I love H.P. Lovecraft and find the idea of the Necronomicon fascinating. Just hoping some of the geniuses in this sub can shed some light on the real world counter parts to this literary titan.
Alien it indeed was to all art and literature which sane and balanced readers know, but we recognised it as the thing hinted of in the forbidden Necronomicon of the mad Arab Abdul Alhazred; the ghastly soul-symbol of the corpse-eating cult of inaccessible Leng, in Central Asia. All too well did we trace the sinister lineaments described by the old Arab daemonologist; lineaments, he wrote, drawn from some obscure supernatural manifestation of the souls of those who vexed and gnawed at the dead. [...] The jade amulet now reposed in a niche in our museum, and sometimes we burned strangely scented candles before it. We read much in Alhazred’s Necronomicon about its properties, and about the relation of ghouls’ souls to the objects it symbolised; and were disturbed by what we read. Then terror came.
Lovecraft's primary and sinister grimoire has taken on a life of its own since he first wrote about it, with dozens of different interpretations from H. R. Giger's artbook to musical scores to a couple of modern-day grimoires - many of which are still attractively priced and available in paperback, to the chagrin of those seekers for rare and crumbling tomes. As to its real-life antecedents, that depends strongly on both the contents and nature of the work - aspects of the Necronomicon which Lovecraft developed over time. In it's first few appearances, "The Hound" and "The Festival" (WT Jan 1925), the book is not yet a grimoire, but a sort of forbidden reference work. For example, in "The Festival" Lovecraft writes:
Pointing to a chair, table, and pile of books, the old man now left the room; and when I sat down to read I saw that the books were hoary and mouldy, and that they included old Morryster’s wild Marvells of Science, the terrible Saducismus Triumphatus of Joseph Glanvill, published in 1681, the shocking Daemonolatreia of Remigius, printed in 1595 at Lyons, and worst of all, the unmentionable Necronomicon of the mad Arab Abdul Alhazred, in Olaus Wormius’ forbidden Latin translation; a book which I had never seen, but of which I had heard monstrous things whispered.
Dan Harms in The Necronomicon Files: The Truth Behind Lovecraft's Legend expands on this strange company:
Here, Lovecraft groups the Necronomicon with three other books. Two of them, Joseph Glanvil's Saduscismus Triumphatus ("Triumph of the Sadducees," referring to a Biblical sect that denied the existence of the soul) and the Daemonolatreia ("Demon-Worship") of Nicolas Remy ("Remigius"), are churchmen's accounts of the doings of witches and wizards and how these evil people may be detected and punished. [...] The first book mentioned, Morryster's Marvells of Sciecne, is not a real book at all. I twas the creation of the journalist and horror writer Ambrose Bierce (1842-1914?) for his story "The Man and the Snake," which tells of a snake that hypnotizes its prey.
By the time of "The Descendant" (1926?), the book was not just abhorred but banned and fantastically rare:
He had known of the dreaded volume since his sixteenth year, when his dawning love of the bizarre had led him to ask queer questions of a bent old bookseller in Chandos Street; and he had always wondered why men paled when they spoke of it. The old bookseller had told him that only five copies were known to have survived the shocked edicts of the priests and lawgivers against it and that all of these were locked up with frightened care by custodians who had ventured to begin a reading of the hateful black-letter.
There were many banned books in the pre-modern period, most famously those that made it to the Index Librorum Prohibitorum of the Roman Catholic Church; and as Lovecraft continued to write he began to weave together his stories into a new, artificial mythology, of which the Necronomicon formed a component part - a guide to the cults, entities, and phenomena that his protagonists witnessed and encountered. Lovecraft himself was not read-up on the occult at this point, but he began to research it to lend a greater air of verisimilitude to his fiction, and late in life wrote:
That's a hard fit -- like it's a fictional book about fictional monsters -- but Abdul Alhazred's book Necronomicon was, basically, about things man was not meant or supposed to know. In that sense, Tertullian's Prescription Against Heretics and Irenaeus' Against Heresies (full name: On the Detection and Overthrow of the So-Called Gnosis) probably qualify. Until the discovery of the Library of Nag Hammadi in 1945, Against Heresies was the best surviving contemporary description of Gnosticism. Other Gnostic or heretical works might qualify as well (Celsus, etc.).