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:
OPEN 12—5 THU—FRI
WEB-SHOP OPEN 24/7.
World Food Books
Postal Address:
PO Box 435
Flinders Lane
Victoria 8009
Australia
Art
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Australian Art
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'Pataphysics / Oulipo
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All prices in AUD (Australian dollars)
Pick-Ups
Please note: The bookshop is closed until February 1, 2024.
Pick-up orders can be collected in our bookshop during opening hours after this date. Please collect any Pick-up orders within 3 weeks of ordering as we have limited storage space. Orders will be released back into stock if not collected within this time. No refunds can be made for pick-ups left un-collected.
Return Policy
All sales are final. We do accept returns (for refund, exchange) for items received in error. All our orders are packed with special care using heavy-duty padding and cardboard book-mailers or bubble mailers (for smaller books), using reinforcement where required. We cannot take responsibility for any lost, stolen or damaged parcels.
Insurance
Should you wish to insure your package, please email us directly after placing your order and we can organise this at a small extra expense. Although all standard/express tracked packages are very safe and dependable, we cannot take responsibility for any lost, stolen or damaged parcels. We recommend insurance on valuable orders.
Interested in selling your old books, catalogues, journals, magazines, comics, fanzines, ephemera? We are always looking for interesting, unusual and out-of-print books to buy. We only buy books in our fields of interest and specialty, and that we feel we can resell.
We base these prices on desirability, market value, in-print prices, condition and our current stock levels. We offer cash, store credit, and can take stock on consignment. All
about 25% of the price we expect to get when we sell them, or 30% in store credit. We base these prices on desirability, market value, in-print prices, condition and our current stock levels.
Sell your books any day of the week. You can drop them off and return later. If you have a lot of books, we can visit your Sydney home.
We buy books that we feel we can resell. We offer about 25 % of the price we expect to get when we sell them, or 30% in store credit. We base these prices on desirability, market value, in-print prices, condition and our current stock levels.
Philadelphia Wireman
03 August - 01 September, 2018
World Food Books is proud to announce our next Occasion, the first presentation of sculptures by Philadelphia Wireman in Australia.
The Philadelphia Wireman sculptures were found abandoned in an alley off Philadelphia’s South Street on trash night in 1982. Their discovery in a rapidly-changing neighbourhood undergoing extensive renovation, compounded with the failure of all attempts to locate the artist, suggests that the works may have been discarded after the maker’s death. Dubbed the "Philadelphia Wireman" during the first exhibition of this work, in 1985, the maker’s name, age, ethnicity, and even gender remain uncertain. The entire collection totals approximately 1200 pieces, all intricately bound together with tightly-wound heavy-gauge wire (along with a few small, abstract marker drawings, reminiscent both of Mark Tobey and J.B. Murry). The dense construction of the work, despite a modest range of scale and materials, is singularly obsessive and disciplined in design: a wire armature or exoskeleton firmly binds a bricolage of found objects including plastic, glass, food packaging, umbrella parts, tape, rubber, batteries, pens, leather, reflectors, nuts and bolts, nails, foil, coins, toys, watches, eyeglasses, tools, and jewellery.
Heavy with associations—anthropomorphic, zoomorphic, and socio-cultural responses to wrapped detritus—the totemic sculptures by Philadelphia Wireman have been discussed in the context of work created to fulfil the shamanistic needs of alternative religions in American culture. Curators, collectors, and critics have variously compared certain pieces to sculpture from Classical antiquity, Native American medicine bundles, African-American memory jugs, and African fetish objects. Reflecting the artist’s prolific and incredibly focused scavenging impulse, and despite—or perhaps enhanced by—their anonymity, these enigmatic objects function as urban artefacts and arbiters of power, though their origin and purpose is unknown. Philadelphia Wireman, whatever their identity, possessed an astonishing ability to isolate and communicate the concepts of power and energy through the selection and transformation of ordinary materials. Over the course of the past two decades, this collection has come to be regarded as an important discovery in the field of self-taught art and vernacular art.
Presented in collaboration with Fleisher-Ollman Gallery, Philadelphia, and Robert Heald, Wellington.
Susan Te Kahurangi King
02 February - 10 March, 2018
Susan Te Kahurangi King (24 February 1951 - ) has been a confident and prolific artist since she was a young child, drawing with readily available materials - pencils, ballpoint pens and felt-tip markers, on whatever paper is at hand. Between the ages of four and six Susan slowly ceased verbal communication. Her grandparents William and Myrtle Murphy had developed a special bond with Susan so they took on caring responsibilities for extended periods. Myrtle began informally archiving her work, carefully collecting and storing the drawings and compiling scrapbooks. No drawing was insignificant; every scrap of paper was kept. The King family are now the custodians of a vast collection containing over 7000 individual works, from tiny scraps of paper through to 5 meter long rolls.
The scrapbooks and diaries reveal Myrtle to be a woman of great patience and compassion, seeking to understand a child who was not always behaving as expected. She encouraged Susan to be observant, to explore her environment and absorb all the sights and sounds. Myrtle would show Susan’s drawings to friends and people in her community that she had dealings with, such as shopkeepers and postal workers, but this was not simply a case of a grandmother’s bias. She recognised that Susan had developed a sophisticated and unique visual language and sincerely believed that her art deserved serious attention.
