Some time in 2003, Joyce relinquished her role of running the English Huber School as a small business, and the Astrological Psychology Association was formed. The heyday of interest in the work of the Hubers was past, following Bruno’s death in 1999.
How could we create new interest, and attract new people, into the Huber world? At the time, Barry was pursuing a writing course, after retiring from full time employment in industry. When it came to the section of the course on publishing, he realised that the emerging technology of ‘print-on-demand’ could be used to create an introductory book without enormous upfront expense.
We soon sketched out an outline for the book, with a set of chapter headings, and enrolled Richard Llewellyn to help and write two of the chapters. Annabel Burton was helping to run the school administration at the time, and she also got involved, giving an artistic dimension in the form of an original artwork cover and a set of amusing cartoons spread through the text. We also consulted with psychotherapist Will Parfitt, who had already successfully published his own books using print-on-demand.
The result of lots of work by Joyce, Richard, Annabel and Barry as editor eventually emerged in 2004 as the first edition of The Cosmic Egg Timer: An Introduction to the Huber Method. We established the publisher HopeWell as the vehicle for publishing this print-on-demand title via the pioneering company LightningSource, part of the Ingram group. The somewhat whimsical title aimed to highlight the connections with astrology (Cosmic), psychosynthesis (Assagioli’s Egg), and timing in the horoscope (Timer).
Over the years since then, this has proved to be a popular book, mostly used by those new to astrological psychology to find out more about it. For the HopeWell publisher, its sales have been surpassed only by the Hubers’ most popular book Aspect Pattern Astrology.
In 2011 we produced a revised and updated edition of The Cosmic Egg Timer, with a simplified subtitle, and omitting the artwork that had seemed such a good idea the first time around. This was then further published as a Kindle ebook, taking advantage of another modern technology, which also allowed for the publication of a colour version: The Cosmic Egg Timer in Colour.
By 2018 technology had again moved on, so that it was possible to produce a third paper edition at a reasonable price, with the illustrations in full colour – giving a correct impression of the Huber birth chart. A more striking image was chosen for the front cover. The Kindle version was correspondingly updated.
The Cosmic Egg Timer remains the best introduction to the Hubers’ astrological psychology, twenty years on from its first publication. Perhaps it will eventually be superseded when a new wave of human understanding and technology leads to introduction of astrological psychology to more modern generations…
This is one of a series of posts, telling the story of the creation of the English Language books about Huber Astrology. Previous posts in the series:
Astrological Psychology 
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