The 9th Gate Revisited

I have read The Club Dumas almost every year from highschool at least one time. This year for some reason i read it twice. Morgan posted the wood cuts from the movie, which are just awesome.

I'm an admitted Bibliofile.. i collect books, read them, love them. One day i would like to sell them.

Let me tell a quick story about Corso Books.

I contacted a guy who lived in Wales who was a college student. His father whom he never talked to left him a huge mass of books and a library to put them in. Books mostly on the subjust of the Occult and some various other subjects lied within the library, dating back to the early 15th century. The house was given to his family, and the burden of the estate was dumped on him. The books were worth hundreds of thousands of dollars. Sell a book to a museum over here, to an occultist over there, pretty soon life was pretty good for this guy. He didnt care if he sold one book a year if thats all it took to get food on the table and pay the bills.

I emailed him and asked if he would ever broker sales to the United States and Canada, out of curiosity, and nothing else. He said not a problem at all, and he would send me scans of the books as he got to them, he had several books on vellum that he had several doubles of, that he would loan them to me and see what damage i could do. This man had no fixed and updated website, did not sell on ebay, and was not interested in travel. We made an agreement, and he sent me the first of the scans.

I looked over the scans and did not know what to say. All the ideas i had, and i knew no one that would be interested in these books. Hell, one of them would be a months salary for me, some of them, much more. I had no idea he was serious. Who would want these books? The pictures scared me sometimes. The woodcuts in the scans stood out like they jumped off the page. The writing was in perfect practiced latin hand, and the vellum of the pages was uneven, but cut so straight, that you would never know how old it was.

I did the only thing i knew how to do: I made a website. I tried to hide refrences and homages to movies, to add little secret buttons and mouse-overs, i really gave it my all with the design. I talked to a friend of mine at work and he said he was interested in the selling part if we could get any bites. We did get bites, calls somtimes from across america. "Are those book really for sale, or is this a joke.", Was a the main theme for the basis of all the emails.

Once in a while the gentleman from wales emails me and asks me if i sold the books. I tell him no, and im sorry, and he says no problem, don't worry about it. They will sell someday.

Visit Corso Books Homepage (sitecopy)

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Oh, to settle rumors, the Nine Doors to the Kingdom of Shadows (Nonus Porta) Does not exist, (but you can get your own here.) When Arturo Perez wrote the book it was obvious that he had to make some things up to make the story believable, and lets face it, the devil didn't write anything.

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Or did he?

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The Book of Soyga

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The truth is, there really is a book that is the treastise on magic, that you can use it to summon the devil, that has no known origin with secrets laying across 3 copies, and you need all three and the key words and phrases to unlock them. There were errors (?) across the three known books, that the wood cuts of the diagrams were copied from an unknown source, so you need all three books present to get it right. It has been translated.

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So what are you waiting for? Go summon the devil already... you assholes.