and how it is blended, the both specific and fleeting location of a reflection on lino or the question of whether a chair leg should be included in a painting.
Please join us on Friday August 21 between 6-8pm to celebrate the opening of the exhibition.
Curated by Colleen Ahern and Lisa Radford.
B. Wurtz
Curated by Nic Tammens
March 26 - April 4, 2015
B.Wurtz works from a basement studio in his home on Manhattan’s Lower East Side.
This local fact is attested to by the plastic shopping bags and newsprint circulars that appear in his work. As formal objects, they don’t make loud claims about their origins but nonetheless transmit street addresses and places of business from the bottom of this long thin island. Like plenty of artists, Wurtz is affected by what is local and what is consumed. His work is underpinned by this ethic. It often speaks from a neighborhood or reads like the contents of a hamper:
“BLACK PLUMS $1.29 lb.”
“Food Bazaar”
“USDA Whole Pork Shoulder Picnic 99c lb.”
“RITE AID Pharmacy, with us it’s personal.”
“H. Brickman & Sons.”
“Sweet Yams 59c lb."
Most of the work in this exhibition was made while the artist was in residence at Dieu Donne, a workshop dedicated to paper craft in Midtown. Here Wurtz fabricated assemblages with paper and objects that are relatively lightweight, with the intention that they would be easily transportable to Australia. This consideration isn’t absolute in Wurtz’s work, but was prescriptive for making the current exhibition light and cheap. Packed in two boxes, these works were sent from a USPS post office on the Lower East Side and delivered to North Melbourne by Australia Post.
Wurtz appears courtesy of Metro Pictures, New York.
Thanks to Rob Halverson, Joshua Petherick, Sari de Mallory, Matt Hinkley, Helen Johnson, Fayen d'Evie, Ask Kilmartin, Lisa Radon, Ellena Savage, Yale Union, and "Elizabeth".
John Nixon
"Archive"
December 15 - January 20, 2014
The presentation of John Nixon's archive offered a rare showcase of this extensive collection of the artist's own publications, catalogues, posters, ephemera, editions and more, from the mid 1980s onwards, alongside a selection of his artworks.
Organized by John Nixon, Joshua Petherick and Matt Hinkley.
"Habitat"
at Minerva, Sydney (organised by Joshua Petherick and Matt Hinkley)
November 15 - December 20, 2014
Lupo Borgonovo, Janet Burchill & Jennifer McCamley,
Lewis Fidock, HR Giger, Piero Gilardi, Veit Laurent Kurz,
Cinzia Ruggeri, Michael E. Smith, Lucie Stahl, Daniel Weil, Wols
Press Release:
“...It contained seven objects. The slender fluted bone, surely formed for flight, surely from the wing of some large bird. Three archaic circuitboards, faced with mazes of gold. A smooth white sphere of baked clay. An age-blackened fragment of lace. A fingerlength segment of what she assumed was bone from a human wrist, grayish white, inset smoothly with the silicon shaft of a small instrument that must once have ridden flush with the surface of the skin - but the thing’s face was seared and blackened.”
William Gibson, “Count Zero”, 1986
"Autumn Projects Archive"
Curated by Liza Vasiliou
March 6 - March 15, 2014
World Food Books, in conjunction with the Virgin Australia Melbourne Fashion Festival 2014, presented the Autumn Projects archive, consisting of a selection of early examples in Australian fashion with a particular interest in collecting designers and labels from the period beginning in the 1980’s, who significantly influenced the discourse of Australian Fashion.
Curated by Liza Vasiliou, the exhibition provided a unique opportunity to view pieces by designers Anthea Crawford, Barbara Vandenberg, Geoff Liddell and labels CR Australia, Covers, Jag along with early experimental collage pieces by Prue Acton and Sally Browne’s ‘Fragments’ collection, suspended throughout the functioning World Food Books shop in Melbourne.
H.B. Peace
presented by CENTRE FOR STYLE
November 14, 2013
"Hey Blinky, you say chic, I say same"
Anon 2013
H.B. Peace is a clothing collaboration between great friends Blake Barns and Hugh Egan Westland. Their pieces explore the divergences between 'character’ and ‘personality’ in garments....etc
Special Thanks to Joshua Petherick and Matt Hinkley of WFB and Gillian Mears
and a Very Special Thank you to Audrey Thomas Hayes for her shoe collaboration.
