Creation Books
Encyclopedia
Creation Books is a British publishing house specializing in experimental literature
, surrealism
, erotic and decadent literature. Creation also publish non-fiction, with books on magic
, subcultures, and taboo topics such as suicide
and serial killers. They are best known for publishing a number of books underground film
, experimental cinema, horror film
and cult film
. Contributors and authors include Jeremy Reed
, Peter Sotos
, David Kerekes, David Slater, Romain Slocombe, Kenji Siratori and Jack Sargeant
.
Founded in England in 1989, Creation Books began by publishing psych-horror-surrealist author James Havoc
's anti-novel Raism, before moving on to publishing non-fiction books, initially on the imprint Annihilation before moving all titles to the Creation Books catalogue. The first non-fiction titles included Simon Dwyer
's Rapid Eye journal. Three volumes were published and included groundbreaking pieces on Genesis P-Orridge
and Derek Jarman
. Volume 2 was notable for a lengthy essay on Dwyer's journey through the American underground.
In this early period Creation also published avant-garde
poetry by Aaron Williamson and Geraldine Monk
as well as a collection of horror stories: Red Stains. They also published Olivia Gladwell's postfeminist
analysis of music Catamania and the Mike Philbin novel Red Hedz. Later novels published include Lydia Lunch
's Paradoxia, Mathew Stokoe's Cows, Pan Pantziarka
's House of Pain and Peter Sotos's Index.
Creation published numerous literary classics including books by Oscar Wilde
, H. P. Lovecraft
, Dalí
, Lewis Carroll
, Edgar Allan Poe
, Arthur Machen
, and Antonin Artaud
.
Creation began publishing their film studies series with Killing for Culture, before moving on to publishing Jack Hunter's Inside Terradome and Jack Sargeant's Deathtripping: The Cinema of Transgression. This numbered series would come to include books on topics ranging from erotica and pornography, beatnik film, Japanese punk film, road movies, and cannibal horror movies. By the mid-nineties Creation's non-fiction catalogue had grown to include nonfiction titles by Jack Stevenson and Stephen Barber
, as well as editions of Krafft-Ebing's Psychopathia Sexualis, Nietzsche
's The AntiChrist and Francis King's Megatherion.
Non-fiction books included numerous books on pop / rock music, including Alan Parker
's Sid Vicious
biography, and books by Jeremy Reed on Marc Almond
, Brian Jones
, and Scott Walker
, as well as Bill Drummond
and Mark Manning's cult Bad Wisdom.
Creation expanded into photography books and published two books by French artist Romain Slocombe, as well as a book by underground film maker Peter Whitehead. Slocombe, Havoc and Lunch also featured in Sargeant's book Suture. Other art books published by Creation include a volume of extreme manga by Suehiro Maruo.
, alongside classic decadent erotica and works by dominatrix author Terrence Sellers. Velvet also published two Torture Garden
volumes edited by David Wood, co-founder of the fetish club of the same name.
Creation Books also published a handful of pulp titles under the Attack! Books
imprint, edited by the late Steven Wells
, an early supporter of Creation. This imprint included books by Mark Manning aka Zodiac Mindwarp
. The imprint was discontinued but Manning continued to publish with Creation Books, while Wells was featured in an anthology published by Creation side project Future Fiction.
Experimental literature
Experimental literature refers to written works - often novels or magazines - that place great emphasis on innovations regarding technique and style.-Early history:...
, surrealism
Surrealism
Surrealism is a cultural movement that began in the early 1920s, and is best known for the visual artworks and writings of the group members....
, erotic and decadent literature. Creation also publish non-fiction, with books on magic
Magic (paranormal)
Magic is the claimed art of manipulating aspects of reality either by supernatural means or through knowledge of occult laws unknown to science. It is in contrast to science, in that science does not accept anything not subject to either direct or indirect observation, and subject to logical...
