Eaton’s Theory & Practice of Commercial Sorcery

Thanks to Wikipedia 

Title: Theory & Practice of Commercial Sorcery

Author: Eaton

Publisher: not known but the 27th edition was printed in 1906, in Manchester 

Source book: You Don’t Have to Evil to Work Here, But it Helps by Tom Holt

At the back of Theory & Practice of Commercial Sorcery is a selection of test papers. The question Benny Shumway remembers sounds absolutely impossible: “a man walking down the street after murdering his grandfather meets an identical copy of himself coming the other way; a practical sorcerer engaged in summoning malevolent spirits in a village on the equator in June discovers that his watch is running backwards; the distance between A and B is exactly nineteen miles, but measures twenty-one miles in a leap year. Explain, using diagrams if necessary.”

I have to say this sounds a whole lot like a question from my least favourite childhood textbook which was called Further Train and Test (Exercises for Juniors by AE Hall - I had forgotten that bit). You know the style of thing; Sammy the snail is stuck at the bottom of a well 12 feet deep. Every day he slithers up 6 inches but every night he slips back 4 ½ inches. How many weeks before he escapes the well only to be eaten by Bobby the blackbird? Needless to say, this sort of question made my head go round in circles, still does, and made my Sunday afternoon homework miserable until I went to a different school which focused more on handwriting and nature study. Also, you probably noticed that I went to school before metric measurements were introduced and sums got easier. I never did get my head around subtracting pounds, shillings and pence.

You could also consider the test papers in the fabulous and unparalleled 1066 and All That.

Also featured in You Don’t Have to be Evil to Work Here, But it Helps is Levinson & Pienaar on Temporal Displacement, Connie Schwartz-Alberich’s copy from school. For a very long extract see pages 123-126 of the 2006 paperback edition of YDHtbEtWHBiH. Cassie nearly hurls the book to the floor and jumps on it. But it belongs to Connie so she restrains herself.

Benny Shumway also consults Necromancy for Dummies but it’s not really much help.

The plot involves Funkhausen’s Loop and Ustinov’s Syndrome. Don’t ask me because I didn’t follow that at all. Some books are way too complicated in the plot department.

Thanks to the Society for the Advancement of Socio-Economics