Pages of a Forbidden Tome

By Sean Michael Ragan
Category: Science, Paper Crafts
Time Required: 3 hours
Difficulty: Easy

They could be from The Necronomicon, Unaussprechlichen Kulten, or simply Poe’s “quaint and curious volume,” but everybody needs at least a few tattered leaves of ancient mind-blasting arcanum lying around to impress guests. Especially around Halloween.

This tutorial presents an easy method for producing weathered “antiqued” paper with burned edges. The trick of soaking white paper in coffee or tea to give it an old, yellowed look is very familiar, but the process for selectively burning the edges of the paper is something I discovered on my own. A simple and safe chemical treatment is used to selectively char the page, only where it has been applied, upon mild heat treatment.

Steps

Step #1: Create and print your art

Print your art using a laser printer, not inkjet. Most inkjet inks are water soluble and will not stand up to the water-based solutions used in this tutorial.
The artwork I used is from an imagining of Lovecraft's Necronomicon by French artist Philippe Druillet that appeared in the October 1979 issue of Heavy Metal magazine, a copy of which I own. If you can't get your hands on the same magazine, there are other good sources for faux-arcana graphics.
Dover has a clip-art collection called Magic and Mystical Symbols that's chock full of appropriate art.
The Howard Phillips Lovecraft Historical Society has some Necronomicon pages for sale as well as some great online resources for making prop documents, including a package of free fonts.
If you're really into it, Propnomicon is an entire blog dedicated to reproduction artifacts from the Cthulhu mythos.

Conclusion

The charring solution works because of the tendency of ammonium chloride to decompose, when heated, to give ammonia gas and hydrochloric acid. The ammonia gas evaporates into the atmosphere, leaving behind strong hydrochloric acid, which is what actually chars the page. This sounds nastier than it is, in practice. Prudence dictates erring on the side of caution and always working with strong ventilation, but, frankly, I did this in my closed kitchen with the air conditioner on and didn't notice much more than a slight burning smell.

An easy way to prepare a saturated solution of ammonium chloride (or any salt, really), is to dump a bunch of it into a jar and add water, but not enough to dissolve it all. So you end up with a layer of solid at the bottom of the jar, all the time. The liquid layer on top will always be saturated with the salt no matter what the ambient temperature may be.

I'm totally thrilled with my results, but if I were to do it again, I might try a slightly heavier laser printer paper, perhaps some of that resumé-grade stuff, just to see if it ended up feeling more like antique parchment at the end of the process.