Miscellany of strange, curious and magic books 1

This is a translation of a post originally published in 2014.

This post is a list of references and ideas with enough developement to look like a blog post. Yes, I could keep it to myself, but if I have to explain it to you, when I reread it some years later, I will remember what obscure piece of pop culture was I talking about more easily than if I was to read "dragon book" in a forgotten notebook. Maybe it will even be useful to you. If so, you are welcome.

I am here today to talk about books and magic documents or special in general. It will come in handy if I ever make something like Bookhounds of Vornheim.

To categorize them somehow, we can start with books that have human, animal or living features. Bird-like fllying books are a classic, especially in the Unseen University's library at Ankh Morpork, where there is usually so much magic that books have to be bound with chains to keep them from attacking the students.

Or that Harry Potter book that went around biting people. I don't know who ever thought that was a good idea.

Or that book from Hocus Pocus. I don't know if the movie about witches and Halloween rings a bell, but their spellbook that they got straight from the Devil was fucking metal. Take a look:

On the other hand there are books that, although they don't look alive, they do seem intelligent like the Book of Shadows in Charmed, that knew how to avoid the minions of evil. When they got close, the book backed a safety distance like a magnet of the same polarity. And probably cornering it wouldn't be such a great idea. Maybe it was a simple security measure, but I wouldn't be surprised if booms as old as that one (that had literally grown after each generation of witches) had developed some degree of sentience.

There are alsl other books that may be difficult to consult or apprehend. We can find the classic book protected by a mechanism that makes it self-destrly if opened incorrectly (tip: vinegar disolves parchment). But there are many other nasty things you can do if your book has something as simple as a lock, like poisonous needles and the like. Or you can take more drastic measures like makin the book burst in flames if you access it wrong, which can of course be weaponized.

About hard to conserve books (as if it wasn't hard enough already), I remember especialmy those mentioned by Pratchett sometimes, with erotic spells so powerfuk that they must be kept in a cold basement and submerged in water to prevent them from setting fire to themselves.

And once opened books can not be easy to read either, of course. There can be mundane reasons like them being written in a different language,with some kind of invisible ink, through symbols and pictures like alchemy manuals, in code... Have you heard about the Voynich anuscript?

It is probably a fake, but there are people who think that someday, when we will be able to decode it with ternary computer, we will solve physics or something. I don't know, I am just a humble philologist.

Speaking of hard to read books. A huge part of the inspiration for this post has been a manga that belongs to the printed works of Touhou Project and is called Forbidden Scrollery. (Spoilers) The story is focused on Kosuzu, the daughter of a family of librarians who collects youma books, magical tomes written by monsters or that contain monsters or related creatures. They are also impossible to read to humans. The girl, however, haa the ability to read them and wants to increase her collection, which of course only brings trouble. Some of the most notable things are the kanji edition if the Necronomicon (not in Japanese, but an unknown language) or a fieldguide of hell's flora written in old Tengu language.

And now that we bring the topic of youma books, one of their characteristics is that they usually have monsters lr spirits traped inside. The one that is featured the most is a scroll that contaibs a version of the Hyakki Yagyou (the parade of one hundred demons), which actually summons demons when read, thatcs why they only do so once a month under a full moon. At a certain point an evil dragon uses it to return to it's original form. (End of spoilers).

Of course there can also be books possessed by ghosts and demons. Or books whose content is so powerfuk that it is alive itself. Pratchett gives use another example of this (this man really likes books) with the spellbook that held the [eight spells of creation. They were so powerful that they had a mind of their own and could in fact jump from the book to someone's mind.

Because the mind can also be a book. People can learn a book by heart (do a Fahrenheit 451) or more, and for a lot of time this was the only way to conserve works. Someone with photographic memory can memorize thousands, like Index, a girl that memorized the 10,300 spellbooks of the Index Librorum Prohibitorum.

On the other hand, the format of the book can also be important. Even just if it is a manuscript or a printed book can make a huge difference. Manuscripts are unique pieces on its own an can easily inclue things that would not be available in other versions of the same texts like addenda or different pictures. And it comes without saying that the people who copied it were especially inclined to leave notes on the margins (usually about how frigging hard is copying whole books by hand). Books copied by a special person can be magical just by virtue of that. On the other hand, magical or cursed printing machines are an interesting concept.

Source.

But there are many other formats like scrolls, inscriptions on bone or wood (like runes, ogam or other type of chamanic writing) or in stones or walls, cuneiform tablets or tattoos or skin mutilations.

Speaking of what, writing can also spontaneously appear on living beings, like the inside of fruits or petals of a flower. One of my favorites approach to this is the one of Zak Smith: Snakes Are Books, where he tells us about how in his campaigns the skin of snakes can be deciphered and read as if it was a book, and it also applies to serpetine monsters like medusae or dragons.

