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
Theory / Essay
Architecture / Interior
Graphic Design / Typography
Photography
Fashion
Eros
LGBTQ+
Fiction / Poetry
Weird / Speculative / Science Fiction / Horror
Transgressive / Visceral / Abject
Symbolism / Decadence / Fin de siècle
Film / Video
Painting
Sculpture / Installation
Performance / Dance / Theater
Drawing
Sound / Music
Curatorial
Group Shows / Collections
Periodicals
Out-of-print / Rare
Posters / Ephemera / Discs
Signed Books
World Food Books Gift Voucher
World Food Book Bag
Australian Art
Australian Photography
Japanese Photography
Conceptual Art
Minimal Art
Dada
'Pataphysics / Oulipo
Fluxus
Concrete Poetry
Pop Art
Surrealism
Arte Povera
Arte Informale / Haute Pâte / Tachism
Nouveau Réalisme / Zero / Kinetic
Situationism / Lettrism
Collage / Mail Art / Xerox Art
Art Brut / Folk / Visionary / Fantastic
Illustration / Graphic Art / Bandes Dessinées
Furniture
Italian Radical Design / Postmodernism
Textiles
Ceramics / Glass
Counterculture
Protest / Revolt
Anarchism
Socialism / Communism / Capitalism
Literary Theory / Semiotics / Language
Feminism
Fetishism / BDSM
Drugs / Psychedelia
Crime / Violence
Animal Rights / Veganism
Occult / Esoterica
Ecology / Earth / Alternative Living
Whole Earth / Crafts
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.
2021, English
Softcover (metallic), 164 pages, 10.8 x 17.8 cm
Published by
no more poetry / Naarm
$30.00 - Out of stock
no more poetry presents drone, the debut collection from poet felix garner-davis, published in a first edition of 200 numbered copies. the book is simple, in that it directs us where to look. high up in the apartment of words the poet offers the audience a window, from which the abundance, beauty, pain and peculiarity of the world can be observed. the poet boldly enacts the role of surveyor, of witness and of voyeur, and asks that we follow suit. the poems offer new perspectives for which to frame the mechanical and the natural, the quiet and the dizzying. with precision and generosity garner-davis offers an inquisitive consideration of people and their many strange performances within time. the poet asks the audience to join him as the grounded witness; to pause and breath, and in turn celebrate one’s hereness. the poem sings of our aliveness! garner-davis places the reader firmly by his feet, neck tilted against the glass pane of the building or the taxi-cab or the train or the motorcar. thrust into the streets that carry the great disconnect of living; of lives separated and alien, and yet so proximal to our own. this is a book of city poems, guided by the poet, whom we may also call the drone. this is a book that collects many small songs of the everyday and asks us to sing them. drone is a celebration of moments and their endurance
felix is a writer, spoken-word artist & architecture student.
he lives in naarm & co-edits the literary journal
malevolent soap.
2021, English
Softcover, 104 pages, 10.8 x 17.8 cm
First edition of 160,
Published by
no more poetry / Naarm
$25.00 - Out of stock
Fucked Up In Paradise is a book about love and sex and power. Which is to say it is about chess. Or perhaps it is to say it is about life. With vibrant imagery and poignant humor, the book explores the small daily transactions of a life lived abundantly, and the fluctuating desires wrapped within these exchanges of power; the tricks, the tests, the trials, the permissions one gives another. These are poems about trust and deceit. The book explores with a generous soul the space between people and the space within people that exists as in-between. It is a search for understanding that lands suspended between truths, as all big questions tend to when treated with respect and care. The book is a queer celebration. Agnes Whalan writes sharp and rhythmically. Their poetry is bountiful, inquisitive, and invigorating.
Published by no more poetry. First edition of 160 numbered copies.
2020, English
Softcover, 120 pages, 10.8 x 17.8 cm
First edition of 225 ,
Published by
no more poetry / Naarm
$35.00 - Out of stock
As a collection, Lunney's book Sucking my Tongue to Keep the Salt of You Close is tender and commanding, a generous documentation of time and desire. It recounts the melding of two beings into each other and the self into everything, slow and intoxicating.
Bridie Lunney is a poet and artist, she lives in “Sydney”.
Published by no more poetry. First edition of 225.
2021, English
Softcover, 120 pages, 14.5 x 20.4 cm
First edition of 225 (numbered),
Published by
no more poetry / Naarm
$40.00 - Out of stock
om speaks to the simple divinity and extreme peculiarity of the highly performative conditions of one’s own daily life; the small insignias and patches, pins and adornments, placements, characteristics, hymns and performances. Lai ponders on the saturation of symbols and signs, communicating both a steady nostalgia for the material and a vibrant framework for which to diagnose the bizarity of the present. the book speaks to the universality of spiritual hunger and the amusing particulars of the physical world which we must construct this meaning/purpose/destiny within. we are asked to observe the statues and gods within which our understandings, interests and obsessions ruminate. where fears are trusted to be stored. the book celebrates the fine details of a global installation.
