The HIPS Books journal
Meet the people, ideas and skills behind our archive discoveries. Start with a question, follow the history, and find a book to take you further.
As new books come out of the archives, the journal follows their stories and subjects. Browse the books in the catalogue or read about our editorial approach.
Before throwaway goods, households mended. Charles Godfrey Leland’s 1896 manual argued that repair was an art with its own rules. What it covers, and how to read its recipes now.
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In 1917 the kitchen joined the war effort. See how Minnie L. Jamison’s booklet asked households to save wheat, meat, sugar, fat and fuel, and what should not be copied today.
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Isis Unveiled and The Secret Doctrine are very different books. Compare their purpose, style and volumes, and see why The Key to Theosophy may be the best place to begin.
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Where should a new reader begin with Annie Besant? A short guide to her Theosophical books, what each one is about, and an order that makes them easier to follow.
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A 1917 manual treats the harvest as the beginning of another job: storing food through winter. Explore its cellars, pits, household labour and wartime purpose as history, not instructions.
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What did A. Marques mean by the human aura in 1896? Explore his layers, diagrams and Theosophical vocabulary, and the difference between a historical explanation and scientific evidence.
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Victory gardens did not begin in the Second World War. Read the First World War campaign through Charles Lathrop Pack’s 1919 book, its community projects and wartime posters.
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How did old manuals approach meat, fruit and vegetables? Compare books from 1864, 1904–1905 and 1917, with historical practices clearly separated from modern food-safety advice.
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What did a small plot promise in Bolton Hall’s Three Acres and Liberty? Explore land access, labour, markets and cooperation in his early text and the 1918 supplement.
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Read the colour symbolism through paired illustrations of devotion, ambition and anger. A close-reading guide to the book’s images, not an aura chart for diagnosing other people.
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Explore Besant and Leadbeater’s illustrated account of thought, emotion and music: how its pictures work, who made them, and what kind of evidence they represent.
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Understand karma, reincarnation, personality and individuality in Blavatsky’s 1889 question-and-answer book, without confusing her spiritual philosophy with established facts.
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