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
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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.
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.
2004, English
Softcover, unpaginated, 19 x 15 cm
Ed. of 600,
Published by
Reverie Press / Daylesford
$55.00 - Out of stock
Book collection of concrete poetry by Australian artists Peter Tyndall, Richard Tipping, Jeff Stewart, Marie Sierra, Alex Selenitsch, Peter O'Mara, Patrick Jones, Aleks Danko, Geoffrey Baxter; edited with an introduction by Patrick Jones. Published in an edition of 600 copies.
Concrete Poetry is both a form and an attitude to poetry that emphasises the visual and material elements of letters and thus words in relation to their meaning. 'Words and Things' is a project Patrick Jones set out to produce to represent concrete poetry and text-based art in Australia. The material considerations of 'Words and Things', both environmental and aesthetic, lead the reader into a work that is more like a sequence of short films than a standard book.
Includes biography of each contributing artist and a related reading list.
As New copy.
1997, English
Softcover (tri-fold, double-sided card), 29 x 21 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / as new
Published by
Bendigo Art Gallery / Bendigo
$10.00 - In stock -
Catalogue published on the occasion of Peter Tyndall's Dreaming Bendigo into Being at Bendigo Art Gallery, Oct 24—Nov 30, 1997. Tri-fold, double-sided card, illustrated throughout with Tyndall's artworks and visual references (including those specific to the Bendigo region), alongside text by Tyndall.
Peter Tyndall (b. Melbourne, 1951, lives and works in Hepburn Springs).
Since the 1970s, Peter Tyndall’s paintings, drawings and prints engage with recursive relationships between art, language and meaning. He is known for his use of graphic lines, text and comic-style illustration. Tyndall’s art reflects and disrupts historical perspectives on art. His ongoing project (since 2008) is a blog entitled bLOGOS/HA HA, which offers commentary on unfolding contemporary history.
As New copies.
1989, English
Softcover (single, double-sided card), 21 x 29.7 cm
1st UK Edition, Out of print title / used / fine
Published by
200 Gertrude Street / Melbourne
$10.00 - In stock -
Scarce catalogue published on the occasion of the exhibition Sally Smart — Mad Woman In The Attic, December, 1989. Illustrated offset printed double-sided card with artist C.V. on verso.
Sally Smart (b. 1960) is an Australian contemporary artist known for her large-scale assemblage installations that incorporate a range of media, including felt cut-outs, painted canvas, drawings, screen-printing, printed fabric and photography, performance and video. Her art addresses gender and identity politics and questions the relationships between body and culture, including trans-national ideas that shaped cultural history. She has exhibited widely throughout Australia and internationally, and her works are held in major galleries in Australia and around the world.
Fine copy.
1991, English
Softcover (single, double-sided card), 21 x 29.7 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
200 Gertrude Street / Melbourne
$45.00 - Out of stock
Scarce catalogue published on the occasion of the exhibition Kathy Temin — The Duck-Rabbit Problem May, 1991. Illustrated offset printed double-sided card with artist C.V. on verso.
Kathy Temin (b. 1968) is an Australian artist who uses synthetic fur to create sculptural objects and installations. She is represented in a number of public collections in Australia and New Zealand and is a professor and Head of Fine Art at Monash University in Melbourne.
Very Good copy with some light wear to corners.
1999, English
Softcover (staple-bound), 8 pages, 21 x 29.7 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / fine
Published by
200 Gertrude Street / Melbourne
$15.00 - Out of stock
Scarce catalogue published on the occasion of the exhibition Same As It Ever Was, curated by Clare Firth-Smith at 200 Gertrude Street in 1999. Exploring a techno-logic of cultural, the link between modernism and a late-90's techno sensibility, the exhibition included work by Damiano Bertoli, Andrea Blundell, Nadine Christensen, Clare Firth-Smith, Julian Holcroft, Katherine Huang. Texts by Daniel Palmer and Julian Holcroft, alongside list of works exhibited.
Fine copy.
