You should wish you had bought it. First editions are selling for quite a profit nowadays. I have one, if you want to negotiate…not that I’ll sell, mind you. But you can negotiate, if you like.
The idea (for those who haven’t run across this tome) is that a young girl was seeing fairies, but no one would believe her. So, in the tradition of pressing flowers, she would capture the fairies she saw by squishing them between the covers of her book, thus preserving them for posterity.
As a result, it is full of…well, basically…squashed fairies. Including their juices. Interspersed with Miss Cottington’s (a riff on the Cottingly Fairies, mind you) diary entries as she grows up. Quite a lovely book, really; and as Guin notes, quite hilarious.
Terry Jones of “Monty Python” fame, and Brian Froud of “Dark Crystal” fame…amongst others for both of them.
That’s by David Gerrold, who gave us (among other things) The Star Trek episode “The Trouble with Tribbles”. TMWFH was an attempt to jam every time travel cliche he could think of into a single story.
Back during the height of the Rubik’s cube craze I bought a book written by an English prodigy on how to solve the damned thing. It wasn’t well written and I got nowhere with it - started looking for another, better book.
When our Scholastic Book catalog featured Not Another Cube Book, I place the order then awaited the day I could show off to my friends.
Book arrived. Not a whit of an instruction contained therein. It was a spoof of how the cube shaped history, tracing its roots back to Adam and Eve (illustration of a forsaken apple while Adam was twiddling). Strange, obscure, and dumb to boot!
More recently, on a whim in Chapters I picked up a copy of Time’s Arrow. I’m not sure how obscure it is; I’ve yet to meet someone who’s heard of it.
Strange though. It’s written backwards. No, not like the movie Memento where you see the end scene, followed by the scene that happened just before it, leap frogging back to the beginning. It’s more like watching a film while it’s rewinding. The story begins with the protagonist dead - then a few seconds later he feels much better, surrounded by doctors, ultimately concluding with his birth - the other end of his life. Conversations begin with “Goodbye” and end with “Hello” The description of going to the bathroom will make you clench! The strange device works though, adding drama and unique perspective on the Nazi atrocities.
I have! I bought that on a recommendation from a friend. I wasn’t too into it the first time I read it so perhaps it’s time to try it again. Thanks for the reminder.
Ooh! I had that book in middle school, and the pictures of the “floating” objects used to freak me out immensely.
The strangest book I’ve ever found is a used copy of a Kreskin book…I’m fairly sure it’s called “Kreskin Predicts Your Future Through 2000!” but I’m unable to find it on Amazon or anything. It was a most amusing read about things to expect up through the year 2000, including large cities sinking into the sea (not anything so obvious as Los Angeles or anything…I believe it was Denver, possibly?!), alien attacks, and the world coming to an end sometime in the mid-nineties.
The coolest/strangest thing, however, was that at some point someone had tucked several newspaper clippings of accounts of people vanishing between the pages of the book. Not vanishing as in they were never heard from again, but vanishing before someone’s eyes. At least ten different clippings, dating back to the 60’s if memory serves. We’ve still got it somewhere.
Sounds like he ripped both stories off from Heinlein. The time travel story appears to be a mix of By His Bootstraps and All you Zombies…, while tribbles bear an uncanny resemblance to the martian fuzzballs in The Rolling Stones.
I still have my copies of Bloodletters and Badmen. The author, Jay Robert Nash, wrote a number of other true-crime books just as lurid, if not more so.
I work with scientific and scholarly books all day, and every now and then one comes through with a title that makes it sound a lot weirder than it is, like **Colour Atlas of the Autopsy ** or Ballistic Trauma: A Practical Guide. I thought of this very thread today when I saw **Handbook of Drowning ** in the day’s delivery.
The book was published in 1994. First editions would have been long gone by 2001. (My ex has a first printing–autographed by Terry Jones, no less.) I see that there’s a new edition out, however, with a bonus DVD.
We’ve got Dancing With Cats on remainder at the store where I work. At least one customer has bought it under the impression that it’s serious. I made some light-hearted comment and got one of those lost, flaky stares, as she said, “But it’s really about cat dancing. It’s not a parody.”
Why Paint Cats is hysterical. I think Dancing and Why Cats Paint are by the same people, but Why Paint Cats isn’t.
I found a complete guide to hot dog cookery in a used bookstore a few years ago. It looked to be printed in the Seventies.
I’ve read some wierd short stories by Frank Herbert (author of the original six Dune novels). I don’t remember the titles of all the stories but they were in an anthology called The worlds of Frank Herbert
Depends on what you mean by “a lot.” It was originally published in Great Britain in 1994 by Pavilion Books Limited. So kinda older, but not dreadfully. I’ve always loved Froud, and this book (which I actully read all the way through, and is rather interesting) absolutely cracked me up. Have you ever seen the book “FAERIES” by Brian Froud and Alan Lee? That was my first Froud experience. There was recently a 25th anniversary reprint of it published.
Brian Froud’s website http://www.worldoffroud.com/ is a joy, and his wife Wendy was the puppet designer for Yoda, as well as some of the characters in The Dark Crystal.
I’m trying to think of other strange books that I have. I’ve got an old edition of “The Adventures of Baron Munchausen” with illustrations by Gustave Dore, but there’s no date. I have a copy of a small (4"x6") of a book entitled “Modern Ghosts,” published by Harpers, and stating nothing but a copyright of 1890. It evidently sat for the majority of a hundred years in the Free Public Library in Mt. Pleasant, Iowa, but was never read. When I grabbed it from a used bookstore ($5.00), the page edges hadn’t been trimmed, and I had to cut the thing open at several places just to read it. That was kind a neat experience: to know that I was the first person to read a 100 year old book.
I also own a copy of a book on alphabets published in Würzburg in 1893, some of which are completely obsolete, and others of which (Russian, for example) have been altered in the intervening century. It’s all in German, except for the page on German, which is written in English.
I also have an illustrated copy of “Salome” by Oscar Wilde that was printed in 1945, which is not only hand-illuminated (gold paint on several illustrations), but also printed in (help me out here: quarto, maybe?) a fashion where the tops of every pair of pages are still connected.
Then there is “The Monuments of Mars: A City on the Edge of Forever” by Richard Hoagland: all about the Face on Mars, and how it (and everything else) proves a prior civilization. That was a gift, so I didn’t waste money on it. Still, it was a fascinating read…even if he’s completely off his rocker.
Tear me out of my bookshelf before I kill a hamster.
I’m a machinist and am on the lookout for old tools and books about machine shop stuff.
Oddest book yet is a 300+ page hardcover “The history of the grinding wheel” I leafed through it whan I got home. I’d rather watch paint dry than look at it again.
That reminds me of the brick-sized “A History of Beer and Brewing” from the Royal Society of Chemistry. 700+ pages if I recall, and only a few of them interesting, even though I like beer. It’s an accomplishment to make beer boring. The RSC likes to issue titles for lay audiences like “The Science of Chocolate” and “The Science of Ice Cream” which would be a lot more popular if they weren’t so damn expensive (“The Science of Ice Cream” is $59.95 for Og’s sake).
Another oddity sent to my workplace was an alleged history of vodka (I wouldn’t bet on its accuracy, though parts of it were entertaining) that also rated various brands using one to three hammer-and-sickle symbols. This book was written well nearly 15 years after the fall of the Soviet Union, and the whole idea of rating vodkas with hammers-and-sickles is about as tasteful as rating Rhine wines with swastikas anyway.
“MADE” woman??? Are you drunk again? 
