Grimoire for the Apprentice Wizard

27” wingspan

working model

of Leonardo da

Vinci’s Ornithopter

by Coast Kites

center. Glue it onto a sheet of cardboard, and wrap it

around the inside back and side in a continuous curve,

so there are no corners.

You can create a scene using action figures, rail-

road miniatures, D&D figurines, spaceships, animals,

sea life, or (in my case) dinosaur models, as I’ve drawn

for you here. The ground can be sculpted using

“kitchen clay” with moss for grass and pebbles for

boulders. Appropriate plants can be made using real

twigs, ferns, etc.; or you can use plastic plants from

aquarium supplies and miniature trees from railroad

hobby stores. If you have a place to put them, you can

have a lot of fun making such dioramas—and even

enter them into science and hobby fairs

How to make kitchen clay: Mix 1 cup cornstarch with

2 cups bicarbonate of soda and 1 1/2 cups cold water.

Add food coloring for color, and heat over medium

burner, stirring constantly until you get a dough-like

consistency. Cool, covered with a damp cloth, until

you are ready to sculpt. A coat of shellac will seal and

preserve the finished products.

Lesson 5. Models & Contraptions

Many Wizards have also been great inventors, such

as Imhotep, Archimedes, and Leonardo da Vinci. They

also tended to collect interesting and intricate gizmos

and artifacts—especially timepieces and instruments

for observing and plotting the motions of the heav-

enly bodies.

Globe & Maps: You should have at least one globe

of the Earth, so you can familiarize yourself with your

home planet. In addition to a modern globe, I have a

small replica of a Renaissance globe with dragons

and sea monsters. I found it at a junk store. I also

have small globes of the Moon and Mars. All kinds of

nifty maps from the National Geographic Society can

also be found in junk stores, including star maps. If

you have enough wall space, it’s very wizardly to

have a good map up; you can even change maps

periodically, as I do (right now I have a map of Middle

Earth up on my wall).

Sand Timers: Sundials, water clocks, astrolabes,

hour candles, and sand timers (often generically called

“hourglasses”) were all invented ages before mechani-

cal clocks. Of all these, sand timers are still widely

available, and remain very useful. I keep several for

different lengths of time, and we use them particu-

larly for meetings, giving everyone the same amount

of time in which to talk.

Leonardo’s Ornithopter: Leonardo da Vinci

(1452-1519) was the greatest Wizard of the Italian Re-

naissance. Of all his many achievements and inven-

tions, however, he is most famed for his ingenious

designs for a flying machine, which never actually

flew. Unfortunately, Leonardo’s studies of the flight

of birds were based on small swallows. If he had stud-

ied large soaring birds like eagles, vultures, and alba-

trosses, he’d have realized that flapping wings were

not the best plan for large flyers, and he’d have prob-

ably created a true hang glider. A flying machine with

flapping wings is called an ornithopter (meaning “bird

wings”), and various small ver-

sions that actually do fly are

available in toy shops. I

have several of these,

and they are fun

to display as

well as fly.

Lesson 6. Menagerie

...six live grass snakes in a kind of

aquarium, some nests of the solitary wasp nicely

set up in a glass cylinder, an ordinary beehive

whose inhabitants went in and out of the window

unmolested, two young hedgehogs in cotton wool,

a pair of badgers which immediately began to

cry Yik-Yik-Yik-Yik in loud voices as soon as the

magician appeared, twenty boxes which contained

stick caterpillars and sixths of the puss-moth, and

even an oleander that was worth two and six, all

feeding on the appropriate leaves, ... an ants’ nest

122 Grimoire for the Apprentice Wizard

Corrected pages 3rd printing.1.p65 41 6/10/2004, 2:59 PM