Speaking of dragons, I already spoke about how dragons would probably make their books modifying the terrain on a large scale. That wasn't a bad idea either.

And a lost thougt about format: books are cool, but there can be other things. Maps are a classic, of course. There is also private correspondence (although of course there are epistolary books) that can be a valuable source of information. Or personal journals, of which I also have very intersting links. On this one, mr. Rients relates how his players stole the personal journal of a salacious [vampiress and made charts of money selling copies (among other things). On this one RPG Pundit explains that the hard thing for a contemporary magician wouldn't be finding secrets, but rather understanding them. And especially on this one, he speaks of the importance of work journals for a magician and how useful would it be to get your hands on one from a rival magician to learn about their secrets and discoveries.

And of course there are stage plays. I guess you already know about The King in Yellow, the fictional play that induces madness and desperation to anyone who sees it. Or the (spoiler) shadow Noh from Forbidden Scrollery, a representation that slowly steals the feelings of anyone that sees it, in theory (end of spoiler). A bookhound worth their salt should keep an eye on the stages.

And now that we are speaking of theater, here goes an anecdote about piracy. On the 15th and 16th centuries, stage plays were tremendously popular, but they were rarely sold as printed books. At the theaters there would usually be a guy that, instead of being screaming with the resta of the public, was listening attentively the dialog and commiting them to memory so he could later sell them to a pirate printer, recited by memory. This was one the main reasons that made Lope de Vega, for example, finally accept that he should print his stage plays.

Back to magical books, there are two types that are especially interesting. One hand ther are books that change themselves, usually to get up to date. For example the books of life that Death (from the Discworl) keeps in his house, that are constantly writing every moment of the life of every person in the world. It is possible to read them to know what they are doing, but not many mortals have reached the house of Death. Another good example is the marauders map of Harry Potters, a sort of magical radar (that can also transform into a perfectly normal piece of paper, which is nice).

Or a certain artifact from Road of Knives, a... webcomic? sadly now defunct where there was a sentient magical book that could communicate through what appeared on its pages and reflect on them the new things it learned.

Additional Entries Under Subheading “Toad, Trespassing”

It was also able to move and defend itself...

On the other hand we have books able to change reality based on what is written on them, like the Death Note or the fictional encyclopedy of Tlön, in one of Borges tales, that was actually (spoiler) creating a new world called Tlön that was steadily joining ours.(spoiler)

And speaking of Borges, this man DID really like books and it some of their tales about this are worth mentioning. Like The Book of Sand that tells the story of an infinite book, without first or last page, so, of course, it is impossible to find the same page twice. O The Garden of Forking Paths, a tale about a novel of the smae title, a labyrinth book where the author tried to write all the possibilities of the story of a character. Or The Library of Babel, that is the description of a strange library where one can find all of the books that can be made with a certain combination of characters. Among others.

We're close to the end, but there are still other three topics I would like to address. For example harmful books. The most famous are those that turn one crazy as their content only leads to madness like the Necronomicon or De Vermis Mysteriis. The Lovecraft circle loved this kind of things. Another possibility that I like a lot is the one offered by Arnold Kempf: The madness of Avool, that is as pamphlet that leads to depression an suicide, not only to anyone who reads it, but anyone that hears enough about it. Although, well, of course the reasons to fear a book can be a lot more mundane like poisoned pages that are used as a weapon, like in The Name of the Rose.

And it is also intersting discussing books that come in groups or cathegories, like the volumes of an encyclopedia. Or those that make pairs of opposites like the books of life and death like in the remake of The Mummy. By the way, books inscribed on metal like gold or deal are fucking...... metal.

There are also books whose objective is finding other books, like catalogs, bibliographic references, states of the art or, a famous example we have already mentioned, the Index Librorum Prohibitorum. Thos books can be valuable as a key that may lead to others.

The trope of a book or a map divided in parts that must be found is still cool. And I don't say that because I saw Cutthroat Island last night, no sir.

Lastly, now that we are speaking about collections of books, the ones presented by Zak Smith on his post about Demogorgon, king of demons, are really cool. There the spells dedicated to Demogorgon are hir hymns, the songs created by bands named after him.

Finally, a last thought. Mundane problems that affect mnundane books could be worse on magical books, with fatal errata or non euclidean binding mistakes. An interesting example is the magical worm of Forbidden Scrollery that eats words leaving the paper intact and that can only be removed by magical smoke.

When I remember things that I have forgotten, I will probably come back to make a note of them. Or maybe I will make another post, who knows? Thanks for reading. Valmar Cerenor!

Translator note: the original post continued with edits that added more stuff. I will compile them in a different post as a part 1.5 of this series. Coming soon!

Part 1.5