They Came From Hyde Brothers!

In my defense, I was left unsupervised.

There is a a very spe­cial used book­store in my home town: Hyde Broth­ers. (Alas, both the Hyde broth­ers are no longer with us.) I can’t even begin to esti­mate just how much I’ve spent there over the years, par­tic­u­lar­ly books on hyp­no­sis. There is even a sec­tion for hyp­nosns in the back, on a high shelf in with the rest of the psy­chol­o­gy and self-help books: I haven’t raid­ed it in a while, since a) I have most of them already, and b) I don’t real­ly have the space or desire to col­lect the Erick­son books. Still, I check it every time I go in.

Like this afternoon.

I was bik­ing into down­town, and the book­store is just a cou­ple blocks down a side street, so I decid­ed to stop by, and I noticed a cou­ple of new books on the shelf. Of course, I had to get them.

• “Advanced Tech­niques of Hyp­no­sis” by Melvin Pow­ers. Yes, I have a copy (or two?) but it was cheap and its a good exam­ple of the type of books Melvin Pow­ers was pub­lish­ing: I espe­cial­ly like the pho­tographs in the front, as well as the very atmos­pher­ic cover.
• “Hyp­no­sis” by Ruben Lan­za. A large for­mat, self-pub­lished book, with sev­er­al sec­tions on a vari­ety of top­ics. The cov­er tag reads “Mas­ter the Covert Art of Hyp­no­sis, Raise the Dor­mant Ener­gy Inside You and Be Always Moti­vat­ed. 20 Hyp­no­sis Ses­sions: Rapid Weight Loss | Gas­tric Band | Deep Sleep | Past Life Regres­sion” I got it large­ly for the cov­er tag, and for the cov­er image of a col­or­ful dream­catch­er with a spi­ral motif. Its a very large for­mat book, so I will have some dif­fi­cul­ty find­ing a place to put it.
• “Hyp­no­tism (For Fun For Health)” by Dr. Clark Bel­lows. Yes, I have a copy of this, too: its a typ­i­cal exam­ple of hyp­no­tism books dur­ing the post-WWII years, up to the Bridey Mur­phy era.
• “Hyp­no­tism in Treat­ment” by William Mood­ie. This is a new addi­tion to The Col­lec­tion. Very dry, def­i­nite­ly direct­ed to any­one look­ing to start using hyp­no­sis in any ther­a­putic set­ting: half of the book is explains every­thing a ther­a­pist needs to know about induc­ing a hyp­not­ic state, and the oth­er half is expla­na­tions on how to use that state in a vari­ety of applications.
• “Sybil” by Flo­ra Rheta Schreiber. An account of the most famous case of mul­ti­ple per­son­al­i­ties ever. Hyp­nother­a­py was part of their long inte­gra­tion process.