World Food Books' programme is largely produced on Kulin Nation land. We acknowledge the Wurundjeri people of the Kulin Nation as the first and continuing custodians of this land, and pay respect to their Elders past, present, and emerging.
World Food Books is an arts and special interests bookshop in Naarm / Melbourne. Founded in 2010, World Food Books is devoted to the presentation of a rotating, hand-selection of international art, design, literary and counterculture publications with an emphasis on the anti-traditional, the experimental, the avant-garde, the heretic, the marginal.
Presenting new titles alongside rare and out-of-print books, catalogues and journals spanning the fields of modern and contemporary art, design, photography, illustration, film, literature, poetry, cultural theory, philosophy, sexuality, popular and underground culture in its many radical forms, World Food Books wishes to encourage adventurous, thoughtful and open-minded reading, looking, writing, and exchange of publishing and ideas, both current and historical.
As well as our bookshop, located in Melbourne's historical Nicholas Building, all of our inventory is available internationally via our online mail-order service.
World Food Books semi-regularly co-ordinates "Occasions", a programme of exhibits and events at the bookshop and in partnership with other hosts (such as museums and art galleries) that develop out of the activities, relationships and content of the bookshop itself.
World Food Books
The Nicholas Building
37 Swanston Street
Room 5, Level 6
Melbourne 3000
Australia
SHOP HOURS:
Thu–Fri 12–6, Sat 12–5
WEB-SHOP OPEN 24/7
World Food Books
Postal Address:
PO Box 435
Flinders Lane
Victoria 8009
Australia
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All prices in AUD (Australian dollars)
Pick-Ups
Pick-up orders can be collected in our bookshop during opening hours after order date. Please collect any Pick-up orders within 2 weeks of ordering as we have limited storage space. Orders will be released back into stock if not collected within this time. No refunds can be made for pick-ups left un-collected. If you cannot make it in to the bookshop in this time-frame, please choose postage option.
Return Policy
All sales are final. We do accept returns (for refund or exchange) for items received in error. All our orders are packed with special care using heavy-duty padding and cardboard book-mailers or bubble mailers (for smaller books), using reinforcement where required. We cannot take responsibility for any lost, stolen or damaged parcels.
Insurance
Should you wish to insure your package, please email us directly after placing your order and we can organise this at a small extra expense. Although all standard/express tracked packages are very safe and dependable, we cannot take responsibility for any lost, stolen or damaged parcels. We recommend insurance on valuable orders.
Interested in selling your old books, catalogues, journals, magazines, comics, fanzines, ephemera? We are always looking for interesting, unusual and out-of-print books to buy. We only buy books in our fields of interest and specialty, and that we feel we can resell.
We base these prices on desirability, market value, in-print prices, condition and our current stock levels. We offer cash, store credit, and can take stock on consignment. All
about 25% of the price we expect to get when we sell them, or 30% in store credit. We base these prices on desirability, market value, in-print prices, condition and our current stock levels.
Sell your books any day of the week. You can drop them off and return later. If you have a lot of books, we can visit your Sydney home.
We buy books that we feel we can resell. We offer about 25 % of the price we expect to get when we sell them, or 30% in store credit. We base these prices on desirability, market value, in-print prices, condition and our current stock levels.
Philadelphia Wireman
03 August - 01 September, 2018
World Food Books is proud to announce our next Occasion, the first presentation of sculptures by Philadelphia Wireman in Australia.
The Philadelphia Wireman sculptures were found abandoned in an alley off Philadelphia’s South Street on trash night in 1982. Their discovery in a rapidly-changing neighbourhood undergoing extensive renovation, compounded with the failure of all attempts to locate the artist, suggests that the works may have been discarded after the maker’s death. Dubbed the "Philadelphia Wireman" during the first exhibition of this work, in 1985, the maker’s name, age, ethnicity, and even gender remain uncertain. The entire collection totals approximately 1200 pieces, all intricately bound together with tightly-wound heavy-gauge wire (along with a few small, abstract marker drawings, reminiscent both of Mark Tobey and J.B. Murry). The dense construction of the work, despite a modest range of scale and materials, is singularly obsessive and disciplined in design: a wire armature or exoskeleton firmly binds a bricolage of found objects including plastic, glass, food packaging, umbrella parts, tape, rubber, batteries, pens, leather, reflectors, nuts and bolts, nails, foil, coins, toys, watches, eyeglasses, tools, and jewellery.
Heavy with associations—anthropomorphic, zoomorphic, and socio-cultural responses to wrapped detritus—the totemic sculptures by Philadelphia Wireman have been discussed in the context of work created to fulfil the shamanistic needs of alternative religions in American culture. Curators, collectors, and critics have variously compared certain pieces to sculpture from Classical antiquity, Native American medicine bundles, African-American memory jugs, and African fetish objects. Reflecting the artist’s prolific and incredibly focused scavenging impulse, and despite—or perhaps enhanced by—their anonymity, these enigmatic objects function as urban artefacts and arbiters of power, though their origin and purpose is unknown. Philadelphia Wireman, whatever their identity, possessed an astonishing ability to isolate and communicate the concepts of power and energy through the selection and transformation of ordinary materials. Over the course of the past two decades, this collection has come to be regarded as an important discovery in the field of self-taught art and vernacular art.
Presented in collaboration with Fleisher-Ollman Gallery, Philadelphia, and Robert Heald, Wellington.
Susan Te Kahurangi King
02 February - 10 March, 2018
Susan Te Kahurangi King (24 February 1951 - ) has been a confident and prolific artist since she was a young child, drawing with readily available materials - pencils, ballpoint pens and felt-tip markers, on whatever paper is at hand. Between the ages of four and six Susan slowly ceased verbal communication. Her grandparents William and Myrtle Murphy had developed a special bond with Susan so they took on caring responsibilities for extended periods. Myrtle began informally archiving her work, carefully collecting and storing the drawings and compiling scrapbooks. No drawing was insignificant; every scrap of paper was kept. The King family are now the custodians of a vast collection containing over 7000 individual works, from tiny scraps of paper through to 5 meter long rolls.
The scrapbooks and diaries reveal Myrtle to be a woman of great patience and compassion, seeking to understand a child who was not always behaving as expected. She encouraged Susan to be observant, to explore her environment and absorb all the sights and sounds. Myrtle would show Susan’s drawings to friends and people in her community that she had dealings with, such as shopkeepers and postal workers, but this was not simply a case of a grandmother’s bias. She recognised that Susan had developed a sophisticated and unique visual language and sincerely believed that her art deserved serious attention.
This was an unorthodox attitude for the time. To provide some context, Jean Dubuffet coined the term Art Brut in 1945 to describe work created by self-taught artists – specifically residents of psychiatric institutions and those he considered to be visionaries or eccentrics. In 1972 Roger Cardinal extended this concept by adopting the term Outsider Art to describe work made by non-academically trained artists operating outside of mainstream art networks through choice or circumstance. Susan was born in Te Aroha, New Zealand in 1951, far from the artistic hubs of Paris and London that Dubuffet and Cardinal operated in. That Myrtle fêted Susan as a self-taught artist who deserved to be taken seriously shows how progressive her attitudes were.
