Art Guide Australia, Art Ink and Perimeter Books Tell us The Books we Should be Reading
The Bookshop at Melbourne Art Fair 2026 is our chance to pull books out of the corner, literally and conceptually, and give them a space that feels immersive, generous, and alive.
It’s a place to wander, linger, lose track of time while flipping through the pages, and buy a book from one of the artists that may have a work hanging in a booth five metres away.
Located on the fair floor, discover a new read and smell the pages in person, with a curated selection of titles from our partners: the Art Guide Australia Bookstore, VAULT Magazine and Art Ink books, and Perimeter Books.
The Bookshop will be open for the duration of the Fair. Click here for opening hours.
ART GUIDE BOOKSTORE
With recommendations from Jackson McLaren, Art Guide Bookstore Manager
Established in Naarm in 1975, the Women’s Art Register (WAR) is celebrating 50 years. This artist-run community and living record contains material that represents over five thousand women and gender diverse artists who have lived and worked in Australia. Perusing the pages of this anthology is a bit like looking through an archive – different voices, images, ephemera, records, and conversations – forming a web of connections. With contributions from leading artists, curators, writers, and academics this book is a must for those wanting to explore feminist art history and the unique role the Women’s Art Register plays in the Australian arts scene.
Co-founder of WAR, Lesley Dumbrell, exhibits at Melbourne Art Fair 2026 with Charles Nodrum Gallery (Naarm/Melbourne), Booth A4. She will also join members of WAR in a lively discussion on the new book, Women’s Art Register: Things That Keep Us Together.
Keeeping Things Together
Women’s Art Register, Published by Melbourne University Press
Photo: Sahra Martin, Women’s Art Register
You might not be allowed to touch a Hany Armanious sculpture (tempting!) but you can touch this satisfyingly soft-cover book, published alongside the current exhibition Hany Armanious: Stone Soup at Buxton Contemporary. This thoughtfully designed monograph focusses on the last fifteen years of Armanious’s practice with new scholarship from co-curator Laurence Sillars. Using a labour-intensive process of casting with polyurethane resin, Armanious makes near identical replicas of everyday, often discarded or decrepit objects. This publication features a sequence of images that invites serious close looking, and a way of tuning into the world through colour, surface and texture.
Image courtesy Art Guide Bookstore.
ART INK
With recommendations from Oliver Frank, and the team at Art Ink.
Windows & Mirrors is the first publication to comprehensively catalogue the influential career of Bandjalung man and cultural leader Djon Mundine OAM. Bringing together key writings from 1999 to 2023 alongside archival imagery and exhibition documentation, the book traces pivotal figures, exhibitions, and movements in the development of contemporary Indigenous art in Australia. Drawing on decades of curatorial and cultural leadership, Mundine’s essays offer both institutional insight and lived experience, making the publication an essential cultural and historical reference.
Image courtesy Art Ink.
Ghost Smoke
Adam Lee, $75
Ghost Smoke surveys the past decade of Adam Lee’s painting and drawing practice, presenting a richly atmospheric body of work shaped by memory, folklore, and imagination. Through moody landscapes and allegorical scenes rendered on canvas and paper, Lee constructs worlds that sit between the real and the imagined. Characterised by a contemporary take on tenebrism, the publication offers an immersive, painterly exploration of time, transcendence, and the unseen forces that shape human experience.
Image courtesy Art Ink.
PERIMETER BOOKS
With recommendations from Dan Rule, Director, Perimeter Books.
A personal favourite from our publishing archive, Ying Ang’s Fruiting Bodies reimagines the mushroom as both a biological form and a feminist metaphor – an emergent, generative force that challenges dominant narratives of fertility and the female body. Photographed while walking through inner-city parks close to the artist’s home in Melbourne, the series examines how the fetishisation of fertility has shaped cultural perceptions of women, nature and reproduction, questioning whether growth and abundance must always serve a reproductive imperative. The book is materially rich, yet somehow humble, much like the work itself.
Image courtesy Perimeter Books.
Sit, site, chair, cherry is a phonebook-scaled archive of photographs that breaks down a site rich in the history of design and architecture – the Vitra Campus in Switzerland, home to the famed Vitra furniture design company – into a sea of fine-grain details, textures, and gestures. The campus – which comprises buildings designed by Frank Gehry, Zaha Hadid, Tadao Ando, and Alvaro Siza – is rendered so as to become a fabric of contained but connected moments and surfaces. A remarkable object and series – content and form working in perfect step.
Image courtesy Perimeter Books.
Melbourne Art Fair returns, 19 – 22 February 2026.
Secure tickets now.
