In honor (or outright plagiarism) of this thread, what are some fake books mentioned in other books, TV shows, movies, etc?
I’ll include a few with author given but a couple of the more obscure ones I’m interested to see if anybody can guess. They’ll appear with title and genre but you have to tell the author.
A Jew’s Jesus by Dr. Aaron Jastrow/The Winds of War & War & Remembrance
The Memoirs of General Armin von Roon [same as above, translated and edited by Victor “Pug” Henry]
Diary of a Working Boy by Ignatius J. Reilly (unpublished as of the author leaving New Orleans)
Guess:
Damn You, Daddy, Sir! (memoir)
Alls I Know, Alls the Other Stuff I Know, and Alls I Know About Politics (essays and memoirs of a failed journalist and politician)
My favorite is Edmund: A Butler’s Tale by Gertrude Perkins. “A searing indictment of domestic servitude in the eighteenth century, with some hot gypsies thrown in.”
Kilgore Trout has a veritable library of non-novels.
2BR02B
‘‘Asleep at the Switch’’
The Barring-gaffner of Bagnialto, or This Year’s Masterpiece
The Big Board
‘‘The Dancing Fool’’
The First District Court of
Thank-You
Gilgongo!
The Gospel from Outer Space
The Gutless Wonder
‘‘Hail to the Chief’’
How You Doin’?
Maniacs in the Fourth Dimension
The Money Tree
Now It Can Be Told
Oh Say Can You Smell?
The Pan-Galactic Memory Bank
‘‘Pan-Galactic Straw-Boss’’
became ‘‘Mouth Crazy’’
Pan-Galactic Three-Day Pass
Plague on Wheels
The Planet Gobblers
SF-1, A Selective Bibliography
The Smart Bunny
The Son of Jimmy Valentine
‘‘This Means You’’
Venus on the Half-Shell
The Bible, Organized to be Read as Literature from the James Bond books. When Kingsley Amis published his book The Book of Bond: Or Every Man His Own 007, the British Edition had a dust jacket that had this title on the reverse. I’ve got a copy.
Stay Alive!, also from the Bond books. It’s the book Bond himself was writing on self-defence (cited, IIRC, in Goldfinger)
Sherlock Holmes’ monographs On Cigar Ashes and On the Polyphonic Motets of Lassus.
My favorite fake book is The Grasshopper Lies Heavy by Hawthorne Abdensen, because apparently it’s not fake at all, and we are. (Those confused may refer to Philip K. Dick’s The Man in the High Castle. Although you may be even more confused afterwards.)
There was a great panel on the subject of fake books at the World Fantasy Convention in Austin last November. Most of the titles mentioned here were discussed, along with others, like the myriad of nonexistent works cited by Jorge Luis Borges in his short fiction. The most well known of those is probably the Book of Sand, which has an infinite number of pages, so that you can flip through it and never see the same page twice. Then there’s the Encyclopedia of Tlon, which . . . hell, I can’t even begin to explain that one!