Find of the Week:

The Bone House by Joel-Peter Witkin (1998) limited release, first edition in cloth slipcase By my third year of art school, I was certain that I had done it all. I'd read the filthiest filth, listened to the loudest noises, and sat through hour upon continuous hour of the most monotonous, minimalist performances. To me and my art school pals, figures such as Stockhausen were formal and populist. Bataille's The Eye was simply a fun little love story. And when the infamous faeces feast scene in Pasolini's Salo appeared on the screen, I was proudly the only individual left in the cinema. (What a little jerk I was!) But one day, all my jaded bravado got a swift kick to the goolies when I came upon a book of the beautiful photographs of Joel-Peter Witkin. And this is that book. (Click here to see some of Witkin's work.)

Rogue
by Fabio (1994)

Between you and me, I think Heinlein is a bit of a dick, but this quote has its charms. In a similar vein, I believe that one's literary vigour rests in the practice of reading a little bit of everything. Never read a sci-fi book? Try one just for kicks. Never read a novel-length poem? Dante beckons! Still think graphic novels are for chumps? You're the chump! The 19th century Russians scaring you? Good, they're supposed to; stop your whimpering and read some Turgenev. Self-help not your thing? Read some if only to know what you already know that you know. And ultra-cheese romance? Well, why not? I've read one, and one only, and when it comes time to compile my list of 50 Most Important Books of My Life, I suspect that Fabio's Rogue may be among them. It's a classic of the genre: ridiculous, brainless, steamy, over-the-top (perhaps even self-consciously so). It reads like a thesaurus with the bonus addition of "stop/don't stop" quasi-rape scenes:

And before you come into the store and berate me for my philistinism, I ask you to consider the following: in an interview for Interview magazine, Fabio claimed to have read the entire works of Balzac and Proust, albeit in Italian, and when questioned, made a convincing display of the finer details of their respective oeuvres…

Prop Art
by Gary Yanker (1972)

This week's Find of the Week is a lovely old book of over a thousand political propaganda posters, flags, badges and leaflets. Some of the slogans are so commonplace now that you can barely hear them ("Make Love, not War"); some are of literary significance ("[Norman] Mailer for Mayor"); some are all but lost in time ("Boycott compulsion: Not grapes"); some are funny for all the wrong reasons ("Register Commies, not guns"); other still aren't so funny at all ("The Only Reason You Are White Today Is Because Your Ancestors Believed & Practiced Segregation").

This book's rather hard to find, but it's an ex-library copy, so we're selling it for a song (We Shall Overcome, naturally). Be quick!

~~~

May 5, 2010

The Long Walk
by Slawomir Rawicz

A Polish soldier is captured at the beginning of the war and sent to Siberia. With a bunch of other prisoners, he plots and executes an insane escape across Central Asia. There are blizzards, deaths in the Gobi Desert, snipers and even a yeti sighting (why not?).

I love this story. No one believes it. Everyone claims Rawicz stole the story from someone else. There are piles of documents supposedly proving that the protagonist was elsewhere during the war… Who gives a shit? All I know is that when I started reading this, at the age of 22, in my snowed-in New York apartment, I didn't look away from the damn book until I had finished it, and when I did, I slept as if I had walked from Siberia to Bhutan myself. Incredible.

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April 18, 2010:

• - Not including this installment, there have been nineteen (19) different Find of the Week posts since the Desire Books website went up late last year.
  
• - Six (6) posts are sex related, in some way.

• - One (1) post features an image of an asshole.

• - Two (2) posts refer to substance abuse (three if you include the book about cooking with offal (and you probably should)).

• - Two (2) posts represent some sort of political dissent.

• - Eight (8) of the posts are squeaky clean.

~~~

March 25th, 2010:

The Kama Sutra in Pop-up
By R. Burton and F. F. Arbuthnot

In Pop-up...

Articulated pop-up...

Come on, do I really have to say any more?

~~~

March 3, 2010:

The Master and Margarita
By Mikhail Bulgakov

It was only a matter of time before we talked Russian literature, dear reader, and I have to make some very blunt and shocking confessions:

- Tolstoy is a bore.
- With the exception of The Idiot, there's not much of Dostoevsky that has either moved or excited me.
- Lermontov reminds me of one of my distant, alcoholic, wife-beating relatives.
- Pushkin's fine.
- Gogol's fine.
- I have a bit of a boner for Turgenev, but I can see how he's not for everyone.
- There's also that unknown monk who wrote The Way of a Pilgrim, but he is, umm, unknown.
- Chekhov is just a Russian Ibsen.
- Gorky is dorky.
- Pasternak is for Reader's Digest subscribers.
- Nabokov is Russian only by name.
- Solzhenitsyn is a one-trick-pony
- Brodsky, certainly, but he's a poet.

Which leaves us with only one other major Russian literary figure known widely in the West: that man is Mikhail Bulgakov, and his greatest work The Master and Margarita. If there's only one Russian book you ever read, I suggest that it's M&M. It delivers on all counts: it's funny, it's surprising, it's a great account of Soviet Russia, it's a masterpiece of modernist formal experimentation AND utterly readable…

This week's Find of the Week is a 1967 first full English edition of the novel (translated by Michael Glenny). (NB: It's a fancy collectable copy, but we've usually got a cheap paperback version if you're keen to give it a try. Come in and ask us!)

