Memphis 1517 and Other Deceptions: the False Imprints of Grimoires

Opening certain editions of the Grimorium verum, one reads that the book was printed at Memphis, by Alibeck the Egyptian, in 1517. None of this information is true. The volume is an eighteenth-century French product, and Memphis, the ancient Egyptian capital, certainly had no printing house. This title page is just one of the most conspicuous examples of a very widespread practice in the history of printed grimoires: giving invented places, dates and printers.

Why lie on the title page

There were at least two reasons. The first was caution. Printing a book of magic meant risking seizures, fines and trials, and a false address made it harder to trace the real person responsible. It was, moreover, a habit common to all clandestine publishing: from the seventeenth century onwards, for example, many forbidden books appeared under the name of a non-existent Pierre Marteau of Cologne, who became almost a trademark of outlaw printing.

The second reason was commercial. A grimoire had to seem ancient, rare and come from far away. A sixteenth-century date, an Eastern city or a reference to a pope gave the text an authority that a small provincial printer could never have guaranteed. The false imprint, in this sense, was part of the book's appeal, and was probably recognised as such by at least some of its readers.

An imaginary geography

The cities named on title pages make up a curious map. Besides Memphis, Rome often appears, chosen to suggest a papal origin: the Enchiridion Leonis Papae presented itself as a collection of prayers given by Pope Leo III to Charlemagne, and the so-called Grimoire of Pope Honorius used the name of a medieval pontiff. The Petit Albert, for its part, claimed to be printed in Cologne, by the heirs of the Beringos fratres, at the sign of Agrippa, echoing the imprint of the old Agrippan editions.

Impossible dates

Dates were manipulated too. Some editions of the Dragon rouge bear the year 1521, although they were printed in the nineteenth century, and other grimoires claimed even more remote ages. The aim was to place the book in the sixteenth century or earlier, in the age of Agrippa and the great Renaissance magicians, or in the Middle Ages of popes and emperors. Sometimes printers chose dates that were plainly absurd, almost winking at the reader.

How historians unmask the forgeries

To date these editions properly, scholars use the tools of material bibliography. They examine the typefaces, which change over time and from one workshop to another; the watermarks in the paper, which reveal the mill and sometimes the year; the woodcuts, often reused and therefore recognisable; and the language, which betrays the real period through modern words and spellings. In this way it has been established that almost all the great French grimoires were printed between the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

False imprints do not lessen the value of these books; on the contrary, they make them even more interesting. They tell of printers working on the margins of the law, of a public eager for antiquity and mystery and of a market capable of turning a title page into a small legend. Reading them with a critical eye means understanding how the myth of the immensely ancient magical book was born, page after page.