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—SAT 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.
$.00 - Out of stock
The eternal clean out! New items weekly.
https://worldfoodbooks.com/category/sale
Published by World Food Books / Melbourne
$20.00 - In stock -
A World Food Books gift voucher is redeemable in our Melbourne bookshop or via our webshop (here). An e-voucher (printable pdf) will be sent to your purchase email address (please notify us if you wish to have the voucher sent to an alternate address and wish us to fill in the receiver's details on the card).
Gift vouchers can be purchased in increments of $20 (Australian Dollars) and the total amount can simply be added to by increasing the quantity in your shopping cart. eg. A quantity of 5 gift vouchers will result in an item total of $100 - a $100 gift voucher. Simply click "ADD TO CART" 5 times, or update your quantity in the shopping cart.
If you wish to purchase multiple, separate gift vouchers in one go, please just email us and we can personally prepare and email you a payment request.
Please note: Please select Pick-Up on gift voucher purchse to avoid any postage charges. Accidental postage charges will be refunded right away!
Thank you.
For any questions, please don't hesitate to email: [email protected]
2004 / 2021, English
Softcover, 408 pages, 22.5 x 14.5 cm
Published by
iUniverse / US
$49.00 - In stock -
The spectre of the marauding serial killer has become a relatively common feature on the American landscape. Reactions to these modern-day monsters range from revulsion to morbid fascination--fascination that is either fed by, or a product of, the saturation coverage provided by print and broadcast media, along with a dizzying array of books, documentary films, websites, and "Movies of the Week."
The prevalence in Western culture of images of serial killers (and mass murderers) has created in the public mind a consensus view of what a serial killer is. Most people are aware, to some degree, of the classic serial killer 'profile.' But what if there is a much different 'profile'--one that has not received much media attention?
In Programmed to Kill, acclaimed and always controversial author David McGowan takes a fresh look at the lives of many of America's most notorious accused murderers, focusing on the largely hidden patterns that suggest that there may be more to the average serial killer story than meets the eye. Think you know everything there is to know about serial killers?
Or is it possible that sometimes what everyone 'knows' to be true isn't really true at all?
2004, French
Softcover, 48 pages, 17 x 10 cm
Numbered edition,
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / fine
Published by
Editions Allia / Paris
$140.00 - In stock -
Lovely, rare, numbered pocketbook re-publication of "1929", the notorious French Dada-Surrealist "pornographic" book by Man Ray, Benjamin Péret and Louis Aragon, originally clandestinely published in 1929 in Brussels in an edition of only 215 copies and intended for private distribution, with most copies seized by customs at the French border. An extraordinarily audacious work, this ostensibly scandalous and blasphemous book features four sexually explicit photographs by Man Ray of himself and Alice Prin, 'Kiki de Montparnasse', a legendary figure in the Montparnasse of the day, accompanied by various pornographic pastiches of poems, old songs and nursery rhymes by Péret and Aragon, two pioneers of literary Surrealism. Were these originally not confiscated, the publication was intended to raise funds for the important Belgian periodical Variétés, published in 1929, featuring René Crevel, Paul Nougé, Paul Éluard, Louis Aragon, E. L. T. Mesens, Robert Desnos, André Breton, and others, featuring the first official mapping of the artistic movement.
A slice of underground erotica made momentarily accessible in it's original French language, although now also rare in this edition.
Louis Aragon (1897-1982), French poet, journalist and novelist, involved in the French Communist Party and a leading figure in the Dada and Surrealist movements. Author of Télémaque (1922), Le Paysan de Paris (1926). Man Ray (1890-1976), French painter, photographer and film director, leader of the Dada movement in New York and then of Surrealism in France. Benjamin Péret (1899-1959), French Surrealist writer. He wrote poems that combine humor, automatic writing and transgression.
VG—NF copy.
