Austin Osman Spare is the strangest and, lately, the most influential figure in modern English magic. A working-class prodigy who exhibited at the Royal Academy at seventeen, dismissed by Aleister Crowley early on, he withdrew into the slums of Kennington and spent thirty years drawing in near-poverty while quietly inventing a magical system that the late twentieth century would rediscover and build the whole of chaos magic upon. This pairing brings together the two books a collector of Spare most wants side by side: his own foundational treatise, and the lavish illustrated study that resurrected his reputation. Both were published in 1975, and each was limited to 1,000 copies.
The first is The Book of Pleasure (Self-Love): The Psychology of Ecstasy, Spare's 1913 magnum opus, here in the handsome large-format facsimile from 93 Publishing in Montreal with an introduction by Kenneth Grant. This is the book in which Spare set out the ideas that made him: the "Death Posture," a technique of exhausting the mind into emptiness; "self-love" as the engine of the will; and above all the method of sigils, his "art of believing," in which a written desire is compressed into a single glyph and then driven below the threshold of conscious thought, because, as he insists, "conscious desire is unattractive." His worked example survives in the facsimile, the wish "I desire the strength of my tigers" stripped of its repeated letters and fused into one sign. The pages reproduce Spare's own dense, aphoristic prose and his extraordinary automatic drawings, hands that see, faces dissolving into smoke, the famous self-portrait surrounded by satyrs, alongside chapters with titles like "Soliloquy on God-Head" and "On Myself." It is one of the genuine primary sources of modern occultism, reproduced at a scale that does justice to the draftsmanship.
The companion volume is Kenneth Grant's Images & Oracles of Austin Osman Spare, the large oblong art book issued by Frederick Muller that did more than anything else to rescue Spare from obscurity. Grant, who had been Crowley's secretary and went on to lead the Typhonian current, knew Spare personally, and he assembled here a biographical essay, a study of the "Zos Kia" system, and a generous gallery of drawings, many of them never before published and intended for the unfinished "Grimoire of Zos." The book is beautifully printed in black and red, its plates punctuated by Spare's own oracular lines set in red ink: "I teach the equal reality of all things, man and his illusions: Dreams shall flesh, some day," or "The familiar is always sterile." Together the two volumes give you Spare in his own words and Spare as his great champion presented him, the theory and the pictures, the 1913 source and its 1970s revival.
Both books are complete in their original pictorial dust jackets and are in good to very good condition, with the usual light shelf wear and faint toning to the jackets. As a matched set they make an ideal cornerstone for a collection of Spare, of Kenneth Grant and the Typhonian tradition, or of twentieth-century British esoteric art. The Grant volume in particular has become genuinely uncommon and sought after in its 1975 first issue.
SPARE, Austin Osman (1886-1956); introduction by Kenneth Grant. The Book of Pleasure (Self-Love): The Psychology of Ecstasy. Montreal: 93 Publishing, 1975. Facsimile of the 1913 first edition. Large folio. Limited edition (1,000 copies). Original cloth and pictorial dust jacket.
GRANT, Kenneth (1924-2011) [and Austin Osman Spare]. Images & Oracles of Austin Osman Spare. London: Frederick Muller Limited, 1975. First edition, limited to 1,000 copies. Oblong/landscape quarto, 96 pp., profusely illustrated, printed in black and red. Original cloth and black pictorial dust jacket.
Condition (both): Good to very good in the original dust jackets; light shelf wear, minor toning/discoloration to jackets, jackets in protective sleeves. Complete.
Austin Osman Spare is the strangest and, lately, the most influential figure in modern English magic. A working-class prodigy who exhibited at the Royal Academy at seventeen, dismissed by Aleister Crowley early on, he withdrew into the slums of Kennington and spent thirty years drawing in near-poverty while quietly inventing a magical system that the late twentieth century would rediscover and build the whole of chaos magic upon. This pairing brings together the two books a collector of Spare most wants side by side: his own foundational treatise, and the lavish illustrated study that resurrected his reputation. Both were published in 1975, and each was limited to 1,000 copies.
The first is The Book of Pleasure (Self-Love): The Psychology of Ecstasy, Spare's 1913 magnum opus, here in the handsome large-format facsimile from 93 Publishing in Montreal with an introduction by Kenneth Grant. This is the book in which Spare set out the ideas that made him: the "Death Posture," a technique of exhausting the mind into emptiness; "self-love" as the engine of the will; and above all the method of sigils, his "art of believing," in which a written desire is compressed into a single glyph and then driven below the threshold of conscious thought, because, as he insists, "conscious desire is unattractive." His worked example survives in the facsimile, the wish "I desire the strength of my tigers" stripped of its repeated letters and fused into one sign. The pages reproduce Spare's own dense, aphoristic prose and his extraordinary automatic drawings, hands that see, faces dissolving into smoke, the famous self-portrait surrounded by satyrs, alongside chapters with titles like "Soliloquy on God-Head" and "On Myself." It is one of the genuine primary sources of modern occultism, reproduced at a scale that does justice to the draftsmanship.
The companion volume is Kenneth Grant's Images & Oracles of Austin Osman Spare, the large oblong art book issued by Frederick Muller that did more than anything else to rescue Spare from obscurity. Grant, who had been Crowley's secretary and went on to lead the Typhonian current, knew Spare personally, and he assembled here a biographical essay, a study of the "Zos Kia" system, and a generous gallery of drawings, many of them never before published and intended for the unfinished "Grimoire of Zos." The book is beautifully printed in black and red, its plates punctuated by Spare's own oracular lines set in red ink: "I teach the equal reality of all things, man and his illusions: Dreams shall flesh, some day," or "The familiar is always sterile." Together the two volumes give you Spare in his own words and Spare as his great champion presented him, the theory and the pictures, the 1913 source and its 1970s revival.
Both books are complete in their original pictorial dust jackets and are in good to very good condition, with the usual light shelf wear and faint toning to the jackets. As a matched set they make an ideal cornerstone for a collection of Spare, of Kenneth Grant and the Typhonian tradition, or of twentieth-century British esoteric art. The Grant volume in particular has become genuinely uncommon and sought after in its 1975 first issue.
SPARE, Austin Osman (1886-1956); introduction by Kenneth Grant. The Book of Pleasure (Self-Love): The Psychology of Ecstasy. Montreal: 93 Publishing, 1975. Facsimile of the 1913 first edition. Large folio. Limited edition (1,000 copies). Original cloth and pictorial dust jacket.
GRANT, Kenneth (1924-2011) [and Austin Osman Spare]. Images & Oracles of Austin Osman Spare. London: Frederick Muller Limited, 1975. First edition, limited to 1,000 copies. Oblong/landscape quarto, 96 pp., profusely illustrated, printed in black and red. Original cloth and black pictorial dust jacket.
Condition (both): Good to very good in the original dust jackets; light shelf wear, minor toning/discoloration to jackets, jackets in protective sleeves. Complete.
Image 1 of 24
Image 2 of 24
Image 3 of 24
Image 4 of 24
Image 5 of 24
Image 6 of 24
Image 7 of 24
Image 8 of 24
Image 9 of 24
Image 10 of 24
Image 11 of 24
Image 12 of 24
Image 13 of 24
Image 14 of 24
Image 15 of 24
Image 16 of 24
Image 17 of 24
Image 18 of 24
Image 19 of 24
Image 20 of 24
Image 21 of 24
Image 22 of 24
Image 23 of 24
Image 24 of 24