Susan’s parents Doug and Dawn were also progressive. Over the years they had consulted numerous health practitioners about Susan’s condition, as the medical establishment could not provide an explanation as to why she had lapsed into silence. Dawn educated herself in the field of homeopathy and went on to treat all twelve of her children using these principles – basing prescriptions on her observations of their physical, mental and emotional state.
Doug was a linguist with an interest in philosophy who devoted what little spare time he had to studying Maori language and culture. To some extent their willingness to explore the fringes of the mainstream made them outsiders too but it was their commitment to living with integrity and their respect for individuality that ensured Susan’s creativity was always encouraged.
Even though Susan’s family supported her artistic pursuits, some staff in schools and hospitals saw it as an impediment to her assimilation into the community and discouraged it in a variety of ways. Her family was not always aware of this and therefore did not fully understand why Susan stopped drawing in the early 1990s. However, rather than dwell on the challenges that Susan faced in pursuit of her artistic practice, they prefer to highlight her achievements. In 2008 Susan began drawing again in earnest, after an almost 20 year interruption, and her work is now shown in galleries around the world.
Susan grew up without television and has been heavily influenced by the comics she read as a child. She is absolutely fearless in the appropriation of recognizable characters, such as Donald Duck and Mickey Mouse, in her work. She twists their limbs, contorts their faces, compresses them together, blends them into complex patterned backgrounds - always imbuing them with an incredible energy. Although Susan often used pop culture characters in her work they are not naive or childlike. These are drawings by a brilliant self-taught artist who has been creating exceptional work for decades without an audience in mind.
Mladen Stilinović
"Various Works 1986 - 1999"
02 February 16 - September 10, 2016
Various works 1986 - 1999, from two houses, from the collections of John Nixon, Sue Cramer, Kerrie Poliness, Peter Haffenden and Phoebe Haffenden.
Including: Geometry of Cakes (various shelves), 1993; Poor People’s Law (black and white plate), 1993; White Absence (glasses, ruler, set square, silver spoon, silver ladel with skin photograph and wooden cubes), 1990-1996; Exploitation of the Dead (grey and red star painting, wooden painting, black spoon with red table, red plate), 1984-1990; Money and Zeros (zero tie, paintings made for friends in Australia (Sue, John, Kerrie), numbers painting), 1991-1992; Words - Slogans (various t-shirts) - “they talk about the death of art...help! someone is trying to kill me”, “my sweet little lamb”, “work is a disease - Karl Marx”; Various artist books, catalogues, monographs, videos; Poster from exhibition Insulting Anarchy; "Circular" Croatian - Australian edition; Artist book by Vlado Martek (Dostoyevsky); more.
Thanks to Mladen Stilinović and Branka Stipančić.
Jonathan Walker
Always Will Need To Wear Winter Shirt Blue + Ochre Small Check Pattern
21 August - 21 September, 2015
Untitled
I am not a great reader of poetry but I always return to the work of Melbourne poet, Vincent Buckley (1925- 1988). Perhaps I find his most tantalising piece to be not a finished poem but a fragment left on a scrap of paper discovered on his desk after the poet’s death.
The poetry gathers like oil
In the word-core, and spreads
It has its music meet,
Its music is in movement.
This fragment is more the shell left behind from a volatile thought than a finished poem. I find the last two lines honest but awkward whereas the first two lines work like an arrow. Most likely he could not find a resolution so it was left. Still, in its present form, it remains an eloquent testimony to the ultimate failure of a medium to express mobile thought and sensation, in Buckley’s case, through verbal language. It’s an important matter because this is something all artists have to deal with regardless of the medium.
I have never written a poem, however, I am forever copying fragments from books on paper scraps in a vain effort to fix certain notions in my head. At first, they function as bookmarks that are sometimes returned to when I open the book. But before long, as they accumulate, they fall out littering the table interspersed with A4 photocopies, bills, books and medications.
To return to Buckley’s fragment, the first two lines very much evoke how I paint nowadays. As you age, detail diminishes and patches of light become more luminous and float. I feel the most honest way of dealing with this is by smearing the oil paint on the canvas with the fingers and working close-up, blind. Only if the patches coalesce into an approaching image can the work gain a life.
-
Jonathan Walker was born in Melbourne, Australia and brought up on a dairy farm in Gippsland. In the 1970’s he studied painting at RMIT and won the Harold Wright Scholarship to the British Museum, London. During the 1980’s he exhibited at Pinacotheca Gallery, Richmond and had work shown at the NGV and Heidi City Art Gallery. Over the same period he designed the cover for the “Epigenesi” LP by Giancarlo Toniutti, Italy and conducted a mail exchange work with Achim Wollscheid, Germany. The work with artists through the post resulted in an article published in the bicentenary issue of Art and Australia 1988. He showed in artist run spaces such as WestSpace in the 90’s and 2000’s, and until 2012, taught painting at Victoria University, which is where we (Colleen Ahern and Lisa Radford) as organisers of the exhibition, among many others, had the privilege of being his student.
Walker’s knowledge was imparted to students through the careful selection of music, literature, and artists found in books that he himself had ordered for the library. Walker’s strategy was the generosity of sharing his vast knowledge with references specific to each student and their context.
Walker’s paintings share a similar focus and intimacy.
This exhibition presents a small selection of recent paintings alongside a publication that includes Walker’s writing. Observational and analytical, Walker’s work is a type of material notation — the time of day, colour and how it is blended, the both specific and fleeting location of a reflection on lino or the question of whether a chair leg should be included in a painting.
Please join us on Friday August 21 between 6-8pm to celebrate the opening of the exhibition.
Curated by Colleen Ahern and Lisa Radford.
B. Wurtz
Curated by Nic Tammens
March 26 - April 4, 2015
B.Wurtz works from a basement studio in his home on Manhattan’s Lower East Side.
This local fact is attested to by the plastic shopping bags and newsprint circulars that appear in his work. As formal objects, they don’t make loud claims about their origins but nonetheless transmit street addresses and places of business from the bottom of this long thin island. Like plenty of artists, Wurtz is affected by what is local and what is consumed. His work is underpinned by this ethic. It often speaks from a neighborhood or reads like the contents of a hamper:
“BLACK PLUMS $1.29 lb.”
“Food Bazaar”
“USDA Whole Pork Shoulder Picnic 99c lb.”
“RITE AID Pharmacy, with us it’s personal.”
“H. Brickman & Sons.”
“Sweet Yams 59c lb."
Most of the work in this exhibition was made while the artist was in residence at Dieu Donne, a workshop dedicated to paper craft in Midtown. Here Wurtz fabricated assemblages with paper and objects that are relatively lightweight, with the intention that they would be easily transportable to Australia. This consideration isn’t absolute in Wurtz’s work, but was prescriptive for making the current exhibition light and cheap. Packed in two boxes, these works were sent from a USPS post office on the Lower East Side and delivered to North Melbourne by Australia Post.
Wurtz appears courtesy of Metro Pictures, New York.
Thanks to Rob Halverson, Joshua Petherick, Sari de Mallory, Matt Hinkley, Helen Johnson, Fayen d'Evie, Ask Kilmartin, Lisa Radon, Ellena Savage, Yale Union, and "Elizabeth".
John Nixon
"Archive"
December 15 - January 20, 2014
The presentation of John Nixon's archive offered a rare showcase of this extensive collection of the artist's own publications, catalogues, posters, ephemera, editions and more, from the mid 1980s onwards, alongside a selection of his artworks.
