#Arkhaven INFOGALACTIC #Castalia House
Just a low-stock alert for STUDIES IN THE NAPOLEONIC WARS by Charles Oman. There are nine eight left of the print run of 600, so if you want one, you should probably act quickly. The print run of 600 is now sold out. Both the stamp and the hub tests have been successfully completed. As a result of the imminent fourth-straight History sellout, we’ll be increasing the print run to 650 for the two-volume Byzantium set.
Thanks to the geniuses at Castalia Shipping, we are now able to offer what was the Castalia History European subscription to book collectors in Australia, Asia, and other countries around the world. Unfortunately, due to global shipping restrictions, we cannot currently accept subscriptions from Belarus, Russia, or Ukraine.
We’re also pleased to confirm that both volumes of THE CAMBRIDGE HISTORY OF BYZANTIUM will be the first Castalia books to feature the full grain Spanish cowhide that we’ve been testing at the bindery.
For more detail on both of these books, their expected print runs, and the title pages of the latter two-volume set, check out the Castalia Library substack.
In other news, the UATV devs tracked down the bug that was recently preventing new subscriptions on Unauthorized. Note that this did not affect renewals.
Unauthorized.TV patch – Sep. 2nd 2024
This weekend, we patched an issue which was preventing many of you from reactivating your UATV subscription or taking out new ones. If you recently encountered a “server error” page while trying to manage your subscription, that problem has now been resolved.
If you’re not subscribed to UATV yet, make an account and sign up for a subscription!
We will be launching the long-awaited crowdfund campaign for the HYPERGAMOUSE book and the SIGMA GAME book next week. It will be a 60-day campaign, and we expect both books to be ready to ship at the end of the campaign. Speaking of campaigns, the AH:Q books are now in the warehouse and we’ll start sending them out to the backers next week.
And finally, we appear to be on a track to get the bindery fully operational in October. This is the first book to be cased, stamped, and cased-in by the newly-repaired machines; it was just completed yesterday. As you can see from the picture, we’ve been experimenting with improving both the thickness of the boards and the overhang now that these details are under our control. The key thing here is that the leather is the Italian cowhide that our previous press did not have the tonnage to stamp cleanly. Obviously, that problem has been resolved by our new 73-year-old Swiss-made beast.
A few notes for History subscribers as we’re rolling a more books into the final stages of the production process.
Dorking Wanderers Football Club – of whom Castalia Library is a sponsor – has announced a new ownership program called 25 for 25, which involves the sale of 25 shares of the club plus a special limited edition retro jersey. Here’s a video of Marc White himself announcing the program and here is the link if you’d like to join the ownership club and join what I can attest is truly an absolutely fascinating ride.
I can also announce something that will not yet be apparent, since it was only settled this morning, but the limited edition 25th Anniversary retro jerseys will, like the three 2024-25 season jerseys, sport the Castalia Library logo on the back. It’s a smaller logo above the number, since there is no need to leave that space for the players names.
It would certainly make for a very cool and unusual Christmas gift, even if you’re not into English soccer. The price of the shares and shirt is around $460 at current exchange rates, which is a very good price for being able to genuinely tell people that you own a real English football team with short, but already legendary history.
Forget Wrexham. Imagine when DWFC makes it to the Premiership in 15 years or so…
UPDATE: Here is the retro jersey. The logo on the back signifies that it is truly elite.
It looks as if SFWA is rapidly going the way of RWA, which is to say, toward extinction. Fandom Pulse has covered the resignation of the last TWO presidents in the last three weeks, now it’s got some inside information as to what appears to be going on.
For the first of the inside information Fandom Pulse has gotten on the situation, we have a post to the SFWA forums from Michael Capobianco that exposes troubles within the organization. Capobianco wrote a series of novels in the 1990s and was married to fan-favorite Star Trek novelist A.C. Crispin before she passed. In this post, Capobianco exposes former President Jeffe Kennedy’s gross incompetence and mismanagement at running SFWA, and paints a story of disaster through the recent years of the organization. He said:
Since I think a lot of people are taken aback by Jeffe’s sudden resignation and lack some of the context of what’s been happening lately, I wanted to post here with my own perspective. Please note that this post is not an attack on any board member, on Jeffe, or on the board as a whole...
However, I just wanted it on the record that her resignation letter (attached here as a PDF in case you haven’t seen it) ignores the fact that some past members of the board and former staff, as well as numerous SFWA members, were asking for her to be removed from her position for a number of reasons. I would even say that her email is a great example of why folks were asking for her removal—it places the blame for what’s happening squarely on something else and makes her seem like the victim, rather than accepting any accountability for how her own actions have led to the current circumstances.
The immediate event that kicked this off was Terra LeMay being terminated from her staff position after putting in a 90-day notice due to being denied reasonable disability accommodations, and then banned from Discord and blocked from accessing her SFWA email (presumably by Jeffe) after she asked for an explanation on Discord in the ask-the-board channel. Prior to that, several former board members and staff have also resigned from their positions, although I do not know for certain these resignations were related to Jeffe and actually did not realize the staff had resigned at all until this happened. (AFAIK Kate is currently the only SFWA staff member.)
