Renowned magic headliner Jeff McBride tweets:

Is Conley's HEXOPEDIA considered the "NEW magic?" or is "HEX-O" the OLD magic renewing itself? Perhaps"HEX_O" is the Phoenix of THIS generation?

Meanwhile, check out how we illustrated the chapter headings for McBride's book The Show Doctor, now in softcover.

From Just So Stories by Rudyard Kipling, 1902.

I'm nearing the point of obsession.  I can’t look away, and don’t want to.  Like Tarot cards, but with built-in illumination, and much more fun. Brilliant, says I! —Jeff Hawkins 

A few years ago, we collaborated on a deck of "wide-awake dreaming" cards for the celebrated mentalist Kenton Knepper.  Kenton occasionally demonstrated this deck at gatherings of the magical underground in Las Vegas, and that's how the cards got the street names of "Waking Dream Cards," "Metaphor Cards," "Subconscious Communication Cards," "Transformation Cards," and "K-Kards."  But their official name is "[Self-Intuiting] Polarity Cards."  The deck long-remained one of Kenton's best-kept secrets, but we can now reveal that they're finally available to anyone who wishes to experience a mind-blowing insight that they verifiably didn't have before.  Unlike Tarot cards or other well-known reading decks, Polarity Cards are wholly free of dogma and therefore allow for fresh, intuitive understandings that are neither influenced nor hindered by preconceptions.  Deeply rooted in coded principles from the Mystery traditions, the cards also work as powerful meditational tools, unlocking a greater sense of harmony and well-being.  Lots more information about the deck is at TheGameCrafter.

5x5 magic word squares are incredibly rare, with the Pompeiian Sator / Arepo / Tenet / Opera / Rotas being the best known by far.  (Futility Closet featured the Revel / Evere / Veoev / Ereve / Lever grid, which reads as a palindromic sentence though not as a magic square.)  But there are three other 5x5 word squares explained in The Young Wizard's Hexopedia, including this one: Balam / Avada / Labal / Adava / Malab.  Balam is a name for supernatural intuition, derived from the diviner called Balaam in the Torah.  Avada is an Estonian word that means "open."  Labal is the occult name for the revealer of all the mysteries of the Earth (described in The Lesser Key of Solomon).  Adava is a Marathi word for a winding road.  And Malab is a Somali word for honey, which is a code for "alchemical gold," which itself is a code for immortality.  Woven together into a grid, these words form a charm that conjures magic insight so as to reveal the mysterious pathway toward everlasting light.

An Indian Wizard by Arthur Lillie, 1887.

From Prof. Oddfellow's sketchbook:

These are pages purloined from The Young Wizard's Hexopedia.  (See the very strange history of this book here.)

Here's how to learn a new magic word from a wishing well, from The Young Wizard's Hexopedia.  (See the very strange history of this book here.)

Here's a random page from The Young Wizard's Hexopedia, our painstaking reconstruction of a tome that wasn't in the window display of a spooky old bookshop.  (See the very strange history of this book here.)

"He fetched a dummy figure of Viola, and tossed it into the knife-lined globe, addressing it: 'There, my fair Viola, I shall bind you, of course!'"  From Thrilling Life Stories for the Masses, 1892.

This wizard used his powers to conjure sixty lemon pies, from St. Nicholas magazine, 1921.  Jonathan notes: "And it looks like when you order a full five dozen, they come with a pieman!"   Also very much of interest: The Young Wizard's Hexopedia.

The lionized poet William Keckler scooped this page from The Young Wizard's Hexopedia on Flickr, where the spell has found a very appreciative following.

The story of how The Young Wizard's Hexopedia came to be is just about as unlikely as the book itself.  One November morning, a stranger wrote from out of the blue, asking for assistance with an extraordinary book of magic.  The stranger turned out to be the CEO of a publishing house specializing in the world's quirkiest subject matter, in search of a grimoire that didn't technically exist.  His own research had somehow determined that I was the one with the know-how to bring this lost book back from the depths.  It seems that he had seen a window display of an esoteric bookshop and had noticed that the lost book in question wasn't there.  The problem was that no surviving copies of the book are known to exist.  My task was to rediscover and recreate the entire document from quotations and implications in magical literature.  The stranger provided me with some crucial scraps, trusting that the whole work might be holographically contained within the parts.  Knowing the title and a rough idea of the table of contents, I set to work hunting through cryptic volumes in private libraries of magic (whose locations I'm not at liberty to reveal, though I can say that I visited Hollywood's Magic Castle).  Suffice it to say, I left no philosopher's stone unturned.  The process was very much like putting together a jigsaw puzzle in a dark room, with only a flickering candle for illumination.  To my own surprise, the lost book began taking shape almost immediately.  Restoring fragments into sentences and arranging them into paragraphs proved less challenging than one might suppose.  For example, you can surely divine what the last word of this sentence will [...].  Whenever a passage seemed to have something almost tangibly missing, like the absence of a vital book in an esoteric shop window, I knew to keep digging.  The moment it was clear that the entire Hexopedia was restored, I verified the accuracy of my work with three highly gifted wizards of words: a playwright in New Hampshire, a poet in Pennsylvania, and a teacher of magical arts in Nevada.  Then I sent the restoration to the stranger, who flabbergasted me by suggesting that the book should not come back into print at all but rather remain hidden in shadowy slumber until a more enlightened era.  (Apparently the trickster merely desired a copy for his personal use!)  Having worked so intimately with the text for so long, I felt convinced that the world was ready once again for the Hexopedia ... that it shouldn't rest only in the private library of one megalomaniacal* publisher.  And the rest, as the former, is history.  Here's a random page from The Young Wizard's Hexopedia.

*Note that "megalomaniacal" is an anagram of "ole magi almanac," so it all seems to be part of some mysterious tapestry, eh?

"Watch, and I will reveal the terrible power of Eblis that hath been imparted unto me!"  From Zoraida by William Le Queux, 1895.

"The witch Thurid cuts a charm on the log."  From The Book of Romance by Andrew Lang, 1902.

"Come in; I'm expecting ye," from God's Winepress by Arthur Jenkinson, 1896.