Organized by John Nixon, Joshua Petherick and Matt Hinkley.
<a href=http://wfb.public-office.info/artist/john-nixon>All titles by John Nixon
"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.
1997, Japanese / English
Hardcover (w. dust jacket), 70 pages, 26 x 21 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Rockin' On / Tokyo
$120.00 - Out of stock
The incredible first monograph that doubles as an artist's book of work by Hungarian New York-based artist Rita Ackerman spanning the years 1993—1996, edited and designed by Makoto Ohrui from Fiction Inc., published by Rockin' On in 1997 and only available in Japan. Long out-of-print, this numbered hardcover volume, with illustrated vellum dust jacket, is illustrated profusely with seventy of Ackerman's drawings, paintings and collages throughout in colour and b/w with many fold-outs and notebook scans, accompanied by essays.
New York City based artist Rita Ackerman was born in Budapest in 1968. She studied at the University of Fine Arts in Budapest and The New York Studio School of Drawing, Painting and Sculpture from the years of 1989 to 1992. Ackermann invented images that became instant sensations, perturbing young girls that are now part of the universe of global imagery. Her drawings and paintings between 1993-95 depict compositions of adolescent female figures of clonelike multiples engaging in various self-destructive and hazardous activities. Her early works with their ambiguous presence serve as bridges between high and low culture, just as the myths and folk tales which often serve as merits to Ackermann's compositions. Later, Ackerman would abandon the figure, erasing the very matter of her own work, in a complex layering of visual language oscillating between abstraction and figuration into a subconscious unfolding of form—concealed deeply in the abstraction of the omnipresence.
First edition, VG copy in VG dust jacket.
2023, English
Hardcover (clothbound), 180 page, 24 x 17 cm
Published by
kiddiepunk / Paris
$80.00 - In stock -
"Teenage Satanists in Oklahoma" was the infamous and (very) limited edition zine by artist Michael Salerno that spawned five issues between 2012 and 2018.
This book collects work that was included within the five issues of “Teenage Satanists in Oklahoma” alongside previously unpublished work from the series.
Hardcover book with sewn binding and printed end papers, 180 pages.
2025, English
Softcover, 455 pages, 24 x 17 cm
Published by
Headpress / Oxford
$65.00 - In stock -
From filmmaker, former Fangoria editor-in-chief, and Corman/Poe author Chris Alexander comes ART! TRASH! TERROR! Adventures in Strange Cinema, a treasure trove of in-depth essays and edifying interviews that celebrate some of the most eccentric and unforgettable movies in cult cinema history. From recognized classics (George A. Romero's Dawn Of The Dead, David Lynch's The Elephant Man) to misunderstood masterpieces (Michael Mann's The Keep, Boris Sagal's The Omega Man) to unfairly maligned curios (Kostas Karagiannis' Land Of The Minotaur, Brett Leonard's Hideaway), the author takes an alternately serious and playful but always personal look at several strains of international horror, dark fantasy, and exploitation film -- motion pictures that transform, transgress, challenge, infuriate, shock, and entertain.
Connecting these passionate and critical essays are insightful interviews with revered talents, such as John Waters (writer/director, Cecil B. Demented), Michael Winner (director, The Sentinel), Nicolas Cage (actor, Vampire's Kiss), Gene Simmons (co-founder/bassist, KISS), William Crain (director, Blacula), William Lustig (director, Maniac), Werner Herzog (director, Nosferatu: Phantom Der Nacht) and many more, as well as witty, heartfelt memoirs charting the author's oddball experiences on the fringes of Hollywood and beyond.
Illustrated with more than 200 startling photographs!
2025, English
Softcover, 640 pages, 24 x 16.99 cm
Published by
Intellect Ltd / US
$110.00 - In stock -
Industrial music has long been recognized for its sonic innovations, but the radical visual culture that accompanied this underground movement has remained largely unexplored. Shock Factory: The Visual Culture of Industrial Music presents the first comprehensive examination of how industrial artists created a coherent aesthetic language across multiple media—from xerox art and mail art to installation and performance—fundamentally challenging modernist utopias while prophetically anticipating contemporary discourse about media manipulation and technological control.
Emerging in mid-1970s Britain from the post-punk underground before expanding globally throughout the 1980s, artists like Throbbing Gristle, Cabaret Voltaire, SPK, Test Dept, Laibach, Einstürzende Neubauten, Nurse With Wound, Current 93, Coil, Psychic TV, Boyd Rice, Whitehouse, Merzbow, Hijokaidan, Hunting Lodge, Controlled Bleeding, Hafler Trio, Z'EV, Nocturnal Emissions, 23 Skidoo, Clock DVA, Master/Slave Relationship, and Monte Cazazza developed sophisticated visual strategies that matched their abrasive soundscapes with equally confrontational imagery.
At 640 pages, this award-winning monograph reveals how industrial artists systematically appropriated reprographic techniques—particularly xerox art and photocollage—to create disturbing visual narratives investigating mind control, criminality, occultism, pornography, psychiatry, and totalitarianism. Through détournement strategies borrowed from Situationist theory, they exposed the coercive mechanisms of mass media and technological society, creating a visual vocabulary that challenged viewers to confront uncomfortable truths about modern power structures. What emerges is a movement that perceptively anticipated contemporary concerns about surveillance, media manipulation, and collective psychological control. Industrial artists' exploration of these themes through deliberately provocative imagery served not as mere provocation but as sophisticated critique of the very media systems they inhabited. Their radical aesthetic choices—degraded reproduction quality, found imagery manipulation, shock tactics—created hybrid forms that defied traditional categorization while establishing independent networks that bypassed conventional art world structures.
Shock Factory positions industrial music's visual culture within broader art historical narratives, revealing connections to Dada, Surrealism, and conceptual art while demonstrating the movement's unique contributions to contemporary visual culture. The book arrives at a moment when questions about technology, media manipulation, and social control have never been more urgent, demonstrating how these artists' radical visual strategies continue to offer valuable insights for our digital age.
For scholars of contemporary art, music history, and media studies, this book provides essential documentation of an overlooked movement that significantly influenced subsequent artistic developments. For readers interested in underground culture and avant-garde aesthetics, Shock Factory reveals the sophisticated visual thinking that accompanied one of the most innovative musical movements of the past half-century.
"A history of industrial music needed to be written. Nicolas Ballet has accomplished this. Thoroughly. This is the book's greatest strength. It explores the significance of noise as a reflection of a world in decay and screaming as a need. And doing it so it reveals a significant connection between industrial music and contemporary art. This is also what makes it an essential book: its contribution to dismantling categories and rethinking history from mixed creative territories."—David G. Torres
Nicolas Ballet is an art historian and assistant curator at the Centre Pompidou in the New Media Department. He is the author of books and articles exploring the visual and sonic contributions of countercultures and experimental artistic practices.
