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Author: Donald Firesmith is the prize-winning author of speculative fiction including The Secrets of Hawthorne House (teen paranormal urban fantasy), the Hell Holes series (alien invasion science fiction), and Magical Wands: A Cornucopia of Wand Lore (fantasy). Named a Distinguished Engineer by the Association of Computing Machinery, he is also the author of 7 technical books in system and software engineering. In his spare time, he crafts one-of-a-kind jeweled magic wands. It was only an old book that the professor found while traveling by train through Scotland. A scholar of medieval history, Professor George Smith was on sabbatical studying Scottish legends and myths when he chanced to meet an aged Scotsman and his granddaughter on their way to her new boarding school in the Isles of Skye. The young girl had accidentally left her book behind, and the professor picked it up meaning to send it on to her. But then he looked inside and discovered it was no ordinary book. It was a school textbook on magic. Could it be real? Could it have actually been left by accident and found by chance? Or was it all an elaborate hoax played on the unsuspecting professor? Did he ever find the secret Isles of Skye School of Magick? Did he ever discover the hidden world of wizards and witches implied by the book's very existence? Or did they find him? The professor vanished soon afterwards, and the answers are unknown. Read the book and decide for yourself. Magical Wands: A Cornucopia of Wand Lore is that textbook from The Isles of Skye School of Magick. The first chapter begins with a basic overview of magic wands followed by an introduction to magical theory including the four planes of existence (Astral, Spectral, Physical, and Daemonic), the five metaphysical elementals (Quintessence, Air, Fire, Earth, and Water), and the three preternatural phases of Light, Twilight, and Darkness. It also contains sets of the commonly used spells associated with each of these elementals and phases. The first chapter then describes the different types of wands, their components, how they are crafted, and how they are used to cast spells. Chapter two teaches the 17 principles of wand making. Chapters three through six comprehensively cover the materials used to make magic wands including magical creatures (both beings and beasts), magical woods, mystical crystals, and mystical metals. Chapter seven documents 26 famous and infamous witches and wizards, their wands, and how well their wands suited their needs. Chapter eight concludes the textbook by nicely summarizing the contents of the entire textbook. Each of the chapters ends with student exercises, the answers of which are included in the back of the textbook which also includes a glossary, references, and afterword by the editor. If you have ever wondered what young witches and wizards actually study in their hidden magic schools, then this book is for you.
In September 2011, Professor George Smith of Oregon State University was on a six month sabbatical in Scotland, where he was researching medieval Scottish legends and myths. He was traveling by train from Glasgow to Inverness when he found a book that had been accidentally left behind by a young girl on her way to a boarding school. It was this book, the textbook Magical Wands - A Cornucopia of Wand Lore.
When his sabbatical ended and the Christmas holidays were over, Professor Smith failed to show up for the winter term, during which he was scheduled to teach classes in modern and medieval European literature. Subsequently, it was discovered that he had also failed to return home the previous week as he had originally planned. A few days later, the university notified his family and filed a missing persons report. Further investigations by the Scottish police eventually revealed that Professor Smith had left his Glasgow hotel in early November without paying his bill and had been neither seen nor heard from since.
When a colleague of Professor Smith's was cleaning out his office, she found an unopened package he had mailed to himself from Scotland a few days before he disappeared. Packed inside were two things: this magical textbook and a foreword he had written explaining how he had come across it and his subsequent efforts to find its author.
As acquisition editor for Professor Smith's professional books, the university passed the textbook and his foreword on to me. Clearly it was his intent to republish them upon his return. Although I have previously only published academic books, I felt that the book's content and the potential importance of its discovery made it worthy of publication. But first, I naturally needed to know who held the book's copyright and whether it was available for republication.
Like Professor Smith, I was unable to locate or find any mention of the book's author or The Isle of Skye School of Magick. I was similarly unable to find any mention of the book in the Library of Congress, the British Library, or the National Libraries of Ireland, Scotland, and Wales. Finally, I could discover no record of Mage Press, which had apparently published the original. After two fruitless years of searching, I finally decided to go ahead with their publication.
As to the book's authenticity, I will leave it up to you to decide whether it is genuine, a work of fiction, or part of an elaborate hoax. As for myself, I am still undecided.
Finally, anyone having knowledge of Professor Smith's whereabouts is requested to please contact the publisher who will pass the information on to Professor Smith's family. They are naturally quite worried and fear that something terrible has happened to him.
Donald Firesmith, 1 April 2014
Acquisition Editor for New Knowledge Academic Press
