The Great Book of Magical Art, Hindu Magic And East Indian Occultism and The Book of Secret Hindu, Ceremonial, And Talismanic Magic. In One Volume.
Chicago, IL: The de Laurence Company, Inc., 1939. Fourteenth Edition. Hardcover. Large Quarto. (8 x 11 inches) 636 pp. Maroon faux leather with gilt title, etc. to cover and spine, frontis photo portrait of L. W. de Laurence. Illustrated. A massive book 'by' Lauron William de Laurence (1868 - 1936), renowned book pirate, plagiarist, and publisher of occult literature. De Laurence was notorious for taking other people's works and reissuing them under his own name (sometimes re-titling them in the process). Despite his rogueish eccentricities de Laurence played an important part in the occult history of the USA: he was a pioneer in selling occult books and supplies by mail order, and the cheap "Pow Wow" books and other books of simple magic which he published were surprisingly well received, and he is quite revered in some quarters. The title of this particular volume says 'Hindu' and 'East Indian' but in fact it is largely a grimoire of Western ritual magic, taken from a variety of sources including Francis Barrett's Magus, the works of Agrippa et al. Its odd title and genesis aside, it sold widely and was probably one of the few books that was widely used for actual magical practice in the USA in the twentieth century until the boom in occult publishing in the late 1960s and 1970s made other texts available. De Laurence had a typically eccentric attitude when it came to identifying editions of his books: in some cases he would reprint them endlessly over decades without changing copyright data, in others he overstated the number of editions that there had been, presumably to give the book "best-seller status." This particular volume is an odd mix of both. It is a stated "fourteenth edition" from 1939, and while no-one knows how many editions there were between the first edition of 1915 and the "fourteenth" of 1939, in reality it was almost certainly less than a handful. However, he seems to have reprinted the "fourteenth edition" numerous times, without changing the edition or the date. This particular volume is clearly more modern - unfortunately it is impossible to say with certainty, but we would guess it is probably from the 1970s. At first glance the volume appears almost "as new" however about a dozen pages have minimal highlighting and a little marginalia. This is really quite unobtrusive - in fact we weren't aware it was there until a final check through after first cataloguing it. Very light rubbing to covers and edges, faintest of bruising to spine ends, tiny light bump to front cover fore-edge, page edges unevenly age toned with slight darkening to corners, internally bright. If it were not for the small amount of highlighting and annotation it would rate at near Fine. (no dust jacket issued). Item #65766
Sold