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Book Title Page — Test Old Editor —
In Search Of The Third Bird
Exemplary Essays from The Proceedings of ESTAR(SER), 2001–2021
Edited by D. Graham Burnett, Catherine L. Hansen and Justin E.H. Smith
Available now
ORDER HERE
155mm x 235mm
HB/PB, 768pp
45 b/w Illustrations
16pp colour plates
ISBN: 9781913689360
Paperback: £25
Hardback: £35
(limited to 200 copies, exclusive to SAP)
Please note that HB copies may take a few weeks to be shipped as we are awaiting stock.
A very strange book
Hal Foster
It’s…. strange! The prose style suggests that at the time of writing the authors were possessed by ghosts from circa 1900. It totally reads like an act of inverse ventriloquism. Strangely compelling… I can hear it as a very odd performance score and everyone off their tits on laudanum.
Emma Bolland
A great deal of uncertainty—and even some genuine confusion—surrounds the origin, evolution, and activities of the so-called Avis Tertia or Order of the Third Bird. Sensational accounts of this “attentional cult” emphasise histrionic rituals, tragic trance-addictions, and the covert dissemination of obscurantist ontologies of the art object. Hieratic, ecstatic, and endlessly evasive, the Order attracts sensual misfits and cabalistic aesthetes—both to its ranks, and to its scholarship.
In recent years, however, the revisionist work of the research collective ESTAR(SER) has done much to clear the air, bringing archival precision to the history of this covey of attention-artists who call themselves The Birds. Gathering the best articles of the last twenty years of The Proceedings of ESTAR(SER), this volume represents a landmark in the history of aesthetic practices, and will be a point of departure for future work wading the muddy marshes at the limits of historicism.
“So what, exactly, ARE these nearly 800 heavily footnoted pages? That is very much the question. I’ll have a go at answering it here below…”
Download a PDF of peer reviews for this unique collection here:
IN SEARCH OF THE THIRD BIRD – Peer Reviews
In Search Of The Third Bird
Exemplary Essays from The Proceedings of ESTAR(SER), 2001–2021
Edited by D. Graham Burnett, Catherine L. Hansen and Justin E.H. Smith
155mm x 235mm
HB/PB, 768pp
45 b/w Illustrations
16pp colour plates
ISBN: 9781913689360
Paperback: £25
Hardback: £35
(limited to 200 copies, exclusive to SAP)
Please note that HB copies may take a few weeks to be shipped as we are awaiting stock.
Available now
ORDER HERE
Exemplary Essays from The Proceedings of ESTAR(SER), 2001–2021
Edited by D. Graham Burnett, Catherine L. Hansen and Justin E.H. Smith
155mm x 235mm
HB/PB, 768pp
45 b/w Illustrations
16pp colour plates
ISBN: 9781913689360
Paperback: £25
Hardback: £35
(limited to 200 copies, exclusive to SAP)
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London’s Lost Rivers Volumes One and Two
London’s Lost Rivers Volumes One and Two
By Tom Bolton
Photography by SF Said
Vol 1:
Foreword by Chris Fowler
PB, 280pp ,illustrated, £11.99
ISBN 978 1907222030
Vol 2:
Foreword by Tom Holland
PB, 304pp, illustrated, £11.99.
ISBN 978 1907222856
“Urban topography and history come vividly alive. There is no better way of exploring a city. And there is no better guide to it than Tom Bolton. No guide book to London has given me greater enjoyment'” Tom Holland
“Tom Bolton carves out his own channel with some proper hardcore research and a wealth of detail, all beautifully written up into walking routes. He’ll have you looking for dips in the road, listening at drain covers and analysing street names in search of buried water.” Londonist
‘a terrific mix of history, topography and practicality… astonishingly diligent… highly recommended’ The Great Wen
London’s Lost Rivers Volumes One and Two take the reader on a series of walks along the routes of 19 lost rivers, combining directions for walkers with richly detailed anecdotes outlining the history of each river’s route, origins and decline.
Tom Bolton reveals a secret network that spreads across the city, from picturesque Hampstead in the North to the hidden suburbs of South London, and runs beneath some of London’s most iconic and historic sites.
These walks trace the routes of buried rivers, tracking the impression they have left on the landscape and cityscape of London. Walks include the little-known Cock and Pye Ditch that shaped Covent Garden, Tottenham’s Moselle River (not to be confused with the French version), the East End’s unsavoury-sounding Black Ditch, and the mysterious channels of the Stamford Brook which hold West London in a tangled embrace.
Accompanied by SF Said’s haunting and evocative Polaroid photographs, this guidebook tracks routes that are recorded on no map, stripping back the layers to reveal London’s veins and arteries.
About the Author
Tom Bolton is a researcher, walker and photographer who has lived and worked in London since 1996. He also writes online about theatre and music. His second book, Vanished City: London’s Lost Neighbourhoods, and the first volume of London’s Lost Rivers, are available now from Strange Attractor Press.
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Flowers of Perversion
The Delirious Cinema of Jesús Franco
Volume Two
By Stephen Thrower
HB 512pp
240mm x 269mm
£45.00 / £65
520 images,
Full colour throughout
ISBN: 9781907222603
Available Mid-November in Standard and Collectors’ Editions.
