BEWITCHED AT THE BOOKSTORE Seven books on witchcraft were published in the first two weeks of January 2002. That’s up from five a year as recently as the 1980s, and fewer than one a year in the first half of the twentieth century. Interest in the contemporary pagan mishmash known as Wicca is clearly booming. “How-to” books are flying off the shelves, and fiction with Wicca themes is also beginning to surface. Last year–no doubt influenced by the success of the Harry Potter books–three major houses launched serials for teenagers: the “Sweep” series by Cate Tiernan from Penguin Putnam; “Circle of Three” by Isobel Bird from Avon; and “Daughters of the Moon” by Lynne Ewing from an imprint of Hyperion. Scholastic Books, a publisher once associated with wholesome children’s books–remember Encyclopedia Brown and the Mad Scientists’ Club?–has seen to it that the 8- to 12-year-old set is not left out: Scholastic has a new series, called “Twitches,” by H.B. Gilmour and Randi Reisfeld, tailored to preteens. Several houses are supplementing their books with “spell kits.” The New Age publisher Llewellyn released a “Teen Witch Kit” in the summer of 2000 by Wiccan author Silver RavenWolf, complete with crystal, pentacle necklace, spell book, spell salt, and pop-up altar. Publisher’s Weekly reported that 24,000 of the kits had sold by spring 2001–at $24.95 a pop-up. “WICCA,” explains Wiccan Phyllis Currott, “is an amalgamation of Freemasonry, mythology, folk practices, nineteenth-century American pantheism, transcendentalism, feminism, Spiritualism, Buddhism, ancient goddesses, and shamanism.” Some adherents revel in the moniker “witch,” while others prefer the term “Wiccan” as less loaded. “We saw a 20 percent increase in sales in our Wicca books last year,” says Ann Binkley, a spokeswoman for Border’s Books. At Barnes & Noble last year, sales of Wicca books grew particularly among teenagers, a spokeswoman reports–so much so that the chain’s publishing arm released its own Wicca titles, including “A Girl’s Guide to Spells: Making Magic Happen In Your Life.” “Over the past three years Wicca has become more popular. The Internet has played a large role in that,” says a representative for Barnes & Noble. “The buyer in that division has a pulse of what is going on in the culture and decides what to publish. Wicca is a steady category for us.” IT WAS NOT always thus. Ten years ago, books about Wicca were mostly confined to small New Age and occult shops. Some of those old-style venues survive. In Asheville, North Carolina, a store called “Elder Moon” is seeing record sales of Gerald Gardner’s seminal works “Witchcraft Today” and “The Meaning of Witchcraft.” “East West,” a bookstore in Sacramento, California, sells only religious titles–and its owner, Garrett Stanley, says that Wicca has now reached fifth place in sales, behind Hinduism, Buddhism, Christianity, and Native American Spirituality. There is no question that Wicca makes money for publishers. ECW, a Canadian publishing house that got its start with academic essays (“ECW” stands for “Essays on Canadian Writing”), leapt into the Wicca market last year with “Witchcraft and the Web: Weaving Pagan Traditions Online” by the appropriately named M. Macha Nightmare and “Magickal Weddings: Pagan Handfasting Traditions for Your Sacred Union,” by the somewhat-less felicitiously named Joy Ferguson. “Our big market is the States,” says ECW publicist Julie Girard. “There are so many pagan gatherings where we can promote our books. There are 2,500 people alone who attend the Heartland Pagan festival in Kansas City every spring. That is pretty astonishing.” Astonishing is hardly the word for it. It’s like some kind of witchcraft.
