Collecting and Selling the
"100 Best Spiritual Books
of the Century"

The best way to describe this book is that it is as a fusion of Catholic theology and hermeticism - which makes sense because Tomberg (1900-1973), a Russian-born legal scholar, was a convert from Anthroposophy to Catholicism. The book was originally written in French; first published in German translation as Die grossen Arcana des Tarot: Meditationen (1972); then published in French as Méditations sur les 22 arcanes majeurs du Tarot (1980); and finally in English translation in 1985. Tomberg left instructions that it was only to be published after his death and then still anonymously. (He had in life ruffled a number of feathers in Theosophical and Anthroposophical circles by reason of his conversion.) The German and French editions, as well as the most recent English edition, carry a preface by Hans Urs von Balthasar (1905-1988), who is increasingly considered to be the greatest Catholic theologian of the twentieth century. He was scheduled to have been made a cardinal by Pope John Paul II two days after he died. Von Balthasar's praise of the book has stirred quite a bit of interest since.

The English edition was later republished in paperback by Element Books, a New Age imprint, in 1991, and, in a revised edition, by Penguin's Tarcher/Putnam imprint in 2002, which is still in print and, so, widely available. But the original 1985 edition from Amity House has become and remains a very collectible and hard-to-find book. Amity House, which seems no longer to exist, produced a big, handsome book - 650+ pages in gold-stamped navy cloth with an imposing dust jacket featuring a detail photograph of the "Christ of the Apocalypse" from Chartres Cathedral - in an edition that must have been very small, perhaps 1,000 copies or fewer. The original cover price in 1985 was $44.95, but it was the kind of book that seemed worth the money.

I discovered this book right after its publication at my favorite "New Age" bookstore, Garland of Letters on South Street in Philadelphia. I bought a copy - quite an investment in those days - but for some reason that copy left my collection and I have been hunting for it ever since. A couple of years ago, I found a flawed copy for $17.50 in the "Games" section (presumably because of the tarot-card connection) of a Washington, D.C. area used shop. The jacket was cigarette-smoke stained (since cleaned and Brodarted) and the book has some ink underlining in the first chapter, but since copies, even flawed (I once saw one listed as "lacking its copyright page"!), typically fetch $250 to $500, it holds the place on my shelf till a better copy comes along.

Thomas Merton, The Seven Storey Mountain (First edition: New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1948)

It is no surprise to find The Seven Storey Mountain, the memoir of Thomas Merton (1915-1968), a worldly Cambridge and Columbia college student who enters a Trappist monastery in Kentucky on the eve of World War II, on a list of the last century's important spiritual works. From the beginning it has been recognized as "among the classic records of spiritual experience," in the words of Evelyn Waugh, who blurbed the American edition and wrote the foreword to the British edition (1949, published as Elected Silence: The Autobiography of Thomas Merton). It also drew the early praise of Graham Greene, Clare Boothe Luce, Clifton Fadiman, and Bishop Fulton J. Sheen and was a great bestseller within a few months of publication.

The book has never been out of print and there is no shortage of copies available for sale. But true first editions are much harder to come by. There is some debate about exactly how many copies of the first printing of the first edition were printed: Frank Dell'Isola, Merton's bibliographer, says there were 6,000 copies of the first printing of the first edition. Robert Giroux, Merton's friend and publisher, who worked at Harcourt, Brace at the time and was later a partner at Farrar Straus, says the initial run was 5,000 but that 7,000 more (presumably later printings) were printed before the end of 1948. Whatever the exact number of first editions, The Seven Storey Mountain (SSM) is an important book in my primary collection, so I have become quite familiar with its first-edition points.