This was an unorthodox attitude for the time. To provide some context, Jean Dubuffet coined the term Art Brut in 1945 to describe work created by self-taught artists – specifically residents of psychiatric institutions and those he considered to be visionaries or eccentrics. In 1972 Roger Cardinal extended this concept by adopting the term Outsider Art to describe work made by non-academically trained artists operating outside of mainstream art networks through choice or circumstance. Susan was born in Te Aroha, New Zealand in 1951, far from the artistic hubs of Paris and London that Dubuffet and Cardinal operated in. That Myrtle fêted Susan as a self-taught artist who deserved to be taken seriously shows how progressive her attitudes were.
Susan’s parents Doug and Dawn were also progressive. Over the years they had consulted numerous health practitioners about Susan’s condition, as the medical establishment could not provide an explanation as to why she had lapsed into silence. Dawn educated herself in the field of homeopathy and went on to treat all twelve of her children using these principles – basing prescriptions on her observations of their physical, mental and emotional state.
Doug was a linguist with an interest in philosophy who devoted what little spare time he had to studying Maori language and culture. To some extent their willingness to explore the fringes of the mainstream made them outsiders too but it was their commitment to living with integrity and their respect for individuality that ensured Susan’s creativity was always encouraged.
Even though Susan’s family supported her artistic pursuits, some staff in schools and hospitals saw it as an impediment to her assimilation into the community and discouraged it in a variety of ways. Her family was not always aware of this and therefore did not fully understand why Susan stopped drawing in the early 1990s. However, rather than dwell on the challenges that Susan faced in pursuit of her artistic practice, they prefer to highlight her achievements. In 2008 Susan began drawing again in earnest, after an almost 20 year interruption, and her work is now shown in galleries around the world.
Susan grew up without television and has been heavily influenced by the comics she read as a child. She is absolutely fearless in the appropriation of recognizable characters, such as Donald Duck and Mickey Mouse, in her work. She twists their limbs, contorts their faces, compresses them together, blends them into complex patterned backgrounds - always imbuing them with an incredible energy. Although Susan often used pop culture characters in her work they are not naive or childlike. These are drawings by a brilliant self-taught artist who has been creating exceptional work for decades without an audience in mind.
Mladen Stilinović
"Various Works 1986 - 1999"
02 February 16 - September 10, 2016
Various works 1986 - 1999, from two houses, from the collections of John Nixon, Sue Cramer, Kerrie Poliness, Peter Haffenden and Phoebe Haffenden.
Including: Geometry of Cakes (various shelves), 1993; Poor People’s Law (black and white plate), 1993; White Absence (glasses, ruler, set square, silver spoon, silver ladel with skin photograph and wooden cubes), 1990-1996; Exploitation of the Dead (grey and red star painting, wooden painting, black spoon with red table, red plate), 1984-1990; Money and Zeros (zero tie, paintings made for friends in Australia (Sue, John, Kerrie), numbers painting), 1991-1992; Words - Slogans (various t-shirts) - “they talk about the death of art...help! someone is trying to kill me”, “my sweet little lamb”, “work is a disease - Karl Marx”; Various artist books, catalogues, monographs, videos; Poster from exhibition Insulting Anarchy; "Circular" Croatian - Australian edition; Artist book by Vlado Martek (Dostoyevsky); more.
Thanks to Mladen Stilinović and Branka Stipančić.
Jonathan Walker
Always Will Need To Wear Winter Shirt Blue + Ochre Small Check Pattern
21 August - 21 September, 2015
Untitled
I am not a great reader of poetry but I always return to the work of Melbourne poet, Vincent Buckley (1925- 1988). Perhaps I find his most tantalising piece to be not a finished poem but a fragment left on a scrap of paper discovered on his desk after the poet’s death.
The poetry gathers like oil
In the word-core, and spreads
It has its music meet,
Its music is in movement.
This fragment is more the shell left behind from a volatile thought than a finished poem. I find the last two lines honest but awkward whereas the first two lines work like an arrow. Most likely he could not find a resolution so it was left. Still, in its present form, it remains an eloquent testimony to the ultimate failure of a medium to express mobile thought and sensation, in Buckley’s case, through verbal language. It’s an important matter because this is something all artists have to deal with regardless of the medium.
I have never written a poem, however, I am forever copying fragments from books on paper scraps in a vain effort to fix certain notions in my head. At first, they function as bookmarks that are sometimes returned to when I open the book. But before long, as they accumulate, they fall out littering the table interspersed with A4 photocopies, bills, books and medications.
To return to Buckley’s fragment, the first two lines very much evoke how I paint nowadays. As you age, detail diminishes and patches of light become more luminous and float. I feel the most honest way of dealing with this is by smearing the oil paint on the canvas with the fingers and working close-up, blind. Only if the patches coalesce into an approaching image can the work gain a life.
-
Jonathan Walker was born in Melbourne, Australia and brought up on a dairy farm in Gippsland. In the 1970’s he studied painting at RMIT and won the Harold Wright Scholarship to the British Museum, London. During the 1980’s he exhibited at Pinacotheca Gallery, Richmond and had work shown at the NGV and Heidi City Art Gallery. Over the same period he designed the cover for the “Epigenesi” LP by Giancarlo Toniutti, Italy and conducted a mail exchange work with Achim Wollscheid, Germany. The work with artists through the post resulted in an article published in the bicentenary issue of Art and Australia 1988. He showed in artist run spaces such as WestSpace in the 90’s and 2000’s, and until 2012, taught painting at Victoria University, which is where we (Colleen Ahern and Lisa Radford) as organisers of the exhibition, among many others, had the privilege of being his student.
Walker’s knowledge was imparted to students through the careful selection of music, literature, and artists found in books that he himself had ordered for the library. Walker’s strategy was the generosity of sharing his vast knowledge with references specific to each student and their context.
Walker’s paintings share a similar focus and intimacy.
