Given our substantial research into esoteric tomes, we're sometimes consulted for strange and unusual magical spells. An award-winning quarterly magazine of art and culture based in New York [name withheld for reasons of discretion] once asked us for a spell to cast over their printing press. Most recently, a winner of two Gertrude Stein Awards in Innovative American Poetry [name withheld in a nod to our lost age of privacy] asked us for no fewer than thirteen different spells:

1. A spell which finds and locates the source of (malicious) gossip and renders the "first tongue" of this gossip chain either serpent-like (i.e. forks the tongue) or like that of some other loathsome beast.
2. A spell which will allow a refrigerator to enchant the food in it, so that when you eat the food you see the food's history (such as the worker picking the grapes. This would be quite grisly when it came to lunch meat and we realized it had a "family life.")
3. A spell which will render water capable of transmitting its memories. When an enemy steps into a tub of "blissful" water, suddenly he or she is overcome with a thousand television stations of water memory, all the way back to the time of the dinosaurs.
4. A spell that turns pussy willows back into the cats they once were.
5. A spell which allows you to enter into a painting or use a painting, drawing, etc. as an avenue of escape.
6. A spell to send snow back upwards into the sky—a reverse snowstorm spell.
7. A spell whereby you can have birds carry a message to other birds to so on to other birds in order to reach someone far away.
8. A spell which makes someone the reverse of a money magnet, so money is always figuratively (and literally) flying away from him or her.
9. A spell to make someone fall in love with his or her own reflection. For example, a teenager cannot concentrate in class but must constantly seek a reflective surface to the point of madness. Good for a stuck up kid in school, beauty queen hex, etc.
10. A spell whereby planes flying overhead will drop valuable things into your yard or on your roof, like a form of tribute from airplane.
11. A spell to turn pancake batter into quicksand, so when the person eats the finished product, the pancake inside the person slowly causes the person to implode into himself/herself, vanishing throughout the day in a very geometrically weird way.
12. A spell on cookies to make them like online cookies; they drop without the eater's consent and glow, leading you to the person you are trailing and to whom you have given the bewitched cookie.
13. A spell to make tornados play music. Needles appears within and the tornado is turned into an old school record player even as it grinds away at a landscape.

Anyone wondering about the content of these spells will want to keep an eye out for our Young Wizard's Hexopedia.

Find more meaning in x's and o's with linguist Craig Conley's 'One Letter Words, a Dictionary'. Covering scarlet letters, medieval branding marks, bra sizes, blood types and more, this handy guide offers over 1000 definitions for those 26 letters and is on the shelves at the Little Library on Level 2.

How many words do you know that are either all consonants or all vowels? Craig Conley trawled the English language and found 4000 examples gathered together in Wye’s Dictionary of Improbable Words. From B-Z (for the consonant-only section, beginning with "b’chtsch”) and A,E,I,O,U and Y (for the vowel-only section, starting with "a i-eee ai-eeee”), there’s proof that sometimes our language doesn’t quite make sense, and that it’s possible to form words without some of our alphabet’s most important letters.

Did you know that the quick brown fox actually jumped over "the lazy mrpldrk"?  It's true; it's in Bewitched, and it made it into Webster's Dictionary of Improbable Words: All-Consonant and All-Vowel Words. 

From Prof. Oddfellow's sketchbook, for Catherine Welsh, who says "[Silence] has a way with words."

"Yex" isn't a word? Oh, yex it is!"  Two stills from Dear Ladies.