I earned this awesome tome from my Father in Law (who is British and probably acquired it in London), from whom I inherited most of my Crowleyan and Grantian Bibliothèque, but I don't know the year of its publication... He does not remember either, but believes it was bought in the 70's.
By the smell and visual aspect, I would guess it was in 70's, but does anybody (Paul?) know how many editions Castle Books issued and which could be the possible year for the edition I have?
Unfortunately, and I simply don't understand why, my edition has no mention of its year of publication. It used to have that purple dust jacket with a heptagram, the seal of babalon, a vescica of some kind, one hexagram and a kind of zodiacal vitruvian man. Hardcover, without the jacket it is clad in a brownish/beige paper, having words only on the spine, where it is written in blue "Crowley", "Magick in Theory and Practice" and "Castle".
I welcome any information.
Ah, in the back of the cover it has a nice (now damaged) golden lamen/seal embossed.
I have a purple covered Castle edition of Magick in Theory and Practice published in 1992. And it's still available from Amazon now it seems:
http://www.amazon.com/Magick-Theory-Practice-Aleister-Crowley/dp/1555217664
93
Hamal
Thank you both for the help.
@ Hamal, mine is actually different despite being purple too (the dust jacket). The diagrams are different.
@ Mr. Clarcke, I also saw it advertised as from 1961, but there was another entry saying 1976 - that's why I was not sure. Maybe the correct year is 1961 indeed, and it is possible that in the entry where I saw an identical book cover saying that it was from 1976 the advertiser mistook it for the Dover edition. It seems to me now that the Castle edition is from 1961 and Dover 1976.
Thank you very much.
Hi LeMo
This is how my edition actually looks, a little different from the one linked to:
Just in case yours is similar.
93
Hamal
Yep, got it.
Mine is actually like this:
But unfortunatelly I gave up in the dust jacket long ago... it was already very very damaged when I earned it (my Father in Law lives in a very wet and cold rainforest).
Interesting. With books I like I often collect different editions even if just for the different covers!
93
Hamal
In the upstairs room of the pagan shop where I gave a talk last month, they have a small library of donated books. During the interval, my lashtalian colleague AbulDiz took down a copy of the Castle edition of Magick in Theory and Practice - no idea of its date, I have to say.
He showed me the inside front cover where someone had printed "bullshit" in large pencil-written letters.
Not sure whether this was a result of allowing a precocious child to read a book that he/she did not understand, or a reminder that we were visitors on fundamentally pagan ground. 😉
He showed me the inside front cover where someone had printed "bullshit" in large pencil-written letters.
Not sure whether this was a result of allowing a precocious child to read a book that he/she did not understand, or a reminder that we were visitors on fundamentally pagan ground. 😉
I think sneakingly Crowley may have approved of this literary review! LOL
93
Hamal
Copies with similar covers are now up for sale on Ebay:
93
Hamal
I can tell you one thing about this particular edition.
In the mid-60's (the daze of wine and strange drugs), Crowley books were pretty much collector's items and you found them in the used bookstores. There was one outstanding exception. Publishers Clearing House always had this purple- jacketed edition in stock, and usually for about $5.95. The 60's bookstore, The Eye of Horus, was literally founded upon its stock of Magick in theory and Practice as endlessly obtained by US Mail. It sold for $10.00 retail. It was the only book students could get (with any certainty), and we all ended up reading it first - before Book 4 Parts I & II. When we finally discovered Parts I & II, we said, "Well, this certainly helps to explain that first book."
Anyway, during the Dawning of the Age of Aquarius, this was Crowley's only "book-in-print" as far as the mainstream booksellers went - unless you counted "The Great Beast" by Symonds, which also seemed to be usually available.
In the mid-60's (the daze of wine and strange drugs), Crowley books were pretty much collector's items and you found them in the used bookstores. There was one outstanding exception. Publishers Clearing House always had this purple- jacketed edition in stock, and usually for about $5.95.
Dover also published a softbound edition of MIT&P during the '70s and '80s that was readily available and affordable.
indeed, i've a soft spot in my heart (perhaps also my head) for that Dover edition. Dover also had Abramelin - and they fit so nicely together on the shelf of the Dover display at the secondhand bookstore where i toiled away my dissolute youth.