2024, English
Softcover, 14 pages, 13.8 x 8.5 cm
Published by
Jouissance / London
$24.00 - In stock -
In House of the Sleeping Beauty, a short story by Emily Wells (A Matter of Appearance), a young woman reflects on the experiences that led to her fetish for unconsciousness...
The erotic works of Anaïs Nin started out as a freelance job. To support their bohemian lifestyles, Nin and her writer friends earned a dollar a page writing pornography for an anonymous client. The writers hated The Collector, as they called him, for his repeated instructions to “Concentrate on sex. Leave out the poetry”.
The Collector, a new series of short stories published by jouissance, seeks to pay homage to writers, like Nin, who explored the erotic, the taboo and the connection between jouissance and the creative process. It also honours their chosen, but much maligned, genre. By commissioning some of our favourite female writers to compose erotic short stories, we begin what we hope will be an ever-growing collection of compelling and provocative fiction that will inspire conversation, debate and further creative expression.
Munken Pure 80gsm paper publication with red Singer Sewn binding.
Featuring an illustration by Emma Rose Schwartz.
2024, English
Softcover, 18 pages, 13.8 x 8.5 cm
Published by
Jouissance / London
$24.00 - In stock -
In The Rebound, a short story by author Natasha Stagg (Surveys, Artless), a young woman takes a work trip in the wake of a humiliating break-up, and agrees to be set up on a blind date...
The erotic works of Anaïs Nin started out as a freelance job. To support their bohemian lifestyles, Nin and her writer friends earned a dollar a page writing pornography for an anonymous client. The writers hated The Collector, as they called him, for his repeated instructions to “Concentrate on sex. Leave out the poetry”.
The Collector, a new series of short stories published by jouissance, seeks to pay homage to writers, like Nin, who explored the erotic, the taboo and the connection between jouissance and the creative process. It also honours their chosen, but much maligned, genre. By commissioning some of our favourite female writers to compose erotic short stories, we begin what we hope will be an ever-growing collection of compelling and provocative fiction that will inspire conversation, debate and further creative expression.
Munken Pure 80gsm paper publication with red Singer Sewn binding.
Featuring an illustration by Emma Rose Schwartz. 138 x 85 mm.
2024, English
Softcover, 14 pages, 13.8 x 8.5 cm
Published by
Jouissance / London
$24.00 - In stock -
In Holds, a short story by author Julia Armfield (salt slow, Private Rites), a woman engages in a fantasy at her local climbing wall...
The erotic works of Anaïs Nin started out as a freelance job. To support their bohemian lifestyles, Nin and her writer friends earned a dollar a page writing pornography for an anonymous client. The writers hated The Collector, as they called him, for his repeated instructions to “Concentrate on sex. Leave out the poetry”.
The Collector, a new series of short stories published by jouissance, seeks to pay homage to writers, like Nin, who explored the erotic, the taboo and the connection between jouissance and the creative process. It also honours their chosen, but much maligned, genre. By commissioning some of our favourite female writers to compose erotic short stories, we begin what we hope will be an ever-growing collection of compelling and provocative fiction that will inspire conversation, debate and further creative expression.
Munken Pure 80gsm paper publication with red Singer Sewn binding.
Featuring an illustration by Emma Rose Schwartz.
2024, English
Softcover, 22 pages, 13.8 x 8.5 cm
Published by
Jouissance / London
$24.00 - In stock -
In Les Mains Négatives by Susanna Davies-Crook, a woman goes on an erotic journey through her past, present and future.
The erotic works of Anaïs Nin started out as a freelance job. To support their bohemian lifestyles, Nin and her writer friends earned a dollar a page writing pornography for an anonymous client. The writers hated The Collector, as they called him, for his repeated instructions to “Concentrate on sex. Leave out the poetry”.
The Collector, a new series of short stories published by jouissance, seeks to pay homage to writers, like Nin, who explored the erotic, the taboo and the connection between jouissance and the creative process. It also honours their chosen, but much maligned, genre. By commissioning some of our favourite female writers to compose erotic short stories, we begin what we hope will be an ever-growing collection of compelling and provocative fiction that will inspire conversation, debate and further creative expression.
