Inner Circle, The.
All About People and Things. What to Read and Where to Get It. New and Old Thought Books and Their Authors. A Cosy Meeting Place for Clever people.
1909—1911? Quarterly
Chicago, IL. Publisher: Louise Radford Wells. Editor: Louise Radford Wells.
Succeeds: The Inner Circle (Uriel Buchanan)
1/1, November 1909.

This was an advertising blurb for The Library Shelf, a distributor and sometime-publisher of New Thought books, whose manager was Louise Radford Wells. She was also the editor of New Thought (Chicago). In 1909 Sidney A. Weltmer, who then owned New Thought, moved the back-office work of publishing New Thought to Nevada, Missouri, and Wells moved both of her enterprises, the journal and The Library Shelf, into new quarters in the McClurg building on Wabash in Chicago, at the same time making an arrangement for A.C. McClurg & Co., a prominent publisher of the era, to publish and distribute The Library Shelf’s books. The journal’s primary purpose was to promote its line of books, notably The Arcane Teaching, The Arcane Formulas, The Mystery of Sex or Sex Polarity, Vril or Vital Magnetism, The Sacred Science of Regeneration, and William Walker Atkinson’s and Sydney Flower’s list from earlier in the decade, all of which centered around the principle that sexual energy (especially retention of the semen) was the source of all spiritual and occult progress. The tone of the journal was informal and chatty, and Wells added to the appeal of the extended advertisements and book reviews articles on graphology (citing books from The Library Shelf’s list), Character Reading (with analysis of character from the handwriting of those subscribing to the journal), responses to Personal Problems (which she also wrote for Magazine of Mysteries), and occasional articles by Atkinson and others. Lest she be dismissed as yet another New Thought innocent, she also was involved in 1911-1912 in The Library Shelf’s attempt to flog shares of its preferred stock to the public, promising a 10% return, but she may have been only a dupe.

There had earlier been another quarterly journal of the same name in Chicago, announced in New Thought to begin in April 1906 and probably edited by Uriel Buchanan, whose Inner Circle group advertised in the journal at the time. Its relation to Wells’ journal is clear but the details are unknown. A journal of the same name was run by Rev. Myrtle I. Hoagland in the 1920s in Los Angeles as the organ of her Occult Science of Christ Church, but nothing connects it with this journal. Noted in H.O. Severance, A Guide to the Current Periodicals and Serials of the United States (1909).

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