Addendum

This is an editorial preface to a photographic reprint of the 1882 first edition of *Oahspe*, a 19th-century American spiritualist scripture produced through automatic writing. It recounts how John Ballou Newbrough, a New York dentist with a serious interest in spiritualism, received a nighttime visitation from angels in 1870 instructing him to spend ten years purifying himself through vegetarianism and charitable work; at the end of that period, the same spirits directed him to place his hands on a typewriter each morning before dawn and allow them to type through him, resulting in the complete manuscript of *Oahspe* by December 1881. The text emphasizes that Newbrough was demonstrably incapable of competent typing, yet the manuscript pages are described as perfectly typed — a fact the preface treats as evidence of genuine supernatural authorship. The preface's central argument is textual: it contends that the 1891 revised edition of *Oahspe* differs meaningfully from the 1882 original, with sections enlarged, added, or omitted, and that the original manuscript was conveniently destroyed in a flood after revision, raising suspicions about tampering. The publisher presents this reprint as a preservation effort and implicitly a defense of *Oahspe*'s authenticity, arguing that restoring access to the first edition prevents the book from being dismissed as "expurgated and perverted." A notably partisan claim runs throughout: the preface suggests that forces hostile to *Oahspe* — even attributing possible sabotage to malevolent spirits called "drujas" — worked to obscure the original text, framing the reprint as a form of spiritual as well as scholarly rescue.