This exhibition presents a small selection of recent paintings alongside a publication that includes Walker’s writing. Observational and analytical, Walker’s work is a type of material notation — the time of day, colour and how it is blended, the both specific and fleeting location of a reflection on lino or the question of whether a chair leg should be included in a painting.
Please join us on Friday August 21 between 6-8pm to celebrate the opening of the exhibition.
Curated by Colleen Ahern and Lisa Radford.
B. Wurtz
Curated by Nic Tammens
March 26 - April 4, 2015
B.Wurtz works from a basement studio in his home on Manhattan’s Lower East Side.
This local fact is attested to by the plastic shopping bags and newsprint circulars that appear in his work. As formal objects, they don’t make loud claims about their origins but nonetheless transmit street addresses and places of business from the bottom of this long thin island. Like plenty of artists, Wurtz is affected by what is local and what is consumed. His work is underpinned by this ethic. It often speaks from a neighborhood or reads like the contents of a hamper:
“BLACK PLUMS $1.29 lb.”
“Food Bazaar”
“USDA Whole Pork Shoulder Picnic 99c lb.”
“RITE AID Pharmacy, with us it’s personal.”
“H. Brickman & Sons.”
“Sweet Yams 59c lb."
Most of the work in this exhibition was made while the artist was in residence at Dieu Donne, a workshop dedicated to paper craft in Midtown. Here Wurtz fabricated assemblages with paper and objects that are relatively lightweight, with the intention that they would be easily transportable to Australia. This consideration isn’t absolute in Wurtz’s work, but was prescriptive for making the current exhibition light and cheap. Packed in two boxes, these works were sent from a USPS post office on the Lower East Side and delivered to North Melbourne by Australia Post.
Wurtz appears courtesy of Metro Pictures, New York.
Thanks to Rob Halverson, Joshua Petherick, Sari de Mallory, Matt Hinkley, Helen Johnson, Fayen d'Evie, Ask Kilmartin, Lisa Radon, Ellena Savage, Yale Union, and "Elizabeth".
John Nixon
"Archive"
December 15 - January 20, 2014
The presentation of John Nixon's archive offered a rare showcase of this extensive collection of the artist's own publications, catalogues, posters, ephemera, editions and more, from the mid 1980s onwards, alongside a selection of his artworks.
Organized by John Nixon, Joshua Petherick and Matt Hinkley.
"Habitat"
at Minerva, Sydney (organised by Joshua Petherick and Matt Hinkley)
November 15 - December 20, 2014
Lupo Borgonovo, Janet Burchill & Jennifer McCamley,
Lewis Fidock, HR Giger, Piero Gilardi, Veit Laurent Kurz,
Cinzia Ruggeri, Michael E. Smith, Lucie Stahl, Daniel Weil, Wols
Press Release:
“...It contained seven objects. The slender fluted bone, surely formed for flight, surely from the wing of some large bird. Three archaic circuitboards, faced with mazes of gold. A smooth white sphere of baked clay. An age-blackened fragment of lace. A fingerlength segment of what she assumed was bone from a human wrist, grayish white, inset smoothly with the silicon shaft of a small instrument that must once have ridden flush with the surface of the skin - but the thing’s face was seared and blackened.”
William Gibson, “Count Zero”, 1986
"Autumn Projects Archive"
Curated by Liza Vasiliou
March 6 - March 15, 2014
World Food Books, in conjunction with the Virgin Australia Melbourne Fashion Festival 2014, presented the Autumn Projects archive, consisting of a selection of early examples in Australian fashion with a particular interest in collecting designers and labels from the period beginning in the 1980’s, who significantly influenced the discourse of Australian Fashion.
Curated by Liza Vasiliou, the exhibition provided a unique opportunity to view pieces by designers Anthea Crawford, Barbara Vandenberg, Geoff Liddell and labels CR Australia, Covers, Jag along with early experimental collage pieces by Prue Acton and Sally Browne’s ‘Fragments’ collection, suspended throughout the functioning World Food Books shop in Melbourne.
H.B. Peace
presented by CENTRE FOR STYLE
November 14, 2013
"Hey Blinky, you say chic, I say same"
Anon 2013
H.B. Peace is a clothing collaboration between great friends Blake Barns and Hugh Egan Westland. Their pieces explore the divergences between 'character’ and ‘personality’ in garments....etc
Special Thanks to Joshua Petherick and Matt Hinkley of WFB and Gillian Mears
and a Very Special Thank you to Audrey Thomas Hayes for her shoe collaboration.
Janet Burchill & Jennifer McCamley
"Aesthetic Suicide"
May 10 - June 8, 2013
The first of our occasional exhibitions in the World Food Books office/shop space in Melbourne, "Aesthetic Suicide" presented a body of new and older works together by artists Janet Burchill & Jennifer McCamley, including videos, prints, a wall work, and publications.
During shop open hours videos played every hour, on the hour.
2018, English
Softcover, 360 pages, 11.4 x 17.8 cm
Published by
The MIT Press / Massachusetts
Semiotext(e) / Los Angeles
$29.00 - In stock -
Essays on the contemporary continuum of incarceration: the biopolitics of juvenile delinquency, predatory policing, the political economy of fees and fines, and algorithmic policing.
