Dangerous Books

A N.E.W.T.-level Potions textbook. The printed text is unremarkable. The previous owner's handwriting in the margins is the entire plot of the sixth novel.

A Hyperborean grimoire that has come down, Smith says, through a series of manifold translations from a prehistoric original written in a lost language — the Necronomicon's older cousin, from the other end of the correspondence.

A cloth-bound octavo bought from a Bible seller in Buenos Aires. It has infinite pages, none of which can ever be found twice.

An unpublished monograph, or a hypothesis that refuses to become one: that Ross's Nobel was steered by a secret Calcutta practice whose first method is not to write anything down.

A Latin grimoire written in prison by a Flemish sorcerer who claimed to have survived the Ninth Crusade, and printed in Cologne the year after they burned him.

A Swedish theologian's masterpiece, in which Judas is not the betrayer of God but God — the Word made flesh as the worst of men.

Not a book: a palace. Every dream in the empire is to be written down, sent in, sorted, and read for the one that might topple the state.

A poem Ivan made up and memorised, never wrote: Christ returns to Seville at the height of the Inquisition, is arrested, and listens in silence while a cardinal explains that the Church has corrected His work.

A banned novel, inside a novel about a world the Axis won, in which the Allies won instead — though not the way they won in ours.

An unfinished epic by a foul-mouthed, centuries-old poet, about the passing of the self-styled Titans called humans — and, he comes to believe, a poem that summons the thing that is killing them.

A film so entertaining that the people who watch it stop doing anything else, including living. Its title is the novel's. Its other name is simply the Entertainment.

A play in two acts. The first is harmless, even banal. The second, once read, is not something a mind comes back from.

Thirteen diary entries by a man who sees cannibalism in every page of the Confucian tradition, framed as a recovered manuscript by a friend who reports that the author is now a candidate for an official post.

A textbook that has to be restrained with a belt, attacks anyone who opens it, and can only be calmed by stroking the spine. Flourish and Blotts keeps the stock in a cage.

A twee picture book about a rabbit in trousers, found by a colony of newly intelligent rats, who take it for a description of how life could be.

A play about a duke poisoned through the ear in a garden, staged at Elsinore so that a king will flinch — Hamlet's name for it, when he wants a lighter one, is The Mousetrap.

A blind man's scholarly account of a film in which a house is larger on the inside than the outside — a film for which no other evidence survives.

The most famous book that does not exist. A grimoire of pre-human history and summoning rites, surviving in a handful of guarded copies, quoted just often enough to convince generations of readers it was real.

A directory of the gods and demons of the Discworld, giving their names, addresses and summoning rites. Its author preferred to be known as Achmed the I Just Get These Headaches.

A book that changes the lives of the people who finish it, quoted nowhere, hunted by a father who would rather murder readers than let the new life spread. Pamuk's novel has the same name and will not show you a page.

A Venetian folio of 1666, illustrated with nine woodcuts, said to be a working copy of a book Lucifer wrote. Three copies survive. They do not quite agree.

The spellbook the Creator left behind after making the Discworld, containing the eight Great Spells. It is chained in the cellars of Unseen University, and it has opinions.

A world-conspiracy, generated for a joke from occult manuscripts and a computer named Abulafia, which occultists then treat as a document and try to extract the secret from — hanging one of its authors from a pendulum when he will not hand it over.

Lovecraft's first invented book, older than the species that later tries to read it — fragments from a library-city that was not built by men.

The genuinely lost second book of Aristotle's Poetics, dealing with comedy — reconstructed by Eco, hidden in a Benedictine library, and defended by a murderer who poisoned its pages.

The book that explains how to make a Horcrux, removed from the Hogwarts library by Dumbledore and kept in his office. Hermione steals it on the way out of the castle.

The holy book of Omnia, assembled from the words of seven prophets, and enforced by an Inquisition. The god it describes has not been consulted about any of it.

A forgotten novel, perhaps the last copy, chosen by a bookseller's son in a secret library — while a man who has taken the name of the Devil from its pages burns every other one.

A book of dragon-summoning stolen from the Unseen University Library by a secret society, on the theory that a dragon would make an excellent political instrument.

A pirate comic in a world that has no use for superhero comics, about a marooned sailor who commits horrors to save his home and arrives too late to be anything but the horror.

A heavy black volume, amateurishly bound, with no name on the cover. Inside it explains how the world of Oceania actually works, in the voice of the man the Party has appointed as its enemy.

A German study of surviving secret cults, printed in Düsseldorf in 1839. Its author was strangled six months later in a locked room, and the manuscript of his second book was torn to shreds.

An oeuvre whose author says there is a single pattern running through it, visible once you have been told to look, and invisible to every reviewer who has ever praised him.