The Secret World: Volume One 1975, A Diary of a Lifetime of Questioning The "Facts" (containing The Ancient Earth - Its Story in Stone)
Amherst, WI: Amherst Press, 1975.
First edition. 144 pp. Bound in publisher's illustrated boards. Very Good with some light dampstaining and foxing to boards.
Richard Shaver is best-known as the author of The Shaver Mystery, a series of fantastical stories in Amazing Stories that captivated science fiction readers in the late 1940s. Shaver, however, hadn't intended to write fiction. His vivid, delusional autobiographical accounts had been edited and packaged as fiction by the editor of that publication, Ray Palmer. The two men would have a long friendship.
Decades later after Shaver had faded into obscurity, the first volume of his friend's long-promised memoirs was finally published and Shaver was dismayed to find that his book, The Ancient Earth - Its Story in Stone, had been included in its entirety in this book, spanning 2/3 of its contents, but that he had not received any credit on the covers or main title page. The unusual images in rock that Shaver found, photographed, and co-created are profiled within it, many in color. He believed he was uncovering a secret pictorial history of the world. This artistic pursuit occupied him until the end of his life. He gradually gained some recognition as an Outsider or folk artist, but this book would be his only one published during his lifetime, albeit hidden within another book like an unexposed geode.
Price: $250.00