Elmer Batters: Legs That Dance to Elmer's Tune

This large book is loaded with full-color and black-and-white images of the work of Elmer Batters, and came from the publisher wrapped in a genuine nylon stocking. Batters passed away in 1997, and this is a great tribute to his work. For collectors of foot and leg fetish art, this is the book for you. There are some graphic images, which some may find as explicit matetial. (out of print)

Exquisite Mayhem

In the early Seventies, Ehret began to stage and photograph female wrestling scenarios in his studio. This erotic photographic genre has come to be known as 'apartment wrestling'. Shot on sets with controlled lighting, his photographs have a sense of uncanny drama absent from previous examples of the "cat fighting" fetish style. This book is the first to present, to a mass audience, the golden age of pro wrestling and its illegitimate sibling: apartment wrestling. By bringing together, for the first time, these two separate bodies of Theo Ehret's work, Exquisite Mayhem presents the roots of today's overtly eroticized theatrical world of pro wrestling. (out of print)

The Atrocity Exhibition

"The first U.S. edition was to have been by Doubleday, also in 1970, but the entire edition was destroyed just prior to publication, with the exception of a few advance review copies and file copies. Senior management at Doubleday had taken exception to the contents, which included Why I Want to Fuck Ronald Reagan and Plan for the Assassination of Jacqueline Kennedy. It isn't clear exactly how many copies still survive (perhaps around a dozen), but this is certainly the rarest of Ballard's books; there was a copy for sale in 2006 by bookseller Lloyd Currey for $7,500.

"Following the pulping of the Doubleday edition, E. P. Dutton took the book up, but eventually decided against publication after advice from their lawyers. The first U.S. publication was therefore not until 1972 when Grove Press published the book under the revised title Love & Napalm: Export U.S.A., with a preface by William Burroughs. This edition went out of print fairly quickly, and the book did not reappear in the U.S. until 1990 when Re/Search brought out a large format, extensively illustrated, paperback edition. This reverted to the original title and retained the Burroughs introduction; it also added sidebar annotations by Ballard, as well as four additional pieces - three of Ballard's 'surgical fictions' from the 1970s, Princess Margaret's Facelift, Mae West's Reduction Mamoplasty, and Queen Elizabeth's Rhinoplasty, and (rather incongruously) a story from the late-1980s, The Secret History of World War 3." (http://www.holli.co.uk/JGB/ballard.htm)

Arnold Odermatt: Karambolage

With thoroughness and a meticulous attention to detail, Arnold Odermatt photographed automobile accidents on the streets of the Swiss canton of Nidwalden between 1939 and 1993. For 40 years, the Swiss police office recorded the wrecked cars left in the wake of excessive speed, drunk driving, right-of-way errors, and plain foolishness, in poignant, sometimes funny, and always strange atmospheric photographs.
(out of print)

Pierre Molinier

Pierre Molinier began his career by painting landscapes, but his work turned towards a fetishistic eroticism early on.

Molinier began to take photographs at the age of 18. When Molinier's sister died in 1918, he had sex with her corpse when he was left alone to photograph it. "Even dead," he said, "she was beautiful. I shot sperm on her stomach and legs, and onto the First Communion dress she was wearing. She took with her into death the best of me."

Molinier started his erotic production around 1950. With the aid of a wide range of specially made "props" – dolls, various prosthetic limbs, stiletto heels, dildos and an occasional confidante – Molinier focused upon his own body as the armature for a constructive form that ultimately produced a large body of photographic work. Most of his photographs, photomontages, are self-portraits of himself as a woman.

He began a correspondence with André Breton and sent him photographs of his paintings. Later Breton integrated him into the Surrealist group.

In the 1970's, Molinier's health began to decline. He lost the will to live after he was no longer able to maintain an erection. Like his father before him, Pierre Molinier committed suicide at 76 years of age by self-inflicted gunshot wound while masturbating.


