Bibliomancers books aren’t your typical collections of retro ephemera. What began as a way for James Weigel, co-founder of the physical media fest Analog Outlaw, to archive his voluminous collection of books. In the process, though, the L.A.-based publisher, whose recent titles include High Crimes, Cult Minds and New Age Grave, has become a conceptual, community art project where the collections of artists, mainly book covers and other ephemera, are bound in a tangible form, their pages revealing stories that go much deeper than aesthetics.
“It’s not a straight, this is a book about 1970s paperbacks,” says Weigel of Bibliomancers on a recent video call. “There are publishers that do that perfectly and it’s great. They’re very inspiring to me, but my hope is that what we’re doing is interjecting a piece of our creative selves into it. If you look, there are elements there that go beyond just archiving a genre and I think that is really us as artists wanting to be more creatively involved in the process of making books.”
It all stems from a process that we’ll call curation through divination. Bibliomancy itself is a way of divining answers through the pages of books and Weigel has been practicing that since he was a teenager. So, when he and publishing partner Eric Nordhauser launched Bibliomancers, he adapted the practice to the project by bringing boxes of books to his storage unit, which held many more books, and laying them out on the floor. The two went through the items to see what the covers revealed. “It would be pieces that would not necessarily have anything to do with each other,” Weigel explains, “but, because of the design choices of the cover artist or the font or the subject matter, these books that seemingly had no context with each other started forming this new narrative.”
The process worked. And the process worked. Spell Bound, a collection of paperback covers exploring witchcraft and the occult, was the first Bibliomancers book release and has sold out of multiple editions. That initial hit sparked a trilogy, which also includes The Spectral Vision of Gothic Romance and Mask Garden: Revealing the Ecstatic Horror of Hidden Identity Through Paperback Cover Persona. “If you start looking at the books that we’ve done in a series, usually each book will inform a new one,” says Weigel.
This remains true for subsequent Bibliomancers release. The latest book, High Crimes, Cult Minds is a follow-up to the publisher’s collaboration with artist Brendan Donnelly, Cults That Kill. “It’s taking where we left off with the exploration of cults, mostly American, and we really diverged into exploring, hyper-focusing on a few of the cults that we touched upon in the last book,” Weigel explains.
Earlier in the fall, Bibliomancers released New Age Grave, which looks at new religious movements, UFOs and other phenomena that came in the aftermath of the hippies. “We’re looking more at the commodification of it. That segues into the cults,” says Weigel. “We were trying to connect the dots, I guess, between the death of the hippie movement through the commodification of the spiritual movement and how it’s basically aligned with where we are today with the rise of MAGA and the far right.”
In looking at cults of the past, Bibliomancers are, on one level, making a statement about today without being too on the nose. “We try to show elements of that reflected in older programs,” says Weigel. “There is definitely a correlation between the two.”
Something to be said about Bibliomancers books, though, is that they are presented in a way that’s open to interpretation. Take, for example, The Spectral Vision of Gothic Romance, which is a favorite of mine. As I flip through the collection of vintage paperback covers, a story emerges. The titles of the horror novels are unfamiliar to me, but the imagery isn’t. There’s always a woman on the cover. She is conventionally attractive— white and model thin— dressed as if she’s trapped somewhere between the Victorian era and the 1970s. Sometimes she appears afraid, other times a bit sinister. She is nearly-always making an escape, be it from a castle or a mansion or a forest. And, just in case you weren’t already concerned for the heroine, there are the salacious taglines. “An audacious girl…a powerful man…and a secret too horrible to reveal,” reads the cover of Darcourt. With every page, the book seems less like a collection of retro art and more like a testament to the sexism that’s sold to women at drug stores and in grocery check out aisles. And, yet, and I mean this with absolute sincerity, I would read the shit out every one of the books featured in here.
When I look through my copy of The Spectral Vision of Gothic Romance, I make all sorts of connections. I think about Bluebeard’s Castle, Anna Biller’s novel that’s one of my favorites in recent years, and Dark Shadows and that new Wuthering Heights movie that I’m totally planning to see next year. But, the only reason that my mind is able to hop between all these points of reference is because I’m letting my eyes linger on one page after the next in a physical book. If this were an Instagram account and I was just scrolling and sharing, I might not even recall the onslaught of dilapidated mansions or 1970s color palettes seen throughout the book, let alone connect them to whatever else was in my head. That might actually be part of the point of Bibliomancers.
Because Weigel also has a popular Instagram account, Astraleyes, he has seen what happens with the images he posts online after they are inevitably recontextualized as memes and become part of the infinite content machine. “The whole point of Bibliomancers was to take things offline, take the community offline, take the shared love of this imagery and the art and all of these amazing things that people created and put it back into a real, tactile experience,” he says. “You could actually sit with the image rather than go through this endless doomscroll of image consumption.”
Bibliomancers will be at Analog Outlaw at 2220 Arts + Archives in Los Angeles on Saturday, December 6, where High Crimes, Cult Minds, Cults That Kill and New Age Grave will be available. Bibliomancers books are available online through the publisher’s Big Cartel site and are stocked by select indie book stores, including Skylight, Artbook @ Hauser and Worth, Arcana, Secret Headquarters and MOCA Store in Los Angeles.
Liz O. is an L.A.-based writer and DJ. Follow on Instagram or sign up for the weekly, Beatique newsletter for updates on new stories and gigs.
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