Spencer Lai is an artist. They live and work in Melbourne.
Published by no more poetry, Melbourne. First edition of 225 (numbered)
2021, English / Mandarin
Softcover, 216 pages, 10.8 x 17.8 cm
First edition of 225 (numbered),
Published by
no more poetry / Naarm
$45.00 - Out of stock
Selected poems by Chunxiao Qu, an artist and poet born in China. She currently lives and works in Melbourne. Her poetry is tender, hysterically funny and cunningly contemporary. The poet reminds us that writing is catharsis and rest is radical.
In English and Mandarin.
Published by no more poetry. First edition of 225 (numbered)
2020, English
Softcover, 104 pages, 15 x 21 cm
Ed. of 130 copies,
Published by
no more poetry / Naarm
$62.00 - In stock -
Melbourne artist's book collated over the 2020 lockdown period by IchikawaEdward and no more poetry, including some twenty-five local artists and their exploration of 2020 at large, published in a limited edition of 130 copies, hand-numbered with silk-screened covers.
Includes : Ainslie Templeton, Amrita Hepi & Samuel Lieblich, Arini Byng, Bridie Lunney, Carmen-Sibha Keiso, Chi Tran, Claire Lambe, daniel ward, Eugene Choi, Eugene Yiu Nam Cheung, Ichikawa Lee, Jacinta Keefe, Joshua Edward, Justine Youssef, Kat Capel, Kiri-Una Brito Meumann, Lil Palser Barto, Latifa Elmrini Gonzalez, Lou Hubbard, Manisha Anjali, Marcus Whale, Panda Wong, Sally Olds, Spencer Lai, Tyson Campbell.
"…ie.—for the people we will be is a concatenation of gestures as much as it is a gesture in itself. This book is an entry point into understanding the psychology of artists in a world that has sped through fragmentation and wholly embraced its disintegration. What you are reading is and was conceived in a time when people began wondering what art can do beyond s(t)imulating itself. It contains artists, writers and thinkers who are both subjects of and contributors to evil, and in their work we might find moments that allow us to swim amidst the melancholy and ecstasy and rage and truncation and hope (false or real), all of which contour the parameters of this particularly untidy moment in history. I have found, in writing this text, that our days to activate change are numbered — which is not so much an indictment on mortality but on the realisation that we must spend our energy more wisely. This book is not about death but it is certainly framed by it, and the revolution which is to come is one where systemic upheaval is — as Audre Lorde once said in The Uses of Anger (1981) — driven by ‘anger, not moral authority. There is a difference.'
—Eugene Yiu Nam Cheung
Tomorrow is a Dream I Never Had
no more poetry is an independent publisher based Naarm (Melbourne)
1990, Japanese
Softcover (w. dust jacket), 112 pages, 25.7 x 18.4 cm
Out of print title / used / fine
Published by
Haga Bookstore / Japan
$70.00 - In stock -
Only in Japan c. 1990 would you be lucky enough to find a book entirely made up of photographs of Kyle MacLachlan, James Spader and Matthew Modine. The wonderful Japanese photo-book / "Cine Album" "Generation of McLachlan, Spader and Modine", captures three of Hollywoods greats at the height of their popularity at the break of the 90's, all in the one place. Profusely illustrated with film stills, press photos, behind the scenes shots, and movie posters to accompany filmographies for each actor, all reproduced in vivd colour and b/w gloss. Published by the great Haga Bookstore imprint.
Fine copy in dust jacket.
1968, French
Hardcover, 72 pages, 29.5 x 22.5 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Eric Losfeld / Paris
$140.00 - Out of stock
First hardcover edition of the iconic "Pravda la Survireuse" (Pravda the Overdriver) by Guy Peellaert (artist and writer), Pascal Thomas (writer) and Eric Losfeld (publisher) in 1968. Belgian advertising illustrator Guy Peellaert was one of the first to fully capture the vitality of Pop Art in his early adult graphic books, melding the bold compositional skills of a pop draftsman with a unique sensitivity to the comics medium, influenced by the music, art, and film of the time. His first comic, Les Aventures de Jodelle, (Jodelle's likeness based after yé-yé chanteuse Sylvie Vartan) appeared in 1966, swiftly followed by 'Pravda la Survireuse' (her visage modelled after Françoise Hardy) serialised for the magazine 'Hara-Kiri' (the precessor of Charlie-Hebdo) in 1967. Pravda is a leather-clad, Coca-cola drinking, panther/motorcycle riding Amazonian whose adventures take place in a surrealistic Mad Max meets Mister Freedom-like, futuristic international landscape, inhabited by degenerates, Authoritarians, beatniks, creeps and fascists. Pravda was first collected as a graphic novel by the great Belgian publisher Eric Losfeld in 1968, who had previously published Jean-Claude Forest's Barbarella in 1964 Philippe Druillet's Lone Sloane and Guy Pellaert's Jodelle. Pravda became a cult classic that remains unsurpassed to this day.
