Books written to be reckoned with, not merely read.
A small, slow list built around inquiries into myth, catastrophe, and the psyche — the kind of books most publishers wouldn't take on.
An History Beside Time reads myth as a current running beneath ordinary history, rather than a relic left behind by it. The book unfolds across seven chapters, closing with an appendix that maps its own terms onto the language of Jungian analytical psychology — a second reading, for anyone who wants to trace the symbols back to their psychological ground.
Standing at the crossing of Jung and Nietzsche, this treatise takes catastrophe and nihilism as its starting conditions and asks what survives of the will toward the good once the easy consolations are gone. A foreword and introduction give way to seven chapters, and finally to a Chapter ∞ — the eternal return of meaning.
Three older texts on the confrontation with darkness and the discipline of transformation, brought into English alongside the press's own titles.
Menghi's sixteenth-century exorcist's manual moves past theory into practice: a working sequence of prayers, adjurations, and blessings written for a priest standing in front of the thing itself. Translating it means sitting with an era's most direct confrontation with darkness, in its own words, rather than at a psychological remove. Its use to the will toward the good lies less in the demons it names than in the discipline it demands of the one who faces them.
Canale's treatise reads less like a grimoire than a pastoral handbook: how to recognize affliction, how to tell its true cause from its false ones, and how to walk a sufferer back toward health. This edition presents Canale's own text on its own terms, with endnotes and appendices, including a previously unpublished manuscript rite, gathered afterward rather than layered on top. Its diagnosis-before-treatment structure models the will toward the good as a practice: seeing clearly before acting.
Della Riviera addresses not the ceremonial magician but the "Heroe," a term he means literally: one undertaking a long inward path of self-transformation through natural, rather than invoked, forces. It stands among the clearest statements in the hermetic tradition of alchemy read as an inner discipline rather than a chemical one, making it the most direct of these three texts on the will toward the good, understood as something worked toward rather than simply held as a belief.
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.
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.