Hello,

Inspired by Philip's awesome ongoing thread here I was wondering if anyone had any suggestions on good book search companies to seek out of print astrology texts. I am not really thinking of the antiquarian first editions as I tend to just want a copy of a book in good condition for practical study purposes. Some of these are not that old but already really hard to obtain.

I have tried the usual options like Amazon, ABE and Ebay but even they are not always able to locate some of the books I have been seeking.

I am UK based but I regularly order on ABE or Amazon from American suppliers so I suppose an American based company would be ok as well.

Thanks

Mark

What are you actually looking for? With titles or authors I might be able to offer suggestions. Philip or I may even already have what you're looking for.

The modern English version of Ramesey will be available in the next few weeks and will be shortly followed by John Indagine's palmistry and astrology book. I'm still struggling through transliterating a Simon Forman manuscript on medical astrology, but that's also high on the priority list. If lots of people enthuse over something particularly obscure I may be persauded to reprint it myself.

Kim

Hello Kim,

I will be looking forward to your annotated edition of Ramesey's Astrology Restored. I know you have an electronic version of this already but there is nothing like browsing the book itself. The book is on Lee Lehman's essential reading list for courses on electional and mundane astrology and I am sure your edition will be a great asset to all students of traditional astrology. Having tried to work my way through the opaque Kessinger edition facsimilie your re-set edition will be a real treat. Unfortunately, my purchase of Ben Dykes new Bonatti translation will probably wipe out my astrology book buying budget for a while!

I should have clarified though that my query wasn't necessarily about long out of print old books but also some more recent books. One example would be several of the Latin track translations by Project Hindsight that are now out of print. While Robert Schmidt is re-issuing new versions of the Greek texts under the so called 'Astrologers Editon' , Project Hindsight has no plans to do this on the Latin track books they issued. Many of these were translated by Robert Hand so I guess it depends if he decides to take up this mantle again. His website is a bit out of date so its hard to tell what his current plans are. Although it does still state plans for an expanded Schoener's Opusculum Astrologicum, The Book of Nativities of Ibn Ezra translated by Meira Epstein, and 'The Complete Montulmo'. However, I am not clear if these are still being planned or have been dropped.

Examples of Project Hindsight Latin track translations I am interested in include the following:

1 ABU MASHAR. ON SOLAR REVOLUTIONS, Part II.
2 HERMES TRISMEGISTUS, LIBER HERMETIS
3 JOHANN SCHOENER, OPUSCULUM ASTROLOGICUM.
4 MASHA'ALLAH, BOOK OF NATIVITES.
5 ANTONIO DE MONTULMO, ON THE JUDGMENT OF NATIVITIES
6 OMAR OF TIBERIAS, THREE BOOKS ON NATIVITIES

There are also some recent books that seem very hard to get a hold of such as 'Kepler's Astrology' by Ken Negus.

Mark

I will be looking forward to your annotated edition of Ramesey's Astrology Restored.

Very, very soon. I have to stop adding footnotes. It's different to the electronic version in that I've annotated it further and modernised the English further by doing things like rationalising the capitalisation and spelling and throwing some occasional punctuation at it.

Sorry, don't think I can help on the Hindsight texts. I'll keep my eyes open though...

Kim

Hello Kim,

Sounds like it will be fantastic once the grammar check is over!

I wasn't really expecting miracles on the Project Hindsight stuff. If these and several other medieval translations are not re-issued they are going to become exceptionally rare and the equivalent of astrological gold dust. Philip did mention these coming up in book auctions sometimes but I am not really sure how one goes about finding out such information. It really seems like something for a specialist in the book trade.

Mark

Hermes Liber Hemetis Part II Project Hindsight Latin Track Volume III
is presently available on Amazon.com

Also cited at Telegraph Books http://www.biblio.com/books/54332014.html#seller_info

The only other one I can see is Liber Astronomiae Part I Project Hindsight Latin Track Volume VII Bonati, Guido http://www.biblio.com/books/54331471.html

Kim

>There are also some recent books that seem very hard to get a hold of such as 'Kepler's Astrology' by Ken Negus. <

Ken is the current and long standing President of the Astrological Society of Princeton, NJ. Their website www.aspnj.org. You might be able to contact him, indirectly, via aspinfo@aspnj.org. He used to use kennegus@aol.com for his personal e-mail. I'm not sure if that still works.

Try writing to see if he still has access to some copies or knows where they can be obtained. Good luck.

Tom

I have not seen any copy of this publication for sale on the used market either. It's fortunate that with the author's permission a transcript was posted on the cura.fr site here:

http://cura.free.fr/docum/15kep-en.html

This appears (though it is not entirely clearly so) to be the totality of the author's original text, which must have been published in a brief pamphlet.

Philip

hi Mark!

To answer your main question, the best used book search engines I find to be:

www.vialibri.net - excludes Amazon listings and has a very peculiar tendency to tell you 'And there appear to be even more results matching your search' any number of times after it seems to have finished presenting all of them, so you have to plough on through these to make sure you have seen everything; but it does have the unique feature of allowing you to sort results by year of publication in ascending order, which is extremely useful if you are looking for the earliest editions possible;

http://used.addall.com - lacks the sort-by-year feature and sometimes searches too quickly to get any results back from Abebooks, bizarrely enough; but in all other respects this is the most logical, easy-to-use and complete used book search engine available. Be sure to enter 'Kessinger' and 'Lightning' in the 'Exclude keywords' box if you're looking for an original but are bombarded with reprints!

On Abebooks.com you can record in your personalised Abebooks account your wants by author, title and (I think) keyword, and then when a match occurs you are emailed to inform you within the following 24 hours. If anyone else has the same want, there's a good chance that if the price is right the copy will be bought immediately however, so you have to check your email often to stand a chance of this working in your favour.