Guy Peellaert (1934 – 2008) was a Belgian artist, painter, illustrator, comic artist and photographer, most famous for the book Rock Dreams, and his album covers for rock artists like David Bowie (Diamond Dogs) and The Rolling Stones (It's Only Rock 'n' Roll). He also designed film posters for films like Taxi Driver, Paris, Texas, and Short Cuts. The band Frankie Goes to Hollywood took their name from Peellaert's painting, titled Frank Sinatra, which featured the headline "Frankie Goes Hollywood".
After contributing a number of photo collage-based style strips to 'Hara-Kiri', Peellaert adopted a photo-realistic airbrush style and made a successful return to advertising and illustration; most notably on David Bowie's 'Diamond Dogs' LP cover and 'Rock Dreams', his collaboration with rock journalist Nick Cohn. Yet he was also briefly active as a comics artist in the late 1960s, making such psychedelica and pop art-influenced stories as 'Les Aventures de Jodelle' (1966), 'Pravda, la survireuse' (1967), 'The Game' (1968) and 'SHE and the Green Rairs' (1968). These comic strips remain hugely important in Bandes Dessinees history.
Éric Losfeld (1922 - 1979) was a Belgian-born French publisher who had a reputation for publishing controversial material and was as often sued as Jean-Jacques Pauvert. A publisher who despised profit, he boasted that he had been, throughout his life, "in debt like a mule". When the creditors and the prosecutors gave him a little respite, he who defined himself as a "free editor" had only one principle: to be faithful to his tastes and unfaithful to his disgusts. "The only literature that touches me," he proclaimed, " is literature written with passion, or rather passionate literature." Thus, for thirty years, Losfeld created, at Arcane Editions, Le Terrain Vague, and under his own name, an invaluable and often clandestine catalog of Babouvist and hallucinated principality, and where he gathered all his preferences. For surrealism, eroticism, anarchism, romanticism, fantasy, black humor, jazz and comics. The world according to Losfeld, was that of Artaud, Mandiargues, Druillet, Sade, Vian, Peret, Allais, Jarry, Gbe, Sternberg, Forneret, Bealu, Topor, Arrabal, Peellaert or Klossowski. He was the publisher of Emmanuelle (1967), surrealist magazines ("Bief") and cinematographic magazines ("Midi Minuit Fantastique" and "Positif"), and the Barbarella science fiction comic book created by Jean-Claude Forest, amongst many other titles. Losfeld's tombstone inscription reads, "Tout ce qu'il éditait avait le souffle de la liberté." ("Everything he edited had the breath of freedom.").
Very Good - Fine copy.
2000, French / Japanese
Softcover + poster, 176 pages, 18.5 x 14.5 cm
Published by
L'Appareil-Photo Éditeur / Tokyo
$100.00 - Out of stock
First edition of this wonderful and very uncommon Japanese volume published by L'Appareil-Photo Éditeur on the explosive pop bandes dessinees art of Guy Peellaert. Cover to cover reproductions of Belgian pop comic artist Peellaert's famous 'Les Aventures de Jodelle' and 'Pravda la Survireuse' comic strips, together with press clippings and photos from french newspapers, accompanied with short texts in Japanese. Comics fragments are in their original French. Complete copy with the 'Pravda la Survireuse' fold-out poster.
Guy Peellaert (1934 – 2008) was a Belgian artist, painter, illustrator, comic artist and photographer, most famous for the book Rock Dreams, and his album covers for rock artists like David Bowie (Diamond Dogs) and The Rolling Stones (It's Only Rock 'n' Roll). He also designed film posters for films like Taxi Driver, Paris, Texas, and Short Cuts. The band Frankie Goes to Hollywood took their name from Peellaert's painting, titled Frank Sinatra, which featured the headline "Frankie Goes Hollywood".
After contributing a number of photo collage-based style strips to 'Hara-Kiri', Peellaert adopted a photo-realistic airbrush style and made a successful return to advertising and illustration. Yet he was also briefly active as a comics artist in the late 1960s, making such psychedelica and pop art-influenced stories as 'Les Aventures de Jodelle' (1966), 'Pravda, la survireuse' (1967), 'The Game' (1968) and 'SHE and the Green Rairs' (1968). These comic strips remain hugely important in Bandes Dessinees history.
Very Good copy w. VG original issue poster, light markings to back corners from previous owner's blue-tac.
2003, English
Softcover, 64 pages, 30 x 21 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / good
Published by
Ptolemaic Terrascope / UK
$15.00 - Out of stock
Ptolemaic Terrascope was a British magazine focusing on old and new psychedelic, improvised, experimental pop/rock and folk music, founded by writer Phil McMullen and published irregularly between 1989 and 2005. It was an important publication (along with its associated Terrastock festivals and events) in fostering an international movement of independent and underground folk artists in the late 1990s that led to a revival of psychedelic folk often referred to as Free Folk, Freak Folk and New Weird America in the 2000s. Ptolemaic Terrascope covered these artists in the same breath as those from all proceeding waves of 1960s—1990s psychedelic, acid, prog, etc.
