The Necronomicon: The True Story of a Book That Doesn't Exist

The Harvard Library website maintains a standing answer to a question its patrons keep asking: Does Harvard have a copy of the Necronomicon?Of all the books that do not exist, this one is the most documented. Its inventor is known. H.P. Lovecraft told seven different correspondents in writing, between 1924 and 1937, that he had made it up. The dates and recipients of the letters can be cited. The hoax editions that came after his death have named publishers, named authors, named confessions in print. And none of it has stopped the invented book from acquiring catalog records, library queries, courtroom evidence, mass-market sales, and a continuous commercial life now in its fifth decade.The Necronomicon is the documentary biography of the book itself — from Lovecraft's deadpan 1927 pseudo-bibliography and the circle of friends who built mutually-corroborating references for it; through the small-press lark of 1973 and the British cipher conspiracy of 1978; through the Brooklyn occult-bookstore scene that produced the mass-market paperback that has now sold for forty-six years; through the police-training seminars that named the book in their evidentiary taxonomies; through the libraries that cataloged it as a working grimoire because their patrons asked for it that way.Working strictly from the released record — Lovecraft's published letters, the hoaxers' own confessions, the publishing history of every edition, the court files, the cataloging decisions — Gordon Mears reads the documents and names the mechanism: verisimilitude engineering, the circle, commerce, practice, and the institutional contact that an invented book accumulates once it has been printed. Believers are quoted fairly from their own publications. The identity of "Simon" is handled as labeled inference, with the evidence shown.The Necronomicon is the case where the receipts survive in full. It is the control specimen for every older grimoire whose manufacture has been lost to the record.For readers of Owen Davies's Grimoires, John Higgs's documentary cultural history, and the long tradition of documentary writing about books, forgeries, and the people who believe them. Read more