The lofty view of man’s progress called ‘history’ deserves a new perspective-that of the common person, not liberated but burdened by modernity.

The American anarchist, primitivist philosopher, and author John Zerzan critiques agriculture-based civilization as inherently oppressive and advocates drawing upon the life of hunter-gatherers as an inspiration for what free society should look like. Subjects of his criticism include domestication, language, symbolic thought, and the concept of time.

This book includes sixteen essays ranging from the beginning of civilization to today’s general crisis. Zerzan provides a critical perspective about civilization.

• Zerzan’s previous books, Against Civilization, Running on Emptiness, Twilight of the Machines, and Why Hope? explore the complex duality role of man in and against nature.

John Zerzan is an American anarchist and primitivist philosopher and author. Zerzan is the editor Black and Green Review,(http://www.blackandgreenreview.org/)  a bi-annual compendium of anarcho-primitivist thought. He is also the host of Anarchy Radio in Eugene on the University of Oregon‘s radio station KWVA. He has also served as a contributing editor at Anarchy Magazine and has been published in magazines such as AdBusters. He does extensive speaking tours around the world.

Orders placed directly with Feral House receive a signed photo of Eugene Robinson. Quantities are very limited.

A rollicking no-holds barred memoir from journalist and musician Eugene S. Robinson that takes readers along through the story of his life.

“A weird rollicking ride” frames how author Eugene S. Robinson views his journey from a Brooklyn kid with decidedly offbeat punk rock proclivities to the realities of California hardcore and dark detours into shows, tours, drugs, porn, guns, MMA fighting, an Ivy League-esque education and his eventual entry into the US Defense industry just in time to see his boss dragged into Contragate.

Robinson’s writing mirrors his fighting style intensity, ferocity, and brutal truth. He knows exactly who he is and how he is perceived by the white people and white culture that surrounds him. Robinson challenges accepted norms. He fights against easy answers and safe passages. He says:

“No one who ever gets a life sentence for just about anything really expects it to last a lifetime. Even if the modifier is “without the possibility of parole.” Hope springs eternal but there’s always the undiscussed other option. The one where the fate is chosen, freely, and the protagonist has about as much interest in escaping as he does of being almost anywhere else at all. Which is to say: not at all.”

A Walk Across Dirty Water is Robinson’s memoir of growing up in Brooklyn during the 1970s, playing in punk bands and touring the world during the eighties, taking a break to attend Stanford, and accidentally becoming a famous television personality in Germany.

Bananas in Ham with Cheese Sauce? Meat Salad made of ground bologna and gelatin? Spend any time on the internet, and you’re bound to come across gross recipes from the past. How did anyone with a single taste bud in their mouth come up with this stuff?

American Advertising Cookbooks: How Corporations Taught Us to Love Spam®, Bananas, and Jell-O® is a deeply researched and entertaining survey of American food history; connecting cultural, social, and geopolitical events. Author Christina Ward (Preservation: The Art & Science of Canning, Fermentation, and Dehydration, Process, 2017) uses her vast collection of cookbooks to tell the fascinating and often infuriating story of corporate greed and advertising and the manipulation of American cuisine.

Academic researchers have published histories of American food and politics, but Ward brings all these elements together to tell the larger story of why we eat what we do. Though easy to mock, once you learn the real history, you will never look at Jell-O® the same way again! American Advertising Cookbooks, How Corporations Taught Us To Love Bananas, Spam®, and Jell-O® features full-color images and essays uncovering the origins of favorite foods.

Christina is a featured contributor to Serious Eats, Edible Milwaukee, The Milwaukee Journal/Sentinel, Remedy Quarterly, and Runcible Spoon magazines. Christina, despite klutziness, is often found in classrooms and community kitchens with sharp knives, spilling vinegar into unsuspecting handbags while wildly gesticulating as she teaches folks how to make perfect pickles. She is a featured guest food expert on Fox6 News Real Milwaukee and public radio stations across the United States.

Christina can trace her Wisconsin roots to the early 1800s. She prides herself on having a hungry mind interested in learning about people, the foods they eat, and the stories that arise from that convergence.

