My white whale book just arrived!!!
I've been trying to find a copy particularly of volume 1 of this book for 1-2 years now, and I've mostly only found $350-1,500 second-hand copies (just for vol 1) , plus one reference copy in a library 3,000km away.
(It was also originally published in Flemish, so there was the added layer of finding an English edition)
But I recently found it for sale, new, in a Dutch bookshop! One of my friends shipped it to me, and the box set cost me AU$230 including the shipping to Australia (which was a little over half the total cost)
It's probably 4x the most I've ever spent on a book, when my funds are the tightest they've been in my entire adult life, and yet I don't even have words for how happy I am to have this book in my hot little hands!!!
It is so, so well-researched. It's so well-cited. Plus the authors speak about as many languages as you'd expect from Belgians, so their pool of sources is so much broader than most similar books whose authors only speak English.
(I opened to a random page and got the footnotes/citations just for the section on Frankincense)
There's been something so wonderful about shifting from reading mostly witchy books by witchy authors to reading mostly academic texts by academics. They're definitely not as easy to read, but the depth of information and the expertise are just delicious!
I have a big research project I'm planning for my 3rd degree project for my Druidry studies (hopefully starting before the end of the year), and there are no words for how valuable a resource this is going to be 🥰