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Happy Birthday to Jack London! On this day 147 years ago, the author of Call of the Wild was born in the slums of San Francisco. Let’s look at five interesting facts about this author, in honor of his special day.

1. London had extremely interesting parents. We all know that the most interesting people come from the most fantastical backgrounds (yes, we made this statistic up to feel better about our own crazy families), and London is no exception! His mother, Flora Wellman, was a spiritualist who claimed to have the ability to channel indigenous Sauk chief Black Hawk. His father is believed to be astrologer William Chaney, whom she lived with after moving with him from Seattle to the bustling Pacific city of San Francisco. In 1876, while living with Cheney, she gave birth to her son, John Griffith Chaney, who would later on go by the name of Jack London.

2. You thought the interesting-parent background ended there, didn’t you? Not a chance! Not only did Flora give birth to Jack against William Chaney’s wishes (he wished her to have an abortion), but out of stress and anger Flora shot herself while pregnant. She obviously did not die, but she was wounded enough that Jack was given to Virginia Prentiss (a friend, as well as a formerly enslaved African American woman) as a baby, and she would be his formative motherly influence throughout his life. When he was studying at the University of California, Berkeley as a young adult, he found the name of his father from old newspaper articles reporting his mother’s suicide attempt, and contacted Chaney who was, by then, living in Chicago. Chaney’s return letter left London (who had taken his stepfather’s name after his mother’s marriage) heartbroken, as the astrologer took no responsibility and asserted that Flora had too many sexual partners at the time for him to be the father. London’s distress at this letter led him to quit school at the University… and then to move north to the Yukon for the Alaskan Klondike gold rush. One might argue that despite the personal stress, Chaney’s awful behavior did London a great favor in the long run!

3. Despite being extremely influential on his writing, working the Klondike gold rush was very detrimental to London’s health and well-being. After moving up to Alaska, the harsh conditions for the gold rush miners caused London to develop scurvy, a typical illness of miners who were experiencing malnutrition. London lost several of his front teeth, developed marks and scars on his face that he would carry with him for life, and endured pain in his joints… not an easy illness. Though he recovered, his constitution would always be a bit weaker than it had been before, and he would go on to develop an alcohol dependency that began around this time. His experiences in the harsh Alaskan wilderness, however, were quite obviously extraordinarily influential on the aspiring young author, and would serve as inspiration in his upcoming works.

4. Hoping to escape hard physical labor for the rest of his life, London decided that he could try to “sell his brains” by writing and being published. Upon his return to California from the Klondike in 1898, London put monumental effort into becoming an author. He began writing 1,000 words a day (no small feat for someone who hadn’t written since high school). He was first published with his story “To the Man On Trail” and was thereafter a frequent published author in journals and magazines. By 1900, London made $2,500 a year. In 1903 Jack London had his story The Call of the Wild published in The Saturday Evening Post. He sold it for $750. The story was an almost immediate success.

5. Local provenance. Did you know that Jack London lived just ten minutes from us, here in Alameda, California? At one point he rented a home (or a villa, as it was once called) on Lake Merritt… a beautiful area of Oakland just through the tunnel out of Alameda. It is while he lived here that he met poet George Sterling and later moved to a home in Piedmont simply to be closer to his best friend. Nevertheless, we are always happy to feel “at home” with authors we admire!

George Sterling, Mary Austin, Jack London and Jimmie Hooper on a beach in Carmel, California.

Happy, happy birthday to an author that has inspired so very many… Happy Birthday, Jack London!

Anyone reading this blog has surely heard the phrase “What the Dickens?” before. Usually used as an exclamation, a comment to proclaim confusion and shock or exaggerate, this phrase is colloquially used throughout the English speaking world.

Now what would you say if I told you that this phrase has nothing whatsoever to do with our main man, Charles Dickens? What if I told you it was infinitely older than him, and his last name just coincided with the phrase already in existence? I think the universal response might be “What the Dickens?”!

In literature, the phrase is first seen in (believe it or not) Shakespeare’s The Merry Wives of Windsor, a work commissioned by Queen Elizabeth I. Published in 1602 (though most likely written before 1597), this Shakespearean play focuses on the vain and comedic knight Sir John Falstaff, and his troubles in love. In Act III, scene ii, the sentence “I cannot tell what the dickens his name is” seems to be the first written use of the phrase, though wordsmiths believe it predates even Shakespeare. Interestingly enough, in Elizabethan times the word “dickens” was a euphemism for the word “devil.” As one knows, cursing has not always been an acceptable act in polite society. And centuries ago, referencing the devil directly was not respectful or used in everyday conversations. Therefore, saying “What the Devil” would have been quite frowned upon.

