The first and foremost of my sub rosa publishing efforts, a reissue of the 1926 Freak Masterpiece, The Oldest History of the World Discovered by Occult Science in Detroit Michigan by Benny Evangelist, is now available in handy PDF format. This is an update and total resetting of the 2001 print edition.

Evangelist, a Neapolitan immigrant born Benjamino Evangelista, came up hard knuckle days in the Hex County of York, PA. He moved to Detroit and became an Occult Scientist, a divine prophet and a faith healer. The Oldest History was produced in nightly trances over a period of some years and was intended as the first of several volumes. The other three were never published. Fate intervened.

On July 4, 1929, Evangelist was found in his St. Aubin Avenue home-office with his head hacked off; upstairs the bodies of his wife and four young children lay mutilated in their own coagulate gore. The crimes went unsolved.

The 2001 edition was one of those projects that a person undertakes for good reasons, and then, years later, the effort turns out to have changed them entirely. My typesetting and design on the book were revolting, and the great shame that I came to feel over the layout sparked a total and on-going obsession with Getting Things Right. Another unintended consequence was the slow descent into Archival Madness– which lead, amongst other crimes of love, to the haunting of countless libraries, turning kobek.com into a dumping ground for sub-sub-sub-sub-subcultures, putting up PDFs of incredibly obscure work, publishing old crime novels and the collected works of Theauraujohn Thomas Tany and, perhaps strangest of all, a co-grant from the American Academy of Religion for a project that never materialized.

The present PDF has been retypeset & includes contemporary news reporting on the murders along with photographs I took of Evangelist’s unmarked grave in December of 2001. There’s a few things that I might add later, but nothing of particular consequence.

This is, I suspect, the definitive edition.