, subcultures, and taboo topics such as suicide
Suicide
Suicide is the act of intentionally causing one's own death. Suicide is often committed out of despair or attributed to some underlying mental disorder, such as depression, bipolar disorder, schizophrenia, alcoholism, or drug abuse...
and serial killers. They are best known for publishing a number of books underground film
Underground film
An underground film is a film that is out of the mainstream either in its style, genre, or financing.-Definition and history:The first use of the term "underground film" occurs in a 1957 essay by American film critic Manny Farber, "Underground Films." Farber uses it to refer to the work of...
, experimental cinema, horror film
Horror film
Horror films seek to elicit a negative emotional reaction from viewers by playing on the audience's most primal fears. They often feature scenes that startle the viewer through the means of macabre and the supernatural, thus frequently overlapping with the fantasy and science fiction genres...
and cult film
Cult film
A cult film, also commonly referred to as a cult classic, is a film that has acquired a highly devoted but specific group of fans. Often, cult movies have failed to achieve fame outside the small fanbases; however, there have been exceptions that have managed to gain fame among mainstream audiences...
. Contributors and authors include Jeremy Reed
Jeremy Reed
Jeremy Thomas Reed is an American professional baseball outfielder who is a free agent.Reed graduated from Bonita High School in 1999, and went on to play college baseball at Long Beach State University...
, Peter Sotos
Peter Sotos
Peter Sotos is a Chicago-born writer and musician. In his books, Sotos examines sadistic sexual criminals and sexually violent pornography, particularly involving children. His writings are interpreted by some as commenting on media hypocrisy around these issues...
, David Kerekes, David Slater, Romain Slocombe, Kenji Siratori and Jack Sargeant
Jack Sargeant
Jack Sargeant is a writer specialising in cult film, underground film, and independent film, as well as subcultures, true crime, and other aspects of the unusual. In addition he is a film programmer and an academic...
.
Founded in England in 1989, Creation Books began by publishing psych-horror-surrealist author James Havoc
James Havoc
James Havoc is, or was, a British extreme writer of esoteric horror and erotica. He was a head of Creation Books, Creation Records book division,and lead his own musical group, The Church of Raism, with a Gothic diva Rose McDowall...
's anti-novel Raism, before moving on to publishing non-fiction books, initially on the imprint Annihilation before moving all titles to the Creation Books catalogue. The first non-fiction titles included Simon Dwyer
Simon Dwyer
Simon Dwyer is an Australian professional Rugby league footballer for the Wests Tigers in the National Rugby League . He primarily plays at second row or centre...
's Rapid Eye journal. Three volumes were published and included groundbreaking pieces on Genesis P-Orridge
Genesis P-Orridge
Genesis Breyer P-Orridge is an English singer-songwriter, musician, writer and artist. P-Orridge's early confrontational performance work in COUM Transmissions in the late 1960s and early 1970s along with the industrial band Throbbing Gristle, which dealt with subjects such as prostitution,...
and Derek Jarman
Derek Jarman
Michael Derek Elworthy Jarman was an English film director, stage designer, diarist, artist, gardener and author.-Life:...
. Volume 2 was notable for a lengthy essay on Dwyer's journey through the American underground.
In this early period Creation also published avant-garde
Avant-garde
Avant-garde means "advance guard" or "vanguard". The adjective form is used in English to refer to people or works that are experimental or innovative, particularly with respect to art, culture, and politics....
poetry by Aaron Williamson and Geraldine Monk
Geraldine Monk
Geraldine Monk is a British poet. She was born in Blackburn, Lancashire in 1952. Since the late 1970s, she has published many collections of poetry and has recorded her poetry in collaboration with musicians...
as well as a collection of horror stories: Red Stains. They also published Olivia Gladwell's postfeminist
Postfeminism
Post-feminism is a reaction against some perceived contradictions and absences of second-wave feminism. The term post-feminism is ill-defined and is used in inconsistent ways...
analysis of music Catamania and the Mike Philbin novel Red Hedz. Later novels published include Lydia Lunch
Lydia Lunch
Lydia Lunch is an American singer, poet, writer, and actress whose career was spawned by the New York No Wave scene...
