Metropolis Bookshop

We are delighted to have a stall at the Melbourne Art Book Fair next week featuring some of our favourite publishers including: 550BC - About Books - Aperture - Bluecoat Press - Cafe Royal Books - Colpa Press - Contra Mundum Press - Feral House - Four Corners - Half Letter Press - Klasse Wrecks - Mamama-Paris - Park Books - Perfectly Acceptable - Pilot Press - RM Editions - Shelter Publications - Timeless + Treville. Hope to see you there!
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Melbourne Art Book Fair is part of Melbourne Design Week 2023, aninitiative of the Victorian Government in collaboration with the NGV.





📷 Homer Sykes - Stonehenge 1970s Counterculture. Cafe Royal Books

PROTEST GRIM REAPERS
The grim reaper is an enduring figure at demonstrations. The reaper—or sometimes simply an angel of death—appears at protests for any cause where the gravity of a death figure feels appropriate. The reaper traditionally carries a scythe and wears a black hood and a skull mask or skull face paint, but sometimes the scythe is replaced with a different symbolic object. In general, the reaper tells spectators: ‘I am here because this is a matter of life or death for someone or something. I don’t want to be here, but because of you, your corporation, your politicians, or your crimes against humanity, my presence is justified. If this wasn’t deadly serious, I would have stayed at home or worn something else.’

For the past four years Marc Fischer has been collecting press photos of grim reapers at protests against hunger, radioactive waste, animal abuse, the death penalty, the Vietnam war, the closing of a Chrysler plant, demands for clean air and water, restrictions on abortion and more. Protest Grim Reapers reproduces details from 27 press photos spanning from the late 1960s to the early 1990s.
Published by Half Letter Press

PROVOKE - We are thrilled to have Nitesha's stunning reprint of all three editions of this absolute classic Japanese photobook publication available at Metropolis.

Provoke was first published in November 1968 as a dojin-shi , or self-published magazine. The subtitle for the magazine was “Provocative Materials for Thought” and each issue was composed of photographs, essays and poems. After releasing the second and third issue the group - Koji TAKI, Takuma NAKAHIRA , Yutaka TAKANASHI, Takahiko OKADA and Daido MORIYAMA - broke up. Provoke 's grainy, blurry, and out-of-focus photographs were initially ridiculed and caused a great deal of controversy, yet it had a strong impact at the time, both inside and outside of the photography world.

Today, Provoke has become an extremely rare book with very few people having seen the original. While running their second-hand bookshop Nitesha was fortunate to be able to purchase all three volumes. Rather than putting them back into the market they decided to make a reprint of these extremely rare and inaccessible issues. We’re very pleased that they did.

AMPHETAMINE SULPHATE
Now at Metropolis ~
Captagon by Philip Best (Whitehouse)
Human Rights edited by Philip Best
Scum by Alex Binnie
Marty Page by Martin Bladh (IRM)
Talisman Angelical by Samantha Davies & Matthew Bower
The Mindshaft by Steve Finbow
The Devils by New Juche
Stupid Baby by New Juche
Four Circles by Meg McCarville
Alone by Thomas Moore
Forever by Thomas Moore
Small Talk at the Clinic by Thomas Moore & Steven Purtill
The Texas Chainsaw Massacre by Josiah Morgan
Specialist Fabricator by Gary Mundy (Ramleh)
Missing by Josh Peterson
The S*x Shops of Sherman Oaks by SJXSJC
Invisible Manifesto by Audrey Szasz
Zealous Immaculate by Audrey Szasz
Happy Days by Jason Williamson (Sleaford Mods)
Slab From Paradise by Jason Williamson

Come visit our market stall at the PHOTO 2022 PHOTOBOOK WEEKEND

Saturday May 21 12 - 7.30
Sunday May 22 12 - 4

Photographic Studies College 37 - 47 Thistlethwaite St South Melbourne

📷 Larry Clark / Chris Steele-Perkins / Karlheinz Weinberger

We are delighted to be part of the Melbourne Art Book Fair’s online platform and to celebrate these fabulous publishers both online and at our bookstore which is located just a few blocks from the NGV. Do come by and say hi. We’re open –

