Miscellany of strange, curious and magic books - 2

This is a translation of a post originally published in 2016. More posts in English here.

I threatened with coming back and by God I'm gonna do it!

An interesting thing about medieval and modern poetry are the romanceros. Poems circulated around, be it in oral form or in loose pages, but a lot of people compiled the ones they liked in a book. Sometimes all of those got compiled in a single anthology. Does this remind you of something?

In D&D that would be a great way to see how spells are transmited. Maybe the wizard learns it or they find it in a loose page (what would a scroll) and they copy it into their book. And printed spellbooks can come out in the same way.

But this whole system has a big problem: there can be many mistakes if a spell is copied and copied again so many times. And at some point it can develop a great flaw that no one noticed. I'd like to see more wizards thst try to get as many versions of the same spell as they can to compare them until they find the most correct version before they try to cast it risking a face explosion. Tip: if it is a compilation of spells just from one author, however got them will likely be more careful than if they were compiling spells at random. There will also be experts that may be consulted.

As they exist in real life. Mostly that's how philology was born--to get the most perfect version of the homeric works, and afterwards, the most perfect version of the Bible to interpret it. Later it would cover other topics, of course, but let's think about a fantasy setting--a scholar would probably pay good money for a version of a sacred text he didn't know about to complete his map of how it's been transmited and copied.

Speaking of the transmission of sacred text. Have you heard about the Septuagint or the Bible of the Seventy? To translate the Tanakh into greek, seventy rabbis got together in a Insland off the coast of Alexandria to do it in the most accurate way possible, so they would do justice to the word of God. Sabotaging a similar event or trying to steal the translation before it arrived or stopping others from doing so can be a great way to introduce and adventure.

About translations and sacred languages I could talk a lot about our friend Alfonso X of Castile. One of the main reasons his famous translators school (which can be ground for a lot adventures by itself) translated texts into Castilian and not into more prestigious languages of the time like Latin, Arabic or Hebrew was because all of these were lithurgical tongues of a religion and he wanted to avoid it.

The court of a wise king is a great opportunity for enterprising bookhounds, as they can basicaly sell almost any books that comes from antiquity: mathematics, science, literature... And also the king himself produces his own books. Alfonso X invented the d8 and he uses it in some of the games from his... Book of games.

A wise king also gives his capitol and atmosphere of city of culture like Bohemia under Rudolf II or London under Elizabeth I with John Dee. In those time and places it would be dirt easy to buy and sell books on alchemy, kabbalah and esoteric matters... Most of them fake.

And, related to this, books with secret codes. We have already talked about the Voynich manuscript, but there are other things, although there are generally very exaggerated, like saying that Plato's books have a secret code based on the harmony of the twelve musical notes. Hidding something in a secret code is not as reliable as hidding an esoteric knowledge through symbols, like alchemy books that used emblems and symbolic carvings. Also, this kind of initiatic books have another funny trait and it is that everything at the beginning is boring fluff to discourage the curious and screen those that are really commited to reaching the knowledge.

Speaking of which, have you heard about the Fama Fraternitatis from the Rosicrucians? It was a sort of manifesto of the order that appeared in the 17th century making a call to the intellectuals of Europe. It was probably a joke made by some funny university students, but people took it seriously and it produced an explosion of similar texts across the continent. Suddenly, everyone seemed to be Rosicrucian.

But going back to the topic of secret codes, I want to tell you an interesting anecdote that could take place in games with a more recent setting. Two investigators were detained by the Spanish police while they were obtaining data for an ethnolinguistic atlas of the Iberian Peninsula, as the Spanish civil war was not so long ago and authorities were convinced that they were soviet spies and their phonetic symbols were actually the cypher they were using to gather data.

Some more details... Someone brought to my atenttion the blog of an illustrator that makes great Cthulhian illos as if they were pages from a horrible tome, take a look, it is House of the necromancer.

On the other hand, I already talked about living books or with living parts back in the day, but I have found something new reading The Invisibles. What if you found the head of a dead prophet that was still saying prophecy?

Books of prophecy like Nostradamus' are interesting and could have a good market. Tell the Sybil about it:

Centuries ago, concurrent with the 50th Olympiad, not long before the expulsion of Rome's kings, an old woman "who was not a native of the country" (Dionysius) arrived incognita in Rome. She offered nine books of prophecies to King Tarquin; and as the king declined to purchase them, owing to the exorbitant price she demanded, she burned three and offered the remaining six to Tarquin at the same stiff price, which he again refused, whereupon she burned three more and repeated her offer. Tarquin then relented and purchased the last three at the full original price, whereupon she "disappeared from among men" (Dionysius).

Or it could also be very interesting to get the records of an oracle with all the prophecies said by the pythoness crossed with the people that recieved them, so you could take advantage of them.

There is also a thing about books really fucking big:

Aren't they great? I haven't seen one THAT fucking big, but I've gotten my hands on an illustrated edition of Dante's Divine Comedy (with the pictures of Delacroix), Spanish in one page and Italian in the other, with big letters. It looked ready to eat smaller books it had to share the shelf with. There goes a picture I took:

Another interesting thing about the transmission of texts and their wisdom are posthumous books like Saussure's Course in General Linguistics or Da Vinci's A Treatise on Painting, that were compilated and published by their students after their deaths.

And I don't want to end without telling you about the "pliegos de ciego" (blind man leaves), that were pretty much proto-newspapers. Blind men wandered around telling macabre stories in verse so people could hear them and give them some coins and, usually, he carried printed copies to sell. Has anyone said that an adventure about tracking a certain blind man to get their story for a rich colectionist is a good idea? Because they ar right.

Thanks for reading. Valmar Cerenor!

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