While procrastinating from work this afternoon, I started a twitter thread asking people to post photos of "books of unusual dimensions" ….
People posted photos and links to wonderful stuff, so if you're into that sort of thing go check out the whole thread!
But at one point @annantrou linked to a truly amazing find — this triangular book of hand-written alchemy.
It's known as "The Triangular Book of St. Germain", and as Wikipedia describes it …
The manuscript begins with a short Latin inscription mentioning that this is a gift given by Count of St. Germain, followed by an illustration of a winged dragon. All the text beyond this point, including the inscriptions belonging to the diagrams, is in cipher.
The book describes a ritual aimed at achieving one of three goals: discovering the location of certain valuable objects (goals 1 and 2) and life extension (goal 3). The former requires performing the ritual during a full solar eclipse. The latter can be performed at any time, but it requires wearing a specific longevity amulet, which the manuscript then refers to in a diagram.
You can check out the whole book here at the Internet Archive, and I took pix of a few choice pages are below. Also note: That triangle book is part of a big collection of alchemical texts scanned at the Internet Archive; you can see all the other (also totally amazing) works here. I'm gonna spend hours gawking at this stuff, so much for getting any work done, yay.
