When I was 12 I received an honor from the local branch of the Optimist Club and was named "Boy of the Year." This included a plaque and a dinner in my honor in L.A.'s Chinatown. As is typical of many kids, I had a very limited food tastes, and I couldn't stand the seaweed soup and other foods that were so foreign to me. After the dinner, my parents, grandparents and I walked around the area. I was immediately drawn to the tourist-oriented sleight-of-hand magic shop that was there and talked my parents into buying me a deck of Gypsy Witch Fortune Telling Cards (they wouldn't go for the rubber chicken). I eagerly read the little instruction booklet and gave my very first reading to my

On Thursday I blogged about book piracy, prompted in part by a particularly egregious offender. The website in question had 32 of our books and tons of other publishers’ books available for download, in full, as well as pages upon pages of spells, rituals, poems, songs, recipes, and more, culled from scores of books, without our authorization (and it seems, without the authorization of several other publishers as well). Llewellyn issued a DMCA takedown notice, I wrote a blog post, it went viral (5,000 hits in a 24-hour span, thanks to authors and other friends), and the website owner finally got the message and agreed to take down the material in question. Llewellyn had written to this

Editor's Note: Please enjoy this guest blog post from Nicole Edman, editor of our Llewellyn’s Astrological Calendar. On the 80th anniversary of the first Astrological Calendar, I dug through our archives for a few olde-tyme samples to see how the calendar has evolved over the years. And boy was I ever fascinated! I couldn’t lay my hands on our earliest copies, which are from a time long before Llewellyn was purchased and moved to Minnesota. Below are images and summaries of the calendars from 1945, 1975, and 1995. 1945 Here are a few images of the 1945 calendar, the year World War II ended. The calendar was titled as the Star Book of the Year back then, and the grids

Editor's Note: Please enjoy this guest blog post from Nicole Edman, editor of our Llewellyn's Astrological Calendar. As we all turn our calendars over to yet another new year, I’m happy to wish our beloved data-heavy wall calendar a happy 80th birthday! First published in 1932, it’s hard to believe that Llewellyn’s Astrological Calendar isn’t even the oldest Llewellyn publication (that honor belongs to our 1905-born Moon Sign Book). I’ve been editing this calendar since I began at Llewellyn five years ago, and what once seemed like a daunting grid of mysterious symbols now tells me so much that I look at it every day. What’s in retrograde? Is there a New Moon or Full Moon