Brickbat Books

Featured: Selected New Poetry

2012-01-28T12:14:00.001-05:00

The Collected Poems Of Kenneth Koch
Hardcover

The Collected Poems Of Muriel Rukeyser
Hardcover

Jack Spicer, My Vocabulary Did This To Me
Hardcover

Selected Poems Of Paul Celan
Paperback

Gertrude Stein, Stanzas In Meditation
Paperback

Susan Howe, The Midnight
Paperback

Alice Notley, Grave Of Light: New And Selected Poems, 1970-2005
Hardcover

Vasko Popa, Complete Poems
Paperback

These books, and thousands of others, can be purchased from:

Brickbat Books
709 South Fourth Street
Philadelphia, PA 19147

215 592 1207

Open:
Tuesday: thru Saturday, 11am to 7pm
Sunday: 11am to 6pm
Closed Monday

New Arrival: Rudolph Wurlitzer's Slow Fade

2012-01-27T12:14:00.000-05:00

Rudolph Wurlitzer, Slow Fade
Signed Hardcover Edition

"Rudolph Wurlitzer's Slow Fade is now available for the first time in almost two decades. As the torch passes from the last generation of the 20th century to the young dudes of the current day, the relevance of Slow Fade is renewed. Through Rudy Wurlitzer's novelistic and screenwriting works, he explored themes of changing identities and the passing of generations. These themes, realized with poignancy in the pages of Slow Fade, which bids farewell to the traditions of the American mid-century in a sweeping, occasionally stumbling backwards glance, all while remaining bound firmly in 'the now' of the present-day of its writing, the early 1980s. Slow Fade is the portrait of a director of motion pictures; a man whose life has been devoted to manipulations of images on the screen, negotiations at the conference table, actors and technicians and even (and especially) with those closest to him. Nearing the end of his career, he tries to divest himself of illusions, to make peace with his demons and his past. The process is complex and at times seems to occur by committee. After his son Walker returns from a long spell in India, searching for his sister at his father's behest, father hires son to write a script about his experiences there, the only way the two men seem to be able to discuss their lives. As Wesley grapples with control over one final film project, Walker roams the American landscape with a disaffected roadie trying to make a new career for himself outside of his rock and roll experiences. The parallel wanderings of father and son are filled with debauched misadventures and spiritual blind alleys as they roam through a diverse geography ranging from the streets of Beverly Hills to the backcountry wastelands of northeastern Canada via a Mexican beach resort, New York's Russian Tea Room and the charnal grounds of India. Slow Fade is by turns spare and eloquent; dryly humorous and darkly savage, a deeply informed novel about the worlds of the movies and rock and roll, as well as a rowdy account of the cultural and generational pas de deux that occurred throughout the 1970s - as previously noted, a dance that must be attended by every generation."

This book, and thousands of others, can be purchased from:

Brickbat Books
709 South Fourth Street
Philadelphia, PA 19147

215 592 1207

Open:
Tuesday: thru Saturday, 11am to 7pm
Sunday: 11am to 6pm
Closed Monday

Event: Tonight: The National Writing Project

2012-01-26T15:41:00.002-05:00

Brickbat will be closing at 6PM today to prepare for Brickbat Jr's appearance on The National Writing Project's radio program on the value of digital writing, tonight at 7PM.
Break a leg kid!

Listen to internet radio with NWP radio on Blog Talk Radio

EVENT: ixnay press Reading

2012-01-21T13:36:00.008-05:00

Saturday, February 11th at 7 pm
at
Brickbat Books

ixnay press authors
Jamie Townsend & Laura Spagnoli

Announcing a reading to celebrate the publication of two chapbooks from ixnay press: Jamie Townsend’s THE DOME & Laura Spagnoli’s My Dazzledent Days. Your hosts will be ixnay co-editors Chris McCreary & Jenn McCreary.

Jamie Townsend is the co-founder of con/crescent, a chapbook publisher & annual magazine focused on discursive essay & creative non-fiction. In addition to THE DOME, he is author of the chapbooks STRAP/HALO (Portable Press @ Yo-Yo Labs; 2011) and Matryoshka (LRL Textile Editions; 2011). His poetry and critical work has appeared in various places, most recently in Wheelhouse, Volt, Jacket2, The Poetry Project Newsletter, Eccolinguistics & TRY.

Laura Spagnoli’s poems have appeared in various publications, including Jupiter 88, ONandOnScreen, and The Apiary, and her story “A Cut Above” was published in the collection Philadelphia Noir. She lives in Philadelphia and teaches French at Temple University.

Founded in 1998, ixnay press is a Philadelphia-based publisher of new and experimental writing. Publishing projects have included ixnay, a twice-yearly journal, and the ixnay reader, a periodic mini-anthology of sorts, as well as a chapbook series and poppycock, an occasional newsletter. Check out ixnay’s complete archives at www.ixnaypress.com or email ixnaypress@gmail.com for additional information.

Featured: Francesca Woodman

2012-01-06T11:22:00.002-05:00

Francesca Woodman
Hardcover

"Artists who arrive fully formed at a young age always dazzle, and Francesca Woodman was one of the most gifted and dazzling artist prodigies in recent history. In 1972, the 13-year-old Woodman made a black-and-white photograph of herself sitting at the far end of a sofa in her home in Boulder, Colorado. Her face is obscured by her hair, light radiates from an unseen source behind her out at the viewer through her right hand. This photograph typifies much of what would characterize Woodman's work to come: a semi-obscured female form merging with or flailing against a somewhat bare and often dilapidated interior. In an oeuvre of around 800 photographs made in just nine years, Woodman performed her own body against the textures of wallpaper, door frame, baths and couches, radically extending the Surrealist photography of Man Ray, Hans Bellmer and Claude Cahun and creating a mood and language all her own. In the 30 years since her untimely death, Woodman has gained a following among successive generations of artists and photographers, a testament to her work's undeniable immediacy and enduring appeal Amid a renewed intensification of interest in Francesca Woodman, this volume is published for a major touring exhibition of her photographs and films at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and the Guggenheim. Containing many previously unpublished photographs, it is the definitive Francesca Woodman monograph."

Francesca Woodman's Notebook
Boxed softcover notebook

"The American photographer Francesca Woodman (1958–1981) spent a brief portion of her childhood in the countryside around Florence, living with her parents in an old farm whose dilapidated interiors were later to influence the backdrops of her mesmerizing self-portraits. In 1977 she returned to Italy, studying in Rome on a year-long RISD honors program. During this tenure, Woodman found five tattered school exercise books, printed in 1906, side-stapled and inscribed in fine cursive penmanship with notes from physics lectures or poems in English and Italian. To these evocative objects, Woodman--already fully formed as the photographer we recognize and admire today--added her characteristic black-and-white photographs, either as small paper prints or as prints made on transparent film that allows the writing beneath to show through, further embellishing them with her own captions or remarks. This facsimile edition of one of these notebooks was selected for publication by Woodman’s mother and father as an artist’s book of particular beauty and revelatory content that provides unprecedented insight into the emphatically narrative logic of Woodman’s photography. Housed in a lightweight printed box, it includes an afterword by George Woodman, Francesca’s father, that contextualizes the work within the photographer’s artist’s book production."

These books, and thousands of others, can be purchased from:

Brickbat Books
709 South Fourth Street
Philadelphia, PA 19147

215 592 1207

Open:
Tuesday: thru Saturday, 11am to 7pm
Sunday: 11am to 6pm
Closed Monday

Happy New Year!

2011-12-31T17:35:00.000-05:00

Brickbat will close today, Saturday, at 6pm.

We will re-open on Tues, Jan. 3rd, at 11am.

Happy New Year!

2011-12-31T00:43:00.000-05:00

Featured: Last Minute Gift Ideas: Classic Children's Books

2011-12-23T17:47:00.005-05:00

Brickbat will be open tomorrow, December 24th, 11am to 3pm.Here are a few gift ideas for the panic-stricken out there.

Struwwelpeter: Or Pretty Stories and Funny Pictures
Hardcover

Pauline knew not to play with matches, Philip's parents told him not to fidget, and Conrad was duly warned about the tailor who snips off thumbsuckers' thumbs--a morbidly hilarious, much-loved classic volume of cautionary verses In December 1844, Dr. Heinrich Hoffmann, a German doctor, couldn't find a suitable book to give his three-year-old son as a Christmas present. Instead he bought a blank book and set out to write and draw what was to become his world-famous picture book. Hoffmann filled his book with dazzling and gruesome stories and pictures that he had invented to try to put his frightened young patients at their ease. After its publication in 1845, the book's popularity continued to grow and it has been published in thousands of editions throughout the world.

Oscar Wilde, A House of Pomegranates
Hardcover

Wilde's second collection of fairy tales, originally published in 1891, following "The Happy Prince" in 1888. The volume includes "The Young King," "The Birthday of the Infanta," and "The Star-Child." While these stories are clearly intended for a younger audience, Wilde, with typical sardonic quip declared that the stories were "intended neither for the British child nor the British public."
A Calla Edition, originally published by Methuen and Co., Ltd., London, 1914.

William Timlin, The Ship That Sailed to Mars
Hardcover

A raison d'etre of Calla Editions is to make long-forgotten masterworks available to contemporary bibliophiles, and this book fulfills that aim like few others can. The Ship That Sailed to Mars has a legendary reputation, and the original edition is much sought after by an ardent cult of collectors. Its author, William Timlin, was an obscure South African architect who, in a singular burst of creativity, brought forth a magical intertwining of science fiction and fantasy, a kind of Burroughs meets Tolkien. With 48 pages of calligraphic text — in Timlin's hand — and 48 color plates, it is a work of stunning design, illustration, calligraphy, and overall conception. The Calla Edition also features a new introduction by John Howe, one of the two chief conceptual designers for Peter Jackson's The Lord of the Rings movie trilogy. The reappearance of this much-discussed title will be applauded by many fans of science fiction, fantasy, and book illustration.
A Calla Edition, originally published by George G. Harrap & Co., Ltd., London, 1923.

The Juniper Tree : And Other Tales from Grimm
Maurice Sendak, Randall Jarrell and Lore Segal
Hardcover

Originally published as a two-volume set thirty years ago, The Juniper Tree is distinguished first by the selection of stories. Lore Segal and Maurice Sendak have jointly culled 27 from the 210 in the complete collection, and their contents page presents a fascinating critical statement. The translations are another distinguishing quality of the Segal/Sendak edition. Both translators have been painstakingly faithful to the German texts; they have not cut, “retold,” or bowdlerized. In addition, Segal and Jarrell bring to their renderings of Grimm the grace and precision that are characteristic of their own original prose. This must-have edition for every home library is jacketed and cloth-bound and has a bookmark ribbon.

Robert Louis Stevenson & Charles Robinson, A Child's Garden of Verses
Hardcover

Generations of children have gone "up in a swing, up in the air so blue" and to "The Land of Counterpane" with these timeless verses by a beloved author. Master storyteller and poet Robert Louis Stevenson evokes the delights, fears, and wonders of childhood in a memorable series of images and rhymes.
In simple, expressive language, the poet ponders the mysteries of home and the wider world — the nightly dreams of "The Land of Nod," the curious rustle of "Auntie's Skirts," and encounters with the changing tide "At the Sea-side."
This keepsake edition features 100 enchanting pen-and-ink drawings by noted artist Charles Robinson. The playful exuberance of Robinson's Art Nouveau-style images provides a perfect complement to this enduring classic.
Reprint of the Charles Scribner's Sons, London, 1902 edition.

Arthur Quiller-Couch & Edmund Dulac, The Sleeping Beauty and Other Fairy Tales
Hardcover

This sumptuous volume is a welcome follow-up to the earlier Calla publication of Dulac's Stories from Hans Christian Andersen. Edmund Dulac was second only to Arthur Rackham in his sensitivity to the world of fairy tales, and his style is at once exotic and elegant. The present edition contains four tales: "The Sleeping Beauty," "Blue Beard," "Cinderella," and "Beauty and the Beast" in artful retelling, but the main feature of the book is the generous offering of 30 full-page color plates in Dulac's inimitable style. Additional design elements make this Calla edition a keepsake for readers and collectors alike.
A Calla Edition, originally published by Hodder & Stoughton, London, 1910.

