Hello there,
Hope all's good and that you're looking forward to some time off over
Christmas... we certainly are!
Just a quick update from us regarding Christmas Post... please do get your
orders in soonish for anything you'd like delivered in time for
Christmas.
The guys at State51 have suggested a final Christmas Postal Date
of December 19th, so it's a good idea to have your order in
the system well in advance of that as they'll likely be swamped next
week.
We also have a few new releases shipping immediately, and number of pre-orders
open right now, so please read on for info on those...
All the beasts,
Jamie & Mark
Shipping Now: Moon's Milk: Images By Jhonn Balance
We're very happy to announce that this beautifully produced art book collecting hand-worked CDr covers and manipulated polaroids by Coil's Jhonn Balance is shipping now!
Moon's Milk: Images By Jhonn Balance
Compiled by Peter Christopherson & Andrew Lahman
Foreword by Andrew Lahman
Afterword by Gavin Semple
Limited to 1,000 Copies
Debossed Hardcover with Dustjacket
170x190mm
224pages
Full Colour
£45.00
ORDER
HERE
In 2002 Coil released Moon’s Milk, a double CD collection of four EPs
comprising improvised performances recorded over successive equinoxes and
solstices.
For friends and collectors, Jhonn Balance painted 300 CD-R sleeves in an
extended moment of what his friend Gavin Semple describes as “psychic
disjuncture and epiphany” to form “the largest piece in the
substantial body of drawing and painting he created over the years”.
Before his untimely death in 2004, Balance and Peter ‘Sleazy’
Christopherson had considered compiling these 300 unique artworks into a single
print volume, a project that Sleazy, alongside his friend Andrew Lahman,
revisited in 2010, before he himself passed away.
We are thrilled and honoured to have worked with Andrew, and a host of
Coil’s fans and friends, to bring this project to fruition. The result is
a deluxe 224 page full colour hardback book, featuring over 200 paintings,
Polaroid photographs and drawings culled from these intensive sessions,
overflowing with all the beauty, horror and humour that characterise
Coil’s output.
With a foreword by Andrew Lahman, and an afterword by Gavin Semple, the
Moon’s Milk project is finally complete.
Shipping Now: Appendix N edited by Peter Bebergal
Appendix N: Weird Tales From The Roots Of Dungeons & Dragons
Revised And Expanded Edition
Edited By Peter Bebergal
Foreword By Adrian Tchaikovsky
Afterword By Ann Vandermeer
Available as a deluxe hardback limited to 500 copies, and a trade paperback with
printed fold-out map endpapers.
Hardback: £30.00
Paperback: £17.99
Hardback orders will include a set of two postcards featuring cover art by Arik
Roper (while stocks last)
ORDER
HERE
An anthology of fantastical tales that inspired the creation of the world's
greatest roleplaying game.
Edited by Peter Bebergal, this lovingly-assembled revised and expanded edition
adds a new foreword by Arthur C. Clarke award-winning novelist Adrian
Tchaikovsky, tales by A. Merritt and Andre Norton, a dark fantasy comic by
Gardner Fox & John Giunta, and illustrations by revered master of the weird,
Virgil Finlay, and Escape The Dark Castle's Alex Crispin.
Drawing upon the original list of “inspirational reading” provided
by Gary Gygax in the first Dungeon Master's Guide, published in 1979, as
well as hobbyist magazines and related periodicals that helped to define the
modern role-playing game, Appendix N offers a collection of short fiction and
resonant fragments that reveal the literary influences that shaped Dungeons
& Dragons, the world's most popular RPG. The stories in Appendix N
contextualize the ambitious lyrical excursions that helped set the adventurous
tone and dank, dungeon-crawling atmospheres of fantasy roleplay as we know it
today.
Includes work by Poul Anderson, Frank Brunner, Ramsey Campbell, Lin Carter, Lord
Dunsany, Gardner Fox & John Giunta, Robert E. Howard, Tanith Lee, Fritz
Leiber, H. P. Lovecraft, David Madison, A. Merritt, Michael Moorcock, C. L.
Moore, Andre Norton, Fred Saberhagen, Clark Ashton Smith, Margaret St. Clair,
Jack Vance, Manly Wade Wellman
Shipping Now: Paradise by Ken Hollings
The third and final volume of Ken Hollings' wondrous 'Trash Trilogy', Paradise, is shipping now alongside the series' previous two titles and an bonus book, available only when you order directly through our webstore...