Friday 11 - 6
Saturday 11 - 6
Sunday 11 - 6

BUY OLYMPIA
CAFÉ ROYAL BOOKS
COLPA PRESS
DASHWOOD BOOKS
FECKARSE
HALF LETTER PRESS /
PUBLIC COLLECTORS
KLASSE WRECKS
MATARILE EDICIONES
MICHAEL LINDSEY DAVISON
PERFECTLY ACCEPTABLE
REPEATER BOOKS
RUIN PRESS
SACRED BONES RECORDS
SESSIONS PRESS
SOLAR BOOKS
SPURL EDITIONS
STANLEY / BARKER
TIMELESS EDITIONS

📷 Homer Sykes - Stonehenge 1970s Counterculture – Café Royal Books
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Timeless Editions

https://metropolisbookshop.com.au

Melbourne Art book Fair 18 - 20 March

Metropolis is delighted to be part of the Melbourne Art Book Fair’s online platform. Our bookshop will also be open throughout the art book fair and Melbourne Design Week so if you're around do drop in to say hi and check out the publishers we are featuring, including the fabulous Colpa Press, plus a whole range of books across art, photography, architecture, counterculture, music, fashion and literature +++

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COLPA PRESS ~ Founded in San Francisco in 2010, Colpa Press publishes art books, limited edition prints and art objects including the wildly popular rave flyer series, one of my particular favourites OCULTAS by Luca Antonucci and David Kasprzak (the publishers of Colpa Press), BASEMENT TAPES 🔥and Mitsu Okubo's collaboration with Luca Antonucci MOVIE MEMORY… and more

In 2016, COLPA co-founded the San Francisco Art Book Fair

✶ NEW ARRIVALS ✶
TECHNO GLOBALIZATION PANDEMIC
Editor Bart van der Heide argues that techno music can not only function as an ecstatic and collective experience, but can also serve as a platform for socio-critical discourse. The authors of this anthology examine techno music and its scene on the basis of current social issues.

HANS BELLMER THE DOLL
The return of an old favourite from Editions Treville.

HURTS SO GOOD: THE SCIENCE AND CULTURE OF PAIN ON PURPOSE
Deliberate and consensual pain has been with us for millennia, encompassing everyone from Black Plague flagellants to ballerinas dancing on broken bones. Masochism is a part of us. It lives inside workaholics, tattoo enthusiasts, and all manner of garden variety pain-seekers. At its core, masochism is about feeling bad, then better-a phenomenon that is long overdue for a heartfelt and hilarious investigation.

MERET OPPENHEIM - MY EXHIBITION
Published in conjunction with a touring retrospective exhibition, this publication surveys work from the artist's precocious debut in 1930s Paris, the period during which her notorious fur-lined Object in MoMA's collection was made, through her post-World War II artistic development, up to her death in 1985.

JUDY BLAME'S OBITUARY
by Derek McCormack, the author of fashion-inflected novels that cast luminaries such as Elsa Schiaparelli and Balenciaga as characters. This collection brings together for the first time McCormack's fashion journalism in a sort of memoir in essays with 20 years' worth of interviews, reminiscences and reviews of fashion shows and books.

ANTOINE D'AGATA X CHARLES BAUDELAIRE , FLEURS DU MAL
For Baudelaire, the photographic medium is not an art but a technical means of representing reality. As a counterpoint to Baudelaire, Antoine d’Agata reworks his own photographs through digital intervention to return to engraving, as if to go from the pixel to the line of the time. This publication includes an original uncensored edition of Baudelaire’s collection accompanied by engraved prints by d’Agata (French text)

20th CENTURY SUMMER by Greg Hunt, renowned skateboarding filmmaker and photographer, features 41 previously unpublished black-and-white photographs from Greg's first ever rolls of film, exposed with a hand-me-down Minolta X-700 35mm camera while on an American skateboarding tour in the summer of 1995.

“The images are in loose chronological order, but the exact location of most is unknown. Everything was captured on twelves rolls of film with my first camera, a used Minolta X-700 I received as a gift just weeks before. Shot with no photographic training or aspiration, these pictures are simply an intuitive reaction to my life at the time.” – Greg Hunt

Published by Film Photographic

We’re back! and so looking forward to seeing everyone at a COVID-safe Metropolis

The end of lockdown sees us return to our regular trading hours 11-6 Monday to Saturday. Sally has decided to open this Tuesday 2/11 (public holiday) 12-5 so drop by and say hi

Save some serious pennies with steep discounts on selected books. The sale starts today online and continues in the store from Saturday
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We’re looking forward to seeing your sweet masked faces and registering those QR code dings at a COVID-safe Metropolis. The store reopens at 11am this Saturday as we go back to our regular trading hours 11-6 Monday to Saturday
*closed Tuesday 2/11 for the public holiday

JIM GOLDBERG - FINGERPRINT
Often considered Jim Goldberg’s seminal body of work, Raised By Wolves collages ten years of photographs, texts, films and installations into an epic narrative of the lives of runaway teenagers in San Francisco and Los Angeles in the late 1980s and early 1990s.

