Items related to Bizarre
Search results for Bizarre
Seller Image
Bizarre
Published by
Bell Publishing Company, 1965
ISBN 10: 0236177656
ISBN 13: 9780236177653
Used
Hardcover
Seller: ThriftBooksVintage, Tukwila, WA, U.S.A.
Seller rating 5 out of 5 stars
Hardcover. Condition: Fair. Dust Jacket Condition: Fair. Dust jacket in acceptable condition. Cover and binding are worn but intact. A reading copy in fair condition. Foxing to text block and pages. Moderate loosening to binding. Secure packaging for safe delivery. Seller Inventory # 1243264480
Seller Image
Bizarre
Published by
Bell Publishing Company, USA, 1965
ISBN 10: 0236177656
ISBN 13: 9780236177653
Used
Hardcover
First Edition
Seller: Turtle Creek Books and Sheet Music, Mississauga, ON, Canada
Seller rating 5 out of 5 stars
Hardcover. Condition: Very Good. Dust Jacket Condition: Good. 1st Edition. Hardcover 1st edition. Book presents some minor shelfwear otherwise this is a very good solid copy. Dust jacket is a bit scuffed and has some wear on edges, otherwise it too is good. Barry Humphries was an Australian comedian, writer, satirist, and performer whose extraordinary creative range encompassed stage performance, literary writing, art collecting, and cultural commentary across a career of remarkable longevity and variety. Best known internationally for his theatrical alter egos, most notably the suburban Melbourne housewife Dame Edna Everage and the hard drinking cultural attaché Sir Les Patterson, Humphries was in reality a man of deep and genuinely unconventional cultural interests whose private enthusiasms extended far beyond the comic personas that brought him public fame. He was a serious collector of Symbolist and Surrealist art, a lover of unusual and marginal literature, and a connoisseur of the eccentric, the outmoded, and the culturally overlooked, with an aesthetic sensibility shaped as much by Dada and Surrealism as by the Australian suburban culture he subjected to such devastating comic scrutiny. Bizarre is an anthology edited by Humphries that gathers together a collection of unusual, eccentric, and culturally marginal material drawn from the broader history of human oddity and creative strangeness, reflecting its editor's personal aesthetic of deliberate perversity and his delight in the overlooked, the unfashionable, and the genuinely strange. The anthology format allowed Humphries to act as a curator of his own unconventional cultural enthusiasms, selecting and presenting material that reflected the particular quality of strangeness and creative eccentricity that appealed to his sensibility and that he wished to bring to the attention of readers open to being surprised and unsettled by their reading. The content of the anthology would draw on a wide range of sources and traditions united by their common quality of genuine unusualness, encompassing material from the history of popular entertainment, Victorian curiosity culture, Surrealist and Dadaist traditions, medical and scientific oddity, and the broader history of human eccentricity and creative strangeness that Humphries found endlessly fascinating and culturally generative. His editorial selections would reflect the same quality of unexpected juxtaposition and deliberate perversity that characterized his own creative work, presenting familiar and unfamiliar material in combinations designed to produce a cumulative effect of pleasurable disorientation. The work sits naturally within the broader tradition of eccentric anthology making associated with figures such as the Surrealists, who similarly used the anthology and collage format as vehicles for presenting unexpected juxtapositions of material drawn from marginal and overlooked cultural sources. Humphries brought to this tradition his own distinctively Australian perspective and his particular combination of high cultural seriousness and low comic instinct, producing a collection that reflects the genuine depth and originality of a creative sensibility that his public comic persona only partially revealed to the wider world. Seller Inventory # 1013807