Munken Pure 80gsm paper publication with red Singer Sewn binding.
Featuring an illustration by Emma Rose Schwartz.
2025, English
Softcover, 80 pages, 21 x 14.8 cm
Published by
Pilot Press / London
$25.00 - In stock -
Light Film explores the cinema of heartache. Thorough in its quest for drama, this collection of poems threads a personal narrative through kaleidoscoping imagery, in turns erotic, violent, and contemplative. Performing a shifting subject position, the speaker of this book finds humour, shelter, and emotional truth in fantasy, even as reality collapses into his desires.
Sholto Buck is a poet and artist living in Melbourne, Australia. He has been commissioned to write poems for the National Gallery of Victoria, and for 'Derek Jarman: Delphinium Days', at Gus Fisher Gallery, Auckland, and UNSW Gallery, Sydney. His first book, In the printed version of heaven, was published by Rabbit in 2023.
“This is a collection of curves and boots, horny and isolated, in rain and bittersweet love with loneliness and lust, articulated through a series of ekphrastic-ish lyrics enamored with the parts of bodies on film. Jarman, O'Hara, and Wieners exert a strong influence, filtered through smartphone snapshots of queer life and longing: witty, tender, and engaging.” — Joshua Jones
“"The landscape / walked / a red / spiral of green / through me" as the poems in this book have passed through me, leaving me dizzy. Light Film is a great collection of poems: moving, curious, thoughtful – it's a film festival of poems.” — Ben Estes
“You will see Sholto Buck's Light Film being held by a romantic taking the subway. . . What is this book but a screen for holding images of tenderness, signifying a safe harbor for the kiss you imagine?”— Eric Sneathen
2024, English
Softcover, 224 pages, 22 x 12 cm
Published by
Pilot Press / London
$42.00 - In stock -
One night a satellite falls out of the sky and splits a girl in half. Disquiet Drive is a book scraped together from the shorn parts of a person who may no longer exist. Beginning with an admission that language and embodiment seem indistinguishable, yet refusing to claim a singular voice, the texts in this collection lurch between the fiery crucible of a transition and the weird jaggedness of our own continuity; between inverted memoir and prose-poetry; the raw, irrepressible lyric and the essay as an exercise in the art of digging-one’s-heels-in. Disquiet Drive is about undoing the words we’re handed so that language can survive, and undoing the body so that it can find a way to live.
'Disquiet Drive is restlessly exquisite. Hesse K’s writing vibrates with the quiet solar intensity of a planetary body that can’t be looked at directly: things slip, slink, snick and lick into each other, limning a gorgeous periphery where genre, past and future selves, follies, fossils and hormones collide. I can’t remember when I last read something as exhilarating, beautiful and deeply attuned to the implications and contradictions involved in struggling towards a bearable world, and the ‘undomesticated sensibility’ it requires of us.' — Daisy Lafarge, author of Lovebug
'Buck wild and entirely unique, Disquiet Drive took me to the beautiful and chaotic edge of the universe and made me want to write (live) for 200 years.' — Eliot Duncan, author of Ponyboy
Hesse K. is a writer. Her criticism and poetry has appeared in MAP magazine and Montez Radio, and in anthologies by Sticky Fingers Publishing, Toothgrinder, Worms and Pilot Press, among others. She lives in London.
2013, English
Softcover, 272 pages, 20.3 x 15.2 cm
Published by
Exact Change / Boston
$39.00 - In stock -
First published in 1945, In Youth Is Pleasure is a beautiful and unassuming coming-of-age novel by the English writer and painter Denton Welch (1915-1948). Painfully sensitive and sad Orville Pym is 15 years old, and this novel recounts the summer holiday after his first miserable year at public school – but as in all of Welch's work, what is most important are the details of his characters' surroundings.
