H.P. Lovecraft invented the Necronomicon, attributed to the mad Arab Abdul Alhazred, around 1922 as atmosphere for his stories, and delighted in the hoax, writing to friends that he invented it. The 1977 Simon Necronomicon, a paste-up of Mesopotamian names and Golden Dawn ritual, made it physically real and commercially permanent.
The believers' shelf: claims that Lovecraft fronted for a real tradition, that the Simon text channels genuine Sumerian power, that the fiction is a cover. No pre-Lovecraft manuscript has ever surfaced; the conviction requires no shelf space.
The chaos-magic reading: a book believed-in by enough people becomes functional, an egregore text, its power supplied by the readers. The Necronomicon is the controlled experiment: invented in print, empowered by use, and now whatever its users made it. The hoax completed its initiation.
At what printing did the hoax become a tradition?