Theos-Talk Archives (July 1996 Message tl00398)

I was just exploring WorldCat for a work-related purpose, and
while I was there started looking at other things.  For the
purposes of my Cayce book, some time ago I searched to find out
how many books had ever been produced on the subject of Edgar
Cayce, compared to other founders of American-born new
religious movements.  Here are some numbers:

Joseph Smith, Jr. 1125
Ellen G. White (Adventists) 686
Edgar Cayce 646
Mary Baker Eddy 601
HPB 341

Today I decided to look up some successors to HPB in
Theosophical and derivative groups, and here's where the shock
came:

J. Krishnamurti 297
Annie Besant 180
Alice Bailey 87
Elizabeth C. Prophet 18
CW Leadbeater 8
and:
RUDOLF STEINER 1210!!

Some caveats: this database counts multiple editions and
translations of the same book as separate.  At 30 million
records plus, it is the closest thing we have to "all books
ever written" but still is biased towards English language
materials.  But despite the inexactitude, it is still a
fascinating discovery to me: Steiner has generated more studies
than Joseph Smith, twice as many as Cayce, Eddy, or White and
eight times as many as his expeller Mrs. Besant.  More than a dozen
times as many as Bailey, who I always put in the same league with him, four
times as many as Krishnamurti, and more than three times as
many as HPB.

Can anyone offer a hint to explain this (to me anyhow) quite
unexpected fact?