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Il Mondo Magico de gli Heroi · Cesare della Riviera, 1605
A hermetic treatise addressed to the reader as “Heroe,” reading alchemy as an inward discipline of self-transformation.
579 herbs, resins, minerals, fungi, poisons, and compound remedies of the old medicine: their plates and old names, what the physicians and exorcists used them for, and what is known of them now.
Rocket
Rucola
Eruca vesicaria, salad rocket.
Says the seed and the leaf of euzomon provoke lust and urine, and that it is eaten raw with lettuce to temper its heat.Dioscorides
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Progress update ·
A note on everything in hand at the press, for those who like to follow the work as it goes. If progress notes are not for you, the button at the foot of this post hides them.
The books. On the Manner of Discerning and Healing the Bewitched, Floriano Canale's treatise of 1614, came out on October 15 in its first English translation: a 6 by 9 inch cloth hardcover with dust jacket, 250 pages, with…
The whole catalogue, with every title’s description → · Old books in English for the first time, in the Translations → · Read from each in the Reading Room → · A free demo of Scherner’s The Life of the Dream (PDF)
Every title here asks the same question in a different tongue: what does it cost, and what does it take, to choose the good once the easy answers are gone.
The Thinking Press exists for books that ask something of their reader. Its editions favor depth over ease: myth read as psychology, catastrophe read as a teacher, philosophy pursued past the point where it stops being comfortable. Each title is built to be returned to, not finished once and shelved, and each returns in its own way to the will toward the good.
The eagle above the flask is Zarathustra's, a mark of the vantage the press writes from, over work that stays close to the ground.