1988, English
Softcover (tri-fold, double-sided card), 29 x 21 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / as new
Published by
200 Gertrude Street / Melbourne
$70.00 - In stock -
Extremely rare catalogue published on the occasion of the exhibition Howard Arkley — Casual Works : Working Drawings, Source Material, Doodles 1974—1987, at 200 Gertrude St., Fitzroy, May 5—May 28, 1988. This ambitious and inventive exhibition involved Arkley’s auto-survey of his own career to date, through a series of black and white air-brushed works-on-paper, shown with selected examples of related ‘source material’ and minor works on paper. Tri-fold catalogue offset printed on stiff card, designed by Ian Robertson, illustrated throughout with Arkley's drawings and pictorial references (the cover featuring a photo of Monash University’s Menzies Building, one of the source images) accompanied by the essays "Art in The Urban Environment" by Richard Brown, and "All Teeth and Hunger" by Virginia Trioli.
Very Good, As New copy.
1988, English
Softcover (staple-bound), 16 pages, 21 x 14.8 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / as new
Published by
City Gallery / Melbourne
$40.00 - In stock -
Catalogue for the 1988 exhibition La Boheme at City Gallery, Melbourne. Curated by John Nixon, featuring Howard Arkley, Peter Cripps, Aleks Danko, John Dunkley-Smith, Lyndal Jones, John Nixon, Peter Tyndall, Jenny Watson.
As New copy.
1991, English
Softcover (staple-bound), 36 pages, 30 x 21cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Art Gallery of New South Wales / Sydney
$35.00 - Out of stock
Scarce exhibition catalogue published on the occasion of the exhibition, 3 Installations : Noelene Lucas, Ross Mellick, Robert Owen, curated by Anthony Bond at Art Gallery of New South Wales, 1991. Illustrated in colour and b/w throughout with the work of all three Australian artists, alongside texts by playwright Noëlle Janaczewska (for Noelene Lucas), curator Tony Bond (for Ross Mellick), and artist John Barbour (for Robert Owen), biographies, artist texts and drawings.
Very Good copy.
1969, English
Softcover (staple-bound), 32 pages, 21.5 x 14 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Oxford University Press / New York
$30.00 - Out of stock
First edition of "Australian Abstract Art", an essay by Australian art historian and academic Patrick McCaughey (born 1942 in Dublin, Ireland), published in 1969 by Oxford University Press under their "National Gallery Booklets" series. Includes illustrated examples of Roy de Maistre, Grace Crowley, Ralph Balson, John Olsen, Elwyn Lynn, Norma Redpath, Lawrence Daws, Clement Meadmore, Robert Jacks, Sydney Ball, Dale Hickey, Richard Havyatt.
Fine copy with light tanning.
1969, English
Softcover, 120 pages, 21.5 x 16 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Sun Books / Melbourne
$18.00 - Out of stock
First 1969 edition of "A Guide to Modern Australian Painting", published by Sun Books, Melbourne. "The first paperback book on modern Australian art", this small but generous volume, traces the extraordinary developments in Australian art for the "student, connoisseur or 'just plain curious'".
Profusely illustrated in colour and b/w throughout with the work of Ian Fairweather, John Olsen, Brett Whiteley, John Coburn, Robert Grieve, Sydney Ball, Col Jordon, Stanislaus Rapotec, Albert Tucker, John Perceval, Sidney Nolan, Arthur Boyd, Donald Friend, Sir William Dobell, Lloyd Rees, Jon Molvig, James Gleeson, Robert Juniper, Clifton Pugh, Jacqueline Hick, Leonard French, John Brack, Lloyd Rees, Russell Drysdale, Elwyn Lynn, Ken Reinhard, David Boyd, David Aspen, and many more.
Foreword by author R.K. Luck, and followed by details of plates, biographical notes on all featured artists, list of main Australian galleries and bibliography.
Good-Very Good copy.