What we see happening in Ferguson and other cities around the country is not the creation of livable spaces, but the creation of living hells. When people are trapped in a cycle of debt it also can affect their subjectivity and how they temporally inhabit the world by making it difficult for them to imagine and plan for the future. What psychic toll does this have on residents? How does it feel to be routinely dehumanized and exploited by the police?—from Carceral Capitalism
In this collection of essays in Semiotext(e)'s Intervention series, Jackie Wang examines the contemporary incarceration techniques that have emerged since the 1990s. The essays illustrate various aspects of the carceral continuum, including the biopolitics of juvenile delinquency, predatory policing, the political economy of fees and fines, cybernetic governance, and algorithmic policing. Included in this volume is Wang's influential critique of liberal anti-racist politics, “Against Innocence,” as well as essays on RoboCop, techno-policing, and the aesthetic problem of making invisible forms of power legible.
Wang shows that the new racial capitalism begins with parasitic governance and predatory lending that extends credit only to dispossess later. Predatory lending has a decidedly spatial character and exists in many forms, including subprime mortgage loans, student loans for sham for-profit colleges, car loans, rent-to-own scams, payday loans, and bail bond loans. Parasitic governance, Wang argues, operates through five primary techniques: financial states of exception, automation, extraction and looting, confinement, and gratuitous violence. While these techniques of governance often involve physical confinement and the state-sanctioned execution of black Americans, new carceral modes have blurred the distinction between the inside and outside of prison. As technologies of control are perfected, carcerality tends to bleed into society.
2020, English
Softcover, 256 pages, 19.8 x 12.9 cm
Published by
Penguin Books / London
$23.00 - In stock -
'A haunting Kafkaesque nightmare'
Introduction by David Mitchell
Dazzlingly original, Kobo Abe's The Woman in the Dunes is one of the premier Japanese novels in the twentieth century, and this Penguin Classics edition contains a new introduction by David Mitchell, author of Cloud Atlas.
Niki Jumpei, an amateur entomologist, searches the scorching desert for beetles. As night falls he is forced to seek shelter in an eerie village, half-buried by huge sand dunes. He awakes to the terrifying realisation that the villagers have imprisoned him with a young woman at the bottom of a vast sand pit. Tricked into slavery and threatened with starvation if he does not work, Jumpei's only chance is to shovel the ever-encroaching sand - or face an agonising death. Among the greatest Japanese novels of the twentieth century, The Woman in the Dunes combines the essence of myth, suspense, and the existential novel.
Kobo Abe (1924-93) was born in Tokyo, grew up in Manchuria, and returned to Japan in his early twenties. During his life Abe was considered his country's foremost living novelist. His novels have earned many literary awards and prizes, and have all been bestsellers in Japan. They include The Woman in the Dunes, The Ark Sakura, The Face of Another, The Box Man, and The Ruined Map.
2020, English
Softcover, 160 pages, 19.8 x 12.9 cm
Published by
Penguin Books / London
$23.00 - Out of stock
Translated by E. Dale Saunders
'This is the record of a box man'. Anonymous and alone, the box man peeps out of his cut-out eyeholes and watches the world from behind his four cardboard walls. At first repulsed by the strange phenomenon of people who have decided to abandon society and live in boxes on the Tokyo streets, he has found himself drawn into the anonymity and voyeurism of their life. As he becomes obsessed with spying on a young nurse, his identity slips away, in Kobo Abe's eerie, disorienting and seductive masterpiece of unease.
'Funny, sad and destructive ... an invention with its own crazy pull, it gnaws at the reader ... a stunning addition to the literature of eccentricity'—The New York Times
2020, English
Softcover, 240 pages, 19.8 x 12.9 cm
Published by
Penguin Books / London
$23.00 - Out of stock
The Ruined Map
3.5 (2,101 ratings by Goodreads)
Paperback Penguin Modern Classics English
By (author) Kobo Abe , Translated by E. Dale Saunders
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'A brilliant display of pyrotechnics, a compelling tour de force ... by a master jeweller of polished prose' The New York Times
A private detective is hired to find a missing person, but nothing is normal about this case. Why has the beautiful, alcoholic wife of the vanished salesman waited over half a year to search for him? Why are the only clues a photo and a matchbox? As the investigator's ever-more puzzling hunt takes him into the labyrinthine depths of the urban underworld, he begins to wonder if it is in fact he who is lost. An intoxicating blend of noir thriller and surreal dream, The Ruined Map questions identity itself.
'An exciting, imaginative and entertaining novel'—San Francisco Chronicle
2021, English
Softcover, 336 pages, 19.8 x 12.9 cm
Published by
Penguin Books / London
$23.00 - Out of stock
The first English-language publication of one of the greatest Polish science fiction novels of all time
Is BER-66 a human or a machine? As he navigates the corridors and locked rooms of a strange bunker, he must solve the mysteries of murderous doppelgangers, a slow-motion city on the verge of destruction, and ultimately, the all-powerful Mechanism itself...
Considered to be one of the most important and original Polish science fiction novels of all time but never before translated into English, Adam Wisniewski-Snerg's debut novel is a haunting and mind-bending masterpiece of philosophical enquiry that penetrates deep into the heart of what it means to be human.
2021, English
Softcover, 176 pages, 19.8 x 12.9 cm
Published by
Penguin Books / London
$23.00 - Out of stock
"Few novelists match the intensity of her vision"—J. G. Ballard
A dreamlike, frozen dystopia from one of the twentieth century's most unique writers.
No one knows why the ice has come, and no one can stop it. Every day it creeps further across the earth, covering the land in snow and freezing everything in its path. Through this bleached, devastated world, one man pursues the silver-haired girl he loves, as she keeps running - away from her husband; away from the sinister 'warden' who seeks to control her; away from him...
Mysterious, unnerving, and beautifully lyrical, Anna Kavan's Ice is a work of science fiction without parallel.