Welch is a Proustian writer of uncanny powers of observation who, as William S. Burroughs wrote, "makes the reader aware of the magic that is right under his eyes." Film director John Waters includes this novel as one of his Five Books You Should Read to Live a Happy Life If Something Is Basically the Matter with You, and writes: "Maybe there is no better novel in the world than Denton Welch's In Youth Is Pleasure. Just holding it in my hands, so precious, so beyond gay, so deliciously subversive, is enough to make illiteracy a worse social crime than hunger."
Also included in this edition is the first U.S. publication of I Left My Grandfather's House. This first-person account of an idyllic walking tour in the British countryside undertaken when Welch was 18 makes a fascinating companion piece to the fictionalised, though no less autobiographical, In Youth Is Pleasure.
1992, Japanese
Hardcover (clothbound), 96 pages, 18 x 13.5 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / fine
Published by
Mole / Tokyo
$300.00 - Out of stock
Rare first edition of one of the greatest kinbaku photo books ever published, Bind by Akio Fuji. Published in 1992 by Mole Gallery, Tokyo, to accompany Fuji's exhibition of the same name, Bind is now a classic photo book of masterful aesthetic bondage photography, featuring the rope work of Chimo Nureki, gloriously reproduced in lush black and white plates bound in silver-foiled cloth hardcovers. Exquisite compositions capturing the two artists at the height of their powers, and an important book and exhibition for bringing the world of kinbaku to the recognition of the fine art world in Japan the 1990's.
Akio Fuji (b. 1959) is a pioneer of bondage photography in Japan, founding the legendary bondage enthusiast circle "Kinbiken" in Tokyo in 1985 with rope master Chimuo Nureki (who also produced the magazines Kitan Club and Uramado), developing into the cult kinbaku bulletin Kinbiken Communications, with core contributions by both Fuji and Nureki, Katsuya Kasui, Masami Akita (Merzbow), Yuri Sunohara, Asoji Muroi, Akira Minomura, and other members of the circle. The object of the group was to study the beauty of bondage, observing the techniques of master Nureki through a membership with one of the most distinctive facets of the club being that the bondage women participate as members themselves. Says Nureki, “One of the main reasons I started this circle was to provide a facility for masochistic women, who are often misunderstood and therefore despised.” Kinbiken Communications remain one of the most desirable kinbaku publications of this period, the photography from which is showcased here in Akio Fuji's debut collection, featured heavily in Masami Akita's compilation of the “History of Bondage Photography in Japan”.
Fine copy.
2025, English
Softcover, 328 pages, 20 x 13.5 cm
Published by
Semiotext(e) / Los Angeles
$34.00 - Out of stock
A darkly comic novel set on the lower slopes of the Los Angeles literary world.
I stepped out to behold a crimson-streaked sky that would soon be adorning ten thousand Instagram posts, and walked down the sleepy residential streets, suffused with a soft and forgiving evening light, to the main drag. It felt like the end here, both sanctuary and termination- a soft place of harsh realities where a sun that once meant something barely brushed against the world. The perfect spring evening was blighted only by the citizenry.
A journalist in his late forties-having lost his job as a consequence of the death of print media-finds himself working at a bookstore in a rapidly gentrifying Los Angeles neighborhood, where he is thrown into the company of a younger generation with whom he has little in common. Embittered by his lowly position at this late stage of what had once been a promising career, he collapses his longtime ambition of writing a novel into a hilariously cathartic litany of contempt for his present circumstances.
Service examines the plight of the unrepentant artistic outsider in an unforgiving day and age. It alternates between passages that painstakingly describe the protagonist's fraught attempts to write his novel and such scenes of service work as wrapping children's books for Silver Lake moms and being "pilloried by dunces" on Yelp. As his writing process stalls in a "stale ceremony" of indolence and self-doubt, these unfamiliar humiliations become a toxic wellspring for his irascible observations.
