Category: General Blog

I am still working on our printed edition of the Malleus Maleficarum, but I expect to be able to make it available within the next couple of months. We’ve faced a number of development issues, as well as difficulties in arranging financing for the project. I’m as committed as ever to the project, though, and feel that it is as important as ever that the work that has been invested in this project not be capitalized upon by unscrupulous publishers for their personal gain.

I always intended this work to belong to the public, and we posted it on the Internet in the spirit of public domain and community. However, upon noticing the unexpected proliferation of cheap print editions of the Malleus Maleficarum that were obviously pulled from this web site, I thought it would be best if supporters of this effort could show their support by purchasing a sanctioned edition directly from us, helping us to keep this web site online.

This is what I continue to work on.

– Wicasta Lovelace

I’ve added our edition of the Malleus Maleficarum to my web catalog, making it available for pre-order. Mostly, I’m mentioning it here as a status update. All we need now is for me to get off of my butt and finish the original artwork. What you see to the right is a cover mock-up. I imagine the final version will be slightly different, but this is the general idea. While I didn’t intend for the Peter Paul Rubens drawing to become the image most closely associated with our online version of the Malleus, it’s something that a lot of people think of. So it made sense to use the image on the book, as well.

If you’d like to visit the catalog page and consider pre-ordering the book (and helping us finance getting it done), please check out the Malleus Maleficarum pre-order page in my web catalog. Of course, once the book is published it will be available through all of the major outlets, such as Amazon.com.

I realize that we need another edition of the Malleus like we need another edition of The Bible. Mostly I figured that if people are going to buy hundreds of copies of the Malleus through our Amazon.com links, it might make more sense to us (at least in regard to the survival of the web site) to receive more than the 3% or commission that we get from Amazon. This is a large step in the right direction for supporting this web site and making sure that it will be around for some time.

– Wicasta Lovelace

I’ve been editing what will be our own edition of the Malleus Maleficarum, and expect to see the book first made available sometime around Christmas of 2008. This is something I’m rather excited about. I hope at least some of the many people who visit this web site every day will pick up a copy of our own version of the Malleus.

Why do we need to publish our own edition of the Malleus Maleficarum? Well, we don’t, actually. My desire to see our own version published has more to do with the fact that the actual text of the Malleus Maleficarum as translated by Montague Summers is now in the public domain, and I’ve discovered that a lot of people have no problem whatsoever with taking the text from our transcription project here and using it to publish their own editions. Most notably I found our PDF downloads being sold on CDs on eBay. I know that at least one published edition was taken from our web site because the “Letter of Approbation” was incomplete (just as it was on the web site – a source of consternation for long-time visitors of the web site here).

While I freely acknowledge that the actual text of the Malleus is in the public domain, it rather irks me to discover that people who had absolutely nothing to do with this project are profiting from our hard work. Therefore, as an alternative I hope to make available an edition which will more directly go toward the maintenance of this web site and our efforts to keep the Malleus Maleficarum at least peripherally in the public consciousness.

Needless to say, no one here expects to get rich from this. I can’t imagine that there would be enough sales of the book for anything like that, and such was never our intent anyway. Mostly what I hope to do is make available a special edition of the Malleus that supporters and other users of this web site can purchase if they wish to help support this effort (instead of the usual pathetic begging for donations).

As for the nature of this special edition, there are a number of improvements over the edition most commonly purchased through our web site. The text has been removed from the multiple column newspaper-like format and expanded into full pages. I believe this makes the text more readable, making reading the Malleus a little less of a chore. I’m also adding some historically influence original artwork to break up the brevity (and perhaps fill up some of the inevitable white space that resulted from the new formatting).

I’m sure I’ll write more about this later. At the moment, I only hoped to make long-time visitors to the web site aware that this effort is nearing completion. We’ll be selling this edition directly through the web site, but we’ll also be making it available to book vendors through normal supply chains. So if you’re uncomfortable with ordering the book directly from us, you’ll be able to request your local book store to order a copy for you.

More on this later.

– Wicasta

We’ve been tinkering with the idea of having a page on MySpace for awhile now. Well, I finally went and did it. The idea is mostly to use MySpace as a way to get to know some of the people who use the web site. Believe it or not, we’re interested in who you are and why you use this web site and how often you visit. While daily visits have dropped off dramatically since Sacred Texts and other web sites started mirroring our files, we still average about 700-800 unique visitors each day. So if you have a MySpace page and would like to get to know us and other people who use the Malleus web site, drop by and send us a Friend request. We’d love to hear from you.

Our MySpace page is at; http://www.myspace.com/derhexenhammer