Issue #33, March 2003 features: The Golden Dawn, Piano Magic, Destroy all Monsters, Cerberus Shoal, The Land of Nod, Dora Flood, Lol Coxhill, Mountain Goats, Terrastock 5, Rockette Morton, Quicksilver Diaries, and The Sandpebbles.
POT-33 CD featuring Bella - Katsimbalis / The Iditarod - Roots of the Butterfly Bush / The Land of Nod - Colli di Pedona / Monster Island - Dream of Nothing / Cerberus Shoal - A Hawaii that Does Exist / Comets on Fire - Beneath the Ice Age / Green Pajamas - The Haunted Dollhouse / Sharron Kraus - Seedless / Lol Coxhill - My Girl / the SandPebbles - Hanging Out / Davis Redford Triad - Spanish Flea Market / The Golden Dawn - My Time / Dora Flood - The View / Dora Flood - Echoes
Good copy with light cover wear. CD missing.
2002, England
Softcover + CD, 72 pages, 30 x 21 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / good
Published by
Ptolemaic Terrascope / UK
$15.00 - Out of stock
Ptolemaic Terrascope was a British magazine focusing on old and new psychedelic, improvised, experimental pop/rock and folk music, founded by writer Phil McMullen and published irregularly between 1989 and 2005. It was an important publication (along with its associated Terrastock festivals and events) in fostering an international movement of independent and underground folk artists in the late 1990s that led to a revival of psychedelic folk often referred to as Free Folk, Freak Folk and New Weird America in the 2000s. Ptolemaic Terrascope covered these artists in the same breath as those from all proceeding waves of 1960s—1990s psychedelic, acid, prog, etc.
Issue #32, October 2002 features: Forest, Apples in Stereo, Kinski, Landing, Ultimate Spinach, Fantasyy Factoryy, Damo Suzuki, Peter Scion, Charalambides, Paik, The Iditarod, and Phosphene.
Comes with CD (POT-32) featuring Paik - Purple / Jens Unossen - The Sea & The Willow Tree / Phosphene - And the Ship of Sunrise Burning / ST 37 - Cloud/Cattle / Peter Scion - Stone Song / Forest - Monday Morning / Forest - Spring Saga / Landing - In the Colors / The Iditarod - Sparrow / Charalambides - Song for Always / Surface of Eceon - Layer of Given Lustre to Clouds in the Seventh Sky / Fantasyy Factoryy - Phobia / Saint Joan - December
Good copy with light cover wear with unplayed CD included.
2003, English
Softcover, 56 pages, 19 x 14 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / fine
Published by
Abaton Book Company / New York
JRP Editions / Zürich
$300.00 - Out of stock
Very rare and collectible artists' book / punk anthology of texts by New York painter Steven Parrino, edited by Lionel Bovier and issued in a single edition in 2003 by JRP Editions and Abaton Book Company in New York. Includes artworks.
Parrino “came to painting at the time of its death, not to breathe its last breath, but to caress its lifelessness.”
Steven Parrino (1958–2005) was an American artist and musician associated with energetic punk nihilism. Parrino began producing art at the end of the 1970s, driven, as he said himself, by his ‘necrophiliac interest’ in painting, which at that time had been pronounced dead. As early as 1981 he began creating large monochrome paintings that he violently slashed, tore or twisted off their stretchers, thus achieving a literal deconstruction of painting. Parrino also played electric guitar in several downtown bands, including Electrophilia, a two-person group he formed with the painter and keyboardist Jutta Koether. Parrino died in a motorcycle accident in Greenpoint, Brooklyn at the age of 46.
Fine copy.
2020, English
Softcover, 80 pages, 11.4 x 17.8 cm
Published by
Urbanomic / Cornwall
$34.00 - In stock -
Translated by Amy Ireland
A disturbing portrait of a society deliriously dreaming itself as eternal, instantaneous, and infinite.
At least for the time being, we humans are still finite and mortal-but death isn't what it used to be. As the body is technologically extended in space and time, we are split between our finitude and our doubled presence in a limitless web of signs, an "immortal" world of information.
After Death offers a penetrating philosophical diagnosis of our contemporary condition, describing not only an anesthesia, but an amnesia in which the compulsions of a hyper-present colonize both past and future, prevailing over any sense of duration, becoming, or appreciation of the "thickness of the real."
Are we living in a kind of counterfeit eternity in which we are effectively already dead? Against the anxiety of the constant present, how can we hope to return to the experience of being in time and facing death?
After Death is a disturbing portrait of a society deliriously dreaming itself as eternal, instantaneous, and infinite.
