As a pre-teen and teenager I was the bookish kid who was always reading, and, like many a kid, love of Mythology lead into a love of fantasy, and the idea of the direct application of "Knowledge is power" that magic offers in those tales was intoxicating. As I got older I branched out into history, which became a passion and my reading has been mostly in that realm.

Then I got Grimoires: A History of Magic Books by Owen Davies as a gift. As various magical or texts on magic, Davies outlines the difference, came up I tried to find them. Naturally, many are public domain, and can be found for free on Project Gutenberg but they can also be found fairly cheap for sale in print. So, I order a couple, and had a blast flipping through them, so I got a few more. Now I have a nice Occult bookshelf, and I smile because teenage me would be so proud.

However, I've also picked up a number of other History books on the history of the belief in magic, and the crossover between the men who advanced science and learning, and those who dabbled and wrote about magic is quite staggering, but I guess not surprising. Both are born from the desire to control and change the environment we live in, and so, in a lot of ways the history of magic is part of the history of science.