This lot is closed for bidding. Bidding ended on 2/1/2025
[AUTOMATIC WRITING]. Automatic Writing Planchette. Evanston, IL: Venture Bookshop, ca. 1960s. Wooden automatic writing planchette with brass mechanical pencil. In the original box with instructions for use from the manufacturer: “Spirit inspiration comes through the mental and emotional faculties and the planchette is a mechanical means of demonstration in writing." Box 6 ½ x 7 ½". Soiling to the box, else very good. RARE.“Clark Publishing Company was founded by the famed science fiction writer and editor Ray Arthur Palmer, who edited Amazing Stories during its 1940s heyday and went on to create such magazines as Fate, Imagination, and Other Worlds. In 1948, Palmer co-founded Clark Publishing Company with partner Curtis Fuller, in order to publish Fate magazine, which deviated from his previous sci-fi efforts by printing articles on such diverse paranormal topics as divination, life after death, prognostication, anomalous phenomena, seances, ghosts, cryptozoology, and out-of-place artifacts. By the 1960s, Fuller and his wife had taken full control of the enterprise, and the paranormal interests manifested further with the founding of Venture Bookshop in Evanston Illinois. The shop offered a wide variety of books and paranormal devices through a prolific mail-order service which used Fuller's popular publications as its main source of advertising, pitching a wide variety of pendulums, tarot cards, crystal balls, “vibroscopic" divining rods, aura goggles, and multiple devices for speaking to the dead, including this automatic writing planchette." – Brandon Hodge, The Mysterious Planchette