Communications from the board have been slow and opaque in general for the past few years, and the Nebulas conference seems to always get cited as a reason not to do anything. But on top of that, a number of volunteers or former volunteers (myself included) have been frustrated with a lack of transparency from the board and the fact that some board members have tended to consistently blame volunteers for projects failing when it was the board that canceled them—or even for projects succeeding if they caused extra work for the organization or its board members and volunteers—despite also frequently pushing extra-heavy workloads onto those volunteers and providing them with zero support. (As an example of this, see Jason Sanford’s post about his withdrawal from running SFWA’s annual auction.)
It seems like a part of the issue is that everyone serving on the board and in some volunteer positions is asked to sign a really broad NDA, which they feel stops them from being able to ever talk about anything. My personal opinion is that in this case, that NDA and the opaque environment it creates resulted in a space in which staff and board members did not feel empowered to speak out about their own poor treatment, and which allowed Jeffe to continue acting in ways that did not necessarily benefit the organization as a whole.
You know, back in 2013, SFWA had the opportunity to elect a smart business- and technology-savvy author who had a pretty clear vision for the way the industry was headed as its president. Not only did they not elect me, they even pretended to kick me out of the club for my effrontery in thinking that a very different course of action to prepare for the coming changes in the industry was in order. Of course, like everything the SFWA Board does, they did it incompetently and ineffectively, as they never held the membership-wide vote on expulsion that the state bylaws required at the time. Like it or not, I’m still a Life Member, at least for the next 6-9 months it takes for SFWA to completely collapse.
Needless to say, I’m only surprised it has taken this long, as I pointed out 11 years ago.
I certainly wish Steven Gould good fortune in piloting the organization, although given his support for the status quo and his stated opinion that SF/F is not in any trouble as an industry, my concern is that his victory will tend to increase the probability that the organization will founder upon the very shoals my platform was designed to avoid. But that is Mr. Gould’s concern now, not mine.
So, I founded and focused my attention on a little organization called Castalia House instead. At this point, I’d say that was a pretty good tradeoff. And if you want to have a look at our beautiful new WAR AND PEACE stampings for the pair of upcoming Library and Libraria editions, as well as the lovely new sign on display for the 2024-25 season at Meadowbank Stadium, check out the Castalia Library substack.
We’ve finished the interior of the fourth book in the History series, STUDIES IN THE NAPOLEONIC WARS. For a look at the endpapers and the title page, visit the Castalia Library substack. There are 50 copies remaining, so if you’d like to acquire one, you can do so at the Arkhaven store. A significant discount from the retail price is available to all History, Library, and Libraria subscribers, but it is not the usual discount code, so please visit the substack for details.
Now, I quite like ebooks. I do most of my reading on my tablet and I have a massive ebook library of which Project Gutenberg is merely the foundation. But I endeavor to obtain a hardcover edition of any book I want to preserve, because I have absolutely zero confidence in ebooks necessarily surviving the coming Dark Age of post-Christianity.
In addition to its relentlessly Orwellian ideological practices, Amazon is already showing the cracks in its core technology that will only be exacerbated over time. I’m not saying one shouldn’t read or collect ebooks, only that it’s important to understand that digital technology is simply not going to survive over time due to its reliance on a technological ecosystem that cannot reasonably be expected to survive.
An outage was preventing Amazon Kindle users from downloading both new and previously purchased books to their e-readers, as noted on Amazon’s support forums and Reddit, but the company says things should be resolved. “Yesterday, some Kindle customers experienced an issue that impacted their ability to download e-books. The issue was quickly resolved,” writes Amazon devices spokesperson Jackie Burke in an email sent to The Verge.
The forum post included many reports of Kindles that were only able to download the title and cover art of books before the progress indicator got stuck at 1 percent. The outage also seemed to affect downloading books from Overdrive to Kindle devices using Libby. However, downloading books to the iOS and Android Amazon Kindle apps is not affected.
This latest issue comes a week after several Kindle users on Reddit reported a problem with Amazon’s “Send to Kindle” feature, which allows ebooks and documents to be sideloaded onto the e-readers without having to plug them into a computer. Some users received error messages telling them their files “could not be delivered due to a service error,” while other users in the thread were still seeing problems with the service earlier this week.
Later this year, I’m hoping we can unveil some of the first steps toward an actual Castalia library. In the meantime, we continue to collect old books that are worth saving, such as this priceless BIBLIOGRAPHY OF MILITARY BOOKS UP TO 1642 that I acquired a few months ago for less than three dollars, one of only 250 copies that were ever printed in 1900.
This is what your support of Castalia Library, Libraria Castalia, and Castalia History is doing, in addition to providing you with some of the most beautiful books in the world for your personal library.
The destruction of knowledge at the behest of the Zero Historians isn’t limited to printed matter.
More than two decades’ worth of content published on MTVNews.com is no longer available after MTV appears to have fully pulled down the site and its related content. Content on its sister site, CMT.com, seems to have met a similiar fate.
