Now here's a thing. This is a story told to me a long time ago by a magician who is now dead, so I'm afraid I can't check the details. And when I say "magician", I mean "rabbits out of hats", not all that Harry Potter stuff. I don't know what the position is in other countries, but here in the UK, until very recently, there was a thing called the Magic Circle which had a total stranglehold on professional stage magicians. If they didn't give you a union card, your career was dead. And they'd permanently take it away for all sorts of reasons, including not being male. Which is now illegal (expelling people from things for being female, I mean - you're still allowed to be a man, otherwise 50% of us would be in no end of trouble!).
Anyway, the relevance of this story is that, because breaking any of the Magic Circle rules was until the last decade or so professional suicide, bribing a magician to do this was just about impossible. One of those rules concerned props. For the sake of convenience, these things were listed in catalogues which might end up in the hands of anybody. But to keep the secrets safe, these catalogues described the props only in cryptic terms which didn't make it clear what they were to to a non-magician. And of course, selling any of these props to a non-magician, or explaining precisely how they worked, got you expelled forever.
Well, one of these props was called The Necronomicon. I've never actually seen this thing, but I'm told that, because it has to look good on stage from quite a long way away, it's the most convincing-looking version of the book you'll ever encounter. Its actual content consists of pages from various medieval grimoires. And its "magic"? Well, it's a "forcing" prop. For those of you unfamiliar with the term, what that means is that if you try to open it at a random page, the page it in fact opens at is totally predictable.
The amusing bit is this. Various people discovered, in a muddled kind of way, that "real magicians" had a "secret" book called the Necronomicon which you absolutely couldn't buy from them, even for what appeared to be stupid amounts of money. Therefore, every so often, he'd get letters in green biro from people who cldnt spel 2 wel offering him surprising amounts of money, but a lot less than his entire career was worth, for a copy of this book which would clearly make them Masters Of The Universe! Presumably this still goes on. I just thought you'd like to know.
