#Arkhaven INFOGALACTIC #Castalia House
We’ve finished the interior of the fourth book in the History series, STUDIES IN THE NAPOLEONIC WARS. For a look at the endpapers and the title page, visit the Castalia Library substack. There are 50 copies remaining, so if you’d like to acquire one, you can do so at the Arkhaven store. A significant discount from the retail price is available to all History, Library, and Libraria subscribers, but it is not the usual discount code, so please visit the substack for details.
Now, I quite like ebooks. I do most of my reading on my tablet and I have a massive ebook library of which Project Gutenberg is merely the foundation. But I endeavor to obtain a hardcover edition of any book I want to preserve, because I have absolutely zero confidence in ebooks necessarily surviving the coming Dark Age of post-Christianity.
In addition to its relentlessly Orwellian ideological practices, Amazon is already showing the cracks in its core technology that will only be exacerbated over time. I’m not saying one shouldn’t read or collect ebooks, only that it’s important to understand that digital technology is simply not going to survive over time due to its reliance on a technological ecosystem that cannot reasonably be expected to survive.
An outage was preventing Amazon Kindle users from downloading both new and previously purchased books to their e-readers, as noted on Amazon’s support forums and Reddit, but the company says things should be resolved. “Yesterday, some Kindle customers experienced an issue that impacted their ability to download e-books. The issue was quickly resolved,” writes Amazon devices spokesperson Jackie Burke in an email sent to The Verge.
The forum post included many reports of Kindles that were only able to download the title and cover art of books before the progress indicator got stuck at 1 percent. The outage also seemed to affect downloading books from Overdrive to Kindle devices using Libby. However, downloading books to the iOS and Android Amazon Kindle apps is not affected.
This latest issue comes a week after several Kindle users on Reddit reported a problem with Amazon’s “Send to Kindle” feature, which allows ebooks and documents to be sideloaded onto the e-readers without having to plug them into a computer. Some users received error messages telling them their files “could not be delivered due to a service error,” while other users in the thread were still seeing problems with the service earlier this week.
Later this year, I’m hoping we can unveil some of the first steps toward an actual Castalia library. In the meantime, we continue to collect old books that are worth saving, such as this priceless BIBLIOGRAPHY OF MILITARY BOOKS UP TO 1642 that I acquired a few months ago for less than three dollars, one of only 250 copies that were ever printed in 1900.
This is what your support of Castalia Library, Libraria Castalia, and Castalia History is doing, in addition to providing you with some of the most beautiful books in the world for your personal library.
The destruction of knowledge at the behest of the Zero Historians isn’t limited to printed matter.
More than two decades’ worth of content published on MTVNews.com is no longer available after MTV appears to have fully pulled down the site and its related content. Content on its sister site, CMT.com, seems to have met a similiar fate.
In 2023, MTV News was shuttered amid the financial woes of parent company Paramount Global. As of Monday, trying to access MTV News articles on mtvnews.com or mtv.com/news resulted in visitors being redirected to the main MTV website.
The now-unavailable content includes decades of music journalism comprising thousands of articles and interviews with countless major artists, dating back to the site’s launch in 1996. Perhaps the most significant loss is MTV News’ vast hip-hop-related archives, particularly its weekly “Mixtape Monday” column, which ran for nearly a decade in the 2000s and 2010s and featured interviews, reviews and more with many artists, producers and others early in their careers.
This is why Castalia Library is expanding its efforts from just publishing leatherbound classics to leveraging its subscriber base to preserve knowledge in general. Among our efforts, which will include opening up Infogalactic editing to all Library and UATV subscribers and making it easier for them, is releasing free Library ebooks for all Library, Libraria, and History subscribers. We’ll also provide an inexpensive bundle of those titles for which we have permission available for sale as ebooks.
We’ll go with a standard cover for all of them, although we’ll update the logo once we’ve got the Castalia Library-specific one instead of the modified History variant. An example can be seen below. An announcement with a link will be made on the Castalia Library substack within the next week; if you haven’t subscribed there yet, we very much encourage you to do so.
We’re also going to start doing books that are transcriptions of worthwhile video works from various UATV and other video creators. If this is something of serious interest to you – and by serious, I mean cleaning up least five 1,500-word transcriptions per week – please email me with TRANSCRIBE in the subject line. We can provide an AI-transcribed text as a starting point, but it takes about twice as long to go over the whole video and edit it for print as the length of the video. So figure 20 minutes of work for a 10-minute video.
