The press
About Pub.Cat Books
A small independent publisher based in Barcelona. Our output consists of full English editions of important works that previously reached English readers only in part.
What we are trying to do
Some books are cited constantly within a field yet seldom read in full, because they survive only in their original language, in abridged translation, or in a nineteenth-century version that is itself difficult to obtain now. Such works are not lost. They are merely out of reach for anyone without command of the source language.
That is the space we occupy. We are not rescuing obscure titles; we are publishing influential ones that never received a complete edition.
How this translation was made
For the second edition, we worked from a digitised copy of the Cairo printing by ʿĪsā al-Bābī al-Ḥalabī wa-Shurakāh, held at the American University of Beirut, which runs to 546 page images. A large language model (Claude, developed by Anthropic) processed those images sequentially and generated a draft English text, including all 483 magic squares, talismans and letter-tables, with each cell transcribed individually from the image rather than lifted from any earlier translation. The publisher then reviewed that output, verified it against the source images wherever the model itself had flagged uncertainty, and used it to compile the two volumes. Rather than quietly smoothing over the ninety-two doubtful passages the model identified, we have left them marked in the text.
The first edition, which appeared in May 2026, came about through a different and less thorough method: it relied on optical character recognition of a scanned copy, a technique that discards substantially more of the original than working directly from page images, and which could not handle the diagrams at all. That shortcoming is precisely why this second edition now exists.
We state all this openly instead of leaving readers to find out for themselves, and there are two reasons. First, Pub.Cat's own editorial rules require such disclosure on every external surface we issue. Second, this particular readership is rightly cautious about machine-produced reprints of grimoires that carry no named methodology, so a clear description of our process works in our favour rather than against us.
On the name
The translation appears under the byline Anwar al-Ghundas, which is a pen name. Pseudonyms are unremarkable in publishing, and we will not pretend this one is anything else: it is simply the working name used for this imprint's translations, and it should not be taken to imply a particular academic background or nationality.
What we will not do
We will make no assertions that anything in these books functions as described. We will not exaggerate the contents of an edition. Where another publisher's edition suits a particular reader better, we will say so; that is why the comparison page recommends books from other houses.
Coming next
Further complete editions of works in a similar situation are in preparation, as are versions of this title in other languages. If you would like to be notified, the home page carries a sign-up list that is used only a handful of times annually.
Contact
All enquiries go through the contact page. We particularly welcome corrections. If you spot an error in the translation or on this website, please let us know and we will put it right and acknowledge the fix publicly.