Tag: books

Why We’re Not on Amazon

Don’t expect to find Castalia House books on Kindle anytime soon.

Hello,

During a recent audit of your account, we found content and/or activities that are in violation of our Terms and Conditions. Therefore, we are closing your account effective immediately.

Examples include attempting to publish books that violate our Content Guidelines.

As part of the termination process:

  • We will close your KDP account
  • You’re no longer eligible to receive any outstanding royalties
  • You’ll no longer have access to your account. This includes, editing your titles, viewing your reports and accessing any other information within your account
  • All of your published titles will be removed from sale on Amazon

Additionally, as per our Terms and Conditions, you aren’t allowed to open any new KDP accounts.

You can find our Terms and Conditions here: https://kdp.amazon.com/terms-and-conditions

If you believe you have received this message in error or you have information about your account that you would like us to consider, please reply to this email.

Regards,
Amazon KDP

The action that was in violation of Amazon’s Terms and Conditions was attempting to publish the Kindle edition of A THRONE OF BONES. They kept asking us to provide a letter from the previous publisher and ignoring both a) the fact that we are the previous publisher and b) we are the publisher of both the paperback and hardcover editions of the book. It was particularly strange, because they accepted, and published, both SUMMA ELVETICA and A SEA OF SKULLS.

This isn’t a problem; Amazon’s sales have been irrelevant to us for the last two years and we were only beginning to put some of our books back up on Kindle in order to make it easier on people who are still unaware that Amazon is systematically destroying the book industry. But it underlines how absolutely and utterly foolish it is for authors or publishers to rely upon Amazon to sell their books anymore.

Castalia will not only survive, but continue to thrive. That which failed to kill us only serves to make us stronger and more independent.

Also, due to a minor technical issue, if you’re buying something on the Arkhaven store, choose the VISA/Mastercard option, not the Credit Card option, until further notice.

DISCUSS ON SG

A Library Survey

We already know what the next book in the Castalia Library/Libraria subscription series will be, and will announce it on the first of March. We’re also working on obtaining the rights to some works we are very confident will please everyone. And we know the two volumes of A SEA OF SKULLS will be in the mix later this year after we get the regular hardcover edition out. But we’re interested in hearing from you what other books might be of interest to you this year; here are some of the books we’re considering.

We are also offering a first look at some very rare books indeed.

Also on the Library stack today is the seventh and final part of Oman’s first chapter. And while I agree with the great historian with regards to the chief lesson of history, thanks to our advantage of 95 years of hindsight, I think we can safely conclude Oman’s hopes for the “new and vigorous age” were dashed to pieces, and that the Pessimists were entirely correct about the prospects for modernity.

From the outlook of the ordinary man we are no longer at the end of a feeble and moribund Christendom, but at the start of a new and vigorous age, full of ideals, moral, cultural, philosophical, religious, and materialistic. As I said in an earlier page, it would take a whole book to discuss the question how far the Revival of Learning, the Reformation, the discovery of America and the Cape Route to the Indies, or scientific discovery which knocked the Geocentric Theory on the head, were each of them responsible for the new historical perspective of the civilized world. But the change was complete and astounding; and the foundations of the modern ways of thought had been laid, while the “Seven Ages” in their depressing series had dropped out of men’s conception of the Universe. A new visualization of the world had begun…

The Pessimist, incidentally, has enjoyed one of those periods in which he is able to snarl “I told you so” to a disconcerted world. But all down history the Pessimist has never had the last word. I prefer to range myself with the Optimists, and hope to survive long enough to see another vista of hope before my own generation has passed away.

I know not whether the change of perspective will come by means of the League of Nations, which has provoked so much enthusiasm in so many quarters, or whether it will be the result of a saner nationalism which can combine true patriotism with a proper regard for the rights of one’s neighbours. All I know is that the world-mind works by action and reaction, and that a swing of the pendulum in one direction will ultimately be followed by a swing in the other.

That to my mind is the teaching of history.

Man’s Outlook on History, Sir Charles Oman, 1929

Needless to say, the globalist neoliberal modernity that has come to be known as Clown World did not turn out to be an improvement upon Christendom, its moral, cultural, philosophical, religious, and materialistic ideals notwithstanding.

DISCUSS ON SG

The Thucydides Trap (Castalia Edition)

Forget great power competition. The real Thucydides Trap is the one that Castalia History has laid for unwary book collectors and armchair historians. If you’d like to see the final stamp design of the first book in the series, you can see it at Castalia Library. It’s scheduled for binding the week of March 8th and it is a behemoth of a book.

