Tag: Castalia

Big Sale Next Week

So, a few things to let everyone know about in the leadup to the annual Castalia Library and Castalia House Thanksgiving sale. We’re going to have a number of Arkhaven and Castalia House products on sale at the NDM site as well as the Library and Libraria books, and we’ll have Library, Libraria, and Junior Classics on sale at the Arkhaven store. So, you’ll definitely want to check out both sites, although I’ll try to have a post with links to everything here.

The Based Book ebook sale is also coming up, and we’ll keep you posted on that too.

Now, we also have an offer for MIDNIGHT’S WAR backers. For a variety of reasons, mostly relating to artists, we’re not going to be doing the planned 7-12 issue anytime soon. However, what we are offering both paperback and hardcover backers as a substitute is the following:

  1. Your choice of any Arkhaven omnibus of the same length of 140+ pages
  2. The soon-to-be-released THE TRAGEDY OF THE TRIBUNE: A Throne of Bones Issue 1, which is now complete, 150 full-color pages, and includes stories from A Throne of Bones and Summa Elvetica. We never crowdfunded this one, but it was illustrated by Midnight’s War illustrator Ademir Leal and colored by Blond, so it’s absolutely top quality.
  3. We’ll also include a complimentary ebook and paperback edition of the now-complete Midnight’s War novel OUT OF THE SHADOWS for all of the affected MW backers.

I’ll send out an email tomorrow to all of the MW 7-12 backers so everyone can let me know their preference. We still plan to tackle it someday, but it’s so far out of the schedule at this point that we don’t want to leave those backers hanging any longer. The leather edition backers are unaffected; we will still be releasing that as well as NIGHT STREETS soon, as it is complete.

And finally, since we decided to do the larger edition of Hypergamouse for the coffee table backers, we’re going to be offering the smaller ones, which are probably some of the highest-quality traditional horizontal comic books ever produced, for sale to anyone who wants one until the 150 or so copies that we’ve got run out.

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Baseless Con

Castalia doesn’t support any con that treats people this way, particularly not one of our authors:

For the last five years, Libertarian author Robert Kroese has been running an alternative convention to the mainstream industry-run cons such as WorldCon, with the intention of making it an alternative. Unfortunately, the convention has turned into much the same liberal gatekeeping as those conventions, as the convention banned me after Kroese could not handle my calling modern woke D&D “Satanic” (rightfully in my opinion), and proceeded to cancel me over my journalism calling out problems in the gaming industry.

There’s much more to the reason robkroese went full-cancel that has to do with his personal ego with the convention rather than anything I’ve done, which is why his continued actions have been beyond absurd, and it’s been a debate of whether Fandom Pulse should address this matter at all.

I’m chosing to for two reasons: 1. Fandom Pulse provides the best comprehensive coverage of conventions with bad behaviors, and this is no different despite my being the focus of the story, 2. because at the convention, Kroese is taking the stage dedicating an entire panel to personally attacking me, which I’ve never heard of a convention doing in the history of cons, making this an incredibly exceptional situation. Despite saying there’s no panel, what is giving a 20-minute talk from a stage of a convention if not a panel?

Below is the history of what transpired and why this is simply a mockery of the name “BasedCon.”

The cucks and cons who act as if they’re any sort of alternative to the SJWs in genre fiction, while attempting to police ideas, politics, and tone in exactly the same manner as those to whom they purport to be an alternative, are as useless and ultimately ephemeral as the Bush Republicans.

They’re just another form of gatekeeper, and they are always opposed to anything that isn’t more of the status quo, only with a conservative varnish. But they’ll cancel people over insufficient enthusiasm for the Gazacaust as readily as the SJWs will cancel someone for insufficient enthusiasm for transgender children.

Anyhow, this is why we don’t support BasedCon, although since we’re not into the business of socially policing anyone, we don’t have any problem with those who choose to attend it, or WorldCon, or ComicCon, or any of the various other events that we ignore as we continue to build infrastructure that will not only last generations, but hopefully, centuries.