"A raw, brutal tale set in a frozen post-nuclear dystopia ... addictive and extremely entertaining"—Guardian
"There is nothing else quite like Ice"—Doris Lessing
"She is De Quincey's heir and Kafka's sister"—Brian Aldiss
A dreamlike, frozen dystopia from one of the twentieth century's most unique writers
No one knows why the ice has come, and no one can stop it. Every day it creeps further across the earth, covering the land in snow and freezing everything in its path. Through this bleached, devastated world, one man pursues the silver-haired girl he loves, as she keeps running - away from her husband; away from the sinister 'warden' who seeks to control her; away from him...
Mysterious, unnerving, and beautifully lyrical, Anna Kavan's Ice is a work of science fiction without parallel.
2020, English
Softcover, 192 pages, 13.1 x 20.4 cm
Published by
The New York Review of Books / New York
$30.00 - Out of stock
Anna Kavan is one of the great originals of twentieth-century fiction, comparable to Leonora Carrington and Jean Rhys, a writer whose stories explored the inner world of her imagination and plumbed the depths of her long addiction to heroin. This new selection of Kavan’s stories gathers the best work from across the many decades of her career, including oblique and elegiac tales of breakdown and institutionalization from Asylum Piece (1940), moving evocations of wartime from I Am Lazarus (1945), fantastic and surrealist pieces from A Bright Green Field (1958), and stories of addiction from Julia and the Bazooka (1970). Kavan’s turn to science fiction in her final novel, Ice, is reflected in her late stories, while “Starting a Career,” about a mercenary dealer of state secrets, is published here for the first time.
Kavan experimented throughout her writing career with results that are moving, funny, bizarre, poignant, often unsettling, always unique. Machines in the Head offers American readers the first full overview of the work of a fearless and dazzling literary explorer.
Few novelists match the fierce intensity of her vision.—J.G. Ballard, The Paris Review
Entering this haunting realm, the reader will crave to plunge deeper into her metallic and poetically surreal universe.—Patti Smith
It is the cool lucid light of that unique mind which makes her Anna Kavan . . . There is nothing else like her writing ... She is one of the most distinctive twentieth-century novelists.wind from now—Doris Lessing
2009, English
Softcover, 176 pages, 11 x 18 cm
Published by
Penguin Books / London
$23.00 - Out of stock
Based on the BBC television series, John Berger's Ways of Seeing is a unique look at the way we view art, published as part of the Penguin on Design series in Penguin Modern Classics.
'Seeing comes before words. The child looks and recognizes before it can speak.'
'But there is also another sense in which seeing comes before words. It is seeing which establishes our place in the surrounding world; we explain that world with words, but word can never undo the fact that we are surrounded by it. The relation between what we see and what we know is never settled.'
John Berger's Ways of Seeing is one of the most stimulating and influential books on art in any language. First published in 1972, it was based on the BBC television series about which the Sunday Times critic commented: 'This is an eye-opener in more ways than one: by concentrating on how we look at paintings . . . he will almost certainly change the way you look at pictures.' By now he has.
John Berger (b. 1926) is well known for his novels & stories as well as for his works of nonfiction, including several volumes of art criticism. His first novel, 'A Painter of Our Time', was published in 1958, & since then his books have included the novel 'G.', which won the Booker Prize in 1972. In 1962 he left Britain permanently, & he now lives in a small village in the French Alps.
'Berger has the ability to cut right through the mystification of professional art critics ... he is a liberator of images: and once we have allowed the paintings to work on us directly, we are in a much better position to make a meaningful evaluation'
Peter Fuller, Arts Review
'The influence of the series and the book ... was enormous ... It opened up for general attention areas of cultural study that are now commonplace'—Geoff Dyer in Ways of Telling
'One of the most influential intellectuals of our time'—Observer
2018, English
Softcover, 272 pages, 19.6 x 12.8 cm
Published by
Tuskar Rock / UK
$20.00 - Out of stock
It's 1996, and Chris Kraus is in Berlin, seeking a distributor for her film Gravity & Grace, described alternately as 'an experimental 16mm film about hope, despair, religious feeling and conviction' and 'an amateur intellectual's home video expanded to bulimic lengths' ...
It's 1942 in Marseille, and Simone Weil is waiting for the US entry visa that will save her from the Holocaust, while writing work described alternately as a 'radical philosophy of sadness' and 'immoral, trite, irrelevant and paradoxical' ...
It's the late 90s, the millennium is approaching, and Chris Kraus is in Los Angeles, not eating, waiting for her s/m partner to reply to her emails ...
It's 1943, and Simone Weil is in London, completing her project of transcendence by dying of starvation ...
Filled with Chris Kraus' trademark wit and frankness, unfolding to reveal the lives of ecstatic visionaries and failed artists, Aliens & Anorexia is an audacious novel about failure, empathy and sadness.
2014, English
Softcover, 512 pages, 14 x 21.6 cm
Published by
Nightboat Books / New York
$49.00 - Out of stock
The long-awaited English-language translation of Hervé Guibert’s arresting journals.
The Mausoleum of Lovers comprises Guibert's journals, kept from 1976-1991. Functioning as an atelier, it forecasts the writing of a novel, which does not materialize as such; the journal itself - a mausoleum of lovers - comes to take its place. The sensual exigencies and untempered forms of address in this epistolary work, often compared to Barthes' A Lover's Discourse, use the letter and the photograph in a work that hovers between forms, in anticipation of its own disintegration.
Translated by Keshii Pelao Nathanaël.
Hervé Guibert (1955–1991) was a French writer and photographer. A critic for Le Monde, he was the author of some thirty books, most notably To the Friend Who Did Not Save My Life, which presents an intimate portrait of Michel Foucault and played a significant role in changing public attitudes in France towards AIDS.
