We have The Alaskan Bootlegger’s Bible at work. The back says something like, “This book has such good instructions for building stills and making your own hooch that it would be very easy to do so, if it weren’t illegal” (paraphrased). I keep thinking of buying it for someone, but I’m not sure who.
I was a fan of Norman Spinrad’s when I was in high school. He wrote a book called The Iron Dream. It was ostensibly a science fiction novel written by Adolph Hitler, a painter and writer living in Paris who had dabbled in radical politics in his youth. Very strange and I’m still not sure whether it was a work of genius or psychosis.
Spinrad also gave us Men In The Jungle, where the 3 protagonists go to a frontier world to foment a revolution in order to gain wealth and power. Things get weird very quickly and there are lavish descriptions of canabalism and rape in the book. Reading the book made me feel dirty, as if I had somehow been made an accomplice in the atrocities.
Finnegans Wake
In his book The Trouble with Tribbles (which is about writing the script, not a novelization), Gerrold claims that he didn’t have Heinlein consciously in mind while writing “Tribbles” – he says he thought he was retelling the story of rabbits in Australia. It wasn’t until later, when somebody pointed out the similarity that he realized it, and recalled reading the book and the flatcats. Some people claim that he got permission from Heinlein, but that’s clearly not true. I believe that he contacted Heinlein about it at one point, and Heinlein was cool with it.
As I noted above, TWHFH was a conscious attempt to cram every time travel cliche into a single volume, so of course he referred to Heinlein’s stories – as well as everyyone else’s. It’s not exactly a “rip off”.
What, no mention of the Codex Seraphinianus yet?
These strange books consist of whole lists of strange books:
Fish Who Answer the Telephone and Other Bizarre Books
How to Avoid Huge Ships and Other Implausibly Titled Books
More macabre than strange but:
Frances Larson’s “Severed - A History of Heads Lost and Heads Found”
About thirty years ago, I found, as I recall. two volumes of a sort of young readers’ illustrated technological history of some spacefarers in the future. Very non-fiction-like, basically a bunch of illustrations, just all made up. I don’t remember the names at all.
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Um, Robert Anton Wilson’s Masks of the Illuminati is actually pretty clever. I don’t think I’d have the patience for it now, but if you want to know what RAW considered a Mind Fuck, reading this book might do it for you.
Shelby Steele’s 2008 book: A Bound Man-Why We Are Excited About Obama and Why He Can’t Win
A few years ago I read Love Is Not Constantly Wondering If You’re Making the Biggest Mistake of Your Life by Anonymous.
I heard about it in this article in Slate which tells you enough about the book for you to understand why it’s weird without spoiling it:
Atlas of Human Anatomy by Dr. Victor H. Frankenstein. There is (or was) a copy in the Herron School of Fine Art Library, IUPUI, Indianapolis. Lots of spectacular hand-drawn illustrations, notes in fine penmanship, and never breaks character.
I actually have several of the books mentioned here.
I can’t remember the title but there’s a book written by Phillip Jose Farmer. Basically it’s about Doc Savage meeting Tarzan. You would think that a book about such an interesting subject written by such a good writer would be interesting. It reads like a fan fiction written by a teenager.
The Third Policeman by Flan O"Brien.
My grandmother had a book published in 1776 detailing how civilization was on the verge of collapse.
Another one I thought of. The Prince of Morning Bells By Nancy Kress. It’s supposed to be a typical fantasy novel, but for some reason she’s replaced a lot of obscure words with sound alike words. For example a sentence like “They attacked the crenelated wall with a trebuchet.” Would be turned into something like “They attacked the mentholated wall with a trebek.” Kind of amusing the first time she did it, vaguely amusing the second time and downright annoying the other 100 times.
“The Dissertation”-by R.M.Koester
A novel about a man with a unique approach to research, he interviews the dead.
I own a Masonic Bible.
When I was in high school in the early 70s, I came across a copy of The Urantia Book while browsing in a B. Dalton bookstore. It freaked me out; I had never had any exposure to alternative religions, and this seemed like a book from a parallel universe. I didn’t buy it, but I told one of my friends about it, and he actually went and bought the damn thing.
Travel phrase books are often hilarious.
In a Greek-English phrase book, chapter “on the boat”, the English sentence “Soon we will see earth.” Meaning, soon we will see land.
A Portuguese phrase book: “Wake me at two o’clock, I shall need to take an aspirin.”
I found one British phrasebook, telling me in the other language what time “half six” is. Luckily I knew the other language well enough to translate “half six” from British to American. Bur now I’ve forgotten, and can’t remember if it is 5:30 or 6:30.
A reprint of an Arabic phrasebook from around 1900: “My shoes are soiled – see that the bootblack is caned.”
Some clever American once wrote an Oklahoma phrase book. Bob wore faints = barbed wire fence. Chick at all = (Would you like me to) check that oil (on your dipstick)?
And the classic from the glorious years of the Raj in India: “Summon the fire brigade, the jute mill has exploded.”
I think the two strangest I read were back in college while browsing the stacks at Kent State.
One was called **Tooth and Talon: Tales of the Australian wild **/ by Henry G. Lamond. Which was a group of stories about various Australian wildlife, with the climax of each being a fight to the death between two males over breeding rights. Every. Single. Story.
The other was Horse-fight and Horse-race in Norse tradition. by Svale Solheim, which was more like a Doctorate paper than a book, but if you wanted to know how the Vikings entertained themselves with their horses, well, this is the definitive work on that topic.
I don’t think I’ve read anything stranger in the last 40+ years…and glad I haven’t.
marque elf wrote: "I was a fan of Norman Spinrad’s when I was in high school. He wrote a book called The Iron Dream. It was ostensibly a science fiction novel written by Adolph Hitler, a painter and writer living in Paris who had dabbled in radical politics in his youth. Very strange and I’m still not sure whether it was a work of genius or psychosis.
Spinrad also gave us Men In The Jungle, where the 3 protagonists go to a frontier world to foment a revolution in order to gain wealth and power. Things get weird very quickly and there are lavish descriptions of canabalism and rape in the book. Reading the book made me feel dirty, as if I had somehow been made an accomplice in the atrocities."
I have read both of those. “Iron Dream” is both a work of genius and psychosis. It comes with an almost superfluous afterword that puts the whole thing into perspective. It is, to say the least, unique.
The strangest book I can think of that achieved best-selling status was this one. I have heard that a movie is in some stage of the works, and if they cast anyone other than John Malkovich as Mr. Penumbra and Seth Rogen as Clay, the movie will be a disastrous failure.
While looking up the link, I found out that the author has since published a prequel called “Ajax Penumbra 1969”. I’ll have to check it out.
A while back, I found a book at a rummage sale called “Clothes Make The Man” that appeared to be about Appalachian mill towns, and the introductory chapter was, as were the plates in the center of the book, but most of the text was stream-of-consciousness rambling.
As a Friends of the Library volunteer, a lot of strange things come our way, and one of the strangest I’ve seen, simply because of the age group it was aimed at, was a book about abortion, from the pro-life Catholic perspective, aimed at lower elementary children. :eek: 
I couldn’t imagine a child that young having the life experience to understand what it was about anyway.
I’m a librarian, so I love this site of weird, wacky and wonderful books that are still on some library shelves that definitely should not be there any more: