Grimoires are the ‘how to’ books of the magical tradition and the message of this study is that you are never far away from one. Reviled as dangerous by the official custodians of religion and science and suppressed by them at every opportunity, they have shown extraordinary persistence and longevity and still have a huge cultural currency. Indeed, in Owen Davies's expert hands, their story provides a continuous commentary on all the cultural movements that have disparaged them – not to mention the broad transfers of knowledge and people that have helped to disperse them, and the needs and desires that have fostered them and sustained their popularity. The premises of the grimoire apart – that the most powerful wisdom is the oldest and comes in cryptic or secret forms – this book shows that it has been as successful in conveying useful content to broad audiences as any other kind of text. Davies has written a richly descriptive and wide-ranging survey, packed with detailed information on the whole history of the genre from the ancient Near and Middle East to the Satanic Bible of ‘Anton Szandor LaVey’. But despite the mass of information, he never loses sight of the broader significance of his subject as (what he calls) a ‘cultural symbol’. Given familiarity with the grimoires of old Europe, the most revealing chapters are likely to be those dealing with their role in the history of slavery, colonialism and creolisation and in twentieth-century America. Davies is particularly good on the impact of modern enterprise and entrepreneurship on the market for grimoires and on the way in which their success has been a kind of ironic side-effect of such factors as growing literacy and popular education, and, in a way, of democracy itself. Ultimately, however, it is the status and perceived legitimacy of kinds of knowledge that will always be most at stake when someone near you opens another grimoire.