Tag: books

The People Have Spoken

In what leather would you prefer to see the two Homer Library editions bound?

  • 54% The new Franklin-style pigskin
  • 34% The new cowhide
  • 11% The original Easton-style cowhide

    There is also considerable enthusiasm for the ability to retroactively back the two Castalia Bindery editions, so we’ll probably get that rolling next week, for the next 2-3 weeks. This will be a useful way of helping us pay for the hubbing tools and the leather-cutting press that we now need to acquire.

    If you are a Bindery backer and you have a religious problem with pigskin, get in touch with me. Due to our great appreciation for your support in helping us get the bindery going, we will arrange to bind your backer editions in the new cowhide. Which, fittingly enough, is something that we can actually do now that we control the production process.

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    Homer in Leather

    The original plan was to print THE ILIAD and THE ODYSSEY in the same Italian cowhide with which we’ve been binding the Library and History books to date. However, after five years of searching, we have finally located quality pigskin leather in the quantities we require and we also have access to some higher-quality cowhide from the same supplier. Hence the poll at the Castalia Library substack concerning the preferences of the backers and prospective retroactive backers.

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    The Narrative is Always Wrong

    James Delingpole actually reads Machiavelli for the first time and discovers that the generally accepted narrative about the Florentine is almost completely false:

    Machiavelli was the victim of a Europe-wide hit job. By the time anyone outside Italy had read The Prince – it wasn’t translated into English til 1640 – Machiavelli’s name had long since become a byword for evil. England’s last Catholic Archbishop of Canterbury Cardinal Pole, who resented his anti-clericism and his rudery towards the Pope, set the ball rolling by declaring him an ‘Enemy of the human race’. Machiavelli’s Christian name – Niccolo – was said to have given the devil his nickname, “Old Nick”. Elizabethan dramatists blamed him as the inspiration for all the scheming and murder that took place in Renaissance Italy. They hated him in France, too, where he was blamed for inspiring the behaviour of Catherine de Medici.

    But what had Machiavelli actually done to deserve all this? Not a lot, as it happens. But enough Renaissance history and literary criticism. I want to conclude by extrapolating a more general truth about the nature of our understanding of the world. And about how the dark rulers who currently lord it over us – the modern equivalent of the Medicis, the Pope, Charles V and the various Italian city states, I suppose – get away so easily with doing to us what they do.

    One of the things we Awake types are often lamenting is the way in which the tiniest, smallest sliver of a fraction of the world’s population – the Cabal; the Predator Class; The Powers That Be; the Satanic Bloodlines; call them what you will – has yet been able to treat us like cattle, or worse than cattle, for generation upon generation. And while obviously, I’m not letting the Cabal off the hook – they really are evil – I do think there’s a degree to which we have invited our own destruction by being so complacent and lazy.

    I’m blaming myself as much as anyone. Especially the person I was before I woke up. There I was, blessed with one of the best educations the world supposedly offers, and yet still, mostly, I remained mired in ignorance because I took too easily for granted what I had been told by my imagined superiors – parents, teachers, the government, ‘experts’, whoever.

    The Machiavelli thing is just one tiny example of this. Here, briefly, I have with luck demonstrated that everything 99.99 per cent of the people who’ve heard of Machiavelli know about one of the bigger names in history, or political philosophy anyway, is a caricature of a travesty of complete nonsense. It’s at best a crass simplification; at worst – probably for the usual reasons of propaganda and political intrigue – a cynical misrepresentation.

    And it happened because, as usual, none of us did our homework. We regurgitated what teacher wanted to hear – Machiavelli bad, m’kay – and the reason teacher wanted to hear it was because he or she hadn’t bothered to do the homework either. Rather than read the actual book, we all went with the received idea of people who hadn’t read the book and took it on trust that the generally accepted narrative was the correct one.

    I am aware that some are dubious about my contention about the importance of the Junior Classics, Castalia Library, UATV, and preserving knowledge for the future. But when one considers the fact that every single backer of the Junior Classics, and every subscriber to Castalia Library, are observably better informed with regards to history, philosophy, science, and religion than even the graduates of some of the most elite college educations in the West, that contention suddenly appears much more soundly based on the available evidence.

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    Ten Must-Read Books

    Fandom Pulse lists ten books it considers integral to understanding the cultural war:

    Our culture is becoming increasingly illiterate, with most attempts at any discourse becoming shouting fruitless insults rather than attempting to build a philosophical or moral goal. A lot of this is the impact of social media and video entertainment, boiling down everything into gotcha rhetoric for dopamine hits one receives from likes on the internet.

    The Christian conservative needs to arm himself with understanding and knowledge to transcend the infantility and ignoramity of the culture, and so we at Fandom Pulse have curated a list of ten books for anyone who truly wishes to fight against the social justice agenda in the current culture must read if he wants to work to make positive change in the culture.