1955, English
Softcover, 168 pages, 13.2 x 20.3 cm
New, Reprint,
Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
New Directions / New York
$35.00 - In stock -
New Directions trade paperback edition of "The Flowers Of Evil: A Selection" by Charles Baudelaire, first published in 1955, containing 53 poems which the editors feel best represent the total work and which, in their opinion, have been most successfully rendered into English. The French texts as established by Yves Gérard Le Dantec for the Pléiade edition are printed en face. Along with Three Drafts of a Preface by Baudelaire, this contains poems too numerous to list but some of the highlights include: The Blessing; Don Juan in Hell; The Punishment of Pride; The Dancing Serpent; Reversibility; Invitation to the Voyage; The Sadness of the Moon; The Seven Old Men; The Gaming Table; Parisian Dream; Litany to Satan; and many more.
Charles Pierre Baudelaire (April 9, 1821 – August 31, 1867) was a French poet who also produced notable work as an essayist, art critic, and pioneering translator of Edgar Allan Poe. His most famous work, a book of lyric poetry titled Les Fleurs du mal (The Flowers of Evil), expresses the changing nature of beauty in modern, and rapidly industrializing Paris during the mid-19th century. Baudelaire's highly original style of prose-poetry influenced a whole generation of poets including Paul Verlaine, Arthur Rimbaud and Stéphane Mallarmé, among many others. He is credited with coining the term "modernity" (modernité) to designate the fleeting, ephemeral experience of life in an urban metropolis, and the responsibility of artistic expression to capture that experience.
2021, English
Softcover, 21 x 29.7 cm
Published by
Centre d'editions / Melbourne
Guzzler / Rosanna
$30.00 - In stock -
Very limited edition informal magazine/catalogue published on the occasion of ‘Sex is Gay: Part Deux’, a group exhibition presented by Zac Segbedzi at Guzzler, Rosanna, 20 Nov — 5 Dec, 2021. Features the work of Ramsay Alderson, Richard Hawkins, Paul Levack, Mathieu Malouf, Heji Shin, and Alex Vivian. Lavishly colour illustrated on glossy stock with work images, video stills and installation photography from the exhibition, followed by 20 pages of erotic photos shot by Ramsey Alderson and Richard Hawkins of famed pornstar Tom Faulk during Mathieu Malouf's 2016 show ‘Toilet’ at Jenny's in Los Angeles.
Very limited print run.
2014, English
Transparent plastic shopping bag, C90 audio cassette, autumnal leaves, loose-leaf A4 printed pages, envelope with edition, various other materials
Edition of 100,
Published by
Endless Lonely Planet / Melbourne
$15.00 $5.00 - Out of stock
Endless Lonely Planet is a yearly periodical of print and data from Melbourne, Australia.
ELP3 features: "a c90 tape from Porpoise Torture, an edition work and poem from Virginia Overell, a vine channel from Fictitious Sighs and Bunyip Trax, including at least 52 artists throughout the coming year, a selection of poetry from Internetemotions, a seasonal treat from Christopher L G Hill, a calender of contributors birthdays from Discipline, a poem by George Egerton-Warburton, an edition work by David Homewood, artist pages from James Deutsher, Kain Picken, Matthew Benjamin, and Dan Arps, an excerpt from a possible novella by Fayen d'Evie, two beautiful text works from Alex Vivian, a posy of poems from Adelle Mills, cover art as always by the illustrious Joshua Petherick"
Self published by Christopher LG Hill and contributors, each copy of Endless Lonely Planet issue III comes with all collateral bound together in a transparent plastic shopping bag.
Limited to 100 copies.
Contributors to this issue in full and counting: Adelle Mills, Alex Vivian, Christopher L G Hill, Dan Arps, David Homewood, Disciple, Fayen K X d'Evie. George Egerton-Warburton, Giles Fielke, Molly Dyson, Julian Schwarmer, Aurelia Guo, Jessica Yu, Trevelyan Clay, Anastsia Klose, Eva Birch, Clare Wöhlnick, Alice Jamerson, Jarved Costa, Tim Cøstẽr, Hamish M Macdonald, Holly Childs, Kate Meakin, Lipstick Larry, Simon Zoric, Brennen Oliver, Jessica van Hecke, Ruth O'Leary, Maffew Linde, Kain Picken, James Deutsher, Joshua Petherick, Matthew Benjamin, Porpoise Torture, Virginia Overell, Endless Lonely Planet III vine channel, Matthew P Hopkins, Kieran Hegarty, Air Max '97, and more to come.....
1995, English
Softcover, 164 pages, 14 x 21.5 cm
1st UK Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Creation Books / London
$100.00 - Out of stock
First edition of the long out-of-print English edition of Eden, Eden, Eden - Pierre Guyotat's masterpiece of atrocity and obscenity.
The most subversive French novelist of the later 20th century, Pierre Guyotat (b. 1940) was the uncompromising heir of De Sade, Artaud, Rimbaud and Genet. Published in France in 1970 by Gallimard, with a preface by Michel Leiris, Roland Barthes and Philippe Sollers, Eden, Eden, Eden was greeted by both furore and acclaim. The book was immediately banned by the French government as pornographic. A campaign of international support for the book was signed by the like of Pier Paolo Pasolini, Jean-Paul Sartre, Pierre Boulez, Joseph Beuys, Pierre Dac, Jean Genet, Simone de Beauvoir, Joseph Kessel, Maurice Blanchot, Max Ernst, Italo Calvino, Jacques Monod, and Nathalie Sarraute. François Mitterrand and Georges Pompidou tried to get the ban lifted but failed until 11 years later when a newly elected President Mitterrand personally intervened to lift the ban in 1981.