2000, English
Softcover, 160 pages, 24 x 17 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Headpress / Oxford
$45.00 - In stock -
Issue 20 of the mighty Headpress magazine, edited by David Kerekes. The "Are You Travelling Back Through Time?" issue features: On the Rack: Magazines & Racks I Knew and Loved, or; Pulp Consumer Consumed by Pulp by Tom Brinkmann, The Sucker Punch: A Personal Discourse on Female Slugging It Out in the Ring and the Men Who Like to Watch by Gemma Bryden, Splendor-American Style! An Interview with Harvey Pekar by John Szpunar, Sock It to Everybody! At Once! A Brief Interlude with Zeta Magazine by David Kerekes, Elvis the Concert by Joe Scott Wilson, Crime Calls... But It Doesn't Pay by William Black, There Aren't Many Hippies in Hull: An Interview with Andy Darlington by David Kerekes, Playing Devil's Advocate: Five Reasons Why The Exorcist Isn't Scary Anymore by Adrian Horrocks, I Saw Huge Spiders: Meddlesome Christians Flush Your Stash Down the Toilet by Martin Jones, To Grill a Christian by Matthew Edwards, Darkness Light Darkness: Meeting Jan Švankmajer Pt. 2 by Will Youds, L'Abécédaire Chimérique by Progeas Didier, Oh, Dr Kinsey! Swinging Sex and Pseudo Science by Mikita Brottman, Men in Rubber Suits: Jörg Buttgereit Talks to Japanese Monster-Film Director Shusuke Kaneko by Jörg Buttgereit, CAK-Watch! Presents: The Wicker Bastard by Phil Tonge, Inside The Wicker Man: An Interview with Allan Brown by Sun Paige, Beautiful Lettuce Pages & Rubber Dolls, Generation Xploitation: An Interview with Alan Smith by Simon Collins, From Indonesia with Lust: An Interview with Jade Marcella by Anthony Petkovich, Of Celluloid and Slime: An Insider Retrospective of the Scandalous 1997 Hamburg Short-Film Festival by Jack Stevenson, Paul Scott: Artist at Large! by Drew Larson, The Quest for the Poetry Groupie by Andy Darlington, The Headpress Guide to Exciting! Modern. Kulture.
Headpress was founded in Manchester, England, in 1991, ostensibly to release a film by cult German director Jörg Buttgereit on VHS. With revenue from the sales of that film (Der Todesking, limited to 500 copies), the publication of a magazine soon followed. Headpress was a long-running journal on a variety of topics, which constitute, it might be said, the ebb and flow of the counterculture in the last decade of the twentieth century.
Running concurrent to the magazine was the Headpress book publishing arm, which emerged in 1992 and continues to this day. Subject matter of Headpress books is wide-ranging and includes cult film, strange music, pulp literature, fanzines, conspiracy theories, sex and gender, occult and folklore, true crime, and pop culture in general.
VG copy, light general wear.
2001, English
Softcover, 174 pages, 24 x 17 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Headpress / Oxford
$45.00 - In stock -
Issue 21 of the mighty Headpress magazine, edited by David Kerekes. The "Unreal Is Real" issue features: The Ghost of Brian Jones Speaks to the Villa Delirium by Johnny Strike, The Sovereign of Smut: The Life and Work of Gershon Legman by Mikita Brottman, Chopper Squad! On the Case with Australian TV Detective Shows by Darren Arnold, A Trip of a Different Kind by Verian Thomas, The Night They Murdered Love: Charles Manson and the Family Franchise by Andy Darlington, So Far Underground, You Get the Bends: An Interview with Mary Woronov by Jack Sargeant, Obitugorey: Farewell to a Frankenstein Person by Martin Jones, In a Lonely Place: An Interview with a BBFC Examiner by Adrian Horrocks, Lord Jim and His Abusive Powers by Anthony Petkovich, Total Abuse! An Interview with Jerry Sadowitz by Will Youds, The Teflon Jesus Syndrome: Contemporary Revivalism & the Story of a Campaign by Marie Shrewsbury, The Smell of Maggots in the Alley by Tom Brinkmann, All Shook Up: An Interview with Greil Marcus by Michael Carlson, The Anatomy of Obsession: The Dark Films of Mark Hejnar by Mikita Brottman, Fanfare for the Common Man: An Interview with Frederick Wiseman by Michael Carlson, Psychedelic Nazi Fräuleins ...and an Interview with Rosa Schlüpher by David Kerekes, The Horwitz WWII Roughies: Sex, Sadism & Sleaze for 4/6 a Month by John Harrison, "Whoever Said Life Was Enjoyable?" Combat-Shock Therapy with Buddy Giovinazzo by John Spzunar, Subscriptions & Headpress Goodies, Beautiful Lettuce Page (Special Edition), L'Abécédaire Chimérique by Progeas Didier, Web.Fun by Verian Thomas, The Herbaceous: Headpress Guide to Exciting! Modern. Kulture.
Headpress was founded in Manchester, England, in 1991, ostensibly to release a film by cult German director Jörg Buttgereit on VHS. With revenue from the sales of that film (Der Todesking, limited to 500 copies), the publication of a magazine soon followed. Headpress was a long-running journal on a variety of topics, which constitute, it might be said, the ebb and flow of the counterculture in the last decade of the twentieth century.
Running concurrent to the magazine was the Headpress book publishing arm, which emerged in 1992 and continues to this day. Subject matter of Headpress books is wide-ranging and includes cult film, strange music, pulp literature, fanzines, conspiracy theories, sex and gender, occult and folklore, true crime, and pop culture in general.
Today, Headpress is run by David Kerekes, one of the three original founders.
2007, English
Softcover, 146 pages, 23.5 x 19 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / good
Published by
Headpress / Oxford
$35.00 - Out of stock
Issue 27 of the mighty Headpress magazine, edited by David Kerekes. Features: The Black Forest Editorial, Spain: Three Days of Advanced Music and One Epiphany by David Kerekes, Balls, the Womb and Mexico City by David Kerekes, A Word with Alan Moore, A Land Where All Is Black: Dark Psych by Matthew Colegate, Iwatt Amp, Letters, "Mu-tan-chés! Mu-tan-chés!" Os Mutantes by Bill Bartell, Manchester Punk on Film by Chris Barber, All About Being Loud by David Kerekes & Antonio Ghura, Motorcycle Nightmare Meets The Deviants by Rich Deakin, The Firmaments of Wrath in West Yorkshire by Rik Rawling, A Bad Mag by Tom Brinkmann, Bring Your Own Sheets: Inside Stuttgart's Stroke Theatre by Jane Graham, "Will I Burn in Hell?" by Bruce Barnar, "If I Could Fuck Myself with It I Would": Long Jeanne Silver by Dr Spike, "Stand and Watch the Towers Burning at the Break of Day": 9/11 by David Kerekes, Chelsea Hotel, Manhattan by Joe Ambrose, Happiness Starts Here, A Skywald Night in Chicago by Al Hewetson, Doug Moench & David Kerekes, An Exhibition of Atrocities: Interview with J. G. Ballard by Mark Goodall, In the Shadow of Sun Ra! A Plea for Help by Dylan Harding, Culture Guide by David Kerekes & Joe Scott Wilson, L'Abécédaire Chimérique: Y and Z by Progeas Didier, Direction and Destination: Headpressianism by Caleb Selan.
Headpress was founded in Manchester, England, in 1991, ostensibly to release a film by cult German director Jörg Buttgereit on VHS. With revenue from the sales of that film (Der Todesking, limited to 500 copies), the publication of a magazine soon followed. Headpress was a long-running journal on a variety of topics, which constitute, it might be said, the ebb and flow of the counterculture in the last decade of the twentieth century.