On ebay.com there is a comparable system for recording wants and having emails sent to you, but it is time-limited so you have to renew it every twelve months if no match has arisen. The advantage here over the Abebooks wants reporting is that usually the listings will be auctions so nobody can steal the wants that come up from under your nose just by being faster to read their emails - you just have to make sure of being the highest bidder!

For major auction house auctions there is always americanaexchange.com, worth checking in the free search box a couple of times a month; but this is only really useful for antiquarian originals from the 19th century and before or otherwise items or collections of exceptionally high value if they are from the twentieth century.

One used book search engine I tend to avoid is bookfinder.com. Although it is popular and well-established, it has some major disadvantages over addall.com and vialibri.net . First of all, it has far less flexible options than either of the above for the order in which you want your results presented. Secondly, it does not proceed directly to a list of matches. Instead, it picks out every different minor variation in title and author name as input by different booksellers for the same book, and then requires you to choose between these different variations to see any results. So you have to click each and every one of them, and in each case a new slow search is undertaken by Bookfinder, before a separate window is opened. So you may have to undertake not only one but four, five, six or seven patient searches in order to see the results for the title and author you want. Bookfinder is only really worth checking as a last resort just in case something that has not shown up on vialibri or addall might be present, but it's unlikely in the extreme that it will be since the other two engines between them are pretty comprehensive in their coverage of the global bookdealer networks!

I completely hear what you're saying about the Project Hindsight Latin Track (and the Hebrew track, incidentally, although this amounted to just one title, 'The Book of Reasons' by Ibn Ezra). Your best bet would probably be to enter some wants on both ebay and Abebooks, one with the set keyword "Project Hindsight" for all matches that come up, and others with individual author and title combinations of relevance. You will probably get a lot of false positives but it will be worth sitting these out to obtain the books you want when they hit the market.

It's worth bearing in mind that collectors are very clued up to what is available for sale in their areas of interest. Anything that is scarce, important, and reasonably priced is likely to have sold out from the worldwide market already. What is left is likely to be more common, less important, or priced high enough to deter all but the most dedicated seeker of the title concerned. This means that recording wants and waiting it out is virtually essential to getting those rarer important astrological books, in some cases at any price, but certainly at a more affordable one!

There are a good many important astrology books that in two-three years of fairly intensive collecting I've still failed to obtain, either because no copy has come on the market at all, or because the only ones have been seriously defective or I've been outbid on them! It becomes a long waiting-game in which you learn lessons from experience and adjust your bids upwardly if need be another time....

I have a few spare copies of the first-issue Vettius Valens translations from Project Hindsight which I'd be delighted to sell to a good home at a reasonable price, but no spares of the Latin track unfortunately. I managed to obtain second-hand copies of most of the Latin track pamphlets a year or two ago, in addition to 'The Book of Reasons', proving that it can be done if you're patient enough!

Best of luck,

Philip

Thanks Kim, Tom and Philip for your elucidating replies!

Kim- Clearly Liber Hermetis is not as hard to find as I thought. I also note Wessex Astrologer are offering the Robert Zoller translation published by Spica. Thanks for your help. Do let us know when your book is ready.

Tom-Thankyou for the Ken Negus details. I will definitely follow this up. I had seen the Cura link Philip gave before but I am under the impression the book is a lot more substantial.

Philip-Wow! so many new book search options to try out. Thanks for all your insider tips. I am not really worried about anything from the Project Hindsight Greek track as I am signed up to the Astrologers edition so should be receiving Schmidt's newly revised version of Valen's Anthology very soon. I guess locating the Latin track translations will become a long, noble quest! In regards the Hebrew text by Ibn Ezra I think 'The Book of Reasons' may still be available direct from Meira Epstein through her website.

Thanks everyone for your extremely helpful replies.

Mark

SPICA in Australia used to sell a reprint in a single large-format softcover volume of all parts of the Project Hindsight edition of the Liber Hermetis. It was imported by Wessex Astrologer in the UK as recently as 2003, because that was when I bought my copy from them.

SPICA started winding down its business affairs considerably a year or two ago when its owner relocated within Australia. According to the SPICA website, she continues to sell books by mail order. However, I have had unfortunately had no success in trying to order any books from her in the past year and a half, despite waiting patiently for further replies since her initial friendly responses. But you never know - it may be worth enquiring regarding any remaining stock of the Liber Hermetis, and I'll probably email again about the books I wanted eventually too.

www.spica.com.au

There is in fact a used copy of the SPICA edition of the Liber Hermetis to be found in one bookstore listed through Abebooks currently, in Canada, but it is priced at $165. At that price, it certainly seems worth trying to get a copy directly from SPICA at the original list price first!

Regarding 'On Solar Revolutions Part II', Project Hindsight still had unsold stock of this just over a year ago because I was able to buy a copy directly from Bill Johnston then. I don't know if they do any more but it might be worth asking. Project Hindsight indicates that it should still be available, here: http://www.projecthindsight.com/products/pricelist.html

The Schoner, Montulmo (first half) and Omar of Tiberias titles are almost certainly sold out to judge by their absence from that list, so you'll surely have to wait for second-hand copies. Likewise Masha'Allah's Book of Nativities - which I haven't even found yet myself (in fact I did in theory, but tragically it never reached me in the post even though I paid for it!).

I have no idea if Rob Hand will be reprinting his translations in the future, though I too hope so. The copyright on some or all of them might be tied up with Project Hindsight, of which he is no longer a part of course, so whether or not he's even allowed to may be more to the point.

Philip

Hey Mark,

Our messages crossed there - we were both writing about the Liber Hermetis at the same time!

Sorry for the superfluousness of that part of my post.