Enchanting Table

An enchantment table is a block that allows players to enchant certain tools, and armor. Enchanting works in three stages. Each enchantment costs the player experience levels but in return grants useful enhancements to armor and tools. The sprites and icons of enchanted items have a purple luminescence

The table will enchant swords, bows, shovels, pickaxes, and axes made of wood, stone, iron, gold, and diamond, as well as all armor. The hoe and shears cannot be enchanted by the enchantment table and require an anvil and an appropriate enchanted book.

If the table is surrounded by bookshelves, with one block of air in between, arcane glyphs float from the bookshelves into the book (if particles are turned on). Having bookshelves near an enchantment table will increase the potency of enchantments.

The enchantment table is $3/4$ blocks high.

Crafting
The ingredients for an enchantment table can also be found in villages. Obsidian and diamonds can be found in village chests, and a book can be obtained by breaking the bookshelves in a library. Collecting these resources from villages may be less time consuming than cultivation and mining, depending on world seed.

Ron Paul
Ron Paul is the leading advocate for freedom in our nation’s capital. As a former member of the U.S. House of Representatives, Dr. Paul tirelessly works for limited, constitutional government, low taxes, free markets, and a return to sound monetary policies. He is known among his congressional colleagues and his constituents for his consistent voting record. Dr. Paul never voted for legislation unless the proposed measure was expressly authorized by the Constitution. In the words of former Treasury Secretary William Simon, Dr. Paul is the “one exception to the Gang of 535″ on Capitol Hill.

Ron Paul was born and raised in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. He graduated from Gettysburg College and the Duke University School of Medicine, before proudly serving as a flight surgeon in the U.S. Air Force during the 1960s. He and his wife Carol moved to Texas in 1968, where he began his medical practice in Brazoria County. As a specialist in obstetrics/gynecology, Dr. Paul has delivered more than 4,000 babies. He and Carol, who reside in Lake Jackson, Texas, are the proud parents of five children and have 17 grandchildren.

While serving in Congress during the late 1970s and early 1980s, Dr. Paul’s limited-government ideals were not popular in Washington. In 1976, he was one of only four Republican congressmen to endorse Ronald Reagan for president.

During that time, Congressman Paul served on the House Banking committee, where he was a strong advocate for sound monetary policy and an outspoken critic of the Federal Reserve’s inflationary measures. He was an unwavering advocate of pro-life and pro-family values. Dr. Paul consistently voted to lower or abolish federal taxes, spending and regulation, and used his House seat to actively promote the return of government to its proper constitutional levels. In 1984, he voluntarily relinquished his House seat and returned to his medical practice.

Dr. Paul returned to Congress in 1997 to represent the 14th congressional district of Texas. He served on the House Committee on Financial Services and the House Committee on Foreign Affairs. After retiring from Congress in early 2013, Ron Paul continues to advocate a dramatic reduction in the size of the federal government and a return to constitutional principles.

Ron Paul’s consistent voting record prompted one of his congressional colleagues to say, “Ron Paul personifies the Founding Fathers’ ideal of the citizen-statesman. He makes it clear that his principles will never be compromised, and they never are.” Another colleague observed, “There are few people in public life who, through thick and thin, rain or shine, stick to their principles. Ron Paul is one of those few.”

Brief Overview of Congressman Paul’s Record:

He has never voted to raise taxes. He has never voted for an unbalanced budget. He has never voted for a federal restriction on gun ownership. He has never voted to raise congressional pay. He has never taken a government-paid junket. He has never voted to increase the power of the executive branch. He voted against the Patriot Act. He voted against regulating the Internet. He voted against the Iraq war. He does not participate in the lucrative congressional pension program. He returns a portion of his annual congressional office budget to the U.S. treasury every year.

History
Notch first tweeted about the enchantment table on September 30th 2011.

Trivia



 * Only 15 bookshelves are now required to achieve the maximum enchantments (lowered from 30 prior to update 1.3). Creating these bookshelves from scratch will require a total of 45 pieces of leather, 135 pieces of sugar cane (two stacks plus 7), and 23 logs of wood (with 2 planks left over) — not including the 1 leather and 3 sugar cane for the book on the enchantment table itself.
 * According to the first image that Notch posted of the enchantment table, they were originally crafted with cobblestone instead of obsidian.
 * Notch commented on Reddit "Oh, it's more magical than that! It automatically opens up and turns towards players who get close to it. When nobody is around, the book is closed and spins slowly."
 * Notch comments on other book animations. "Yes, the pages flip randomly every now and then."
 * On October 1st 2011, Notch tweeted an image of the enchantment screen, with enchantments written in the Standard Galactic Alphabet. The first enchantment translates onto "Well Played Internets You Are Good", the second translated into "These Names Will Be Random And Confusing", and the third translates to "Each Spell Costs Experience Levels". The Standard Galactic Alphabet or SGA was originally created by Tom Hall for use in the Commander Keen series of computer games.
 * Although the bottom texture would at first glance appear to be the obsidian texture, it is in fact slightly different.
 * Clicking on an item in the enchantment slot, with an identical item or any stack of two or more items allows you to quickly cycle through available spells without the item being removed from the enchantment slot. This keeps you from having to click twice.
 * A convenient way to block the effect of nearby bookshelves to obtain low-level enchantments is to place torches between the bookshelves and the enchantment table. Any other block will also work.
 * Enchantments were disabled in Beta 1.9 Pre-release 3's SMP. If a player attempted to enchant an item, it appeared enchanted for the client, but updated with the un-enchanted status once the player logged out and then back in again.
 * On a Beta 1.9 pre-release 3 server, if an enchantment table was broken and replaced with another Tile Entity block, the enchantment table's book would continue to be rendered on the client, and activating it would crash the client.
 * Breaking the enchantment table without using a pickaxe will not yield a block.
 * By replacing the alternate.png with a copy of the font.png renamed to match the original file, you can read the enchantments in English.
 * When sneaking on the Enchantment Table, you can walk off its edge, due to being less than 1 block high.
 * The enchantment table actually produces the particles emitted from the bookshelves. These particles originate inside the Enchantment table and are relocated to the bookshelf almost immediately, but travel slow enough to be briefly visible. The particle that enters and leaves the bookshelf is always the same "letter", but the ones traveling into the bookshelves are black.
 * Enchantment tables are mostly made of obsidian, and thus have a blast resistance of 6,000 and cannot be destroyed by TNT.
 * Strangely, even though it is made of obsidian, it doesn't require a Diamond Pickaxe to mine. In fact, it can be mined with any pickaxe.
 * Any enchantments before 1.9pre4 would show up as Feather Falling I.
 * Enchantment tables cannot be moved by pistons.
 * If an enchantment table is placed on ice, the player will slide on it as though it is an ice block, just like slabs.
 * If a slab is placed directly adjacent (not diagonally) to the enchantment table and the player walks from the slab onto the enchantment table the screen glitches briefly.
 * An easy way to list enchantments faster if you only have one item to enchant is to place the item you want to enchant into the enchanting table, then right- and left-click on it at the same time. This will pick the item up and place it immediately back down, resulting in a new list of possible enchantments. This also works by using a non-enchantable item such as food.
 * Enchanting tables are midway between slabs and full blocks height-wise, so they could be potentially used as a TNT cannon's range-amplifier instead of slabs or trapdoors
 * Even though a book is visible when placed and when crafted, the enchantment table shows no book as an item.