2002, English
Softcover (staple-bound), 32 pages, 27 x 21 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
$15.00 - In stock -
Scarce catalogue published on the occasion of the First Birthday Exhibition of Metro 5 Gallery, May - June, 2002, coinciding with the world exclusive release of the gold sculptures of Sidney Nolan (depicted on the cover and within). Features the work of Sidney Nolan, Arthur Boyd, Dale Hickey, John Brack, John Firth-Smith, Hoawrd Arkley, Robert Jacks, Roger Kemp, Yvonne Audette, Albert Tucker, James Gleeson, John Perceval, Tim Storrier, Brett Whiteley, and many others. Illustrated throughout in colour with press release and room-sheet price-list enclosed.
Very Good copy.
2021, English
Softcover, 234 pages, 22.4 x 29 cm
Published by
BATT Coop /Paris
$70.00 - In stock -
Osawatomie is a direct allusion to the eponymous battle waged by the abolitionist John Brown of whom Victor Hugo at the time of saving him from hanging says "Yes, let America know and think about it, there is something more frightening than Cain killing Abel, it is Washington killing Spartacus". By his call to the armed struggle to fight slavery Brown is part of a revolutionary culture which links him in particular to Auguste Blanqui.
At a time when the United States of America seems once again affected by the fever of resistance against racial and social inequalities, it seems opportune to put the documents of the radicals of the 1960s and 1970s back into circulation. The context of the struggle for civil rights and the military expansion in Vietnam then allowed the emergence of a militant generation such as the country had not known since the crushing of the unionism of the IWW (Industrial Worker of the World) and the hunt for communists. From Ghettos to Universities, groups are suddenly forming and organizing in the middle of the sixties into a whole, that history calls New Left. Among them, the student union movement is experiencing through the SDS (Student for a Democratic Society) a peak of 100,000 inscribed members, torn within it by two political organizations, one based on Marxist Leninist orthodoxy, strongly tinged with workerism, refusing the contextual analysis of racial tensions and the particular history of the USA, the Worker Student Alliance (WSA). The other, majority in the SDS, the Revolutionary Youth Movement (RYM) wishing to accompany the resistance movements of the Young Lords to the Black Panther Party, opting after the dissolution of the SDS for a strategy of participation in the increase of tensions and confrontations with the power and reactionary America. Thus are formed the Weather Underground in allusion to the words of a Bob Dylan song "You don't need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows", prophetic adhesion to the imminence of a world revolution. While they are not about taking power, it is about accompanying it to its downfall. Its members, numbering 30, exclusively from the white petty bourgeoisie went underground from 1969 relying on a strong network of thousands of sympathizers. They carry out attacks of symbolic significance which never claim victims, and become much more radicalized in their autarky and publish in low circulation, Osawatomie, a newspaper sent mainly to their relays supposed to withdraw and distribute the publication which will know 6 issues in a year before disappearing with the organization.
The complete collection is reproduced in this book, along with the brochure explaining the organizational explosion, the split. Feminism, anti-imperialist struggle, Vietnam, racism and segregation, sexism, workers' struggles, anti-colonialists, anti-prison in addition to the political orientations of the revolutionary movement are all themes addressed.
2022, English
Softcover, 256 pages, 17.5 x 11.5 cm
Published by
Urbanomic / Cornwall
$35.00 - In stock -
An argument that by amplifying alienation in performance, we can shift the emphasis from the sonic to the social.
We are not what we think we are. Our self-image as natural individuated subjects is determined behind our backs—historically by political forces, cognitively by the language we use, and neurologically by sub-personal mechanisms, as revealed by scientific and philosophical analyses.
Under contemporary capitalism, as the gap between self-image and reality becomes an ever greater source of social and mental distress, these theoretical insights are potential dynamite. Shifting his explorations from the sonic to the social, amplifying alienation and playing with psychic noise, artist and performer Mattin finally lights the fuse.
In what is a handbook for practical transformation as much as a theoretical treatise, Mattin sets out the thinking behind his score Social Dissonance, in which the audience is the instrument.
