Frontispiece to Francis Barrett’s Magus, 1801.

I’m a geek for bibliographies and old auction catalogs that list books that are now difficult to find in any edition. Auction catalogs can be especially mouthwatering as they often contain details about the bindings of the books offered for sale. Many of these catalogs become rarities themselves, as is the case with a late 1907 Sotheby’s catalog, Books on Magic and Other Occult Subjects Property of Charles F. Cox. Cox was president of the New York Academy of Sciences as well as several other major New York area scientific organizations. He was something of an expert on Charles Darwin and was known in his time as a major collector of Darwiniana. Three years before his death he auctioned off his collection of occult books. The original Sotheby’s catalog is extremely rare, the only copy I can find in a public institution is at Yale (surely there must be one or two in private hands?), but the “In the Sale Room” column in a 1908 issue of The Connoisseur gives us both a taste of its contents and a feel for the state of interest in occult books at the time:

The Ceremonial Magic chapter in Barrett’s Magus, 1801.

On November 6th Messrs. Sotheby sold an extensive collection, consisting almost wholly of works on magic and other occult subjects belonging to Mr. Charles F. Cox, of New York. Mr. Van Antwerp set a precedent in March last, when his library was removed from that city for sale in London, and the very high prices realised acted as a direct encouragement for further moves in the same direction, for there is very little, if any, doubt that books of a high class realise more in London than they do in the United States. Mr. Cox’s occult library was, however, hardly of the right kind to make the correctness of this opinion self-evident. A few years ago a great wave of occultism spread over this country, but it has now almost entirely subsided, and the prices realised for occult literature have declined to the same degree. For this reason the 389 lots realised but £317, though many of the books were important enough to merit a better fate. That Agrippa’s Vanity of Arts and Sciences, 1685, 8vo, should reailise but 15s, and the same author’s Fourth Book of Occult Philosophy, 1783, 8vo, but 13s, notwithstanding that both were bound in green morocco, with gilt edges, is inexplicable on any other hypothesis. Several works by Paracelsus, including his Aurora, 1659, 8vo, went for sums varying from 23s to 12s; the first edition of Bodin’s De la Demonomanie des Sorciers, printed at Paris in 1581, for 23s (calf gilt); Barrett’s Magus, the original edition of 1801, for 33s (half morocco); and Wilson’s Dictionary of Astrology, 1819, for 6s (calf). The only book here which realised a fairly good price was the Magus. All the rest, and indeed all the books in the catalogue, would have sold for much more seven or eight years ago.

—Stephen Canner