Angry Penguins (4 results)

Small Quarto exhibition catalogue, 16pp, illustrated, original illustrated wrappers, a near fine copy. Title essay by Peter Herbst First edition. From the collection of Australian art historian Leigh Astbury with his signature.

Paperback. First Edition. Melbourne, The National Press [for Reed and Harris, March] 1946. Quarto, 16 pages with 8 illustrations. Drop-title pictorial wrappers. Ten issues of this supplement to 'Angry Penguins' appeared monthly between January and December 1946 (with the exception of October and November); the editors for the first five issues (including this one) were Max Harris, James McGuire and Sidney Nolan. The main contribution is 'Governor Latrobe's Underpants - a Colonial Melodrama' by Arthur Davies; 'The Sex Life of Booksellers' by A. Fraid (a short work, entirely fictitious) adds considerably to the interest of this issue.

London 1988. Sm. 4to. Orig. illust. wrapper. (176pp.). With frontispiece, and numerous illusts., some in col. NOTE: Catalogue of an Exhibition at the Hayward Gallery, London, May to August 1988.

A complete set of ten issues. The Angry Penguins Broadsheet was an offshoot of Angry Penguins, Australia's leading modernist literary magazine. The title came from Harris's poem, Mithridatum of Despair: "We know no mithridatum of despair/as drunks, the angry penguins of the night/straddling the cobbles of the square/tying a shoelace by fogged lamplight". The first magazine was founded in Adelaide in 1940 by Harris and his co-editor, D. B. "Sam" Kerr, and was published irregularly, with only nine issues in total. The art patrons John and Sunday Reed, together with Max Harris, published The Broadsheet, along with the later issues of the Angry Penguins magazine itself. Angry Penguins was famously the subject to one of the great literary hoaxes of the century by James McAuley and Harold Stewart. The Oxford Companion to Australian Literature observes that "the vigorous and legitimate movement for modernism in Australian writing. received a severe setback, and the conservative element was undoubtedly strengthened". 10 vols, quarto. Original paper wrappers, titles to front covers in black. Housed in a black solander box. Mildly toned; an excellent set.