With regards to the fourth book in the History series, in the latest selection posted, Sir Charles offers profound observations about the past that reflect directly on our future. Consider how well his description of a transformed political perspective applies to the post-WWII United States and what that implies for the future of its empire.

Two centuries and a half later there was a good example of political perspective being upset for a whole nation, not by catastrophe, but by sudden expansion. I allude to the Greeks, and the result on their view of the world caused by the exploits of Alexander the Great. The Macedonian conquest of the East revolutionized the relations of the active and high-cultured little states of Greece, both with each other and with the outer world. Civic patriotism received a blow, but in return the establishment of the new Macedonian Empire offered many compensations both to the state and to the individual. If a man consented to forget that he was an Athenian or a Corinthian, and merely to remember that he was a Greek, what was more inspiring than to see that the old Hellenic genius for colonization was not extinct; to behold every land from the Aegean to the Indus covered with Greek cities as large and splendid as any that had ever existed in the old motherland…

While the empire of the Eastern world was being won by the Tigris, fights at home between small armies for a strip of plainland or a border fort seemed contemptible and absurd. For the Greeks who had thrown themselves into Alexander’s great adventure the national perspective had suddenly enlarged from a view of the Aegean to a view as far as the Oxus and the Indus. The Hellenic world had been increased twenty-fold. Why discuss constitutions any more, or indulge in petty faction-fights, when the man with a brain and a sword had the universe at his feet? The vision was illusive, and ended in a veneer of Greek civilization imposed on the East for a few centuries, at the cost of the exhaustion and debasement of the civilizer.

DISCUSS ON SG

A SEA OF SKULLS on Amazon

A SEA OF SKULLS is now available for Amazon Kindle for those who prefer to read their ebooks on Kindle. It is, of course, also available on DRM-free epub on the Arkhaven store. For those of you who have been wanting to write reviews of it or rate the book, this would be the ideal place to do so.

In Selenoth, the war drums are beating throughout the land. The savage orcs of Hagahorn and Zoth Ommog are on the move, imperiling Man, Dwarf, and Elf alike. The Houses Martial of Amorr have gone to war with each other, pitting legion against legion, and family against family, as civil war wracks the disintegrating Empire. In the north, inhuman wolf-demons besiege the last redoubt of Man in the White Sea, while in Savondir, the royal house of de Mirid desperately prepares to defend the kingdom against an invading army that is larger than any it has ever faced before. And in the underground realm of the King of Iron Mountain, a strange new enemy has been attacking dwarf villages throughout the Underdeep.

Beneath the widespread violence that has seized all Selenoth in its grasp, a select few are beginning to recognize the appearance of a historic pattern of almost unimaginable proportions. Are all these conflicts involving Orc, Elf, Man, and Dwarf the natural result of inevitable rivalries, or are they little more than battlegrounds in an ancient war that began long before the dawn of time?

Epic fantasy at its deepest and most intense. A SEA OF SKULLS is Book II in the ARTS OF DARK AND LIGHT series that began with A THRONE OF BONES.

“If you’re into epic fantasy, I can’t recommend Arts of Dark and Light highly enough.”

“Easily the best epic fantasy series out today. Many reviewers are comparing to LOTR and while I cannot go that far, I believe this series is better than GOT.”

“The story keeps getting more exciting. The characters are well-defined. Unlike A Song of Ice and Fire and The Wheel of Time, there is no filler here.”

Print length ‏ : ‎ 1016 pages

SUMMA ELVETICA is also now available in Kindle format on Amazon. A THRONE OF BONES should be available soon as well, but it’s first necessary to convince Amazon that the Castalia House to which the KDP account is attached is the same Castalia House that publishes the print edition.

The print edition will be available in the April timeframe.

DISCUSS ON SG

Man’s Outlook on History

Castalia Library has begun the serialization of Castalia History Book 4, STUDIES ON THE NAPOLEONIC WARS by Sir Charles Oman. It is truly an excellent work, as this excerpt should suffice to demonstrate.

