Still stuck for something to buy for your friends and family? Might I suggest a browse in the Abe Books Weird Book Room? (Thanks V!). The current featured book is Talks with Trees; A Plant Psychic’s Interviews with Vegetables, Flowers and Trees. Other classic titles listed there include the following: The English: Are They Human?, Toilet Paper Origami, Barbie: Voyage to Rados, How to Defend Yourself Against Alien Abduction, and the inimitable 50 Ways to Use Feminine Hygiene Products in a Manly Manner. What more could anyone ask for?
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I am pleased to see you are as enchanted by it as I was. I tried to buy the one on unusual words, but I guess they sold out. : (
” What more could anyone ask for ? ”
Well, since you ask ….. and is it Really Too Much To Ask for ? ….
” The castle of Christianitie : set forth, by Lewys Euans. ”
http://collpw-newton.lib.cam.ac.uk/vwebv/holdingsInfo?bibId=185695
The binding is illustrated Here …
http://www.joh.cam.ac.uk/library/special_collections/early_books/pix/provenance/elizabeth/elizabeth.htm
Bloody Christmas Holidays … People NEVER get you what you really want. Bloody Christians .. No Appreciation of the True Meaning of Xmas …. Ba, Humbug !!
Of tangential relevanceThe Bookseller runs an annual “Diagram Prize” competition for odd titles around the time of the Frankfurt Book Fair. The publisher I once worked for, Prentice Hall, pulled off a win in 1980 with the pleasingly ambiguous The Joy of Chickens.
Maybe Abe got the idea from that: at least two of their titles – Natural Bust Enlargement with Total Power and The Big Book of Lesbian Horse Stories – were Diagram winners, in 1985 and 2003 respectively.
Some publishers, I gather, self-consciously use wacky titles, which is a kind of cheating. I like titles that have some kind of technical meaning in one context but happen to be funny in a more general context, like The Theory of Lengthwise Rolling and How To Avoid Huge Ships.