Anyone who reads on the left-hand path for long will meet its book trade, and may be surprised by it. A great deal of the most serious writing on the subject now appears from small independent presses, in editions of a few hundred copies. The books are bound in cloth or leather, stamped in foil, numbered by hand, and often sold out before they are printed. A catalog may offer the same title in four or five grades, from a fine binding at the price of a week's wages down to a paperback and a digital file. On the resale market, a scarce title can cost more than a month's rent.
We have been reading these catalogs with mixed feelings, and we want to set down both halves of them.
What the Presses Do Well
The first half is gratitude. These presses publish work that no large publisher would touch: careful translations of old grimoires, long studies of single figures and single traditions, and the working accounts of practitioners who have spent decades at what they describe. Much of what any of us knows about the history of the path rests on scholarship that exists in print only because someone was willing to issue it for a few hundred readers.
The books are also well made, and that is not a small thing. Bookmaking is a craft. The people who practice it are entitled to be paid for their labor, and a reader who can afford a beautiful book and wants one has done nothing that needs defending.
Three Confusions
The second half is a caution, and it is addressed to readers, not to publishers. The trade invites three confusions.
Scarcity for depth. A book limited to three hundred copies is rare. Whether it is profound is a separate question, which the edition size cannot answer. The feeling that a text must be important because it is hard to get is very old, and it is the feeling on which every locked grimoire has depended.
Price for initiation. Some editions are offered as more than books: as consecrated objects, as talismans, as a link to a current. We take no position on what a consecration does. We observe only that a buyer may come away with the sense of having been admitted to something, and that this sense has been purchased. Nothing that can be purchased is an initiation. A numbered copy confers what a certificate confers.
Ownership for study. It is possible to own a remarkable library and to have read very little of it, and it is possible to have read all of it and practiced none of it. A shelf is not a record.
An Old Pattern
None of this is new. For most of the history of Western magic, the texts circulated in manuscript, and to possess one was to possess a kind of rank. The owner of the book was a person of consequence among those who wanted to read it. Printing weakened that arrangement, and the limited edition has, without anyone quite intending it, brought back a little of it.
We do not think the presses are to blame for this. Small editions are what the economics of serious publishing allow, and most presses would gladly sell more copies if there were more readers. But the effect is the same whatever the cause. A text that exists in three hundred costly copies is closed to nearly everyone who might have used it.
What We Suggest
If you want the text, buy the plainest edition that is offered, or borrow it, and spend the difference on time to read it. If the work is old, look first for a version in the public domain; a great many of the primary sources can be had for nothing. If you want the object, buy the object, and enjoy it as an object. Keep clear in your own mind which of the two you are doing. The Practice page asks only that you read widely, critically, and from primary sources where you can. None of that requires a fine binding.
As for our own texts: they are in the public domain, and any press that wishes to may set The Shed Skin in handsome type, bind it in goatskin, number it, and sell it at whatever price the market will bear. We would not object, and we could not if we wanted to. The words inside will be the same words that can be read on this site for nothing. We hope the buyer will know that. It is the reason we publish as we do.