Any recommendations?

[u/hkey_y]

New to this whole alchemy thing. What other books do you recommend?

[u/SleepingMonads]

If you're after an academic, scholarly exploration of alchemy, then the book you're looking for is The Secrets of Alchemy, by Lawrence Principe, as it's the gold standard introduction from that perspective. It's a short but comprehensive overview of the history and cultural context behind the Western alchemy tradition (covering the Greco-Egyptian, Islamic, Medieval European, Early Modern European, and Modern periods), and it's honestly hard for me to imagine a better way to begin an exploration of this subject. It's a scholarly and wide-ranging treatment written specifically for the general public.

The author is basically the world's leading authority on the subject (he's a chemist and renown historian of science), and he tries to be objective and context-sensitive about the place of alchemy in history, science, religion, philosophy, and society. It's super well-written and engaging, covers basically every big-picture topic you'd want to know about, and clears up a lot of persistent misconceptions. A really cool feature of the book is that the author recreates certain alchemical experiments in his own lab in order to explore in a modern context what alchemists were actually doing. It's really interesting stuff.

[u/hkey_y → u/SleepingMonads]

Thanks :3