“Some men are born sodomites…”

The postcard’s irreverent aphorism is the most immediately startling item in Apollo Kagwa’s discovery of the D’Agostinos’ occult library. But the card’s significance shifts as he reads it: first it promises a remarkable collectible, then its personal address and the surrounding books lead him to see a record of two lives studied and lived together. The discovery thus joins the excitement of rare-book dealing to a more intimate recognition of companionship—and of Apollo’s own solitude.

Discovery among the books

The card emerged from a third-edition folio of the lightheartedly titled Witch Hunter Manual of the Blood Council, part of a forty-two-container collection found at a basement estate sale in a Bronx apartment building. The containers ranged from sneaker boxes to an old orange milk crate scavenged from a supermarket. The books were among the rarest works on magic and the occult Apollo had encountered. The D’Agostinos’ four children and eleven grandchildren had been unsettled by the collection left behind after the couple died within months of each other.

The postcard offered a startling contrast with the unassuming domestic evidence around it. Apollo had already found a snapshot of the couple tucked inside a grimoire: their ordinary appearance seemed at odds with the esoteric library. Now a plain card, addressed to them and dated 1945, added a private joke to that incongruity. Its blunt aphorism was followed by a short expression of remembrance. The combination made the card feel less like an isolated curiosity than a glimpse of the couple’s private world.

Provenance and collectible value

The signature on the postcard was clearly Aleister Crowley’s. Apollo checked the name online and confirmed that Crowley was a famed early-twentieth-century occultist, notorious enough to have been called “the wickedest man in history.” The card therefore connected the D’Agostinos’ collection to a prominent figure in occult history. Its date, legible signature, and addressees made it an especially consequential discovery, although authentication remained necessary before Apollo could treat it as a definitive prize.

The card changed the scale of the sale in Apollo’s mind. The haul had already been his best; if the postcard could be authenticated, it might become legendary. He measured his find against Carlton Lake’s discovery of Baudelaire’s corrected texts, then framed his own equivalent as a bawdy Crowley postcard. That comparison conveys both the professional value he attached to a singular literary artifact and the humor with which he initially greeted it. The card was at once evidence to assess and a joke he wanted to share.

From joke to loneliness

Apollo read the card again and laughed, then held it up as if to share the joke. He was alone in his living room. The reversal is small but decisive: the discovery that might have crowned his collecting career made the absence of another person newly apparent. His response was not simply excitement about value or provenance; he felt lonely.

That loneliness altered how he looked at the purchase. The volumes contained marginal notes in two distinct handwriting styles. Together with the postcard addressed to both spouses, those marks suggested that the D’Agostinos had studied the books side by side, leaving one another comments across decades. Apollo came to understand the collection as evidence of intertwined lives, rather than merely a valuable haul. The card’s intimate address mattered alongside its famous signature: it belonged to a shared history, not just to the market for rare books.

Significance in Apollo’s story

The episode makes a private artifact do two kinds of work. As a collectible, the postcard offers the possibility of authentication and a legendary sale; as a personal message, it leads Apollo from amusement to an awareness of what the couple’s books preserve. The two handwritten styles extend that recognition beyond the card itself, turning the surrounding library into traces of an ongoing conversation.

At three in the morning, in his one-bedroom apartment and surrounded by occult texts, the thirty-four-year-old Apollo realized that his biological clock had gone off. The timing connects his response to the collection with an emerging awareness of his own desire for a shared life. The D’Agostinos’ books do not answer that loneliness, but they give it a form: a library assembled and annotated together, and a postcard addressed to both of them. The find is valuable not only because of who signed it, but because of the partnership its destination and context help Apollo recognize.