The moment that man begins to think about something more than the passing trifles and troubles of his daily life, and starts, consciously or unconsciously, to make generalizations about himself and his neighbours, their ends and objects, their past and future, he has begun to look at things in perspective. And when he extends his survey so as to draw deductions from all that he knows about the past records of mankind, he is trying to look at the world in historical perspective. It may be that his survey extends over no greater space of time than a generation or two—“Tales of a Grandfather” may be the limit of his knowledge. Or, on the other hand, he may know—or may think that he knows—the whole history of mankind since the Creation—if he ties himself down to the idea of a Creation—down to the all-important present day. Such was the happy conviction of Orosius in A.D. 417, and of Mr. H. G. Wells in A.D. 1925. But whether his horizon of knowledge be long or short, whether it be a hundred years or a hundred aeons, the man who has started to generalize about his own position in universal history is constructing for himself an historical perspective.

What are the things that determine a man’s outlook on the past and the future?

It is with some difficulty that I restrain myself from essentially converting Castalia History into the Sir Charles Oman series. Although I can guarantee that there will be more Oman titles in the series. I think, at this point, that he has joined Eco, Tolkien, Aristotle, and Aquinas in my personal pantheon, surpassing Bury, Murakami, Lee, and Gibson in the second rank.

Note that the serialization begins with the Preface, and can be navigated through the NEXT and PREVIOUS buttons on the bottom of each post. And speaking of Man’s outlook on history, perhaps one might enjoy a look at the results of the test stamping for Castalia History Book 3, THE CAMBRIDGE MEDIEVAL HISTORY Volume 2: The Twelfth Century to the Renaissance, which is scheduled for binding today.

DISCUSS ON SG

A Call to Preserve Civilization

Bishop Williamson issues a call to all Western civilizationists to preserve what we can from the inevitable collapse of Clown World.

The collapse of France and of Europe as a whole is a catastrophic reality. It did not happen overnight. The undermining has been going on for a long time, as French nationalists most keenly saw, predicting the grave consequences for society and civilisation, which are now evident. Several outstanding writers, and magazines like Rivarol, have long been sounding the alarm, as dark events followed one after another.

After the collapse of France’s colonial empire and the betrayal of French Algeria the student uprising of 1968 in Paris demonstrated that the French people in general were ready to accept the overthrow of all common sense, Tradition, sane morals, of whatever used to make the greatness of our civilisation. Then came the legalising of abortion, a socialist government in 1981, anti-racism, engineered immigration, reshaping the family, LGBT, transgender, paedophilia, adrenochrome (a real horror), organ sales, “climate change,” chemtrails, etc. Yet there was little public reaction. People might be a little shaken for a moment or two, but soon they settled down again. Yet we speak of “a rise in the standard of living” as though there has been a real bettering of life, when in reality it has been little more than technical – better machines making available more material goods. The result has been that the household’s need for two salaries instead of one splits the mother from the home, especially if she may not like mothering.

For a whole age France radiated worldwide, in general for good, but now it is itself sinking in a moral and economic decline, in such a social and intellectual crisis that it can no longer exercise any such influence. Worst of all, it rejects, scorns and is ignorant of all that it once achieved. Yet surprisingly, that “West,” which is no longer anything more than the puppet of satanic masters who are an oligarchy of materialistic and gnostic globalists, still behaves as though it has a calling to lead the world, somewhat like the Talmudic Jews pretending themselves to be the priesthood of mankind.

And ever since Covid, that monstrous lie designed to test just how far the manipulation of modern man can go, the peoples of the Europe of Charlemagne have fast been enslaving themselves to the banksters of London and New York. The depopulation plan behind Covid goes back at least to the 1970’s when Jacques Attali, still today a key adviser to the French government, said in a public interview, “Useless eaters are good for the slaughter-house.” Hence the dangerous and deadly “vaccinations.”

As for France, it is cut up and sold for profit to the USA and private interests. As for Europe, it is torn apart by the USA-NATO attack on Russia, with the vile mass-media and their commentators spewing lies against Russia, while above all the entire political class keep silent. By their proxy war in the Ukraine, killing half a million whites, the USA have achieved at least one thing – Europe’s economic power and Germany’s competition are broken – German companies are moving to America. Little do the Americans suspect how history shows that such “conquests” are signs of an empire’s imminent fall. Moreover, the West has tied its fate to that of the State of Israel which it worships, but the rest of the world is rejecting such arrogance and degeneracy, and it is not accepting what Israel is doing to the Palestinians.

The complete lack of reaction in all of France’s highest institutions to such infamy of the France of Charlemagne signals the end of a world. They stand and watch, silent and docile, while France rolls into the trash-cans of history. Some hope it will last their time, others continue to sleepwalk, drunk on their own propaganda. Those in power strive to silence all opposition, while World War hangs over their heads.