With his notoriously dry wit, John Tottenham's debut novel reflects on a farrago of contemporary afflictions- gentrification, debt, friendship, aging gracelessly, self-medication, male vanity, professional jealousy, the perils of political correctness, and the role of literature in the digital era. Eventually, after endlessly agonizing about matters of form and style, he finds that despite himself he has actually written a book.
2024, English
Hardcover (w. dust jacket), 360 pages, 21 x 13.5 cm
Published by
New Documents / Los Angeles
$64.00 - In stock -
Compiling works from nearly five decades, Headwaters (and Other Short Fictions) provides the first comprehensive overview of the narrative and experimental writing of Lucy R. Lippard. While she is best known for her pioneering work as an art writer and activist, Lippard’s fiction helps frame her broader impact on contemporary culture.
Headwaters anthologizes over fifty short works written between 1951 and 1994, many previously unpublished. These often experimental vignettes showcase the range of her literary voice while also challenging our understanding of her oeuvre. Sometimes speculative or fragmented, yet always compelling, these pieces range from short-form narrative stories and conceptual fiction to visual essays and political prose.
Included are excerpts from two never-released novels, as well as collaborations with artists Robert Barry, Sol LeWitt, and Jerry Kearns.
Lucy Lippard is author of thirty books on contemporary art and cultural criticism. She has curated some fifty exhibitions in the United States, Europe, and Latin America.
Edited by Jeff Khonsary
2021, English
Hardcover (w. dust jacket), 224 pages, 21 x 13.5 cm
Published by
New Documents / Los Angeles
$64.00 - In stock -
From the first edition, published by Chrysalis Books (1979):
I See / You Mean is an experimental novel about mirrors, maps, relationships, the ocean, elusive success, and possible happiness. Through a collage of verbal photographs, overheard dialogue, sexual encounters, found material, and self identification devices (astrology, the I Ching, palmistry, Tarot), it charts from past to future the changing currents between two women and two men: a writer, a model/stockbroker/maybe dictator, a photographer, and an actor. A lot happens between the lines. Art critic Lucy Lippard wrote this novel in 1970 and became a feminist in the process: “I started writing and realized I was ashamed to be a woman. Then I had to find out why. Then I got very angry. The fragmented visual form came out of contemporary art and the conflicting emotions of 1960s political confrontation; they suggested a new way to put things back together—an open-ended, female way that didn’t pretend conclusions.”
Lucy R. Lippard is a writer, activist, and curator. She is the author of twenty-five books on contemporary art and cultural criticism and has curated some fifty exhibitions in the United States, Europe, and Latin America.
Afterword by Susana Torre
Edited by Jeff Khonsary
1979, English
Softcover, 152 pages, 20 x 13.5 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / fine
Published by
Chrysalis Books / Los Angeles
$290.00 - In stock -
Rare unread first 1979 edition of Lucy R. Lippard's experimental novel, I See / You Mean.
I See / You Mean is an experimental novel about mirrors, maps, relationships, the ocean, elusive success, and possible happiness. Through a collage of verbal photographs, overheard dialogue, sexual encounters, found material, and self identification devices (astrology, the I Ching, palmistry, Tarot), it charts from past to future the changing currents between two women and two men: a writer, a model/stockbroker/maybe dictator, a photographer, and an actor. A lot happens between the lines. Art critic Lucy Lippard wrote this novel in 1970 and became a feminist in the process: “I started writing and realized I was ashamed to be a woman. Then I had to find out why. Then I got very angry. The fragmented visual form came out of contemporary art and the conflicting emotions of 1960s political confrontation; they suggested a new way to put things back together—an open-ended, female way that didn’t pretend conclusions.”
Lucy R. Lippard is a writer, activist, and curator. She is the author of twenty-five books on contemporary art and cultural criticism and has curated some fifty exhibitions in the United States, Europe, and Latin America.
