"Sponging off Socrates."  From Lighted Pathway, 1971. 

From The Outline of Everything by Hector B. Toogood, 1923.

"Plato's idea of love was what is technically known in literature as hot stuff."  From The Outline of Everything by Hector B. Toogood, 1923.  

From Archaiologik Ephmeris, 1862.

From Virginia Illustrated by David Hunter Strother, 1857.

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.