The Summa Libra Personae is a book of magic spells which describe how to create the elements of magical disguises. For an astute scholar of magic, it also doubles as an occult dissertation describing the constituent parts of people.
The book is protected by magic. It is difficult to copy down (by hand or electronically) any of its words or sentences, or translations of these -- ink fails to flow, pencil lead fails to leave marks, computer applications crash.
Anyone who picks up the unowned copy will find every page but the front cover sealed shut, as though the pages have been glued together.
Each page is "unsealed" in turn by the performance of a specific action; most of these are related to the completion of a spell. That is, the owner can unlock a spell only by making and using an item from a the spell that precedes it. All spells require an odd but not impossible to assemble mix of ingredients, and the use of sigils provided by the book.
The book was found in Arnholm's Used Books in the special collections cabinet, where it had been priced and placed without any of its unusual properties being noticed. The original price of $225 was marked down to $2.00 after it was found that its pages would not part.
The book is mentioned only in several rare codices, one of which (in the Bodleian Library) brought it to the attention of Aubrey Blackwell.
NB: The book is damaged. The page containing the eighth spell is torn, rendering the spell incomplete. Because that spell cannot be completed, subsequent spells cannot be unlocked unless a special trick is performed to get past it. That trick is described in these appendices.
Advice to Authors
Do not be too impressed or intimidated by the amount of detail given in these appendices. You do not have to use the Latin, the detailed instructions, etc., in your chapters. They are only there so that you know what is in the book and by implication what is not. The details are provided so that authors can check against an objective, authoritative source and not accidentally invent something that will contradict what another author might write.
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