At Play In The Fields Of The Lord Of Crazy Books

[princeofcairo]

This year, since my standard DunDraCon schedule is thrown off by a Tiny Tank Meeting (which is why I'm typing this in Oakland), we hit Fields Bookstore (on Polk Street in San Francisco), pound for pound the finest occult bookshop in the English-incanting world, on the Tuesday after the cons rather than the Friday before. And thereby, like the

Comments

[herbmcsidhe]

1. It's annoying that DunDraCon and PantheaCon are the same weekend.
2. do you happen to recall the title of "a book on occult and ritual elements in British folk songs" that you passed over...

[princeofcairo]

The folk song book was Where Is St. George? by Robert Stewart.

[herbmcsidhe]

Ah, thanks. I was hoping there was something new out there I hadn't heard about.

[wire_mother]

was the book on British folksongs, by any chance, Earth, Air, Fire, Water by Robin Skelton? because, by odd coincidence, i happened to pull that volume off my bookshelf this evening to look through.

[tundra_no_caps]

Hooray for books!

I spent about $350 on reading books since the year started, and my purse is crying tears of crimson red.

I meant to ask you for quite some time, if one is interested in the "True" or rather, alternate history of the world, as you write it, which 20 books would you suggest they have in their libraries, and why?

[princeofcairo]

Check the "Eliptony Core Sample" entries in this LJ from last winter, and that should get you started...

[beamjockey]

A preposterous suggestion. Nothing on Livejournal is read by anyone more than twelve hours after it's written.

(I quite enjoyed your Eliptony Core Sample series, by the way.)

[tundra_no_caps]

Not true.

When I add a new friend I read their last 20 entries. I also retain and reference older entries constantly.

I'll hunt the post Kenneth was referring to tomorrow morning, as I'm swamped elsewhere currently!

[krfsm]

The Covert Enlightenment seems interesting. I wish I had the money to visit and go crazy shopping in Fields (as well as in Powell's)...

[richardthinks]

I love Lethaby's book; it's got that wonderful Frazeran coherence that later books lack - sadly, I can't really use it in my own research for pretty much exactly that reason :(

...on the other hand, I did not know about the Dee title, and I'm now running off to my university library to grab their 2004 edition. I'm surprised to see a reference to the British Empire long before 1707... but maybe I'm just being ignorant. Perhaps I can shoehorn it, and Dee's General and rare memorials pertayning to the perfect arte of nauigation into my thesis somehow.

[luckymarty]

Henry VIII declared that England was, and had long been recognized as, an "empire" as part of his self-justification: essentially, it was a way of declaring complete independence from the rest of Christendom. I'm not sure when the usage fell out of favor (to be revived when Britain actually acquired an empire), but it seems a likely enough origin for Dee using it.

[richardthinks]

It wasn't the Empire part so much as the British part that gave me pause - however, a quick diversion to Wikipedia's "Britain" article reveals that Dee's coining of it, although not unique, does seem to have been unusual at the time (there's a 1548 ref there too, but England seems to have still been the accepted unit at the time) - so I can conole myself that my ignorance of the name is folded into my ignorance of Dee's output (shocking though that may be in itself).

John Dee wrote mystical volumes predicting a British Empire and using the terms Great Britain and Britannia. After Elizabeth's death in 1603 the kingdoms shared one King, James VI of Scotland and I of England. On 20 October 1604 he proclaimed himself "King of Great Brittaine" (thus including Wales and also avoiding the cumbersome title "King of England and Scotland"). This title was eventually adopted formally in 1707 when the Kingdom of Great Britain was formed. - which was why I thought it was an 18th century thing.