This book is subtitled “a down-to-earth guide to the runes”. Yet is claims “academic facts in plain English”, “source material with translations”, “how esoteric knowledge can be found in the old sources” and “common myths and misconceptions found in popular rune books”. Indeed, the first part of the book really is a common-sense book about the runes, not unlike the Dutch Runenlore (no connection to Stephen Flowers Runelore which I reviewed before. Rune poems in the original language and in translation, some information about what we know about the history of the runes. I had preferred if the rune poems where just printed entirely instead of one verse of each each time. What I didn’t have yet is the Anglo-Saxon rune-like alphabet which is a nice novelty. Somewhere halfway the writer starts to give lengthy information about the Rune Gild, neo-satanic / Sethian / left hand path / etc. systems so I thought I had again ran into a Rune Gild member. Plowright says to be an ex-member and he is nicely (but balanced) critical about the Rune Gild. The same goes for the other esoteric rune systems that he writes about, so in the course of the book you get nice information about nowadays (esoteric) rune systems (not shying for example the Armanan system). The writer never ‘takes sides’ which is of course nice for the searching reader, but at the end I had the idea that I have only been given facts without having been forced to consider where I stand. Maybe I find it just nice to agree or disagree with a writer, in this case there is no need to. In general The Rune Primer is an objective book about runes and modern rune systems, available in a variety of versions, paperback, pocket, Ebook, etc. See here.