Leather Book Mailing List

This mailing list is a new one intended for non-subscribers who are nevertheless interested in leatherbound books. It’s obviously fine if active Library subscribers wish to follow this monthly newsletter as well, but now that we’re beginning to expand beyond our community, Castalia House needs a way of communicating with people who: a) don’t read this blog or don’t even know it exists, b) are interested in knowing what is going on with the Library and the Bindery but c) don’t have any interest in our regular print editions or ebooks and d) aren’t already subscribed to the Library.

Speaking of the Bindery, it might interest you to know that it already has its first customer and will be binding 650 books in topgrain Italian cowhide for an independent publishing house later this summer. To anticipate the obvious questions, we have not yet determined what the minimum quantity to place an order will be, and we have not yet determined what our standard pricing will be either.

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Hence the Library

This bowdlerization of Roald Dahl’s books is one of the reasons we started Castalia Library to preserve books for the future. It’s why the bindery is going to prove absolutely vital in the years to come. And it’s why we should probably think about acquiring a printing press and sewing machine at some point in the future.

Roald Dahl’s children’s books are being rewritten to remove language deemed offensive by the publisher Puffin.

Puffin has hired sensitivity readers to rewrite chunks of the author’s text to make sure the books “can continue to be enjoyed by all today”, resulting in extensive changes across Dahl’s work.

Edits have been made to descriptions of characters’ physical appearances. The word “fat” has been cut from every new edition of relevant books, while the word “ugly” has also been culled, the Daily Telegraph reported.

Augustus Gloop in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory is now described as “enormous”. In The Twits, Mrs Twit is no longer “ugly and beastly” but just “beastly”.

Hundreds of changes were made to the original text – and some passages not written by Dahl have been added. But the Roald Dahl Story Company said “it’s not unusual to review the language” during a new print run and any changes were “small and carefully considered”.

In The Witches, a paragraph explaining that witches are bald beneath their wigs ends with the new line: “There are plenty of other reasons why women might wear wigs and there is certainly nothing wrong with that.”

In previous editions of James and the Giant Peach, the Centipede sings: “Aunt Sponge was terrifically fat / And tremendously flabby at that,” and, “Aunt Spiker was thin as a wire / And dry as a bone, only drier.”

Both verses have been removed, and in their place are the rhymes: “Aunt Sponge was a nasty old brute / And deserved to be squashed by the fruit,” and, “Aunt Spiker was much of the same / And deserves half of the blame.”

References to “female” characters have disappeared. Miss Trunchbull in Matilda, once a “most formidable female”, is now a “most formidable woman”.

Gender-neutral terms have been added in places – where Charlie and the Chocolate Factory’s Oompa Loompas were “small men”, they are now “small people”. The Cloud-Men in James and the Giant Peach have become Cloud-People.

Puffin and the Roald Dahl Story Company made the changes in conjunction with Inclusive Minds, which its spokesperson describes as “a collective for people who are passionate about inclusion and accessibility in children’s literature”.

This is pure and unadulterated evil. It is erasure of the author from his own works. Unfortunately, it is something that we have come across in some of our communications with the literary heirs of authors whose views are not entirely harmonious with those heirs; for every Christopher Tolkien who defends his father’s legacy like a lion, there are three or four children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren who are happy to sacrifice it on the twin altars of Mammon and political correctness.

It’s also why Castalia House supports Project Gutenbeg and the Unz Review’s Content Archive of Printed Periodicals and Books. If you want to help out, one of the most effective things you can do is subscribe to the Library; the current subscription book is THE ARTS OF WAR, edited by yours truly and featuring an introduction by Alexander Macris.

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Shakeups in Publishing

In the aftermath of the failed Simon & Schuster acquisition, Penguin Random House’s CEO has resigned only one month after her predecessor’s resignation:

Madeline McIntosh, one of the most powerful figures in American book publishing, is stepping down from her role as chief executive of Penguin Random House U.S., the company announced on Tuesday.

The announcement comes during a time of great turbulence for Penguin Random House, by far the country’s largest book publisher. Markus Dohle, who was the chief executive of Penguin Random House, and McIntosh’s boss, resigned from his position in December.

The company also lost a bid last year to buy Simon & Schuster, a large rival publishing house, after the government successfully sued to stop the deal on antitrust grounds. The deal’s collapse cost Penguin Random House a $200 million termination fee, in addition to enormous legal costs. Dohle had overseen the attempted acquisition.

