This edition has been fully restored with modern typesetting, custom cover design. This witty, skeptical survey turns palmistry into both history and satire, tracing its roots from ancient cultures through Greece, India, China, and the Middle Ages to the later writers who shaped its modern form. The author explains how hand-reading promised access to character and destiny, then questions the very idea that the hand can reliably reveal either. Palmistry emerges as one more human system for craving certainty about the future, alongside religion, fortune-telling, and even science when it ventures into prediction. From there, the book catalogs the palmists' elaborate classifications: the elementary, conic, square, knotty, psychic, and mixed hands; the meanings of finger length, shape, bends, and spacing; the planetary associations of each digit; the phalanges, thumb, nails, mounts, lines, wrinkles, hardness, softness, hairiness, and skin color. Every feature is made to signify labor, artistry, intellect, ambition, caution, vanity, morality, success, cowardice, sexuality, domesticity, or even criminality. With comic precision, the text exposes how endlessly adaptable and fundamentally arbitrary these readings are, mocking a pseudo-science that can always invent an interpretation.

À propos de l'auteur

Markun, Leo

Leo Markun was a popular early-20th-century writer and lecturer whose career reflected a fascination with practical self-help, occult traditions, and the everyday mysteries people hoped to decode through them. Best known for his accessible writing on palmistry and related subjects, he helped bring esoteric ideas out of the margins and into the hands of ordinary readers, translating a once-specialized practice into clear, engaging prose. His work sits at the crossroads of curiosity, psychology, and popular culture, and it reveals a lasting human desire to understand character, destiny, and the hidden patterns of a life. Markun’s writing remains interesting today not only as a window into the beliefs of his era, but also because it speaks to a continuing appetite for meaning, self-knowledge, and interpretive systems that promise insight into personality. In that sense, his legacy is less about prediction than about the enduring appeal of reading signs and stories in ourselves and others. Readers who enjoy vintage self-help, occult history, personality traditions, or the cultural history of popular belief will likely find Leo Markun especially rewarding.