“We’re not ashamed of a little hairspray and makeup. We’ve always said it takes a real man to wear makeup.”?Bret Michaels, Poison

There was a time?not so long ago?when pomp and spandex dominated MTV and pop radio playlists. Nearly 20 years after the first edition, people can’t get enough hair metal!  The new expanded edition of American Hair Metal visually celebrates this orgy of flamboyance, androgyny, and animal magnetism, of big-haired alpha males and the beautiful women who surrounded them. Interest in hair metal is currently exploding?witness arena-level revival tours, reissue compilations, and documentaries and docudramas that revisit the excesses of the eighties and nineties.

Hundreds of striking photographs are complimented by hedonistic ephemera from bands like Poison, Cinderella, Mötley Crüe, Skid Row, and Stryper. Wild quotes from major players such as David Lee Roth, Jon Bon Jovi, Sebastian Bach, Tommy Lee, Nikki Sixx, Bret Michaels, Don Dokken, and many unsung heroes. The expanded edition includes more photos, more quotes, and a new introduction by Chip Z’Nuff (Enuff Z’Nuff) and an interview with Rik Rox (WASP, Steeler).

Feral House presents an irreverent, educational and entertaining collection of essays by the Great Contrarian of graphic design, Art Chantry.

“There used to be a time when designers were trained in the history of composition. Now you just buy a fuckin’ piece of software and now you’ve become a designer.”

“Art Chantry . . . Is he a Luddite?” asks a Rhode Island School of Design poster promoting a Chantry lecture. “Or is he a graphic design hero?”

For decades this avatar of low-tech design has fought against the cheap and easy use of digital software. Chantry’s homage to expired technology, and his inspired use of Xerox machines and X-Acto blade cuts of printed material, created a much-copied style during the grunge period and beyond.

Chantry’s designs were published in Some People Can’t Surf: The Graphic Design of Art Chantry (Chronicle Books), exhibited at the Seattle Art Museum, the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, the Museum of Modern Art, the Smithsonian, and the Louvre.

Recently, Chantry has drawn upon his extraordinary collection of 20th-century graphic art to create compelling histories of the forgotten and unknown in essays he has posted on his Facebook page. These essays lionize the unrecognized illustrators of screws, wrenches, and pipes in equipment catalogs, and reveal how some famous artists were improperly recognized for work they didn’t create.

Art Chantry Speaks is the kind of opinionated art history you’ve always wanted to read but were never assigned in class.

 

A delightful romp through a garden of devilish enticements.

Commissioned by and for wealthy aristocrats for their private amusements, we introduce you to a selection of stories, poems, limericks, and bon mots assured to delight the most refined of connoisseurs. Complimented by rare erotic lithographs by renowned illustrator Eugene Lepoittevin.

Lepoittevin’s Devils first appeared to acclaim in 1832. His original devil was an impish troublemaker. At the behest of his publisher, he created a new series of lithographs featuring his devils ala erotique. The drawings are more humorous than titillating and reflect the sense of absurdity prevalent in European eroticism. Even so, the drawings were long banned in Europe and the United States, with the government going so far as to confiscate copies intended for the Kinsey Institute in 1956.

The selection of writings is culled from humorous erotic pastiches and rare writing privately printed for exclusive collectors by underground publishers that have long been hidden in the Private Case of the British Library and the L’Enfer of the Biblioteque nationale du France.

Bawdy Tales is designed with the collector in mind, utilizing vegan leather and gold embossing to simulate period morocco binding. Includes a bound-in black ribbon bookmark.

Art Historian Sarah Burns introduces Lepoittevin’s work and career. Expert collector of written erotica, “Lady Fanny Woodcock” contributes a short history of the erotic book in Western culture.

Sarah Burns (Ph.D., University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign) is Professor Emeritus of Art History, Indiana University, Bloomington. She is the author of The Emphatically Queer Career of Perkins Harnly and His Bohemian Friends (Process, 2021).

“Lady Fanny Woodcock” is the sobriquet of a respected collector of erotic books and student of their bibliographic history.

The surreal saga of the famous kitsch artists, the Keanes, as seen in Tim Burton’s film Big Eyes.

Teary, big-eyed orphans and a multitude of trashy knockoffs epitomized American kitsch art as they clogged thrift stores for decades.