Before the end of October, we’ll have the ability to produce mainstream-sized print runs, but in leather. It’s taken a very long time for all of the pieces to come together, but we’re finally getting to where we knew we needed to be. And there will very likely be some developments well beyond what anyone is imagining is possible in the next few years, as our strategic plan for the next stage will take most people by surprise.

Which is why I’m making it clear now that we will work with anyone who simply wishes to do business in a professional manner, regardless of whatever their past antics may have been. We are focused on producing the best and most beautiful books in the world, and while there is certain content we will not publish, we don’t concern ourselves with policing the opinions of our current or prospective partners.

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These are Not Our Principles

But they do make for a good point from which to begin contemplating them. From Walter Isaacson’s excellent biography of Steve Jobs.

Markkula would become a father figure to Jobs… “Mike really took me under his wing,” Jobs recalled. “His values were much aligned with mine. He emphasized that you should never start a company with the goal of getting rich. Your goal should be making something you believe in and making a company that will last.”

Markkula wrote his principles in a one-page paper titled “The Apple Marketing Philosophy” that stressed three points. The first was empathy, an intimate connection with the feelings of the customer: “We will truly understand their needs better than any other company.” The second was focus: “In order to do a good job of those things that we decide to do, we must eliminate all of the unimportant opportunities.” The third and equally important principle, awkwardly named, was impute. It emphasized that people form an opinion about a company or product based on the signals that it conveys. “People DO judge a book by its cover,” he wrote. “We may have the best product, the highest quality, the most useful software etc.; if we present them in a slipshod manner, they will be perceived as slipshod; if we present them in a creative, professional manner, we will impute the desired qualities.”

It’s not for us to say, but I think we’re doing reasonably well on all three scores. The biggest failure, I think, is impute, with regards to which we very much need to improve our Internet store game. And, obviously, we need to reduce our release times, but we’re already focused on that.

The only way to improve is to contemplate one’s failings.

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The Most Based Book of All

Is A SEA OF SKULLS, apparently. The director of the Based Book Sale issues a report preparatory to the Spring sale, in which both Castalia and Arkhaven will be participating.

A Sea of Skulls by Vox Day took top honors. John C. Wright authored the next two most popular books. In second place was his first Starquest book, Space Pirates of Andromeda, followed by his 2016 Dragon Award winning Best Novel, Somewither. Vox Day closely follows in fourth and fifth place with A Throne of Bones (Arts of Dark and Light Book 1) and Summa Elvetica: A Casuistry of the Elvish Controversy (Arts of Dark and Light). In sixth place was sale newcomer, Devon Eriksen, with Theft of Fire: Orbital Space #1. Michael F. Kane secured seventh place honors with After Moses. The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire by Edward Gibbon came in eighth place. Based Book Sale perennial offering, The Hidden Truth was ninth. Henry Brown’s six-book Paradox series in a box set completed the top ten.

And you know, A SEA OF SKULLS is based. Speaking of which, the interiors of volumes I and II have just been printed for the leather editions.

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A New and Better Bookstore

Castalia House and Arkhaven Comics are extremely pleased to announce that a) the Arkhaven store will no longer sell Castalia House or Arkhaven print editions and b) the NDM Express store will be selling Castalia House and Arkhaven print editions, as well as merchandise related to everything from Arkhaven to Sigma Game.

NDM Express was already handling all of the shipping and customer relations for the print editions, so we decided that in the interests of efficiency, customer satisfaction, and allowing Castalia House to focus on what it does best as opposed to that which it barely manages to do at all, it would be to everyone’s benefit to move the sales operations to NDM. We also anticipate fewer of the problems with credit cards being rejected that have plagued the Arkhaven store.

Castalia will still be selling all leatherbound books through the Arkhaven store, so if you’re a Library, Libraria, or History subscriber, nothing changes at all. Individual editions of Library, Libraria, and History books can still be purchased there.

However, speaking of Castalia History, we’re pleased to also announce that the first LEGO ERGO SCIO t-shirts and hoodies are now available in black and navy blue at NDM, for those who aren’t ashamed to display their intellectual superiority in public.