Running concurrent to the magazine was the Headpress book publishing arm, which emerged in 1992 and continues to this day. Subject matter of Headpress books is wide-ranging and includes cult film, strange music, pulp literature, fanzines, conspiracy theories, sex and gender, occult and folklore, true crime, and pop culture in general.
Today, Headpress is run by David Kerekes, one of the three original founders.
1979, French
Hardcover (clothbound, gilt), 112 pages, 21.8 x 14 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Obliques / Paris
$170.00 - Out of stock
First edition of this beautiful clothbound album of arresting erotic photography by Pierre Molinier (1900—1976), a French painter, photographer and a forerunner of gender performance art and Body Art (Art corporel), published in 1979 by Obliques Images, Paris. Briefly associated with Breton's surrealist group, Molinier spent much of his artistic life working in isolation in Bordeaux, exiled from local and national art scenes. With an introductory essay by French man of letters, playwright, poet, writer, director, journalist, literary critic and photographer, Pierre Bourgeade entitled "La clé est chez le concierge" the rest of the book is made up of some of the most exquisite examples of Molinier's challenging monochrome erotic photography. Cent photographies erotique is the fourth of the collection "Images Obliques" produced by Roger Borderie and Michel Camus.
Pierre Molinier is an unknown of worldwide renown. Every book and every exhibition on the body, gender confusion or sexual excess seems to feature at least one work by this artist whose “genius” was acclaimed by André Breton in a memorable text published in 1956. But the bulk of his work has remained inaccessible. A number of pictures have never been shown and a corpus of only 160 prints has been published. The ensemble revealed by the artist's archives is much more extensive. It includes numerous proofs made to prepare his photomontages and working prints given to friends, but also notebooks and personal letters. Here, precise links emerge between his paintings, photographs and scandalous life. The myth carefully constructed by the artist begins to crumble before the reality of the work.
An inveterate seducer, thoroughgoing fetishist, unrepentant transvestite and inadvertent bisexual, to the very last Molinier remained haunted by two obsessions: pleasure, meaning immediate access to la petite mort, and “leaving a trace in the infinity of time.” This book charts the aesthetic incarnation of his passions. Its 819 photographs, most of them never published before, reveal the method, shed light on the procedures and give details of the origin and alchemy of his latent or composed images. Finally, an exhaustive chronology offers a new biography of Molinier, based on his letters: for it is in the intimacy of these writings that the shaman's heart beats closest to the truth.
In a career shared between the university (fifteen years) and publishing (twenty) Jean-Luc Mercié has written widely on painting and photography. This monograph is his fourth book about Pierre Molinier, the master from Bordeaux.
Born 1900 in Agen (France), Pierre Molinier, surrealistic painter and photographer, a precursor to body art, died in 1976 after having thought out radical and pornographic artwork.
VG copy with light foxing to block edges, initial blanks.
2014, English
Softcover, 240 pages, 145 x 210 mm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
The MIT Press / Massachusetts
Whitechapel / London
$65.00 - In stock -
Out of print volume of Documents of Contemporary Art Series tracing the identification of art with sexual expression or repression, from the era of the rights movements to the present.
It has been argued, most notably in psychoanalytic and modernist art discourse, that the production of works of art is fundamentally driven by sexual desire. It has been further argued, particularly since the early 1970s, that sexual drives and desires also condition the distribution, display and reception of art.
This anthology traces how and why this identification of art with sexual expression or repression arose and how the terms have shifted in tandem with artistic and theoretical debates, from the era of the rights movements to the present. Among the subjects it discusses are abjection and the “informe,” or formless; pornography and the obscene; the performativity of gender and sexuality; and the role of sexuality in forging radical art or curatorial practices in response to such issues as state-sponsored repression and anti-feminism in the broader social realm.
Artists surveyed include:
Vito Acconci, Assume Vivid Astro Focus, Lynda Benglis, Louise Bourgeois, Gerard Byrne, George Chakravarthi, Judy Chicago, Vaginal Davis, Wim Delvoye, Elmgreen & Dragset, Valie Export, Félix González-Torres, Guillermo Gómez-Peña, Harmony Hammond, Claudette Johnson, Mary Kelly, Yayoi Kusama, Robert Legorreta, Paul McCarthy, Sarah Maple, Shirin Neshat, Lorraine O’Grady, Yoko Ono, Catherine Opie, Orlan, William Pope.L, Miriam Schapiro, Carolee Schneemann, Joan Semmel, Barbara Smith, Annie Sprinkle, Alina Szapocznikow, Del LaGrace Volcano, Hannah Wilke, David Wojnarowicz
Writers include:
Malek Alloula, Norman O. Brown, Judith Butler, Douglas Crimp, Angela Dimitrakaki, Michel Foucault, Daniel Guérin, Eleanor Heartney, Jonathan D. Katz, Rosalind Krauss, Julia Kristeva, Paweł Leszkowicz, Herbert Marcuse, Kobena Mercer, Laura Mulvey, Lawrence Rinder, Jacqueline Rose, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Susan Sontag, Trinh T. Minh-ha, Stephen Whittle
About the Editor
Amelia Jones is Grierson Chair in Art History and Communication Studies at McGill University. Her books include Irrational Modernism: A Neurasthenic History of New York Dada (MIT Press), Self/Image: Technology, Representation and the Contemporary Subject, and Seeing Differently: A History and Theory of Identification and the Visual Arts.
VG copy.
2024, English
Softcover, 256 pages, 21.5 x 14 cm
Published by
Ↄalamari / Earth
$55.00 - In stock -
2024 redux edition of the long out-of-print 2002 cyberpunk cult classic
"A Finnegans Wake for the postdigital millennium, Kenji Siratori’s Blood Electric is probably the foundational text of the language-horror sub-genre: an evasive, esoteric and ultraexperimental writing style produced by the convergence of poetics and methods borrowed from avantgarde literature, electronic/noise music, synthetic abstract image generation, and severe—yet delicate—syntactic deconstruction. Siratori’s unique writing technique results in a hardcore-cyberpunk material account of a bio-techno singularity network in which flesh-code wetware and silicon-thriving software infold together into wave-multitudes of text-organisms. While most contemporary authors exploring the possibility of the blending of humans and machines focus on the extrapolation of logical and transcendental interactions (as in classical cyberpunk, from which Blood Electric initiates a radical breakup), Siratori’s language emanates directly from the contingent, rhizomatic, non-teleological, reciprocal disruption of several unstable and immanent modes of embodied (in)existence. In Blood Electric the text becomes an incantation demanding full abandonment, generating its own unpredictable rhythms as it enraptures you beyond reading, beyond yourself, like when participating in a rave."—Germán Sierra
"… Blood Electric is unreadable in anything other than short, migraine-inducing bursts."—The Guardian
"Following the publication of Kenji Siratori's Blood Electric, the Japanese cyberpunk writer perhaps pioneered a movement among all non-English speaking writers whose languages are radically dissociated from the dominant Latin-Anglo-Franco-German linguistic germ-line on the one hand, and are, on the other, enthusiastically seeking to contribute to the diversification of the English language whose centrality has already been sabotaged in the wake of emerging cyber-societies."—Reza Negarestani, in 3:AM Magazine
"Kenji is making rather more sense than usual. Perhaps the lad is finally coming into his own as the literary avatar of our times."—Bruce Sterling
"Kenji is a madman for sure, but if you scan his hallucinatory textual mashups in just the right frame of mind, they begin to make sense. And that's the scary part."—Douglas Rushkoff
"Contemporary Japan is exploding in slow-motion, and Kenji Siratori arranges the blood- and semen-encrusted deris with the finesse of a berserk Issey Miyake. Rendering English-language cyberpunk instantly redundant with his relenteless, murderous prose-drive, Siratori transmits his authentic, category-A hallucinogenic product direct to this reader’s cerebellum. A virulently warped amalgam of Tetsuo and cut-up era William Burroughs."—Stephen Barber (author of Tokyo Vertigo)
"Blood Electric is the black reverb of soft machine seppuku, a molten unspooling of sheet metal entrails and crucified memory banks into the howling void of violence. It is a cyborg crash nightmare of the new flesh, a final dispatch from mutant Hell where the embryo hunts in secret."—Jack Hunter (author of Eros in Hell)
"Siratori’s hypermodern project articulates the nonarticulation that currently dominates the substratum of much current discourse. Without the intense atomization of the individual, Siratori’s work does not resound. Yet, if we take pause, Siratori’s work resonates at a fever pitch, blaring at the limitless informational realm of our minds as it bursts the parameters of the skull. As a kind of accelerationist aesthetic, Siratori critiques technology by pushing it beyond its sensible potentiality; he cultivates alien cognitions where alternatives thrive, where semantic derangement is revolt, where epistemology uncoils. Ultimately, he uncompromisingly forces us to pause on the chaos of the glitch, to claim the instance where embodying the unquantifiable amounts to insurgency."—Andrew C. Wenaus, Author of The Literature of Exclusion: Dada, Data, and the Threshold of Electronic Literature
2002, English
Softcover, 224 pages, 21.5 x 13.5 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Creation Books / London
$150.00 - Out of stock
Rare first 2002 edition of Kenji Siratori's cyberpunk cult classic, published by Creation Books, London.