    Our list begins here:

    SJWs Always Lie by Vox Day

    Vox Day’s 2015 manifesto serves as a tactical handbook for those facing social justice attacks in professional and personal settings. Day, a figure who has experienced cancel culture firsthand, outlines what he calls the “SJW attack sequence” and provides specific defensive strategies for those targeted by online mobs. The book’s value lies in its practical approach to understanding how modern callout campaigns operate, the psychology behind them, and concrete steps for defending oneself against reputation destruction. His breakdown of how institutional capture occurs and his “Three Laws of SJWs” provide a framework for recognizing patterns in cultural conflicts that continue to play out across institutions.

    For the purposes of better understanding the enemy and its aims, I would have included Utilitarianism by John Stuart Mill as well as Tragedy and Hope by Carroll Quigley. It’s also worth noting the way in which social justice has been transformed into “woke” and then promptly misapplied as “woke right” to attempt to discredit the most effective opponents of social justice is a rather remarkable demonstration of how Clown World utilizes the Narrative to conceals its precepts and direct its controlled opposition against its genuine opponents.

    I was always suspicious of those who leaped to endorse the term “woke” to replace “SJW” and those suspicions were confirmed as soon as Clown World’s pet “conservatives” began to make use of it to attack the same nationalists and Christians that they’ve been attacking since the closeted clown and conservative gatekeeper William F. Buckley drew a hard line between conservatism and nationalism in the early 1960s.

    I have never been a conservative because conservatives are unprincipled frauds whose primary purpose is to control the opposition and throw the game.

    Anyhow, there has been some demand for a leatherbound edition of SJWAL, and while we won’t make it part of the Library subscription, we may make it available as a one-off if there is sufficient demand, most likely including SJWADD as well.

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    Spring Library Sale

    First, Castalia Library is announcing a surprise Spring Library sale made possible by our finally merging the warehouses and getting an accurate count on our entire stock. We also knew we had some additional books in Alabama, but in the aftermath of losing our good friend at Cryptofashion, we didn’t know how many we had and which books were there until everything was shipped to the current warehouse and counted correctly.

    The sale has only been announced here ahead of being announced publicly Monday on VP and elsewhere, so if you want to make sure you obtain one of the less-available books, you should probably take action pretty quickly. All of the books are in stock at the warehouse and available for immediate shipment.

    The 11 books that were previously out of stock, all of which are cowhide Library editions, are:

    The sale price on all 11 volumes is $79.99 while supplies last. No subscription or coupon is necessary. The sale price includes shipping. It’s a good opportunity to round out your collection if you’re missing anything, or pick up an additional volume of interest or two.

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    The End of Monster Hunter

    May also mean the end of Baen Books, if Fandom Pulse’s logic is correct:

    Larry Correia has made a Facebook post stating he won’t even begin writing the next Monster Hunter International books until 2026, which means a two-year dry spell of revenue for the embattled publisher. However, it gets even worse, as Correia has stated that this book will likely be his last in the series.

    But never fear, there are still monsters and they still need to be hunted. Or, at least, controlled, which is why Monster Control Incorporated is on the job and is being serialized every week at Sigma Game.

    I’ve been walking my crush home since last week to protect her from all the creeps walking around. Next week I’m going to introduce myself to her.

    Right now, though, I was content to stay in the shadows, watching from a distance as she made her way down the dimly lit sidewalk. Her name was Elise, and she worked the late shift at the diner on 5th and Main. Every night at 11:30, she stepped out, adjusted her bag over her shoulder, and started the six-block walk to her apartment. And every night, I followed.

    Not in a creepy way. At least, I hoped not. The city had gotten bad lately—muggers, weirdos, and worse. The kind of things most people didn’t believe in until it was too late. I’d seen the news reports: Missing Persons. Unexplained Attacks. Animal Maulings. The cops didn’t have a clue. But I did.

    I knew what was out there.

    Elise turned the corner, her fair hair bright under the glow of a flickering streetlight. She was small, and delicate, but moved with a quiet confidence that made my chest tighten. I kept my distance, staying far enough back that she wouldn’t notice me, close enough that I could reach her in seconds if something went wrong.

    Something went wrong a lot these days.

    Tonight, the air smelled like rain and something else—something musky and wild. My fingers twitched at my sides. I didn’t carry a gun. Guns were too loud, too messy. Instead, I had a knife sheathed at my belt and a length of silver chain wrapped around my wrist.

    Elise hummed softly to herself, oblivious. She had no idea what was coming.

    Then I heard it—the low, guttural growl from the alley up ahead.

    You’ve never seen a monster hunter quite like Horace “Race” Scrubb before. He puts the L in “professional”.