Featured: Four Hardbacks by Philip K. Dick

2011-12-16T14:26:00.001-05:00

Ubik
Hardcover (BCE)

In Milton Lumky Territory
First Edition

Radio Free Albemuth

Mary And The Giant
First Edition

These books, and thousands of others, can be purchased from:

Brickbat Books
709 South Fourth Street
Philadelphia, PA 19147

215 592 1207

Open:
Tuesday: thru Saturday, 11am to 7pm
Sunday: 11am to 6pm
Closed Monday

Featured: Four Covers

2011-12-16T13:18:00.001-05:00

Claude Simon, The Palace
Cover by Sydney Butchkes
Hardcover

Gerhard Zwerenz, Little Peter In War And Peace
Cover by Kuhlman Associates
Hardcover

Joseph Kessel, Belle De Jour
Cover by William Metzig
Hardcover

Lawrence Durrell, The Dark Labyrinth
Cover by Greta Eichelbaum
Hardcover

These books, and thousands of others, can be purchased from:

Brickbat Books
709 South Fourth Street
Philadelphia, PA 19147

215 592 1207

Open:
Tuesday: thru Saturday, 11am to 7pm
Sunday: 11am to 6pm
Closed Monday

Featured: Five From Wakefield Press

2011-12-15T14:08:00.001-05:00

Georges Perec, An Attempt At Exhausting A Place
Paperback

One overcast weekend in October 1974, Georges Perec set out in quest of the “infraordinary”: the humdrum, the nonevent, the everyday—“what happens,” as he put it, “when nothing happens.” His choice of locale was Place Saint-Sulpice where, ensconced behind first one café window, then another, he spent three days recording everything to pass through his field of vision: the people walking by; the buses and driving-school cars caught in their routes; the pigeons moving suddenly en masse, as if in accordance to some mysterious command; the wedding (and then funeral) at the church in the center of the square; the signs, symbols, and slogans littering everything; and the darkness that eventually absorbs it all. In An Attempt at Exhausting a Place in Paris, Perec compiled a melancholic, slightly eerie, and oddly touching document in which existence boils down to rhythm, writing turns into time, and the line between the empirical and the surreal grows surprisingly thin.

Pierre Louys, The Young Girl's Handbook Of Good Manners
Paperback

The first of Pierre Louÿs’s erotic works to see publication after his death, The Young Girl’s Handbook of Good Manners is also his most outrageous, and one of the few erotic classics in which humor takes precedence over arousal. By means of shockingly filthy advice and a parodic format, Louÿs turns late nineteenth-century manners roundly upon their head, with ass prominently skyward. Whether he is offering rules for etiquette in church, school, or home, or outlining a girl’s duties toward family, neighbor, or God, Louÿs manages to mock every institution, leaving no hypocrisy unexposed. The book has only grown more scandalous and subversive than when it first appeared in 1926.

Charles Fourier, The Hierarchies Of Cuckoldry
Paperback

In this zoological guidebook to cuckoldry and commerce, Fourier offers a caustic critique of the bankruptcy of marriage and the prostitution of the economy, and the hypocrisies of a civilization that over-regulates sexual congress while allowing the financial sector to screw over the public. Gathered together here for the first time are Fourier’s two “Hierarchies”—humorously regimented parades of civilization’s cheated and cheated-on in the domestic sphere of sex and the economic sphere of buying and selling commodities. “The Hierarchy of Cuckoldry”—translated into English for the first time—presents 72 species of the male cuckold, ranging from such “common class” cases as the Health-Conscious Cuckold to the Short-Horned Sympathetic, Optimist and Mystical Cuckolds, and the Long-Horned varieties of the Irate, Disgraced and Posthumous Cuckolds. For Fourier, these amount to 72 manifestations of women’s “secret insurrection” against the institution of marriage. “The Hierarchy of Bankruptcy” presents 36 species of the fraudulent bankrupt: a range of Light, Grandiose, and Contemptible shades of financial manipulators who force creditors, cities and even nations to bail them out of ultimately profitable bankruptcies. In these attacks on the morality of monogamy and the perils of laissez-faire capitalism, Fourier’s “Hierarchies” resonate uncannily with our contemporary world.

Benjamin Peret, The Leg Of Lamb
Paperback

A foundational classic of Surrealist literature, The Leg of Lamb: Its Life and Works brings together the arch-Surrealist Benjamin Péret’s short prose: a smorgasbord of automatic writing and fantastical narratives that play on a medley of registers, employing everything from the cinematic antics of Buster Keaton and slapstick animation to the storytelling devices of detective novels, alchemical operations, and mythology. The Leg of Lamb consists of twenty-four delirious narratives, including the novella-length works … And the Breasts Were Dying… and There Was a Little Bakeress…. Péret’s adult fairy tales bear equal allegiance to Lewis Carroll and the Marquis de Sade, and present one of the clearest examples of Surrealist humor, in which the boundaries between character and object blur, and where a coat rack, artichoke, or a pile of manure is just as likely as Napoléon, El Cid, or Pope Pius VII to take on the role of hero and adventurer.

Péret himself edited this collection toward the end of his life. Originally published in French in 1957, almost all of the stories in this collection had been written in the 1920s, half of them even preceding André Breton’s Manifesto of Surrealism. The Leg of Lamb offers not just a highpoint of Surrealist automatic writing, but a key chapter in the genesis of the Surrealist movement. Here, Péret’s unfettered imagination does not so much represent Surrealism as constitute it, and describes a world defined by childlike delight and aggression—a world in which metamorphosis is endless and death is dream.

Honore de Balzac, Treatise Of Elegant Living
Paperback

Honoré de Balzac’s 1830 Treatise on Elegant Living was a keystone text on dandyism, preceding Jules Barbey d’Aurevilly’s Anatomy of Dandyism (1845) and Charles Baudelaire’s “The Dandy” (in The Painter of Modern Life, 1863), and marking an important shift from the early dandyism of the British Regency to the intellectual and artistic dandyism of nineteenth-century France. The Treatise is the first true philosophical expression of dandyism, and is full of well-crafted aphorisms: “Elegant living is, in the broad acceptance of the term, the art of animating repose,” runs one classic definition of dandyism, and “The man of taste must always know how to reduce need to a minimum” asserts the role elegant living can play in times of both opulence and strife. Further embellished with anecdotes and historical and personal illustrations, Balzac’s Treatise even features a fictitious encounter with the original dandy himself, Beau Brummell. Never before translated into English, this witty tract makes for an illuminating cornerstone to Balzac’s Human Comedy (which was originally to have included a never-completed four-part philosophical “Pathology of Social Life”). Above all, it represents a decisive moment in the history of dandyism, and an entertaining exposition on the profundities of what lies deepest within all of us: our appearance.

These books, and thousands of others, can be purchased from:

Brickbat Books
709 South Fourth Street
Philadelphia, PA 19147

215 592 1207

Open:
Tuesday: thru Saturday, 11am to 7pm
Sunday: 11am to 6pm
Closed Monday

New Arrivals: Philip K. Dick Classic Paperbacks

2011-12-15T13:00:00.001-05:00

Mr Bloodmoney

The Preserving Machine

Solar Lottery

Confessions Of A Crap Artist

Clans Of The Alphane Moon

The Word Jones Made (1st Edition)

The Word Jones Made

Eye In The Sky

These books, and thousands of others, can be purchased from:

Brickbat Books
709 South Fourth Street
Philadelphia, PA 19147

215 592 1207

Open:
Tuesday: thru Saturday, 11am to 7pm
Sunday: 11am to 6pm
Closed Monday

New Arrivals: Penguin Hardcover Editions

2011-12-14T10:57:00.003-05:00

The Picture Of Dorian Gray

Pride And Prejudice

Little Women

Dracula

Alice's Adventures In Wonderland And Through The Looking-Glass

Tales From the 1,001 Nights

The Hound Of The Baskervilles

These books, and thousands of others, can be purchased from:

Brickbat Books
709 South Fourth Street
Philadelphia, PA 19147

215 592 1207

Open:
Tuesday: thru Saturday, 11am to 7pm
Sunday: 11am to 6pm
Closed Monday

2011-12-11T15:17:00.004-05:00

EVENT: Matt Kish's Moby Dick

2011-11-20T15:44:00.006-05:00

Wed. Nov. 30th
at 8PM
at
Brickbat Books!

Matt Kish, Author
of
MOBY-DICK IN PICTURES:
ONE DRAWING FOR EVERY PAGE

“In an age of soulless, cookie-cutter computer illustrations, Matt Kish's intense and obsessive drawings, paintings, and montages are a riotous delight. Kish's artwork renews our age-old love of expressive handmade imagery. He humanizes his material in a way that has all but disappeared from the design scene. It's great to see that passion again.”
—Paula Scher

Portland, Oregon, September 19, 2011—Inspired by one of the world’s greatest novels, Ohio artist Matt Kish set out on an epic journey of his own one day in August 2009. More than one hundred and fifty years following the original publication of Moby-Dick, Kish began illustrating Herman Melville’s classic, creating images based on the text selected from every page of the 552-page Signet Classics paperback edition. Completely self-taught, Kish refused to set any boundaries for the artwork and employed a deliberately low-tech approach in response to the increasing popularity of born-digital art and literature. He used found pages torn from old, discarded books, as well as a variety of mediums, including ballpoint pen, marker, paint, crayon, ink, and watercolor. By layering images on top of existing words and images, Kish has crafted a visual masterpiece that echoes the layers of meaning in Melville’s narrative. In retrospect, Kish says he feels as foolhardy as Ishmael and as obsessed as Captain Ahab in his quest for the great white whale. “I see now that the project was an attempt to fully understand this magnificent novel, to walk through every sun-drenched word, to lift up all the hatches and open all the barrels, to smell, taste, hear, and see every seabird, every shark, every sailor, every harpoon, and every whale,” he says. “It was a hard thing, a very painful thing, but the novel now lives inside me in a way it could never have before.” Kish spent nearly every day for eighteen months toiling away in a small closet he converted into an art studio. In order to share the work with family and friends, he started the blog “One Drawing for Every Page of Moby-Dick,” where he posts art and brief descriptions about his process on a daily basis.

“Not so much honored as reimagined, Moby-Dick in Kish's hands is the vertiginous immersive experience Melville intended.”—Bookforum

“Kish has done something really fascinating [in Moby-Dick in Pictures]. He has not only re-imagined Moby Dick for a modern audience. He has also slyly, almost imperceptibly, yanked this nineteenth century novel into the twenty-first century, underlining its relevance for the post-post-modern world. These illustrations are not simply a sideshow to the novel: they are a well-thought out pleasure that enhances the enjoyment and understanding of Melville’s work.”—The Rumpus

“[A] wondrous compendium . . . sometimes vibrant, sometimes somber, Kish’s images are relentlessly fresh and eye-catching . . . Even the least visual readers will feel energized by
Kish’s artistry and his obvious passion for Melville’s work.” —Library Journal

"Conjuring the frenetic energy of tempest-tossed waves so integral to Moby-Dick's setting, the artist's bold, full-page drawings in highly saturated colors illustrate passages he's called out, but also extend the narrative to suggest that modern-day man hungers to fulfill his self-proclaimed destiny every bit as much as the legendary whalers did....clearly infused with an intense joy that only comes from following one's heart."—ForeWord Book Reviews

New Arrivals: Fiction, etc

2011-11-19T12:36:00.001-05:00

Haruki Murakami, 1Q84
Hardcover

"Murakami is like a magician who explains what he's doing as he performs the trick and still makes you believe he has supernatural powers . . . But while anyone can tell a story that resembles a dream, it's the rare artist, like this one, who can make us feel that we are dreaming it ourselves." --"The New York Times Book Review"
"The year is 1984 and the city is Tokyo.
A young woman named Aomame follows a taxi driver's enigmatic suggestion and begins to notice puzzling discrepancies in the world around her. She has entered, she realizes, a parallel existence, which she calls 1Q84 --"Q is for 'question mark.' A world that bears a question." Meanwhile, an aspiring writer named Tengo takes on a suspect ghostwriting project. He becomes so wrapped up with the work and its unusual author that, soon, his previously placid life begins to come unraveled.
As Aomame's and Tengo's narratives converge over the course of this single year, we learn of the profound and tangled connections that bind them ever closer: a beautiful, dyslexic teenage girl with a unique vision; a mysterious religious cult that instigated a shoot-out with the metropolitan police; a reclusive, wealthy dowager who runs a shelter for abused women; a hideously ugly private investigator; a mild-mannered yet ruthlessly efficient bodyguard; and a peculiarly insistent television-fee collector.
A love story, a mystery, a fantasy, a novel of self-discovery, a dystopia to rival George Orwell's--"1Q84" is Haruki Murakami's most ambitious undertaking yet: an instant best seller in his native Japan, and a tremendous feat of imagination from one of our most revered contemporary writers"

Colson Whitehead, Zone One
Hardcover

“[Whitehead] takes the genre of horror fiction, mines both its sense of humor and self-seriousness, and emerges with a brilliant allegory of New York living.”-- New York Observer

"A zombie story with brains...Readers who wouldn't ordinarily creep into a novel festooned with putrid flesh might be lured by this certifiably hip writer who can spine gore into macabre poetry...Everything comes to life in this perfectly paced, horrific, 40-page finale shot through with grim comedy and desolate wisdom about the modern age in all its poisonous, contaminating rage. It's a remarkable episode, but elevated by the power of Whitehead's prose to the level of those other ash-covered nightmares imagined by T.S. Eliot, F. Scott Fitzgerald and Cormac MacCarthy.--Ron Charles, The Washington Post

"Highbrow novelist Colson Whitehead plunges into the unstoppable zombie genre in this subtle meditation on loss and love in a post-apocalyptic Manhattan, which has become the city that never dies."--USA Today

"For-real literary -- gory, lyrical, human, precise."--GQ

Jeffrey Eugenides, The Marriage Plot
Hardcover

“Wry, engaging and beautifully constructed.” —William Deresiewicz, The New York Times Book Review

“[The Marriage Plot] is sly, fun entertainment, a confection for English majors and book lovers . . . Mr. Eugenides brings the period into bright detail—the brands of beer, the music, the affectations—and his send-ups of the pretensions of chic undergraduate subcultures are hilarious and charmingly rendered . . . [His] most mature and accomplished book so far” —Sam Sacks, Wall Street Journal

“No one’s more adept at channeling teenage angst than Jeffrey Eugenides. Not even J. D. Salinger . . . It’s in mapping Mitchell’s search for some sort of belief that might fill the spiritual hole in his heart and Madeleine’s search for a way to turn her passion for literature into a vocation that this novel is at its most affecting, reminding us with uncommon understanding what it is to be young and idealistic, in pursuit of true love and in love with books and ideas.” —Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times

Nicholson Baker, House of Holes: A Book of Raunch
Hardcover

"Shandee finds a friendly arm at a granite quarry. Ned drops down a hole in a golf course. Luna meets a man made of light bulbs at a tanning parlor. So begins Nicholson Baker's fuse-blowing, sex-positive escapade, "House of Holes." Baker, the bestselling author of "The Mezzanine," "Vox," and "The Fermata," who "writes like no one else in America" ("Newsweek"), returns to erotic territory with a gleefully over-the-top novel set in a pleasure resort, where normal rules don't apply. Visitors, pulled in via their drinking straws or the dryers in laundromats, can undergo crotchal transfers . . . make love to trees . . . visit the Groanrooms and the twelve-screen Porndecahedron . . . or pussy-surf the White Lake. It's very expensive, of course, but there are work-study programs. In charge of day-to-day operations is Lila, a former hospital administrator whose breast milk has unusual regenerative properties.

