Samizdat

Revelation cover treatment including Kālī Yuga, 1977 by Michael Hafftka.

It occurs to me that I forgot to announce publication of my third book, Revelation, on Samizdat. So those of you who follow me here but not on my other site, Magic Kingdom Dispatch, may not know that I published this work.

Revelation is a metaphysik, a revelation on metaphysics, cosmogony, quantum physics, Hinduism, Buddhism, Tantra, the Apocrypha, Kabbalah, the Western Mystery Tradition, dreams within dreams and multiverses without end. Revelation includes art by the figurative expressionist painter Michael Hafftka: Kālī Yuga, 1977.

Revelation is now on sale at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, GooglePlay and Apple iBooks. The full text is available free on Academia, ResearchGate, and GoogleBooks. I made Revelation freely available as Revelation differs from my first book, A Tale of the Grenada Raiders: it steps outside that narrative. Indeed, it explains it.

I did not want readers who expected a continuation of that work of military history to wonder “what the fuck, Doc?” when they read Revelation. I feel better knowing that they can preview it and verify that it is something that they wish to read.

Information needs to be free. This website, Samizdat, is predicated on that ideal. That is why I rekeyed every word of Umberto Eco’s The Search for the Perfect Language and published it here in 2016. I do not regret it. Like medieval monks laboriously copying MSS, I know no better way to internalize a work than to duplicate it letter by letter. As a side effect of that exercise, The Search for the Perfect Language is now available in an electronic format–and anybody with access to the internet can read it at no cost.

I do not own the rights to that work. I may fold all those posts into a critical edition and offer it to the copyright holder. I will not demand compensation. If they choose not to release it, I will not be surprised if a stray copy escapes and ends up freely circulating on the net. Information wants to be free. And that work by Eco should be universally available. Professor Eco died in 2016. His estate is wealthy.

I originally wrote Revelation as the preface for The Rosetta Stone of Memories. It was not until Amazon priced the paperback at $88 that I realized that it was too long (490 pages). At 3lbs in my preferred 8.5×11-inch format, Rosetta Stone weighs as much as a phone book.

I could not in good conscience accept my readers paying $88 for a book from me, so I pulled Rosetta Stone. It took me a couple of days to split off the preface into Revelation, and the narrative into Metamorphosis. I fixed continuity errors. Inevitably I missed a couple, requiring corrected uploads to overwrite incorrect manuscripts. A pain in the ass.

There are still some errors in the .mobi Kindle and the B&N .ePub Nook versions, but they are not invalidating. Just annoying to me as a perfectionist. I am a writer. Not a designer, not a publisher. I know just enough technology to publish my books and to cobble together a cover treatment. I resorted to programmers to convert the original MS into Nook and Kindle formats, costing me $89, sapping earnings from sales, but they saved me massive time and grief.

Those 15 readers who purchased Rosetta Stone in paperback now own a rare artifact. I intend to publish a corrected version of Rosetta Stone in coming weeks. It will be an anthology containing the two books. Rosetta Stone remains on sale exclusively with Apple iBooks–and not out of any marketing motive: I am too stupid to figure out how to pull it. I will overwrite the MS there with the revised version, I know how to do that, and publish a notice to readers to delete their copies and download the fixed revision at no cost.

That fix will move the 35 literary citations at the beginning into an appendix at the end of the preface, as they are positioned now in Revelation, and fold in the corrected texts of Revelation and Metamorphosis. It will still cost $88 on Amazon, unless I publish it in black and white. I do not yet know what it will cost on Barnes & Noble. Every other physical book that I published on B&N costs $34.99 in paperback. Electronic editions: Kindle, Nook, Google, iBooks, will all be cheaper by several orders of magnitude.

I marvel at folks who prefer to purchase physical books. Yes, there is tactile gratification in holding my books, reviewers mentioned this many times. I get it. I publish in large format 8.5×11-inches because I prefer to lay out an entire page for readers. It makes it easier to grok the meaning of a page. The larger page also makes it possible to publish better photos, and most of my books are prolifically illustrated. With the exception of Revelation, which contains a mere five illustrations, my books are, in fact, picture books.

I write history. None of my books are fictional. They are history, I recount events as I experienced them and I recount them as they transpired. I knew when I wrote A Tale of the Grenada Raiders that readers would be skeptical at times. When a reader finishes a chapter in that work, they see photos illustrating the incident and the protagonists.

This is my point: with electronic formats, it is possible to search and to keep MSS in the cloud, accessible from any iDevice. My gargantuan library resides in my iCloud account. Siri can download any work, or search particular sentences. It is simple and fast to share, or to cite. I long ago lost  patience flipping through physical books, looking for text. Indexes are last century. It is much faster to search. When I read, and I read all the time, I read on an iPad. I use a giant iPad Pro, because I can put an entire page of a text on the screen.

Still, many prefer physical books. Half of my readers purchase print editions.

Those who seek to purchase Rosetta Stone on Amazon now see that it is listed but not available. Inevitably, I just today encountered the first pirated Samizdat version of one of my works on the net. Somebody extracted a copy of Rosetta Stone from GoogleBooks and set it free. I am not angry. I am honored.

As I say, Revelation was the preface to Rosetta Stone. It just kept growing as the Big Ranger in the Sky pointed me at articles and books and ideas. I am not that smart. But I know when to listen to my Muse, when to go into receive mode, and when to record revelation. Revelation is not perfect, as the messenger is flawed. But the arguments are internally coherent and I find them fascinating.

I made Revelation free as I cannot in good conscience profit from a work of revelation. Those who can benefit from it, my fellow pilgrims on a particular path, will find no obstacles in their way. If you are interested in metaphysics, cosmogony, quantum physics, Hinduism, Buddhism, Tantra, the Apocrypha, Kabbalah and the Western Mystery Tradition, you will love Revelation.

I look forward to hearing from you.

Revelation is available from Amazon.

Revelation is available from Barnes & Noble.

Revelation is available from GoogleBooks and GooglePlay.

Revelation is available from Apple iBooks. (This is its native format, as I write my books using iBooks Author. The iBooks app on Mac and iDevices offers the best reading experience, in my opinion, though the Kindle app offers better features and integration with GoodReads.)

Revelation is available from Academia and ResearchGate.

After you read Revelation, please review it. Review it anywhere, make any comments that you like, positive, negative, whatever. I will be delighted to see your feedback.

Thank you for reading! Share Revelation far and wide!

Doc T sends.

Bangkok, Updated January 15, 2019.