Samples:

Evidence

In 1977 photographers Larry Sultan and Mike Mandel sifted through thousands of photographs in the files of the Bechtel Corporation, the Beverly Hills Police Department, the Jet Propulsion Laboratories, the U.S. Department of the Interior, Stanford Research Institute and a hundred other corporations, American government agencies, and educational, medical and technical institutions. They were looking for photographs that were made and used as transparent documents and purely objective instruments--as evidence, in short. Selecting 50 of the best, they printed these images with the care you would expect to find in a high-quality art photography book, publishing them in a simple, limited-edition volume titled Evidence.


Some samples:




New edition available at Amazon.com

Miroslav Tichy

Miroslav Tich was born in 1926 in what is now the Czech Republic, and studied at the Academy of Art in Prague. After the communist takeover, he is widely reported to have spent as many as eight years in detention camps and mental hospitals. In the late 1950s, he began to make photographs with cameras he designed himself, salvaging their lenses from eyeglasses and making their bodies from tin cans, toilet-paper rolls and cigarette boxes. He chose his subjects from the streets and from public and private spaces of his small town, where he is not a favorite with the ladies--some have reported his peeping-tom-like activity to the police. The resulting images, grainy and often overexposed, cropped and developed at home, framed on card stock, decorated in pencil, and then left to deteriorate around Tich 's house, are haunting.



Tichy's homemade camera:



Some samples:





(via Amazon)

The Paranoid's Pocket Guide to Mental Disorders You Can Just Feel Coming On

With complete descriptions of the symptoms, diagnosis, prognosis, prevention, and treatment for psychosis, this book could convince even the most rational readers that something—or someone—is out to get them. From the slightly odd Stendhal Syndrome (the fear of artwork) to the mentally debilitating Athazagagoraphobia (the feeling that you’ve forgotten something important) and the downright bizarre Windigo Psychosis (the belief that you are a wild and ravenous monster), The Paranoid’s Pocket Guide to Mental Illnesses You Can Just Feel Coming On is a fascinating compendium of psychological illnesses for all of us to fret and agonize over.
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The Deviant's Pocket Guide to the Outlandish Sexual Desires Barely Contained in Your Subconscious

So you like animals. Everyone likes animals. But if you really, really like animals — or clowns, or trees, or dressing up in a fur suit before you enter the bedroom — then this book is for you.
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I Shall Destroy All the Civilized Planets: The Comics of Fletcher Hanks

One of the strangest cartoonists of American comics' Golden Age, Hanks had a short career—the 15 stories collected here were all published between 1939 and 1941—but the deranged, nightmarish vigor of his work has made it something of a cult item. Hanks created pulpy characters like Stardust the Super Wizard, the scientific marvel whose vast knowledge of all planets has made him the most remarkable person ever known and the jungle heroine Fantomah, whose face becomes a snarling skull when she uses her magic powers. The artist's manic obsessions turn up again and again: global-scale atrocities, miraculous rays and, most of all, poetically apt punishments. In a typical story, Master-Mind De Structo tries to suffocate America's heads of state with an oxygen-destroying ray, so Stardust turns him into a giant head, then hurls him into a space pocket of living death occupied by a headless headhunter. Hanks's artwork is crude and technically limited (each of his characters has exactly one, wildly caricatured, facial expression), but nearly every page has some image that sings out with deep, primal power.
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Naked Lunch

Burroughs's literary experiment--the much-touted "cut-up" technique--mirrored the workings of a junkie's brain. But it was junk coupled with vision: Burroughs makes teeming amalgam of allegory, sci-fi, and non-linear narration, all wrapped in a blend of humor--slapstick, Swiftian, slang-infested humor. What is Naked Lunch about? People turn into blobs amidst the sort of evil that R. Crumb, in the decades to come, would inimitably flesh out with his dark and creepy cartoon images. Perhaps the most easily grasped part of Naked Lunch is its America-bashing, replete with slang and vitriol.
(Cover shown is the Flamingo Sixties Classic 2001 edition)