's Paradoxia, Mathew Stokoe's Cows, Pan Pantziarka
Pan Pantziarka
Pan Pantziarka is the author of House of Pain, crime writer and techie...
's House of Pain and Peter Sotos's Index.
Creation published numerous literary classics including books by Oscar Wilde
Oscar Wilde
Oscar Fingal O'Flahertie Wills Wilde was an Irish writer and poet. After writing in different forms throughout the 1880s, he became one of London's most popular playwrights in the early 1890s...
, H. P. Lovecraft
H. P. Lovecraft
Howard Phillips Lovecraft --often credited as H.P. Lovecraft — was an American author of horror, fantasy and science fiction, especially the subgenre known as weird fiction....
, Dalí
Salvador Dalí
Salvador Domènec Felip Jacint Dalí i Domènech, Marquis de Púbol , commonly known as Salvador Dalí , was a prominent Spanish Catalan surrealist painter born in Figueres,Spain....
, Lewis Carroll
Lewis Carroll
Charles Lutwidge Dodgson , better known by the pseudonym Lewis Carroll , was an English author, mathematician, logician, Anglican deacon and photographer. His most famous writings are Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and its sequel Through the Looking-Glass, as well as the poems "The Hunting of the...
, Edgar Allan Poe
Edgar Allan Poe
Edgar Allan Poe was an American author, poet, editor and literary critic, considered part of the American Romantic Movement. Best known for his tales of mystery and the macabre, Poe was one of the earliest American practitioners of the short story and is considered the inventor of the detective...
, Arthur Machen
Arthur Machen
Arthur Machen was a Welsh author and mystic of the 1890s and early 20th century. He is best known for his influential supernatural, fantasy, and horror fiction. His novella The Great God Pan has garnered a reputation as a classic of horror...
, and Antonin Artaud
Antonin Artaud
Antoine Marie Joseph Artaud, more well-known as Antonin Artaud was a French playwright, poet, actor and theatre director...
.
Creation began publishing their film studies series with Killing for Culture, before moving on to publishing Jack Hunter's Inside Terradome and Jack Sargeant's Deathtripping: The Cinema of Transgression. This numbered series would come to include books on topics ranging from erotica and pornography, beatnik film, Japanese punk film, road movies, and cannibal horror movies. By the mid-nineties Creation's non-fiction catalogue had grown to include nonfiction titles by Jack Stevenson and Stephen Barber
Stephen Barber
Stephen Barber is a British political scientist / political economist, and author based at London South Bank University. He is also a Senior Fellow at London Metropolitan University's Global Policy Institute. He has also worked in the European Research Forum...
, as well as editions of Krafft-Ebing's Psychopathia Sexualis, Nietzsche
Friedrich Nietzsche
Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche was a 19th-century German philosopher, poet, composer and classical philologist...
's The AntiChrist and Francis King's Megatherion.
Non-fiction books included numerous books on pop / rock music, including Alan Parker
Alan Parker
Sir Alan William Parker, CBE is an English film director, producer, writer and actor. He has been active in both the British cinema and American cinema and was a founding member of the Directors Guild of Great Britain.-Life and career:...
's Sid Vicious
Sid Vicious
Sid Vicious was an English musician best known as the bassist of the influential punk rock group Sex Pistols...
biography, and books by Jeremy Reed on Marc Almond
Marc Almond
Marc Almond is an English singer-songwriter and musician, who originally found fame as half of the seminal synthpop/New Wave duo Soft Cell...
, Brian Jones
Brian Jones
Lewis Brian Hopkins Jones , known as Brian Jones, was an English musician and a founding member of the Rolling Stones....
, and Scott Walker
Scott Walker (singer)
Scott Walker, born Noel Scott Engel on January 9, 1943 is an American singer-songwriter, musician, record producer, and the former lead singer of The Walker Brothers. Despite being American born, Walker's chart success has largely come in the United Kingdom, where his first four solo albums...
, as well as Bill Drummond
Bill Drummond
William Ernest Drummond is a Scottish artist, musician, writer and record producer. He was the co-founder of late 1980s avant-garde pop group The KLF and its 1990s media-manipulating successor, the K Foundation, with which he burned a million pounds in 1994...
and Mark Manning's cult Bad Wisdom.