The noise is here to stay. Alienation is a constitutive part of subjectivity and an enabling condition for exploring social dissonance—the territory upon which we already find ourselves, the condition we inhabit today.
2022, English
Softcover, 192 pages, 19.8 x 12.9 cm
Published by
Urbanomic / Cornwall
$35.00 - Out of stock
Insights into the intelligence throughout the natural and technical environment, in the fabric of our devices and dwellings, in our clothes, and under our skin.
Is there a way to understand the materials that surround us not as passive objects, but as other intelligences interacting with our own?
In Parallel Minds, expert in materials science and nanotechnology Laura Tripaldi delivers not only detailed insights into the properties and emergent behaviours of matter as revealed by state-of-the-art chemistry, synthetic biology, and nanotech, but also a rich philosophical reflection that crosses the frontier between nature and culture, and where the most cutting-edge scientific syntheses resonate with ancient myth.
The result is a technomaterial bestiary full of unexpected encounters with ‘strange minds’—from cobwebs to kevlar and carbon fibre, from centaurs to amoebas to arachnids, from polycephalic slime to resonating plasmons, from viruses to golems. In leading us through this labyrinth of intelligent materials, Tripaldi picks up the thread of new materialisms and—in the historical weave between ‘women’s work’ and the ‘unnatural sciences’—contemporary feminisms.
Parallel Minds reveals the intelligence at large throughout the natural and technical environment, in the fabric of our devices and dwellings, in our clothes, and even under our skin. Full of lateral ideas and unexpected images, Tripaldi’s book imbues the study and synthesis of materials with a new urgency. For not only do the materials that surround us participate actively in the construction of the world in which we live, but harnessing their ability to interact intelligently with their environment could be the key to the future of our species.
"Parallel Minds is a welcome guide to contemporary debates about material intelligence: calm and measured, it is also bold in its ambitions and unafraid to face the challenges posed by an increasingly—and often disconcertingly—smart and lively world in which culture is inseparable from technology." —Sadie Plant, author of Zeros and Ones
"Tripaldi’s book is the most important philosophical surprise of recent years. It outlines a research programme in which philosophy and chemistry, the science of living beings and morality will have to work together in order to overcome all the dualisms that have marked modernity. Radical and erudite, very readable, and revolutionary, Tripaldi’s book is sure to become a great contemporary classic." —Emmanuele Coccia, author of Metamorphoses
2022, English
Hardcover (w. dust jacket), 216 pages, 21 x 14 cm
Published by
Yale University Press / New Haven
$46.00 - Out of stock
Foreword by Rachel Kushner
Preface by Alexandra Truitt
"Impressive . . . Truitt lyrically looks back on 80 years of life. . . . [T]hese daily entries . . . offer a version of Truitt free of artifice as she meditates on the sacred and mundane. . . . This sparks with intelligence."—Publishers Weekly
In the spring of 1974, the artist Anne Truitt (1921-2004) committed herself to keeping a journal for a year. She would continue the practice, sometimes intermittently, over the next six years, writing in spiral-bound notebooks and setting no guidelines other than to "let the artist speak." These writings were published as Daybook: The Journal of an Artist (1982). Two other journal volumes followed: Turn (1986) and Prospect (1996). This book, the final volume, comprises journals the artist kept from the winter of 2001 to the spring of 2002, two years before her death.
In Yield, Truitt's unflinching honesty is on display as she contemplates her place in the world and comes to terms with the intellectual, practical, emotional, and spiritual issues that an artist faces when reconciling her art with her life, even as that life approaches its end. Truitt illuminates a life and career in which the demands, responsibilities, and rewards of family, friends, motherhood, and grandmotherhood are ultimately accepted, together with those of a working artist.