The Third Policeman

A comic/surreal tale of a one-legged gentleman farmer who participates in a botched robbery-turned-murder, only to find himself having a long conversation with the dead man shortly after the deed. The farmer is sent to a two-dimensional barracks of three metaphysical policemen. Here he finds himself in a world where people can become bicycles and eternity is within walking distance.
(Shown is cover from the Flamingo Sixties Classic 2001 edition.)
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How to Shit Around the World: The Art of Staying Clean and Healthy While Traveling

Ruby Ann's Down Home Trailer Park Cookbook

Overheard in New York

Blonde: You're seeing your astrologist tomorrow?
Tattooed girl: Yeah, my pussy's been tingling lately, and I need to find out why.
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A Beginner's Guide to Immortality: Extraordinary People, Alien Brains, and Quantum Resurrection

Part memoir and part surrealistic perspective on culture, A Beginner's Guide to Immortality illuminates some of the most mysterious phenomena affecting our species. What is creativity? What are the religious implications of mosquito evolution, simulated Matrix realities, the brain’s own marijuana, and the mathematics of the apocalypse? Could we be a mere software simulation living in a matrix? Who is Elisabeth Kübler-Ross and Emanuel Swedenborg? Did church forefathers eat psychedelic snails? How can we safely expand our minds to become more successful and reason beyond the limits of our own intuition? How can we become immortal?
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Dude, You're a Fag: Masculinity and Sexuality in High School

Demonstrates how the "specter of the fag" becomes a disciplinary mechanism for regulating heterosexual as well as homosexual boys and how the "fag discourse" is as much tied to gender as it is to sexuality.
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The Book of Bunny Suicides

The Book of Bunny Suicides follows over one hundred bunnies as they find ever more outlandish ways to do themselves in. From supergluing themselves to a diving submarine, to hanging around underneath a loose stalactite, these bunnies are serious about suicide.
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FUCK this book

Juvenile, profane, and timeless, Fuck This Book collects images of real public signs that have been mischieveously altered by stickers bearing the most expressive of all four-letter words. The results show a world persuasively transformed. Please Don't Fuck the Pigeons, indeed. What happens if one triggers the Automatic Sprinkler Fuck Off Valve? And is it any wonder The Fuck Depot is so popular? All photographs are unretouched--the result of countless hours on the hunt for the almost perfect sign, in need of just the slightest improvement.
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Hips

Hips is a collection of 250 arresting and inspired photographs of hips (some in costume, some in body paint, some in nothing at all), taken at the vibrant and insanely creative annual international arts festival known as Burning Man. Each subject is photographed in the exact same position, but the images themselves are varied and unique, providing a rich kaleidoscope of self-expression and individuality wherein conventional rules and regulations no longer apply.
via Amazon

Charlie White: Photographs

Full color images and complete details of Charlie White's three recent photographic projects. This is a thorough treatment of an artist whose images have explored the limits of pornography, the modern psychological landscape, and the emotionally fraught relationship between self-perception and appearance.

Helmut Newton's SUMO

Weighing over 65 pounds, measuring more than two feet long, and breaking any previous size record in book publishing, SUMO contains 480 pages of every aspect of Newton's career of subversive and erotic photography.

Kohei Yoshiyuki: The Park

Kohei Yoshiyuki's nighttime photographs, taken with infrared film and flash in Japan's Shinjuku, Yoyogi and Aoyama Parks during the 1970s, capture the illicit sexual encounters, both heterosexual and homosexual, that frequently occurred there under the cloak of darkness. The Park's images not only reveal hidden sexual exploits, but also uncover many spectators ardently lurking in the darkness, waiting to join in--and quickly raise issues of voyeurism and surveillance. Originally published as Document Kouen in Japan in 1980 and long out of print, the austere and acclaimed first edition of this book now commands prices near $1000 per copy. This new, updated edition, featuring an interview of the artist by colleague Nobuyoshi Araki and an essay by the noted photo critic Vince Aletti, contains all 60 works from the infamous Park series, reproduced from new scans in deluxe duotones. This work has not been seen by the public since the 1970s, and has been known only to cult collectors until now.
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Some samples: