A week ago, one of the scarcest works attributed to the succession of 19th century astrologers using the pen-name 'Raphael' came up for auction on ebay, entitled 'Raphael's Sanctuary of the Astral Art, or Elysium of Astrology'.

http://cgi.ebay.com/Raphaels-Sanctuary- ... dZViewItem

With a starting price of just $19.99 and no other copies available for sale on the Internet anywhere in the past couple of years at least, I was expecting some competition for this, but to my surprise nobody else bid and I am currently awaiting my invoice from the seller.

I was all the more surprised by the lack of bidding competition in view of the fact that there are no copies listed in the United States on OCLC and only one in the UK on COPAC, at the British Library; and that one stated as being defective, lacking the frontispiece pull-out chart.

This may well be a case, then, of a book that is so scarce that almost nobody has heard of it, and therefore nobody is interested in it. If it had been better documented thanks to a good handful of surviving institutional copies rather than just one and a defective one at that, it might easily have sold in the hundreds of dollars.

It is certainly not always the case that the scarcest items are the most in demand! And that may be one of the reasons why some of them end up becoming virtually extinct. Who knows: if nobody had bid at all on this auction, it might have ended up being recycled or thrown away. I'll be touching wood that this example gets here safely, with literary preservation in mind above all.

Obviously it is not a serious technical astrological work, and probably lacks any semblance of true originality, but at the same time, it is part of the corpus of broader occult publications put out under the famous Raphael pen-name, and in this respect it is an important part of the heritage of 19th century astrological literary history.

Philip