Licensing & Sources

1. The nature of the works

Every work we distribute is a historical text whose copyright has expired in the European Union, where we are based and from which we sell. These are not modern publications. They are original historical documents, classical treatises, and foundational texts spanning centuries of human thought, sourced from recognised public archives.

Under European Union copyright law, a literary work enters the public domain seventy years after the death of its author. Where a translator is involved, the translator must also satisfy this rule for the specific edition we ship. We verify both. Many of the works we distribute pre-date the modern concept of copyright entirely.

2. Your jurisdiction is your responsibility

Copyright law is not the same in every country. The United States applies a different rule (typically ninety-five years from first publication). Other jurisdictions apply life-plus-fifty, life-plus-eighty, life-plus-one-hundred, or rules of their own. A work that is freely distributable under European Union law may still be restricted under the law of your country.

By placing an order, you confirm that you are responsible for verifying that your purchase, your download, and your subsequent use comply with the laws of the jurisdiction in which you reside. We sell from Belgium under Belgian and EU law. We make no representation about the legality of any work in any other jurisdiction. The risk is yours, not ours.

3. What you are paying for

The texts themselves are, in principle, available to anyone willing to spend the time to find them. What we sell is not the texts. What we sell is the work of finding them, vetting them, organising them, and delivering them as coherent, themed collections you can actually use.

Each collection represents months of library research. We identify the canonical works in each tradition, check their provenance, reject the modern reprint editions whose translations remain under copyright, weed out the low-quality, the misattributed, and the off-brand, and assemble what remains into clean, readable bundles. You are paying for expertise, time, judgement, and curation. The underlying historical works themselves are not for sale and could not be — no one owns them.

Our curatorial selection, ordering, and presentation are protected by copyright as a compilation work and, where applicable, by the sui generis database right. The texts inside are free. The arrangement is not.

4. Sources

We draw from the recognised public archives that have, between them, preserved most of the world’s out-of-copyright literary heritage:

• Internet Archive (archive.org) — a non-profit digital library preserving millions of historical texts.
• Project Gutenberg (gutenberg.org) — the oldest digital library, offering more than seventy thousand verified out-of-copyright ebooks.
• HathiTrust Digital Library (hathitrust.org) — a partnership of academic institutions preserving the cultural record in digital form.
• Wikisource (wikisource.org) — a Wikimedia Foundation project providing free access to source texts.
• Sacred Texts Archive (sacred-texts.com) — a specialist archive of religious, spiritual, mystical, and esoteric literature.

We do not bypass access restrictions, controlled digital lending, or any other limit set by these archives. If a work is gated, we move on.

5. Verification — best effort, not warranty

Every candidate is checked against the EU life-plus-seventy rule and, where applicable, the US ninety-five-year rule. Translators are checked separately from authors. Editions from commercial reprint publishers — Penguin, Oxford World’s Classics, Cambridge, Hackett, Routledge, Llewellyn, Inner Traditions, and others — are excluded as a matter of policy because their translations and apparatus remain under active copyright even when the original work does not.

We do this with care and rigour. We do not, however, warrant that every single attribution, biographical detail, edition date, or translator identification in our catalogue is correct. If we have made a mistake, the notice-and-takedown procedure (Section 17 of our Terms & Conditions) applies.

6. Your licence as a purchaser

On purchase, we grant you a personal, non-exclusive, non-transferable, perpetual licence to download, store, read, print, annotate, and reference the collection for your own private, educational, scholarly, or research use.

You may not resell, sub-licence, or commercially redistribute the collection or any substantial part of it. You may not upload the archive to public file-sharing services, torrent trackers, mirror sites, or aggregator platforms. You may not re-package our curated arrangement as your own product. The underlying texts are free — what is not free is the package we sold you.

7. Editorial standards: what we will and will not sell

A serious historical library contains material that is uncomfortable. We accept that. We also accept that some material is not appropriate for unrestricted commercial distribution under Belgian law, regardless of its public-domain status.

Before any work enters our catalogue, we screen it against an internal content policy that excludes, in particular: (a) works whose distribution may constitute incitement to hatred, discrimination, or violence under Belgian law; (b) works that deny, minimise, justify or approve of recognised genocides under Belgian law; (c) any material capturing minors in a manner that would be unlawful under current Belgian standards, regardless of how it was characterised at the time of publication.

We do not always get this right. Reasonable people can disagree on edge cases, and the legal lines have moved over the last century. Where we are uncertain, we err on the side of exclusion. If you believe a work in our catalogue crosses one of these lines, write to info@holygrailbookshop.com and we will review it.

8. We do not endorse what is in the books

The works we distribute were written by their authors, in their eras, for their purposes. They reflect the views, beliefs, ideologies, prejudices, rituals, and recommendations of those authors and those eras. Many contain claims, instructions, or worldviews that are factually wrong, ethically objectionable, or considered dangerous by modern standards. Some are graphic. Some are religiously partisan. Some are esoteric instructions that would be unwise to attempt.

Holy Grail Bookshop does not endorse, advocate, recommend, or share any view, belief, ritual, instruction, ideology, theory, or claim contained in any book we distribute. The presence of a work in our catalogue is not an endorsement of its contents. We sell these works strictly as historical documents for educational, historical, scholarly, and research purposes.

Engagement with the contents of any book is your decision and your responsibility. Nothing in any book is medical, legal, financial, psychological, or professional advice. If you need professional advice, consult a qualified professional.

9. Historical context

A serious reader will encounter, in any honest historical library, material that is uncomfortable. Engage with it critically, and in its proper historical context, or do not engage with it at all.

10. Notice and takedown

If you are a copyright holder (or are authorised to act for one) and you believe a work in our catalogue infringes a right you hold, write to info@holygrailbookshop.com with the following: (a) identification of the work, (b) the URL on our site where it is offered, (c) evidence of your rights, and (d) a statement made in good faith that, to the best of your knowledge, the use is not authorised. We will investigate promptly and, where the claim is substantiated, remove the work and refund affected purchasers. We take this seriously and we will move quickly.

11. Governing law

This page, and the licensing it describes, are governed by the laws of Belgium. Any dispute arising from or in connection with our sales is subject to the jurisdiction described in our Terms & Conditions (Section 21).