I have a hardcover of the Simon edition of the Necronomicon (as advertised in Heavy Metal, Omni, and other magazines at the time). It makes a great coffee table book.
My guests don’t stay very long.
tiltypig beat me to “Why Cats Paint.” I’ve never heard of “Why Paint Cats,” though. I could never decide whether WCP was a send-up, or not. I’ve seen elephants paint (and they weren’t just slopping paint at random, they were painting recognisable pictures), so you never know.
The strangest book that I’ve every seen (and I am still kicking myself for not splurging on it 15 years later) was a very large (probably 12-14 inches tall, 10-12 inches deep, and 3-4 inches thick) book I found in a used bookstore once. I am convinced that I cannot remember the title verbatim, because I have never been able to find any reference to it on the internet. However, it dealt with the brothers and sisters of Tetragrammaton. The basic thesis was that the God of the Bible had many siblings, and this book contained the Scriptures of the rest of His family. I don’t recall the copyright date, but I’m guessing it was close to 100 years ago. All of the illustrations were finely detailed engravings, and the print was very small.
They wanted $60 for it at the time, which I didn’t have. When I went back to buy it, it was gone.
If it rings a bell for anyone, let me know. I would love to have this on my shelf.
I got seriously taken in by this a few weeks ago in a book shop - the artistic pretension in the critiques of the paintings is absolutely spot-on. It was only towards the end that I realised it was a spoof. Hilarious book.
The weirdest Book I ever found was End Product: The Last Taboo. It’s a book about poop. I have the only copy I’ve ever seen. Other books have come out that purport to be about this topic, but they invariably end up having a lot about non-ordure subjects, even Scatalog.
I’ve come across a book that must have cited Eve’s vampire-killer book. And when The Master himself wrote on the topic of vampires many years ago, he cited either Eve’s book or mine, because he lists a number of ways to kill vampires from various countries.
Another weird book I found – You Can Smoke!, written by a bunch of Tobacco Industry Shills. It questioned the evidence linking tobacco to cancer, emphysema, high blood pressure, and other conditions. There were more cancers now because we had better detection methods – stuff like that. This came out in the 1960s and I picked it up at a bargain table for $0.19. Freaked my father out when he found it, because he thought I m,ight have been convinced, and would start smoking. But I only picked it up for its curiousity value – it was obviously a scam that I couldn’t believe anyone would be taken in by it. They probably were, though.
I have the good fortune to be in acquaintance with a rare book dealer who specializes in unearthing rather odd literary curiosities. His most impressive volume though had to the genuine (certified by historians no less) Confederate States Army - guide to battlefield surgical procedures.
My acquaintance (being a bit of a scatterbrained old hippie) had left it on the floor of his apartment, at the bottom of a heap of other less interesting books, for several years (!) until one of our mutual friends happened to be snooping through his apartment (long story) and came across it. In fact, the dealer had forgotten he even had it.
A novel called Krazy Kat. Not by George Herriman, but featuring his characters - it was a stream-of-consciousness novel based on the comic strip, that had no plot that I can recall (except for Ignatz occasionally throwing bricks at Krazy and Pup locking him up).
While cleaning out a storeroom in the Texas Parks and Wildlife Department headquarters in Austin several years ago, I came across a pamphlet from the early 1960s about the importance of keeping orderly files. It was important, you see, because after a nuclear attack we’ll need orderly files to make sure the remaining irradiated mutants can get back to business as usual as easily as possible. Seriously, that was the reason they gave. It was full of little illustrations of a stereotypical secretary in heels and pearls taking orders from her boss and typing and filing everything to his specifications.
Strange, yes, but not, I think as strange as many isted here, or as obscure. It’s been reprinted many times, and made into a film by George Pakl. I highly recommend it.
Another book by Charles G. Finney, but harder to find, is The Unholy City.
Wow, I read this thread earlier today, hit up the bookstore this afternoon, and what’s the very first book I see on display when I enter the store? Why Cats Paint, of course.
I remember a book published around 1970 called Telecult Power, which p to promised to teach anyone how to read minds, perform telekinesis, and silently compel others, through telepathy, to do things. You would also learn how to will physical objects into being.
I shudder to think what it would have meant if all that had been true. Sort of like what we say would happen if we all had those flying cars we were promised, raised a few orders of magnitude.
Lady Cottington’s Pressed Fairy Book* by Terry Jones (illustrated by Brian Froud). Gorgeous, but wacky portraits of fairies “pressed” into an album by a made woman. Hilarious. I wish I had bought it (I first saw it along with “Dance with Your Cat” at a Dopefest).
was a trio of books that I constantly took out of the library when I was in high school. I don’t think it was normal then ( or now) for some catholic high school girl to take out books on serial killers and murdering lunatics.
I still wish I had these books. (they helped keep the perky cheerleaders at bay.)
The Man Who Folded Himself is a time-travel yarn with a weird wrinkle. Our hero is presented with a time machine built into a belt by a strangely familiar old man. Along the way, he finds out that every time he travels, he leaves himself in a separate reality stream. He starts to run into himself all over the place. Somehow, one of him becomes female, and he mates with her. He happens on to a place where he dies, over and over again, witnessed by several of him, and her. He figures out that the old man who gave him the belt was him. Very strange.
Naked Lunch by Wm. S. Burroughs is a painfully strange book. It may be the only book in the world where the movie was better, and much, much stranger.
Topsy Dingo Wild Dog is a very strange book. It starts out odd, and gets really weird. It’s very funny. It’s brutal, too, but more funny.
I ran into an odd little book called something like “Tea and Sympathy for the Devil,” proving that Prince Charles is the anti-christ. Proving it several different ways, as a matter of fact.
It was of course self-published, and very poorly edited, and not well laid out (no margins, very few paragraph breaks).
In the cat vein, I love the idea of “Why Paint Cats?” (as opposed to Why Cats Paint but there is an actual book called Calculus for Cats and . . . it’s pretty good. You can actually buy this one from amazon.com.