Excellent essay by Jason Colavito which is "a look into the fabulous history of the world's most famous non-existent grimoire" and should be required reading by anyone considering using information supposedly from the Necronomicon as a basis for a real magical practice. They may change their mind after reading it, and if not, well... that's their choice.

Rumored to be the source of black magic, many have sought in vain for the fabeled Necronomicon of Abdul Alhazred. Here now the true story behind the most infamous book never written.

Like every edition of the pulp horror magazine Weird Tales, the February 1924 issue gave its readers a mix of horror, dark fantasy and unclassifiable stories. That month, readers could peruse Burton P. Thom's short story "The Thing That Should Not Be," Richard Presley Tooker's novella Planet Paradise, and Mary Sharon's poem "The Ghost." But Weird Tales volume 3, issue 2 had something else within, something that would spawn debate for the next eight decades. Deep inside, on page fifty, was a small story by an obscure Providence, Rhode Island author named H. P. Lovecraft. The title of the story was "The Hound."

Of the story itself, its plot revolved around a pair of decadents who devoted their lives to the morbid to find something exciting in their moribund life. But vastly more important and more interesting was the reference book the characters consulted to identify a particular and grotesque amulet freshly extracted from a grave: We recognized it as the thing hinted of in the forbidden Necronomicon of the mad Arab Abdul Alhazred the ghastly soul-symbol of the corpse-eating cult of inaccessible Leng, in Central Asia.

Soon, however, other mentions of the dread book would come from Lovecraft's pen, and many other pens as well. Around the world some would begin to suspect that the Necronomicon was more than a literary device, perhaps even the secret source of black magic itself.