Paradise
The Psychoanalysis of Trash
by Ken Hollings
ISBN: 9781913689858
352 pp. | 130x 182mm
30 illustrations
£17.99
ORDER HERE
In the third and final volume of his personal reflections on Trash Aesthetics, Ken Hollings tells the story of three kings who squandered everything they had in a grandiose spectacle of waste. King Ludwig II of Bavaria, ‘King of Rock ‘n’ Roll’ Elvis Presley and Michael Jackson, the ‘King of Pop,’ all shared the same doomed innocence. Their lives and early deaths were connected through individual displays of unfettered extravagance that brought them to the very edge of ruin. Each of them lived out their personal ideals of beauty and pleasure – even after the money was gone. In his reworking of Dante Alighieri’s Paradiso, Hollings presents Heaven as a place of rebellious but tragic self-indulgence.
Shipping Now: Music From Elsewhere by Doug Skinner
Music From Elsewhere: Haunting Tunes From Mythical Beings, Hidden Worlds,
and Other Curious Sources
By Doug Skinner
170mm x 220mm
272 pages, 2-colour
Heavily illustrated, with 112 pages of musical scores
ISBN: 9781913689216
£20.00 / £30.00
ORDER
HERE
A cacophonous cabinet of curiosities, gathering other musics channeled from the
spirit world, the fairy kingdom, outer space, secret societies and occult
lodges.
Compiled by musician, historian and archivist Doug Skinner, this unique
collection of esoteric earworms gathers, and examines, music from other worlds.
Notation is also included for several tunes so that you can play along at
home.
Over eight themed essays you’ll find tunes hummed, strummed, and sung by
spirits, sprites and fairies, extraterrestrial elevator music, dreamed ditties,
marches for occult ceremonies, secret musical codes and languages, music made by
animals, and more.
£20.00 / £30.00
170mm x 220mm
272 pages, 2-colour
Heavily illustrated, with 112 pages of musical scores
ISBN: 9781913689216
A cacophonous cabinet of curiosities, gathering other musics channeled from the
spirit world, the fairy kingdom, outer space, secret societies and occult
lodges.
Compiled by musician, historian and archivist Doug Skinner, this unique
collection of esoteric earworms gathers, and examines, music from other worlds.
Notation is also included for several tunes so that you can play along at
home.
Over eight themed essays you’ll find tunes hummed, strummed, and sung by
spirits, sprites and fairies, extraterrestrial elevator music, dreamed ditties,
marches for occult ceremonies, secret musical codes and languages, music made by
animals, and more.
Shipping Now: Two-Headed Doctor by David Toop
Two-Headed Doctor: Listening For Ghosts In Dr. John's
Gris-Gris
By David Toop
Paperback with flaps
148mm x 210mm
300 pages (approx)
ISBN: 9781913689605
£19.99 / £35.00
ORDER HERE
“An extraordinary LP begets an extraordinary book. Two-Headed Doctor
is about spectral America, the porosity of identity, racial drag, syncretic
spirituality, nocturnal transmissions, fantastical fabulation. No one listens
more deeply – or more hemispherically – than David Toop; no music
writer is more entrancing or contagious”
– Sukhdev Sandhu
“Dr John might have come into being just so David Toop could unravel
his mysteries. We bump into our Two Headed magus in a twilight zone across the
river, where a strange ceremony is underway. The celebrants include Ornette
Coleman and Sonny Bono, Nick Tosches and Margaret Mead, Princess Lotus Blossom
and Prince La La, Ishmael Reed and Irma Thomas, Gábor Szabó and
Bing Crosby. There are marshmallow sandwiches and musical bones, frogs and
tambourines. Irish fiddlers and Egyptian sistrum players vamp together. Joseph
Conrad and Merle Haggard meet on the same burial ground. Baron Samedi is snapped
on a beach in Sussex. The dead among the living. All fictional, all
real.”
– Ian Penman
Two-Headed Doctor is a forensic investigation into a single LP: Dr. John, the night tripper’s Gris-gris. Though released in 1968 to poor sales and a minimum of critical attention, Gris-gris has accumulated legendary status over subsequent decades for its strangeness, hybridity, and innovative production. It formed the launch pad for Dr. John’s image and lengthy career and the ghostly presence of its so-called voodoo atmosphere hovers over numerous cover versions, samples, and re-invocations. Despite the respect given to the record, its making is shrouded in mystery, misunderstandings, and false conclusions. The persona of Dr. John, loosely based on dubious literary accounts of a notorious voodooist and freed slave, a nineteenth-century New Orleans resident known as Doctor John, provided Malcolm “Mac” Rebennack with a lifelong mask through which to transform himself from session musician in order to construct a solo career.
