When I was kid, my father collected a lot of strange books pertaining to psychic phenomena and the occult. Dad never went to college, so I think these books were his path to self-education. If only they weren’t so weird.

The author he crowed about for years was a guy named Edmund Shaftesbury, who wrote books about “magnetism,” which meant anything from charm to charisma to, yes, the power to control minds.

Aiiieeeee!

I don’t know how much my father bought into this, but for a while there in the early 20th Century, Shaftesbury had a lot of takers. The author’s name was actually a pseudonym for a man named Webster Edgerly who published tons of these books. He and they are not remembered well, and deservedly so.

Here’s why…