This is going to be particularly important in light of the meltdown we hear is coming in the book industry. The financial takeover of Simon & Schuster by KKR, a private equity firm, combined with the incipient failure of Barnes & Noble, means that the distribution system is going to be further converged and cease to function normally, which will have a tremendous negative effect on all of the mainstream publishing houses going forward.
UPDATE: MTV News isn’t the only site destroying its own archives in the last year:
Tech news website CNET has deleted thousands of old articles over the past few months in a bid to improve its performance in Google Search results, Gizmodo has learned. Archived copies of CNET’s author pages show the company deleted small batches of articles prior to the second half of July, but then the pace increased. Thousands of articles disappeared in recent weeks
UPDATE: Wikileaks is also being wiped.
Julian Assange has been instructed to direct WikiLeaks to destroy any remaining classified documents and information in their possession and provide an affidavit once completed, as part of his plea agreement.
For the last 24 hours, we have polled the subscribers of the Castalia Library substack to determine which work we would serialize in the aftermath of the very successful serialization of Oman’s STUDIES IN THE NAPOLEONIC WARS. The results were as follows, with Medieval History eking out a narrow victory over Meditations, which was a surprise to me, as I expected Discourses would be the favorite after having narrowly finished second last time, although I voted for the Marcus Aurelius work myself.
Now, although we have not yet presented the logo for Castalia Library proper, as opposed to the logo for Castalia History, we already have the Latin motto for it: NOLITE TIMERE BONI. This admonition to not be afraid of the Good can be interpreted in several ways, one of which is “don’t be afraid to do it right”. This mindset applies to everything we do at the Library, from taking risks on ancient machines that may or may not work to abandoning a perfectly good space for a better one that provides us with room to grow in the future.
In this context, however, it applies to which version of the Cambridge Medieval History we serialize. Although I was originally thinking of the serialization in the context of the abbreviated edition by Charles Previté-Orton that we published in two volumes, both of which are already sold out, it occurred to us that the lack of material limitations that applied to the leather books does not apply to the digital domain of the substack. So, we’ve decided that instead of the 1952 Previté-Orton edition, we will serialize the first volume of the original 1911 edition edited by J.B. Bury, entitled The Christian Roman Empire and the Foundation of the Teutonic Kingdoms.
At 614 pages, not including the bibliography which we will not serialize, it’s of a similar length to the edition we published, but it goes much deeper into the details of historical events such as the original Nicene Council and Diocletian’s persecution of the Christians than the shorter Previté-Orton edition. Given the chance to provide our readers with the deeper and more substantive material, our philosophy dictates that we do so.
The serialization has already begun. Therefore, please enjoy the preface to volume I as presented by the editors.
The present volume covers a space of about two hundred years beginning with Constantine and stopping a little short of Justinian. At its opening the Roman Empire is standing in its ancient majesty, drawing new strength from the reforms of Diocletian and the statesmanship of Constantine: at its close the Empire has vanished from the West, while the East is slowly recovering from the pressure of the barbarians in the fifth century, and gathering strength for Justinian’s wars of conquest. At its opening heathenism is still a mighty power, society is built up on heathen pride of class, and Rome still seems the centre of the world: at its ending we see Christianity supreme, Constantinople the seat of power, and the old heathen order of society in the West dissolving in the confusion of barbarian devastations. At its opening Caesar’s will is law from the Atlantic to Armenia: at its ending a great system of Teutonic and Arian kingdoms in the West has just been grievously shaken by the conversion of the Franks from heathenism direct to orthodoxy.
Yesterday marked the end of the successful 116-part serialization of Sir Charles Oman’s STUDIES IN THE NAPOLEONIC WARS, which ended with an intriguing take on the iconoclastic brilliance of the Duke of Wellington, Arthur Wellesley by Sir Oman.
He knew what was expected of him: “I am the Duke of Wellington, and must do as the Duke of Wellington doth”, was one of his touches of sardonic humour. But it was also one more indication of the fact that he regarded an inflexible adherence to his own peculiar code of duty as the highest obligation.
But above all, to thine own self be true,
Thou canst not then be false to any man.
In the aftermath of the completion of the STUDIES, we want to know which Library or History book you would like to see serialized next on the Castalia Library substack. Please feel free to share your opinion on the matter by voting for one of the four selections in the next 24 hours. The serialization will be announced and begin tomorrow. And if you haven’t subscribed yet to the substack, you really should consider doing so, since it is free.