So… society came up with an alternative! It is possible that it began by shortening the word “devilkins” – a religious word predating Elizabethan times that referred to a small devil, or an imp. Nowadays the phrase is used in several ways, though almost always to exclaim and exaggerate. “Run like the dickens” or “working like the dickens” are heard often enough, though my own personal use of the phrase is typically “it hurts like the dickens!” Yet I had no idea that in writing it down, the word dickens need not be capitalized! Since it isn’t referring to Charles. What the dickens!?

In honor of Spooktober (a spooky October, of course), today our blog calls on our love of the movie Hocus Pocus, as we focus on a magical text, a witches handbook – called Grimoires. 

By definition, a grimoire is a “a textbook of magic, typically including instructions on how to create magical objects like talismans and amulets, how to perform magical spells, charms and divination, and how to summon or invoke supernatural entities such as angels, spirits, deities, and demons” (Davies). I first came across the idea of antiquarian grimoires via, you’ll be surprised to learn…. Tiktok. The latest and “greatest” of social media platforms is full of information. Some interesting, some shocking, and some downright useless, true. But suddenly on my “for your page” there appeared an antiquarian bookseller (Reid Moon, Moons Rare Books) discussing an early grimoire in his inventory, and I was hooked.

It is not unusual to find witchy empty journals for a witches Book of Shadows’ at Barnes and Noble these days, which differs from Grimoires in the fact that grimoires (a French word derived from the French term for “grammar”) quite literally translate to the grammar of magic. Bookseller William Kiesel explained that “Typically, grimoires are often manuals of practice that give recipes, operations, rituals and perhaps even spells.” Grimoires are then… manuals, where practitioners of alternative methods of healing, spirituality, medicine and more would put their practices within for easy reference later on (literally “grimoires” throughout history run the gamut – from ancient Egyptian magical inscriptions on cuneiform tablets and amulets to the medieval period texts by Popes and doctors, even, to modern day). These days, antiquarian grimoires hold a special sort of fascination in the book collecting community, as they allow for a more individualized look at spirituality, unlike and sometimes even opposing conventional, organized religion.

One of the pentacles found in the Key of Solomon.

While grimoires were mainly popular between the 1500s and 1900s, there is evidence of their existence (as a physical copy of a written text) as far back as one of the most famous of all grimoires, the Key of Solomon (or Testament of Solomon, two separate works but sometimes confused with each other) written in Greek in the 1st millennium CE. When rumors of its existence first began to circulate, it was claimed that this text included incantations for summoning demons and described them being used to cure cases of possession. The actual Testament of Solomon, while not written by Solomon himself (this can get confusing in the realm of grimoires), is one of the oldest surviving magical texts, dating back to one of the first five centuries A.D. It carries descriptions of a ring that could bind demons from doing harm, and was written as a source of information and warning to its readers. 

As Christianity gained favor throughout the world, many magical texts or books centered on demonology and other potentially pagan beliefs were banned, burned and their authors silenced. A few of the more notable works that remain are often ones dealing in “natural magic” rather than “demonic magic”, as during the medieval period the former was allowed – it could be construed as a way to praise and celebrate all that God placed upon the earth for others to enjoy. Demonic texts, on the other hand, were wildly unacceptable. Another Key of Solomon appeared around this time (Solomon a popular figure for authoring these texts, evidently), and then a German abbot and occultist (I know, the irony) named Trithemius supposedly had a book of magic based on the New Testament character Simon Magus – a contemporary of Jesus Christ who was vilified and demonized by the church as a devil worshipper, despite performing similar “miracles” that were attributed to the former. 

Several grimoires make their way onto the scene in the 1500s, with a steady stream of them from thereon after. Some of these include Les Secrets merveilleux de la magic naturelle du petit Albert (1272), the Grand Grimoire (1521), Le Dragon Rouge (published in 1822 but supposedly dating back to 1522), and the Grimoire of Armadel (written in the 1600s, not published until 1980). As time passes and the ability to write becomes more commonplace, availability of paper and writing utensils increase, more and more grimoires emerge. Notable antiquarian collections of grimoires can be found at the Cornell University Library, the Ritman Library in the Netherlands, and the Museum of Witchcraft and Magic in the UK. 

The extensive history of the grimoire and like texts prove that one thing is for sure and certain – magic, and the human interest in magic/the ability to witness things not easily attributed to science have inspired us for thousands of years. And here in witch-season we don’t expect it to let up any time soon! Happy Spooktober!