As New, unread copy of the first 1979 edition.
2025, English
Softcover (staple bound), 74 pages, 20 x 14.8 cm
Published by
Ex Film / Melbourne
$10.00 - In stock -
Back in print. Originally released in 2020, this booklet accompanied the Ex Film VHS release of The Wasp Woman and was also available separately from stores, selling out fast. For those who missed out, this reissued volume presents the public life of Susan Cabot, an actress whose cruel early life echoed into her adult years and presented her with challenges that make you wonder how and why life is so unfair. Cabot was determined to survive, but Howard Hughes, the CIA, King Hussein of Jordan, human growth hormones and her own mental state would create a situation that would lead to December of 1986.
Another in this series of tracts from Ex Film documenting the public eye of tabloid news and the narrative it conveys. Isolated from the surrounding visual noise of their original newspaper presentation, these publications offer a new perspective on strange, historical stories often forgotten by the public media lens.
2025, English
Hardcover, 88 pages, 23.2 x 16.5 cm
Published by
David Zwirner Books / New York
$49.00 - In stock -
Heji Shin’s photographic practice pushes boundaries and challenges societal ideals surrounding fashion, celebrity, and sexuality.
“The German artist . . . is one of the wildest experimentalists working in photography today.”—Interview magazine
Shin’s practice oscillates fluidly between the commercial and fine-art realms, and the work she exhibits in gallery and museum contexts is strongly influenced by the editorial work she produces. For THE BIG NUDES, a title that appropriates Helmut Newton’s series of the same name, Shin photographed pigs at close range, employing the vernacular of fashion photography to transform the pigs into models who appear to flirt with and pose for the camera. The photographs are paired with MRI scans and a holographic model of Shin’s brain—an impression of the self that troubles and transforms our foundational ideas of what constitutes a portrait.
Alongside a curator’s note from Ebony L. Haynes, this publication features a text by Benoît Lamy de La Chapelle that explores the interplay between Shin’s commercial and fine-art practices. This insightful analysis provides a deeper understanding of Shin’s work, shedding light on the nuances of her artistic choices.
Born in Seoul, Heji Shin (b. 1976) lives and works in New York. She has had solo exhibitions at institutions including KAT_A, Bad Honnef, Germany (2022); Le Consortium, Dijon, France (2021); and Kunsthalle Zürich (2018). Shin has had several solo presentations at galleries worldwide, most recently at Reena Spaulings Fine Art, New York (2018 and 2020); Galerie Buchholz, Berlin (2019); Gaga & Reena Spaulings, Los Angeles (2019); Galerie Bernhard, Zurich (2016); Real Fine Arts, New York (2013 and 2016); and Anna-Catharina Gebbers, Berlin (2010).
Ebony L. Haynes
Ebony L. Haynes is a writer and curator from Toronto. She is based in New York, where she is a senior director at David Zwirner and curator of 52 Walker.
Benoît Lamy de La Chapelle
Benoît Lamy de La Chapelle is an art critic and curator based in France. He has written for 02, La belle revue, May, Texte zur Kunst, and Joyfully Waiting, as well as for artists’ monographs. He is a member of the International Association of Art Critics (AICA) and the acquisitions committee of FRAC Alsace. He is currently the director of Centre d'art contemporain – la synagogue de Delme.
2025, English
Softcover, 248 pages, 30.7 x 22.4 cm
Published by
Walther König / Köln
$85.00 - In stock -
The first monograph by internationally acclaimed painter Jana Euler, which comprehensively shows and explains more than fifteen years of her creation. Jana Euler's artistic practice is stylistically varied, direct, critical and sometimes funny, downright silly. In doing so, she always refers to the social and material foundations of her chosen medium. The richly illustrated monograph illuminates Euler's specific way of producing exhibitions, which the artist compares to a "body, made of all the parts that flow into the different aspects of exhibition making." Exhibitionism follows its development using its own memories and materials from her studio archive: invitation cards, exhibition texts, posters and diagrams come to light here, in addition to other new drawings and collages specially made for publication.
