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Description: First and signed limited edition, number 51 of 500 copies, signed by the author on the frontispiece, additionally inscribed by the author to Alfred Richard Orage on the front free endpaper, "To A. R. Orage, with the author's kindest wishes. January 12, 1908". Although the colophon states that each copy was numbered and signed, as here, the majority appear to have been left blank. Orage (1873-1934) was an influential political, philosophical, and literary thinker, who from late 1907 edited the modernist journal The New Age. He first encountered Crowley in 1906 at a Society for Psychical Research meeting, where he acted as secretary, and from there a friendship readily blossomed. Orage published a review of the present work in The New Age as the journal's "Book of the Week" on 29 February 1908, listing the work as "Priceless". He then published two further pieces by Crowley: a poem ("The Pentagram", 21 March 1908) and an article ("The Suffragette: A Farce", 30 May 1908, under the pseudonym of Lavinia King), and was only prevented from printing more by his partner and unofficial co-editor of The New Age Beatrice Hastings, the pen name of Emily Alice Haigh. Hastings claimed: "I found a collection of works on sorcery, as, up to this time, Orage's intimate friend was Mr. Aleister Crowley. Well, I consigned all the books and 'Equinoxes' and sorcery designs to the dustbin" (Webb, p. 210). Although Crowley and Orage's friendship waned in the following years Orage continued his interest in various spiritual matters, and in the 1920s, on the recommendation of esotericist P. D. Ouspensky, began a close and lasting involvement with the Russian mystic George Gurdjieff, which led him to sell The New Age and follow Gurdjieff to a new life in America. Konx Om Pax is a collection of spiritual "hyper-intelligent prosody and poetry" named after the supposedly mystic Egyptian phrase "Khabs Am Pekht", roughly translating as "Light in Extension", used in the vernal and autumnal equinox ceremonies of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn (Sutin; Churton). Crowley claimed to have designed the distinctive "vast modernist and geometrically disciplined maze of exaggerated lettering" front cover design while high on hashish on 2 October 1907 (McWilliams, p. 67). This is one of an estimated 100 copies bound in black cloth, with the remaining copies bound in white cloth lettered in gilt. Although there is some evidence the two variants were issued simultaneously the low limitation number on this copy would support the generally held view that copies bound in black can be described as the first issue. This copy is from the library of Clive Harper, Crowley scholar and bibliographer of Austin Osman Spare, with his discreet bookplate tipped in to the rear. Tobias Churton, Aleister Crowley in India: The Secret Influence of Eastern Mysticism on Magic and the Occult, 2019; Stuart McWilliams, Aleister Crowley's Graphomania and the Transformations of Magical Inscriptivity, 2016; Lawrence Sutin, Do What Thou Wilt: A Life of Aleister Crowley, 2014; James Webb, The Harmonious Circle, Thames and Hudson, London, 1980. Square octavo. Original black cloth, titles in geometric design by Crowley within frame in white to front cover, edges untrimmed. Title page printed in red and black. Frontispiece photogravure portrait of Crowley by Aimee Dupont and numerous diagrams in the text. Bookseller's pencilled notes to front pastedown. Spine a little cocked, minor rubbing to edges, touch of wear to very tips, a couple of small white marks to cloth of rear cover, decoration to front cover lightly soiled and very slightly chipped but remaining wholer than usual, light offsetting to outer leaves, a couple of small marginal thumb smudges; a very good copy indeed.
Seller: Peter Harrington. ABA/ ILAB., London, United Kingdom