1993 / 1996, Japanese
Hardcover (w. dust jacket), 386 pages, 26 x 26 cm
Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Shashin Kagaku Co. / Kyoto
$320.00 - Out of stock
Very collectible early hardcover edition of what is now one of the truely iconic interior "design" books - Tokyo Style. Over a period of two years, Japanese writer-photographer Kyoichi Tsuzuki visited apartments, condos and suburban homes in Tokyo, and documented exactly what he saw in colour photography. First published in 1993 in this large photo book format, Tokyo Style is a collection of these photographs along with Tsuzuki's texts. Divided into eight sections - Beauty in Chaos, The Fancy Fetish, Artsy Pads, The Traditional Touch, Monomaniacs, Kiddie Kingdoms, Inertial Living and Hermitages - the book shows readers a demystified Tokyo and the ordinary lifestyles of the Tokyo people. No wide-angles or post-production here, just the most amazing compendium of hundreds of tiny Tokyo living spaces, no two alike.
Very Good copy in Good dust jacket with some small chipping and wear to corners and edges.
2022, English
Softcover, 192 pages, 21 x 13.5 cm
Published by
Black Inc / Melbourne
$25.00 - Out of stock
A dark and compelling work by a new voice in Australian – and world – literary fiction.
A nomad swallows poison and drowns himself. Resuscitated by a paramilitary bandit named Aslan, Figure is nursed back into a world of violence, sexuality and dementia. Together, Figure and Aslan traverse a coastline erupting in conflict. When the nearest city is ethnically cleansed, Figure escapes on the last ship evacuating to the other isle of the sea. Crossing village to village largely on foot, a slew of outcasts and ghosts guide him as he navigates states of cultural and metaphysical crisis.
Scott McCulloch’s debut novel, Basin, explores the axis of landscape and consciousness. Echoing the modernist tradition, and written in an incendiary yet elliptical prose style, Basin maps the phenomenon of a civilisation being reborn – a hallucinatory elegy to the inter-zones of self and place.
Born in Melbourne, based between Ukraine and the Caucasus since 2014, and currently dividing his time between Lebanon and Georgia, Scott McCulloch works with prose, essay and sound. His writings have appeared in various magazines and journals worldwide. Basin is his debut novel.
2022, English
Softcover, 232 pages
Published by
Allen & Unwin / NSW
$30.00 - Out of stock
Oscillating between elation and despair, An Exciting and Vivid Inner Life is the highly anticipated debut short story collection from Melbourne writer Paul Dalla Rosa.
Whether working in food service or in high-end retail, lit by a laptop in a sex chat or by the camera of an acclaimed film director, sharing a dangerous apartment in the city, a rooming house in China or a vacation rental in Mallorca, the protagonists of the ten stories comprising Paul Dalla Rosa’s debut collection, An Exciting and Vivid Inner Life, navigate the spaces between aspiration and delusion, ambition and aimlessness, the curated profile and the unreliable body.
By turns unsparing and tender, Dalla Rosa explores our lives in late-stage capitalism, where globalisation and its false promises of connectivity and equity leave us all further alienated and disenfranchised. His stories are small masterpieces of regret, futility and tenderness, dripping with acuity, irony and wit.
Like his acclaimed contemporary Ottessa Moshfegh and the legendary Lucia Berlin, Dalla Rosa is a masterful observer and unflinching eviscerator of our ugly, beautiful attempts at finding meaning in an ugly, beautiful world.
Author bio:
Paul Dalla Rosa is a writer based in Melbourne, Australia. His stories have appeared in Granta, The Paris Review, McSweeney's, Meanjin and New York Tyrant. In 2019, his story 'Comme' was shortlisted for the Sunday Times Short Story Award. He is currently undertaking his PhD at RMIT University, studying 'the real' within contemporary fiction. An Exciting and Vivid Inner Life is his debut collection.
2022, English
Softcover, 250 pages, 27.5 x 21 cm
Ed. of 100,
Published by
Cupboard / Melbourne
$100.00 - Out of stock
Issue one of Cupboard, a fashion magazine. This 250 page inaugral issue, "Bedroom Dressups", features Anabel's Drawings by Anabel Robinson; Anthems of a Seventeen Year Old Girl by Chloe Hagger and Anabel Robinson; Costumes for Grown Ups by Jasmine Nelson; Tramp Persona by Chloe Hagger; Storyboard: Dreamworks by Rowan Oliver and Katherine Botten; Whats a Party Girl to do? by AbeIla D'Adamo and Chloe Hagger; Bedroom Dressups by Chloe Hagger; Sara Mikorey #1; Flash Photography by Chloe Hagger; Wandering Heavenly Dead Gram a Tonne by Nicholas Curtis and Zoe Jackson; Overworked and Underlooked by Chloe Nagger; Sara Mikorey #2; La Mer by Mack; An Interview with J.T. Le Roy and Speedy by Chloe Hagger; Beauty Looks for Thursday Rags by Olive; Nostalgia in the Fallen World by Ursula Cornelia de Leeuw; Crossword by Brayden van Meurs
Introduction by Yuval Rosinger. Design by Ned Shannon.
Published in an edition of 100 copies.
2022, English
Softcover, 47 pages, 21 x 15 cm
Published by
Magic Hour Press / New York
$37.00 - In stock -
On December 18, 1974, Linda Rosenkrantz asked her friend Peter Hujar to write down everything he did one day. Hujar met Rosenkrantz at her apartment on 94th street the following day where she asked him about it in detail. She tape-recorded their conversation and this book is a full transcript of that exchange, published here for the first time since it was recorded 47 years ago.
