The Magician's Tables vs The Magician's Companion

http://tinyurl.com/2vwrr7

This book by Bill Whitcomb looks pretty good, has excellent Amazon feedback, and covers much the same ground as Skinner's book. Anyone read it?

Hey ff,

I have them both, but the Skinner is more comprehensve, and a little more user friendly in terms of assembling all of that data between two covers. Whitmore's Companion has some gaps and makes some assumptions that might irk certain users. It's a slighter book, though useful. WHile doing research over the past 4 months, I know that the Skinner has the info while the WHitmore will have some of the info.

Totally personal opinion, BTW. I'm interested to see what other folks have to say about comparing them.

Scion

Skinner's Complete Magician's Tables is much better..deeper (i have both)

Have them both - use them both

I have both books. I use the Companion when teaching and working with groups that don't need a lot of information overload. It is useful, but I have found several mistakes. Can't remember exactly at the moment, but either the trigrams or the I Ching hexagrams come to mind. They printed two of one and none of another in the charts. I have noticed a couple of other questionable things in there. So I just remind folks that whatever their source, it was probably built on another source, and individuals should check their material and validate it before doing any fancy stuff.

Skinner's book, on the other hand, is most magnificent, and I am using it as a springboard for further study (LOVE his notes) and in my solitary practise. I believe Skinner went back to as many original sources as he could, and explained his logic in constructing the tables. I still validate and verify correspondences before I use them, but I feel a bit better using Skinner's stuff out of the box.

For what it's worth - I'm fairly eclectic, but I like my sources to dot their "i"s and cross their "t"s precisely. I break the rules all the time, but I want my books to be clear on what the rules are. If that makes any sense.

Happy Reading!

Mnem

I probably didn't make it clear that I already have Skinner, so my revised question should be: Does The Magician's Companion contain anything that The Magician's Tables doesn't; and if it does, is the info worth spending $20 for?

Thanks for the replies so far. I suspected a Llewellyn publication would not be faultless; my copy of Godwin's Cabalistic Encyclopedia is full of Gematria errors and it's still in print!

Not that I can think of...

My local shopping centre has one of the book clearance stands running at the moment, today I saw 3 copies of Skinner's book for AUD$15 each (rrp $50 and seen it go for $70 at some places). Its probably too heavy to post overseas cheaply, but any Aussies who want a cheap copy pop me a PM and I'll help you out.