Brimful of good-nature, wit, and surreal sexual vocabulary, "House of Holes" is a modern-day Hieronymous Boschian bacchanal that is sure to surprise, amuse, and arouse."

These books, and thousands of others, can be purchased from:

Brickbat Books
709 South Fourth Street
Philadelphia, PA 19147

215 592 1207

Open:
Tuesday: thru Saturday, 11am to 7pm
Sunday: 11am to 6pm
Closed Monday

New Arrival: Lubok 4

2011-11-17T11:36:00.003-05:00

Lubok 4
Paperback

63 black and white linocuts by Jules de Balincourt, Luis Gispert, Stuart Hawkins, Justin Lieberman, Tim Lokiec, Tom McGrath, Danica Phelps, Christoph Ruckhäberle, Dana Schutz, Aaron Spangler, Tal R, Phoebe Washburn
Paperback, 98 pages, 32x24 cm, edition of 1500

This book, and thousands of others, can be purchased from:

Brickbat Books
709 South Fourth Street
Philadelphia, PA 19147

215 592 1207

Open:
Tuesday: thru Saturday, 11am to 7pm
Sunday: 11am to 6pm
Closed Monday

EVENT: Mickey Hess, Ryan Eckes, Todd Dills, Peter Richter

2011-11-16T14:38:00.005-05:00

New Arrivals: More United Dead Artists

2011-11-13T12:15:00.000-05:00

The final UDA shipment has arrived...

Le Muscle du Sommeil, Gilles Berquet

ReBonjour, Roland Topor

Grossesse Nerveuse, Ichiba Daisuke

To kick a wind to, Chris Hipkiss

Le Muscle Carabine - troisième gorgée

These books, and thousands of others, can be purchased from:

Brickbat Books
709 South Fourth Street
Philadelphia, PA 19147

215 592 1207

Open:
Tuesday: thru Saturday, 11am to 7pm
Sunday: 11am to 6pm
Closed Monday

New Arrivals: United Dead Artists

2011-11-12T12:19:00.001-05:00

Just in from France! Shocking, intense, beautiful: UDA editions are always gorgeously produced. We've managed to get a hold of most of their in print catalog. Below is the first batch to arrive from France for the holidays...

Haldernablou, Alfred Jarry & Tom de Pékin

Sous ta barbe mon âme est morte, Aurélie William-Levaux

La tranchée Racine N°1

The Land Unknown, Gary Panter

Bêtes à bon dieu, Anne Van Der Linden

Viande de chevet

Reborn Again, BLEXBOLEX & Stefanie Schilling

Le Tendon revolver 3

Le Tendon revolver 2

La Caverne Sentimentale, Anne Van Der Linden

These books, and thousands of others, can be purchased from:

Brickbat Books
709 South Fourth Street
Philadelphia, PA 19147

215 592 1207

Open:
Tuesday: thru Saturday, 11am to 7pm
Sunday: 11am to 6pm
Closed Monday

New Arrival: The Goops!

2011-11-09T12:39:00.000-05:00

The Goops, And How To Be Them by Gelett Burgess
Hardcover with dust jacket (early Lippincott edition)

This book, and thousands of others, can be purchased from:

Brickbat Books
709 South Fourth Street
Philadelphia, PA 19147

215 592 1207

Open:
Tuesday: thru Saturday, 11am to 7pm
Sunday: 11am to 6pm
Closed Monday

Featured: Four by Edward Gorey

2011-11-08T12:15:00.002-05:00

You Read Me, I'll Read You by John Ciardi
Illustrated by Edward Gorey
Hardcover with dust jacket (early Lippincott edition)

The Monster Den by John Ciardi
Illustrated by Edward Gorey
Hardcover with dust jacket (early Lippincott edition)

Penny Candy by Edward Fenton (rare)
Illustrated by Edward Gorey
Hardcover with dust jacket (early Lippincott edition)

Harry Vernon At Prep by Franc Smith (out of print)
cover illustration by Edward Gorey
Hardcover with dust jacket

These books, and thousands of others, can be purchased from:

Brickbat Books
709 South Fourth Street
Philadelphia, PA 19147

215 592 1207

Open:
Tuesday: thru Saturday, 11am to 7pm
Sunday: 11am to 6pm
Closed Monday

Featured: Cy Twombly's Fifty Days At Illium

2011-11-07T14:10:00.001-05:00

Cy Twombly, Fifty Days At Ilium
Hardcover accordion book, with clear mylar cover

"Cy Twombly's Fifty Days at Iliam is a rare type of work for a twentieth-century artist--a painting that illustrates a narrative. Long inspired by classical antiquity, Twombly here pays homage to what is perhaps the definitive narrative of Western literature: Homer's Iliad, the tragic story of the final fifty days of the Trojan War, probably written before 700 B.C. Twombly's series in ten parts progresses from the fiery moment when the Greek warrior Achilles is inspired to join the fight against Troy (Iliam) to an almost blank canvas filled with the silence of death. The installation develops in both diachronic and synchronic fashion: the story unfolds chronologically, while simultaneously one wall presents a predominantly Greek mood, passionate and explosive, as the facing wall depicts an essentially Trojan attitude, more contemplative and cool. Twombly uses the visual language he had derived over twenty years earlier, full of scrawling marks, seemingly random brushstrokes, and legible numbers and letters, to create his own tribute to an anchor of Western culture." Ann Temkin, from Philadelphia Museum of Art: Handbook of the Collections

This book, and thousands of others, can be purchased from:

Brickbat Books
709 South Fourth Street
Philadelphia, PA 19147

215 592 1207

Open:
Tuesday: thru Saturday, 11am to 7pm
Sunday: 11am to 6pm
Closed Monday

New Arrivals: Two by William Steig

2011-11-06T14:54:00.002-05:00

The Lonely Ones (1942)
Hardcover with dust jacket (out of print)

The Bad Speller (1970)
Hardcover with dust jacket (out of print)

These books, and thousands of others, can be purchased from:

Brickbat Books
709 South Fourth Street
Philadelphia, PA 19147

215 592 1207

Open:
Tuesday: thru Saturday, 11am to 7pm
Sunday: 11am to 6pm
Closed Monday

Featured: Four by Kerouac

2011-10-30T15:53:00.004-04:00

Featured: Four Covers By George Giusti

2011-10-29T14:35:00.000-04:00

The Eclogues And Georgics Of Virgil
cover by Giusti

Interaction Ritual
cover by Giusti

The Judge And His Hangman
cover by Giusti

Mansfield Park
cover design by Giusti, illustration by Leonard Weisgard

These books, and thousands of others, can be purchased from:

Brickbat Books
709 South Fourth Street
Philadelphia, PA 19147

215 592 1207

Open:
Tuesday: thru Saturday, 11am to 7pm
Sunday: 11am to 6pm
Closed Monday

Featured: Mat Brinkman's Cave Evil

2011-10-25T11:24:00.000-04:00

Just in time for Halloween...

Cave Evil: Necro-Demonic Dungeon-Brawl Boardgame
Mat Brinkman
edition of 500

340+ cards of unique art (no duplicates). Over 120 unique creatures, more than 50 items and spells and tons of dungeon events!

48 dungeon tiles for Endless Corridor Combinations

Fold out map of the corroded, festering space of the unexplored Necropolis

2 Combat Dice, 1 Spawn Die

1 Endgame Blood-eye marker

24 Necromancer Squad Control Marker sets (for 4 players, controlling up to 17 or more sinister minions)

5 Endgame Event Horizons

Rules and Dungeon Warfare scenario book with tons of illustrations

Made in the USA

Cave Evil - Game Art from m3 on Vimeo.

Available from:

Brickbat Books
709 South Fourth Street
Philadelphia, PA 19147

215 592 1207

Open:
Tuesday: thru Saturday, 11am to 7pm
Sunday: 11am to 6pm
Closed Monday

New Arrivals!

2011-10-16T13:58:00.004-04:00

A very busy book-buying season this fall and not enough time to post!
A fairly large collection of new Poetry; a couple dozen NYRB titles; new Children's (and out of print rarities!); Fiction restocks; New Art and Photography, as well as a selection of titles from Buenaventura Press and D&Q. More arrivals expected in the next week!

"Letters to Madeleine collects for the first time in English the remarkable letters and poems sent by French poet Guillaume Apollinaire to his fiancée Madeleine Pagès during World War I. Stationed in the trenches of Champagne, this man of letters who had been at the forefront of the surrealist movement was transformed overnight into an artilleryman.

The fascinating correspondence bears witness to the typical yet deeply idiosyncratic experience of Apollinaire at an especially crucial moment of his existence as man and artist. Apollinaire shares with Madeleine his thoughts on art and literature from Racine to Tolstoy, and at the same time he uniquely documents the daily life of a soldier at the front during the Great War. As well, the letters reveal intimate and little-known aspects of Apollinaire’s personality—from his childhood and tastes to his grandest aesthetic ideas.

Writing about the letters in his biography of Apollinaire, Francis Steegmuller noted, “Nowhere, is there a more ‘living picture’ of a poet in a war . . . or, outside of Stendhal, a more vivid picture of war itself.” Letters to Madeleine is a moving portrait of a poet facing one of humanity’s starkest realities, and it will be of interest to not only fans of Apollinaire but those interested in personal accounts of World War I as well."

Featured: Three Classic Modern Library Editions

2011-10-08T13:45:00.002-04:00

William Faulkner, Go Down Moses
(cover artist unknown)
SOLD!

The Odyssey
(cover artist unknown)

John Steinbeck, The Grapes Of Wrath
cover by Thomas Hart Benton

These books, and thousands of others, can be purchased from:

Brickbat Books
709 South Fourth Street
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215 592 1207

Open:
Tuesday: thru Saturday, 11am to 7pm
Sunday: 11am to 6pm
Closed Monday

Featured: Danny Dunn

2011-10-06T12:15:00.004-04:00

Featured: The Albatross Continental Library

2011-10-05T14:20:00.005-04:00

Albatross published the first modern mass market paperback, in Hamburg, in 1932. Their publishing model and their design were a direct influence on Penguin Books (as well as The Olympia Press.) The rise of Nazism and the beginning of the war eventually brought an end to Albatross.

E.M. Forster, A Passage To India
Albatross
Paperback with dust jacket

This book, and thousands of others, can be purchased from:

Brickbat Books
709 South Fourth Street
Philadelphia, PA 19147

215 592 1207

Open:
Tuesday: thru Saturday, 11am to 7pm
Sunday: 11am to 6pm
Closed Monday

EVENT: Michael Hurley & Laura Baird!

2011-09-28T12:31:00.007-04:00

Friday, October 7th at 9 pm
at
Brickbat Books

Michael Hurley
Laura Baird

Michael Hurley:

"Whether weaving a yarn about a mysterious hog or comparing the human heart to a mechanics toolbox, Mr. Hurley create(s) elaborate vistas in a musical version of outsider art" - Ann Powers / New York Times 12/9/97

"Hurley remains one of the elusive masters of American folk" - Chris Morris / Billboard 10/31/98

".....let's just shut up and listen and go to where Michael Hurley is. After all, we can always turn around and come back. He can't." - Nick Tosches (from the liner notes to Weatherhole)

"Undoubtedly one of this country's greatest folk singers, Hurley has little in common with the majority of today's folk performers. While they seem bent on demonstrating that all people are alike, such a suffocating presumption has no place in this man's work. Michael Hurley is nothing like his potential audience. What better reason to hear what he has to say?" - Chuck Cuminale (Colour Blind James)

"Trusting in his own peculiarities, Hurley makes the world spin just a little bit slower, and a little bit bumpier. Somehow it feels much more natural that way." - Jim Macnie

"Michael Hurley is the last unreconstructed folkie-shaman in America. His songs are primordial tales of the hunt for good cheer and satisfying sex, etched like cave paintings on city walls and farmland silos. Like many characters in his songs, his voice seems to have been run over by the dump truck of life, but it marries human mystery to forthright music like no other." - Milo Miles

Laura Baird

"Laura Baird has been writing songs and making home recordings since the late 1980's. She is also an enthusiastic collector and performer of traditional Appalachian music. She sings and plays many instruments, including clawhammer banjo, guitar, piano and harpsichord.

