hi trae, i was listening to your latest podcast episode and i quite enjoyed it (speaking as someone who knows absolutely nothing about wicca but has also seen all the bombarding on it). this kinda has nothing to do with it, but upon hearing "llewellyn [publishing]" it reminded me i keep seeing sentiments like "NEVER read llewellyn books" and i was wondering if you knew what the heck is going on there? i see some mentions of a couple of imperfect books and biases, but i feel like witchcraft and paganism is always subject to those and this isnt unique to llewellyn publishing. could i ask for some of your perspective?
Llewellyn is the big publisher of witchcraft books in the US. They publish both good witchcraft books and bad witchcraft books. They're a business, so they're going to publish whatever sells, y'know?
Like they're the company that publishes Silver RavenWolf, but they're also the same company that publishes the late Scott Cunningham.
Publishing standards in occult books used to be a bit lower, and as they were the big witchcraft publisher in the 90s, the flood of witchcraft books back then largely came under their imprint. Because of that, they got a big of a reputation -- and there are stories about them having a "house style" in the 80s and 90s, but I don't think that's been true for a while.
Overall their mark on a book isn't really the problem. The works just need to be judged on their own. Like Thorn Mooney's "Witches Among Us" is one of the best witchcraft books I've read in years. But it also, again, doesn't make a book good either. Because, again, Silver RavenWolf.
Let's just make sure we aren't looking at things with black and white thinking.
(And, to their credit, they're the only publisher that did their due diligence on me before throwing an author my way. 😆)
