Pnakotic Manuscripts

The Necronomicon is the famous one. This is the older one, and the stranger, because it does not pretend to have been written by a person.

Lovecraft needed a book before he needed a mad Arab. In “Polaris” the Pnakotic Manuscripts are simply there, the way a real library is there when you are dreaming of a city under siege. Later he gave them a provenance — Yith, Pnakotus, Lomar — which is to say he did to them what he would do more noisily for Alhazred: he wrote a bibliography instead of a text. The difference is the author. Abdul Alhazred is a man with a biography you can almost believe. The Pnakotic scribes are a species that borrowed our bodies and went home.

That is why it belongs on this shelf next to Eibon rather than instead of him. Smith’s book is Hyperborean and lost. Lovecraft’s first book is pre-human and fragmentary on purpose. You cannot finish a thing that was never assembled for you.

A few daring mystics, the Antarctic story says, have hinted at a pre-Pleistocene origin. The sentence is doing the same work as a footnote in a real palaeography: it places the object outside the reach of the people who want it.

On the readability rating. Named in more stories than any invented book of his except the Necronomicon; quoted in “The Other Gods”; never given as a document you could transcribe. The fragments are the point. The complete work would be a different species of thing.