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“Expensive” is a bit of an understatement… by the time I’d found out about their existence, a single copy of Viridarium Umbris was retailing for roughly $1,200 and Ars Philtron was going for $200.  Combined, that’s over three month’s rent for me.  I’ll grant you that they’re certainly worth more than the average metaphysical book, but their release as extremely limited edition art runs effectively takes them well out of the range I could ever afford to spend on a pair of books, however good.  I realize that prevents me from having full access to the talismanic properties of the original books, but I’ve found the information presented in them quite valuable even without that.  If Xaonon ever releases its books in a wider print run that would bring them down into an affordable range, I would certainly buy them, even at two to three times the price of an average pagan book.  But Ars Philtron alone is nearly ten times more expensive than most pagan books, and Viridarium Umbris is roughly sixty times more.  I’m grateful I was able to find them as PDFs, or I literally never would have read them.

If I’d known about it when it was first released, I probably would have bought it at that price.  Unfortunately, coming across the pdfs was my first introduction to any of Xoanon’s works, and I don’t know if I would have bought it at that price sight-unseen.  Until finding the pdf, I’d never heard of Schulke or Xoanon or the Cultus Sabbati.  I probably had heard of Chumbley, but only in passing.

If they ever do a reprint at the original price, I think I’d rather happily scrape the money together to buy it just to support them, now that I have read the works.  Though I think I’d stick with using the PDF copy for most of my own study, given its portability.  I love being able to carry around a literal library of books (occult and otherwise) on my iPad.

And yeah, the secondhand market is definitely criminal when it comes to texts like these.