Laura has recorded with Espers (flute) and Death Vessel (banjo and backing vocals), among others.

Currently, Laura performs as "The Baird Sisters" with her sister Meg."

Featured: Takako Saito

2011-09-25T12:14:00.001-04:00

Takako Saito, Blaues-Regenbogen-Wein-Schachspiel

Edition Hundertmark, Koln, 1982
Limited Edition. Printed Folder containing two folded (as issued) 23" x 23" prints of two game boards with game instructions (in German). Limited to 500 copies.

Fluxus artist known for her chess and game related pieces.

This book, and thousands of others, can be purchased from:

Brickbat Books
709 South Fourth Street
Philadelphia, PA 19147

215 592 1207

Open:
Tuesday: thru Saturday, 11am to 7pm
Sunday: 11am to 6pm
Closed Monday

Featured: Four Covers

2011-09-24T17:14:00.002-04:00

Featured: Three Classic Time Inc Covers

2011-09-17T12:23:00.001-04:00

Aldous Huxley, Brave New World

Charles Johnson, The Lost Weekend

Ray Bradbury, The Martian Chronicles

These books, and thousands of others, can be purchased from:

Brickbat Books
709 South Fourth Street
Philadelphia, PA 19147

215 592 1207

Open:
Tuesday: thru Saturday, 11am to 7pm
Sunday: 11am to 6pm
Closed Monday

Featured: Two Classic Grove Press Melville Covers

2011-09-17T12:11:00.003-04:00

Herman Melville, White Jacket
cover by Roy Kuhlman

Herman Melville, Pierre Or, The Ambiguities
cover by Roy Kuhlman

These books, and thousands of others, can be purchased from:

Brickbat Books
709 South Fourth Street
Philadelphia, PA 19147

215 592 1207

Open:
Tuesday: thru Saturday, 11am to 7pm
Sunday: 11am to 6pm
Closed Monday

Featured: Two Classic Covers

2011-09-16T12:43:00.000-04:00

Federico Garcia Lorca, Poet In New York
Cover by Roy Kuhlman

Robert Creeley, A Day Book
Cover by Robert Indiana

These books, and thousands of others, can be purchased from:

Brickbat Books
709 South Fourth Street
Philadelphia, PA 19147

215 592 1207

Open:
Tuesday: thru Saturday, 11am to 7pm
Sunday: 11am to 6pm
Closed Monday

Update: Anders Nilsen & Marc Bell

2011-09-15T13:41:00.001-04:00

I'd like to thank Anders Nilsen and Marc Bell, PBC, and everyone who came out for making last night's event such a success!

We have a limited number of signed (with a small drawing!) copies of Big Questions (Paperback, and the signed, limited (and out of print!) Hardcover edition, as well as Anders's self-published The Game.

Also still available are a handful of Marc Bell's Pure Pajamas, signed with a spiffy illustration of a four-legged sausage; a couple of limited/numbered Sobey's pamphlets; and only three(!) Shrimpy & Paul (out of print) books.

So for all of you who missed the event, or arrived sans wallet, avoid weeping and gnashing of teeth and get 'em while you can!

Big Questions
Signed Paperback
$44.95

Big Questions
Signed, Limited Hardcover
$69.95

The Game
Self-published poster
$9.00

Pure Pajamas
Signed, Hardcover
$22.95

Sobey's
Limited/ Numbered Pamphlet
$9.95

Shrimpy & Paul
Paperback
$16.95

Featured: Two Modern Library Editions

2011-09-15T12:38:00.001-04:00

Women In Love, D.H. Lawrence
Cover by McKnight Kauffer

Flowering Judas, Katherine Anne Porter
Cover artist unknown

These books, and thousands of others, can be purchased from:

Brickbat Books
709 South Fourth Street
Philadelphia, PA 19147

215 592 1207

Open:
Tuesday: thru Saturday, 11am to 7pm
Sunday: 11am to 6pm
Closed Monday

New Arrivals: Art

2011-09-14T07:45:00.010-04:00

Don't Kiss Me: The Art of Claude Cahun and Marcel Moore
Hardcover

"This first comprehensive overview of the oeuvre of Claude Cahun offers a wealth of previously unpublished photographs and drawings, illuminating not only her work but also that of her partner Marcel Moore and establishing for the first time the extent of their collaboration. It also includes the first thorough account of their Resistance operations, trial, imprisonment and attempted suicides during the Occupation. Cahun (1894-1954) is best known for riveting photographic self-portraits that seem eerily ahead of their time and has become the focus of an almost cultlike following. She acted out diverse identities, both male and female, in scenes ranging from severely simple to elaborately staged and was a pioneer of the gender-bending role-playing now seen in works by artists such as Cindy Sherman (born the year Cahun died), Nikki S. Lee and many others. Cahun (a pseudonym for Lucy Schwob) and Marcel Moore (Suzanne Malherbe, 1892-1972) were an extraordinary couple who worked and lived together for more than 40 years. Avid participants in the cultural avant-garde in Montparnasse during the 1920s and 30s, they ultimately moved to Jersey, in the Channel Islands, the only part of Great Britain to be occupied by the Germans during World War II. In Don't Kiss Me, seven international authors examine Cahun's and Moore's lives and art-making; their theatrical, literary and performance activities; their relationship with the Surrealist movement; their writings and Cahun's photographic technique. The extensive illustrations encompass not only Cahun's iconic images but also Moore's drawings and previously unseen photographs, manuscripts and ephemera."

Block Beuys
Hardcover

"Joseph Beuys created his “Block Beuys” in the 1960s. This complex and extensive installation consists of a wide range of materials and salvaged items that were selected, manipulated, altered and brought together by Beuys in unusual ways. The objects correspond to each other and, in their unmistakable forms, refer to the artist’s work in its entirety. The “Block Beuys” is permanently installed in a series of seven inter-connected rooms in the Hessische Landesmuseum in Darmstadt.
The photographer Manfred Leve has documented the work, “Block Beuys”, not only in the variety of its individual pieces, but also with a view of the entire work of art. His black-and-white photographs, devoid of any kind of staging, allow a thorough and genuine look at this radiant work. Leve sieht Beuys — Leve looks at Beuys."

Eva Hesse
Hardcover

"The work of Eva Hesse (1936–1970), one of the greatest American artists of the 1960s, continues to inspire and to endure in large part because of its deeply emotional and evocative qualities. Her latex and fiberglass sculptures in particular have a resonance that transcends the boundaries of minimalist art in which she had her roots. Hesse’s breakthrough solo exhibition—Chain Polymers at the Fischbach Gallery in New York in 1968—was a turning point in postwar American art.

Eva Hesse: Sculpture focuses on the artist’s large-scale sculptures in latex and fiberglass and provides a rare opportunity to look at Hesse’s artistic achievement within the historical context of her life in never-before-seen family diaries and photographs. Essays consider Hesse’s art from a variety of angles: Elisabeth Sussman discusses the sculptures shown in the 1968 solo exhibition; Fred Wasserman delves into the Hesse family’s life in Nazi Germany and in the German Jewish community in New York in the 1940s; Yve-Alain Bois examines Hesse’s works within the context of the art and aesthetic theories of the 1960s; and Mark Godfrey analyzes the importance of Hesse’s celebrated hanging sculptures of 1969–70. In addition to color reproductions of the artist’s sculpture, the book features a copiously illustrated chronology of the artist’s life."

Rachel Whiteread
Hardcover

Catalog from the 1995 Philadelphia ICA show. Very Nice.

Jasper Johns
Hardcover

"Jasper Johns (b. 1930) is one of the most significant figures in the history of postwar art. His work from 1955 to 1965 was pivotal, exercising an enormous impact on the subsequent development of pop, minimalism, and conceptual art in the United States and Europe. This is the first publication to approach Johns’s work of this ten-year period through a thematic framework. It examines the artist's interest in the condition of painting as a medium, a practice, and an instrument of encoded meaning through several interrelated motifs: the target, the “device,” the naming of colors, and the imprint of the body.

In this handsome book, leading scholars, a conservator, and a contemporary artist consider Johns’s activity in this critical decade and discuss many of his iconic paintings, such as Target with Four Faces (1955), Diver (1962), Periscope (Hart Crane) (1963), and Arrive-Depart (1963). Their new critical and historical perspectives are grounded in an unusually close visual and material analysis of Johns's work."

Thomas Chimes
Hardcover

"Thomas Chimes is one of the most important artists to emerge in Philadelphia since World War II. Tracing the stylistic evolution of Chimes's idiosyncratic art, this book presents a long-overdue survey of his remarkable five-decade career: canvases combining landscape imagery with symbols such as crucifixes (late 1950s–mid–1960s); mixed-media constructions set within finely crafted metal boxes (late 1960s-early 1970s); his best-known works, a series of forty-eight intimate sepia-toned panel portraits of nineteenth- and twentieth-century writers and artists that are placed within oversized wood frames (1973-78); and the enigmatic "white paintings" of the past two decades.

In an essay that explores each of these creative periods in detail, Michael R. Taylor reveals how Chimes has found inspiration in the writings of literary heroes such as Antonin Artaud, James Joyce, and especially Alfred Jarry, the iconoclastic French playwright and novelist whose invented "'Pataphysics"—the "science of imaginary solutions"—has provided the artist with a seemingly inexhaustible font of imagery. Taylor discusses the links between Chimes's work and that of contemporaries such as Gerhard Richter, Cy Twombly, Jess, and Nancy Spero, as well as that of important predecessors like Vincent van Gogh, Marcel Duchamp, and fellow Philadelphian Thomas Eakins."

Annotated Catalogue Raisonné Of The Books By Martin Kippenberger 1977-1997
Hardcover

"Roberta Smith called him the “madcap bad boy of contemporary German art” and also “one of the three or four best German artists of the postwar period.” Martin Kippenberger disrupted the status quo throughout his brief, excessive life, not just by making art of every variety and medium but also by conducting an extended performance in the vicinity of art that involved running galleries, organizing exhibitions, collecting the work of his contemporaries and overseeing assistants. He published books and catalogues, played in a rock-and-roll band and cut records, ran a performance-art space during his early years in Berlin, became part owner of a restaurant in Los Angeles during six months he spent there preparing for an exhibition, and collaborated extensively with other artists. This particular volume considers his output of artist’s books, as well as his exhibition catalogues and all the publications whose content he either created or edited. More than just documentation, this publication makes accessible for a wider public the multiple aspects of Kippenberger’s books, with all the complexity and consequence of his oeuvre intact."

These books, and thousands of others, can be purchased from:

Brickbat Books
709 South Fourth Street
Philadelphia, PA 19147

215 592 1207

Open:
Tuesday: thru Saturday, 11am to 7pm
Sunday: 11am to 6pm
Closed Monday

New Arrival: Tank Tankuro!

2011-09-11T12:09:00.001-04:00

GAJO SAKAMOTO, TANK TANKURO: PREWAR WORKS 1934-1935
Full Color, Hardcover in Slipcase
Cover design by Chris Ware

Tank Tankuro is one of the first robots ever to appear in Japanese comics and may be the first manga "superhero." First published in 1934, Tank Tankuro was one of the most famous manga characters at the time. The comic by Gajo Sakamoto is famous for its innovative and captivating adventure stories full of surrealism, nonsense, innocence, absurdity, and eccentricity. Lost in the turmoil of WWII, this hidden gem has been unearthed by Presspop Gallery. It is now available as a full color, deluxe hard cover with slipcase, beautifully designed by Chris Ware!

"I considered it a pleasant diversion and a distinct honor working on the cover design of Tank Tankuro," said Ware. "Sakamoto's pages seemed wonderfully energetic, almost willfully naive and playful, yet also strangely dire, given their overriding military theme. The immediate Western association I saw was with cartoonist Milt Gross, of the so-called 'screwball' school whose work captured the slam-bang of vaudeville, Yiddish humor and never took itself seriously, while at the same time getting at some of the common frustrations and societal anger that 'higher arts' don't necessarily directly address. Gross's frenetic, loopy pen style is analogous somewhat to Sakamoto's, and I get the same sort of feeling of hectic happiness when looking at their work."

TANK TANKURO'S ANTI-WAR MESSAGE: Under pressure from the militaristic Japanese government of the '30s, Sakamoto was forced to create what appears to be a pro-war comic. However, at a time when creative freedom was deeply at risk, Sakamoto used the pages as a silent anti-war protest, expressing his feelings in the playful, free-spirit of Tankuro himself.