“Peter Hujar’s monologue, prompted by Linda Rosenkranz, is a Warholian gem, and a prize discovery for Magic Hour Press.”—Moyra Davey
2020, English
Softcover, 320 pages, 23.3 x 12.8 cm
Published by
Vintage / UK
$23.00 - Out of stock
A powerful criticism of modern life by one of the most provocative and prophetic writers of our age.
Florent-Claude Labrouste is dying of sadness. Despised by his girlfriend and on the brink of career failure, his last hope for relief comes in the form of a newly available antidepressant that alters the brain's release of serotonin.
When he returns to the Normandy countryside in search of serenity, he instead finds a rural community left behind by globalisation and red-tape agricultural policies, with local farmers longing for an impossible return towhat they remember as a golden age.
Michel Houellebecq is a poet, essayist and novelist. He is the author of several novels including The Map and the Territory (winner of the Prix Goncourt), Atomised, Platform, Whatever and Submission. He was awarded the Legion d’Honneur in 2019.
2016, English
Softcover, 256 pages, 23.3 x 12.8 cm
Published by
Vintage / UK
$23.00 - In stock -
Submission is the highly-anticipated new novel from the internationally bestselling French writer Michel Houellebecq.
In a near-future France, François, a middle-aged academic, is watching his life slowly dwindle to nothing. His sex drive is diminished, his parents are dead, and his lifelong obsession – the ideas and works of the nineteenth-century novelist Joris-Karl Huysmans – has led him nowhere. In a late-capitalist society where consumerism has become the new religion, François is spiritually barren, but seeking to fill the vacuum of his existence.
And he is not alone. As the 2022 Presidential election approaches, two candidates emerge as favourites: Marine Le Pen of the Front National, and Muhammed Ben Abbes of the nascent Muslim Fraternity. Forming a controversial alliance with the mainstream parties, Ben Abbes sweeps to power, and overnight the country is transformed. Islamic law comes into force: women are veiled, polygamy is encouraged and, for François, life is set on a new course.
Submission is both a devastating satire and a profound meditation on isolation, faith and love. It is a startling new work by one of the most provocative and prescient novelists of today.
A poet, essayist and novelist, Michel Houellebecq is the author of several novels, including The Map and the Territory, Atomised, Platform and Whatever.
2012, English
Softcover, 304 pages, 23.3 x 12.8 cm
Published by
Vintage / UK
$23.00 - Out of stock
Part thriller, part satire, Houellebecq's prize winning and critically acclaimed new novel will be a publishing sensation.
If Jed Martin, the main character of this novel, was to tell you its story, he would perhaps begin by talking about a boiler breaking down, one 15th December. Or about his father, a well-known and committed architect, with whom he passed alone many a Christmas Eve.He would certainly recall Olga, a very pretty Russian he met at the start of his career, during the first exhibition of his photographs of Michelin road maps. This was before global success arrived with the series of ‘professions’, those portraits of personalities from all walks of life (including the writer Michel Houellebecq), captured at their work.He should also say how he helped inspector Jasselin to solve an atrocious crime, whose terrifying scene left a lasting mark on the police teams.At the end of his life he will find a certain serenity, and utter only murmurs.Art, money, love, the father-son relationship, death, work, and France turned into a tourist paradise are some of the themes of this novel, which is resolutely classical and openly modern.
About the Author
Michel Houellebecq is a poet, essayist and novelist. He is the author of five novels, Whatever, Atomised, Platform, The Possibility of an Island and The Map and the Territory, which won the prestigious Prix Goncourt.
2001, English
Softcover, 384 pages, 23.3 x 12.8 cm
Published by
Vintage / UK
$23.00 - Out of stock
Half-brothers Michel and Bruno have a mother in common but little else.
Michel is a molecular biologist, a thinker and idealist, a man with no erotic life to speak of and little in the way of human society. Bruno, by contrast, is a libertine, though more in theory than in practice, his endless lust is all too rarely reciprocated. Both are symptomatic members of our atomised society, where religion has given way to shallow 'new age' philosophies and love to meaningless sexual connections.
Atomised (Les Particules Elementaires) tells the stories of the two brothers, but the real subject of the novel is in its dismantling of contemporary society and its assumptions, in its political incorrectness, and its caustic and penetrating asides on everything from anthropology to the problem pages of girls' magazines. A dissection of modern lives and loves. By turns funny, acid, infuriating, didactic, touching and visceral.
Michel Houellebecq lives in County Cork, Ireland. He is the bestselling author of Whatever, Atomised, Platform, Lanzarote and The Possibility of an Island . He is also a poet, essayist and rap artist.
1994, English / French / German
Hardcover (w. die-cut foiled dust jacket), 248 pages, 34 x 25 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
$190.00 - In stock -
Rare first edition of Czech-American artist Ruth Francken's catalogue raisonné, who's cosmopolitan and nomadic life was a reflection of her work as a painter and visual artist: marginal, disparate and inseparable from the various post-war trends, whether American Abstract Expressionism, Art Informel, Surrealism or Pop Art. Published in 1994, this lavishly illustrated volume, issued in hardcover with fragile die-cut metallic silver dust-jacket, features texts by the artist, her close friend French philosopher Jean-François Lyotard, Peter Ruthenberg, Ursula Sandmann, and Ignatz Bubis, in English, French and German. Documentation of works from all periods of her oeuvre are accompanied by studio and social photography, a full catalogue of works and biography. A valuable and scarce book on a tremendous artist with little reception outside France, where she was primarily active. Francken's exploration of themes of fragmentation, incompleteness, multiplication, and decomposition in communication and image spanned the mediums of painting, sculpture, collage, textile and furniture design, and has been a large influence on artists such as Rosemarie Trockel.