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    The Man Who Loved His City

    A lovely little essay on Niccolo Machiavelli and his love for his native city of Florence:

    The tradition of political realism has a reputation for being pessimistic—that is, for seeing and expecting the worst from the world, its individuals, and its states. Yet, despite all his realism, Niccolò Machiavelli was a romantic about his city. He famously said in a letter to his friend, diplomat Francesco Vettori, “I love my city more than my own soul.”

    In 1512, the Medici retook Florence from Piero Soderini, and removed Machiavelli from his diplomatic position. The following year, they accused him of conspiring against them and tortured him for three weeks. After this, Machiavelli retired to his family home in Sant’Andrea, and never ceased to lament his “great and continued malignity of fortune” of not being able to contribute to his city’s administration.

    Exiled from praxis, Machiavelli theorised about politics. He wrote two historical works—Discourses on Livy and Florentine Histories—to speak to the ways in which he thought that the Italy of his day should aspire to the glory of ancient Rome and the ways in which it failed to do so. He never rejected his being a modern man, and he did not believe that Renaissance Italy could imitate ancient Rome in all respects. However, he pushed his fellow citizens to take inspiration from it and to consider carefully that they share something with their past: it’s not “as if heaven, sun, elements, and men had varied in motion, order, and power from what they were in antiquity.”

    In what you may rightly suspect to be closely related news, Castalia Library has announced the April-May-June book for the History subscription.

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    Defectus Eclipsus

    The mystery of phantom time continues as TEMPUS OCCULTUM is now up to Episode 14.

    The door of the observatory creaked open, and I started, hastily covering Brother Clemens’s manuscript with a star chart. But it was the old astronomer himself who entered, looking unsurprised to find me there.

    “I thought I might find you here,” he said, closing the door behind him. “Your meeting with our visitor from Rome has concluded, I see.”

    “Yes,” I replied, my voice tight with excitement and anxiety. “Brother Clemens, I’ve been comparing your calculations with a reference provided by Doctor Visconti, and I’ve found—”

    “Discrepancies,” he finished for me, sinking onto a stool with a sigh. “Yes, I imagined you would.”

    “Then you’ve known? About the falsified eclipse records, the impossible comet appearances?”

    He nodded slowly. “For many years, Brother Lukas. But knowing and proving are different matters. And proving and revealing different still.”

    “But this is extraordinary evidence!” I exclaimed, gesturing to the open books. “If Halley’s Comet appeared in 530 and again in 684, with only 154 years between—”

    “Then the chronology is compressed,” Clemens said, “and the missing years must lie somewhere in that interval. Yes, I reached the same conclusion decades ago.”

    “Why did you never publish your findings? This overturns our entire understanding of medieval history!”

    The old man’s expression was a mixture of resignation and suppressed excitement. “Publication requires approval, Brother Lukas. And such approval would never be granted for work that undermines the established chronology. Men like Visconti ensure that.”

    “The guardians of true time,” I murmured.

    “They have many names throughout history,” Clemens replied. “But their purpose remains constant: to maintain the fiction, to guard the secret that time itself has been manipulated.”

    Also, there is a sneak preview of the stamp design for one of the two volumes of the Castalia Library edition of A SEA OF SKULLS.

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    Insufficient Brutality

    GRRM explains why he’s still not finished with “the curse of his life”:

    Game of Thrones novelist George R.R. Martin recently shared a new update on where he was with the next book in his Song of Ice and Fire, The Winds of Winter, and described completing it “the curse of my life.”

    Speaking with Time, Martin was asked for an update on the novel after he did press for Colossal Biosciences and its genetic altering of DNA to create what they are calling dire wolves. He answered, “That’s the curse of my life here. There’s no doubt that Winds of Winter is 13 years late. I’m still working on it. I have periods where I make progress and then other things divert my attention and suddenly I’m working for-. I have a deadline for one of the HBO shows. I have something else to do.”

    “But, you know, the two things are not connected. I swear,” he continued. “I open a book store and people say, ‘Why is George R.R. Martin opening a book store? He could be writing Winds of Winter.’ And now we’re getting this. I don’t actually work in the book store. I own it. I hired people to do it. If you go into the book store, yes, a lot of my books are there, which I’ve signed, a lot of books by other people. I’m not going to ring up your register. I’m not going to order what books are coming in.”

    He’s actually correct. Martin’s problem isn’t distractions, it’s the technical corner into which he wrote himself. Even AI can’t really help him finish the story properly, because he has far too many perspective characters. Ironically, given his reputation courtesy of the Red Wedding, Martin’s problem is that he’s too delicate.

    If I was tasked with finishing ASOIAF, I could do it, but at a cost that would upset a lot of fans because I would kill off two-thirds of the perspective characters with either sorcery, a plague, or by having the White Walkers get a lot further south than Martin appears to have wanted to permit them to reach. There are other possibilities too, but if he doesn’t get rid of most of the perspective characters, he’s not going to be able to finish the series.

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