Cagliostro Book?
Posted: Fri Jul 08, 2016 5:39 pm
Hi Everyone,
I wanted to run an idea past you all. Back around the 1700's, there was a very famous numerologist who lived in France named Cagliostro. He was known for being able to forecast winning lottery numbers in the Paris lottery. Back then, you'd win something with just one number correct. So he'd figure out his number and would show up and win every time. He's also give the numbers to people he'd meet at parties, and they'd win too. He became very famous because of all this, and there are all sorts of crazy stories about him.
Anyway, the inquisition eventually got a hold of him, and as they were searching him to put him in the cell, they took a lot of items off of him. One of these items was a book. The guard there spotted it on the table, and thinking it might have some value, stole it when no one was looking. When he got home, he was surprised to find that he couldn't understand anything in there, as it was all written in a Arabic. He brought the book to a translator he knew, and it turned out to be a manual for how to use numerology to forecast the lottery. One thing lead to another, and in the 1800's a run of these books was printed.
Fast forward to the early 2000's, and guess who happened to spot one of these for sale in a rare book auction? So I paid a couple thousand for the book, which was so old that the pages all were falling apart at the edges. I had to have a guy build me a special box just so I could store the thing safely. It was written in Old French, so I went over to the Unversity of Colorado and found a native French speaker who had come over on an exchange program to teach French, and I hired that guy to translate the book for me.
Modern lotteries don't work on the same principles that the older ones did, and now they do huge prizes for all numbers correct, but don't reward the ones and twos, like they did in Paris. So it's not something that you could use for the lottery successfully, but it's still a really interesting work for students of numerology and kabbalah. There are lots of techniques involving number pyramids, where you resolve everything down to a few solutions at the bottom, and Caglistro uses planetary tables and associations, and all kinds of cool stuff. He has tables in there with the complete results of the Paris lottery, and he goes and backtests all his systems on those numbers to prove they worked. It's interesting stuff, and it's valuable to students of esoteric subjects because there are just no copies available of anything done by Caglistro. The guy is a practically a myth at this point.
Ok, long story! So what I'm trying to figure out is if there's enough demand to go through the whole process of turning this into a book or not, or is it just too far off the wall to be of interest. Publishing this is going to take some time and energy, and I have to pay the printer, buy a minimum number of copies, etc, etc. If I set the price to $50-$100 each, it will probably take 40-50 of them just to break even on the whole project, and given the very esoteric topic here (especially since it's not directly useful for trading), there's a good chance that I just end up with a pile of Caglistro's books taking up space in the corner of the garage.
So the question is, for $50-$100, would you be interested in a book like this? Or should I just leave this as a cool antique with an interesting story? I've set it up as a poll, so if you've got a feeling one way or the other, please choose an option (above).
Thanks,
Earik
I wanted to run an idea past you all. Back around the 1700's, there was a very famous numerologist who lived in France named Cagliostro. He was known for being able to forecast winning lottery numbers in the Paris lottery. Back then, you'd win something with just one number correct. So he'd figure out his number and would show up and win every time. He's also give the numbers to people he'd meet at parties, and they'd win too. He became very famous because of all this, and there are all sorts of crazy stories about him.
Anyway, the inquisition eventually got a hold of him, and as they were searching him to put him in the cell, they took a lot of items off of him. One of these items was a book. The guard there spotted it on the table, and thinking it might have some value, stole it when no one was looking. When he got home, he was surprised to find that he couldn't understand anything in there, as it was all written in a Arabic. He brought the book to a translator he knew, and it turned out to be a manual for how to use numerology to forecast the lottery. One thing lead to another, and in the 1800's a run of these books was printed.
Fast forward to the early 2000's, and guess who happened to spot one of these for sale in a rare book auction? So I paid a couple thousand for the book, which was so old that the pages all were falling apart at the edges. I had to have a guy build me a special box just so I could store the thing safely. It was written in Old French, so I went over to the Unversity of Colorado and found a native French speaker who had come over on an exchange program to teach French, and I hired that guy to translate the book for me.
Modern lotteries don't work on the same principles that the older ones did, and now they do huge prizes for all numbers correct, but don't reward the ones and twos, like they did in Paris. So it's not something that you could use for the lottery successfully, but it's still a really interesting work for students of numerology and kabbalah. There are lots of techniques involving number pyramids, where you resolve everything down to a few solutions at the bottom, and Caglistro uses planetary tables and associations, and all kinds of cool stuff. He has tables in there with the complete results of the Paris lottery, and he goes and backtests all his systems on those numbers to prove they worked. It's interesting stuff, and it's valuable to students of esoteric subjects because there are just no copies available of anything done by Caglistro. The guy is a practically a myth at this point.
Ok, long story! So what I'm trying to figure out is if there's enough demand to go through the whole process of turning this into a book or not, or is it just too far off the wall to be of interest. Publishing this is going to take some time and energy, and I have to pay the printer, buy a minimum number of copies, etc, etc. If I set the price to $50-$100 each, it will probably take 40-50 of them just to break even on the whole project, and given the very esoteric topic here (especially since it's not directly useful for trading), there's a good chance that I just end up with a pile of Caglistro's books taking up space in the corner of the garage.
So the question is, for $50-$100, would you be interested in a book like this? Or should I just leave this as a cool antique with an interesting story? I've set it up as a poll, so if you've got a feeling one way or the other, please choose an option (above).
Thanks,
Earik