Folio Society is celebrating… something.
We want to hear about your LGBTQ+ recommendations
One of the greatest comforts reading can offer is the feeling of being seen, whether in the form of fiction or true stories.
We’d like to do our part in amplifying voices and connecting more readers with stories that have moved them.
So in celebration of Pride month, we’re asking you which LGBTQ+ books and authors you’d like to see as Folio collectibles. Editor’s Pick:
Conundrum
A memoir of identity and belonging, and the pain, joy and discovery that the journey from man to woman entailed.
From the team at Folio, Happy Pride!
I’d very much like to see Folio do an edition of Space Raptor Butt Invasion by award-winning author Chuck Tingle. If any work embodies the spirit of Pride, it’s that epic and inclusive tale of interspecies love in space. But failing that, Moira Greyland’s The Last Closet would be my recommendation.
It’s not going to get any better going forward, because the lunatics aren’t just running the asylum, they literally own it now. If you want to help us defeat the complete convergence and eventual demolition of the deluxe book industry, there are three things you can do:
Speaking of NDM Express, the first t-shirt of the month has been announced and it is the very handsome Castalia History LEGO ERGO SCIO shirt.
The Libraria edition, anyhow. The Library edition would be sold out already too, except for the fact that we published 250 additional copies. So, if you’ve been on the fence or if you’re planning to buy someone one for Christmas, you should probably do it soon before the Library edition is also sold out.
Also, if you want to keep up with Castalia Library’s announcements, news, and production updates, I HIGHLY recommend obtaining a free subscription to the Castalia Library substack. As an added bonus, you’ll receive daily serializations of one of Castalia’s works.
If you’re not a Castalia Library or Castalia History subscriber, but you’re looking to pick up a single leather book, you can now do so at NDM Express. This includes PRIDE AND PREJUDICE, which is now available in stock, as well as the second edition of THE MISSIONARIES.
Subscribers should continue to buy any additional leather books at the Arkhaven store, as they will be able to apply a subscriber’s discount there.
You may recall we were having some problems sorting out the issue of the spine hubs for the bindery. Yeah, so, about that…
There are more details at the Castalia Library substack.
We’re very pleased to announce that both editions are now bound and shipping to the warehouse. We printed 250 more than usual knowing that there would be additional demand. If you want to pick up one of these magnificent reproduction of the spectacular Peacock first edition, you can do so at Arkhaven.
There are more pictures of both editions at the Castalia Library substack. And speaking of which, I would be remiss if I did not mention the amazing adventures of the celebrated Major Grant, the scout whom Wellington declared was worth more than a brigade of troops, which are being serialized there and are very well worth reading.
These documents took one back at once to one of the most daring escapes of a British prisoner which can be found in the annals of the Napoleonic Wars—an escape carried out with an almost absurd nonchalance and readiness of wit. The tale was known to Napier, who thought it so curious that he spared four pages for it in a chapter of his fourth volume. And Mr. John Buchan made an excellent story out of it in one of his volumes of miscellaneous adventures, with confirmatory detail out of his fertile imagination, and an exciting account of Grant’s dealings with Spanish guerrilleros, who sought to rescue him, and were refused his permission to carry him off.
What really happened I can give from the memoirs of Colquhoun Grant’s brother-in-law, Sir James McGrigor, who devoted a chapter to the exploits of his evasive and resourceful relative.
Colquhoun Grant, of the IIth Foot, was one of four officers whom Wellington employed on special reconnoitring and Intelligence duties. They were all good horsemen, good linguists in Spanish, French, and Portuguese, and noted for resourcefulness and cool heads. Whenever the French were on the move it was their duty to hang about the advancing army, on its flank sometimes, not infrequently in its rear, and to report to headquarters all important developments. These officers were Colquhoun Grant, Waters of the Portuguese Staff, Leith Hay of the 29th Foot, and Charles Somers Cocks of the 16th Light Dragoons. The pitcher that goes often to the well ends by being broken, and all these gallant Intelligence officers came to their day of ill-luck; it was impossible to foresee all possible dangers. Waters was captured on the Coa in April 1811, Leith Hay near Toledo in April 1813, Somers Cocks was killed in action (not while scouting) at Burgos in October 1812. Of Colquhoun Grant’s extraordinary capture and escape this screed must suffice to tell the tale.