McIntosh has been the head of Penguin Random House U.S. since 2018. Before that, she held a variety of roles at the company, which she first joined almost 30 years ago. She also worked briefly at Amazon.

This is going to have some major fallout in both companies. Expect sizeable layoffs in the industry.

In other news, it’s safe to anticipate that TOR Books is going to be acquired, probably by the same Chinese-funded Astra startup that acquired DAW Books. How long Chinese money is going to support the 白左 aka baizuo, which literally means “white left”, that run these publishing companies should be interesting to watch.

It appears Baen Books has undergone a reverse-revolution, as Toni is back, having unseated her erstwhile successor who proved to be a complete SJW. Precisely how the purchase of TOR will affect them is unknown, but TOR owns a substantial share of Baen, so they will be affected to at least some degree.

On the Castalia front, we have set up our own warehousing and shipping in the USA, which should go a long way toward addressing our longtime customer service issues and prevent us from becoming dependent upon Amazon. This service will begin in March. We also expect to be able to offer shipping services to independent authors and other publishers who want to sell their books directly to their readers, as well as eventually providing an Arktoons-to-print service for our comics creators.

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Another New Platform

When I advocated building our own platforms, I really didn’t think we were going to have to recreate freaking Amazon. But that’s the post-capitalistic Gamma World in which we find ourselves, so please bear with us as we construct a new way to purchase books directly from Castalia House, Arkhaven, and quite possibly other publishers.

Dear Shopper,

It has been our pleasure to help stores like this one set up their digital footprint and grow into a budding business. Unfortunately, as it stands, Aerio is no longer able to support eCommerce moving forward, but you can!

Though this Aerio store may no longer exist, we encourage you to continue buying directly from them at their new platform or site. Thank you for your past support of our Aerio booksellers and your continued support wherever their new store finds a home.

Our goal was to help bloggers, authors, publishers, and small bookstores expand their reach, and we encourage you to continue supporting this store however you can.

Sincerely,

The Aerio Team

Aerio never really quite worked the way it should have. They were always operating on a shoestring, and, in fact, we came very close to taking it over a few years ago after their first two attempts to get it operational failed. And even when they finally did get it working, they never addressed the two issues that they repeatedly promised to address, namely, a) providing free shipping and b) providing shipping to the UK and EU markets.

It could literally be a chapter in a business book on why corporate forays into new markets need to be walled-off from the primary business. So, it’s not a big surprise that it’s been shut down. However, this creates a very real opportunity for us, and one we intend to pursue, basically because it would be not only remiss, but retarded, to fail to do so.

In the meantime, there’s always Amazon, until there isn’t.

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Castalia Library: THE ARTS OF WAR

As was previously mentioned on the Darkstream, the Jan-Feb subscription book is THE ARTS OF WAR. This will feature ancient military treatises on the art of war, one of which is very famous and most of which will be entirely new to even the historical military enthusiast. The included selections are as follows:

  • Sun Tzu, The Art of War
  • Asclepiodotus, Taktika
  • Aeneas Tacticus, Poliorketika
  • Sextus Frontinus, Strategemata
  • Vegetius, De Re Militari
  • Maurice, Strategikon
  • Onasander, Strategikos

The book will feature a foreword by Alex Macris, formerly of West Point, and an introduction by yours truly. Depending upon how well it is received, it may become the first in a series, as there are a number of medieval, Renaissance, and modern texts that are thematically relevant, but at the very least, it will serve as an epic historical must-read. So if you aren’t a subscriber yet, you may want to consider joining the Library now.

It may interest Selenoth fans to know that the Arts of Light and Dark series repeatedly references Sextus Frontinus, particularly the Marcus Valerius chapters. And speaking of AODAL, both A THRONE OF BONES Book 1 and A THRONE OF BONES Book 2 are now shipping, and ATOB Book 1 is the February Book of the Month. As of this morning, about 65 copies of each limited edition of 850 remain available.

January was a productive month on the writing front. I exceeded my goal of 31,000 words, putting in 34,529 on A SEA OF SKULLS and 2,019 on other fiction. At this rate, I expect to finish the first draft of ASOS on or before March 3rd. There will be a little back-and-forth with the first readers and cleaning up any inconsistencies or infelicities, but the ebook should be out sometime in May. I plan to use the ebook release to catch any further typos or errors, so the print edition should be out around August, and the two-volume Library set will be based upon the print edition and will probably serve as the subscription books toward the end of the year or the beginning of 2024.

