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.
1972, English
Hardcover (w. dust jacket), 320 pages, 22 x 14.5 cm
Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Faber & Faber / London
$65.00 - In stock -
1973 hardcover Faber & Faber edition of Genet's classic, translated from French by Gregory Streatham.
Jean Genet, French playwright, novelist and poet, turned the experiences in his life amongst pimps, whores, thugs and other fellow social outcasts into a poetic literature, with an honesty and explicitness unprecedented at the time. Widely considered an outstanding and unique figure in French literature, Genet wrote five novels between 1942 and 1947. Querelle of Brest is widely considered to be Jean Genet's most accomplished novel, which was made into a film by Rainer Werner Fassbinder in 1982. Querelle, a young sailor at large in the port of Brest, is an object of illicit desire to his diary-keeping superior officer, Lieutenant Seblon. He is coveted, too, by corrupt policeman Mario. He gives himself freely both to brothel-keeper Madame Lysiane and to her husband. But Querelle is a thief and a murderer -- not a man to be trusted or trifled with . . .
Jean Genet, (born Dec. 19, 1910, Paris, France-died April 15, 1986, Paris), French criminal and social outcast turned writer who, as a novelist, transformed erotic and often obscene subject matter into a poetic vision of the universe and, as a dramatist, became a leading figure in the avant-garde theatre, especially the Theatre of the Absurd.
VG copy in VG dust jacket, light wear and tear to extremities, price-clipped to inner front dj flap, old bookseller stamp to inner spine.
1977, English
Softcover, 244 pages, 18 x 18 cm
Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Faber & Faber / London
$35.00 - Out of stock
1977 revised re-print of the first UK edition from 1954 of Le Corbusier's classic The Modulor.
Between 1942 and 1955 the architect Le Corbusier (1887–1965) developed a universal measuring system known as the "Modulor".
The Modulor represented an attempt to give architecture a mathematical order oriented to a human scale. Starting from the golden ratio and the proportions of the human body, Le Corbusier developed his doctrine for the proportions of construction. He started from an assumed standard size of the human body and marked three intervals related to each other in the proportion of the golden ratio.
Le Corbusier managed to combine the imperial measuring system based on the foot with the metric decimal system and at the same time to relate to human body measurements. As a result, he obtained a systematic planning basis for architecture and industrial products that gained worldwide currency and was applied by countless practitioners.
Le Corbusier published Le Modulor in 1948, followed by Modulor 2 in 1955. These works were first published in English as The Modulor in 1954 and Modulor 2 (Let the User Speak Next) in 1958.
Very Good copy. Not sure what year this print comes from.
1999, English
Softcover (w. dust jacket), 288 pages, 21.5 x 13.4 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Faber & Faber / London
$55.00 - Out of stock
Scarce first edition of CCRU founder Sadie Plant's end-of-the-millennium classic, Writing on Drugs, published by Faber and Faber in 1999.
"All writers on drugs become ghost writers for drugs. Or perhaps their drugs are ghost writing them"—Sadie Plant
Narcotics, stimulants and hallucinogens — these drugs have always affected far more than the perceptions, minds and moods of their users. Writing on Drugs explores the profound and pervasive nature of their influence on contemporary culture. It reads Coleridge on opium, Freud on cocaine, Michaux on mescaline and Burroughs on them all, and with such writers it begins to understand the many ways in which the modern world has found itself on drugs. Psychoactive substances have been integral to its economic history, its politics, media and technologies. They have influenced its poetry and stories, and shaped some if its most fundamental philosophies. They have even exposed the neurochemistry of a human brain which, like its cultures, has never been drug-free.
Sadie Plant was born in Birmingham and studied at the University of Manchester, where she gained her PhD in Philosophy in 1989. She has been a Lecturer in Cultural Studies at the University of Birmingham and a Research Fellow in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Warwick, where, in 1995, she formed The Cybernetic Culture Research Unit (CCRU) with Mark Fisher and Nick Land, an experimental cultural theorist collective celebrated for its idiosyncratic and surreal "theory-fiction" which incorporated cyberpunk and Gothic horror, gaining an online cult following related to the rise in popularity of accelerationism. She published The Most Radical Gesture: The Situationist International in a Postmodern Age in 1992, and Zeros and Ones: Digital Women and the New Technoculture in 1997. Having spent much of the 1990s in the academic world, she now works independently and writes full-time.
