The Bookshop is managed by Ken Bolton.
As Minnie Wilt tells it:
"The bookshop, it transpired, was begun some years after the EAF itself, born in fact from the EAF magazine rack in the middle 80s. It grew from there into one of the more curious bookshops around the place, servicing the intellectual and spiritual and, indeed, entertainment needs of the arts-intelligentia of Adelaide and, by degrees, similar communities and individuals far afield. The range is huge & has 'depth' - that is, not just latest releases & commentaries: the original texts of the various contemporary canons & counter-canons are kept in stock. Everybody goes there: the counter-intuitive, the cerebral, the noodly, your pin-headed academic, your smart-young-thing, the serious insect, the traditionally 'bookish', artists, poets, architects - students of 'Life', but also researchers in cultural studies, literature, feminism, film studies, philosophy, postcolonialism! And why not - that's exactly the sort of thing the shop stocks: Raymond Roussel and Harry Mathews - cheek by jowl with Kristeva and Bourdieu! Rajchman and Benjamin, Lyotard and Adorno, Blanchot, Berrigan, Kerouac - Louise Bourgeois and Rosalind Krauss, Joe Brainard and Georges Bataille, Meaghan Morris and Spivak."
"Jeez I love this shop!" These were Minnie's very words - echoing, as she found later and after many visits to the shop, the very words of AndrŽ Breton, the author of Nadja, one of Ms Wilt's favourite books. She bought it there on the advice of the droob behind the counter, the poet Ken Bolton who started the shop.
Ken Bolton is a poet, art critic, editor and publisher. He edited the magazine Otis Rush and now oversees Little Esther books. His major publications to date are a Selected Poems (Penguin/ETT) and Untimely Meditations (Wakefield Press), a book he edited on John Forbes and a monograph on artist Michelle Nikou. His latest collection is At The Flash & At The Baci.
For money (though not much money) he runs Dark Horsey bookshop.
Ken Bolton studied Fine Arts at Sydney University and has taught in visual art there and at Wollongong Art School, Wollongong University, Flinders University, and the SA School of Art, Adelaide. He is interested in art theory & art history, continental philosophy & cultural studies - & in the innovative side of literature. His art criticism has appeared in most Australian art magazines.
There are a number of things he wishes to avoid in poetry (the cornily 'poetic', strong reliance on metaphor, and the supposedly ineffable and transcendant). More positively he writes to keep himself awake.
When that fails, though, he knows where to find a good book.