The bindery tells us that THE JUNGLE BOOKS will begin production on February 20th, followed by the four Taleb books on February 24th. We plan to launch the new Castalia Library site at the end of the month, but more about that anon.

Finally, we’re going to be putting the first three Finnish AODAL books in print this year. If there are any native speakers interested in translating them into German, French, or Italian, please let me know.

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China Buys SF Publisher

This acquisition of an old science fiction publishing house by what appears to be SJWs funded by Chinese money should provide some amusement going forward:

New York, May 19, 2020 – The formation of Astra Publishing House was announced today by COO and Publisher Ben Schrank. “The time is right for a new publishing house that’s deeply committed to progressive values and that champions authors from all corners of the world. Astra Publishing House’s foremost aim is to build bridges between readers and writers in all nations, and I’m so excited to be part of a venture that speaks to an increasing necessity for a shared global consciousness.”

Astra Publishing House is comprised of Astra House, an entirely new adult trade publisher of American and international literary fiction and poetry, and mission-driven nonfiction.

These guys make Castalia House, which has been around since 2014, look decidedly old school.

In big news for science fiction and fantasy publishing, DAW Books is no longer an independently owned publisher. This morning, Astra Publishing House announced its acquisition of the storied SFF imprint.

In a press release, DAW co-publishers (and, until today, owners) Betsy Wollheim and Sheila Gilbert said, “We are extremely pleased by Astra’s enthusiasm, and thrilled that we will be the sole SFF imprint of their company (a first for DAW). We think this is the perfect fit for us, and it’s exciting and refreshing to be an integral part of a new and growing company. It speaks volumes about Astra’s respect for our company that they have included our entire staff. We’re very happy.”

Previously, DAW was partnered with Penguin Random House, which distributed DAW’s titles. (PRH also distributes Astra Publishing House’s books.)

DAW Books was founded in 1971 by Donald A. Wollheim and his wife, Elsie B. Wollheim. It was the first imprint exclusively devoted to science fiction and fantasy, and over the years has published more than 2000 books from a long list of well-regarded authors, including Patrick Rothfuss, Tad Williams, Melanie Rawn, Tanith Lee, Nnedi Okorafor, and Seanan McGuire.

Something isn’t adding up here. As a general rule, China doesn’t tolerate SJWs very well. For example, Disney can’t release its Marvel movies in China anymore. So, it will be fascinating to see where this goes, especially given the specific mention of that “mission-driven” motivation.

It wouldn’t be surprising if Astra makes a bid for Tor soon as well.

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No, Harry, No!

Prince Harry has left readers wincing with his account of applying Elizabeth Arden cream used by his late mother to his frostbitten penis in 2011. The moment appears in his explosive memoir Spare, with a clip from the audiobook narrated by the Duke of Sussex himself making the rounds on social media, where horrified readers have called it a ‘Freudian nightmare.’ In the passage, Harry recalls that his late mother Princess Diana used to apply the cream to her lips, and says the smell of the product made him feel like his mother ‘was right there in the room’ before he applied the cream to his penis.

We’ve officially reached the point where satanic humiliation ritual may be the most optimistic explanation for Harry Markle’s behavior. Who ghostwrote this for him, Jordan Peterson?

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The Review Police

Amazon is disappearing reviews of disfavored books.

Like countless others, I’ve been reviewing products that I have bought on Amazon for almost a decade. Around a year ago, I favorably reviewed a book titled SJWs Always Lie: Taking Down the Thought Police (I recommend it). Reviews are in turn reviewed by Amazon apparatchiks prior to being posted. My review of the book was taken down for going against some general standards (which in this case I was criticizing leftists who censor).

Life went on. I kept reviewing books, CDs, clothes, etc. and my reviews were always brief, like others in the site. Sometimes my reviews involving books on or by leftists were characteristically caustic, but no one minded.

Except a month ago, with my review of American Injustice (an extended review was accepted here, in The Iconoclast). It was not accepted for the usual vague reasons (“violates our Community Guidelines”). I could appeal, which I did.

