Some evidence that your local bibliomancers have been a little over-active of late.

NOTE: Okay, basically, I was trying to make a top 10 list, but I could only get out five before I went dry, so I went on over to RPG.net and asked for help. The people there were very helpful, and gave me some extremely cool and imaginative ideas. Therefore, books with odd numbers were written by yours truly (Mr. Sluagh), and books with even numbers were written by others who are credited below the write-up. Anyway, on with the weirdness…

1. Your First Novel, by Daren Samson — The first time someone opens this book, it appears as the book they’ve always wanted to write, exactly how they imagined it and perfect in every way. After it’s closed and opened again, however, it reverts to a guide to writing your first novel. Everyone seems to agree that (after being closed) Your First Novel is supremely badly written and unhelpful, although specific complaints differ wildly and are often mutually contradictory.

2. The Little Book of Calm — There are many little stocking filler books that are available at Christmas. They all cost about $3 and are filled with quotable quotes, cod philosophy and mawkish messages. It’s landscape format 4″x7″ and runs to 50 thickish pages. The print run for these books was enormous and they all look identical. This is one such book. The reason it is different is that it was used by John Hawks to plan his murders in 1983. He got to page 19 before he was finally apprehended by Santa Cruz Police getting off a Greyhound bus with the driver’s head in a holdall. The book was placed in a zip-lock bag but disappeared from the local PD evidence room before his trial and subsequent execution. Whatever anyone can say about John Hawks, he never denied the charges, showed any remorse and he went to the chair with a strange serene smile on his face.

This item is highly prized in the occult underground because it is rumoured to allow the possessor to get away with 18 murders, before they are inevitably found guilty of a 19th and executed.
—Submitted by GB Steve.

3. The Treatise — Go to the library computer and do a search for a book with your name as the title and the name of someone you know as the author. Usually, you’ll come up with a book in the reference section called “A Treatise on , by “. Then, go to the reference section and find the book. It has no Dewey decimal number, but is always extremely obvious to the person who searched for it as well as its supposed author, while other people always overlook it. The treatise itself is a detailed account of the author’s opinions on the subject of the book, written as if by him or her but always with impeccable grammar and vocabulary (although the actual quality of the writing varies). An individual can only find the treatise once, after which all searches for it yield no results and the book does not appear. Furthermore, any attempt to search for a treatise on someone other than you or a treatise by you is unsuccessful and permanently bans you from accessing the book. Being a reference book, the treatise can not be checked out and any attempt to steal it inexplicably fails.

4. The Real Guide to System Administration — That’s what the cover says, anyway. And it is a decent guide … for about the first two-thirds of the book.
The “tone” of the book is what puts it on this list. See, it starts out nice and cheerful, like someone who just started a new job–upbeat tone, ‘cheery’ examples, the occasional “Now we can accomplish something!”–you get the idea. The first hint of trouble is about 1/3 of the way through, with a sidebar “Oh, those wacky users!” featuring tales of how newbies mess things up. So far, so good, but it’s heading downhill…

Around the middle, the tone is that of someone who’s been there a while, and been through all the inherent frustrations of stagnating in a typical office. The examples are things like killing processes anonymously, snooping for certain phrases in e-mail, and later on, kissing up to the boss while not actually changing anything… the sidebar “Dealing with management” about 2/3 of the way through, comes close to explicitly stating “Your bosses are probably idiots: here’s how to deal with them” without actually saying that…
The last third, though… the phrase “descent into madness” is overused, but it fits here very well. The examples start out with things like how to destroy entire systems with a few keystrokes, how to set up cords and such to hurt people (or worse), how to delete all trace of users who have “moved on to their FINAL position”… et cetera. The language slowly changes from standard business-ese to something you’d expect to read in one of the diaries from Se7en. Near the end is a sidebar “PEOPLE WHO NEED TO DIE”–most of whom are identified by management-sounding titles, except for a few famous names (Bill Gates is on there 5 times). The last few pages with text sound like they should be scrawled in blood–then there’s a disturbing “figure” that seems to confirm that they were. The pages after the figure are blank–except for odd brownish stains and scrawls…

In addition to its inherent weirdness–the author would have had to have worked on the book from day one of his new job right through who knows what, then found someone who’d publish that–the book can also be used for a minor divination. For some reason, the author isn’t listed on the cover–there’s just a blank space where the name should be. If you neatly write in the name of the local I.T. Pro from where you work or go to school, stand the book on its spine, count from 0 to 15 in binary, then let go, the book will open to the part of the book that most closely matches its new “author”s technical competence and frustration level. God help you if it falls to the left without opening.
—Submitted by NPC Whozat?.

5. Teen Life magazine — Teen Life was a teenage gossip and fashion magazine along the lines of Seventeen and Teen People. Only one issue was ever published. After that, someone tipped off the mob about the location of the entrepreneur who ran it and he had to go into the Witness Protection Program again. It sold almost no copies, but somehow, a single, tattered copy found its way into a dishevelled stack of magazines in the teen section of the local library. Since very few people know it ever existed and even fewer care, it’s lost its definition in the collective unconsciousness. Its existence has become extremely mutable, and is periodically redefined by its surroundings. Thus, whenever a paper is delivered to one of the newspaper vending machines outside for the first time in a given month, the magazine updates itself to cover recent events. Of course, since it has no real source of information to base its articles on, it gleans its information from the minds of the people who surround it. Each month, there’s a new set of articles on the people who most frequently visited the teen section that month, all detailing the most dramatic aspects of their lives in the same hyperbolic prose as they did the celebrities in its original incarnation. They don’t have to be actual teenagers, but people over thirty are rarely mentioned.

6. The Obliviscriptum — A compilation of reader-written marginalia and underlined text from all other texts, never reread or reviewed by the original note-taker.
—Submitted by tbryant23.

7. My First Cookbook — Prominently displayed in the children’s section among several others of the same title, My First Cookbook appears as a run-of-the-mill children’s cookbook, complete with large print, simple instructions, colorful, friendly illustrations and a somewhat disproportionate desert section. In fact, the only major deviation from this theme is an article near the end of the book entitled “A Recipe for Success”. This is a complex, macabre ritual involving human sacrifice, self mutilation and sacrilege, as well as more curious and innocuous practices such as walking down a stair case with a prime number of stairs taking them two at a time and then up it taking them three at a time. It’s written in the same cheerfully simple prose as the rest of the book and accompanied by the same helpful, pastel drawings. For obvious reasons, the librarians have tried repeatedly to remove it, whether by destroying it, removing it from the library or at least relocating it to more appropriate section of the library. All of these attempts have appeared to succeed at first, but the book immediately reappeared in the same place it was to begin with. In fact, after one of the staff’s more elaborate attempts to eliminate it, it returned to a more eye-catching location than where it was originally discovered, so they’ve now decided to let well enough alone. The book can be checked out, but it instantly returns to the library as soon as its due date arrives. What the ritual is actually supposed to do is never specified beyond its cryptic title, and thus far no one is known to have actually tried it.

8. Ramjet Egebr’s Guide to Every Movie Ever Made — A massive omnibus collection of thousands upon thousands of one paragraph movie reviews, the kind they have in TV guides and the like, along with brief color commentary and a rating from one to five stars. The thing about this book is that if you know the name of someone, you can find a listing for any movie ever made about them — including home movies and (possibly) security tape footage, along with all the same color commentary, plot summary, and rating.