From Red Herring, Feb. 1993.

From Space & Time, 1988.

From Coraddi, 1976.

From St. Nicholas, 1913.

From Tulane's 1933 yearbook.  See How to Hoodoo Hack a Yearbook.

Relics of the Anti-Saints ... a book so diabolical that it's known only in the world of Dark Shadows.  From episode 1118.

From St. Nicholas, 1913.

From Ya-Hoo, 1954.  See The Young Wizard's Hexopedia.

The magical mist surrounding these grimoires is not technically a special effect -- there was condensation on the camera lens.  Yes, these books are stacked in a shop window in the Wizarding World at Universal Studios, Orlando.  We can now reveal for the first time that it was this very window display that directly led to the rediscovery of The Young Wizard's Hexopedia.  One November morning, a stranger wrote from out of the blue, asking for assistance with an extraordinary book of magic.  The stranger was in search of a grimoire that didn't technically exist.  His own research had somehow determined that we possessed the know-how to bring this lost book back from the depths.  It seems that he had seen the esoteric window display at the Wizarding World 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.  Our task was to rediscover and recreate the entire document from quotations and implications in magical literature.  The stranger provided 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, we set to work hunting through cryptic volumes in private libraries of magic (whose locations we're not at liberty to reveal, though we can perhaps mention Hollywood's Magic Castle).  Suffice it to say, we 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 our 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 occult 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 megalomaniac.  And the rest, as the former, is history.

"He who seriously wishes to see the Devil has but to summon him with his whole heart, and he will come."  From The Strand, 1908.

"Spell-Bound," from Cassell's, 1888.

A gift pairing idea: 

Two Books that Read their Reader’s Mind

Two books on the market purport to provably read the minds of their readers: Clive Barker’s horror novel Mister B. Gone and Anthemion Buckram’s grimoire The Young Wizard’s Hexopedia.  You could tell the person who has everything that this book pairing gift suggested itself.