The latest major expansion of the holdings of IAPSOP, the International Association for the Preservation of Spiritualist and Occult Periodicals, was announced by founder Marc Demarest this month. He wrote:
Private lessons and teachings boomed after the mail order revolution of the 1880s and 1890s, but were related to far older practices like phrenological, astrological and psychometric readings-by-mail. Private lessons and teachings allowed a mage to develop an apparently more intimate relationship with his or her students, to reach sparse markets of students scattered, literally, all over the globe, and to monetize his or her teachings more effectively, by selling the same material, over and over again, in dozens, hundreds or thousands of transactions. Private lessons and teachings also had other beneficial effects, for the mage and the movement, promoting regular interchange between a student and the movement’s leader or headquarters, and reducing the cost of the production of materials (little more than paper, a typewriter and a method of duplication was required to produce lessons). Occult lessons-by-mail also opened up new suppression mechanisms for the State, making occult teachers subject to postal fraud regulations, and served as further evidence, in the hands of mail-order detractors, that the mail-order business model was a serious social ill that needed to be legislated out of existence.
This provides context for the authorial partnership that I was investigating when I learned of the Thomas Moore Johnson correspondence, the still-mysterious collaboration of Thomas H. Burgoyne and Sarah Stanley Grimke. The Johnson letters reveal that within a few months of publishing her First Lessons in Reality and joining the Hermetic Brotherhood of Luxor in 1886, Grimke was being promoted by Burgoyne as required reading material for HBofL initiates. Although details of their subsequent collaboration are unknown, it was plausibly reported by Elbert Benjamine that they were co-authors of The Light of Egypt, first published pseudonymously as the work of “Zanoni” in 1889. Few of the 48 teachers included in the Private Lessons archive are remembered today, even to the small extent that Burgoyne and Grimke have been. But the expanded holdings of IAPSOP may eventually change that, as increased accessibility of occult and Spiritiualist books and periodicals has already been useful to many scholars around the world.