Our task in politics is to do whatever we can that may have an effect, but it is mainly to preserve for a better future the best fruits of France’s glorious past, just as, when in the sixth century the Roman empire was being swamped by the barbarians, the monks in the monasteries preserved the glories of antiquity. These glories, preserved, played a large part in the building up which followed, of 1500 years of European and Christian civilisation.

You know what we’re doing. Hundreds of you are doing it with us. We are the warrior monks of the 21st Century and beyond, even as our children lay the foundations of the future Christian civilization that will inherit the shattered remnants of the satanic empire.

DISCUSS ON SG

Heroes of History

Castalia Library is happy to report the successful test-stamping of JUNIOR CLASSICS VOL. 7, HEROES OF HISTORY at the bindery. There are more details available at the Castalia Library substack.

Also, as a result of the reader poll, it has been decided that it will be STUDIES ON THE NAPOLEONIC WARS by Sir Charles Oman that will be serialized on the substack. The serialization will begin tomorrow.

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Castalia Library Stacks

We’re pleased to report a few new developments that will be of interest to Library and History subscribers. First, the test stamping of Castalia History Book 2 was successful and you can see the results at the new Castalia Library substack. These are promising to be our most aesthetically successful books yet. While we are still utilizing the mailing list and the LibraryThing group, too many subscribers have somehow been falling through the cracks, so we’ve created this new substack that everyone who is interested can follow either through the site or the emails.

Second, since there won’t be daily updates, at least not until we’re doing a LOT more books, we are going to be serializing one of our Library books there. There isn’t much point in doing Dracula, since there is already an extremely popular substack dedicated to serializing that, so we’re giving you the choice of one of four current or coming Library/History books. There is a poll there running for the next two days, so feel free to make your voice heard.

  • DISCOURSES ON LIVY by Niccolo Machiavelli
  • STUDIES ON THE NAPOLEONIC WARS by Sir Charles Oman
  • PRIDE AND PREJUDICE by Jane Austen
  • WAR AND PEACE by Leo Tolstoy

And third, speaking of serialization, we’ve set up a substack dedicated to the Junior Classics. This may or may not be of any interest to those who already have them, in leather, hardcover, or ebook, but we think it is a good way of helping bring them to the attention of homeschool parents and others who have never heard of the Junior Classics.

If you’re wondering why we’re utilizing Substack now, the fact that the Sigma Game substack already has 137k views in little more than two weeks should suffice to explain it. I expect it to surpass this blog in terms of traffic by the time the book comes out.

We’re also working hard on getting production caught up, and the leathers for both volumes of War and Peace as well as four other books are being ordered now that we have the final size of the interiors. On the bindery front, both hubbing tools have been made and the first one will be tested as soon as the coming week. That’s the last major challenge we face before Team Europe can start tackling The Iliad and The Odyssey.

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The Russian Art of War

A new book by a French colonel explains the difference between Western and Russian military thought, and how the superiority of the latter is why the former loses its wars:

Throughout the Cold War period, the Soviet Union saw itself as the spearhead of a historical struggle that would lead to a confrontation between the “capitalist” system and “progressive forces.” This perception of a permanent and inescapable war led the Soviets to study war in a quasi-scientific way, and to structure this thinking into an architecture of military thought that has no equal in the Western world.

The problem with the vast majority of our so-called military experts is their inability to understand the Russian approach to war. It is the result of an approach we have already seen in waves of terrorist attacks—the adversary is so stupidly demonized that we refrain from understanding his way of thinking. As a result, we are unable to develop strategies, articulate our forces, or even equip them for the realities of war. The corollary of this approach is that our frustrations are translated by unscrupulous media into a narrative that feeds hatred and increases our vulnerability. We are thus unable to find rational, effective solutions to the problem.

The way Russians understand conflict is holistic. In other words, they see the processes that develop and lead to the situation at any given moment. This explains why Vladimir Putin’s speeches invariably include a return to history. In the West, we tend to focus on X moment and try to see how it might evolve. We want an immediate response to the situation we see today. The idea that “from the understanding of how the crisis arose comes the way to resolve it” is totally foreign to the West. In September 2023, an English-speaking journalist even pulled out the “duck test” for me: “if it looks like a duck, swims like a duck and quacks like a duck, it’s probably a duck.” In other words, all the West needs to assess a situation is an image that fits their prejudices. Reality is much more subtle than the duck model….

