My Current Titles Are Now Available on Kindle

Getting them on there has been a technical problem. More precisely, it has been me having problems coping with the technology. But at last it’s done.

Getting the novel, Aradia and the Books of the Sacred Marriage, up there is a relief. It had been growing for 45 years. Now it is done, released, finished. I can move on.

Hippie Commie Beatnik Witches: A Social History of the New Reformed Orthodox Order of the Golden Dawn has been available on Kindle for a while, but I did put up a better-formatted version of it.

I decided to put the reference book, A Tapestry of Witches: A History of the Craft in America, Vol. I, to the Mid-1970s, up on Kindle also. I hadn’t, thinking the e-book format would totally mess up the hundreds of footnotes. Well, it doesn’t. Bu I added the following to it.

A Note to the Reader of this Kindle Edition

I planned this book and the next two volumes to be primarily a tool for reference. If you intend to use it for that purpose, I recommend that you obtain the physical book, because it is indexed. Here you can use the table of contents and the search function to find particular sections, as wll as names of persons and groups that you already know about. You can also use the Kindle internal numbering to cite this book, but that numbering is impossible to use for the normal sort of index. To be honest, I am an old dragon, and the technical problems of using them to index seem beyond me, especially when the search function makes an index less than essential.

In addition, in this Kindle version, all of the thousand-odd footnotes are shoved down to the end of the file, where they are much less con­venient. You can scan through them to see which are substantive and which are merely page citations, but that placement makes this version far more difficult to use as a reference tool.

In The Gutenberg Galaxy, Marshall McLuhan told an anecdote, that when printed books first became available, the wealthy families—the only people who previously could afford books—would have the family scribe obtain such a book and handcopy it onto a scroll, in order to make it a “real book.” The scribe would then throw the printed book away.

These days I tell my Composition classes that, when I began as an assistant editor at Stanford University Press in 1964, the type was set with Linotype machines, casting metal slugs out of molten lead. The slugs were assembled in a galley and inked; a long strip of paper was placed over them, and a roller was used to create a galley proof. I tell my classes this story to emphasize that, in my lifetime, publishing technol­ogy advanced from that of Gutenberg to this digital incarnation, and that those union typesetters, who thought they were secure for life, were un­employed by the mid-1970s, and the last Linotype machine was donated to the Smithsonian.

I know that this Kindle version is now de facto a real book—but my inner dragon still grumbles about having to believe that.