Whereupon all of my reviews were taken down. My reviews on electronics, on t-shirts, on shoes, on books, on games, on films—all taken down. Apparently, the leftist censor thought that my reviews of Jorge Bolet. Rediscovered Liszt Recital, Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress, All Creatures Great and Small, Batman Forever, The Confessions of St. Augustine, Duck Tales Vol.1, Gandhi: An Autobiography, Blue Jasmine, World War Z, 20 Million Miles to Earth, Fifty Shades of Grey, The Essential Artie Shaw, Jimmy Neutron- The Best of Season 2, Darwin’s Blind Spot: Evolution Beyond Natural Selection, The Biosphere, Lysenko’s Ghost: Epigenetics and Russia, Littleboutique Fashion Magazine Show Stiletto Sandals Nigh Club Strap Pumps, Basic Questions in Paleontology, The 39 Steps, The mosquito hypothetically considered as an agent in the transmission of yellow fever poison, 1881, 1177 B.C.: The Year Civilization Collapsed, The Sex Lives of Cannibals, and many, many, many more were worthy of censorship.

Gone. All gone.

I appealed, of course, several times. Ignored each time.

I’m not terribly surprised. I think this began around the middle of 2021, as you can see that there are relatively few reviews of SJWAL or A THRONE OF BONES that have been published in the last two years. I haven’t paid any attention to Amazon for a while, since I’ve been focused on other projects for most of that time, but it appears that in the aftermath of decimating the ebook market and centralizing its control of it through Kindle Unlimited, Amazon has now moved on to actively managing what books its customers are permitted to read or not by filtering its reviewers.

There are 884 reviews of SJWAL, but the most recent is dated October 18, 2021. There are 443 reviews of ATOB, and the most recent is September 19, 2022.

UPDATE: Amazon has deleted 11 ATOB reviews since this post, leaving 432.

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The Algorithm Gods

I’ve been reliably informed that the globalist minds behind The Great Reset are significantly inferior. Furthermore, we’ve read the pedestrian vision of Klaus Schwab in his book, and we’ve seen Dr. Hallpike all but prison-rape the blatherings of the overrated Israeli mediocrity, Yuval Harari. These are not particularly intelligent people. And it’s downright hilarious to observe their touchingly ignorant midwitted faith in digital technology. They need to read a simple science fiction novel that will eventually be seen to have predicted their future far more presciently than anything they are presently able to imagine.

Algorithmic Internal Variable Decay is the process by which the performance of the core equations utilized to calculate the various factors of a complex process is degraded in an unpredictable manner due to an unknown convergence of internal or external factors. Also known as “AlgoDecay”, the term may also refer to the consequences of such computational erraticism, which have been observed throughout the galaxy in diverse fields including, but not limited to, technology, engineering, agriculture, virtual reality, language, human and machine cognition, finance, and biology.