~~~

February 17, 2010:

Snuff
By Chuck Palahniuk

I really wish I could tell you how we got our hands on this book, but I can't. It's a pity, because it's actually a very funny story. Very surprising... I'll disclose only that we broke no laws, civil or moral, and that no animals were involved.

As far as we know, this is the only signed, US first edition copy of this nasty little book available in Australia. It's in immaculate condition. And once again, no, I will not tell you where we found it. Rest assured that its discovery was very surprising, and quite funny.

~~~

February 2, 2010:

Fantastic Architecture:
Personal and Eccentric Visions
By Schuyt and Elffers

I really love my job. I love the books that I come across. I love passing them onto the people who come through the store. But most of all, I like to take home the gems for which I've patiently waited for a long time (come on, don't complain; wouldn't you?).

This week's Find of the Week is actually a find from last September, but it never made it onto the shelves. That is to say, it made it to my shelves, in my house, but not into the shop. "This one's for me," I announced to my wife coming home one night. "Take care that it doesn't find its way into Desire." But there is a curse to being a book dealer. It seems that no matter how much a dealer may love a particular book, no matter how long he or she has waited for it to come their way, it may just one day insist that it isn't yours, and that it must go out to The People. Not all books do this, but some certainly do. It has nothing to do with preferring money over personal ownership, or even some sort of egalitarian sense of duty; a book dealer's mission to spread the love to the bibliophiles of the world. No sir. The book in question will sit there among all your other books and it seems to glow and beat out a dull little heart beat, begging to be set free. I don't know what it is, but it happens. Other dealers will confirm this. It's a phenomenon beyond rational analysis. This is why a book I love is leaving my house for yours.

Well, lucky fucken you.

This 1980 book, Fantastic Architecture is incredible. It's filled with photographs and diagrams of buildings that fall well outside the recognised canon of world architecture. This is true Outsider architecture. Some of these insanities were designed by eccentric millionaire nobles, others by total nutters in the middle of suburbia. There are crazy commercial buildings and life-long, self-built, artist's projects. There are tunnels that stretch under several neighbourhoods and giant towers made of junk. Flicking though this book of massive, passionate endeavours, you just start to think that some people are truly bonkers and wonderful and that life, all in all, is pretty fucking lovely.

~~~

January 13, 2010:

The Village Is Quiet (words)
By Patrick Hartigan

In the middle of 2009, Sydney artist Patrick Hartigan had an exhibition of his drawings, watercolours and film projections in a show at Darren Knight Gallery. Patrick's wife comes from a little village in Slovakia and the two of them spend long stretches of time there, with grandparents and cousins, helping with banal domestic chores and negotiating family interactions. Hartigan's paintings grow out of their time in the village.

The work was amazing - possibly his best stuff yet - but what I loved most of all was the little self-published A5 book that accompanied the exhibition. It's a simple, black and white, un-illustrated collection of one-page stories, some of them referring directly to specific paintings, others not. Hartigan writes beautifully; his tone is calm, his imagery crisp. There is an indirect melancholy to these stories, but he never tells you how to react or what conclusions to draw. It makes perfect sense that Hartigan's chief form is the visual image. Only a non-literary artist can be this comfortable giving his audience so much scope for interpretation.

I read this little booklet, and re-read it and read it some more. It's beautiful.

We asked Hartigan for a few copies of the booklet and he happily provided. There is a bunch in store now, and they're only two bucks each.

(Website of the exhibition, with images here: Darren Knight Gallery)

~~~

January 3, 2010:

The Twelfth Anniversary Playboy Reader

If you're enthusiastic about tits, ass and everything, then this book is not what you think it is (you sick pervert); there are no photographs. This is a collection for those who read Playboy "for the articles". Published in 1965, on the twelfth anniversary of Playboy's founding, it includes specially commissioned interviews, stories and commentary by Hemingway, Nabokov, Kerouac, Wodehouse, Albert Schweitzer, Philip Roth, Martin Luther King, D.H. Lawrence, Steinbeck, that scumbag Bertrand Russell, Moravia, Huxley, Ian Fleming and dozens more. Many of these pieces have not been published elsewhere.

It's a handsome book, with a text-covered glassine dust-jacket over a linen bound cover emblazoned with the Playboy logo. It's also a little too thick to hide under your mattress, but you shouldn't need to, unless your mum's a real square.

And we'll even slip it into a discreet little brown bag for you.