The Collectors’ Edition of 500 copies is signed and numbered by Stephen Thrower and features specially designed boards and a different dust jacket image, a set of colour postcards and…
The Sinister Case of Dr. Franco
A 100 page, hardbound book, featuring a facsimile of items left behind at Hotel Quetzal in Southern France during the shooting of Mandinga in 1975. Jess and Lina Romay left the hotel in a hurry abandoning a suitcase containing numerous script treatments, story outlines and poster ideas, all of which are reproduced, annotated and made public here for the first time. This is a unique opportunity to own a piece of cinematic history and won’t be repeated.
This unique, one-off publication, presents a detailed cross-section of Jess Franco’s seething imagination and hectic filming schedule at the crest of his career.
The second volume in Stephen Thrower’s monumental study of Jess Franco’s cinematic delirium, covering the years 1975 to his death in 2013.
Jesús “Jess” Franco is an iconic figure in world cinema. His sexually charged, fearlessly personal style of filmmaking has never been in vogue with mainstream critics, but for lovers of the strange and sado-erotic he is a magician, spinning his unique and disturbing dream worlds from the cheapest of budgets.
Stephen Thrower has devoted many years to examining each and every known Franco film, second only to the maestro himself. This book—the second in a two-volume set—delves into the latter half of Franco’s career, covering films that have never received critical appraisal before, as well as exclusive interviews with Franco collaborators including Antonio Mayans, Juan Soler, Katja Bienert and Monica Swinn.
In the world of Jess Franco freedom was the key, and he pushed at the boundaries of taste and censorship repeatedly, throughout an astonishingly varied career spanning sixty years. The director of more than 180 films, at his most prolific he worked in a supercharged frenzy that yielded as many as twelve titles per year, making him one of the most generative auteurs of all time.
Franco’s taste for the sexy and horrific, his lifelong obsession with the Marquis De Sade, and his roving hand-held camera style launched a whole new strain of erotic cinema. Disturbing, exciting, and defiantly avant-garde, films such as Shining Sex, Barbed Wire Dolls, Ilsa The Wicked Warden and Bloody Moon are among the jewels of European horror, while a plethora of multiple versions, re-edits and echoes of earlier works turn the Franco experience into a dizzying hall of mirrors, further entrancing the viewer who dares enter Franco’s domain.
Thrower shines a light into the darkest corners of the Franco filmography and uncovers previously unknown and unsuspected facts about their casts, crews, and production histories.
Unparalleled in scope and ambition, Flowers of Perversion brings Jess Franco’s career into focus with a landmark study that aims to provide the definitive assessment of his labyrinthine film universe.
Murderous Passion, the first volume of this set, will be reprinted in early 2019 in full colour.
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Austin Osman Spare Death Posture Flight Patch
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Autumn arrivals
We finally have news of new arrivals for the Autumn, all of these titles will appear between mid October and Mid November, so watch this space for more information.
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Save The Horse Hospital!
The Horse Hospital is the birthplace of Strange Attractor, and its spiritual home.
We have managed to negotiate a contract to stay here and continue with our scheduled program until the end of March 2015. Although it leaves us no time at all, we have decided to do everything within our capacity to secure the building and somehow or other raise the necessary funds.
The Horse Hospital as an arts organization is intrinsically tied into the fabric of the building and in 2004 under the imminent threat of redevelopment, we thoroughly researched the history of this beautiful building and upon application to English Heritage it was promptly awarded a Grade 2, making The Horse Hospital a slightly less attractive prospect for property developers, we hoped..!
Built originally by James Burton in 1797 as stabling for cabby’s sick horses, The Horse Hospital is the only existing unspoilt example of a two-floor, purpose-built stable remaining for public access in London and is now an important Grade II listed building which has operated a Not For Profit policy, and provided space for underground and Avant-Garde media since 1993. It also houses and is supported by the ‘Contemporary Wardrobe Collection’, a fashion archive that specialises in post-war street fashion, sub-cultures and British design.
So, however challenging it has been, the rewards of being nonpartisan keepers of culture in this magnificent and idiosyncratic building have been manifold and profound. We are incredibly proud of the fact that since 1993 we have not only been fortunate enough to have shown a vast amount of amazing work by some of the underworlds true visionaries such as Joe Coleman, Helen Chadwick, Brice Dellsperger, Dennis Cooper, Cameron Jamie, Laurie Lipton, Bruce Bickford, Gee Vaucher & Crass, Vivienne Westwood & Malcolm McLaren, Franko B, Morton Bartlett, Craig Baldwin, Alejandro Jodorowsky, Lydia Lunch, Bjaarne Melgard to name but a few, but that we have also had the privilege to support and introduce literally hundreds of obscure artists, performers, filmmakers and writers, who may otherwise have been denied a voice by more mainstream organisations, to an ever-growing, receptive and appreciative audience.
Whether we can raise that kind of money remains to be seen, but having invested over 20 years in the building we intend to do everything in our power to make it happen, it’s a massive task but we remain firmly optimistic that with everyone’s help it is possible.
In a climate where any grass roots, alternative or independent endeavours are being swept away into the dust of history it is vital that the spirit and ethos that we wholeheartedly embrace as an organization is given a chance to survive in these ever more capitalist, corporate and homogenous times.
Any and all suggestions welcome to: popculture@thehorsehospital.com
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