Janet Burchill & Jennifer McCamley
"Aesthetic Suicide"
May 10 - June 8, 2013
The first of our occasional exhibitions in the World Food Books office/shop space in Melbourne, "Aesthetic Suicide" presented a body of new and older works together by artists Janet Burchill & Jennifer McCamley, including videos, prints, a wall work, and publications.
During shop open hours videos played every hour, on the hour.
2004, English
Softcover, 221 pages, 15.2 x 20.3 cm
Published by
Exact Change / Boston
$34.00 - Out of stock
Morton Feldman wrote as he composed music, carefully placing one element after another, producing some of the avant-garde's most lucid considerations of what it means to make music
Morton Feldman (1926-87) is among the most influential American composers of the 20th century, a man whose music is known for its extreme quiet and delicate beauty (while Feldman himself was famously large and loud). Karlheinz Stockhausen once asked the composer what his secret was: I don't push the sounds around, Feldman replied. His writings resemble his music in their quiet steadiness, their oscillations between assertion and doubt. They are also funny and illuminating, not only about his own music but about the entire New York School of painters, poets and composers that coalesced in the 1950s, including Feldman's friends Jackson Pollock, Philip Guston, Mark Rothko, Robert Rauschenberg, Frank O'Hara and John Cage. Give My Regards to Eighth Street is an authoritative collection of Feldman's writings, culled from published articles, program notes, LP liners, lectures, interviews and unpublished writings. It is one of those rare books from which anyone can draw inspiration, no matter what the vocation or discipline.
Edited by B H Friedman
2023, English
Softcover, 160 pages, 15 x 20 cm
Published by
Exact Change / Boston
$30.00 - Out of stock
Jarry is best known as the author of the proto-Dada play Ubu Roi, but this anarchic novel of absurdist philosophy is widely regarded as the central work to his oeuvre. Written in 1898 and refused for publication in the author’s lifetime, Exploits and Opinions of Dr. Faustroll recounts the adventures of the inventor of ” ’Pataphysics… the science of imaginary solutions.” ’Pataphysics has since inspired artists as diverse as Marcel Duchamp and the ’60s rock band Soft Machine, as well as the mythic literary organization, the Collège de ’Pataphysique. Simon Watson Taylor’s superb annotated translation (which in turn inspired a new French edition of the text) was first published by Grove Press in 1965 as part of their now out-of-print collection, Selected Works of Alfred Jarry. As a result this most important novel by Jarry has never before been published under its own title in English.
“The complement to the Ubu plays… a stupendous effort to create out of the ruins Ubu had left behind a new system of values… Jarry would have found an audience more readily had he written simply a work of science fiction, a symbolist narrative, a bawdy tale, or a spiritual allegory. As it is, Faustroll is [all of these] at the same time”—Roger Shattuck, author of The Banquet Years
1994, English
Softcover, 352 pages, 20.5 x 15 cm
Published by
Exact Change / Boston
$38.00 - In stock -
Andre Breton described Maldoror as "the expression of a revelation so complete it seems to exceed human potential." Little is known about its pseudonymous author, aside from his real name (Isidore Ducasse), birth in Uruguay (1846) and early death in Paris (1870). Lautreamont bewildered his contemporaries, but the Surrealists modeled their efforts after his black humor and poetic leaps of logic, exemplified by the oft-quoted line, "As beautiful as the chance meeting on a dissecting table of a sewing machine and an umbrella." Maldoror's shocked first publisher refused to bind the sheets of the original edition--and perhaps no better invitation exists to this book, which warns the reader, "Only the few may relish this bitter fruit without danger."
This is the only complete annotated collection of Lautreamont's writings available in English, in Alexis Lykiard's superior translation. For this latest edition, Lykiard updates his introduction to include recent scholarship.