~~~.

December 21, 2009:

Breakfast of Champions
by Kurt Vonnegut

The late Kurt Vonnegut had a handsome moustache. It wasn't as bombastic as Nietzsche's, or as vain as Proust's; it did what a moustache needs to do, and that's to not be a beard.

Rarely does a moustache so accurately mimic the head hair of a man (or woman). Presented with a single Vonnegut hair, one would be unable to discern from whence it came. Is it from the crown of his head? His asshole (of which he drew a rousing portrait on page 5 of Breakfast of Champions (reproduced below))? Or the centre of his soup channel (that little furrow running from one's nose to upper lip; so called because it can be used as a trough through which one can run soup into the mouth)? The coarseness and curliness of K.V's hair was consistent from head to toe; a unique gift, indeed.

Vonnegut kept his moustache trimmed to just below his lower lip, presumably to mask the wry, ironic smirk that always played across his expression. Any man (or woman) who wears a moustache will know the freedom that this engenders. One can sarcastically say, "I absolutely love this fondue cookbook you got me for my birthday" to one's wife, and she'll not for a second perceive your satirical grin, nor will she recognise either the proverbial or literal tongue in your cheek.

In conclusion, Kurt Vonnegut has a great moustache and this week's Find of the Week is a US first edition, first printing, Delacorte Press* copy of Breakfast of Champions, with a full-sized author's portrait on the back of the dust-jacket in which he presents the viewer his whiskers.

From Breakfast of Champions:

*- Very rare in this condition. (Tight pages, no foxing, unmarked. Dust-jacket: clean with minimal spine fading and a few minor chips on the back edges. Protected in removable mylar cover). A must for one of the many Vonnegut fans that make up Desire Books' regulars.

~~~

December 4th, 2009:

Violence
by Slavoj Žižek

He's no genius and he's no messiah, but Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek is my intellectual hubba-hubba this last couple of years. He submits everything he encounters (cinema, capitalist globalisation, political correctness, the phenomenology of taking a shit) to his own particular hybrid of Hegelian dialectics and Lacanian psychoanalysis. Though he's reviled for his sweeping generalisations, his inconsistency, his wanton provocativeness, and general disregard for "philosophical rigour", it's through these very "flaws" that he manages to inject contemporary philosophy with those two elemental features that had been forgotten since Heidegger, namely, pure artistic creativity and a school-boy's delight in questioning every freakin' foundation and presupposition of our lives.

This week's Find of the Week is a whole stack of Žižek's recent book, Violence, in which our hero tackles that particular concept in its many forms and manages to tell some really good Stalin jokes. We've got quite a few copies but they're cheap, so they're going fast, so hurry up! Hurry up!

~~~

November 26th, 2009:

runway
An independent, not-for-profit art publication

Desire Books has a soft spot for small-press booklets, journals and zines. We're slowly adding select titles and this week we have the lovely and beloved Sydney-based art journal: runway.

It's one of the prettiest and most exciting art publications that we've ever seen and it's only $10.

We love it, which means that you will too.

(More info at their website.)

~~~

November 17th, 2009:

The Good Cook: Offal
By Time-Life Books

It must be admitted that this tasty little morsel is here in part because of its bizarreness. Nearly everyone to whom it's been shown has shuddered in horror, if not gagged with disgust. But anyone out there who shares my Polish heritage (or who is, for that matter, Scottish or German or Indian or French or Spanish or Caribbean), will muse misty eyed at such delights as Stewed Tripe, Lamb's Heads with Curry Pork Stuffing, Pig's Trotters with Noodles, Home-Made Liver Faggots or (simply) Testicles .

~~~

November 3rd, 2009:

The Wild Party
By Joseph Moncure March
Illustrated by Art Spiegelman

This week's Find is a classic
Old, but certainly not Jurassic
It's the tale of two lovers, depraved;
Their party and the way they behaved:
The jazz, the gin,
A murderous sin,
Sex,
Envy,
A fist fight:
Sounds like a wonderful night.

Published in Nineteen-Twenty-Eight
But banned until a much later date
It inspired William Burroughs to write
And Cassius Clay to learn how to fight.

It's written in rhyme,
Though it keeps better time
Than this piece of shit
What I wrote, doesn't it?

~~~