Tank Tankuro influenced a great many manga artists, such as Shigeru Sugiura, Osamu Tezuka, Fujiko Fujio and more, and is the cornerstone from which many masterpieces of manga art would spring. Tankuro became the archetype for various Japanese manga heroes that were to follow. In the story, Tankuro fights the villain Kuro Kabuto (lit. "Black Hat"), who attacks Japan. Kuro Kabuto is famous among Japanese sci-fi fans who believe he resembles Darth Vader of Star Wars.

These books, and thousands of others, can be purchased from:

Brickbat Books
709 South Fourth Street
Philadelphia, PA 19147

215 592 1207

Open:
Tuesday: thru Saturday, 11am to 7pm
Sunday: 11am to 6pm
Closed Monday

New Arrivals: Children's Books

2011-09-08T18:35:00.008-04:00

Remy Charlip, Fortunately
Hardcover

Wanda Ga'g, Nothing At All
Hardcover

Charlotte Pomerantz & James Marshall, Piggy In The Puddle
Hardcover

Jeff Brown & Tomi Ungerer, Flat Stanley
Hardcover

Ted Hughes & Jim Downer, Timmy The Tug
Hardcover

Dr Seuss, Les Oeufs Verts au Jambon
Hardcover

These books, and thousands of others, can be purchased from:

Brickbat Books
709 South Fourth Street
Philadelphia, PA 19147

215 592 1207

Open:
Tuesday: thru Saturday, 11am to 7pm
Sunday: 11am to 6pm
Closed Monday

Featured: Visual Editions

2011-09-07T16:38:00.007-04:00

Visual Editions is a London-based book publisher. They believe "that books should be as visually interesting as the stories they tell; with the visual feeding into and adding to the storytelling as much as the words on the page."

Laurence Sterne, The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman

“A lot of nonsense is written about Laurence Sterne’s The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman – and that’s just as well. It would be depressing in the extreme if this triumphant tangling up of the threads of reason with the strands of linear narrative were to admit of any effective unravelling; which is as much to say, that were you to find yourself picking apart a lucid, non-discursive exposition of the novel – its themes, its techniques, its plot – you would know that you had finally gone mad.”
—Will Self

Jonathan Safran Foer, Tree Of Codes

“Revolutionary” – New York Times

“Very, very cool…delightfully tactile” – Vanity Fair

“the most potent work of art that Jonathan Safran Foer has yet produced.” – Michel Faber, The Guardian

“a true work of art” – Erica Wagner, The Times

“Jonathan Safran Foer, deftly deploys sculptural means to craft a truly compelling story. In our world of screens, he welds narrative, materiality, and our reading experience into a book that remembers that it actually has a body.”–Olafur Eliasson

"Our early conversations with Jonathan Safran Foer about Tree of Codes started when Jonathan said he was curious to explore and experiment with the die-cut technique. With that as our mutual starting point, we spent many months of emails and phone calls, exploring the idea of the pages’ physical relationship to one another and how this could somehow be developed to work with a meaningful narrative. This led to Jonathan deciding to use an existing piece of text and cut a new story out of it. Having considered working with various texts, Jonathan decided to cut into and out of what he calls his “favourite book”: The Street of Crocodiles by Bruno Schulz.

As Jonathan began to carve out his story, we started doing our production homework and literally got turned down by every printer we approached – their stock line being “the book you want to make just cannot be made”. Thankfully, we found Die Keure in Belgium who relished the challenge of making a book with a different die-cut on every page.

Over a year of writing, cutting and proto-typing later, comes Tree of Codes, a haunting new story by Jonathan Safran Foer cut from Bruno Schulz’s words.

The book is as much a sculptural object as it is a work of masterful storytelling: here is an “enormous last day of life” that looks like it feels."

Marc Saporta, Composition No.1
illustrated by Salvador Plascencia

"VE3 is a re-imagining of a book originally published in the 1960s. The book is the first ever “book in a box”, called Composition No. 1 by Marc Saporta. When we say book in a box we mean: quite literally a book that comes in a box with loose pages. Each page has a self-contained narrative, leaving it to the reader to decide the order they read the book, and how much or how little of the book they want to read before they begin again. In so many ways, Composition No.1 was published ahead of its time: the book raises all the questions we ask ourselves today about user-centric, non-linear screen driven ways of reading."

These books, and thousands of others, can be purchased from:

Brickbat Books
709 South Fourth Street
Philadelphia, PA 19147

215 592 1207

Open:
Tuesday: thru Saturday, 11am to 7pm
Sunday: 11am to 6pm
Closed Monday

New Arrivals: Kramer's Ergot

2011-09-04T11:53:00.007-04:00

Kramer's Ergot 7
Hardcover (out of print!)

"Kramers Ergot, the most influential and acclaimed anthology of the past decade, returns in its seventh volume as a gigantic full-color 16 x 21 inch (that’s bigger than a full page from your daily newspaper) hardcover! While past issues explored an innovative blend of art and comics, this collection focuses on expanding the boundaries of the narrative comics page. #7’s massive page size has given these contemporary artists an opportunity to tell stories at a scope not seen since the expansive Sunday newspaper comics of the early twentieth century. Including over 50 of the world’s greatest cartoonists, it draws on the talents of established cartoonists, newcomers, elegant stylists, and unpredictable innovators such as Al Columbia, Carol Tyler, Chris Ware, Paper Rad, Jaime Hernandez, Blanquet, Daniel Clowes, Mat Brinkman, Kim Deitch, Anna Sommer, Anders Nilsen, C.F., Adrian Tomine, Joost Swarte and many others."

This book, and thousands of others, can be purchased from:

Brickbat Books
709 South Fourth Street
Philadelphia, PA 19147

215 592 1207

Open:
Tuesday: thru Saturday, 11am to 7pm
Sunday: 11am to 6pm
Closed Monday

New Arrivals: A Selection

2011-09-03T12:01:00.001-04:00

Akiyuki Nozaka, The Pornographers
Hardcover

Timothy Leary, The Politics Of Ecstasy

Hanns Heinz Ewers, Blood
Hardcover (cover & illustrations by E.P. D'Aulaire)

Richard Aldington, Death Of A Hero
Hardcover SOLD!

Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Routines
Paperback (cover by Roland Topor)

These books, and thousands of others, can be purchased from:

Brickbat Books
709 South Fourth Street
Philadelphia, PA 19147

215 592 1207

Open:
Tuesday: thru Saturday, 11am to 7pm
Sunday: 11am to 6pm
Closed Monday

Event: Anders Nilsen & Marc Bell at Brickbat!

2011-08-26T12:12:00.001-04:00

Wed. Sept 14th
at 7pm
The Big Questions Book Tour, Slide Show & Reading
with
Anders Nilsen & Marc Bell
at
Brickbat!

Anders Nilsen

"Nilsen creates an epic landscape of desolation and doubt" --New City Chicago

"Nilsen's sparse, thinly rendered line work adds to the level of existential discomfort that the artist seems to excel at... 'Dogs and Water' stays with you a lot longer than most recent comics, easily marking it as one of the best of the year." --Harrisburg Patriot News

"Nilsen's art is filled with amazing white space showing a true sense of human loneliness. Above all else, the work echoes our need to be heard, even if only by ourselves." --Punk Planet

A haunting postmodern fable, BIG QUESTIONS is the magnum opus of Anders Nilsen, one of the brightest and most talented young cartoonists working today. This beautiful and minimalist story, collected here for the first time, is the culmination of ten years and over 600 pages of work that details the metaphysical quandaries of the occupants of an endless plain, existing somewhere between a dream and a Russian steppe. A downed plane is thought to be a bird and the unexploded bomb that came from it is mistaken for a giant egg by the group of birds whose lives the story follows. The indifferent and stranded pilot is of great interest to the birds–some doggedly seek his approval, while others do quite the opposite, leading to tensions in the group.Nilsen seamlessly moves from humor to heartbreak. His distinctive, detailed line work is paired with plentiful white space and large, often frameless panels, conveying an ineffable sense of vulnerability and openness.

BIG QUESTIONS has roots in classic fable–the story's birds and snakes have more to say than their human counterparts and there are hints of the classic hero's journey, but the easy moral that closes most fables is left here as open and ambiguous. Rather than lending its world meaning, Nilsen's parable lets the questions wander out to go where they will.

Marc Bell

“Bell has a gift for incomprehensible gab, juggling a dozen language gags in complicated comic pages that, like Ulysses, could take you twenty-four hours or a lifetime to read.”–Lee Henderson BORDER CROSSINGS

Featured:The Adventures Of Jeanne-Marie

2011-08-11T12:52:00.006-04:00

Francoise Seignobosc, The Adventures Of Jeanne-Marie
Hardcover (out of print)

Francoise Seignobosc, Jeanne-Marie At The Fair
Hardcover (out of print)

These books, and thousands of others, can be purchased from:

Brickbat Books
709 South Fourth Street
Philadelphia, PA 19147

215 592 1207

Open:
Tuesday: thru Saturday, 11am to 7pm
Sunday: 11am to 6pm
Closed Monday

Featured: Hanns Heinz Ewers' Alraune

2011-08-10T15:05:00.003-04:00

Hanns Heinz Ewers, Alraune
Limited edition Hardcover (out of print)

A decadent, and a German nationalist, Ewers influenced H.P. Lovecraft, and was an associate of Aleister Crowley. He was an early supporter of the Nazis, but his Jewish sympathies and homosexuality eventually lead to his work being banned and his property seized. He died tubercular and penniless in 1943.

"A mad scientist and his nephew researching artificial insemination and heredity...traverse the sordid underbelly of Berlin looking for the city's most shameless prostitute, whom they impregnate with the sperm of an executed sex criminal. The mother of this union dies in childbirth but the daughter, Alraune, survives. She grows up to be a beautiful, sadistic and soulless destroyer of all who are associated with her..." - John Hirschhorn-Smith

This book, and thousands of others, can be purchased from:

Brickbat Books
709 South Fourth Street
Philadelphia, PA 19147

215 592 1207

Open:
Tuesday: thru Saturday, 11am to 7pm
Sunday: 11am to 6pm
Closed Monday

New Arrival: Ralph Eugene Meatyard

2011-08-05T12:40:00.001-04:00

Ralph Eugene Meatyard: Dolls & Masks
Hardcover

"In 1950s America there were neither likely nor logical paths for a photographer. Family man, optician, photographer and avid reader, Ralph Eugene Meatyard found himself in the midst of a cultural and philosophical movement in Lexington, Kentucky, which at that time included such figures as Thomas Merton, Wendell Berry and Guy Davenport. Through the camera, Meatyard explored and created a fantasy world of dolls and masks, where his family members played the central roles on an ever-changing stage. His monograph, The Family Album of Lucybelle Crater, published posthumously in 1974, recorded his wife and family posed in various disquieting settings, wearing masks and holding dolls and evoking a penetrating emotional and psychological landscape. The book won his work critical acclaim and has been hugely influential in the intervening decades.

Dolls and Masks opens the doors on the decade of rich experimentation that immediately preceded the production of his final opus, The Family Album of Lucybelle Crater. Published to coincide with an exhibition at the Art Institute of Chicago, this handsome book presents 55 never-before-seen works from the Meatyard Archive. Essays by writer and historian Eugenia Parry and curator Elizabeth Siegel greatly expand our understanding of Meatyard's elusive and captivating genius and set the stage for this foray into this unknown work of one of the century's most intriguing photographers." -Radius Books

This book, and thousands of others, can be purchased from:

Brickbat Books
709 South Fourth Street
Philadelphia, PA 19147

215 592 1207

Open:
Tuesday: thru Saturday, 11am to 7pm
Sunday: 11am to 6pm
Closed Monday

Featured: More Classic Children's Books

2011-08-04T12:11:00.001-04:00

Ruth Krauss & Helen Stone, The Bundle Book
Hardcover with dust jacket (out of print)

Margaret Wise Brown & Leonard Weisgard, Nibble Nibble
Hardcover with dust jacket (out of print)

Maud & Mishka Petersham, Off To Bed
Hardcover with dust jacket (out of print)

Ethel & Leonard Kessler, Do Baby Bears Sit In Chairs
Hardcover with dust jacket (out of print)

These books, and thousands of others, can be purchased from:

Brickbat Books
709 South Fourth Street
Philadelphia, PA 19147

215 592 1207

Open:
Tuesday: thru Saturday, 11am to 7pm
Sunday: 11am to 6pm
Closed Monday

David Foster Wallace Raps

2011-08-03T13:11:00.003-04:00

Mark Costello & David Foster Wallace, Signifying Rappers
SOLD!

Perhaps not the headspinner that is Martin Amis' Space Invaders. Still, an obscure (and out of print) oddity in the great man's oeuvre.

This book, and thousands of others, can be purchased from:

Brickbat Books
709 South Fourth Street
Philadelphia, PA 19147

215 592 1207

Open:
Tuesday: thru Saturday, 11am to 7pm
Sunday: 11am to 6pm
Closed Monday

New Arrivals: I Can Read It By Myself

2011-08-02T11:36:00.005-04:00

This post is for the Tiny Dictator, who says, "I can read it all by myself because it says I Can Read It All By Myself."