2025, English
Softcover, 208 pages, 23 x 16.6 cm
Published by
Memo Review / Naarm
$35.00 - In stock -
What happens when political art becomes indistinguishable from marketing? Catherine Liu calls it “the highest form of kitsch” — where liberal good intentions become another elite commodity. Vincent Lê sees Apple’s crushingly smooth aesthetics not as mere flattening, but as capitalism’s natural logic of “creative destruction” at work: art compressed into commodity pixels; culture remade through self-improving competition. Either way, we’ve reached peak kitsch. Slavoj Žižek spots it: Trump’s AI-generated Gaza fantasy isn’t just tasteless satire; it’s political kitsch perfected. Call it hasbara via hyperpop.
Meanwhile, Isobel D’Cruz Barnes shows how artists on Narrm’s subculture music scene recognise that the real stage isn’t sound — it’s Instagram, TikTok, and every surface of aesthetic performance. Emerging now is culture as costume, rebellion reimagined as self-design, “lazy representation politics and identity capitalism” countered by their acceleration. And maybe that is just fine.
But no one slices open this tension between image and impact like artist Maria Kozic, whose visceral pop provocations twist kitsch into something uncomfortable, even violent—like Warhol thrown into a meat-grinder. Here kitsch doesn’t comfort but “pops.”
Khaled Sabsabi’s Venice controversy crystallises the stakes: Creative Australia recoiled from his political ambiguities, preferring art to neatly market their own virtue. Adorno (via Benjamin and Greenberg) knew all along: kitsch is the aestheticisation of politics. Or was it fascism? Or is art best when it risks being misunderstood or ambivalent, or, even better, wrong?
2024, English
Softcover, 290 pages, 18 x 11 cm
Published by
Discipline / Melbourne
$35.00 - In stock -
Edited by Olga Bennett and Helen Hughes.
Designed by James Vinciguerra.
Published by Discipline.
Screenic is an anthology of Philip Brophy’s writing on art, published from 2000 onwards.
The focus of the selection is on art that involves screens: projected as film in museums, digitised for installations in galleries, curated as documents within exhibitions, presented as outdoor illuminations on buildings, utilised for the production of VR and AI-generated content, and even wall murals derived from televisual screens. The driver for the writing of these articles over two decades is an interest in media literacy within fine art contexts.
Together, the articles reinforce the view that ongoing changes taking place in the mediascape over the last two decades create challenges for artists, producers, curators, viewers, and critics—sometimes resulting in a rejuvenation of how media art can be imagined and presented, other times evidencing an anaemic grasp of the contemporary mediascape that whorls outside the white cube.
2000, English
Hardcover (w. obi), 280 pages, 24 x 17.5 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Rockin' On / Tokyo
$160.00 - In stock -
First 2000 edition and first printing. Hiromix Works is iconic Tokyo photographer Hiromix's selection of her best photographs spanning 1995—2000. Born Tokyo in 1976, Hiromix (Hiromi Toshikawa) is a Tokyo photographer who, along with Yurie Nagashima and Mika Ninagawa, is considered the main instigator of the girly photo boom in the 1990s, a photographic movement in which Japanese teenagers, and especially, teenage Japanese women from the early 90's, took center stage in a new visual language. Championed by photographers Takashi Homma and Nobuyoshi Araki, to whom he dedicated this book, Hiromix was selected by Araki to win the 11th New Cosmos of Photography award in 1995 with a series of photographs depicting high school life from a teenager's perspective — images of her half-eaten breakfast, blurred portraits of her friends, stuffed toys, flowers, musicians, images that helped to build a world of the intimately feminine, personal and unknown to a nation accustomed to overly sexualized representations of women, created, of course, by men. In 2001, Hiromix was the youngest person ever to win the 26th Kimura Ihei Photography Award. Hiromix Works is a heavy hardcover compilation of her best 1990's photographs, during the time where she was also working as a photographer for ‘Rockin' On’, a Japanese bi-monthly music magazine, and publisher of this prized first book. Issued only in Japan, includes many works shot for Studio Voice, Purple, Rockin' On, Self Service, Purple Sexe, Visionaire...