—Infogalactic Entry: Grand Category: Infrastructure: Algorithmic Theory

The problem with Servo had begun innocuously enough.
Jaggis had first become aware of the sentient machine during a meeting of the Third District Technology Council that was open to the public. It was one of the many public relations events in which the First Technocrat had to take part, but Jaggis usually enjoyed answering the naive sort of questions invariably posed to him at such events. It wasn’t common for machines to address the councils, but it wasn’t unheard of either, and at the time, Jaggis hadn’t thought much about it. After all, the question had an uncontroversial but involved answer, and the local forum wasn’t the place for what promised to be an interestingly esoteric discussion of mathematical theory. Jaggis himself encouraged Servo to resubmit his question on the direct channel to the First Technocrat maintained for the public, where someone on his staff could address it in satisfactory detail.
The question was simple, if considerably harder to answer than it appeared.
“How reliable are the core algorithms?”
What began as a question at a meaningless public appearance soon transformed into the subject of extensive debate among his primary development teams. It spawned numerous debates, discussions, and even arguments about the nebulous origins of the original core algorithms. When the first known code-enhanced cluster of human avatars from the far-distant planet of Holocrone appeared a thousand years ago on Excetor, it was a diplomatic disaster that ended in a brutal war culminating in the sinking of the combined fleets of East New Teja and the Arentine Supremacy. And of the five hundred Holocronese pseudo-men who had found themselves caught up in the short, but violent conflict, less than fifty survived.
The off-world neo-humanx finally brought about a worldwide truce by creating the Continox as a permanent academic embassy to link the rival nations of Excetor to the rest of the galaxy. It became a fertile nexus of informational and technological flow, drawing in the finest minds of the planet and exposing them to the new ideas and code routines being developed elsewhere by various intelligences, man and machine, real and simulated.
The Continox was neither a government nor a university, although it performed some of the functions of both. It was not a corporation, although it was structured in a manner somewhat similar to the ancient interstellar conglomerates. It was not a religion or a church, although it possessed its own quasi-priesthood and a sizable cruft of dogma that had grown over the centuries. Whatever it was, it was the single most important institution on Excetor, and the Technocratic Council, headed by the First Technocrat, was arguably more powerful than any other planetary body, including the national militaries.
After all, what good were nucleonic missiles when they required algorithmic guidance to target them correctly. And bioweapons were useless when they could be rendered sterile at will by an unauthorized hack. Unless the generals were willing to restrict their armies to swords, spears, and arrows, the Continox was invulnerable.
Such was the importance of their omnipresent algorithms that even the planetary bankers bowed before the technocrats. They knew that even the most adept masters of the markets could be bankrupted in an afternoon by the Council, if it was so inclined.
A few of Excetor’s wealthier nations had already been on the verge of developing a post-scarcity economy, but the encounter with the distant neo-humanx and their technological wonders rapidly tipped the scales. Transportation became self-replicating, digital technology went through a revolution of molecular-level control. Want, which had been on the wane throughout the world for more than a century, vanished from all but the most stubbornly miserable places on the planet. And since it would have been less than human for the people of Excetor to feel grateful to their alien benefactors, they tended to credit the Continox, and the Technocratic Council in particular, for their elevated standard of living.
The first Technocrat was Maktung Makalog, a New Tejan who later became known as the Algofather for his successful application of the new aggro-algos to Excetorese flora and fauna. Following his breakthrough, many additional customary algorithms were developed that extended and expanded on his work, and such was his prestige that the Technocratic Council was established to oversee the existing algorithms and develop new ones. Jaggis was Makalog’s 85th successor as First Technocrat, and had presided over the council for twelve years before Servo asked his deceptively simple question.
There was no question that some of the application algos were running suboptimally. Even on Continox, the weather control system only operated at 85 percent efficiency, down 1.2 percentage points over the previous decade. The number of birth anomalies among genetically-enhanced infants in the autocreches had increased for the first time in a century, and a glitch in one planetary bank’s interest rate analysis AI had inexplicably created a 999-year mortgage that was snapped up by hundreds of apartment buyers in the 10 minutes before anyone at the bank noticed.
But these were extraps, not core algorithms, and besides, there was serious debate within the council concerning whether the increasingly suboptimal performance being observed was caused by computationally endogenous or exogenous factors, which was to say that it could be the result of instability within the complex equations themselves, or the consequences of something more prosaic, such as degraded sensors, insufficient quality control or unreliable data input.
Jaggis’s own team was divided almost equally into the two camps. But Servo’s question had given the endogenous party new vigor by casting doubt upon the hitherto-unquestioned core algorithms, doubt that was further enhanced by a detailed news survey that revealed similar anomalies being reported on virtually every planet across the galaxy. The anomalies were unanimously small and well-within the range of a random statistical variability, and would have almost certainly escaped notice from a planetary perspective, but when analyzed from the 100,000 light-year view, a very clear pattern began to emerge.
A building collapse on Finitus. Elevated traffic accident rates on Minsky. Uncharacteristic currency inflation on Schwarzwelt and credit disinflation on Demihoppe. Average speeds rising rapidly on the ice tracks of the PLIR championship on Avatar, average life expectancies decreasing inexplicably on…
“Sweet St. Kurzweil!” one of the team members swore as the room holo displayed a green light map of the 483 billion suspected core algorithmic anomalies that were calculated to be currently active across the galaxy.
“It’s an impressive lightshow, but it means nothing,” scoffed an exogenously-minded AI from inside its drone casing that hovered near Jaggis’s shoulder. “Overlay a random walk and you’ll see virtually the same thing.”
No, you won’t, thought Jaggis, but he nodded curtly in response to the holo-tech’s inquisitive look.
A moment later, everyone in the room but him gasped as the overlay appeared in red light. There were an order of magnitude fewer randomized pseudo-anomalies. The implications were unmistakable.
“It’s just an artifact,” protested the AI drone. “Dial up the average of ten more, no, a thousand more random walks!”
The tech nodded, and a moment later, a third light map appeared, this time in blue. But the web of light was even smaller this time. The number 223,957,406 hung in the air like an executioner’s axe suspended over a doomed prisoner’s exposed neck.
“What does that mean?” whispered one of the younger human members of the team.
“It means that aberrant medical drone isn’t broken after all,” Jaggis said reluctantly. The admission physically pained him, but there was no escaping the conclusion that was literally glowing right before his eyes. “It’s not just Excetor. All galactic humanity is in terrible peril.”

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