About A Distant Mirror
A Distant Mirror is an independent publisher dedicated to reviving rare, forgotten, and culturally significant works — and to publishing original books written in the same spirit. Founded in 1995 and based in Bendigo, Victoria, Australia, the press has issued some twenty titles spanning the history of science and medicine, the origins of organic agriculture, natural history, literature, and the esoteric.
The name
The imprint takes its name, with admiration, from Barbara Tuchman’s 1978 history A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century. Tuchman chose that title to express an idea that runs to the very heart of this publishing project: that the past is a mirror in which we recognise ourselves, because human nature changes remarkably little from one age to the next. Circumstances and technologies shift; people — their follies, their blind spots, and their insights — do not.
It is exactly this conviction that guides what A Distant Mirror chooses to publish. Time and again, ideas that were dismissed, sidelined, or quietly forgotten in their own day turn out to speak directly to ours. The work of this press is to bring those voices back into print — carefully edited, well made, and ready to be read and reconsidered.
What we publish
A Distant Mirror’s catalogue gathers around a few enduring threads.
Science, medicine, and the natural world. The nineteenth-century work of the French chemist Antoine Béchamp — Béchamp or Pasteur?, Ethel Hume’s classic account of the long dispute between Béchamp and Louis Pasteur, and The Blood and its Third Element — alongside the pioneering biophysics of Jagadish Chandra Bose in Response in the Living and Non-Living, Eugene Marais’s groundbreaking studies of the animal mind in The Soul of the Ape & My Friends the Baboons and The Soul of the White Ant, and Karin Lindgaard’s Taking Heart and Making Sense: A New View of Nature, Feeling and the Body.
Soil, food, and the land. The foundational writings of the organic movement: Sir Albert Howard’s An Agricultural Testament and The Soil and Health, Dr G. T. Wrench’s The Wheel of Health and Reconstruction by Way of the Soil, and Edmund Morris’s Ten Acres is Enough.
Literature, history, and belief. George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, Thomas Miller’s The Saxons in Britain, Henry Frost’s Franz Schubert: A Biography, Thomas à Kempis’s The Imitation of Christ, and Myron Fagan’s Illuminati.
The writings of Nikola Tesla. My Inventions and The Problem of Increasing Human Energy. A comprehensive compendium of his works is currently in production.
Original works and the Distant Mirror Tarot. New books by David Major — The Major Arcana, The Strange Voyage of Máel Dúin, The Day of the Nefilim, and Air for Fire — together with the Distant Mirror Tarot, a 78-card deck rooted in the classical tradition.
For several of its principal authors, A Distant Mirror maintains in-depth research hubs — gathering biography, timelines, bibliographies, articles, and archival images — so that each book sits within the fuller story of the figure behind it.
Who is behind it
A Distant Mirror is the work of David Major, who selects, edits, designs, and typesets each title — and who, under his own name, contributes original works to the list. It is a deliberately small, hands-on press: every book is chosen because it deserves a second life, and prepared with the care that conviction demands.
Where to find our books
Titles from A Distant Mirror are available worldwide, in paperback and ebook, through Amazon, and — via IngramSpark — to bookshops and libraries internationally.