In FINGERPRINT, Goldberg exhibits many never-before-seen Polaroids from the project, which served as drafts for photographs he would later make, as well as gifts for the subjects themselves. The images are sometimes scrawled with text proclaiming the identities, challenges, and resilience of the teens, and other times capture a quiet reality of life on the street.  

Encased in a box set, the 45 loose leaf facsimile Polaroids create a freshly intimate and fragmented account of this classic body of work.
⛓you can check out the website listing for this via the link in our profile
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Free delivery for all orders within the Melbourne metropolitan area & for orders $50+ across the rest of Australia. Stay safe x

♦️BOOK GIVEAWAY♦️
We’ve put together this little motley assortment of books as a lockdown care package for a lucky someone. DM ‘giveaway’ to enter. The winner will be drawn on Thursday evening. Good luck! Stay safe x

THE LOCKDOWN CARE PACKAGE
✷ Nan Goldin (Lambert Collection Icons)
✷ Mark Fisher’s The Weird & The Eerie
✷ Prisoners’ Inventions
✷ Hera Lindsay Bird’s poetry
✷ Confess - the autobiography of Rob Halford (Judas Priest)
✷ The 50th anniversary edition of The Witches’ Almanac
✷ New Animal - a novel by Ella Baxter
✷ Volume 1 of Katsuhiro Otomo’s Akira

Check out our architecture instagram account to go into the draw for that little lockdown care package…
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The store is closed during the current lockdown but you can visit the website metropolisbookshop comau to browse our full inventory. Free postage for all orders in the Melbourne metro area & for orders $50+ across the rest of Australia. Stay safe x

KARL FRITSCH: RUBY GOLD
A selection of eighty one glorious rings from the past twenty years

GAY AREAS DIGEST
A collection of advertisements published between 1979 and 1982 in the first, fourth and fifth editions of Gay Areas, an American telephone directory published by Gay International Inc.

BABBLE ON AN’ TING: PATERSON’S INCREDIBLE JOURNEY BEYOND THE ULTRAWORLD WITH THE ORB by Kris Needs with Alex Paterson

Steered by Alex Paterson, The Orb were the mischief-making pioneers of the late 80s acid house revolution. Inventing “ambient house”, they took it to the top of the charts, before continuing its idiosyncratic flight path through subsequent decades, battling meteor storms en route.

Babble On An' Ting, the first full account of Paterson’s life, written by long-time friend Kris Needs in close collaboration with Alex, reveals a frequently astonishing journey from traumatic childhood through punk, Killing Joke and KLF to starting The Orb in 1988, then the five decade roller coaster that followed. Moving, shocking, hilarious and inspiring, at the heart of this story lies a true survivor doggedly following their musical passion. First-hand interviews include those with Youth, Andrew Weatherall, Primal Scream, Jah Wobble, Jimmy Cauty and a parade of friends, collaborators and starship mechanics.

We have a winner of the Genesis P-Orridge book giveaway! Congratulations Rhiannon! 👏♥️⚡️Thanks so much to everyone who entered 🖤
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and now to this stunning book… DECADENCE AND DARK DREAMS - BELGIAN SYMBOLISM by Ralph Gleis
This substantial, heavily illustrated and beautifully printed book is SO divine and, for some reason that I can’t quite fathom, it is incredibly cheap. Our first delivery flew out the door before I got a chance to look at it but fortunately more copies have arrived. One of them is coming home with me.

Metropolis is open 12-5 this Monday, the Queen’s Birthday public holiday

✶ Free delivery via Australia Post for all orders within the Melbourne metropolitan area & for orders $50+ across the rest of Australia

⚡️BOOK GIVEAWAY ⚡️
Genesis P-Orridge's posthumously published memoir NONBINARY is here and we have a copy to giveaway!

