Astrolearn astrology library progress report
– No. 9: 24th September 2015
These past seven days, I have exhaustively catalogued another 4½ shelves of academic hardback books on astrology. That is better progress than last week. The weekend was lost to a family visit, so those 4½ shelves were dealt with on Friday last week and Monday to Thursday this week.
All this cataloguing work is revision of existing more basic entries that lacked pagination details, binding format and condition details and (where applicable) publication series details. In the cases of books that feature ancient or medieval source texts and / or modern English translations thereof, I’m also adding footnotes where called for to outline what it is they actually contain.
There are now just three shelves of hardback books left to catalogue in this fuller manner, most of them non-academic.
After that, I still have a shelf of unbound dissertations and several shelves of A4-format 20th century publications to deal with (these are in many cases relatively obscure so they deserve fuller treatment).
I do not plan to add pagination and binding format details for general paperback books post-1960 other than those that are academic or feature translations of ancient or medieval texts.There are many (probably thousands) such paperbacks, and it would massively increase the scope of the job and time taken to process them all in this manner.
Purchase-wise, the Stephen Heilen edition of Bonincontrius “De Rebus Naturalibus” (1999) that I mentioned last week has not yet arrived, but should be by this time next week.
The academic edition that I enquired about over two weeks ago has still not yet been located by the bookseller. At this stage I have no immediate expectations that it will be found, so I shall not mention it further here until and unless it materialises.
For the time being, I have instead ordered a set of the 25 instructive letters from Hans Baumgartner’s “Astrologische Universal-Harmonien – Fernlehrgang der Astrologie” series. I previously had just the first letter. The set of 25 had been on the market for quite some time priced at 125 Euros, but the vendor recently cut the price to 87½ Euros, which I felt reasonable for a set that is currently very scarce on the free market.
Also published by Baumgartner under the general banner of “Astrologische Universal-Harmonien”, but quite separate from the Brief series discussed above, were several score short books in their own numbered series, produced from the 1950s onwards. I have already collected nearly all of those that were not merely translations or reprints of books available in other editions. Some were reprints of classic German works published in the 1920s and 1930s, others German editions of classic works in other languages, and it is on these that I have generally passed.
Baumgartner was seemingly a towering figure in the history of German astrological publishing in the third quarter of the 20th century, indeed practically on a level with Reinhold Ebertin in that era.
Leave a Reply