Although I saw the purple-clad edition quite a lot back in the 70s it hasn’t been around my neck of the woods for some time now. There was also a Guild Publishing (a sort of Book Reader’s circle/ Collector’s club) edition of the Routledge & Kegan Paul printing of “Magick” (= MiT&P) around about the same time, maybe a bit later, with almost exactly the same cover & contents which on first casual glance was virtually indistinguishable from the ‘real thing’. This was also significantly a lot cheaper than the publisher’s edition (still is, I believe!) & seemed to be similarly omnipresent for a while.
Neglect not the care of thine dust jackets, for in them alone wilt thy bounty be fulfilled again, again & yeah mayhap possibly once more again
Norma N. Joy Conquest
Not quite the same. Magick consisted of Parts I and II of Book 4 as well as Part III, which was Magick in Theory and Practice.
You are quite right, Mick. Rather a nice little volume all round, in fact, in those bad old days before the big blue breezeblock came to town!
"And this town ain't big enough for the both of us" (- Sparks)
N. Joy, Jamie
before the big blue breezeblock came to town!
I not sure the works were supposed to be published in that way, and so, I am not a big fan of it.
before the big blue breezeblock came to town!
I not sure the works were supposed to be published in that way, and so, I am not a big fan of it.
I would tend to agree re. this big bulky burly bonzo budgetbusting blue breezeblock brick, which hefts the content out so much that it is just the wrong side of being easily manageable & is instead slightly top-heavy and rather sensitive to imbalance, e.g. especially if perched upon one’s lap!
Although HB and whoever else is editorially responsible make an attempt to justify the inclusion of the 4th and final section - to do with The Book of the Law - and justify it as part of a grand scheme realizing A.C.’s original intentions for what was originally going to be Liber ABA (or Book Four), even if this is the case I can’t see any great benefit having been produced by putting it after the previous three. That A.C. may have thought wiser of & reconsidered his original decision might be reflected in the fact that he never made any real attempts to achieve this in his lifetime nor regretted that it had not been done, and was presumably the reason why The Equinox of The Gods (1936) then followed 1929’s MiT&P and which was instead what at one time he foresaw the fourth section might have become.
The decision to include this fourth part makes even less sense particularly since it then goes on to omit the full Old and New (not to mention the Djeridensis) Commentaries, which will then have to be issued separately again at some (probably far-ahead) future date. (This is all quite apart from taking into consideration the “official” compilation, The Law Is For All.) It would then have been better to issue the fourth part as a single volume possibly of a comparable size (with Magick I-III), rather than then having to have more than one. But that in turn would make the Caliphornian’s version of Magick… very similar in appearance and content to the Typhonian's! Oh dear, what a dilemma!
N. Joy
This is the Magick I have. I acquired Yoga and book 4 earlier thankfully and in recent years picked up a blue brick/ABA for the extra bits.
This version has served me well and is an excellent volume to travel with.
The Keegan Paul version is my personal favourite. The intro by KG is of especial interest to anyone interested in the Abbey of Thelema.
the Dover also fits quite well in the manbag!
To save newcomers to A.C., the A.’. A.’. system & the Great Work generally the time and effort of having to read through the whole of the super-size breezeblock Book 4 or even Magick, the entire methodology of the Book may be summed up in one single sentence (from the Postulate given in the Introduction to Part III):
"ANY required Change may be effected by the application of the proper kind and degree of Force in the proper manner through the proper medium to the proper object."