2022, English
Softcover, 256 pages, 21.3 x 14 cm
Published by
Simon and Schuster / New York
$33.00 - Out of stock
Renowned American artist Anne Truitt kept this illuminating and inspiring journal over a period of seven years, determined to come to terms with the forces that shaped her art and life. Her range of sensitivity—moral, intellectual, sensual, emotional, and spiritual— is remarkably broad. She recalls her childhood on the eastern shore of Maryland, her career change from psychology to art, and her path to a sculptural practice that would “set color free in three dimensions.” She reflects on the generous advice of other artists, watches her own daughters’ journey into motherhood, meditates on criticism and solitude, and struggles to find the way to express her vision. Resonant and true, encouraging and revelatory, Anne Truitt guides herself—and her readers—through a life in which domestic activities and the needs of children and friends are constantly juxtaposed against the world of color and abstract geometry to which she is drawn in her art.
Beautifully written and a rare window on the workings of a creative mind, Daybook showcases an extraordinary artist whose insights generously and succinctly illuminate the artistic process.
Introduction by Audrey Niffenegger
"A remarkable record of a woman's reconciliation of art, motherhood, memoires of childhood, and present-day demands." — Anne Morrow Lindbergh
"Daybook is a rare gift, illuminating and nourishing, a journal to read and re-read." — May Sarton
"A natural and graceful writer... Truitt's self-examination is unflinching and, at every moment, possessed of the inevitable dignity that attends a genuine commitment to telling the truth about oneself." — Art in America
1973, English
Softcover, 480 pages, 18.3 x 10.9 cm
Reprint,
Published by
Vintage Books / New York
$32.00 - Out of stock
'It's only after our death that we shall really be able to hear.'
Originally published in 1925, this book became known for the frank sexuality of its contents and its account of middle class French morality. The measured tone of hopeless nihilism that pervades The Counterfeiters quickly shatters any image of André Gide as the querulous and impious Buddha to a quarter-century of intellectuals. In sharp and brilliant prose a seedy, cynical and gratuitously alarming narrative is developed, involving a wide range of otherwise harmless and mainly middle-to-upper-class Parisians. But the setting could be anywhere. From puberty through adolescence to death, The Counterfeiters is a rare encyclopedia of human disorder, weakness and despair.
An appendix to this edition (Vintage, 1973) contains excerpts from the Gide's notebooks which he kept while writing this book.
André Paul Guillaume Gide (1869 – 1951) was a French author. Born in Paris in 1869, Gide's career ranged from its beginnings in the symbolist movement, to the advent of anticolonialism between the two World Wars. He had an irregular and lonely upbringing. He became devoted to literature and music, and began his literary career as an essayist, moving on to poetry, biography, fiction, drama, criticism, reminiscence and translation. By 1917 he had emerged as a prophet to French youth, and his unorthodox views were a source of endless debate and attack. Known for his fiction as well as his autobiographical works, Gide exposed to public view the conflict and eventual reconciliation of the two sides of his personality (characterized by a Protestant austerity and a transgressive sexual adventurousness, respectively), which a strict and moralistic education had helped set at odds. Gide's work can be seen as an investigation of freedom and empowerment in the face of moralistic and puritanical constraints, and centers on his continuous effort to achieve intellectual honesty. His self-exploratory texts reflect his search of how to be fully oneself, including owning one's sexual nature, without at the same time betraying one's values. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1948. Gide died in Paris in 1951.
2018, English
Softcover, 280 pages, 23 x 15.2 cm
Published by
Northwestern University Press / Evanston
$35.00 - In stock -
Collected Stories is an authoritative new translation of the complete fiction of Bruno Schulz, whose work has influenced writers as various as Salman Rushdie, Cynthia Ozick, Jonathan Safran Foer, Philip Roth, Danilo Kis, and Roberto Bolano.
Schulz's prose is renowned for its originality. Set largely in a fictional counterpart of his hometown of Drohobycz, his stories merge the real and the surreal. The most ordinary objects—the wind, an article of clothing, a plate of fish—can suddenly appear unfathomably mysterious and capable of illuminating profound truths. As "Father," one of his most intriguing characters, declaims: "Matter has been granted infinite fecundity, an inexhaustible vital force, and at the same time, a seductive power of temptation that entices us to create forms."