Robert Lopshire, How To Make Flibbers, etc.
Hardcover(out of print)

Robert Lopshire, I Am Better Than You!
Hardcover with dust jacket (out of print)

Technically not an "I Can Read It All By Myself" book, but still...

Joan Heilbroner & P.D. Eastman, Robert The Rose Horse
Hardcover

Laurent De Brunhoff, Babar Loses His Crown
Hardcover with dust jacket (out of print)

Benjamin Elkin & Katherine Evans, The Big Jump
Hardcover with dust jacket (out of print)

Fred Phleger & Paul Galdone, The Whales Go By
Hardcover (out of print)

These books, and thousands of others, can be purchased from:

Brickbat Books
709 South Fourth Street
Philadelphia, PA 19147

215 592 1207

Open:
Tuesday: thru Saturday, 11am to 7pm
Sunday: 11am to 6pm
Closed Monday

Featured: Juan Rodolfo Wilcock

2011-07-30T14:11:00.004-04:00

...name-checked in the recently Bolaño anthology, Wilcock was a member of the literary circle that included Borges, Ocampo, Casares. He fled Peronist Argentina, eventually settling in Italy where he associated with Moravia, Morante and Pasolini. Like Borges, he breaks with realism, but is more absurdist in temperament, less metaphysical.

Juan Rodolfo Wilcock, The Temple Of Iconoclasts
Paperback

"Compellingly whimsical, alienated, pseudo-scientific, bizarre: all these adjectives describe this fiction in the form of a short reference work, the first book by admired Argentinean-Italian novelist Wilcock (1919-1978) to be published in English. Wilcock's early career in Argentina brought him close to the young Borges, and fans of Borges, Italo Calvino or Stanislaw Lem will recognize Wilcock's methods. The book (his best known in Italy) consists of short essays describing the lives of obsessive eccentrics, some real and some imaginary, with each entry giving significant dates, major works and summaries of the relevant obsessions. Some of the real people here seem stranger than fiction: Roger Babson was a rich American pseudoscientist who directed a foundation dedicated to isolating a gravity 'atom' and finding a substance that could resist it. Another all-too-real oddball is John Cleves Symmes, whose arguments for a 'Hollow Earth' inspired a story by Poe. Wilcock's greatest aesthetic successes come with the characters he makes up from scratch. Catalan director Llorenz Riber believed he was a rabbit, and therefore brought rabbits onstage in his avant-garde interpretations of Europe's classic plays: he also adapted, for the stage, Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations, in order to depict the thinker's famous 'duck-rabbit.' Wilcock's inventions get stranger as he moves on: 'At the age of fifty-nine, the Belgian Henry Bucher was only forty-two.' The telepathic hypnotist Jose Valdes y Prom sabotaged an 1878 congress of theologians and scientists by taking over their minds. So Wilcock proceeds, through 30 other oddly comic entries. Venuti renders Wilcock's Italian into lucid, captivating English, and offers a biographical introduction. Lovers of postmodern mind games should certainly start seeking out Wilcock's work--assuming they can be sure it really exists" -Publishers Weekly.

This book, and thousands of others, can be purchased from:

Brickbat Books
709 South Fourth Street
Philadelphia, PA 19147

215 592 1207

Open:
Tuesday: thru Saturday, 11am to 7pm
Sunday: 11am to 6pm
Closed Monday

Featured: Another Edward Gorey

2011-07-29T12:35:00.001-04:00

The Dwindling Party
Hardcover, signed by Edward Gorey

This book, and thousands of others, can be purchased from:

Brickbat Books
709 South Fourth Street
Philadelphia, PA 19147

215 592 1207

Open:
Tuesday: thru Saturday, 11am to 7pm
Sunday: 11am to 6pm
Closed Monday

New Arrivals: Classic Children's Books

2011-07-28T13:10:00.004-04:00

Anne Archibold Miller, Little Bigs
Hardcover, illustrated Bernard Westmacott

Marie Hall Ets, Mister Penny
Hardcover

William Hall, The Walking Hat
Hardcover, illustrated by Kurt Wiese

Marian King, Kees and Kleintje
Hardcover, illustrated by Elizabeth Enright

The Night Before Christmas
Hardcover, illustrated by E. MacKinstry

These books, and thousands of others, can be purchased from:

Brickbat Books
709 South Fourth Street
Philadelphia, PA 19147

215 592 1207

Open:
Tuesday: thru Saturday, 11am to 7pm
Sunday: 11am to 6pm
Closed Monday

Featured: Edward Gorey

2011-07-21T11:44:00.002-04:00

Edward Gorey, The Water Flowers
Hardcover

An amusing tale detailing the perils of white sauce. Appears to be out of print, as such.

This book, and thousands of others, can be purchased from:

Brickbat Books
709 South Fourth Street
Philadelphia, PA 19147

215 592 1207

Open:
Tuesday: thru Saturday, 11am to 7pm
Sunday: 11am to 6pm
Closed Monday

New Arrivals: Richard Stark's Parker

2011-07-20T14:19:00.005-04:00

“Westlake knows precisely how to grab a reader, draw him or her into the story, and then slowly tighten his grip until escape is impossible.”—Washington Post Book World

“Elmore Leonard wouldn’t write what he does if Stark hadn’t been there before. And Quentin Tarantino wouldn’t write what he does without Leonard. . . . Old master that he is, Stark does all of them one better.”—Los Angeles Times

“Donald Westlake’s Parker novels are among the small number of books I read over and over. Forget all that crap you’ve been telling yourself about War and Peace and Proust—these are the books you’ll want on that desert island.”—Lawrence Block

The Hunter

The Man with the Getaway Face

The Outfit

These books, and thousands of others, can be purchased from:

Brickbat Books
709 South Fourth Street
Philadelphia, PA 19147

215 592 1207

Open:
Tuesday: thru Saturday, 11am to 7pm
Sunday: 11am to 6pm
Closed Monday

New Arrival: EC Comics

2011-07-19T14:36:00.001-04:00

EC Comics Cover Portfolio: Tales From The Crypt
30 full color covers in a printed envelope
published by Russ Cochran, 1977

This book, and thousands of others, can be purchased from:

Brickbat Books
709 South Fourth Street
Philadelphia, PA 19147

215 592 1207

Open:
Tuesday: thru Saturday, 11am to 7pm
Sunday: 11am to 6pm
Closed Monday

Featured: Two From Japan

2011-07-18T12:37:00.002-04:00

Tadanori Yokoo, Spiritual Pop 1994 With Love Document
Hardcover

Yukio Mishima, Sun & Steel
Hardcover

These books, and thousands of others, can be purchased from:

Brickbat Books
709 South Fourth Street
Philadelphia, PA 19147

215 592 1207

Open:
Tuesday: thru Saturday, 11am to 7pm
Sunday: 11am to 6pm
Closed Monday

Featured: More Time Inc Editions!

2011-07-17T12:02:00.012-04:00

Some of the finest cover designs (Tomi Ungerer, George Salter, Ed Young, Ilonka Karasz) of the post-war period, printed on possibly the worst cover stock of the 20th century. And they have their own singular smell. Is it the ink? The glue? The paper? Hard to say...

Fitzroy Maclean, Eastern Approaches
cover by Ed Young

A.B. Guthrie, Big Sky
cover by George Salter

Romain Gary, Roots Of Heaven
cover by Ilonka Karasz

John Collier, Fancies And Goodnights
cover by Seymour Chwast

William Bolitho, Murder For Profit
cover by Austin Briggs

James Joyce, Portrait Of The Artist
cover by Martin Rosenzweig

Theodor Plievier, Stalingrad
cover by Martin Rosenzweig

These books, and thousands of others, can be purchased from:

Brickbat Books
709 South Fourth Street
Philadelphia, PA 19147

215 592 1207

Open:
Tuesday: thru Saturday, 11am to 7pm
Sunday: 11am to 6pm
Closed Monday

Featured: Hannah Höch

2011-07-16T14:41:00.003-04:00

Cut With A Kitchen Knife: The Weimar Photomontages Of Hannah Höch
Hardcover (out of print)

"Höch, a member of the Berlin Dada group, was recognized as one of the most innovative practitioners of photomontage. In such works as Dada-Ernst and Cut with the Kitchen Knife, she reconstructed the wonderfully seductive mass media images of the New Woman with their appeal intact but with their contours fractured in order to expose the contradictions of the new female stereotypes. Her photomontages exhibit a disturbing tension between pleasure and anger, confidence and anxiety. In Weimar—as today—says Lavin, the representation of women in the mass media took on a political meaning when it challenged the distribution of power in society. Höch's work provides important evidence of the necessity for women to shape the production and reception of the images that redefine their role." -Yale University Press

also available:

Hannah Höch, Bilderbuch (Picture Book)
Hardcover

These books, and thousands of others, can be purchased from:

Brickbat Books
709 South Fourth Street
Philadelphia, PA 19147

215 592 1207

Open every day, 11am to 7pm.

We accept Visa, MC, Amex, Paypal and cash.

Featured: Alvin Lustig

2011-07-12T11:51:00.003-04:00

...a monograph on one of the great 20th century designers. Long overdue and highly recommended!

Born Modern: The Life And Design Of Alvin Lustig
9 x 12 in; 208 pp; color images throughout
Hardcover, $50.00

"Alvin Lustig was modern before it was cool. But there has never been a monograph devoted to his work—until now. A genius best known for his book covers and interior design, his theories on design education were precursors to the curricula of some of the most renowned design schools today. Lustig lent his imaginative vision and talent to a wide range of legendary projects, from the groundbreaking architecture of 1940s Los Angeles to magazine covers that have become collector's items. Spanning the breadth of Lustig's tragically brief but prolific career, Born Modern is a must-have for any student or practitioner of design, as well as anyone interested in the history of American visual culture." -Chronicle

This book, and thousands of others, can be purchased from:

Brickbat Books
709 South Fourth Street
Philadelphia, PA 19147

215 592 1207

Open every day,except Monday, 11am to 7pm.

New Arrivals: More Pulp Sci Fi

2011-07-08T17:06:00.005-04:00

New Arrivals: Pulp Sci Fi

2011-07-07T13:56:00.005-04:00

a few dozen sci fi pulp anthologies just arrived. Stories by Philip K. Dick, Alfred Bester, Ray Bradbury, Raymond Chandler(?!) and the like. Most $10 and under. This stuff tends to go fast, so don't snooze!

These books, and thousands of others, can be purchased from:

Brickbat Books
709 South Fourth Street
Philadelphia, PA 19147

215 592 1207

Open every day,except Monday, 11am to 7pm.

New Arrival: Angus MacLise

2011-07-05T21:05:00.002-04:00

DREAMWEAPON: The Art and Life of Angus MacLise 1938-1979

Standard edition of the DREAMWEAPON exhibit catalog with texts by Lou Reed, La Monte Young, Ira Cohen, plus exhibit curators Johan Kugelberg and Will Swofford Cameron. This edition includes a laid in memorial letterpress broadside commemorating Ira Cohen, reprinting a 1976 ode to Cohen by Angus MacLise. The broadside printed by Jon Beacham/The Brother In Elysium Press. 120 pages.
Edition of 1000

Also, available from Bardo Matrix/ Starstreams Press (published in Katmandu, Nepal by Angus MacLise & Ira Cohen):

Paul Bowles, Next To Nothing

Jane Falk, Ckrowww (signed and inscribed by author)

Charles Henri Ford, 7 Poems (SOLD!)

These books, and thousands of others, can be purchased from:

Brickbat Books
709 South Fourth Street
Philadelphia, PA 19147

215 592 1207

Open every day,except Monday, 11am to 7pm.

Brickbat Closed for July 4th!

2011-07-03T12:03:00.006-04:00

Brickbat will close early today, Sunday, at 3pm, and reopen Tuesday, July 5th, at 11am.
Happy holiday!

Featured: Memoirs Of My Nervous Illness

2011-07-02T12:30:00.004-04:00

Daniel Paul Schreber, Memoirs Of My Nervous Illness

"In 1884, the distinguished German jurist Daniel Paul Schreber suffered the first of a series of mental collapses that would afflict him for the rest of his life. In his madness, the world was revealed to him as an enormous architecture of nerves, dominated by a predatory God. It became clear to Schreber that his personal crisis was implicated in what he called a “crisis in God’s realm,” one that had transformed the rest of humanity into a race of fantasms. There was only one remedy; as his doctor noted: Schreber “considered himself chosen to redeem the world, and to restore to it the lost state of Blessedness. This, however, he could only do by first being transformed from a man into a woman….”

"Since…[its publication in 1903] it’s been widely regarded as the most revelatory subjective account of mental illness ever put forward…This edition, the first for decades, represents a very welcome return to print….To call this epiphanic confession a cross between Hildegard of Bingen and Philip K Dick may demarcate its territory, but it gives little idea of the universe of detail and the evangelical white heat of its sustained visionary narrative. Schreber was undoubtedly barking mad, as we’re reminded by the dry psychiatric reports on his progress, which are included in this volume. But we’re also reminded throughout that barking madness can coexist with a razor-sharp legal mind, astonishing personal courage and a boundless love for humanity."
— Mike Jay, Fortean Times, The Journal of Strange Phenomena

This book, and thousands of others, can be purchased from:

Brickbat Books
709 South Fourth Street
Philadelphia, PA 19147

215 592 1207

Open every day,except Monday, 11am to 7pm.

