Black Magic Today

by June Johns

Signed first edition

[London]: New English Library, 1971. First edition. Signed by June Johns on the half title. 128 pp. Bound in publisher's illustrated wraps. Good only with two diagonal creases through book, light edge wear, pages toned with age.

A British guide to the history of the occult and its practitioners circa 1971, around the time of Black Sabbath's classic song "Paranoid" and their second album. Aside from some true crime accounts, Johns didn't go into many specifics of the contemporary scene (frustrating readers and reviewers), but the book became one of her best-known works and would be referenced in the "Satanic Panic" of the 1980s. Very uncommon signed.