Fans of H.P. Lovecraft’s work – in particular, his Necronomicon – will have no doubt spotted our April Fool’s joke last Friday, aptly described by a colleague as a “goof and a spoof“. For everyone else, it’s time for us to come clean: we don’t really hold a book with the contents as described in that blog post, nor one featuring all the images we highlighted. But every photo in the article is from a real book in our Special Collections. Here are the titles of those texts:

• Della Fisonomia Dell’uomo (The Human Physiognomy) / G. Battista Della Porta (1610)
  Shelfmark: SRQ 138 D38
• The Discoverie of Witchcraft / Reginald Scot (1584; our edition, 1930)
  Shelfmark: SRQ 133.4 SC81. Click here to read more about this book.
• The Natural History of Many Curious and Uncommon Zoophytes / John Ellis (1786)
  Shelfmark: SRQ 593 ELL
• The Natural History of the Frog Fish of Surinam / Thomas Hutchinson (1796)
  Shelfmark: SRQ 597.8 HUT
• Conchological Illustrations of Figures of New and Rare Genera and Species of Shells / (Drawn by) Henry Denny (1838 Mss.)
  Shelfmark: SRQ 594 D428
• An History of Fungusses, Growing About Halifax: Volume 1 / James Bolton (1788)
  Shelfmark: SRQ 579 BOL
• Coloured Figures of English Fungi or Mushrooms: Volume 1 / James Sowerby (1797)
  Shelfmark: SRQ 579 SOW
• De Magorum Dæmonomania: Libri IV (Of the Demon-Mania of the Sorcerers) / Jean Bodin (1586)
  Shelfmark: SR 133.4 B632. Click here to read more about this book.

All of these titles are available to view in our Local and Family History department. While the books aren’t perhaps quite as “weird” as our Lovecraftian version, they are all interesting pieces in their own right and well-worth a thorough investigation. Readers interested in learning more about our collections relating to the Supernatural can see a fuller list of items by clicking here.