Description

London: Walter Scott Publishing / Society for the Propagation of Religious Truth, 1907. First Edition – White Buckram Issue. Hardcover, Octavo. (8″ x 6 3/4″), xii [+ ii] + 108pp [+ 12 pp adverts]. Frontispiece portrait. First edition, second issue. Original white buckram, with intricate highly stylized title design of book’s title stamped in gilt to upper board. A magnificent example of book design. The first edition of “Konx om Pax” was supposed to have been limited to 500 numbered and signed copies, although the majority of copies seen are neither signed nor numbered. This copy is numbered 119 and SIGNED by Crowley with his full name in ink on the limitation page. Approximately half the print run of “Konx om Pax” was bound in black buckram with white printing (symbolising light out of darkness), with the other half bound in gilt stamped white buckram, as is this copy. The white buckram edition is commonly said to be the second issue although given that Crowley was known for playing games with bibliographic details and we have seen white bound copies with quite low numbers (this for example, is 119) we can’t help wondering if the publication wasn’t actually simultaneous. The book itself is a collection of poetry, plays and essays and was clearly one of Crowley’s own favorite works. He wrote glowingly of it in his “Confessions”, in particular describing the final essay “The Stone of the Philosophers” as being “really beyond praise.” From the collection of Clive Harper with his discrete book-label neatly tipped in at the rear. Harper is well-known as the bibliographer of Austin Osman Spare, for updating the Aleister Crowley bibliography in the 2011 Teitan Press collection of Gerald Yorke’s writings, and as someone who has lent his expertise to numerous other publications. The label can easily be removed without affecting the page, although it would be a shame not to preserve this record of the book’s provenance. The gilt of the front cover is still bright and fresh, although as often the white buckram of the background is somewhat darkened and dulled. The front cloth hinge is a little rubbed, and with two pin-head size holes, cloth at head and tail of spine chafed, and with a tiny chip missing from tale of spine. There are a few discolored patches on the buckram of the rear panel, and it is also starting to bubble a little which again is typical of this edition. Endpapers lightly toned, as always there is a “ghost” of the frontis-portrait offset onto the title page, despite the presence of the (quite heavily browned) tissue guard. A short closed tear to the bottom edge of one leaf, a few light finger-marks or other signs of use, otherwise the internals are bright and fresh. Overall a tight, attractive better-than VG copy (no dust jacket issued).

First and signed limited edition, number 130 of 500 copies, signed by the author on the limitation page, additionally inscribed to a recipient whose name has been subsequently washed out. The inscription is warm and personable, discussing the practicalities of the binding variants, with very little of the grandiose posturing so often found in Crowley’s inscriptions, his name written simply here without the phallic exaggeration he adopted. The name of the recipient has been sometime washed, perhaps out of a desire to remain anonymous, or to remove a connection to the”wickedest man in the world”. The inscription, which is on the front free endpaper and dated 19 January 1909, reads in full: “My dear [name now unclear], Please accept this book. I think you will like the binding much better than the previous effort. It costs a good deal more, of course, so I am putting up the price to 10S-. Even that leaves hardly any margin of profit. Why this book was so very expensive to produce I don’t know – but it was! I hope the country is restoring you & that you will be able to keep term after all. Fuller & I are thinking of going up next week – it won’t be half itself without you. Yours Aleister Crowley”. Crowley appears to be writing to one of his associates in Cambridge, where he regularly visited in hopes of converting young undergraduates to his cause. He gave three talks at Trinity College in the latter part of 1908 and was was invited to speak by the newly formed Cambridge University Free Thought association in January 1909, an event he intended to attend with his acolyte J. F. C.Fuller. The talk never went ahead: after pressure from the university exerted at the end of January, the invitation was revoked, and by “the end of February, both Crowley and Fuller were officially excluded from the Trinity grounds, and the porters were so notified” (Sutin, p. 194). Crowley had three main devotees at the college with whom he would stay in this period: Victor Neuburg, his lover and potentially closest disciple at the time, Kenneth Ward, who would later be initiated into the A A , and Norman Mudd, the student who rescinded the invitation upon threat of expulsion from the college. Mudd, whose “shame over his surrender would endure for over a decade”, didn’t contact Crowley again until the 1920s (ibid.). Konx Om Pax is a collection of spiritual “hyper-intelligent prosody and poetry” named after the supposedly mystic Egyptian phrase “Khabs Am Pekht”, roughly translating as “Light in Extension”, used in the vernal and autumnal equinox ceremonies of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn (Sutin; Churton). Crowley claimed to have designed the distinctive “vast modernist and geometrically disciplined maze of exaggerated lettering” front cover design while high on hashish on 2 October 1907 (McWilliams, p. 67). An estimated 100 copies of this work were bound in black cloth, the variant described as the “previous effort” by Crowley in his inscription. While there is no established scholarly precedent between the variants the black cloth is often described as issued first due to the low limitation numbers found. This theory is strengthened by Crowley’s note. Although the colophon states that each copy was numbered and signed, the majority appear to have been left blank. Tobias Churton, Aleister Crowley in India: The Secret Influence of Eastern Mysticism on Magic and the Occult, 2019; Stuart McWilliams, Aleister Crowley’s Graphomania and the Transformations of Magical Inscriptivity, 2016; Lawrence Sutin, Do What Thou Wilt: A Life of Aleister Crowley, 2014; James Webb, The Harmonious Circle, 1980. Square octavo. Title page printed in red and black. Frontispiece photogravure portrait of Crowley by Aimee Dupont and numerous diagrams in the text. Original cream cloth, titles in geometric design by Crowley within frame in gilt to front cover, edges untrimmed. Spine toned, wear to ends, slight speckling to covers, browning to endpapers; a very good copy.