Ruth Francken (1924, Prague—2006, Paris) was a Czech-American sculptor, painter, and furniture designer who was mostly active in Paris. Ruth Francken's life and career would span over six decades, two continents, and more than half a dozen countries. After studying painting from 1939-1940 at the Ruskin School in Oxford, England, she moved to New York, where she studied at the Art Students League of New York. After becoming an American citizen in 1942, she worked as a textile designer until 1949, when she left the United States for Europe. After a two-year period in Venice (1950-1952), she moved to Paris, where she lived until her death in 2006, save for two years in the 1960s and 1970s when she worked out of Berlin and Santa Barbara, California. Ruth Francken was considered an Abstract Expressionist in her early career, until around 1964. After this point she began working with object sculptures, collage, and different textiles and techniques, and her art took on a more surrealist and pop-art aesthetic. She focuses heavily on problems and disconnects in communication, a subject she shared with friend and collaborator French philosopher Jean-François Lyotard.
Very Good copy with Good dust-jacket. Some general wear to foiled covers and common small damages to the fragile die-cut lettering. Preserved in mylar wrap.
1983, English
Softcover (staple-bound), 22 pages, 26.6 x 18.5 cm
1st UK Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
George Paton Gallery / Melbourne
$180.00 - In stock -
Wonderful, exceptionally rare catalogue published on the occasion of the group exhibition Comic Stripping at George Paton Gallery, Melbourne, May 31—June 24 1983. Features the work of Howard Arkley, Julie Cunningham, Juliet Darling, Juan Davila, Linda Marrinon, Raymond X, Peter Tyndall, Christopher Van Der Craats, → ↑ →. Illustrated throughout with work and texts by the artists and an introduction by Denise McGrath.
Very Good copy with ex-libris 200 Gertrude St. archive stamps to contents and final page of catalogue. Small mark, soft surface tear from old sticker to bottom-left of cover, otherwise a lovely copy with only light wear.
1994, English
Softcover (staple-bound), 36 pages, 27 x 21.5 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
The University of Melbourne Museum of Art / Melbourne
$35.00 - In stock -
Catalogue published on the occasion of Australian artist Aleks Danko's exhibition at Ian Potter Gallery, 18 May-18 June 1994; volume #1 in "The Artist and the Museum" series curated by Merryn Gates. A timeline of works spanning the bottom half of each page throughout the catalogue traces Danko's history of works across sculpture, installation, video, performance, editions, books, etc. from 1970-1994, accompanied by texts by Charles Green, Jacqueline Thomas, Jackie Dunn, and Merryn Gates occupying the top half of each page. Also includes "Lafart" Manifesto - 18/3/1975 written by Danko and Mike Parr!
Aleks Danko (b. 1950) is an Australian performance artist and sculptor. The son of Ukrainian migrants, he was born in Adelaide, and educated at the South Australian School of Art and the Hawthorn Institute of Education. He started exhibiting in Adelaide in 1970. Aleks Danko’s career spans more than 5 decades and encompasses diverse media, from sculpture and installation to text and language-based works. Drawing actively on Australia’s political and cultural history, his work is infused with satirical humour and a subtle critique of contemporary social values.
Very Good copy.
2015, English
Softcover (w. french flaps), 176 pages, 26 x 21 cm
Published by
Heide Museum of Modern Art / Victoria
Museum of Contemporary Art / Sydney
$35.00 - In stock -
Major survey catalogue of Australian artist Aleks Danko, published by Hiede Museum of Modern Art and MCA in 2015. First held at Heide, 7 November 2015—21 February 2016, MY FELLOW AUS-TRA-ALIENS presented artworks spanning nearly five decades of the long career of Victorian-based, Adelaide-born artist Aleks Danko, from his earliest exhibitions in the late 1960s through to his recent installations. Profusely illustrated with accompanying texts by curators Lesley Harding and Glenn Barkley.
Aleks Danko (b. 1950) is an Australian performance artist and sculptor. The son of Ukrainian migrants, he was born in Adelaide, and educated at the South Australian School of Art and the Hawthorn Institute of Education. He started exhibiting in Adelaide in 1970. Aleks Danko’s career spans more than 5 decades and encompasses diverse media, from sculpture and installation to text and language-based works. Drawing actively on Australia’s political and cultural history, his work is infused with satirical humour and a subtle critique of contemporary social values.
2004, English
Softcover, 30cm x 21cm. 48 pages
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
NGV (National Gallery of Victoria) / Victoria
$35.00 - In stock -
Exhibition catalogue published on the occasion of the major National Gallery of Victoria travelling exhibition Aleks Danko — Songs of Australia Volume 16: Shhh, Go Back To Sleep (an un-Australian dob-in mix) in 2004. Presenting "The Song Cycle Volumes 1—16" this profusely illustrated catalogue documents many of Danko's major installations in glossy colour, alongside texts, including those by the artist, exhibition history, bibliography.
Aleks Danko (b. 1950) is an Australian performance artist and sculptor. The son of Ukrainian migrants, he was born in Adelaide, and educated at the South Australian School of Art and the Hawthorn Institute of Education. He started exhibiting in Adelaide in 1970. Aleks Danko’s career spans more than 5 decades and encompasses diverse media, from sculpture and installation to text and language-based works. Drawing actively on Australia’s political and cultural history, his work is infused with satirical humour and a subtle critique of contemporary social values.
Very Good copy.