G—VG in VG dust jacket. Normal page tanning, tanning to dust jacket edge and spine. Not necessarily copy pictured.
1996, English
Softcover, 224 pages, 21.6 x 13.5 cm
Published by
Faber & Faber / London
$45.00 - Out of stock
First 1996 softcover edition of Bálint András Varga's "Conversations with Iannis Xenakis", published by Faber and Faber. Later re-published as print on demand reprint.
Messiaen said that Xenakis was "one of the most extraordinary men that I know ... a hero, unlike any other". His music is elemental, primordial, yet it could not have existed at any other time. It comes out of the most personal experience of the horrors of the age, and from an intense engagement with the conceptual world of modern architecture and higher mathematics. His musical thinking from the start incorporated many of the preoccupations that have since become fashionable, such as chaos and game theory, fractals and probability, transformed into a music that has an energy and violence both disturbing and exhilarating. These conversations reveal a man of uncommon integrity, with a breadth of artistic empathy that is unique in the music of our time.
"Xenakis has developed a music of truly majestic otherness. It is an alien shard, glimmering in the heart of the West."—Ben Watson, The Wire
The music of the Greek-born composer, Iannis Xenakis, has been called brutal and violent. He first studied as an architect, but then turned to composition and put to musical use his knowledge of higher mathematics. In these conversations he talks about his life and music.
VG copy with some light general wear and tanning.
1987, English
Softcover, 14 x 22 cm, 818 pages,
Out of print title / used / good
Published by
Faber & Faber / London
$40.00 - Out of stock
The Cantos of Ezra Pound is one of the great landmarks in twentieth-century poetry. This Fourth Collected edition of 1987 includes two previously uncollected cantos, and some passages from other cantos, omitted from earlier printings, restored to the text. The additional cantos, numbered LXXII and LXXIII, were written by Ezra Pound in Italian, during the collapse of Italy at the end of the war. They belong in the sequence between the John Adams and the Pisan cantos.
Good copy with some wear and marking.
1966/1974, English
Softcover, 258 pages, 18.5 x 12.5 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / good
Published by
Faber & Faber / London
$50.00 - Out of stock
First edition from 1966 of The Bell Jar, Sylvia Plath's only novel, originally published under a pseudonym in 1963.
"It is a fine novel, as bitter and remorseless as her last poems.... The world in which the events of this novel take place is a world bounded by the cold war on one side and the sexual war on the other. We follow Esther Greenwood's personal life from her summer job in New York with "Ladies' Day" magazine, back through her days at New England's largest school for women, and forward through her attempted suicide, her bad treatment at one asylum and her good treatment at another, to her final re-entry into the world like a used tyre: "patched, retreaded, and approved for the road".... This novel is not political or historical in any narrow sense, but in looking at the madness of the world and the world of madness it forces us to con-sider the great question posed by all truly realistic fiction: What is reality and how can it be confronted? Esther Greenwood's account of her year in the bell jar is as clear and readable as it is witty and disturbing."—Robert Scholes in the New York Times Book Review
"It has magnificent sections whose candour and revealed suffering will haunt anyone's memory."—M. L. Rosenthal in the Spectator
Good copy of first edition in 1974 printing, with some foxing/tanning to block edges.
1971 / 1975, English
Softcover, 64 pages, 19.5 x 13 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Faber & Faber / London
$35.00 - Out of stock
First 1971 paperback edition in 1975 print of Crossing the Water by Sylvia Plath.
In this volume Ted Hughes has collected a number of poems written by Sylvia Plath in the transitional period between the publication of The Colossus (1960) and before the composition of the poems in Ariel.
'Crossing the Water is full of perfectly realised works. Its most striking impression is of a front-rank artist in the process of discover-ing her true power. Such is Plath's control that the book possesses a singularity and certainty which should make it as celebrated as The Colossus or Ariel. It's capable of bearing the full weight of the grand style while staying true to the sharpest observation of reality.'—Peter Porter in the New Statesman
'Miss Plath's poems chronologically fall between The Colossus (1960) and the posthumous volume Ariel (1965), and to my mind they are her best. ... These poems are an almost perfect marriage of strength and elegance.'—Lyman Andrews in the Sunday Times
'Sustained poems of great quality are gathered in this book. . . . Crossing the Water is an indispensable book, and Sylvia Plath is one of that handful of modern poets whom intelligent readers will feel, more and more, that they have no option but to try and understand.'—Douglas Dunn in Encounter
Very Good copy.