A fatal collusion of drag embryos and DNA angels in Cadaver City ignites the circuitry of the ADAM Doll... dogs of zero waging gene war in Placenta World, chaos unleashed by the digital vampires of Sato Corporation, nano-junk virus pandemic. On the pink ash planet EVOL, ADAM and ANTI-ADAM clash in terminal zodiac burn... enter robo-succubus Super Cherry 666, hunting for the grotesque nova skulls of Sato Corporation napalm torture victims.
Vividly evoking the coming to consciousness of an artificial intelligence Blood Electric is a devastating loop of language from the Japanese avant-garde which breaks with all existing writing traditions. With unparalleled stylistic terrorism fully embracing the image mayhem of the internet/multimedia/digital age, Kenji Siratori unleashes his first literary Sarin attack.
"Contemporary Japan is exploding in slow-motion, and Kenji Siratori arranges the blood- and semen-encrusted debris with the finesse of a berserk Issey Miyake. Rendering English-language cyberpunk instantly redundant with his relentless, murderous prose-drive, Siratori transmits his authentic, category-A hallucinogenic product direct to his reader's cerebellum. A virulently warped amalgam of Tetsuo and cut-up era William Burroughs."–Stephen Barber (author, Tokyo Vertigo)
"Blood Electric is the black reverb of soft machine seppuku, a molten unspooling of sheet metal entrails and crucified memory banks into the howling void of violence. It is a cyborg crash nightmare of the new flesh, a final dispatch from mutant Hell where the embryo hunts in secret."–Jack Hunter (author, Eros In Hell)
"A Finnegans Wake for the postdigital millennium, Kenji Siratori’s Blood Electric is probably the foundational text of the language-horror sub-genre: an evasive, esoteric and ultraexperimental writing style produced by the convergence of poetics and methods borrowed from avantgarde literature, electronic/noise music, synthetic abstract image generation, and severe—yet delicate—syntactic deconstruction. Siratori’s unique writing technique results in a hardcore-cyberpunk material account of a bio-techno singularity network in which flesh-code wetware and silicon-thriving software infold together into wave-multitudes of text-organisms. While most contemporary authors exploring the possibility of the blending of humans and machines focus on the extrapolation of logical and transcendental interactions (as in classical cyberpunk, from which Blood Electric initiates a radical breakup), Siratori’s language emanates directly from the contingent, rhizomatic, non-teleological, reciprocal disruption of several unstable and immanent modes of embodied (in)existence. In Blood Electric the text becomes an incantation demanding full abandonment, generating its own unpredictable rhythms as it enraptures you beyond reading, beyond yourself, like when participating in a rave."—Germán Sierra
"… Blood Electric is unreadable in anything other than short, migraine-inducing bursts."—The Guardian
"Following the publication of Kenji Siratori's Blood Electric, the Japanese cyberpunk writer perhaps pioneered a movement among all non-English speaking writers whose languages are radically dissociated from the dominant Latin-Anglo-Franco-German linguistic germ-line on the one hand, and are, on the other, enthusiastically seeking to contribute to the diversification of the English language whose centrality has already been sabotaged in the wake of emerging cyber-societies."—Reza Negarestani, in 3:AM Magazine
"Kenji is making rather more sense than usual. Perhaps the lad is finally coming into his own as the literary avatar of our times."—Bruce Sterling
"Kenji is a madman for sure, but if you scan his hallucinatory textual mashups in just the right frame of mind, they begin to make sense. And that's the scary part."—Douglas Rushkoff
"Siratori’s hypermodern project articulates the nonarticulation that currently dominates the substratum of much current discourse. Without the intense atomization of the individual, Siratori’s work does not resound. Yet, if we take pause, Siratori’s work resonates at a fever pitch, blaring at the limitless informational realm of our minds as it bursts the parameters of the skull. As a kind of accelerationist aesthetic, Siratori critiques technology by pushing it beyond its sensible potentiality; he cultivates alien cognitions where alternatives thrive, where semantic derangement is revolt, where epistemology uncoils. Ultimately, he uncompromisingly forces us to pause on the chaos of the glitch, to claim the instance where embodying the unquantifiable amounts to insurgency."—Andrew C. Wenaus, Author of The Literature of Exclusion: Dada, Data, and the Threshold of Electronic Literature
Very Good copy. Light edge wear to boards, some foxing to block edges. No spine creases, overall a great copy.
1998, English
Softcover, 188 pages, 21.5 x 13.5 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Creation Books / London
$150.00 - In stock -
Very rare first 1999 Creation Books paperback edition of Cows, the cult classic first book by British–born, Australian–based novelist Matthew Stokoe. One of the most polarizing books of transgressive fiction from the end of the end of the 20th century.
"...enormously disturbing and transcendently clever, Cows, a literally eviscerating portrait of life among the British lower classes, is revered internationally as one of the most daring English-language novels of the past few decades."–Dennis Cooper
"Stokoe's vision of Hell is a carnivore's nightmare. A powerful and all-too-possibly prophetic work."–Kathy Acker
"Underground literary shock-rocker Stokoe slaps his readers in the face with this bloody, truly disgusting diatribe against normalcy. On the bright side, there’s absolutely no pretense about what the book is aiming for..."–Kirkus Review
"If we had to name the most bloody, unpleasant piece of fiction we've read, COWS would be near the top of the list. That's a compliment."–Bizarre
"Forget Bret Easton Ellis, Poppy Z Brite, and Dennis Cooper. That's kid's stuff. If you want something truly repellent, try this."– Gay Times
"The word is out that COWS is every bit as dark and deranged as lain Banks' classic 'The Wasp Factory. It's not: it's even more so. Possibly the most visceral novel ever written."–Billy Chainsaw, Kerrang!
