Reading California
Art, Image, and Identity,
1900-2000
Los Angeles County
Museum of Art
University of California Press.

America's Communal Utopias
Donald E. Pitzer
The University of North Carolina Press.

Krotona Series formed source reference for the film documentary "Under the Hollywood Sign" by Hope Anderson.

Joseph E. Ross, a native Californian, born in Culver City in 1943. Graduated in 1981 from the Human Relations Center in Goleta California, now called Joseph Campbell University, located in Carpenteria, California to become an advisor in the field of marriage and family counseling.

Due to his is interest in Theosophy he came to the Krotona Institute of Theosophy in Ojai, California where he resided around 1971. Widening his interest, he began collecting letters, articles and photograph of theosophical leaders, to document its history. During the Fall and Winter Terms 1978-79, was a guest lecturer at the Krotona Institute.

In 1980-89, Ross began writing articles for theosophical journals, and traveled several months a year with renowned Indian dancer, Srimati Rukmini Devi, as her secretary, visiting educational centers around the world. In 1989, he founded El Montecito Oaks Press, Inc., to publish his first book, Krotona of Old Hollywood, Volume I, 1866-1913. (See a full bibliography with publication information to the right.)

He currently resides in Taormina, California, where he calls himself the "Book Doctor." Spending a great deal of his time painstakingly caring for and mending rare and new books that have frayed stitching, crumbling pages, spines coming unglued and cracked covers. Now retired, he maintains the Ross Collection, and is working on future titles connected to the Krotona Institute and the Adyar Theosophical Society.

Ross, in the summer of 2000, authored a series of columns appearing in the Ojai Valley News, under the column titled "A View from Krotona."

Krotona Volume VII, 1941-1949
Krotona Volume VIII, 1950-1959