Today’s blog post is about an object which you might find very useful in a story: the grimoire. A grimoire is a hand-written book created by a magic user and filled with all spells, hexes, charms, enchantments, potions, and other magical knowledge they have. Such a book can be an interesting object for a story and in different ways, too.
The grimoire has a real-world equivalent in the commonplace book. These books were kept by scholars (and at certain times also other people) and filled with all the information the owner considered important, such as passages from different textbooks or results of their own research or experiments. For a time, it was expected of students at various colleges and universities, such as Cambridge or Oxford, to keep a commonplace book for their studies.
At that time, printing was a difficult process and had to be done with woodcuts, meaning that every page had to be cut into a wooden board and then printed - runs were limited by how often the board could be used before the printed page was no longer legible. It was only with the invention of the moveable lead printing letters that books began to get cheaper and larger runs were possible. Different ways of binding the books then made it even cheaper to make and sell them. Before all of that, the individual book was too expensive for every student to have one, so they needed to write down information somewhere else and blank books were a good deal more affordable.
Some people did write grimoires as well - even if there’s no real magical knowledge in there, they often also include recipes which do work. Alchemists certainly kept books for their own research and for their recipes as well.
In a world in which magic exists, however, such a grimoire would be far more interesting than in ours. Grimoires can take quite a few different jobs in a story, depending on what you want to write and how you use them.
Magic could, for instance, influence the books and make them dangerous. So many different spells, hexes, etc. in close quarters can create a lot of problems. Your main character’s job might be to deal with grimoires which have grown dangerous, perhaps even sentient. It could be a one-time job, because their own grimoire or that of their mentor has gone wild, or it could be their regular job, keeping order in a large library full of grimoires or being the go-to person when one’s grimoire begins to act strangely. They might even be on the government’s or the magician’s guild’s payroll.
A grimoire could be a MacGuffin in the story. Once upon a time, a powerful magic user wrote a grimoire full of powerful spells unknown to everyone else. As every grimoire is unique, there’s no reason why this shouldn’t be the case. The villain is after the grimoire to use it to enslave the world and the main character (or characters) have to make sure they don’t get it. A grimoire is no better or worse a MacGuffin than that microfilm or SD card or other regular object.
In a magical school, every student could have to write their own grimoire and your main character could either be very into it, trying to find spells and suchlike which are not in the normal curriculum or they could be very lazy and try to make someone else write their grimoire for them.
Even a use of grimoires in modern times, in an Urban Fantasy setting, is quite possible, it needs less of an explanation than, for instance, the fact that people don’t notice dragons and sprites all around them. Harry Dresden from the Dresden Files actually keeps a stack of notebooks with magical information - whether he calls them that or not, those are grimoires.
Grimoires cannot be printed, because they need specific paper and ink, none of which can be used with a printing press. This is a functional thing and, until someone (perhaps your main character?) invents a press which can deal with the paper and ink, everyone has to write their grimoire themselves.
Magic is forbidden knowledge and thus books about it cannot be regularly printed and sold. Whoever finds a mentor to teach them about magic has to make their own book about it - a grimoire.
Magical skill is vastly different from person to person, so a standard textbook will not suffice. Everyone who uses magic has to keep their own book with the spells they can actually use.
While standard spells, potions, etc. are gathered in textbooks, a lot of magic users also experiment with magic and thus develop new things. Those are written down in a notebook and this notebook, no matter what it looks like, is a grimoire.
Modern grimoires are no longer books filled with hand-written notes - they’re an app on the mage’s smartphones filled with all the spells, hexes, potions, and other magical information the mage has.
Your main character might be pulled into the magical world after buying an old book during a yard sale which turns out to be a grimoire. They use a spell as a joke and it works - because they’re secretly magic, too, but have never been told.
Grimoires can also be presented in different ways.
They may take pride of place on a lectern in the middle of a magic user’s vast library. They could be hidden in the tomb of a powerful witch or wizard and require a lot of daring-do to extract from there.
Perhaps they’re just a stack of harmless-looking, cheap notebooks, because that’s the only thing your fledgling mage can afford. Perhaps they’re huge, ancient-looking tomes with yellowish parchment pages and an odd black ink in them.
The students of your magical school might spend a lot of time lugging their books around and discuss what spells and recipes they’ve gotten in theirs, exchanging information between classes. Some teachers might be very strict about what part of their classes they allow to be written down.
Instead of having a boring printed spell book, try giving your magic user a grimoire which is self-made and filled with all the information which that magic user has already gathered about their craft. Make it a MacGuffin, a regular tool, a dangerous artefact - get creative with the principle. Make good use of the grimoire and make grimoires great again!
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