A Treasury of 20th Century Witchcraft, Merlyn Stone’s Long-Lost Classic Restored

Long before the public inception of the Systemology Society, or even the Mardukite Research Organization, Joshua Free maintained an underground occult presence in the 1990’s as “Merlyn Stone.” Thousands of copies of his works began circulating during an era prior to the type of commercialized self-publishing and “print-on-demand” distribution prevalent throughout the “New Age” market today. At the time, it was still quite a prestigious feat to see hundreds of hand-made books reaching new readers each month—but what’s more amazing is that Joshua Free (then “Merlyn Stone”) was only a high school teenager. [This blog post excerpts portions of Rowen Gardner’s foreword to “The Witch’s Handbook” by Joshua Free/Merlyn Stone.]

Although it is quite common for writers to maintain an archival stock of unpublished notebooks and manuscripts, “The Witch’s Handbook” is unique for the fact that its existence as the “1998 Book of Shadows” is not…