DM 'giveaway' to put your name in the hat. We will draw the winner tomorrow morning. Good luck

Metropolis is open 11-6 Monday to Saturday

✶ Free delivery via Australia Post for all orders within the Melbourne metropolitan area & for orders $50+ across the rest of Australia

❤️ Melbourne

📷 Michael Peppe performing Actmusikspectakle V, 1982.

Ahead of their imminent arrival... WEAR LEATHER! WORSHIP SATAN! ⭒ & ⭒ NECTAR PARTY two illustrated erotic short story zines penned by Carlos Deth ✈️ from NYC as we speak...
⛓see the link in our bio / DM to reserve a copy /copies

⭑𝙻𝙾𝙲𝙺𝙳𝙾𝚆𝙽 𝚂𝙰𝙻𝙴 𝙴𝚇𝚃𝙴𝙽𝙳𝙴𝙳 𝚃𝙾 𝟷𝟶𝚃𝙷 𝙹𝚄𝙽𝙴 ⭑ 𝟭𝟬% 𝗢𝗙𝗙 𝗔𝗟𝗟 𝗕𝗢𝗢𝗞𝗦 𝗜𝗡 𝗦𝗧𝗢𝗖𝗞
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During lockdown click & collect orders can be picked up from the store between the hours of 11am - 2pm Monday to Friday or by appointment
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Free delivery via Australia Post for all orders within the Melbourne metropolitan area & for orders $50+ across the rest of Australia.
Stay safe & take care x

Due later this month....Vivienne Westwood Catwalk The Complete Collections

The first comprehensive overview of Vivienne Westwood’s womenswear collections, from her 1981 catwalk debut to today.

⭑ 𝗟𝗢𝗖𝗞𝗗𝗢𝗪𝗡 𝗦𝗔𝗟𝗘 𝗘𝗫𝗧𝗘𝗡𝗗𝗘𝗗 𝗧𝗢 𝗧𝗛𝗘 𝟭𝟬𝗧𝗛 𝗢𝗙 𝗝𝗨𝗡𝗘 ⭑ 𝟭𝟬% 𝗢𝗙𝗙 𝗔𝗟𝗟 𝗕𝗢𝗢𝗞𝗦 𝗜𝗡 𝗦𝗧𝗢𝗖𝗞

During lockdown click & collect orders can be picked up from the store between the hours of 11am - 2pm Monday to Friday or by appointment
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Free delivery via Australia Post for all orders within the Melbourne metropolitan area & for orders $50+ across the rest of Australia. Stay safe & take care x

Bleeding Skull! A 1990s Trash-Horror Odyssey by Annie Choi, Zack Carlson & Joseph A Ziemba

A celebration of the most obscure, bizarre, and brain-busting movies ever made, this film guide features 250 in-depth reviews that have escaped the radar of people with taste and the tolerance of critics. Curated by the enthusiastic minds behind this book gets deep into gutter-level, no-budget horror, from shot-on-VHS revelations (Eyes of the Werewolf) to forgotten outsider art hallucinations (Alien Beasts). Jam-packed with rare photographs, advertisements, and VHS sleeves (most of which have never been seen before), Bleeding Skull is an edifying, laugh-out-loud guide to the dusty inventory of the greatest video store that never existed. Due late June
𝗟𝗢𝗖𝗞𝗗𝗢𝗪𝗡 𝗦𝗔𝗟𝗘 𝟮𝟴𝗧𝗛 𝗠𝗔𝗬 𝗧𝗢 𝗝𝗨𝗡𝗘 𝟯𝗥𝗗 - 𝟭𝟬% 𝗢𝗙𝗙 𝗔𝗟𝗟 𝗕𝗢𝗢𝗞𝗦 𝗜𝗡 𝗦𝗧𝗢𝗖𝗞
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During lockdown click & collect orders can be picked up from the store between the hours of 11am - 2pm Monday to Friday or by appointment
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Free delivery via Australia Post for all orders within the Melbourne metropolitan area & for orders $50+ across the rest of Australia

Stay safe & take care x

An excellent video on Mark Fisher’s books and ideas

Ghosts of Mark Fisher: Hauntology, Lost Futures, and Depression After writing one of the most relevant books in the 21st century, Capitalist Realism, Mark Fisher began to look at the immediate subjective, cultural implica...