This may look a bit bold & final in a way, like attempts to describe all the complexities of the known Universe as “Forty two” - but it is nevertheless the case, with the rest of it all a matter of detail of the exact “proper” kinds of solve et coagula. Naturally I’m not recommending any neophyte’s skipping their reading of the actual text, nearly all of which is vital and germane to the Great Work. But it may help to set the stone of VITRIOL in some kind of broader general context - unless anyone wishes to disagree and argue with me here, of course? (Then we can get a little heated debate going, as Mrs Merton would say…)
“Dance, laugh, wine, dine, talk & sing/ But those cannot replace what is the Real Thing
It's a lot like playing the violin/ You cannot start off and be Yehudi Menuhin...” (– Amateur Hour)
N. Joy
I suspect AC would give you a razor blade and ask you to go contemplate the use of the word "proper"! 😉
93
Hamal
I don't know what d/j my Castle Books edition originally had. It has blue boards, different than most copies I've seen, I was in High School almost forty years ago when I got mine. A friend of mine found my copy of the Castle Books edition at a used book store in Texas one summer vacation. He bought it for a couple dollars, couldn't make heads or tails of it, and threw it my way.
By 1975 Crowley's "Book of Thoth" had made it to paperback, as had drug-store dime-novel edition of "Moonchild", I was 14-15 when I found those, I'd already read several of Eden Gray's Tarot paperbacks by then, and had a Marseilles tarot cards.
For the record, the 1st Edition of the so-called "blue brick" was no bigger or heavier than Regardie's "Gems From The Equinox", and I've never heard *anyone* piss and moan about it's size, or being top-heavy, or whatever.
Mine too had blue boards, acquired in the late 1960s. It had a purple cover. Gorgeous little book.
Should I assume, then, that my book is from the early 60s ??
Difficult to say if it was from the original edition or a later reprinting; mine, for instance, had the author's name in yellow, not red as in the jacket illustrated in your earlier post. Certainly, the copies of the book that I saw a few years later were different - perfect bound instead of sewn sections, for instance.
perfect bound instead of sewn sections, for instance
Perfect bound seems to be a constant feature of later, cheaper reprints. Although, in some cases, not cheaper at all, just plain inferior.
If you’re referring to my observation about the SIZE, walterfive, (and I don’t know who else you might be referring to), I wasn’t “pissing and moaning” about the offending volume, as you so eloquently and poetically phrase it, just fairly noncommittally I thought passing comment that I find it’s too big for my LAP to comfortably manage. And I’m a big boy, by the way! The first edition was smaller and more in line with the Gems from the Equinox, as you rightfully say. But we were talking about its current manifestation, and it ain’t the first edition that’s around anymore. (Just as well, as it was apparently chocker-Block full with errata!) And I notice you haven’t commented on nor addressed the pointless duplication of the fourth section with The Equinox of The Gods and The Law Is For All, should you really want to piss & moan about something relatively important yourself...
(Incidentally I don’t have a Castle Books edition, blue boards, perfect bound or no.)
I suspect AC would give you a razor blade and ask you to go contemplate the use of the word "proper"! 😉
Ha, ha! Quite so, Hamal, quite so. Except that the repeated use of “proper” was A.C.’s and not mine, of course!
"Nothing in the world is perfect - Grin and bear it silently or yell into my ear/
How they chatter, how they bore us, like some avant-gardish chorus: Just give it back, no questions asked" (Complaints, It’s My Department – the Mael Brothers)
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I still have mine! It's stained and spotted now, and the front end paper was torn out by someone decades ago, but it's still the same one I got when I was 17, one of the few possessions I've kept from my youth.
http://www.amazon.com/Magick-Theory-Practice-Aleister-Crowley/dp/1555217664
93
Hamal
That's the one I have -- but the edges of the pages are untrimmed, which I always thought adds a little bit of character to his edition 😉
Edit: mine actually reads 1991 [e.v.]
I intuit you cannot be referring to the blue brick (or as I prefer to affectionately label it, “the breezeblock”) then, walterfive. It must be either the Castle press book or the Book of Thoth you mentioned earlier. (I would plump for the former.)
Some people would say spots and stains detract from the overall value of a book, but like the occasional scratches with vinyl, for instance, they can also add to the general morphic resonance of the whole thing, as it were. Which is presumably why you have kept and treasured it since you were seventeen. I know the feeling. Ah me possessions!
Here, there are lots of things to do/ And a panoramic view/ Of the universe completely surrounding you/
And Here, you cannot buy souvenirs/ For you’re never going back – never, ever! (Sparks Here in Heaven),
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