Oh God. There have been repeated attempts by misguided Wikipedia editors to rewrite the article about Gadsby as a lipogram, but sanity has prevailed there. I’m disappointed to see that the lunatics have won in the A Void article.
Much of the book is unusual in content rather than form, but the frame story for Barth’s Lost in the Funhouse is supposed to be folded and pasted into a Möbius strip.
After Marvel Comic writer Mark Gruenwald died—he was cremated and his ashes were mixed with the ink used to print the first printing of the trade paperback compilation of the Squadron Supreme 12 part comic book series he wrote in 1985.
There is that novel where every copy is different. Subcutanean did this via print-on-demand; I wonder how many copies he sold, though? I suspect there was some procedural generation involved, meaning you can easily knock out as many variations as you need.
Do pop-up books qualify? There are many modern ones on all kinds of subjects, but I remember two that my father had: One was a steam engine, showing intricate details, and the other a motorcar. I was only allowed to look at them under supervision, and I have no idea what happened to them. I imagine that they would have been quite expensive back in the 1940s.
Oh man, I have two I want to post but I’ll respect the OP, and stick with “Les dîners de Gala” a cookbook by Gala and Salvador Dali. With her stunning dinner party menus and his illustrations, it’s a rich steaming feast for the senses. One of my all time favorite finds.
*ETA: The one in the video is not mine. A signed one would bowl me over!
The Amazon reviews are hilarious.
If we’re gonna submit unusual cookbooks, then I nominate one that’s in my collection - A Treasury of Great Recipes by Vincent Price. Yes, the Vincent Price. It’s not a cookbook in the traditional sense so much as it’s a travelogue of the haute cuisine restaurants he and his wife visited across America and Europe during the peak of his film career and the recipes they cajoled out of the management of those establishments, accompanied by gorgeous color photos and menus. The recipes are organized by the restaurant they originated from instead of by what kind of food they are. They’re hopelessly indulgent recipes from the era where heavy sauces were the norm, mushrooms were a condiment, and “finely chop four truffles” was a reasonable thing to ask of the reader.
https://www.allrecipes.com/vintage-cookbook-treasury-of-great-recipes-8728213
These two books belong together on a shelf.