Creation expanded into photography books and published two books by French artist Romain Slocombe, as well as a book by underground film maker Peter Whitehead. Slocombe, Havoc and Lunch also featured in Sargeant's book Suture. Other art books published by Creation include a volume of extreme manga by Suehiro Maruo.
Imprints
Creation Books' erotic imprint; Velvet, published the one-off journal Heat and new translations of works by Marquis de SadeMarquis de Sade
Donatien Alphonse François, Marquis de Sade was a French aristocrat, revolutionary politician, philosopher, and writer famous for his libertine sexuality and lifestyle...
, alongside classic decadent erotica and works by dominatrix author Terrence Sellers. Velvet also published two Torture Garden
Torture Garden
Torture Garden may refer to:* The Torture Garden , novel by Octave Mirbeau* Torture Garden , album by Naked City* Torture Garden , film directed by Freddie Francis and written by Robert Bloch...
volumes edited by David Wood, co-founder of the fetish club of the same name.
Creation Books also published a handful of pulp titles under the Attack! Books
Attack! Books
ATTACK! Books was an avant-pulp imprint of Creation Books founded in 1999. Partly a homage to the raw pulp writing of Richard Allen and the world of British action comics, part surrealism and part ultraviolence, the titles were overseen by former NME journalist Steven Wells, with the following...
imprint, edited by the late Steven Wells
Steven Wells
Steven Wells was a British journalist, author, comedian and notable punk poet born in Swindon, Wiltshire. He is best remembered for ranting poetry and his provocative, unapologetic music journalism. In June 2006, he wrote in the Philadelphia Weekly about his treatment for Hodgkin's lymphoma...
, an early supporter of Creation. This imprint included books by Mark Manning aka Zodiac Mindwarp
Zodiac Mindwarp
-Overview:The band is the brainchild of Mark Manning, a graphic artist and editor of London's Flexipop magazine. Deciding to experience the debauchery of life as a decadent rock star, he assumed the alter ego, Zodiac Mindwarp, and formed the Love Reaction in the mid 1980s together with guitarist...
. The imprint was discontinued but Manning continued to publish with Creation Books, while Wells was featured in an anthology published by Creation side project Future Fiction.
Partial bibliography
- Killing for Culture: An Illustrated History of Death Film from Mondo to Snuff, by David Kerekes and David Slater, ISBN 1-871592-20-8, paperback, 1996
- The Starry Wisdom (anthology, ed. D M Mitchell) homage to H P Lovecraft
- Artaud: Blows and Bombs by Stephen BarberStephen BarberStephen Barber is a British political scientist / political economist, and author based at London South Bank University. He is also a Senior Fellow at London Metropolitan University's Global Policy Institute. He has also worked in the European Research Forum...
- The Monk (The Modern Classics Series) by A. Artaud and Matthew Lewis
- Heliogabalus : Or, The Crowned Anarchist (Creation Modern Classics) by A. Artaud
- Ultra-Gash Inferno (ISBN 1-84068-039-3)
- Alan Parker, Vicious. Too Fast To Live... (2004)
- Simon Whitechapel, Flesh Inferno: Atrocities of Torquemada and the Spanish Inquisition (2003). ISBN 1-84068-105-5
- Tick, 2000 (ISBN 1-84068-048-2)
- Index, 2000 (ISBN 1-84068-010-5)
- Lazy, 2000 (ISBN 1-84068-010-5)
- Proxy: Peter Sotos Pornography 1991-2000, 2005 (ISBN 1-84068-080-6), a compendium of five of Sotos' works (Tool, Index, Special, Lazy, and Tick)
- Predicate (2005)
- Lordotics, September 2008 (ISBN 1-84068-152-7, limited run of 113 copies, all signed and numbered)
- Blood Electric by Kenji Siratori, 2002 (ISBN 1-84068-060-1)
- Acidhuman Project by Kenji Siratori, 2006 (ISBN 1-84068-117-9)