When I was doing research in my campus library a short time ago, I found a book claiming to be the autobiography of William Shakespeare. This struck me as peculiar, for reasons that are obvious. Curious, I decided to read it.
It turned out to be even stranger when I actually read it. It was quite clear, from both word usage and style, that it owed more to the late 19th century (it was published in 1911) than it did to the late 16th, and its’ claims about Shakespeare’s life seem to have come more from earlier authors than from the facts.
The final weirdness came when I researched the self-professed editor (and, in my opinion, the author), expecting to find him to be some obscurity.
He turned out to be the founding secretary of the Royal Historical Society.
“Just how special are Donny, Wayne, Merrill, Alan and Jay? What do they have in common with David Cassidy and the Jackson 5?”
First page:
“There is a new sound in America, a catchy pop sound that is completely different from anything that has ever happened before in pop music. The age of the rock dinosaurs with their blaring chords and their ear-splitting amplification has come to an end”
Whe I was working at the library of the American Museum of Natural History, I found an early 19th-century book on how to track and kill vampires of every nation.
There’s a very very odd book published 1499 or so in Venice called the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili-- something vaguely like (multiple pun) "the Strife of Love in a Dream (but with Polifilo used as the protagonist’s name as well-- Mr Many-Luvs). It’s written in something like Italian mixed up with Latin, Greek, Hebrew, fake hieroglyphics, chaldeaen (!), etc in James Joyce-style portmaneau, following this character (maybe?) from one place to another-- a garden made all of precious gems-- flowers made from diamond and leaves from jade, etc etc, to a huge building shaped like an elephant, etc etc, in search of his women. And the illustrations and typography are absolutely wacky, too-- some totally graphically erotic (for the time–a Priapus character, naughty fauns, etc), others just confusing. A book for the über-elite-intellectual of 1500. It’s the Italian Renaissance equivalent of Finnegan’s Wake.
The Destruction of the Temple a sci-fi novel by Barry N. Malzburg. It’s about a director filming a reenactment of the Kennedy assassination in an apparently post-apocalyptic America who somehow keeps getting looped into the bodies of participants in the actual assassination. The whole thing reads like Hunter S. Thompson wrote it, and even though I’ve read it half a dozen times, I still haven’t completely figured it out.
I found a book in my university library published early 20th century going on this huge crazy rant about how the move away from the gold standard was a massive consipracy by an international cartel to keep the working class down. And that the war and the recession were both deliberatly engineered to keep the population down.
Why Paint Cats? a satire on the art world consisting of dozens of cats painted in various styles, Gothic, classical, op-art, whatever. In addition it has discussions with the cat’s owners discussing their artistic message.
The cats are done in photoshop and the interviews are pure parody.
The thing is that it is so well-done, I had the book for years before I finally and authoritatively figured out it was a send-up.
Great Mambo Chickens and Transforming the Human Condition" – a book about the Extropian movement. They’re most noted for cryogenically preserving their bodies instead of burying them or incinerating them. It was a weird but exhilirating read - to encounter that kind of faith in the future.
Loompanics is a great source of bizarre books, including my favorite: Contingency Cannibalism: Hardcore Survivalism’s Dirty Little Secret (with recipies)
This was actually advertised in Heavy Metal (the comics magazine) circa 1978. The photo looked like it was solidly bound with a gold-leaf pseudo pentagram on the cover.
There was once a chain of drug stores/discount stores called Phar-Morr that I loved because in addition to renting movies for $.69 each (who cares if they’re good?) they sold books for a fraction of the cover cost. Usually it was a recent bestseller or the type of book you’d see in a remainder bin at a chain store, but sometimes they had “the hell?” titles, a couple of which I bought just for my bookshelf. One was a children’s book about Woodstock (luckily not scratch and sniff- “stick the little Mickey Mouse tab on your tongue, then look at the paisley picture”) and the other was my favorite (actually had it, I bought several copies to give as gifts): An Illustrated Guide to Chinchilla Diseases.
Buying too many copies of Chinchilla disease books bankrupted the company. Well, that and executives embezzling a half billion dollars from the company, in some order.
I once ran across The Complete Time Traveler: A Tourist’s Guide to the Fourth Dimention in an isolated antique store run by a Torgo-like fellow…a shop which later completely disappeared from the face of the Earth. (Probably because it was pretty ramshackle, and was built over the bank of a river that’s prone to flooding.)
Odd little book, that. I still have it’s packaged away, somewhere.
And I saw The Stuwwelpeter in Borders, but I already knew about that one, so I don’t suppose it counts.