The reason the Russians are better than the West in Ukraine is that they see the conflict as a process; whereas we see it as a series of separate actions. The Russians see events as a film. We see them as photographs. They see the forest, while we focus on the trees. That is why we place the start of the conflict on February 24, 2022, or the start of the Palestinian conflict on October 7, 2023. We ignore the contexts that bother us and wage conflicts we do not understand. That is why we lose our wars…

In Russia, unsurprisingly, the principles of the military art of the Soviet forces inspired those currently in use:

  • readiness to carry out assigned missions;
  • concentration of efforts on solving a specific mission;
  • surprise (unconventionality) of military action vis-à-vis the enemy;
  • finality determines a set of tasks and the level of resolution of each one;
  • totality of available means determines the way to resolve the mission and achieve the objective (correlation of forces);
  • coherence of leadership (unity of command);
  • economy of forces, resources, time and space;
  • support and restoration of combat capability;
  • freedom of maneuver.
  • It should be noted that these principles apply not only to the implementation of military action as such. They are also applicable as a system of thought to other non-operational activities.

An honest analysis of the conflict in Ukraine would have identified these various principles and drawn useful conclusions for Ukraine. But none of the self-proclaimed experts on TV were intellectually able to do so.

Thus, Westerners are systematically surprised by the Russians in the fields of technology (e.g., hypersonic weapons), doctrine (e.g., operative art) and economics (e.g., resilience to sanctions). In a way, the Russians are taking advantage of our prejudices to exploit the principle of surprise. We can see this in the Ukrainian conflict, where the Western narrative led Ukraine to totally underestimate Russian capabilities, which was a major factor in its defeat. That is why Russia did not really try to counter this narrative and let it play out—the belief that we are superior makes us vulnerable….

This is very, very similar to what Martyanov describes in the current Castalia Library book, Losing Military Supremacy. Which should come as no surprise, as both men are familiar with Russian military thought and how different it is than what Victor Davis Hanson once described as the Western way of war. The short term thinking of the Western military strategists can most easily be seen in their historical obsession with “the decisive battle” and strange focus on the idea that losing a battle or two, or even denying him a sufficiently impressive victory, will somehow weaken the enemy leader and magically cause him to be replaced by a more amenable successor.

Which is why the Russians are patiently winning a brutal attrition war in Ukraine while the US bleeds itself out everywhere from Afghanistan to Yemen.

DISCUSS ON SG

Bookshelf Billionaire

Some people flex their gold chains and other flex their debt-financed sports utility vehicles. But contra the assumptions of this semi-literate Potemkin Pushkinite with a terminal case of imposter syndrome, the discerning intellectual flexes his bookshelves:

I confess that when I take a Zoom call, I rotate my chair and my laptop 45 degrees so that my head is framed by books. This is because the straight-on view is of an office full of piled up junk. The bookshelf background is tidier, but you can’t tell much about me from the titles, because I haven’t read any of them. They’re not my books – just my share of the general household burden, most of them paperbacks bought by my wife before she met me. But if you’re impressed by seeing the Complete Prose of Pushkin above my left ear, I’m also OK with that.

The Pushkin illusion is perhaps an unintentional example of Bookshelf Wealth, a design trend cited by both the New York Times and Homes & Gardens magazine, and described as a “whole home vibe” by TikTok interior designer Kailee Blalock. It’s an understated, homey look that seems to involve getting some books and putting them on shelves.

Of course it’s not that simple. “These aren’t display books,” says Blalock. “These are books that have actually been curated and read.” In that case Pushkin is ruled out on both counts. But what do your curated books say about you? How wealthy are you, bookshelf wise?

Leaning books, lying down books, books competing for shelf space with non-book items
This is meant to convey casual intellectual abundance: my books, they just get everywhere! It’s curated overspill affected by someone who has never known true overspill – a book on its side takes up the shelf space of at least five upright books. When you really have too many books they end up wedged in so tight you can’t get them back out. This looks more like you’re halfway through packing up to move house, which is very now.

Shelves filled with antique, leather-bound volumes
No one will ever believe you’ve read these, much less curated them. It just looks as if you’ve tried to purchase cultural credibility by the metre. If that’s the effect you’re after, you’re better off slicing off the spines and gluing them directly to the walls.

If books on shelves are Bookshelf Wealth, then it’s readily apparent that I am a Bookshelf Billionaire. My leather books are not merely curated and read, but I’ve published about half of them, and even written a few as well.

DISCUSS ON SG