This comprehensive volume includes all of The Cinnamon Shops, restoring the original Polish title to Schulz's most famous collection (sometimes titled The Street of Crocodiles in English), and Sanatorium under the Hourglass. Also included are four previously uncollected short stories that pay tribute to Schulz's enduring genius. Madeline G. Levine's masterful new translation shows contemporary readers how Schulz, often compared to Proust and Kafka, reveals the workings of memory and consciousness.
Bruno Schulz (1892—1942) was a Polish Jewish writer, fine artist, literary critic and art teacher. He is regarded as one of the great Polish-language prose stylists of the 20th century. The author nurtured his extraordinary imagination in a swarm of identities and nationalities: a Jew who thought and wrote in Polish, was fluent in German, and immersed in Jewish culture though unfamiliar with the Yiddish language. Yet there was nothing cosmopolitan about him; his genius fed in solitude on specific local and ethnic sources. He preferred not to leave his provincial hometown, which over the course of his life belonged to four countries. His adult life was often perceived by outsiders as that of a hermit: uneventful and enclosed. In 1938, he was awarded the Polish Academy of Literature's prestigious Golden Laurel award. Several of Schulz's works were lost in the Holocaust, including short stories from the early 1940s and his final, unfinished novel The Messiah. Schulz was shot and killed by a German Nazi, a Gestapo officer, in 1942 while walking back home toward Drohobycz Ghetto with a loaf of bread.
2009, English / Spanish
Softcover, 736 pages, 23.2 x 15.45 cm
Published by
University of California Press / Berkley
$76.00 - Out of stock
Edited and translated by Clayton Eshleman
Foreword by Mario Vargas Llosa
Introduction by Efrain Kristal
This first translation of the complete poetry of Peruvian Cesar Vallejo (1892-1938) makes available to English speakers one of the greatest achievements of twentieth-century world poetry. Handsomely presented in facing-page Spanish and English, this volume, translated by National Book Award winner Clayton Eshleman, includes the groundbreaking collections "The Black Heralds" (1918), "Trilce" (1922), "Human Poems" (1939), and "Spain, Take This Cup from Me" (1939).
Vallejo's poetry takes the Spanish language to an unprecedented level of emotional rawness and stretches its grammatical possibilities. Striking against theology with the very rhetoric of the Christian faith, Vallejo's is a tragic vision - perhaps the only one in the canon of Spanish-language literature - in which salvation and sin are one and the same. This edition includes notes on the translation and a fascinating translation memoir that traces Eshleman's long relationship with Vallejo's poetry. An introduction and chronology provide further insights into Vallejo's life and work.
César Abraham Vallejo Mendoza (1892–1938) was a Peruvian poet, writer, playwright, and journalist. Although he published only three books of poetry during his lifetime, he is considered one of the great poetic innovators of the 20th century in any language. Always a step ahead of the literary currents, each of his books was distinct from the others and, in it's own sense, revolutionary. Thomas Merton called him "the greatest universal poet since Dante".
Poet and essayist Clayton Eshleman is a recipient of the National Book Award and the Landon Translation Prize. He is the cotranslator of César Vallejo: The Complete Posthumous Poetry and Aimé Césaire: The Collected Poetry, both from UC Press. Among Mario Vargas Llosa's prestigious literary awards are the National Critics' Prize, the Peruvian National Prize, and the Miguel de Cervantes Prize. He is the author of more than twenty books. Efrain Kristal is Professor of Comparative Literature at the University of California, Los Angeles. Stephen M. Hart is Professor of Spanish and Latin American Studies at University College, London.
1976, English
Softcover, 252 pages, 18 x 11 cm
Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Penguin Books / London
$18.00 - In stock -
A gripping tale of human unrelieved horror, of survival and resilience, and of the ways in which humankind confronts death, The Plague is at once a masterfully crafted novel, eloquently understated and epic in scope, and a parable of ageless moral resonance, profoundly relevant to our times. In Oran, a coastal town in North Africa, the plague begins as a series of portents, unheeded by the people. It gradually becomes an omnipresent reality, obliterating all traces of the past and driving its victims to almost unearthly extremes of suffering, madness, and compassion.
