Publications

40 Pages, Richard W. Couper Press, 2020 ISBN: 978-1-937370-32-9 ($15)

Gordon Ball first saw San Francisco as a small child, traveling there by train with his Ohio River Valley family to join his father in Japan after his narrow escape from Shanghai before Mao Zedong took it. In My San Francisco he recounts incidents and experiences from family furlough visits in the City of Hills every few years, followed by hitchhiking there in the war-torn 1960s and embarking on a six-month stay a few years later, the culmination of a cross-country journey with poet Allen Ginsberg—a stay marked by a failed love affair and the start of a lifelong friendship. My San Francisco, a large format chapbook with several photographs including two by the photographer author, is both a highly personal memoir of and tribute to the city, vitalized by imagistic gists and brief encounters melded with longer narratives; it is, as some readers have celebrated it, “honest,” “brave,” and “beautiful.”
Author Bio: Gordon Ball edited Allen Verbatim and two volumes of journals with Allen Ginsberg. He’s the author of three memoirs (’66 Frames, Dark Music, and East Hill Farm) and a volume of short stories, On Tokyo’s Edge. His films and photographs have been shown and acclaimed widely. He’s currently at work on a half-century of family history from the Ohio River through 1920s Shanghai to prison camp World War II. He teaches at Washington and Lee University and with his wife Kathleen lives outside Lexington, Virginia in the Shenandoah Valley.

194 Pages, Richard W. Couper Press, 2020 ISBN: 978-1-937370-34-3 ($35)

This Chart, comprising four huge copperplates engraved in 1775 by Du Chenteau himself, is a monumental attempt to unite ceremonial magic, Kabbalah, alchemy, Hermetic philosophy, and the science of number. In memorable images, many borrowed from the Rosicrucian philosopher Robert Fludd, it depicts a cosmos emanating from the mind of God, structured by correspondences, and culminating in the human being (the Microcosm), whose body and soul reflect the Macrocosm. Du Chenteau, a practicing alchemist and member of esoteric Masonic orders, represents an “enlightenment” very different from the secular and materialistic trends of his time. His work is a visual encyclopedia, forming a bridge between the late Renaissance world view and the occult revival of the nineteenth century. This edition sets Du Chenteau’s Chart in its historical context, traces all its sources, translates its texts from the original French, and explains its arcane imagery. An Appendix by Antoine Faivre, Professor at the Sorbonne, tells of Du Chenteau’s life, his friends, and his bizarre spiritual practices.

Joscelyn Godwin is Emeritus Professor of Music, Colgate University. He has published two books on Robert Fludd and many other works on esoteric topics, including Harmonies of Heaven and Earth, The Theosophical Enlightenment, Music and the Occult, Upstate Cauldron, and, co-authored with Christian Goodwillie, Symbols in the Wilderness: Early Masonic Survivals in Upstate New York (Couper Press of Hamilton College and Upstate Institute of Colgate University, 2016).
 

• From the Editor
• The Shaker Meetinghouse: 230 Years of Worship, Tourism, and Preservation by Christian Goodwillie
• The White Water, Ohio, Shaker Community: A Newly Discovered 1877 Visitor's Account by Thomas Sakmyster
• The Shakers. A Day with the Communists of the Whitewater Valley. Westliche Blatter (May 22, 1877)
• A Photograph of the 1908 Print Shop at the Israelite House of David by Brian Ziebart
• Portraits: Sister Mary Purnell and Brother Benjamin Purnell

Front cover illustration: Brother Hiram Baker and his bicycle in the meeting room of the 1793 meetinghouse at Enfield, New Hampshire. Salt print by Lewis Johnson, August 1902. Courtesy of Robert P. Emlen. Back cover illustration: Print Shop, Israelite House of David, prior to the 1908 fire that destroyed the building. Courtesy of the Israelite House of David.

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American Communal Societies Series, no. 14. 126 pages with illustrations, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-937370-31-2 ($20)

Daughter colony of America's most successful utopian experiment (1848-1880), the Wallingford commune was the Oneida Community's pastoral getaway. It was also the place silverware was created, the industry that would support Oneida's successor organization, Oneida Ltd., through the twentieth century. Although a substantial part of Oneida's history, Wallingford's story has never been told. This first study features about a dozen accounts by the communards, nearly forty vintage photographs and other illustrations, and commentaries by the editor.

