A Blue Book

August Strindberg's "A Blue Book" is a collection of essays by famous Swedish novelist and playwright, author of "Miss Julie", "The Ghost Sonata", "The Red Room", among others.

This books deals mostly with philosophy, religion, spirituality, science and other subject matter, very much influenced by his readings of Emmanuel Swedenborg. In some ways, this book can be considered a conclusion to his autobiographical romance "Inferno", which is also influenced by Swedenborg.

The book was written between 1906 and 1912 and published in Sweden in four volumes.

As far as we know, the only English translation of the work was published in 1913 as "Zones of the Spirit: A Book of Thoughts". The translation was made by Claud Field, M.A.. It included texts from Volume I and II only, and did not maintain Strindberg's original order.

What we did here was mostly to keep most of Field's translation, which is in the public domain and seems to us still very readable, but we added a few minor corrections and notes, and, more importantly, reordered all entries so that they were again in Strindberg's original order, and also separated them into Volume I and Volume II.

We also translated several new entries to fill in some of the gaps. These new entries have never been published in English before, and are marked with an asterisk.

Last but certainly not least, we included illustrations by Edvard Munch (a personal friend of Strindberg) and a few paintings made by Strindberg himself.