From the Back Cover:
It takes bravery to make magic happen with words. It's courageous and exciting and fun to even try to learn magic. There is something deeply subversive about learning. It's a taking apart, an inquiry into the dark halls, the forgotten corners, the undersides of things. The security guard is somewhere else, and the students and the teachers conspire. They are alchemists. Things are not how they first appear to be. Behind each thing is something else. Everything can be reassembled in another way. There's a code, a ghost, a magic trick to the world. Hence, the Hexopedia. --Gary Barwin, author of Seeing Stars (Fitzhenry and Whiteside, 2001)
Craig Conley's Hexopedia not only surprised and delighted me, it changed my opinion about what young adult books could be. What a treat!
--Gordon Meyer, author of Smart Home Hacks (O'Reilly, 2004)
We might call a bookish person a "walking encyclopedia," but what do we call a printed work with its own wits? The Hexopedia reads your mind as you cast your eye over its pages, but what's more, it proves beyond a doubting shadow that you and you alone are the reader it has been waiting for. --William Keckler, author of Sanskrit of the Body (Penguin, 2003)
Language gives genuine power and wonder to magic. The Hexopedia is a master course in spellbinding words that can make wizards of us all.
--Jeff McBride and Abigail Spinner McBride, authors of Mystery School (The Miracle Factory, 2003)
The most important lesson that I've learned [through magic] is that you are the magician in your own life, and you either play it or you don't. The Hexopedia is a welcome invitation to play. --Eugene Burger, author of Mastering the Art of Magic (Kaufman and Co., 2000)
A wizard is defined by words spoken and secrets kept. The Hexopedia is trove of magical words and secrets. --Kenton Knepper, author of Wonder Words (Wonder Wizards, 2004)
Craig Conley is a word-goldsmith. Or a word-alchemist. He mixes fun, pun and profundity in an imaginative way, thereby opening your mind like nasal spray opens up your sinuses. In this book he guides young wizards through the initial chaos of magic with amazing clarity and coherency. You won't read this book cover to cover. You will dive in wherever you like and be sure you will learn a little something that you won't forget for the rest of your life, simply because you will put it to use. Whatever that use may be. Lie down in your hammock and gently sway between the magic of imagination and reality while you utter magic words to prevent yourself from falling out when your world is rocked by this book. --George Parker, author of The Big Book of Creativity (2004)
Craig Conley's Hexopedia is a literally marvelous grimoire. It should be put into the hands of bright youngsters and the curious of all ages. A truly multicultural miscellany of lore and lingo, jeweled with the legends of the globe, The Hexopedia uncovers the hidden meanings of common words and counsels an appreciation of life's endless depth. For the magic-averse, it can be appreciated as a novel without a plot: a map of a world in which churches and dragons, memory palaces and magic mirrors, are as mundane as they are mystical--where, in other words, nothing is mundane. And the 'reasonable' dilettante-occultist litterateur can read it with clean-conscience pleasure for its allusive and anagrammatic wit, its pleasant recollections of Borges, Calvino, and Emerson. This book will become famous in an emerald city for its demonstration that language itself is magic. --John Pistelli, author of The Ecstasy of Michaela (Valhalla Press, 2012)
About the Author:
Anthemion Deckle Buckram, a.k.a. the eccentric scholar Craig Conley, left academia to pursue his esoteric research. Hailed as “America’s most creative and diligent scholar of letters, words and punctuation” (Encarta), he is author of Magic Words: A Dictionary (Weiser Books), One-Letter Words: A Dictionary (HarperCollins), The One-Minute Mystic, Astragalomancy, How to Believe in Your Elf, Tarot of Portmeirion, The Minimalist Coloring Book, and dozens of other titles. His websites are MysteryArts.com and OneLetterWords.com.
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