I told them I read daily from the Necronomicon... never saw them again...
Don't know what happened???
Showing them a peek inside a trashbag full of dead mice, and pointing to a chicken in a cage might do it.
Pulling the Psalter (Liber psalmorum) from the pocket and reading some of the tasty bits would just be a fun addition. Yes, I often carry that little book in my pocket if I have to kill some time, but the flat black cover with only the title written in white script probably does its job at scaring away some of the rebel Anglo-Teutonic sectarians.
Or, pulling a Mossberg 500 12 gauge shotgun down off its rack, with no cartridge in the chamber, and racking the slide before opening the door. (Yes, that's likely what part of my tax refund is going to this year).
Or, pressing the button on the mixer to solo the SM57 on a desktop mic stand to amplify crude messages of doom cribbed from the movie
The Exorcist would do.
With you always,
jt
ETA No, I'm not always Vulgate-toting: some of the Universal-Bibliothek Reclam formats are good, like a good one of Ingeborg Bachmann, or even Goethe's
Faust II, and some tiny editions of tales from Conrad. American publishers really don't have anything comparable in portable format. The French have many excellent publishing houses, but even then, they haven't mastered the ultra-miniature format.