The Necronomicon

During the events described in Cosa Nosferatu, Randolph Carter makes guarded references to the Necronomicon.  It is purportedly an ancient tome written by the so-called "Mad Arab", Abdul Alhazred, a book which contains esoteric and forbidden knowledge relating to ancient beings worshipped as gods in earliest human history.  Carter, writing under his nom de plume of H.P. Lovecraft, made many references to the Necronomicon in his published research.  The pictures on this page, reproduced courtesy of the Randolph Carter archives maintained by Miskatonic University, may well be the only known photographs of the Necronomicon.  Notes made by Carter on the back of the above photo do not use "the N word" to describe the picture, but they do contain handwriting that indicates "the Alhazred manuscript", although the script is faint and difficult to decipher.  The photograph reproduced below was contained in the same folder as the other two photos, leading to the belief that all three are images of the same ancient text.

The below photograph may well be the only known photographic record of a page (or at least a portion of a page) from the Necronomicon itself.

Miskatonic University insists it no longer possesses a copy of the Necronomicon.  According to Cosa Nosferatu, Carter obtained his copy from the Oriental Institute, affiliated with the University of Chicago, where Carter had been an instructor, along with Harley Warren.  It was at the University of Chicago that Carter first made the acquaintance of Eliot Ness. Interestingly, the Oriental Institute denies it ever held a copy of the Necronomicon, and even promotes the popular misconception that the manuscript is a fictional construct.  Certainly, Carter himself contributed to this popular misunderstanding by publishing his researches under the pen name of H.P. Lovecraft.  Perhaps reflective of Carter's concerns about what was revealed in the manuscript, in his earlier published work "The Statement of Randolph Carter", he deliberately omitted reference to the Oriental Institute as being the source of the tome.  He also continued his practice of obscuring his own identity, by making it appear "Randolph Carter" was a fictional creation of his own pen name, H.P. Lovecraft.  The events described in Cosa Nosferatu go a long way towards explaining this extreme caution on the part of Carter.