Very Good copy with some sun discolouration to spine edge of cover boards.
2003, English
Softcover, 310 pages, 21.5 x 13.5 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Creation Books / London
$150.00 - Out of stock
Rare first 2003 English Edition of Antonin Artaud’s evil simulacrum of The Monk, the only work of sustained fiction by the infamous literary provocateur. Taking Matthew Gregory Lewis's gothic novel of 1794 as the raw material for an astonishing exploration of the far edges of death, sexuality, terror, language and the body, Artaud conducted an aberrant evisceration of the original novel, discarding entire chapters, recreating others and stamping his own distinctive identity on the work in his avowed aim to accentuate the story's violence and atrocity to the maximal degree.
In Artaud's The Monk, sexual obsession is irrepressibly crushed together with murder, cruelty and blasphemy. The result is a searing narrative of massacred nuns, raped virgins and satanic retribution which will leave the reader simultaneously ensnared, gratified and abused.
Best known for his Theatre of Cruelty manifestoes, experimental film projects and corporeal poetry, Artaud created The Monk in France in 1930, to the acclaim of such figures as Jean Cocteau, at a time when Artaud's explicit purpose in his work was to cancel out all existing social and moral systems. This is the first time ever that the book has appeared in English. With an introduction by Stephen Barber.
"A great masterpiece of fantastic literature... marvels burst out at the reader, burning with a thousand fires... the spirit of the supernatural inflames this book to the very core"—André Breton
Very Good—NF copy.
2003, English
Softcover, 310 pages, 21.5 x 13.5 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Creation Books / London
$150.00 - Out of stock
Rare first 2003 English Edition of Artaud's Heliogabalus, published by Creation Books.
Translated into English for the first time, this novelized biography of the 3rd-century Roman Emperor Heliogabalus is simultaneously Artaud’s most accessible and his most extreme book. Written in 1933, at the time when Artaud was preparing to stage his legendary Theatre of Cruelty, Heliogabalus is a powerful concoction of sexual excess, self-deification and terminal violence. Reflecting its author’s preoccupations with the occult, magic, Satan, and a range of esoteric religions, this account of Heliogabalus’ reign invents incidents in the Emperor’s life in order to make the print of the author’s own passionate denunciations of modern existence.
Heliogabalus is Artaud’s greatest and most revolutionary masterpiece: an incendiary work that reveals both the divine cruelty of the Roman Emperor and that of Artaud himself.–Stephen Barber
Very Good copy.
2003, English
Softcover, 164 pages, 14 x 21.5 cm
Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Creation Books / London
$150.00 - Out of stock
Rare 2003 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
Good–Very Good copy. Some light general wear, board wear and some scratching to the middle of the back cover. Sample images only.
2001, English
Softcover, 144 pages, 25.5 x 18 cm
Published by
Hips Road / New York
$59.00 - Out of stock
Reviled, rioted over and banned as pornographic even as it was recognized by many as an unprecedented visionary masterpiece, Jack Smith's Flaming Creatures is one of the most important and influential underground movies ever released in America.
J. Hoberman's monograph details the creative making—and legal unmaking—of this extraordinary film, a source of inspiration for artists as disparate as Andy Warhol, Federico Fellini and John Waters.
Described by its maker as "a comedy set in a haunted music studio," the story of Flaming Creatures is here augmented with a dossier of personal recollections, relevant documents and remarkable, previously unpublished on-set photographs by Norman Solomon, alongside photographs and film–stills by Ken Jacobs. Expanding on notes originally prepared for the 1997 retrospective on Jack Smith at the American Museum of the Moving Image, the monograph includes further material on his unfinished features Normal Love and No President, as well as shorter film fragments.
2026, English
Softcover, 256 pages, 21 x 14.7 cm
Published by
SMUT Press / London
$65.00 - In stock -
SMUT Press is proud to present Cruising Archaeology II: Eurotrash, the long awaited follow-up edition to the 2024 cult bestseller; Cruising Archaeology. Cruising Archaeology II: Eurotrash is the tenth printed matter produced by the press and will launch in a series of launches across sex clubs, saunas and book fairs across Europe, starting at MA1: Bunker in Old Street in London.
The project builds on the initial edition’s success by expanding the breadth of archaeological sites to various locations scattered across European cities including Berlin, Athens, Dublin, Barcelona and Paris. The diversity of cruising areas in this edition, including woodland areas, public toilets, palatial gardens, sex clubs and beaches, speak to the inventive, site-responsive forms that cruising assumes and situating desire within the folds of city infrastructure and natural landscape.
Much like its predecessor, the book pairs vivid scans of collected objects with writing that contextualises, complicates and historicises cruising’s material traces. Featured texts include interviews with Marc Svensson of You Are Loved, a London-based harm reduction initiative, and with Mati Klitgård of Gay Consent.Lab in Berlin - both offering urgent perspectives on chemsex, intimacy, and consent in contemporary queer life. Other contributors include Stav B, whose piece addresses the persistent erasure of lesbian cruising spaces, Jordan Tannahill’s piece recounts a wild night in Hampstead Heath, evoking the fantasy and libidinal charge of cruising grounds whilst Prem Sahib’s insert ‘Vape’ responds to the complicated relationship between the digital and the physical. João Florêncio’s powerful opening piece in the publication, titled ‘Fucking Ruins,’ interlaces queerness with empire, hauntology and decay.
The publication retains the pocket-sized paperback format of the first edition with the book’s design researched and assembled by designer John Philip Sage. Printed in Lithuania, distributed by Public Knowledge Books.
2024, English
Softcover, 200 pages 21 x 14.7 cm
Ed. of 350,
1st Edition, Out of print title / as new
Published by
SMUT Press / London
$200.00 - In stock -
First, only edition of 350, quickly out–of–print.
Initially born from an Instagram account bearing the same name, this project is a careful process of selection and curation that sees the anonymous artist reconstitute detritus and debris discarded in over half a dozen renowned cruising locations around London into cultural artefacts. Positioning archaeology as its point of departure, over 100 unique relics not only uncover and investigate the types of sex and pleasure that happen in cruising areas through a material culture lens, but also serve as a testimonial to the often invisible sexual practice.
Accompanying the series of scanned objects is a foreword by Marcus McCann, author of ‘Park Cruising: What Happens When We Wander Off Path’ (2023) as well as an interview with OWL, a volunteer litter-picking group in one of the cruising sites and a report on ‘Jurassic’ a renowned local cruising site in Medellín by academic David Edgar.
The soft-cover 200 page publication is purposely pocket sized, intended to be utilised as a nu-hunter’s-guide for those who cruise. The book’s design has been thoughtfully researched and assembled by London based designer Marco Cacioni.
Edition of 350
As New copy, light corner wear.
