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I began to enter the books and my occasional annotations into an antiquated database on the late (unlamented) 5.5" discs. Two computers, five crashes, and three conversions to other word processor programs later, the bibliography still survives. Perhaps its magical subject matter protected it. However some of the notations of the old database still remains.
The bibliography is being revised, copyread, proofread, and updated. I am adding some illustrations, mostly book covers, as I find them. I hope to correct some factual errors of my own as I work through the work.
There was a series of essays which accompanied the bibliography which will be the last addition simply because of sheer volume, and because I am not sure if much of it is worth the effort of reading.
In short, I maintained that the most important book in opening the cycle of 60s and 70s visionary works was Louis Pauwels and Jacques Bergier's Le Matin des Magiciens (1960), known in Britain as The Dawn of Magic (1963) and in America as Morning of the Magicians (1964). This work, and its sequels, introduced almost every theme which was to occupy the writers of visionary literature for the next twenty odd years. My title is taken from Part II of this book, which was titled "A Few Years in the Absolute Elsewhere." Although the authors were actually referring to an earlier time, I felt it also nicely applied to what followed in the years after the appearance of the book.
The second idea expressed was that the entire phenomenon visionary activity which flourished in the 60s and 70s might be somehow related to the 22 year cycle of solar radiation, known as the Sun Spot cycle. At one time I actually graphed the entries in the bibliography and discovered that they did indeed seem to peak and wane in a 22 year cycle, but this hardly constitutes a proof of any sort. By my rough and unscientific reasoning the absolute low point in the publishing of visionary works fell around 1983 through 1985.
By the late 80's, I felt that a new cycle was coming into being. Publishers began to once again publish visionary material under the generic category of "New Age". The seminal incident signaling the beginning of this cycle was most likely the "Harmonic Conversion" of 1987. The years of crystal wearing New Agers had begun.
In the current bibliography, when a title if followed by a numeral, it means that there are several different entries for that title. It does not refer to edition numbers or printings.
The bibliography is chronological by year, and alphabetical within a year. Publishing dates are tricky things made even trickier by the publishing information (or lack thereof) provided by some publishers. A question mark next to a date means that the date of the edition or printing is an educated guess.
In a work of this size, errors are bound to show up, and I welome any observations that may reduce them. If you have any comments or suggestions about this bibliography, please email me.
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