#Arkhaven INFOGALACTIC #Castalia House
We’ve got books for all three subscription series to announce, so we’ll start with announcing Castalia Cathedra Book 2, which is PRAYER AND THE CONTEMPLATIVE LIFE by St. Thomas Aquinas. Translated by Hugh Pope.
For more information, an example of the interior layout, and an excerpt from the Introduction, visit the Castalia Library stack. Tomorrow, we’ll announce the next History book, and Wednesday, the next Library book.
\This is just a note to remind those who are interested in the Castalia Cathedra subscription that this is the final day to subscribe and get a copy of Book #1: THE EVERLASTING MAN by GK Chesterton.
Book #2 in the subscription will be announced tomorrow. I’m also pleased to be able to say that the initial print run will be in the 400 to 500 range, although we cannot calculate a precise number until the initial six-month period comes to an end. I can also say that we will be making use of the higher-quality pigskin leather for the Cathedra line.
Given the sad loss of great sports-related weekly columnists from the recent past, like Peter King, Dr. Z, and even Bill Simmons, who, though still alive and well, is more a media mogul than a writer now, the best column currently running is Screencaps on Outkick, which is amusingly eclectic and keeps regular tabs on everything from bikinis to books. I responded to Joe’s recent call for library pictures, which will look familiar to most Darkstream viewers, and he featured it along with one of Castalia Library’s upcoming books.
You just never know who’s reading Screencaps
— Vox writes:
If it doesn’t have leather books, is it even a proper library?
The non-leather books include complete sets of The Cambridge Medieval History series, 1911 edition, and The Cambridge Ancient History series 1928 edition. There is also a set of the original Dispatches and Letters of Lord Nelson, published in 1845, and one of the 300 original copies of The Bibliography of Military Books up to 1612 published in 1900.
I run one of the world’s only leather book binderies, so we buy a lot of rare books in order to make perfect high-end reproductions of them, like the first edition of Pride and Prejudice and the first complete English
translation of The Tale of Genji. We do high-end books in cowhide and pigskin, and even higher-end ones in goatskin with real gold. If you’re interested, let me know and I’ll send you one. I’ve also included a
picture of the book we’re currently binding, part of a two-volume set for Cambridge University Press.
Speaking of the bindery, we hope to have some excellent news for everyone very soon, although unfortunately, it appears that we have become even more exclusive than we were last week when that note was sent, as the world’s number of leather book binderies just shrank by one with the closure of Maltby’s Bookbinders and the Green Street Bindery, an Oxford-based bindery originally established in 1834.
Tomorrow we’ll be announcing the new books for Library, History, and Cathedra. It also appears as many as FIVE books will be bound this month, but we’ll provide more details on that when I have confirmation.
As we’re rapidly approaching full operational status for the Death Star bindery, we’re going to need to figure out the print runs for THE ILIAD and THE ODYSSEY. So, sometime next month, we’re giving everyone the chance to back the bindery at the same price as the original backers who have made the whole thing possible.
We’ve set up a poll at the Castalia Library stack, so please feel free to let us know if a) you’re already a backer, b) you’re interested in becoming one, or c) not so much. You can also check out the first draft of the title page as well as what the interiors are going to look like.
The poll has closed. A respectable 190 Castalians had their say and the results were remarkably close.
Tomorrow, therefore, we shall begin with the serialization of RHETORIC by Aristotle, utilizing the Library edition which begins with an Introduction by none other than your favorite dark lord. If you want to take part in the group reading and the discussion in the comments, be sure to subscribe to the Castalia Library substack.
Congratulations to the intrepid subscribers to the Castalia Library substack, as today marks the end of our second serialization. After 315 daily installments and 614 pages covering everything from the Niceno-Constantinopolitan Creed to the Teutonic migrations, we have finally managed to accomplish together something I never quite managed to do on my own despite it being one of my prize possessions, which is read every single page of The Cambridge Medieval History Volume I: The Christian Empire.
So, well done, everyone.
To be honest, I’ve been a little shocked at seeing how many people have been reading along; there are usually 1,000 post-reads recorded, so even if three-quarters of those readers are only glancing at each post, that’s a lot more people reading through one of the more advanced historical summaries ever published.
Tomorrow I’ll put up a poll for what the next daily serialization should be. One option is to simply continue with Volume II: Foundation of the Western Empire, but perhaps we might do with a break from the Cambridge historians for a while. Feel free to make any suggestions on SocialGalactic, but recall that any work we serialize there must be in the public domain.
In what leather would you prefer to see the two Homer Library editions bound?
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.
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.
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.
There are still a few copies of ETHICS and POLITICS left on the final day of the Castalia Library Spring Sale.
They may be of interest considering the book we have announced for the MAY-JUNE Library subscription book.
Thanks to everyone who made it such a successful sale. We anticipate making a major announcement concerning Library production this week.