2000, English
Softcover, 128 pages, 20.5 x 15 cm
Published by
Exact Change / Boston
$32.00 - Out of stock
Dark Spring is an autobiographical coming-of-age novel that reads more like an exorcism than a memoir. In it author Unica Zurn traces the roots of her obsessions: The exotic father she idealized, the "impure" mother she detested, the masochistic fantasies and onanistic rituals which she said described "the erotic life of a little girl based on my own childhood." Dark Spring is the story of a young girl's simultaneous introduction to sexuality and mental illness, revealing a different aspect of the "mad love" so romanticized by the (predominantly male) Surrealists.
Unica Zurn (1916-1970) emigrated in 1953 from her native Berlin to Paris in order to live with the artist Hans Bellmer. There she exhibited drawings as a member of the Surrealist group and collaborated with Bellmer on a series of notorious photographs of her nude torso bound with string. In 1957, a fateful encounter with the poet and painter Henri Michaux led to the first of what would become a series of mental crises, some of which she documented in her writings. She committed suicide in 1970--an act foretold in this, her last completed work.
2004, English
Softcover, 344 pages, 15.2 x 20.4 cm
Published by
Exact Change / Boston
$35.00 - In stock -
Translated by Clayton Eshleman and Bernard Bador
Among Antonin Artaud’s most brilliant works are the scatological glossolalia composed in the final three years of his life (1945-1948), during and after his incarceration in an asylum at Rodez.
These represent some of the most powerful outpourings ever recorded, a torrent of speech from the other side of sanity and the occult. In this collection, the most complete representation of this period of Artaud’s work ever presented in English, and the first new anthology of Artaud published in the U.S. since Helen Weaver’s 1976 Selected Writings, cogent statements of theory are paired with the raving poetry of such pieces as “Artaud the Momo,” “Here Lies,” and “To Have Done with the Judgement of God.” These are translated with drama and accuracy by Clayton Eshleman, whose renditions of Vallejo and Césaire have won widespread acclaim including a National Book Award.
“Clayton Eshleman’s translations are the finest and most authentic which have yet been made from Artaud’s writing. Artaud’s final work is his strongest and most enduring, and this collection has been wisely selected and magnificently realized. Artaud is being taken into the twenty-first century.” — Stephen Barber, author of Antonin Artaud: Blows and Bombs
2011, English
Softcover, 228 pages, 20.5 x 15 cm
Published by
Exact Change / Boston
$34.00 - Out of stock
Translated and with an introduction by Simon Watson Taylor.
Paris Peasant (1926) is one of the central works of Surrealism, yet Exact Change's edition is the first U.S. publication of Simon Watson Taylor's authoritative translation, completed after consultations with the author.
Unconventional in form--Aragon consciously avoided recognizable narration or character development--Paris Peasant is, in the author's words, “a mythology of the modern.” The book uses the city of Paris as a stage or framework, and Aragon interweaves his text with images of related ephemera: café menus, maps, inscriptions on monuments and newspaper clippings. A detailed description of a Parisian arcade (nineteenth-century precursor to the mini-mall) and another of the Buttes-Chaumont park, are among the great set pieces within Aragon's swirling prose of philosophy, dream and satire.
André Breton wrote of this work: “no one could have been a more astute detector of the unwonted in all its forms; no one else could have been carried away by such intoxicating reveries about a sort of secret life of the city. . . .”
2009, English
Softcover, 156 pages, 15 x 20.3 cm
Published by
Exact Change / Boston
$27.00 - In stock -
A collection of outrageous short stories about heretics, renegade mystics and criminal religious fanatics, The Heresiarch & Co. was Apollinaire's first book, and reportedly remained his favorite. Making full use of his encyclopedic knowledge of obscure historical, ecclesiastical and geographic information, Apollinaire's stories rely neither on the dream nor on unlikely juxtaposition, but instead represent an approach that Andre Breton called a "formula" for Surrealism; its "music," Breton famously wrote, is "like gold pebbles rolled in a torrent." Apollinaire himself wrote of The Heresiarch & Co., "This is a book for those who love literature, powerful and disturbing, strange and logical... The author, amid so many fantastic, tragic and sometimes sublime inventions, intoxicates himself with a charming erudition with which he also intoxicates his readers."