In 2023, MTV News was shuttered amid the financial woes of parent company Paramount Global. As of Monday, trying to access MTV News articles on mtvnews.com or mtv.com/news resulted in visitors being redirected to the main MTV website.
The now-unavailable content includes decades of music journalism comprising thousands of articles and interviews with countless major artists, dating back to the site’s launch in 1996. Perhaps the most significant loss is MTV News’ vast hip-hop-related archives, particularly its weekly “Mixtape Monday” column, which ran for nearly a decade in the 2000s and 2010s and featured interviews, reviews and more with many artists, producers and others early in their careers.
This is why Castalia Library is expanding its efforts from just publishing leatherbound classics to leveraging its subscriber base to preserve knowledge in general. Among our efforts, which will include opening up Infogalactic editing to all Library and UATV subscribers and making it easier for them, is releasing free Library ebooks for all Library, Libraria, and History subscribers. We’ll also provide an inexpensive bundle of those titles for which we have permission available for sale as ebooks.
We’ll go with a standard cover for all of them, although we’ll update the logo once we’ve got the Castalia Library-specific one instead of the modified History variant. An example can be seen below. An announcement with a link will be made on the Castalia Library substack within the next week; if you haven’t subscribed there yet, we very much encourage you to do so.
We’re also going to start doing books that are transcriptions of worthwhile video works from various UATV and other video creators. If this is something of serious interest to you – and by serious, I mean cleaning up least five 1,500-word transcriptions per week – please email me with TRANSCRIBE in the subject line. We can provide an AI-transcribed text as a starting point, but it takes about twice as long to go over the whole video and edit it for print as the length of the video. So figure 20 minutes of work for a 10-minute video.
This is going to be particularly important in light of the meltdown we hear is coming in the book industry. The financial takeover of Simon & Schuster by KKR, a private equity firm, combined with the incipient failure of Barnes & Noble, means that the distribution system is going to be further converged and cease to function normally, which will have a tremendous negative effect on all of the mainstream publishing houses going forward.
UPDATE: MTV News isn’t the only site destroying its own archives in the last year:
Tech news website CNET has deleted thousands of old articles over the past few months in a bid to improve its performance in Google Search results, Gizmodo has learned. Archived copies of CNET’s author pages show the company deleted small batches of articles prior to the second half of July, but then the pace increased. Thousands of articles disappeared in recent weeks
UPDATE: Wikileaks is also being wiped.
Julian Assange has been instructed to direct WikiLeaks to destroy any remaining classified documents and information in their possession and provide an affidavit once completed, as part of his plea agreement.
For the last 24 hours, we have polled the subscribers of the Castalia Library substack to determine which work we would serialize in the aftermath of the very successful serialization of Oman’s STUDIES IN THE NAPOLEONIC WARS. The results were as follows, with Medieval History eking out a narrow victory over Meditations, which was a surprise to me, as I expected Discourses would be the favorite after having narrowly finished second last time, although I voted for the Marcus Aurelius work myself.
Now, although we have not yet presented the logo for Castalia Library proper, as opposed to the logo for Castalia History, we already have the Latin motto for it: NOLITE TIMERE BONI. This admonition to not be afraid of the Good can be interpreted in several ways, one of which is “don’t be afraid to do it right”. This mindset applies to everything we do at the Library, from taking risks on ancient machines that may or may not work to abandoning a perfectly good space for a better one that provides us with room to grow in the future.
In this context, however, it applies to which version of the Cambridge Medieval History we serialize. Although I was originally thinking of the serialization in the context of the abbreviated edition by Charles Previté-Orton that we published in two volumes, both of which are already sold out, it occurred to us that the lack of material limitations that applied to the leather books does not apply to the digital domain of the substack. So, we’ve decided that instead of the 1952 Previté-Orton edition, we will serialize the first volume of the original 1911 edition edited by J.B. Bury, entitled The Christian Roman Empire and the Foundation of the Teutonic Kingdoms.
At 614 pages, not including the bibliography which we will not serialize, it’s of a similar length to the edition we published, but it goes much deeper into the details of historical events such as the original Nicene Council and Diocletian’s persecution of the Christians than the shorter Previté-Orton edition. Given the chance to provide our readers with the deeper and more substantive material, our philosophy dictates that we do so.
The serialization has already begun. Therefore, please enjoy the preface to volume I as presented by the editors.
The present volume covers a space of about two hundred years beginning with Constantine and stopping a little short of Justinian. At its opening the Roman Empire is standing in its ancient majesty, drawing new strength from the reforms of Diocletian and the statesmanship of Constantine: at its close the Empire has vanished from the West, while the East is slowly recovering from the pressure of the barbarians in the fifth century, and gathering strength for Justinian’s wars of conquest. At its opening heathenism is still a mighty power, society is built up on heathen pride of class, and Rome still seems the centre of the world: at its ending we see Christianity supreme, Constantinople the seat of power, and the old heathen order of society in the West dissolving in the confusion of barbarian devastations. At its opening Caesar’s will is law from the Atlantic to Armenia: at its ending a great system of Teutonic and Arian kingdoms in the West has just been grievously shaken by the conversion of the Franks from heathenism direct to orthodoxy.