Heres the straight dope:
I am making a hollow book as a gift to someone. I want you all to list some hard cover books with boring covers and titles. I want some snooze fests that hardly anyone would be interested in. Something so esoteric and humdrum that it will be a veritable purloined letter on their bookshelf.
Shower me with your vast knowledge of the mundane and uninteresting!
The Baking Powder Controversy in Two Volumes - A Collection of Data.
What do I win?
Hazardous Chemicals: Desk Reference, 1742 pages. I even have the book for you to use.
My coworker used a dictionary when he made one.
The Bible. Everyone’s read it, or has had an opportunity to if they were interested and/or ever slept in a hotel, so no one will be flipping through it to find out if it’s any good. Grab a free one from a hotel (they want you to take them), since those have the most boring covers imaginable, and most people are blind to them now anyways from having seen them so much. I really think it’s the one book everyone owns(*), so no one will ever look at in someone else’s home.
(*actually, I don’t even have one, but I could if I wanted, which is kind of the point I’m getting at).
Or the Joy of Cooking (or Jehane Benoît, if your friend is from Quebec!). An old, ratty stained copy from a garage sale, that looks like your grandmother passed down to you. Same rationale as for the Bible, except for the free-in-hotels bit.
Nah, the dictionary and the Bible are both books that someone might conceivably grab off the shelf to look something up in.
But I think it’d be pretty safe that no one would consult a table of logarithms nowadays.
You’re kidding, right? There’s a bestseller on the history of salt and anotehr on coffee. Now I want to read all about the Baking Powder War.
Here’s my entry in the boring book club: 1146 pages, and currently on its third edition:
[The Prokaryotes: Archaea. Bacteria: Firmicutes, Actinomycetes By Martin Dworkin](The Prokaryotes: Archaea. Bacteria: Firmicutes, Actinomycetes By Martin Dworkin)
Anything with the words “Uniform Commercial Code” in the title.
Sadly, that sounds interesting. How about Classics in Austrian Economics: A Sampling in the History of a Tradition (The Pickering Masters). It’s a three volume set, which may not be what you want. Although you could hollow the third volume, assuming that no one would get that far.
I inherited a set. The covers a very plain.
Not to be a spoilsport, but it doesn’t matter which book is suggested if you can’t find a copy. So wouldn’t you start by looking at your bookshelf to see which book you want to sacrifice, or wander through a used bookstore or library sale to look for something dull?
I did a project a couple years ago that required destroying a book, and I used an old astronomy book - not because astronomy books aren’t awesome, but because I have ones that are much more up to date. Maybe think along those lines?
Bah. Next you’ll be telling me that a CRC handbook is not an interesting text. Seriously, though, if I came upon that text in someone’s library and it had been damaged, I’d be annoyed.
The winner: A Million Random Digits with 100,000 Normal Deviates, copyright 1955 by The RAND Corporation. It’s exactly what it says on the tin: A million random numbers, generated using a computer with an ‘artificial roulette wheel’ attached to it, with 100,000 normal deviates (I didn’t know the SDMB had so many members!), all for use in things like Monte Carlo simulations. It’s 600 pages and you can buy the hardbound edition used for about $50 on Amazon; Wikipedia knows where you can legally get the data for free.
I looked at the Amazon listing for the book, and people who looked at that book looked at some other, um, interesting items.
The reader reviews are a hoot!
Oh, god, that was awesome.
Maybe I’m just a particular form of weird geek, but every single book listed here would probably catch my eye enough to flip through it and ask the owner why the hell they even had it, let alone whether or not it was interesting. And I do randomly grab my CRC handbook and flip though it just for fun, and I’m annoyed that one of my cats chewed on one corner of one of the covers!
Every book would have some attraction to someone, of course, but I still think the way to go is with a book that everyone has seen and knows well enough that it’s unlikely to get randomly picked up by someone browsing a bookshelf, rather than a weird and obscure title that might spark curiosity. In that vein, maybe one of the Harry Potter books would do? 
Old software manuals/bibles.
This was what I was going to suggest - obsolete computer books. “Windows 95 Secrets Revealed!” and the like.
This is about as amusing as I thought it would be. I knew someone would suggest books that other people would want to dig right into.
I’m an atheist, so a bible is an amusing idea, and of course, most people aren’t going to grab it for a random read when visiting. It could be delicious irony to place another book inside it.
On the other hand, its conceivable that someone might want to read it. Its going to my sister, so if I can get someone annoyed at her… hey, what are big brothers for?
The old computer manual sounds like a good idea, though I have some 20 year old books on design theory that are still interesting reads. It would probably have to be something like a windows manual, though in hard cover.
At my old job we had huge hard bound books on sewer construction. How I wanted my own copy. Same with most of these ideas.
I was thinking about one of those old books with dull green or maroon colors and faded lettering, but then thats going to ironically stand out at her place.
The other option would be to go the other way. Make a faux-book that has a big lock on it.
Oh and that random book? Just the thing I would LOVE to own. Anyone want to get it for me for Xmas? 
Find the biggest SAT review guide you can find…your hardest task would be getting one in hardcover. It doesn’t matter which, though, since no-one over 18 wants to deal with that test ever again, and the only thing drier than the test are the test prep books.