1971 / 1975, English
Softcover, 56 pages, 19.5 x 13 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Faber & Faber / London
$25.00 - Out of stock
First 1971 softcover edition in 1975 print of Winter Trees, a poetry collection by Sylvia Plath.
The poems in this collection were all written in the last nine months of Sylvia Plath's life, and form part of the group from which the Ariel poems were chosen. Her radio play Three Women, also included here, was written slightly earlier, in the transitional period between The Colossus and Ariel.
Winter Trees was the Poetry Book Society's Choice for Autumn 1971.
'A book that anyone seriously interested in poetry now must have ... Sylvia Plath's immense gift is evident throughout.'—Martin Dodsworth in the Guardian
'Nearly all the poems here have the familiar Plath daring, the same feel of bits of frightened, vibrant, indignant conciousness translated instantly into words and images that blend close, experienced horror and icy, sardonic control.'—Alan Brownjohn in the New Statesman
Very Good copy, light cover wear
1989, English
Softcover, 174 pages, 13 x 20 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Faber & Faber / London
$25.00 - Out of stock
'One day there is life . . . And then, suddenly, it happens there is death.'
So begins Paul Auster's moving and personal meditation on fatherhood, The Invention of Solitude. The first section, 'Portrait of an Invisible Man', reveals Auster's memories and feelings after the death of his father. In 'The Book of Memory' the perspective shifts to Auster's role as a father. The narrator, 'A.', contemplates his separation from his son, his dying grandfather and the solitary nature of writing and story-telling.
With all the keen literary intelligence familiar from The New York Trilogy or Sunset Park, Paul Auster crafts an intensely intimate work from a ground-breaking combination of introspection, meditation and biography.
1989 first paperback Faber and Faber edition. Very Good copy.
2022, English
Hardcover (w. dust jacket), 304 Pages, 23.4 x 15.3 cm
Published by
Faber & Faber / London
$45.00 - Out of stock
From the acclaimed author of Art Sex Music comes a vital meditation on womanhood, creativity and self-expression, and a revelatory exploration into the lives of three visionary artists.
In 2018, boundary-breaking visual and sonic artist Cosey Fanni Tutti received a commission to write the soundtrack to a film about Delia Derbyshire, the pioneering electronic composer who influenced the likes of Aphex Twin and the Chemical Brothers. While researching Delia's life, Cosey became immersed in her story and uncovered some fascinating parallels with her own life. At the same time Cosey began reading about Margery Kempe, the 15th century mystic visionary who wrote the first English language autobiography.
Re-sisters is the story of three women consumed by their passion for life, a passion they expressed through music, art and lifestyle; they were undaunted by the consequences they faced in pursuit of expanding and enriching their lives, and unwilling to conform to the societal and cultural norms of their time.
2021, English
Hardcover, 360 pages, 19.5 x 25.2 cm
Published by
Faber & Faber / London
$52.00 - Out of stock
A definitive insight into the ever-influential world of Mark E. Smith and the Fall, featuring never-before published essays and ephemera from fans, collectors and the artist and band themselves.
This is not a book about a rock band. This is not even a book about Mark E Smith. This is a book about The Fall group - or more precisely, their world. Over a prolific forty-year career, the Fall created a world that was influential, idiosyncratic and fiercely original - and defied simple categorisation. Their frontman and lyricist Mark E. Smith spun opaque tales that resisted conventional understanding; the Fall's worldview was an education in its own right. Who wouldn't want to be armed with a working knowledge of M. R. James, shipping-dock procedures, contemporary dance, Manchester City and Can? The group inspired and shaped the lives of those who listened to and tried to make sense of their work.
Bringing together previously unseen artwork, rare ephemera and handwritten material, alongside essays by a slate of fans, EXCAVATE! is a vivid, definitive record - an illumination of the dark corners of the Fall's wonderful and frightening world.
This is a book about Mark E. Smith and The Fall - or more precisely, their ever-influential world. The Fall were so many things, so many worlds; if you got it (and not everyone did), they represented everything.
