The Editor

The Editor My first knowledge of Douce MS. 116 came through an article by Stephanie Pope in the Bodleian Library Record. 123 The book had garnered little attention from scholars and practitioners of ritual magic, most likely because it was the solitary work on the topic in a much more extensive and variegated collection. The benefit was that this book would be unique even to dedicated readers on ritual magic. The chief difficulty was that no one had previously paid the Bodleian Library to create a microfilm of the whole. Joe Peterson and I initially paid for a quarter of the book to be digitised, but the cost for the rest was prohibitive.

This led to a series of trips to the Weston Library to view and photograph the original. I would leave my lodgings in London early in the morning to catch a shuttle to Gloucester Green in Oxford. From there I walked up George and Broad Streets, past Balliol College and Blackwell’s bookstore, until I arrived at the Bodleian’s Weston Library. There, having turned over my documentation and read the traditional oath not to injure books or to set fires in the building, I would ascend to the second-story reading room. I obtained the book from the librarian, laying it on its foam supports and taking photographs—full pages, partial pages, marginal notes, the gutters next to the binding—until my back and shoulders ached. I’d finish the day with dinner at the Eagle and Child pub, where Tolkien and C. S. Lewis once relaxed, or at a less prestigious establishment, before getting on the bus. On the ride to London, I would review each photograph to make sure it was sharp and usable, making painstaking notes on reshoots if it was not.

If you said it would have been cheaper just to pay for the whole manuscript to be digitised, you’re not wrong. Yet it was an experience that I would not trade.

Sometimes people ask me how I feel about the people who write these books. Our first author is unknown, so most of my emotion toward his work is frustration. With Harrington, I see a never-fulfilled wish to educate another, and I hope that any remnant of his spirit will be pleased with his work reaching appreciative readers. I feel that Serres would probably be charming, so long as I hid my wallet and didn’t have to listen to her poetry. Raphael seems to need too much adulation, but I can imagine us spinning supernatural horror tales at a roaring fire. Douce is a librarian and sometimes frustrated, so I regard him with the greatest degree of sympathy, even if he’d throw me out of his home within five minutes.

123. Pope, “‘Darcke and Clowdie Speeches.’”