The Shaver Mystery
Thursday, May 8, 2025 at 7pm
361 Stagg Street, Suite 407, Brooklyn
Presented with The Further Reading Library
Featured among the offerings of The Further Reading Library—a new book series by Christine Burgin and Andrew Lampert "dedicated to forgotten ideas, overlooked accomplishments, and idiosyncratic worldviews"—is a volume on writer Richard Sharpe Shaver. Shaver, the publishers explain, "believed that rocks were books imprinted with valuable information about such mythical ancient races as the Lemurians and Atlanteans. His controversial stories about an advanced prehistoric civilization and a race of evil beings living at the center of the earth appeared in Amazing Stories and other landmark sci-fi publications of the 40s and 50s. A decade later, he was living in relative isolation and devoting himself to rock book research, a course of study that he shared with a devoted group of correspondents. Shaver believed that ancient leaders had left behind images embedded into rocks, which he then tried to interpret."
For this evening at Light Industry, a selection of Shaver's writings—read by Burgin, Lampert, Matt Mullican, and Ed Park—will be presented alongside a pair of films. The first is Chapter Five of The Phantom Empire, a uniquely bizarre 1935 serial starring singing cowboy Gene Autry and chronicling his encounter with "a nation 20,000 feet underground"; The Passion Pot, our second title, made by George Kuchar with his students at the San Francisco Art Institute in 2003, likewise concerns subterranean humanoids and, in the spirit of Shaver, summons another world with materials close at hand.
"As much as this is a celebration of Shaver and the book," says Lampert, "our show is an exploration of the hollow earth and the vast, likely very evil solar system that is actively working to suppress and destroy humanity. These distinctly different and vast spaces are not entirely unrelated. It takes visionaries like Gene Autry, Richard Sharpe Shaver, and George Kuchar to reveal the lines in this twisted constellation. Something stinks out there, and thankfully we have the discerning noses of these three do-gooders to sniff out a path towards salvation."
Copies of Richard Sharpe Shaver: Some Stones Are Ancient Books will be available for purchase alongside other FRL publications.
16mm print of The Phantom Empire courtesy of Mike Olshan.
Tickets - Pay what you can ($10 suggested donation), available at door.
Please note: seating is limited. First-come, first-served. Box office opens at 6:30pm. No entry 10 minutes after start of show.