Hilaritas Press apparently is working on at least four new Robert Anton Wilson titles.
The small press publishing imprint of the Robert Anton Wilson Trust already has issued a title this year, the new edition of Chaos and Beyond.
And Rasa recently provided me an update on two books that are pretty far along, a new edition of RAW's Reality Is What You Can Get Away With and a reprint of Timothy Leary's Terra II: The Starseed Transmission.
During the recent podcast featuring Scott Apel, timed to promote the new release of Chaos and Beyond, the podcast host, Mike Gathers, discussed two more RAW collections that are in the works, one focused on politics and one on magick.
At about two minutes into the podcast, Mike explains that Rasa deserves the credit for what Hilaritas has done, then mentions that he himself did play a role in putting together last year's Lion of Light.
"We're working on a new one now," Mike says. "Cuz there's no shortage of stuff that we can pull out of magazines and put into print. We're looking at a politics book and a magick book and there's probably a half dozen good ideas."
I don't know anything else yet about the "half dozen good ideas," although there's apparently been some discussion about a book that consists entirely of interviews, see below.
There's a good discussion in the podcast about RAW's failure to maintain copies of many of his short pieces, forcing RAW fans such as Mike (who founded RAWilsonfans.org) and Martin Wagner to collect such material.
It's also known that Hilaritas is looking to reprint The Sex Magicians; see for example my interview with Rasa last year. From that interview:
About the reports on planned new titles, Rasa wrote, "Yes, we are working on a few ideas. The 'RAW Politics' book (working title) has been picking up speed with Mike Gathers, Chad Nelson and Jesse Walker all working to get a collection of RAW articles together."
About other possible books that haven't been announced yet, Rasa wrote, "Two books that we’ve been thinking about for a while are also on my mind recently: Playboy’s Book of Forbidden Words, and The Sex Magicians. I just last week scanned Forbidden Words. RAW obtained the copyright for that book when he left Playboy.
"Mike Gathers had a couple ideas for compilations of RAW essays for a few other books: RAW on Magick and RAW Interviews are in that list. We’re still thinking about those."
If you look at the Hilaritas Press home page, you can see that the initial plan was to put out new editions of many of RAW's titles. Despite the fact that everything on that list has been published except for Reality Is What You Can Get Away With, it doesn't look like the well will run dry anytime soon.
Natural Law Or Don’t Put A Rubber On Your Willy And Other Writings From A Natural Outlaw originally was conceived as a "politics book" but eventually went into a different direction, see this interview with Chad Nelson, e.g., "We shelved several of the more overtly political tracts and focused exclusively on Wilson's writings on model agnosticism. The project really became fun when we made that pivot explicit. Wilson scholars know how much model agnosticism underlies his worldview, so the idea that there would be a newly published book of essays and interviews spanning five decades where we get to see him riff on that theme very directly, over and over again, in a variety of different ways, was one of the coolest moments for me."
1 comment:
this was great. nice interview, mike. Scott is a real lovable guy.
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