Guillaume Apollinaire (26 August 1880 – 9 November 1918) was a French poet, playwright, short story writer, novelist, and art critic of Polish-Belarusian descent. Apollinaire is considered one of the foremost poets of the early 20th century, as well as one of the most impassioned defenders of Cubism and a forefather of Surrealism. He is credited with coining the term "cubism" in 1911 to describe the emerging art movement and the term "surrealism" in 1917 to describe the works of Erik Satie. The term Orphism (1912) is also his. Apollinaire wrote one of the earliest Surrealist literary works, the play The Breasts of Tiresias (1917), which became the basis for the 1947 opera Les mamelles de Tirésias. Apollinaire was active as a journalist and art critic, and in 1912 Apollinaire cofounded Les Soirées de Paris, an artistic and literary magazine. Two years after being wounded in World War I, Apollinaire died in the Spanish flu pandemic of 1918; he was 38.
Exact Change publishes books of experimental literature with an emphasis on Surrealism, Dada, Pataphysics, and other nineteenth and twentieth century avant-garde art movements. The press was founded in 1989 by Damon Krukowski and Naomi Yang, known outside publishing as musicians from the bands Damon & Naomi, and Galaxie 500.
1998, English
Softcover, 304 pages, 20.3 x 15.2cm
Published by
Exact Change / Boston
$38.00 - Out of stock
The eternal mystique of Portuguese writer Fernando Pessoa (1888-1935) stems largely from his practice of writing under "heteronyms." More than just nom de plumes, Pessoa's heteronyms came with distinct biographies, careers, life spans, even horoscopes. In The Book of Disquiet, Pessoa came as close as he ever would to autobiography. Left on disordered scraps of paper in a trunk, the fragments that make up The Book of Disquiet record in disjunct entries a vast interior landscape and daily minutiae, making for a discontinuous, gently unhinged monologue in daybook form.
“Limpid, aphoristic, gorgeous, sometimes maddening and utterly original, this compendium of dull days and transfiguring epiphanies is so distilled it should be dipped into in small doses over a lifetime.”
— New York Times Book Review
“There are in Pessoa echoes of Beckett’s exquisite boredom; the dark imaginings of Baudelaire (whom he loved); Melville’s evasive confidence man; the dreamscapes of Borges…”
— Voice Literary Supplement
2019, English
Softcover, 160 pages, 15.2 x 20.3 cm
Published by
Exact Change / Boston
$34.00 - Out of stock
Translated and with an Introduction by Roger Shattuck
Postface by Véra Daumal
“For a mountain to play the role of Mount Analogue, I concluded, its summit must be inaccessible but its base accessible to human beings as nature has made them. It must be unique and it must exist geographically. The door to the invisible must be visible.”
A touchstone of Surrealism, Pataphysics, and Gurdjieffian mysticism, Mount Analogue tells the story of an expedition to a mountain whose existence can only be deduced, not observed. Left unfinished (mid-sentence) at the author's early death from tuberculosis in 1944 and first published posthumously in French in 1952, the book has inspired seekers of art and wisdom ever since - Alejandro Jodorowsky's 1973 film The Holy Mountain is a loose adaptation. This 1959 translation, the first made into English, remains the best and closest in spirit to the deadly serious joking of the original. Written in the form of an adventure tale, the story and language of Mount Analogue are open to layers of interpretation, an invitation that has kept generations of devoted readers returning to it again and again. Exact Change is delighted to bring this superb translation of a true 20th-century classic back into print.
René Daumal (1908-1944) was a literary prodigy in his teens, publishing writings and editing a journal (Le Grand Jeu) that attracted the attention of André Breton and the Surrealists. Rather than join the group, he turned his attention to Eastern Philosophy — first teaching himself Sanskrit to study the Hindu classics, then under the influence of G.I. Gurdjieff and his Parisian circle.