2023, English
Hardcover (w. dust jacket), 224 pages, 29 x 29 cm
Published by
George Schwarz and Charis / East Sydney
$190.00 - In stock -
Powerful Paradise the Art of George Schwarz and Charis is an artists book, a collaboration between George Schwarz, his partner Charis, Linda Dement and Craig Judd. It is an introduction to a wonderful life and to beautiful, complex and intriguing art. Ernest Georg Schwarz and Charis Elizabeth McKittrick enjoy a unique partnership beginning 1964. The word collaborators in this case is an inadequate descriptor. In their presence one is witness to but a force of nature, a swirling vortex of creative mutuality. Simultaneously lovers, artists, apiarists, activists, authors, film and wine makers, 'Powerful Paradise' is a celebration and a legacy.
This extremely limited hardcover edition is the first survey of the couple's life in art, the last survivors of bohemian Kings Cross. Creators of the first Australian hardcore sex films to be passed by the censors (and also refused classification), George and Charis were ahead of the curve in every aspect of their practice. This volume features the only writing covering their film output, extensive photographic work and global travels. Simultaneously erotic, taboo, progressive, liberated; lives dedicated to their work and one another and perhaps too provocative/evocative for the Australian art establishment.
1980, English / Japanese
Softcover (w. acetate jacket and obi-strip), 190 pages, 30 x 22 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Byakuya Shobo / Tokyo
$700.00 - In stock -
First edition. A seminal Japanese photo book and instant classic upon release, Flash up is one of the most remarkable photographic excursions into the seedy underbelly of 1970s Tokyo. Kurata (b. 1945—2020), one Japan’s formidable contemporary photographers who’s work is often referenced in the same circles as his "Provoke" teachers Daido Moriyama and Nobuyoshi Araki, won the fifth Kimura Ihei Award in 1980 for this, his first book, his acclaimed collection of photographs of creatures of the night — gangsters showing off their full-length tattoos, youth styling themselves after the Hells Angels, self-professed ultra-nationalists from the notorious Black Dragon Society, transvestites drawing in crowds of men, cabaret girls...
"The photographs of Seiji Kurata are striking for their violence. The viewer must be prepared to be hit by his flashgun along with the subjects. ‘Violence’, in this case, is not necessarily invoked by the scenes of blood-shed; rather, it is Kurata’s sharp-shooting ability to stop the flow of time, capture the moment, draw of details we would otherwise never see, then proffer them up before our eyes. Sometimes our response is to avert our eyes for fear of seeing too much. This is not to say that the images are not exaggerated; for after all, people tend only to see what they want to see. If there are those who find Kurata’s photographs ‘ugly’, it can only be said that he has succeeded in paradoxically pointing the finger at them: You who want to avoid ugliness, he says, this is reality and I have cut it out for you. [...] we must admit that the ugliness apparent in these photographs is our ugliness. Our failure to do so simply invites Kurata to deal us an extra-violent blow with his images."—Akira Hasegawa, from the afterword.
Included in Martin Parr & Gerry Badger, The Photobook, Vol. II.
Text in English and Japanese.
Very Good copy, wear and usual shrinkage to publisher's thick acetate dust jacket, VG original metallic obi-strip, Very Good book, light bump to one corner.
2018, English
Softcover, 104 pages, 20.5 x 13.5 cm
Published by
Snuggly Books / UK
$38.00 - In stock -
During his lifetime the eccentric Count Eric Stenbock published a single collection of short stories, Studies of Death. These seven tales, at once feverish, morbid, and touching, are a key work of English decadence and the Yellow Nineties.
Stanislaus Eric Stenbock (1860–1895), Count of Bogesund, was born in the South West England to Lucy Sophia Frerichs, an English cotton heiress, and Count Erich Stenbock, who was of a distinguished Swedish noble family of the Baltic German House of nobility in Reval. He inherited his family’s estates in 1885 and returned to live in his manor house at Kolkbriefly for a period before returning to England. In his life he published three volumes of poetry and one collection of short stories, Studies of Death. He died as a result of alcoholism and opium addiction.
1991, English
Softcover, 240 pages, 21 x 13.5 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Blast Books / Baltimore
$35.00 - Out of stock
"This book belongs on the shelf of every Johnson in America."–William S. Burroughs
First 1991 edition of The Drug User: Documents 1840-1960, published by Blast Books, Baltimore. Foreword by William S. Burroughs.
Charles Baudelaire, Jean Cocteau, Anais Nin, and Aldous Huxley are just some of the notable authors included in this one-of-a-kind volume of writings on the drug experience. Stretching back 120 years to the days of legal use, The Drug User: Documents 1840-1960 includes essays on hashish use by a New York physician (1910) and a clergyman's son (1857); accounts of opium extravagances by artists and journalists in the first decades of this century; reports on ritual peyote use by an ethnologist in 1896 and of mushrooms by a banker in 1953; the journals of experimenting scientists and poets alike on the ingestion of newly synthesized hallucinogens such as mescaline and LSD in the 1930s and 40s.
Writings by Antonin Artaud, John (Fire) Lame Deer, Dr. Albert Hofmann, Sigmund Freud, Boxcar Bertha, Gérard de Nerval, Stanislaw Witkiewicz, and many more demonstrate surprisingly wide-ranging perspectives on this subject. No down-and-out apologies of reformed junkies, no hyperbolic heroics of crime-busting drug czars, these neglected records of drug use are thoughtful and provocative excursions into the material and spiritual realms of existence arising from the use of intoxicating substances.
Texts by William S. Burroughs, John Strausbaugh, James Lee, Charles Baudelaire, Antonin Artaud, Robert S. de Ropp, Herbert Huncke, René Daumal, John (Fire) Lame Deer, R. Gordon Wasson, Albert Hofmann, Fitz Hugh Ludlow, Mabel Dodge Luhan, Mezz Mezzrow, Victor Robinson, Anaïs Nin, Mark Twain, Sigmund Freud, H. H. Kane, James Mooney, Heinrich Klüver, Henri Michaux, William Blair, Boxcar Bertha Thompson, Jean Cocteau, Théophile Gautier, Gérard de Nerval, Anonymous, Aldous Huxley, Followers of the Tipi Way, Stanislaw Witkiewicz.
VG copy with some wear to boars/extremities. Crisp/tight copy otherwise.
2006, English
Softcover, 144 pages, 21.5 x14 cm
Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Solar Books / UK
$140.00 - In stock -
Rare first 2006 Solar Books edition.
Translated into English for the first time, this novelized biography of the 3rd-century Roman Emperor Heliogabalus is simultaneously Artaud’s most accessible and his most extreme book. Written in 1933, at the time when Artaud was preparing to stage his legendary Theatre of Cruelty, Heliogabalus is a powerful concoction of sexual excess, self-deification and terminal violence. Reflecting its author’s preoccupations with the occult, magic, Satan, and a range of esoteric religions, this account of Heliogabalus’ reign invents incidents in the Emperor’s life in order to make the print of the author’s own passionate denunciations of modern existence.
Heliogabalus is Artaud’s greatest and most revolutionary masterpiece: an incendiary work that reveals both the divine cruelty of the Roman Emperor and that of Artaud himself.–Stephen Barber
Very Good copy.
2008, English
Softcover, 190 pages, 22 x 14 cm
Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Solar Books / UK
$140.00 - In stock -
2003 Solar Books edition of the long out-of-print English edition of Eden, Eden, Eden — Pierre Guyotat's masterpiece of atrocity and obscenity, with preface by Roland Barthes and introduction by Stephen Barber.
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 creasing.