Does this description sound right:
If so, it’s a children’s book by John Verney published in 1964.
KneadtoKnow - thank you. I’m sure that’s the book. thanks again!
Third page.
Well, this theory, that I have, that is to say, which is mine,… is mine. My theory is along the following lines…
The 1960s are the direct successor to the 1920s. An accident of space-time warpage introduced three extraneous decades in between, which never should have been put there. They just confuse cultural historians. If you take those three decades out, the entire 20th century starts to make sense and goes the way it was supposed to go.
That is the theory that I have and which is mine and what it is, too.
The NinJew- A very fit Jew details his approach to life and a fictional story of stopping terrorists.
Haikus For Jews- The title says it all
The Angry Clam- a picture book. A clam searches for meaning in the universe.
Happy to help. It’s a fairly widely-held book, so if your local public library does not own it, they should be able to get it for you via inter-library loan.
Among my rarities (which I’m sure others have read):
as I noted on the What Are You Reading This Month threads, I’ve recently read a bunch of histories and geographies from the first half of the 19th century. I don’t have the titles with me, but they’re fascinating. History stops with Andrew Jackson and there are a lot fewer states – but they cover history and geography more intensely because there’s less of it. I don’t have any titles at hand.
End Product: The First Taboo by Sabbath. A book entirely devoted to shit. Literally. Oddly fascinating.
Two Planets by Kurd Lasswitz, the German contemporary of Jules Verne who has been unjustly neglected in English-speaking countries.
The Snouters – a German fantasy about Darwinian evolution on an island where a single species of rodent has adapted to fill all ecological niches, like Darwin’s finches. the book is tongue-in-cheek, so many of the adaptations are wonderfully ludicrous. Some of them look as if they were deliberately drawn as caricatures of people, but who they were (politicians? entertainers? well-known evolutionary biologists?) I have no idea.
I obtained an original German copy and gave it to my (German) Ph.D. Advisor when I graduated.
After Man- A zoology of the far future
Man After Man- An anthropology of the far future
Hercolubos Or The Red Planet- a lunatic’s predictions of the coming end of mankind.
LSD And Psychotherapy- Freudianism on acid.
But . . . but . . . we’d miss Jean Harlow, and the Andrews Sisters . . . and Betty Grable!
One of my favorites is an historical adventure novel entitled The Year of the Horsetails. It was published in the 1960s, I found it in a pile of used books of $1, and I’ve never come across anyone who has read it - though no doubt somebody here has. I recommend it on occasion.
The unique aspect of the book is that it has an extremely well-researched setting - the nomadic invasions of settled peoples on the fringes of the steppe - without ever specifically locating the place or the time.
I’ve read a couple of collections of short stories by Turkish author Aziz Nesin. He’s a humorist in the vein of Mark Twain, James Thurber, or Ring Lardner … i.e., he pokes fun at society’s foibles, though in his case it’s Turkish society. For some reason, he’s fantastically popular in Vietnam, but I haven’t seen his books in English. Amazon has a couple, but they don’t look like the stories I’ve read.
That sounds fascinating.
Google books shows that three copies exist in libraries. Since it’s out of copyright, hopefully someone will digitize it soon.
To be fair, there wasn’t an English translation until 1971 and even that one was abridged.
As a kid, I read not only the novelization for the movie E.T. The Extra Terrestrial, but also the sequel novel, E.T. The Book of the Green Planet.
By F Gwynplaine “Froggy” MacIntyre (name probably misspelled).
AFAIK, it’s never been published. I was working at the home of George Scithers, member of the Trapdoor Spiders, friend and editor to Isaac Asimov, and agent of Macintyre. Mostly, I read submissions for weird tales. One day, a large box bearing the picture of a two headed hermaphrodite and the words The Lesbian Man arrived. I was curious so I read a bit. It was fascinating in a horrible way.
In a dystopian future, a man has to leave the settlement he belongs to. Along the way he injures his hands. He finds a new settlement where the women are normal, but the men are Crogs- beast things the women generally don’t realize are members of the human species. He gets sold at a slave auction, where a brand injures his tongue. His new owner knows that he is inteligent but disguises him as a half Crog half dog hybrid to fool the other women.
That’s as far as I ever got. The above description utterly fails to convey the weirdness of the book. Macintyre could write. He had numerous published sf and fantasy stories and a few books. So the Lesbian Man is NOT a bad read. It’s just that he got obssessed with a few strange ideas, threw in a few stranger ones and wrote a book about them.
Froggy also wrote a letter to Mr Scithers when Like Water For Chocolate was really hot and the recipe novel was in. He was probing interest in a recipe novel involving female killers who ate their male victims.
I am not making this up.
Well dammit, I was going to mention the long-out-of-print Flicker by Theodore Roszak, but it’s been reissued as a “Rediscovered Classic”. But if you like film, and you like books like Foucalt’s Pendulum, this is a winner.
I’ve read both of those! Pretty cool IIRC.
Oh! More good humor books, both by Douglas Jerrold, a friend of Chas. Dickens: Mrs. Caudel’s Curtain Lectures, and The Biography of a Feather. I found both, first editions, at a dusty old bookshop, and just fell in *love *with Jerrold.
The Wicker Man. I forget the author.
*To Walk the Night *and The Edge of Running Water, both by William Sloane, a fantasy author of the 1930’s.
This interested me so I Googled it and came up with this 1887 NY Times article: Fair but Faithless, the story of which actually details a plot you’d expect a typical serving wench to enjoy. 
Everything about Froggy was made up, including Froggy himself. The details of his death were bizarre, to say the least.
I read this when I was in a John Sladek phase. He was a very funny writer.
Others for my list:
The Carpet Makers by Andreas Eschbach. Eschbach is Germany’s best SF writer, and this was his only book translated into English. An amazing story about a world where people make carpets of human hair – millions of them – and send them off to the emperor. No one knows why. The solution will blow you away. Hell, reading just the first chapter (which appeared in Fantasy & Science Fiction in 2001) and will blow you away. Probably the best SF novel of the 2000s and unlike any other.
Swashbuckling Editor Stories – not a joke, and actually a decent collection.
L’Homme qui dort cent ans (The Man Who Slept 100 Years) – a French science fiction novel that I haven’t been able to track down since I read it.
Where Were You Last Pluterday? by Paul van Herck