Everything from Razorfist’s GHOST OF THE BADLANDS to THE JUNIOR CLASSICS VOLS 1-8 are already available at NDM Express, so please be sure to visit when you’re in the market for a book or comic.

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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.

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Negativity is the Consequence of Degeneracy

The great 20th century historian, Sir Charles Oman, presciently illuminates the philosophical mediocrity and fundamental inutility of what he describes as the Pessimist, and what we would describe as a Blackpiller, a doomsayer, or an MGTOW, in today’s selection from his epic STUDIES IN NAPOLEONIC WARFARE now being serialized on the Castalia Library substack.

The conception of the history of the world as a process of consistent deterioration, from a golden age down to a catastrophe well earned by degenerate mankind, is not a very cheerful or inspiring one to guide the way of life. The most obvious deduction from it is, “Let us eat and drink, for tomorrow we die”. The average man finds within himself no power to withstand the stream of tendency in which he believes himself carried along toward an unhappy end. He does not even exclaim with Hamlet:

The World is out of joint—O cursed spite
That ever I was born to set it right.

For how few minds even conceive the idea that it is their duty to stand against the spirit of the times, hard though the task may be.

Historical Perspective: Man’s Outlook on History, Sir Charles Oman

This is precisely why I harbor neither respect nor regard for those who have nothing to offer the world except their ceaseless predictions of inevitable doom. For as Sir Charles explains, their negativity is the inevitable and inescapable consequence of their own degeneracy.

Hope is a Christian virtue. Even in a fallen world populated by mediocrities, engulfed by lies, and ruled by inverts, demons, and satanic pedophiles, we have the undying hope of the Cross. Despite our own flaws, sins, stupidities, and shortcomings, the Almighty God chose to extend His hand to us, and through His Son, offer us a way out of the material mire.

Having taken that Divine hand, it is now our duty to stand against the evil spirit of our times. Not our desire, our dream, or our mood of the day. Our duty, however hard it might be.

And if our inspired optimism pains our enemies, if our relentless conviction burns them, if our Christian faith enrages them, if our intolerance makes them feel bad about themselves, that is only further testimony to the fact that our perspective is essentially beautiful, good, and true.

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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.

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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.

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Castalia Library on Substack

In the aftermath of the extremely successful launch of the Sigma Game substack, I brought up the idea of a substack devoted to Castalia Library with the idea that it might help those who somehow miss out on a) blog posts, b) the monthly emails, c) Gab and SocialGalactic announcements, and d) LibraryThing posts keep tabs on the current state of things with the various Castalia Library books, including Library, Libraria, History, the Junior Classics, and the various one-off editions.

The response was overwhelmingly positive, and since Castalia Library is nothing if not responsive to its subscribers, I duly set up a Castalia Library substack. Those who sign up for a free subscription will be kept up to date on the latest production schedules with regular emails, and it should even be possible to allow new subscribers to sign up through the paid subscription option at some point.

It should be noted that this substack is absolutely not a substitute for anything else or any other platform. Rather, it is an attempt to cast a wider net, as the primary challenge facing Castalia Library at the moment is that the vast majority of book collectors, and therefore, the vast majority of its potential subscribers and customers, have never heard of it. So even if you’re on the mailing lists and receiving the monthly emails, it’s probably not a bad idea to widen your net before you get caught in a bounce and your email is scrubbed by the mail service.

And speaking of the Sigma Game substack, I would be remiss if I neglected to mention today’s post on my thoughts concerning a female SSH and the various attempts to construct it. No offense intended to the various men and women who have thus far attempted to formulate one, but the fact is that most of those who do appear to be more interested in relating various anecdotes about their personal experiences than in an objective analysis of the complexities of female social interaction.

Not that it’s my concern or my interest, but I would point out that anyone who fails to take into account either the fat factor or the sexual availability and experience factor in what purports to be a “socio-sexual” hierarchy can’t reasonably be considered to be serious about the task. And due to the female discomfort in honestly addressing both of those issues, to say nothing of the male ignorance, and inability to grasp the details, of female competition, I find it difficult to believe that anyone will succeed in describing a functional female SSH any time soon.

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