Somewhere between puzzle, experimental rhythm, blues disguised as rock, and elaborate hoax, Gris-gris was a collaborative project between Rebennack and producer/arranger Harold Battiste (at the time musical director for Sonny & Cher). A few brief sessions held at Gold Star Studios in Los Angeles brought together many of New Orleans’ finest musicians, including Shirley Goodman, John Boudreaux, Plas Johnson, Jessie Hill, Ernest McLean, and Tami Lynn. Along with their complex histories, the cast of characters implicated in the story includes Ornette Coleman, Lafcadio Hearn, Zora Neale Hurston, Cher, Sonny Bono, Sam Cooke, Ishmael Reed, Black Herman, Prince La La, and many others. The story details in discursive style the historical context of the music, how it came together, its literary sources, production and arrangements, and the nature of the recording studio as dream state, but also examines as a disturbing undercurrent the volatile issue of race in twentieth-century music, the way in which it doomed relationships and ambitious projects, exploited great talents, and distorted the cultural landscape.
“David Toop’s books have always been examples of what can be
achieved by scholarship liberated by the norms and conformism of academia. They
are enlivened by the storytelling of a writer and artist who remains a voracious
reader and listener. But in Two Headed Doctor: Listening for Ghosts in Dr.
John’s Gris Gris he has outdone himself. At once a densely researched
blend of cultural history, ethno/musicology and memoir of listening, it is also
a personal accounting of the occult pathways of the African Diaspora and its
gloriously convoluted impact on music, culture and identity”
– Louis Chude Sokei
“Ostensibly about an album I barely know and had little interest in, I
burned through this book, which raises the ghosts of 20th century culture, to
ask questions about the very stuff our musical histories are made
from.”
– Jennifer Lucy Allen
“A double headfirst plunge into the murk of American performance and
states of “dreamed-up being” — but also a generous archival
sharing (say, tilialea plant for the Gabonese voice disguiser tea), passed
between worlds studio and spectral, in acknowledgement to all gris gris
contributors, actual and imagined. David Toop reverse engineers the Night
Tripper mythology, listening as a way to question our own mediumship.”
– Dave Tompkins
Pre-Order Now: Delinquent Elementals by Phil Hine & Rodney Orpheus
Delinquent Elementals
A Pagan News Anthology
Edited by Phil Hine & Rodney Orpheus
ISBN: 9781907222931
165 x 221mm
656 pp.
Containing both original archive materials
With new illustrations by Krent Able
£25 / £45
ORDER
HERE
Available as an unlimited paperback with flaps & a special hardback edition
of 300, featuring a bookplate signed by the editors.
The first 100 copies bought from SAP will include an exclusive
postcard.
Delinquent Elementals: A Pagan News Anthology collects some of the finest
articles, news reports, interviews, and humour that appeared in this singular
publication, providing a fascinating glimpse into the British occult and Pagan
countercultures of the 1980s and early ’90s.
This collection, newly annotated by the editors, contains a plethora of essays,
commentary, and a wide selection of evolving knowledge and insight into occult
practices, while the list of contributors is a veritable directory of new wave
British occultism. Delinquent Elementals reveals how magical practitioners
interacted with the wider culture, political activism, and the struggle for
LGBTQ+ rights and recognition. The zine’s 36 issues also charted the
arrival, and devastating impact, of the Satanic Ritual Abuse Panic as it landed
on UK shores and began a systematic assault on its occult communities.
Wonderfully unpretentious, absurdly funny and deeply insightful, this is the
definitive guide to the radical publication that reflected and reshaped
late-twentieth century British occultism.
Pre-Order Now: The Stammering Librarian By Timothy d'Arch
Smith
And finally, the long-awaited new collection of essays by cult bibliographer Timothy d'Arch Smith, The Stammering Librarian, is available to pre-order now...
The Stammering Librarian
Essays by Timothy D’Arch Smith
Edited by Edwin Pouncey & Sandy Robertson
ISBN: 978-1-917319-04-1
192 pp.
133 x 203mm
Illustrated, index
Available mid January 2025
£35.00
In the long–awaited followup to his famed 1987 anthology, Books Of The Beast, writer, legendary bookseller and cricket enthusiast Timothy d’Arch Smith steps up to the crease with The Stammering Librarian, another diverse collection of erudite essays all told with forensic detail, tenderness and an acerbic wit.
Here, among other absorbing topics, he provides further insight into the life and occult writings of Aleister Crowley, the criminal prosecution that resulted in Montague Summers’s translation of The Confessions of Madeline Bavent, an A to Z of naughty public-school slang and the feline mystery behind Thomas Hardy’s heart.
Along the way we are introduced to such memorable personalities as actor, avowed libertine and previous Montague Summers associate Anatole James, Sixties poet Brian Hill, and earlier Uranian poets (both real and mythical) Edmund John and Rev. T. Hartington Quince, M.A.. Elsewhere the autobiographical title essay recalls the author’s early days, including a meeting with “compiler of bibliographies and biographical dictionaries of living persons”, Geoffrey Handley-Taylor. No serious librarian should be without this collection on their shelves.