New Morning Books

FROM THE VAULT:

A shipment of books on, e.g. Shamanism (Sam The Shaman & The Pharaohs?) , astral travelling etc reminds me of a long-ago conversation with the late Bob Gould on the subject of New Age literature, which we both deplored but stocked

1) because, we agreed, it is not our business to censor except in extreme circumstances and

2) because there was money in it, and as I said to him, there's one reborn every minute

3)never give a sucker an even break etc

BG told me that he'd always assumed that once the Marvellous Thirty years post WW2 were over, and grim late capitalist reality set in, as it was definitely doing at the time of our conversation in the early 80s, people would abandon books about talking plants, UFOs, mystical holy men etc and turn to improving revolutionary literature, but his experience was that they clung ever more limpet-like to magical thinking.

Demand has slackened compared to the Me Decade, but it has never completely disappeared, and as long as the world's woes seem to many to defy rational solutions, I expect it never will.