"Black Books", in the style of
Mr. Halton. For more titles to add to your library, see
here and
here.
Dawn of Civilization, Egypt, and Chaldea
An early 20th-century worth of psychohistory and ethnography by notorious North American White Raven Society member Sefton Milburn on the topic of the origin of the three sophont species native to Earth; Human, Kemetic and the now-orbital Bit-Yakin. Interaction between the first two species created the Black and White races of Milburn's taxonomy. He has no explanation for Asia and the Americas, besides suggesting the Bit-Yakin may have constructed and peopled them.
Pences de meon Pedre
The autobiography of Brame Cagot, an 11th-century Norman sorcerer and serial killer. The 20th-century scholar who translated this English edition chose, unlike his Victorian predecessors, to include the stream-of-consciousness narratives of incest, patricide, autocoprophilia, and the murder and ritual crassifaction (filling with molten gold) of young women in Rouen, mostly prostitutes. Cagot claims the reason his rituals failed was that the young women he murdered were not virgins. Famously, Brame was executed by Norman authorities on Christmas morning in 1035 by forced consumption of molten gold. His last words were a promise to return in a state of immortality; this he failed to do.
De Attarum Mysteriis
An etiquette book by an unknown author, printed in France shortly before the Revolution for the education of young scions of occulted noble families. The text consists of long descriptions of various classes of Hellish, Outside and Inverted entities, their manner of greeting, their manner of dining, their preferred offerings, and their (sometimes very complicated) systems of names, reputations and droit de seigneur.
Gods of Dead Ivy
A novel by American author Melissa Boudreaux published in 1994. The opening sentence reads, "the sun-silvered white door sat in a sun-silvered white wall, which time and weather and unforgiving day had worn and split and slowly covered with crackling leaves and vines like a creeping brown pelt". Every subsequent word not present in the title, publishing boilerplate or first sentence is either a non-English phantomnation or completely unrecognizable (e.g. "bzlkkro", "paaniymet", "ahharrattattaddadd". Though several Melissa Boudreauxes exist in the United States, according to their own testimony none have ever published a book.
Die Welt der Spinne
A late 19th-century genealogy of the influential but largely unrecognized Spinne family of Boston. The book details their expulsion from the NRW region of Germany, their arrival in the New World, and the murderous rituals they performed to propitiate many-legged mechanical gods who blessed them with success in the oil and rail industries. The author, Ariel Badge, appears to have been a member of a cadet branch of the Spinne family, one which was expected to offer sacrifices on a generation-to-generation timescale.
El Mitos
A 16th-century bestiary and travelog written by the Spaniard "Erodotos de Peres Mentirosa" the pen name of an unknown author, possibly Cervantes or (as the book claims) one of his associates. It contains reports and eyewitness accounts of cryptozoological beings from Mediterranean Europe, the Near East and Jerusalem. Erodotos explains how a hidalgo with limited equipment and resources might hunt or banish vampires, ghuls, genii, ogres, "spirits of air" and "mandrake-mouthed tigers", among many others.
Dlinyy Yubi
A Meiji-restoration era gospel on the teachings of "The Man With Your Face", a Hokkaido stylite mystic, and the practices of the "Long Finger Society", his worshipers and successors. The surreal dogma of the Man With Your Face is usually considered to only appeal to the most dedicated of scholars; to own a copy of the book is itself the prize, as agents of the Long Fingers use the most extreme acts of violence to recover copies of the book and destroy those who have read it outside the context of their Society.
The Search For Meaning, Volume IX
One volume of the magnum opus of English art restorer and famous art forger Tom Keating. Over the course of his art career, Keating (a socialist) wrote the estimated 2,000,000 words of
The Search for Meaning by hand in one-hundred-eighteen large composition books. He never contacted publishers, so this work (which is said to adequately explain Man's purpose in the universe) exists only as scattered manuscripts and a few handmade copies.
Hard Travel to Desecrated Places
The personal diary of an 18th-century Swedish nobleman named Magnus de la Gardie. It recounts his "black pilgrimage" — a journey taken by members of some occult brotherhoods to the accursed Galilean city of Chorazin. Hand-drawn maps in the margins indicate that Count Magnus ultimately reached a subterranean portion of the city, where he presumably remained for the six years before his return home.
Mai Doon Izahn
A portfolio traceable to early renaissance Florence at the most recent. Every second sheet of this unusual and anonymous work unfolds to double-size, and thus the book contains twenty-four hand-painted triptychs in a fantastical style reminiscent of Bosch. While some themes — war and devastation, poverty, religious awakening — and some locations — Rome, Istanbul and Kristiania — are recognizable, the majority are incomprehensible, and many panels depict something other than typical three-dimensional space. The twenty-first triptych depicts, in sparse shades of dark grey, a broad river, with a lone boatmen looking over his shoulder at the viewer. The remaining three triptychs are entirely black.
