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papers on the desk, as usual. Gradually, the familiarity of what I was doing began to take effect, calming me, returning me to a sense of safe, undramatic routine. I stood and went to a stack on my right, where I guessed that several of the volumes I needed would be located. They were all there, and I quickly became engrossed in the pursuit of the answers I sought.
    Back at the table, I buried myself in my work, leafing through book after book, scribbling notes, consulting my index cards. From time to time I would get up and go across to a stack for a book I needed, switching on a light and extinguishing it again; sometimes I would consult the catalogue. The pile of books on my desk grew quite high.
    The work went better than I had hoped, and I became wholly absorbed in it, shutting out all impressions beyond the pale circle of light that the lamp cast over the table-top and my papers. It must have been midnight or later when I went back to the shelves for the last time.
    As I bent to pick up a book from the bottom shelf of a stack I had not been to before, I noticed the edge of a small volume jutting out from behind the wooden back of the bookcase, at a spot where the carpenter had left a space. With difficulty, I succeeded in catching a firm enough grip on it to draw it out through the gap. It seemed old, older than the majority of volumes I had seen there before. Curious, I took it over to my table and sat down.
    The little book was bound in hard brown leather. It had no title on the spine or the front cover. In size, it was little more than ten by seven inches, and I guessed it held around two hundred pages. The binding suggested a date at least before 1700, possibly much older. Taking care not to bend the spine unduly – the general state of the volume suggested that it had not been opened for a very long time – I gently lifted the cover. Unlike all the other books I had seen in the library, this had no label to identify it as the property of the Fraternity.
    The flyleaf bore a faded inscription in brownish ink, written in an archaic and, to me, illegible hand. I turned it and came straight away to the title page. This read as follows:

    It astonished me to find a book printed as early as 1598 lying here gathering dust behind some shelves, unopened and unread. I had never come across the title in my reading, but that was hardly surprising. All the same, I knew at once that it was an early example of printed occult literature, possibly a treatise on astrology. This first impression was confirmed as soon as I opened the book and began to leaf through it.
    The left-hand pages carried text that I guessed to be Arabic, printed in large letters. Facing these were pages set in double columns, one in Latin, the other in English. The main text consisted of short verses, which I then took to be spells, interspersed with what appeared to be commentary or instructions. Of these, one in particular struck me at the time. I still have it by heart.
    Hee that shal come shal come quickly
And hee shal bring with him many
For that there are now with him many
And hee with them always untill hee come.
Call on him thus and bee not afraide:
Ya maloon, ya shaytoon, ya rabb al-mawt
Bismika, bismika, ya rabb al-mawt.
    Every five pages or so, a reproduction of a talismanic device – a circle or a star filled with geometrical shapes and more Arabic writing – was printed opposite a page of instructions on its use.
    I continued reading, fascinated by the curiosity of the language and the strange, oracular quality of the spells. The author, I learned from Ockley’s foreword, had been a Moroccan scholar, known to medieval Europe by the Latin name Avimetus (or Avimetus Africanus). His treatise was a little-known classic of ritual magic that had exercised a profound influence on authors such as Trithemius and Cornelius Agrippa and had been condemned by Johann Wier for its ‘diabolic incantations’ and its advocacy of ‘consort with all manner of