1992, English
Softcover, 280 pages, 20.5 x 15 cm
Published by
Exact Change / Boston
$38.00 - In stock -
The artist Giorgio de Chirico's novel, Hebdomeros is a dream-like book of situations and landscapes reminiscent of his paintings. In his introduction John Ashbery calls the book "the finest work of Surrealist fiction", noting that de Chirico "invented for the occasion a new style and a new kind of novel... his long run-on sentences, stitched together with semi-colons, allow a cinematic freedom of narration... his language, like his painting, is invisible: a transparent but dense medium containing objects that are more real than reality." Hebdomeros is accompanied by an appendix of previously untranslated or uncollected writings, including M. Dudron's Adventure, a second, fragmentary novel translated by John Ashbery.
2018, English
Softcover, 240 pages, 15.2 x 20.3 cm
Published by
Exact Change / Boston
$32.00 - Out of stock
“Everything in the world exists to end up as a book.”
French poet Stéphane Mallarmé (1842–98) was modernism’s great champion of the book as both a conceptual and material entity. A colossal influence on literature from Huysmans to Ashbery, art from Manet to Broodthaers, music from Debussy to Boulez and philosophy from Blanchot to Rancière, Mallarmé spent more than 30 years on a legendary, ultimately unfinished project he called simply Le Livre.
The Book was Mallarmé’s dream of a total artwork, a book to encompass all books. His collected drafts and notes toward it, published first posthumously in French in 1957, are alternately mystic, lyrical and banal: many concern the dimensions, page count and cost of printing this ideal book. Often cited, frequently quoted, but rarely encountered in its entirety, The Book has remained as much myth as text.
Sylvia Gorelick has undertaken the first complete translation of The Book into English. This fresh translation is not only between languages, but from its original handwritten manuscript — now in the collection of Houghton Library, Harvard University — to the typographic page. The result is a strikingly visual poem about its own construction.
2007, English
Softcover, 160 pages, 20 x 15 cm
Published by
Exact Change / Boston
$32.00 - Out of stock
Joseph Cornell is well known for the oneiric quality of his art and films. Many have tried, often in vain, to put into words the strange power of his boxes--toy-like constructions whose playfulness and humor are anchored in a profound melancholy and loneliness. "Slot machines of visions," said Octavio Paz. Cornell himself is said to have enjoyed children's responses to his work; perhaps because nothing prepares one better for viewing a Cornell box than having an unbiased mind. Catherine Corman has combed through the voluminous diaries that Cornell kept throughout his life, now in the care of the Smithsonian's Archives of American Art, in search of the artist's own dreams. What she found are brief flashes of images, and short, enigmatic narratives of illumination -- the verbal equivalent of Cornell boxes. In 1993, Mary Ann Caws edited a large portion of Cornell's diaries for publication by Thames & Hudson, an invaluable sourcebook for Cornell studies. This new, shorter volume is a poetic addition to that literature, equally indispensible to those interested in Cornell as it contains previously unpublished writings, but also because it is as intriguing and mysterious to the uninitiated as the magical boxes themselves.
Joseph Cornell (December 24, 1903 – December 29, 1972) was an American artist and film maker, one of the pioneers and most celebrated exponents of assemblage. Influenced by the Surrealists, he was also an avant-garde experimental filmmaker. He was largely self-taught in his artistic efforts, and improvised his own original style incorporating cast-off and discarded artifacts. He lived most of his life in relative physical isolation, caring for his mother and his disabled brother at home, but remained aware of and in contact with other contemporary artists.
1997, English
Softcover, 256 pages, 20.5 x 15 cm
Published by
Exact Change / Boston
$30.00 - Out of stock
This is the first U.S. publication of two riotous novels by the Polish-born British writer Stefan Themerson (1910-1988), who with his wife Franciszka ran the Gaberbocchus Press in London. Gaberbocchus published both Kurt Schwitters and Bertrand Russell--and these extremes unite in Themerson's highly individual brand of philosophical Dadaism. Bayamus recounts the adventures of a self-proclaimed mutant with three legs (one is attached to a roller skate) and his efforts to propogate a new species; it includes an instructive visit to the Theatre of Semantic Poetry, where old rhymes mutate into new truths. Cardinal Polatuo is the biography of Apollinaire's anonymous father, who turns out to be a ecclesiast with a murderous interest in poetry, a faith based on science, and a dreamlife so frankly obscene that only a dictionary of Freudian symbols can explain its innocence.