If you love pulp fiction and weird tales as much as I do then you’ve probably already heard about the €300,000 donation that Da Vinci Code author Dan Brown gave to the Ritman Library to digitize it’s occult collection. The collection includes thousands of pre-1900s texts including alchemy, astrology, magic, and theosophy. How cool.
This is a particularly awesome thing for those of us who like to dabble in fiction that often revolves around occult themes or any of the subjects listed above. I think that far too often speculative authors are forced to concoct fictitious source material for stories that they wish to tell. But now with this huge collection freely available online, one only needs an afternoon of research to find real world material. Even if you are just looking to name drop some manuscripts you can now do it with some authority, I know that I plan to!
Feel free to check out the library’s site here
Guide to the collection – ebook
Photo by Stefan Steinbauer on Unsplash