Today Eden, Eden, Eden is recognised as one of the major works of the last century. In literally a single sentence, a desert-like, polluted, apocalyptic landscape of unending civil war unfolds without any morality (and therefore also without evil). This delirious, lacerating novel of startling innovation brings scenes of brutal carnage into intimate collision with relentless acts of prostitutional sex and humiliation.
'a new landmark and starting-point for new writing' - Roland Barthes
'I have never read anything like it in any stream of literature' - Michel Foucault
Very Good copy with some light wear and light creasing.
2018, English / Spanish
Softcover, 370 pages, 20.3 x 25.1 cm
Published by
Kelsey Street Press / US
$82.00 - Out of stock
New and Selected Poems of Cecilia Vicuña is a telling of old cultures, modern nation states and lives in exile. Rodrigo Toscano calls Vicuña's poetry the outer out, beyond nation states, passed 'inter state' affairs, in other words, close in, as close as we get to our fair planet's sources, and to each other. In this bilingual collection, Vicuña and her translator, Rosa Alcalá, are artist witnesses to a natural world that is a storehouse of sacred words, seeds, threads and songs. Present everywhere, they are sources for a rebalancing in human relationships and for new forms of grace and healing. In Vicuña's vision, art is life and intimacy with it is transformative.
Cecilia Vicuña is a Chilean poet, artist and filmmaker. The author of twenty poetry books published in Europe, Latin America and the U.S., she performs and exhibits her work widely. A precursor of conceptual, impermanent art and the improvisatory oral performance, her work deals with the interactions between language, earth and textiles. Her recent books are NEW AND SELECTED POEMS OF CECILIA VICUÑA (Kelsey Street Press, 2018), SPIT TEMPLE: THE SELECTED PERFORMANCES OF CECILIA VICUÑA (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2012), Chanccani Quipu, a new artist book by Granary Books, and SABORAMI (ChainLinks, 2011). She co-edited The Oxford Book of Latin American Poetry (2009). Since 1980 she divides her time between Chile and New York.
2022, English
Hardcover (w. dust jacket), 176 pages, 20 x 13 cm
Published by
Verso / London
$34.00 - Out of stock
The unwritten contract of the internet, that a user is what is used, extends from the well-examined issue of data privacy and consent to the very selves women are encouraged to create in order to appear. Invited to self-construct as 'girls online', vloggers, bloggers and influencers sign a devil's bargain: a platform on the condition they commodify themselves, eternally youthful, cute and responsibility-free, hiding offline domestic, professional and emotional labour while paying for their online presence with 'accounts' of personal 'experience'. Can a Girl Online use these platforms not only to escape meatspace oppressions, but as spaces for survival, creativity and resistance?
Told via the arresting personal narrative of one woman negotiating the (cyber)space between her identities as girl, mother, writer, and commodified online persona, Girl Online is written in a plethora of the online styles, from programming language to the blog/diary, from tweets to lyric prose, taking in selfies, social media, celebrity and Cyberfeminism.
“This is theory as user manual for every girl who has misplaced her body, for all who have ever attempted the looking glass life of writing a self onto screen. Walsh does not betray these early desires of screen life even as she elucidates the stark disappointments of its actualization.” – Anne Boyer, author of The Undying
“A brilliant, timely act of feminist resistance. Joanna Walsh wields language as deliberately as a surgeon her knife. She doesn’t miss a trick, or an opportunity for (s)wordplay. Here as ever she is ‘good to think’ with, a formidable and original theorist for and beyond our online era.” – Lauren Elkin, author of Flaneuse
“The internet is all about girls—and is an impossible place to be one. Girl Online writes its way through that dilemma with critical insight and creative moxie. It’s a really good book for anyone who has ever tried to have a gender—especially on the internet.” – McKenzie Wark, author of Capital is Dead
1995, English
Softcover, 240 pages, 26.7 x 20.5 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Goad to Hell Enterprises / Portland
$400.00 - Out of stock
Extremely rare and collectible first edition of Peter Sotos' Total Abuse, a coveted collection of Peter's early and extremely aggressive zines and nearly all of his written output between 1984 and the year of publication in 1995 by Jim and Debbie Goad's infamous Goad to Hell publishing imprint.
WARNING: TOTAL ABUSE is not for the squeamish!!! This book contains extremely unpleasant material described with unremittingly graphic precision. It would be a darkly humorous understatement to say that this collection is not intended for the squeamish.
Peter Sotos is the world's foremost practitioner of verbal brutality. His words achieve a nearly inconceivable level of intensity while offering the most cohesive, insightful commentary on pornography currently available. And he serves it up without detached, hypocritical hand-wringing or the sticky postmodern safety net of camp humor. Devotees of blandly moralistic “true crime” writing and pockmarked collectors of “horror” fiction won't find much to suit their tastes here.