Featured: Two Books

2011-06-15T11:55:00.003-04:00

Ed Ruscha
Hardcover

Robert Frank, The Americans (1978 edition)
Hardcover

These books, and thousands of others, can be purchased from:

Brickbat Books
709 South Fourth Street
Philadelphia, PA 19147

215 592 1207

Open every day,except Monday, 11am to 7pm.

EVENT: Glenn Jones/ Leaves From Off the Trees/ Baird Sisters

2011-06-15T11:50:00.011-04:00

Thursday, June 23th at 8 pm
at
Brickbat Books

Glenn Jones
Leaves From Off the Trees
(Meg Baird, Sharron Kraus, Helena Espvall)
Baird Sisters

(donations of at least $5 are mandatory)

Glenn Jones
While there's certainly no dearth of post- American Primitive finger-picking acoustic guitarists out there these days, none even remotely come close to the well-worn, actual SONGCRAFT of Glenn Jones. Pieces flow, unhurried and thoughtful. You know how Robbie Basho used to instruct the audience to envision birds swirling around a French cathedral in "Cathedral Et Fleur Lis" and even if you've never been to France whatsoever you can still SEE it? Glenn Jones too has that ability to conjure up memories and images of people and places you've never had or met. He is the only true heir to the Takoma tradition. Whether roughly using a bottle slide, shimmering a 12 string, or slowly plucking a banjo, this guy is the real deal.

Leaves From Off The Trees
Leaves From Off the Trees was a record that came out a few years back that documented the hang-out sessions of Meg Baird, Sharron Kraus, and Helena Espvall. Those fortunate enough to find a copy were rewarded with versions of classics like "Willy O Winsbury" performed in a casual and friendly fashion by voices, guitars, and cello. The songs culled from the folk traditions of both America and the British Isles, and were performed in a loose manner befitting a slightly drunken post-dinner party jam more than an uptight "proper" studio setting. The players are known for their works with intricate acid-folkers Espers, bludgeoning sullen punkers Watery Love, guitar psych hero Masaki Batoh, to mention but a few, not to mention their own illustrious solo careers. This is an international outfit, and thus a rare opportunity to see them should not be missed.

The Baird Sisters
Baird Sisters are Meg and Laura Baird. A guitar, a banjo, and 2 sets of mesmerizingly clear and gorgeous vocals, singing songs cultivated from a lifetime immersion in Appalachain folk. Not be heretical, but they do a version of Gene Clark's "Silver Raven" that is every bit as breathtaking as the original, possibly more so.

Featured: William Burroughs & Brion Gysin

2011-06-13T12:34:00.001-04:00

William Burroughs, The Ticket That Exploded
First Edition, Hardcover

William Burroughs, Sinki's Sauna
Stapled wraps, a numbered edition of 500

William Burroughs & Brion Gysin, The Third Mind
First Edition, Hardcover

Brion Gysin, Alarme
Paperback

Brion Gysin, Beat Museum- Bardo Hotel, Chapter 2
Stapled wraps

William Burroughs, Nova Express
First Edition, Hardcover

These books, and thousands of others, can be purchased from:

Brickbat Books
709 South Fourth Street
Philadelphia, PA 19147

215 592 1207

Open every day,except Monday, 11am to 7pm.

New Arrival: Anders Nilsen's The Game

2011-06-12T12:57:00.003-04:00

Anders Nilsen, The Game

"This is the fully painted 'angels with machine guns' strip I did for the giant-sized Kramer's Ergot #7 in 2008. The strip in Kramer's was 3 pages. This poster/mini includes the previously unpublished fourth page. Each page is 19.5" x 16". Offset printed." -Anders Nilsen

This book, and thousands of others, can be purchased from:

Brickbat Books
709 South Fourth Street
Philadelphia, PA 19147

215 592 1207

Open every day,except Monday, 11am to 7pm.

Featured: Three Photography Books

2011-06-11T13:07:00.006-04:00

Joan Almond, The Past In The Present
Signed, numbered, limited edition hardcover, accompanied by two artists proofs, in a silk covered slipcase

"Whether in the play of shadows cast on a rock by drying leaves, or in the strength of a woman's crossed forearms covered in marriage tattoos, Joan Almond's photographs maintain an exceptional sobriety of form and treatment. Shot in Morocco, Algeria, India, and Jerusalem, her photographic images focus on family traditions still strong in North Africa and the Middle East but long lost in her native America. Traveling to and working in villages and homes where few photographers have tread, Almond manages to show human beings with remarkable dignity and resilience, despite their sometimes impoverished personal circumstances. This first monograph of Almond's work is printed in tritone to replicate the platinum printing process so integral to the viewing of her photographs."

Don James, Pre-War Surfing Photographs: Portfolio 2
Limited, numbered edition of four prints in a box with tipped on plate

"Four 6.8" x 4.6" archival prints reproduced from the original negatives found in Don James's studio shortly after his death in 1996. The photographs are printed with soy-based UV inks on 100% cotton rag, acid-free paper. Each print is mounted on an acid-free 4-ply board with a numbered certificate of authenticity, and enclosed in a glassine sleeve."

Dayanita Singh, Sent A Letter
7 paper bound books in a linen clam shell box

"Dayanita Singh has been making small photo journals of her travels in India for some years now. Each book is made with a certain person in mind, either one she has made the journey with or one that was on her mind on her travels. She makes two handmade copies, one remains with her (she calls this her kitchen museum) and the other with the friend it was made for. A diary with coded images of a time shared. SENT A LETTER contains 7 of these diaries including one of Nony Singh’s photographs of her daughter growing up. The diaries are in accordion folds and open into a mini private exhibition in her friends’ homes. They are presented in a handmade cloth box."

These books, and thousands of others, can be purchased from:

Brickbat Books
709 South Fourth Street
Philadelphia, PA 19147

215 592 1207

Open every day,except Monday, 11am to 7pm.

New Arrival: Zap!

2011-06-09T12:36:00.001-04:00

Zap: Masters of Psychedelic Art 1965-1974

"This gorgeous oversized book is a catalog for a Zap retrospective show at Andrew Edlin Gallery curated by Gary Panter. Included are complete stories by Robert Williams, Gilbert Shelton, and R. Crumb, and enormous images by Spain, Moscoso, Rick Griffin and S. Clay Wilson, some never-before printed. Everything was scanned from the original art and printed in luminous black and silver. These are the largest reproductions of this artwork I've ever seen."

Cardboard covers, 14” x 16,” 48 pages
Edition of 1000

This book, and thousands of others, can be purchased from:

Brickbat Books
709 South Fourth Street
Philadelphia, PA 19147

215 592 1207

Open every day,except Monday, 11am to 7pm.

New Arrival: Destroy All Monsters!

2011-06-08T15:26:00.007-04:00

Destroy All Monsters Magazine 1976 - 1979
Paperback, 2011, 270 pages

In stock: A slightly less opulent (no silk screened covers or flexi-disc) edition of Geisha This from a while back. Nice to have it back and available again, if briefly, for the masses.

"Facsimile edition of Destroy All Monsters Magazine including remnants of the "lost" seventh issue, which was never released. Destroy All Monsters Magazine features work by Mike Kelley, Cary Loren, Niagara, and Jim Shaw.

Destroy All Monsters Magazine was edited by Cary Loren and contained artwork, photographs, and flyers from band mates Mike Kelley, Cary Loren, Niagara, and Jim Shaw. Printed using any papers and techniques available to the band, the issues combine the cut and paste tactics of punk zines with a psychedelic affinity for color. Destroy All Monsters Magazine functions as a kind of manifesto, providing insight into the band through densely layered pages with movie imagery, kitsch, cartoons, delicate drawings, and counter-culture collages. While Destroy All Monsters has been the subject of recent exhibitions and partial reprints, this is the first time that all issues have been reprinted."

These books, and thousands of others, can be purchased from:

Brickbat Books
709 South Fourth Street
Philadelphia, PA 19147

215 592 1207

Open every day,except Monday, 11am to 7pm.

New Arrivals: Little Golden Books

2011-06-07T12:25:00.002-04:00

Gustaf, Tenggren, The Shy Little Kitten
1st Edition

Kathryn Jackson & Leonard Weisgard, Wheels
1st Edition

Mabel Watts & Art Seiden, Never Pat A Bear

Margaret Wise Brown, Edith Thacher Hurd & Richard Scarry, Two Little Miners

May Justus & Sue d'Avignon, Fun For Hunkydory
1st Edition

Esther & Eloise Wilkin, Baby Looks
1st Edition

Margaret Wise Brown & Leonard Weisgard, Pussy Willow

These books, and thousands of others, can be purchased from:

Brickbat Books
709 South Fourth Street
Philadelphia, PA 19147

215 592 1207

Open every day,except Monday, 11am to 7pm.

New Arrivals!

2011-06-05T17:12:00.004-04:00

a heck of a lot of books arrived at the shop this weekend. Here are a few...

Virginia Woolf, The Waves

Henry Green, Nothing

e.e. cummings, The Enormous Room

Elizabeth Bowen, The House In Paris

Alan Watts, The Two Hands Of God

These books, and thousands of others, can be purchased from:

Brickbat Books
709 South Fourth Street
Philadelphia, PA 19147

215 592 1207

Open every day,except Monday, 11am to 7pm.

EVENT: Michael Chapman/ Chris Forsyth's Paranoid Cat Duo on June 10th

2011-06-01T12:12:00.003-04:00

Friday, June 10th at 8 pm
at
Brickbat Books

Michael Chapman
Chris Forsyth's Paranoid Cat Duo

Very excited about this one! UK folk legend Michael Chapman is making a return appearance to Philly. Best known for his early 70's Harvest recordings where he sang world-weary, gorgeous songs of discontent and failure while playing the sort of progressive folk sounds that existed in the same orbit as Roy Harper or Bert Jansch. Those who saw him on any of his previous visits (including one right here with Jack Rose a few years ago) know that he's still utterly on top of his game, and, one could argue, even gotten better! His playing has gotten deeper, the songs longer and darker, and his voice as rough as Charley Patton. He is not to be missed!

Chris Forsyth's Paranoid Cat Duo finds minimalist/maximalist guitarist Chris Forsyth teaming up with organist/guitarist Don Bruno. Not too easy to pin down Forsyth's compositions. Sometimes they sound like the chiming sun shimmer of the Byrds as reinterpreted by Glenn Branca. Other times they're endless cascading solos like one guy playing Verlaine and Lloyd simultaneously.

$5 (or more if you'd like, we're not gonna try to stop you) donations are MANDATORY! Feel free to also BYOB.

Featured: L'Oie de Cravan

2011-05-25T13:13:00.003-04:00

A selection of comix from Canadian publisher L'Oie de Cravan, responsible for the recent Hurley and Coley books...

Plustard
Obom
Limited, silkscreened covers

Mimi Pink Drink
Obom
Limited edition of 800 copies under cover screenprinted by Simon Bossé. $12.00

Schmo
Jeff Ladouceur
Cartoons. Black and white, with four color pages. $20.00

Holy Moly
Jeff Ladouceur

L'Affaire Madame Paul
Julie Doucet
Limited edition of 500 copies, cover screenprinted by Simon Bossé. $13.00

Intestine
Simon Bossé
Limited edition of 600 copies, silkscreened cover by the author.
The first full album of this pillar of the Montreal comics. $15.00

Bébête
Simon Bossé
Limited edition of 700 copies, silkscreened cover by the author. $14.00

bébé
Nadia Moss
Limited edition of 700 copies color cover. $17.00
"A very nice combination of scratchy, obsessive skits and more full-blown assembly /illos. A very nice piece of work and highly recommended." -Byron Coley and Thurston
Moore

Mr Non Pigeon
Nadia Moss
60 p. including 4 color pages. $18.00

These books, and thousands of others, can be purchased from:

Brickbat Books
709 South Fourth Street
Philadelphia, PA 19147

215 592 1207

Open every day,except Monday, 11am to 7pm.

New Arrivals: Michael Hurley & Byron Coley

2011-05-24T12:32:00.003-04:00

Byron Coley, C'est la guerre : Early Writings 1978-1983
Frontline writings from the music war
$16.00

"Coley was born in Manhattan in 1956. He has written extensively about underground culture since the mid-70s. His work for Forced Exposure and Spin made him legendary. This book shows it all started years earlier at NY Rocker and Take It! Since then he has published poetry, writen liner notes for hundreds of records, spewed for more zines than anyone could ever remember and contributed to various anthologies. His previous book was «No Wave» with Thurston Moore.

C'est la guerre is a perfect snapshot, via letters and early articles, of a time of great changes in american music, that of the emergence of new kinds of wild rock, punk or noise, that would extend the explorations of free jazz or of great innovators like Captain Beefheart. Some of the articles included are about David Bowie, Robert Fripp, Fred Frith, Devo, Hüsker Dü, Suicide, Lydia Lunch, Jim Morrison, The Meat Puppets and the minutemen."