When Adam Parfrey tracked down Walter Keane—the credited artist of the weepy waifs, for a San Diego Reader cover story in 1992—he discovered some disturbing facts. Decades of lawsuits and countersuits revealed the reality that Keane was more of a con man than an artist, and that he forced his wife Margaret to sign his name to her own paintings. As a result, those weepy waifs may not have been as capricious an invention as they seemed.

Parfrey’s story was reprinted in Juxtapoz magazine and inspired a Margaret Keane exhibition at the Laguna Art Museum. Big Eyes, Tim Burton’s movie about the Keanes,  was released in December 2014. (Burton’s Ed Wood, starring Johnny Depp, was based upon the Feral House book edited and published by Parfrey about the angora sweater-wearing B-film director.)

Citizen Keane is a book-length expansion of Parfrey’s original article, providing fascinating biographical and sociological details, photographs, color reproductions, and appendices with legal documents and pseudonymous essays by Tom Wolfe inflating big eye art to those painted by the great masters.

Cold Glitter: The Untold Story of Canadian Glam uncovers a forgotten yet fascinating chapter on glam rock music and culture…from Canada.

Multi-disciplinary artist Robert Dayton taps his Canadian roots to reveal mind-blowing stories of musicians fighting to be heard. It’s a universal story of determined creators striving to make their voices heard. Dayton has spent years researching and interviewing these ground-breaking musicians trapped by geography, colonial mindsets, and the difficulties of penetrating the cultural behemoth that is the United States.

There’s no denying that glam rock was marginalized in Canada. In fact, RCA almost didn’t release the 1973 Bowie-produced Lou Reed album “Transformer” in Canada because they didn’t see a market for it. Of course, they were wrong! Cold Glitter gets at the reasons why: nature vs. artifice, old world values vs. new freedoms, and how transgressive actions—including gender play, as well as intense stories from these top acts on how they were run out of town for appearing outrageous.

Filled with stories from musicians about what they did to build a career and fight against the old guard controlling the airwaves and stages. Readers everywhere will find solidarity with the all-too-familiar story of artists who were attacked for appearing outrageous and daring to be different. Within the struggle to be fabulous are anecdotes of fun and mayhem. Readers will be taken back to the seventies as they meet the unknown and infamous musicians and artists who dared to be glamorous. Familiar names like magician Doug Henning, Vancouver band Sweeney Todd and their lead singer Nick Gilder, and his replacement, Bryan Adams, to underground heroes like The Dishes, to hundreds of musicians who put away their mascara and left their glamorous wild days behind.

Cold Glitter is filled with rare (and sometimes outrageous) images throughout and additional chapters on glam fashion, film, and comedy in Canada. You’ll be amazed to discover how many of their favorite artists were and are secretly Canadian.

From the original release: On highly-detailed canvases that are packed to the margins with strange symbols, bleeding body parts, Bible verses, and nightmare genitalia, Joe Coleman paints the wondrous carnival of his psychotic universe. His work is even blessed by a blurb from Charles Manson: “His art is something else. Praise! Praise! Praise! He’s a caveman in a space ship.” 

This is an artist no horror fan can afford to miss: He does serial killers, sideshow freaks, deranged sex, evil doctors, and religious iconography like no one else on Earth. This is a superb introduction to Coleman’s world and work, with a biographical article, photos, 32 color plates, and numerous illustrations. Warning: Disturbing!

Twenty-six years later, Joe Coleman is recognized as a genius lauded by critics and collectors throughout the world.

While we now enjoy this exploitative genre for its campy kitsch, gloriously bad writing, and outlandish misinformation, drug paperback books were once a transgressive medium with a perversely seductive quality.

DOPE MENACE collects together hundreds of fabulously lurid and collectible covers in color, from xenophobic turn-of-the century tomes about the opium trade to the beatnik glories of reefer smoking and William S. Burroughs’ Junkie to the spaced-out psychedelic ’60s. We mustn’t forget the gonzo paranoia brought on by Hunter S. Thompson in the ’70s, when anything was everything.

Author Stephen J. Gertz is a well-regarded authority on antiquarian books and contributor to Feral House’s Sin-A-Rama, an award-winning visual history of sleaze
paperbacks from the sixties.