My contribution to this thread will be a humble one. As a small boy in the early-mid 80s, I had a rather strange little humorist volume which, if I recall correctly, was called “Your Birthday Bean Book”. It was written in a mockumentary style about beans. There were short vignettes about, well, beans, illustrated by simple drawings. For example, there was a drawing of a pianist singing: “I’m in the mood for beans!” Or a drawing of one Inuit throwing another out of an igloo, with a caption saying that “Eskimos” don’t eat baked beans, because there are no windows in igloos (I didn’t get the joke until much later). Another image showed a stonemason working on a skyscraper and using individual beans as bricks, and the caption claimed that some of the tallest buildings in the world were made entirely of beans. Throughout, there were drawings of a funny little man carrying around a basket full of beans and doing things like throwing a bean into his mouth.
I don’t know what happened to that book. My parents likely got it in a clearance bin at the local discount department store. I have tried to Google it, but have found no trace of it.
I own a copy of The Weeping Book. The Mysterious Package company mails books that look like handwritten diaries with articles and clippings and photos in them. Friends bought me the Weeping Book. It’s a lot of fun.
I’ve got this, and love it. The Chants are played to the hilt – to the non-discerning ear, they sound like real Gregorian chants. But if you listen closely, the lines are filled with puns, Pig Latin (appropriately), and “dog latin” puns.
I wouldn’t count this as a gimmick book, though. It’s a CD with an attached libretto.
The Madman’s Library, which I chanced to pick up last year, has at least a couple of these that were meant for commercial sale, IIRC.
The rest are of unusual subject (Didn’t use the letter “E,” or were supposed to have been composed by automatic writing from a psychic link with Martians, were supposedly signed by the devil, etc.), unusual physical composition (all the pages were different types of cheese), or were more art/protest projects (the collection of Brazil’s tax codes, which is two meters high and weighs seven tons).
I mastered the first step, “The Drop”. “Take all three balls. Drop them on the floor. It’s important to get this step right, as you’ll be doing it quite a lot” (not sure I’ve got the phrasing right, but you get the gist).
My daughter once got a cookbook from a school book fair - not a Klutz-branded item; if it had been, the included spatula might have been better quality. We put the spatula in the dishwasher’s utensil rack - and it melted and dripped plastic through the holes in the rack, then cooled off and was completely stuck in place. IIRC, we had to use a utility knife to cut off the drips.
Not a gimmick, per se, but the year Cryoburn (by Lois McMaster Bujold) came out, my brother gifted us with a hardback copy - which included a CD of all the other Vorkosi-verse books (except Memory; Bujold said that was likely omitted because it was never published in an omnibus edition; I say they, er, simply forgot…). We delightedly added the entire CD to Calibre, and now have the books on our Kindles. Sometimes professional books (e.g. an Oracle database book I own) come with a CD in them, either of the entire text, or of all the examples and exercises.
I learned to juggle from this, and had those lovely cubes until one of them burst.
The Klutz line of books also produced the book that taught me my very first guitar chords, “Country & blues guitar for the musically hopeless”. That one came with tape cassettes.
Baen books used to do this with a number of their books. I have several CDs with the early Honor Harrington books as well as some of David Weber’s other works.
Some kids books had a cartoon in the corner animated by flipping pages.
I liked the Sabine books
Breakfast of Champions had drawings.
Some puzzle books offered prizes (one had no title but lots of hexagons on the cover, a sequel to one already mentioned?).
Some promised monsters at the end but failed to deliver, despite significant obstacles
In some you had to find a hidden character, perhaps @pulykamell?
“Scratch and sniff” kids books were a thing I vaguely remember; others had pull tabs. Since many of these were library books, they could be pretty well used by the time one read them
I have a copy of Action Figure! somewhere.
The Cat’s Quizzer was a gimmicky book.
A few books had (as per Nat Geo) hologram covers.
Some collections (New Yorker cartoons) came with a disc with all of them
Billy and the Boingers Bootleg came with terrible music, even if you liked Bloom County
As a kid I had two joke books by a guy named Larry Wilde (almost certainly a pseudonym). One was an Italian and Polish Joke book. The other was Irish and Jewish. The jokes were exactly what you are thinking but the books had no back cover but instead two front covers and you could flip the book and start reading which ever of the four books you wanted.
For instance, each letter could be represented by a capital letter, a lower-case letter, a signal flag, Morse code, Braille, ASL and semaphore – and each of those had to be marked off individually on the checklist.
There were amazing numbers of fish, birds and butterflies, too…
Would [i]Cloud Atlas[/] count as a gimmick? It consists of six loosely connected novellas nested within each other like a Russian doll. Halfway through the first story, the story stops in mid-sentence and the next page is the beginning of the second story, which is from the viewpoint of the reincarnation of the first story’s protagonist. The third story likewise starts halfway through the second, and so on until the sixth story which is presented uninterrupted, followed by the conclusion of the fifth, with the end of the first story making up the end of the book. In each story, the protagonist reads the previous story at some point, which introduces some “spoilers” as you hear them comment on things you haven’t read yet.
It’s definitely an interesting way to tell a story.