'To 50,000 Fall Fans: please buy this inspired & inspiring, profound & provocative, beautiful & bonkers Book of Revelations, choc-stock-full of loving Acts by true Apostles, simultaneously both the scrapbook you wished you'd kept and a portal to futures & pasts, known & unknown, & a Fantastic Celebration of this Nation's Saving Grace.' — DAVID PEACE
Contributions by : Elain Harwood, Ian Penman, Paul Wilson, Owen Hatherley, Mark Fisher, Mark Sinker, Michael Bracewell, Jon Wilde, Stuart Bertolotti-Bailey, Sian Pattenden, Dan Fox, Adelle Stripe, Scott King, Richard McKenna...
2021, English
Hardcover (w. dust jacket), 224 pages, 21.6 x 13.8 cm
Published by
Faber & Faber / London
$29.00 - Out of stock
The life’s work of two of British music’s most unique and timeless artists, with an introduction by Jarvis Cocker.
Selected and arranged by the authors themselves, Side by Side presents the lyrics, poems, writings and drawings of innovative musician Robert Wyatt and his creative partner, English painter and songwriter Alfie Benge. As a founding member of influential English rock bands Soft Machine and Matching Mole, and with a solo career which has lasted for over forty years and seen him collaborate with a diverse range of artists including Bjork, Brian Eno, Carla Bley, Paul Weller and David Gilmour, his own music remains unclassifiably personal. Alfie Benge is a visual artist, songwriter and pioneering music manager, having managed Robert’s career for fifty years. She is also married to Robert. Since 1982 they have collaborated on many of Robert’s most well-known songs. This unique volume celebrates one of the most enduring creative partnerships of the last half-century.
"Whenever an aspiring musician asks me about songwriting I point them towards Robert and Alfie. Their work is so unusual, so perceptive, so playful and so grownup. I don’t think there's anyone to compare. If you want songs that touch your mind as well as your heart, these are the best. Wide distribution of this book could improve the state of music dramatically." — Brian Eno
"Taken together Alfie & Robert’s lyrics combine to create a humanist world-view that is at once global & particular. Take it from me: that’s no mean feat." — Jarvis Cocker
2017, English
Softcover, 512 pages, 15.3 x 23.4 cm
Published by
Faber & Faber / London
$35.00 - Out of stock
Art Sex Music is the wise, shocking and elegant autobiography of Cosey Fanni Tutti.
Art Sex Music is the autobiography of a musician who, as a founding member of the avant-garde group Throbbing Gristle and electronic pioneers Chris & Cosey, has consistently challenged the boundaries of music over the past four decades.
It is the account of an artist who, as part of COUM Transmissions, represented Britain at the IXth Biennale de Paris, whose Prostitution show at the ICA in 1976 caused the Conservative MP Nicholas Fairbairn to declare her, COUM and Throbbing Gristle 'Wreckers of Civilisation'...shortly before he was arrested for indecent exposure, and whose work continues to be held at the vanguard of contemporary art.
And it is the story of her work as a pornographic model and striptease artiste which challenged assumptions about morality, erotica and art.
1975, English
Hardcover (w. dust jacket), 144 pages, 25.5 x 19.5 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Faber & Faber / London
$100.00 - Out of stock
First hardcover edition of The Music Of Stockhausen by Jonathan Harvey (1939–2012). This crucial and comprehensive book from 1975 looks at and decrypts the early work of German composer Karlheinz Stockhausen (1928–2007). "This important and innovatory study of Stockhausen's music makes available for the first time systematic analyses of his works. Dr Jonathan Harvey comprehensively surveys the periods into which Stockhausen's music falls, from the early post-Webern works and group-form works, of which 'Gruppen' is a famous and brilliant example, to the subsequent moment-form works and the later period, which includes text-works (like 'Aus den sieben Tagen') and works like 'Hymnen', in which the composer would seem to be communicating on a quasi-mystical level. This is an indispensable book for the serious student of twentieth-century music and for anyone else with a lively interest in the new forms and sonorities of the preset day, their technology and the creative doctrines which gave birth to them." - from the dust jacket.
Includes a full list of compositions up to 1974, an appendix on Mantra (1970), a bibliography and full discography. The most comprehensive of published works on Stockhausen.
Very Good copy with good dj, some edge-wear and tanning.