Total Abuse: Collected Writings 1984—1995 contains the publications Pure #1, #2, #3; Tool; Parasite 1—20.
PURE. The world's first self-published true-crime fanzine, PURE was so convincingly written that it led to police surveillance of the author and his subsequent arrest. The first two issues of PURE have been endlessly photocopied on the bootleg circuit; their complete text is reprinted herein. The text to both volumes of PURE III, written in 1985, is being published here for the first time anywhere. Included are the author's essays on child pornography; anal rape; Nazi fetishes; Prostitutes' crushed skulls; homosexual slaughter; and a close-up lens on the bawling faces of victims' family members.
TOOL. A brief collection of fictionalized psycho sexual narratives, the first chapter of which caused seismic levels of uneasiness when printed in ANSWER Me! #4. Sotos regales the reader with thoughts on his arrest; child abuse; gay-bashing; race-baiting; project-dwelling crack whores; peep-show dancers; murdered male hookers; and the inexorable pain of surviving friends 'n' family.
PARASITE. Pornography examined, prodded, deconstructed, and understood as never before. Originally published as twenty issues of a monthly newsletter, PARASITE is literary criticism seamlessly woven with personal psychodrama. Sotos scrutinizes gay glory-hole porn; true-crime untruths; gang-bang videos; and his favorite philosophical ghetto, radical feminism. He delivers surprisingly witty one-liners regarding the current glut of empowerment-theory, sexual-healing, self-help gibberish. He ruminates about the “money shot” and its degrading potential. More abused kids. More crying mothers. More bad feelings on all sides.
Total Abuse contains a brief introduction by Jim Goad and an extensive interview with Peter Sotos.
Peter Sotos (born April 17, 1960) is a Chicago-born writer who has contributed an unprecedented examination of the peculiar motivations of sadistic sexual criminals. His works are often cited as conveying an uncanny understanding of myriad aspects of pornography. Most of his writings have focused on sexually violent pornography, particularly of that involving children. His writings are also considered by many to be social criticism often commenting on the hypocritical way media handles these issues.
In 1984, while attending The Art Institute of Chicago, Sotos began producing a self-published newsletter or "fanzine" named Pure, notable as the first zine dedicated to serial killer lore. Much of the text and pictures in Pure were photocopied images from major newspapers and other print media. Sotos also used a photocopy from a magazine of child pornography as the cover of issue#2 of Pure. In 1986 this cover led to his arrest and charges of obscenity and possession of child pornography. The charges of obscenity were dropped, but Sotos eventually pled guilty to the possession charge and received a suspended sentence. Sotos was the first person in the United States ever to be charged for owning child pornography.
Sotos' writings explore sadistic and pedophilic sexual impulses in their many, often hidden, guises. Often using first person narratives, his prose takes on the point of view of the sexual predator. Despite his early legal troubles, and the seemingly fatal stigma of falsely being labeled a pedophile, Sotos continues to garner support for his ideas and literary output.
He was until 2003 a seminal member of the industrial noise band Whitehouse.
Good—VG copy with some edge wear and light cover/spine creasing.
1985 / 1991, English
Softcover, 142 pages, 18 x 12 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Autonomedia / New York
Semiotext(e) / Los Angeles
$35.00 - Out of stock
"A Blake Angel on Bad Acid" — Robert Anton Wilson
"Fascinating..." — William Burroughs
"Who is Hakim Bey? I love him!" — Timothy Leary
First trade paperback edition of T.A.Z.: The Temporary Autonomous Zone, the underground cult bestseller and first book by anarchist writer and poet Hakim Bey (Peter Lamborn Wilson) published in 1991 by Autonomedia. Originally published in 1985 and circulated in the underground via small private and pirate editions, these texts were an inspiration for a generation of troublemakers and idealists. Both celebrated in the punk underground (where the original book has become a seminal text) and denounced in some anarchist circles, the book has proved itself as both influential and relevant to multiple generations of dreamers, agitators, and activists.
Essays that redefine the psychogeographical nooks of autonomy. Recipes for poetic terror, anarcho-black magic, post-situ psychotropic surgery, denunciations of spiritual addictions to vapid infotainment cults — this is the bastard classic, the watermark impressed upon our minds. Where conscience informs praxis, and action infects consciousness, T.A.Z. is beginning to worm its way into above-ground culture. This book offers inspired blasts of writing, from slogans to historical essays, on the need to insert revolutionary happiness into everyday life through poetic action, and celebrating the radical optimism present in outlaw cultures. It should appeal to alternative thinkers and punks everywhere, as it celebrates liberation, love and poetic living.
This book contains the full text of "Chaos: The Broadsheets of Ontological Anarchism", the complete "Communiques of the Association for Ontological Anarchy", and the new long essay "The Temporary Autonomous Zone".
Very Good copy with some light wear.