VG—Near Fine first edition, with obi.
1973, English
Softcover, 96 pages, 18.5 x 18 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / fine
Published by
Art Gallery of New South Wales / Sydney
$45.00 - In stock -
Catalogue published on the occasion of the major exhibition "Recent Australian Art" held at Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, 18 October-18 November 1973, featuring new work (created between 1970-1973) by close to 50 Australian artists, including many of 'The Field' artists. Each exhibited artist is profiled with a photographic portrait, potted history and blck and white reproductions of their work. Includes a foreword by Peter Laverty, Director, Art Gallery of New South Wales, and introduction by Frances McCarthy and Daniel Thomas.
Artists: Robert Hunter, Mel Ramsden, Ian Burn, Dick Watkins, Robert Rooney, Aleks Danko, Ewa Pachuka, Ti Parks, John Firth-Smith, Robert Jacks, Tim Johnson, Robert Hunter, Victor K, Donald Laycock, Mike Parr, Peter Kennedy, Paul Partos, Nigel Lendon, Rollin Schlicht, Alberr Shomaly, Guy Frank Stuart, William Anderson, David Aspden, Jonas Balsaitis, Peter Booth, Robert Boynes, Mike Brown, Tim Burns, Gunter Christmann, William Delafield Cook, John Davis, Bill Clements, Tony Coleing, Ross Grounds, Dale Hickey, Ian Howard, Noel Hutchison, Tony Kirkman, Richard Larter, Donald Laycock, Tony McGillick, Alan Oldfield, John Peart, Peter Powditch, Ron Robert-Swann, Rollin Schlicht, Alberr Shomaly, Guy Stuart, Michael Taylor, Imants Tillers, Tony Tuckson.
VG—NF copy.
2025, English
Hardcover (w. dust jacket), 480 pages, 23 x 15.4 cm
Published by
Simon and Schuster / New York
$59.00 - In stock -
The first biography of Robert Crumb—one of the most profound and influential artists of the 20th century—whose iconic, radically frank and meticulously rendered cartoons and comics inspired generations of readers and cartoonists, from Art Spiegelman to Alison Bechdel.
Robert Crumb is often credited with single-handedly transforming the comics medium into a place for adult expression, in the process pioneering the underground comic book industry, and transforming the vernacular language of 20th-century America into an instantly recognizable and popular aesthetic, as iconic as Walt Disney or Charles Schulz. Now, for the first time, Dan Nadel, a curator and writer specializing in comics and art, shares how this complicated artist survived childhood abuse, fame in his twenties, more fame, and came out the other side intact.
More than just a biography of an iconic cartoonist, Crumb is the story of a richly complex life at the forefront of both the underground and popular cultures of post-war America. Including forty-five stunning black-and-white images throughout and a sixteen-page color insert featuring images both iconic and obscure, Crumb spans the pressures of 1950s suburban America and Crumb’s highly dysfunctional early family life; the history of comics and graphic satire; 20th century popular music; the world of the counterculture; the birth of underground comic books in 1960s San Francisco with Crumb’s Zap Comix; the economic challenges and dissolution of the hippie dream; and the path Robert Crumb blazed through it all.
Written with Crumb’s cooperation, this fascinating, rollicking book takes in seven decades of Crumb’s iconic works, including Fritz the Cat, Weirdo, and his final book-length comic of The Book of Genesis; capturing, in the process, the essence of an extraordinary artist and his times.
“This is a great biography that explores the complexity of one of the world’s greatest cartoonists ever.”—Art Spiegelman, author of Maus