An immediate triumph when it was published in 1947, The Plague is in part an allegory of France's suffering under the Nazi occupation, and a story of bravery and determination against the precariousness of human existence.
Albert Camus (1913—1960) was an Algerian-born French philosopher, author, dramatist and journalist. He was awarded the 1957 Nobel Prize in Literature at the age of 44, the second-youngest recipient in history. His works include The Stranger, The Plague, The Myth of Sisyphus, The Fall, and The Rebel.
Very Good copy of the 1972 Penguin edition, light wear and tanning.
1962, English
Softcover, 256 pages, 18 x 11 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Penguin Books / London
$18.00 - Out of stock
Written in 1914 but not published until 1925, a year after Kafka’s death, The Trial is the terrifying tale of Josef K., a respectable bank officer who is suddenly and inexplicably arrested and must defend himself against a charge about which he can get no information. Whether read as an existential tale, a parable, or a prophecy of the excesses of modern bureaucracy wedded to the madness of totalitarianism, The Trial has resonated with chilling truth for generations of readers.
Franz Kafka (1883—1924) was a German-speaking Bohemian novelist and short-story writer, widely regarded as one of the major figures of 20th-century literature. His work fuses elements of realism and the fantastic. It typically features isolated protagonists facing bizarre or surrealistic predicaments and incomprehensible socio-bureaucratic powers. It has been interpreted as exploring themes of alienation, existential anxiety, guilt, and absurdity. His best known works include the short story "The Metamorphosis" and novels The Trial and The Castle. The term Kafkaesque has entered English to describe situations like those found in his writing.
Very good copy of 1962 edition, with tanning and light wear.
2012, English
Softcover, 136 pages, 12 x 18 cm
Published by
Wakefield Press / Cambridge
$30.00 - Out of stock
When Marcel Schwob published The Book of Monelle in French in 1894, it immediately became the unofficial bible of the French symbolist movement, admired by such contemporaries as Stephane Mallarmé, Alfred Jarry, and André Gide. A carefully woven assemblage of legends, aphorisms, fairy tales, and nihilistic philosophy, it remains a deeply enigmatic and haunting work over a century later, a gathering of literary and personal ruins written in a style that evokes both the Brothers Grimm and Friedrich Nietzsche. The Book of Monelle was the fruit of Schwob’s intense emotional suffering over the loss of his love, a “girl of the streets” named Louise, whom he had befriended in 1891 and who succumbed to tuberculosis two years later. Transforming her into Monelle, the innocent prophet of destruction, Schwob tells the stories of her various sisters: girls succumbing to disillusion, caught between the misleading world of childlike fantasy and the bitter world of reality. This new translation reintroduces a true fin-de-siècle masterpiece into English.
Marcel Schwob (1867–1905) was a scholar of startling breadth and an incomparable storyteller. A secret influence on generations of writers, from Guillaume Apollinaire and Jorge Luis Borges to Roberto Bolaño, Schwob was as versed in the street slang of medieval thieves as he was in the poetry of Walt Whitman. His allegiances were to Rabelais and François Villon, Robert Louis Stevenson and Edgar Allan Poe. Paul Valéry and Alfred Jarry both dedicated their first books to him, and in doing so paid tribute to the author who could evoke both the intellect of Leonardo da Vinci and the anarchy of Ubu Roi. He was also the uncle of Lucy Schwob, better remembered today as the Surrealist photographer Claude Cahun.
Translated, with an afterword, by Kit Schluter
“[A]n utterly heartbreaking book, beautiful in the torment and suffering that is manifested through its words.” — Janice Lee, HTML Giant
“[The Book of Monelle] is an unsettling work, a triptych in which the singular is transformed into the universal." — Stephen Sparks, 3:AM Magazine
“It is a work of poetic force and intuitive form, and the book Schwob was best known for during his lifetime.” — Martin Riker, The Wall Street Journal
A "Best of the Small Press" selection by CAConrad.