I recently posted a little vintage booklet called Basic Pyramid Experimental Guide Book by Bill Kerrel and Kathy Goggin, and it got me thinking about vintage pamphlets and booklets in general — and some of the wonderfully varied examples I currently have here at Ash Tree Books.
So I thought I’d pull a few of them together and show you.
These little publications may not look particularly significant at first glance. They’re small, softcover, and quite different from the larger antiquarian books that usually catch our attention.
But that’s part of what I find so interesting about them.
The five publications in this video come from remarkably different places and interests.
There’s Basic Pyramid Experimental Guide Book by Bill Kerrel and Kathy Goggin, exploring the ideas and experiments surrounding pyramid power.
There’s The Journal of Shasta Abbey from 1978, published by the headquarters of the Reform Soto Zen Church and the Zen Mission Society.
Then there’s Herbs, published by Tansy Farm in 1983, with information on herbs, how to grow them, and how to use them.
Adrienne Rich’s Women and Honor: Some Notes on Lying, published in 1979, takes us into an entirely different area — writing about women, relationships, language and society.
And finally, there’s The Mystery of Jeane Dixon: Prophetess or Psychic Medium by Gordon Lindsay, a publication exploring the life and reputation of the well-known psychic and prophetess.
What I love about putting these together is that they aren’t really connected at all.
And that’s exactly the point.
Small publications, specific communities
Before the internet made it possible to instantly publish information and find people interested in almost anything, small publications provided a way for ideas to circulate.
A religious community could publish a journal. A farm could produce a guide to herbs. An author could publish a short work exploring a particular social question. Writers and researchers could produce inexpensive booklets about subjects that might never have attracted a large commercial publisher.
They didn’t need to be big books.
They just needed to reach the people who were interested.
That’s what makes these little publications so fascinating to me as a bookseller. They can offer a glimpse into the interests, beliefs, questions and practices of particular communities at a particular moment in time.
And sometimes the format itself tells us something.
A small booklet could be affordable, portable and easy to distribute. It could be passed from person to person, sold through a small organization, handed out at a gathering, or simply taken home by someone who wanted to learn more.
The pyramid booklet that started this little collection of thoughts is a wonderful example. Its cover invites readers to conduct experiments at home and explore the mysteries of pyramid energy. Whether or not one accepts the claims being made, the publication itself documents a fascinating period in the history of alternative spirituality and popular experimentation.
And then you can put it beside a Zen journal, an herbal guide, a feminist text and a publication about psychic prophecy — and suddenly you’ve got a wonderfully odd little cross-section of the things people were reading and exploring.
That’s one of the things I love about old books.
Not everything worth preserving is a grand first edition or a beautifully bound volume.
Sometimes it’s a little booklet.
Sometimes it’s a few dozen pages.
Sometimes it’s something that was probably never expected to survive for decades.
And sometimes, those small publications have some of the biggest stories to tell. 📚