About the editor:
Anthropologist Anthony Wonderley worked for the Oneida Indian Nation in its cultural management and preservation program and for the Oneida Community Mansion House (Oneida, New York) as curator of collections and interpretation.

July and October 2019

• From the Editor
• A Short History of the Columbian Phalanx by Julieanna Frost
• Document: "A Journal of a Journey from Canterbury to Enfield [Connecticut]" introduced and edited by Stephen J. Paterwic
• Why Historians Should Examine Shaker Novels and Short Stories: Exposing Century-Old Misconceptions of Shaker Life by Richard Marshall
• Personal Visits and Observations: Charles Nordhoff's Remarkable Tour of American Communal Societies by Peter Hoehnle

Front and back cover illustrations from: J.F. Witherell, ed., The Anti-Millerite and Scriptural Expositor (Concord, N.H.: 1843).

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• From the Editor
• Shaker Brothers in the Spirit: The Exchange of Ideas and Spiritual Gifts between Seth Youngs Wells and Calvin Green by Jane F. Crosthwaite
• Document: "A Beautiful Box of Gifts and Emblems of Presence Given to Calvin Green as a Token of Eternal Blessings....Copied November 25th 1847"
• "Blacksmith by Trade" : The Journey of African- American Shaker Justinian Cartwright by Rebekah Brummett
• Document: An Account of an American Commune in the Soviet Union during the 1920s by Arthur B. Ruhl

Front and back cover illustrations: "A Beautiful Box of Gifts and Emblems of Presence Given to Calvin Green as a Token of Eternal Blessings....Copied November 25th 1847." Canterbury Shaker Village Archives, #788.

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• From the Editor
• Utopia, Ohio, 1844-1847: Seedbed for Three Experiments in Communal Living by Cori L. Flatt and Peter A. Hoehnle
• From Württemberg to Zoar: Origins of a Separatist Community by Eberhard Fritz
• Document: Questioning of the Separatists of Rottenacker after the Quartering of a Military Command, May 1804
• Document: Visitor's Account of the Shaker Community at Pleasant Hill, Kentucky, by Clara von Gerstner

Front cover illustration: A Separatist star, the only one known to exist in Württemberg. It is attached to a document in the Hauptstaatsarchiv Stuttgart. Courtesy of the Hauptstaatsarchiv Stuttgart A 213 Bü 3091 Back cover illustration: Clermont Phalanx, as painted by A.J. MacDonald. Courtesy of the Beinecke Library, Yale University, GEN MSS 1394.

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278 Pages, Richard W. Couper Press, 2019 ISBN: 978-1-937370-26-8 ($25)

The President's Medium collects and carefully examines the available material on the colorful but nearly forgotten life of spiritualist medium John Benjamin Conklin and concludes that he most likely conducted private seances at the White House for a receptive Abraham Lincoln during the time the president was weighing the issuance of the Emancipation Proclamation. It also examines Conklin's association with communitarians and health reformers Thomas L. and Mary S. Gove Nichols, as well as his connections within the theatrical community of New York City during the 1850s.

Dr. John B. Buescher is the author of books and articles on the history of 19th-century American Spiritualism. He is a co-director of the International Association for the Preservation of Spiritualist and Occult Periodicals (IAPSOP).

Shaker Studies, no. 15. 338 pages, full color illustrations, 2019.
ISBN: 978-1-937370-28-2 ($45)

In the half century between 1830 and 1880 the visual culture of America's oldest, largest, and most distinctive communal religious society was portrayed in scores of printed images published in the popular illustrated press. In this complement to his 1987 book Shaker Village Views , Robert P. Emlen identifies and explicates every known engraving or lithograph that pictured the Shakers in the years of their greatest prosperity and before photography became popular in Shaker communities. Many of these images are reproduced here for the first time.

• July and October 2018

• Gentile's Invitation to Shiloh, House of David by Henry M. Yaple
• Descriptive Bibliography of Imprints in the House of David Collection by Shannon McRae and Brian Ziebart
• The Quest for 392 by Brian Ziebart

Front cover illustration: The Star of Bethlehem. 2nd. ed. Book 1. 1903 M-048. Collection of the Israelite House of David Back cover illustration: Information for Excurstionists!. ca. 1910. M-007. Collection of the Israelite House of David.

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