1966, English
Hardcover (w. dust jacket), 224 pages, 23 x 18 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Farrar Straus & Giroux / New York
$100.00 - Out of stock
Beautiful copy of the First US book club edition of English author J.G. Ballard's The Crystal World, published in 1966 by Farrar Straus & Giroux, New York, in hardcover with dust jacket featuring the work of Max Ernst. A science fiction novel, The Crystal World is regarded as the best of Ballard's "catastrophe novels."
J. G. Ballard’s fourth novel tells the story of a physician trying to make his way deep into the jungle to a secluded leprosy treatment facility. While trying to make it to his destination, his chaotic path leads him to try to come to terms with an apocalyptic phenomenon in the jungle that crystallises everything it touches.
Ballard previously used the theme of apocalyptic crystallisation in the 1964 short story "The Illuminated Man" (included in The Terminal Beach), which is also set in the same locations.
Near Fine copy, interior perfectly preserved, book looks unread/unhandled. Tight binding, crisp and clean throughout. Dust Jacket Very Good with only light edge wear/ageing. Beautifully preserved copy.
1973, English
Hardcover (w. dust jacket), 224 pages, 21 x 14 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Farrar Straus & Giroux / New York
$190.00 - Out of stock
Lovely copy of First US edition of English author J.G. Ballard's Crash, published in 1973 by Farrar Straus & Giroux, New York, in hardcover with dust jacket illustrated by Lawrence Ratzkin and portrait of Ballard (verso).
Crash is a story about symphorophilia; specifically car-crash sexual fetishism: its protagonists become sexually aroused by staging and participating in real car-crashes. It was a highly controversial novel: one publisher's reader returned the verdict "This author is beyond psychiatric help. Do Not Publish!". In 1996, the novel was made into a film of the same name by David Cronenberg.
Original jacket blurb :
"This brilliant, startlingly original novel opens with the narrator recovering in the hospital after a car crash in which he has killed the husband of a young woman doctor. In his pain-filled dreams he finds himself dominated by strange sexual fantasies, and he determines to find the real meaning of this horrific experience. When he leaves the hospital, he revisits the scene of the crash, and meets the woman doctor. During their affair they begin an exploration of the motorcar in all its forms, conducting a variety of sexual experiments on the motorways spreading around London. They meet a violent and aggressive figure called Vaughan, a "hoodlum scientist" who seems determined to die in a car crash with a famous film actress.
Terrified of Vaughan, and yet under his spell, the narrator joins his entourage of racing drivers, drug addicts, and airport prostitutes. They take part in stock-car races, watch test vehicles being crashed at the Road Research Laboratory, and all the time are being carried closer to the sinister climax of the novel, a disquieting vision of the future in which sex and technology form a nightmare marriage.
Violent and frightening, but always true to its subject, Crash is a visionary portrait of the brutal, erotic, and overlit future that beckons ever more powerfully from the margins of the technological landscape. Mr. Ballard has written a compulsively readable tour de force, as hypnotic and baleful in its own way as was A Clockwork Orange is."
Very Good first edition w. Very Good original dust jacket. Light tanning and small chipping to dj bottom back edge, light marks back. Internally clean, fine throughout and beautifully preserved, almost unread looking.
2002, English
Hardcover, 288 pages, 27 x 22 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Arena Editions / New Mexico
$260.00 - Out of stock
First hardcover edition of the beautiful Carlo Mollino Polaroids book, published in 2002 by Arena Editions. Now highly collectable, Carlo Mollino Polaroids is the first published book of the famed Italian designer's "decadent and hermetic" erotic photographs, selected from the roughly 1200 surviving Polaroids, never exhibited during his life, which were found following his death in 1973. This book represented the first comprehensive look at these polaroids, exquisitely reproducing over 250 examples collected within a lovely gilt, photo-inlayed cloth hardcover.
Carlo Mollino (1905–73) was an architect, designer, photographer, writer, skier, racing driver and stunt pilot. In a career that spanned more than four decades, Mollino designed buildings, homes, furniture, cars and aircraft. One of the most dashing figures of mid-century Italy, Mollino was famed for his design finesse and his elegant organicism. In 1949 he published an important book on photography: Message from the Darkroom. Sometime around 1960, he began to seek out women - mostly dancers - in his native Turin, inviting them to his villa for late-night modeling sessions. The models would pose against extraordinary backdrops, designed by Mollino, in clothing, wigs and accessories that he had carefully selected. Finally, having printed the Polaroids, Mollino would painstakingly amend them with an extremely fine brush, to attain his idealized vision of the female form. The pictures, which totalled around 1,200, remained a secret until after his death, in 1973. Only a few were ever publicly shown, until this acclaimed first edition was published by James Crump in 2002. Reviewing this book, The New Yorker declared, "This lavish selection of several hundred Polaroids preserves the essential mystery of a project both decadent and hermetic. Though clearly the product of a deep obsession, the photographs are deliberately impersonal, each baroque detail an invitation for the viewer to imagine Mollino's encounters with the women."
Very Good copy!