Foreword by Mike Watt. Cover drawn & silkscreened by Simon Bossé. 142 pages,
Bilingual (English/French), translated by Marie Frankland (John-Glassco Translation Price 2007).
6.5 x 6.5 inches.

"Byron used to come by SST Records, where I was living at the time. He would help the label with college radio ads. I would ask him about a band or an artist because it seemed that there wasn't anything or anyone in the world of music he wasn't conversant about."
Henry Rollins, LA Weekly, February 2011

Michael Hurley, The Words To The Songs Of Michael Hurley
Lyrics to 19 songs of the Great American Folk Legend.
$16.00

"Michael Hurley, is an american songwriter reportedly born in 1941 (aka Doc Snock), whose 40 years of songs have been seeping into the folk unconscious (including covers by Cat Power, Yo la tango, Esper and others). Hurley's melodies and words take flight into a world of plenty, inspiring wonder and humour, sin and slowness, laziness and longing. His music is often coined as "outsider folk." His hobo lifestyle indeed could be looked upon as eccentric, but it might be better to regard him as one of the last insiders keeping alive the traditions of the folk troubadour. Hobo-ing around the country, making music since the days Bob Dylan first set foot in NYC Gaslight club, Hurley recorded his first album for legendary Folkways label in 1964 and continued to release albums for Warner Brothers, Rounder or Devendra Banhart's Gnomonsong label. His mid-'70s Have Moicy album was among the top ten for the decade selected by Rolling Stone magazine. While many of his contemporaries are long past their prime (or deceased), Hurley's muse is still intact.

Hurley is considered by fellow musicians as a master of incomparable songwriting skills. It is easy to see why. His songs can be seen as excentric, with characters including werewolves, sign-painters, tea and whiskey-drinkers, pork chops and hot dogs, wild geese, intoxicated lovers and blue navigators but above all they always manage to be moving and funny. The perfection of his craft is even more obvious on paper. The Words to the Songs of Michael Hurley is the first publication ever of Hurley's lyrics. It includes a foreword by critic Byron Coley and a french version by Marie Frankland, winner of the 2007 John-Glassco price for translation."

Cover drawing by Michael Hurley, cover typographic design by Kiva Tanya Stimac. Songs calligraphed by the author. Hand-stiched by Julie Doucet.
Foreword by Byron Coley.
Bilingual edition, translated by Marie Frankland. 48 pages. Format 5,75 x 7,75.

"I don't know what else to say about what he writes and sings, other than that it is gosh-darned great. What kind of music is it? Hell, what kind of weeds does God grow? Let's just shut up and listen and go to where Michael Hurley is. After all, we can always turn around and come back. He can't." -Nick Tosches

These books, and thousands of others, can be purchased from:

Brickbat Books
709 South Fourth Street
Philadelphia, PA 19147

215 592 1207

Open every day,except Monday, 11am to 7pm.

Featured: Three Recommendations

2011-05-22T12:18:00.001-04:00

Three recommendation from man-about-town W. Lane...

Stephen Calt, I'd Rather Be The Devil: Skip James & The Blues

"Skip James (1902–1969) was perhaps the most creative and idiosyncratic of all blues musicians. Drawing on hundreds of hours of conversations with James himself, Stephen Calt here paints a dark and unforgettable portrait of a man untroubled by his own murderous inclinations, a man who achieved one moment of transcendent greatness in a life haunted by failure. And in doing so, Calt offers new insights into the nature of the blues, the world in which it thrived, and its fate when that world vanished." -Chicago Review Press

"This is the real thing. I drink up every word. This and Calt’s life of Charlie Patton are the best books ever written on the subject of old-time blues." —R. Crumb

Jack Black, You Can't Win

"A legendary book, bestseller in 1926, and hovering at the edge of our memory since; the favorite book of William Burroughs. A journey into the hobo underworld, freight hopping around the still Wild West, becoming a highwayman and member of the yegg (criminal) brotherhood, getting hooked on opium, doing stints in jail, or escaping, often with the assistance of crooked cops or judges. Our lost history revived. Includes a new afterword by Bruno Ruhland, who tells what became of Jack after the book was written (he gave up the outlaw life and moved to San Francisco), and an essay by Jack Black called "What's Wrong with the Right People," which was originally published in Harper's. With an introduction by William Burroughs." -AK Press

Oakley Hall, Warlock

"Oakley Hall’s legendary Warlock revisits and reworks the traditional conventions of the Western to present a raw, funny, hypnotic, ultimately devastating picture of American unreality. First published in the 1950s, at the height of the McCarthy era, Warlock is not only one of the most original and entertaining of modern American novels but a lasting contribution to American fiction. " NYRB

"... in ‘59 we simultaneously picked up on…Warlock, by Oakley Hall. We set about getting others to read it too, and for a while had a micro—cult going. Soon a number of us were talking in Warlock dialogue, a kind of thoughtful, stylized, Victorian Wild West diction...

Tombstone, Arizona, during the 1880’s is, in ways, our national Camelot: a never-never land where American virtues are embodied in the Earps, and the opposite evils in the Clanton gang; where the confrontation at the OK Corral takes on some of the dry purity of the Arthurian joust. Oakley Hall, in his very fine novel Warlock has restored to the myth of Tombstone its full, mortal, blooded humanity. Wyatt Earp is transmogrified into a gunfighter named Blaisdell who … is summoned to the embattled town of Warlock by a committee of nervous citizens expressly to be a hero, but finds that he cannot, at last, live up to his image; that there is a flaw not only in him, but also, we feel, in the entire set of assumptions that have allowed the image to exist… . Before the agonized epic of Warlock is over with—the rebellion of the proto-Wobblies working in the mines, the struggling for political control of the area, the gunfighting, mob violence, the personal crises of those in power—the collective awareness that is Warlock must face its own inescapable Horror: that what is called society, with its law and order, is as frail, as precarious, as flesh and can be snuffed out and assimilated back into the desert as easily as a corpse can. It is the deep sensitivity to abysses that makes Warlock one of our best American novels. For we are a nation that can, many of us, toss with all aplomb our candy wrapper into the Grand Canyon itself, snap a color shot and drive away; and we need voices like Oakley Hall’s to remind us how far that piece of paper, still fluttering brightly behind us, has to fall.”
— Thomas Pynchon

These books, and thousands of others, can be purchased from:

Brickbat Books
709 South Fourth Street
Philadelphia, PA 19147

215 592 1207

Open every day,except Monday, 11am to 7pm.

Featured: Four by Gide

2011-05-21T12:34:00.002-04:00

Urien's Voyage
cover by Lawrence Ratzkin

If It Die
cover by Antonio Frasconi

Travels In The Congo

Straight Is The Gate
cover by Antonio Frasconi

These books, and thousands of others, can be purchased from:

Brickbat Books
709 South Fourth Street
Philadelphia, PA 19147

215 592 1207

Open every day,except Monday, 11am to 7pm.

FEATURED: The Shape Of Things

2011-05-20T12:03:00.001-04:00

Ilonka Karasz, The Shape Of Things
Hardcover, 1964, SOLD!

...recently described by a customer in the shop as "Lawrence Weiner for children."

Those familiar with Karasz's New Yorker covers from the 20s through the 70s might be surprised by the cool, if quirky, modernism on display in this children's book from 1964. It manages to explain basic geometric ideas quite clearly, and yet manages to turn the whole thing into a mad, visual romp. Shabby Minimalism (the best kind of Minimalism) at its very best!

New Arrival: Vonnegut's Sirens Of Titan

2011-05-19T21:20:00.001-04:00

Kurt Vonnegut, Siren's Of Titan
Dell, 1959, cover by Richard Powers
Paperback, First Edition

This book, and thousands of others, can be purchased from:

Brickbat Books
709 South Fourth Street
Philadelphia, PA 19147

215 592 1207

Open every day,except Monday, 11am to 7pm.

EVENT: Sandy Bull: No Deposit, No Return Blues

2011-05-18T11:33:00.001-04:00

Thursday, May 19th at 7PM
at
BRICKBAT BOOKS

a screening of the film
SANDY BULL: NO DEPOSIT, NO RETURN BLUES

(Director KC Bull in attendance!)

with two short live sets by:
WILLIE LANE

DAN MATZ
(it's his birthday- there will be cake!)

$5 donation please

"On recess from her job as a primary school teacher in Oakland, California, KC Bull has recently been touring with her illuminating documentary NO DEPOSIT, NO RETURN BLUES, a sensitively assembled homage to her father, the pioneering psychedelic folk musician, Sandy Bull. Active from 1950 until his death in 2001, Bull’s legendary performances, blending elements of American folk with jazz, classical, Indian and Arabic-influenced modes, and later rock n’ roll, made him a cult hero to a generation of musicians and artists, many of who, including the likes of “clown activist” Wavy Gravy and Nubian musician Hamza El Din, are seen here paying their respects. Bull’s eclectic borrowings transcended conventional ideas of what an instrument could, or indeed should, sound like – no one had ever thought of playing a scenic cantata on a five string banjo (Carl Orff’s “Carmina Burana”) before, much less a bossa nova on an electric oud (Luis Bonfa’s “Manha De Carnaval”). And while the film depicts his early career, zooming around with Hunter S. Thompson, as maybe a little regretful (despite a clutch of classic albums released on Vanguard, including Fantasias for Guitar and Banjo and Inventions), it’s also clear that Bull’s peripheral position offered him space to gestate and experiment."

Featured: Psychic Phenomena of Jamaica

2011-05-17T12:06:00.002-04:00

Joseph J. Williams, S.J., Psychic Phenomena of Jamaica
Hardcover (no dust jacket)

Classic pre-war anthropology. Long out of print, except as a rather grisly print-on-demand edition.

This book, and thousands of others, can be purchased from:

Brickbat Books
709 South Fourth Street
Philadelphia, PA 19147

215 592 1207

Open every day,except Monday, 11am to 7pm.

Featured: Three Classic Children's Books

2011-05-14T12:59:00.000-04:00

How To Make An Earthquake, Ruth Krauss
Pictures by Crockett Johnson
Hardcover, Out of Print

The Fantastic Mr Fox, Roald Dahl
Hardcover, First Edition
SOLD!

The Mouse And His Child, Russell Hoban
Pictures by Lillian Hoban
Hardcover

These books, and thousands of others, can be purchased from:

Brickbat Books
709 South Fourth Street
Philadelphia, PA 19147

215 592 1207

Open every day,except Monday, 11am to 7pm.

Featured: Two Photography Books

2011-05-04T14:31:00.003-04:00

Bill Jacobson, Photographs
Hardcover

"Bill Jacobson's photographs resist easy identification. They are blurred, diffuse and atmospheric, depicting only the vague outlines of urban scenes, rural landscapes and human figures. Enveloped by a dark or light mist, these shadowy forms refute the premise that photographs capture reality and serve as a reliable aid to memory. Instead, his photographs are images of vague recollections and forgotten experiences. They speak of mortality and dissolution, not only of the body but of its surroundings as well. His latest works, presented here, are related to two earlier series from the 1990s which were direct responses to the AIDS epidemic, but are more open-ended and universal in spirit."

Yutaka Takanashi, Toshi-e (Towards the City) (Books on Books)
Hardcover

"Yutaka Takanashi's Toshi-e (Towards the City) is a landmark volume from one of the founders of the short-lived avant-garde Japanese magazine Provoke. The photographers associated with Provoke cultivated a grainy, blurry, black-and-white aesthetic, and Takanashi's pictures are grainy in the extreme. In contrast to his earlier, more upbeat Tokyoites series, the images here approach landscapes at skewed angles, as though shot from a speeding car, speeding perhaps “towards the city.” Published in 1974 and considered the most luxurious of all of the Provoke-era publications, its brooding, pessimistic tone describes the state of contemporary life in an unnamed city, in a Japan undergoing massive economic and industrial transformations. This sixth volume in Errata's Books on Books series reproduces all 116 black-and-white photographs, along with an essay by the British photographer, writer and book historian Gerry Badger."

These books, and thousands of others, can be purchased from:

Brickbat Books
709 South Fourth Street
Philadelphia, PA 19147

215 592 1207

Open every day,except Monday, 11am to 7pm.

Featured: Christian Morgenstern & K.F. Edmund von Freyhold

2011-04-28T13:47:00.001-04:00

Hasenbuch
Christian Morgenstern, illustrated by K.F. Edmund von Freyhold
Hardcover, tipped-on cover plate and spine labels

Still in print in Germany, but unfortunately unavailable in English, as are all the works of Christian Morgenstern (with the exception of In The Land Of Punctuation, by the wonderful Indian publisher, Tara Books.)
Morgenstern's work was inspired by British nonsense verse (Edw. Lear, Lewis Carroll, etc) although less influenced by mathematics and biology than philosophy and mysticism (Nietzsche, Rudolph Steiner, Tolstoy, etc.)

These books, and thousands of others, can be purchased from:

Brickbat Books
709 South Fourth Street
Philadelphia, PA 19147

215 592 1207

Open every day,except Monday, 11am to 7pm.