Astrology library progress report
– No. 26: 21st February, 2016
After taking things easy for another week, I have no back pain in normal circumstances and have recovered some of my lost flexibility, but have yet to resume serious walks, heavy cleaning or lifting. However, I’m quietly confident that so long as I’m careful, my back will heal itself.
This past week, I have made some minor presentational changes to this website. About a week ago, I split the main Products menu page in two, giving the CD products their own separate page and changing the name of the other one to DVD in the navigation bar at the top of each page so that both would fit.
I have also tried to brighten up the headings to the main pages by making them green, then repeated this with the internal links to make them more visible, so that they all matched those on the existing Articles menu page and Products menu page. Towards the end of the week, I had become increasing dissatisfied with the look of the green colour, feeling it was too bright, so I have since gone through, toning down the shade of green to one that is easier on the eyes on most of the affected pages. The individual DVD and CD product pages may still need treatment, as well as the first 20 or so Bibliography pages.
More significantly, I have received and catalogued a modest but valuable lot of relatively obscure mid-20th-century French astrological journals that included some titles new to the collection. Entries for “Astral”, “L’Avenir du Monde”, “Consolation”, “Destinées”, “Le Monde de Demain” and “Votre Bonheur” are now therefore found in the online bibliography for the first time. A few additional issues of “Astres”, two of “Destin”, and several of “Le Bon Astrologue” were also in the lot and have been added to their respective pages. Collectively, this represents a major improvement to the historical value of the archive in the area of 20th century French astrological literature. The magazines were ordered in January by private arrangement with a genial seller in France, but I was not able to pay for them until early this month.
I have also carefully and thoroughly updated my article first written in the Autumn of 2014 that details the tally of journals and almanacs in the archive as a whole, which has now passed 9240. The wording of parts of the “About” page has been revised to reflect this change, and an internal link placed to the updated tally article.
Received: Kim Farnell’s annotated edition of the Fabian Withers translation of Indagine, q. v. on the page for Indagine in the Bibliography.
Ordered: “Sidera Viva”, a two-volume compilation of scholarly essays on ancient astral mythology and related subjects by the academic historian Antonio Panaino. It was published in 2014 by Mimesis but surprisingly is not shown on their website. I therefore had to place an order manually through email. It should with luck be processed in the coming week, but the book will not get here at least until the week after that, if not later.
I have been thinking some more about how and when to launch a formal appeal for funding beyond the domain of simply posting a notice on the About page of this website. I think I’m going to leave it a few more months, for a variety of reasons, including seeking to fill in some more recent gaps in my holdings of relevant academic books on astrology beforehand.
One thing that is now very clear is that I cannot live off the receipts from DVD and CD sales alone. DVD sales last year brought in a total of £1384 over the course of the entire year, including contributions to shipping. Once the cost of shipping and material costs of production are factored out, I’m left with considerably less even than that. My rent alone is £300 a month, with other household bills to pay on top of that, not forgetting food. Ergo the situation is unsustainable without funding, and failing that I’ll have to rejoin the job market this summer.
Best wishes to all,
Philip
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