I have a copy.
Heh, this thread got me thinking about “Venus on the Half-Shell”. I thought it was pretty strange, but even stranger was the pulp novels Simon, the protagonist, was reading.
We have quite a library at home, but nothing too weird.
We do have (I forget the title) an illustrated napkin-folding guide and The Jane Austen Handbook: A Sensible Yet Elegant Guide to Her World. It include fashion, meal plans, manners, etc. My wife likes being fancy every once in awhile.
Oh, and a Bible written in Icelandic.
I saw a copy of a Humument at a library once Tom Phillips - A Humument - now that’s a weird book.
Dude had a lot of time.
Thanks for posting this…I own three different editions of this work (Phillips repeatedly revised and added new and different artwork over the years) plus the app version, and now I see that a “Final” edition has just been published, which is a must-have for me.
I’ve not heard Gerrold’s explanations, only the observation that several of his novels seem “inspired directly” (cribbed?) by Heinlein. Not only The Trouble With Tribbles, and The Man Who Folded Himself, but When Harlie Was One being inspired by The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress - not so much the whole plot but the AI aspects.
TMWFH is a solipsism extension of Heinlein’s two stories, most explicitly with All You Zombies, where the protagonist is a time traveler who was born a hermaphrodite but fertile female who was seduced and impregnated, during delivery the organs were damaged and she was surgically transformed to be a man, who then went on to seduce himself. TMWFH takes that further, by running into alternate reality versions of himself. In each case, every major event in their lives is dictated by another version of themselves.
I believe it means “half hour before 6”.
It’s called “pre-indoctrination” - get 'em early before they know anything by which to evaluate it. “This is the way it is,” at the time when everything a child learns is “This is the way it is” from a “trusted” source.
And of course, “A Matter for Men” is certainly inspired by Starship Troopers (not that there’s anything wrong with that).
At a Saskatoon Public Library book sale, I once bought a copy of a fairly thick book that was named something like “Population Statistics of Ringed Seals (1973-1978)”. It was somewhat dry reading.
Several years ago, my brother found out that our 3rd grade teacher’s master’s thesis was available through inter-library loan (not sure how he found this out) and requested it. He said it was actually fairly interesting; it was a collection of case studies of boys who had benefited from being held back at the kindergarten or 1st grade level.
She got that degree in the early 1960s, and died about 20 years ago.
I’m surprised I didn’t post in this thread the first time around. My oddest is probably Golfing for Cats, although I have an older edition with different cover.
Oh, and I have a German dictionary of American slang, but I haven’t been able to find it in a while.
I picked up a used copy of Black Box, which as its name suggests is a cpllection of final communications from doomed airline crews who realize their existences are about to wink out.
The really weird thing was the bookmark that I found in the book: a boarding pass on a flight from Los Angeles to San Francisco, back in the eighties. So someone apparently considered this to be appropriate reading while flying.
… OK, that ‘different cover’ certainly increases the ‘strange’ level. Is there actually a reason for it, or is it just random weirdness?
As a kid I came across a book in out house that was the US Census for Oregon. For 1860. Just page after page of tables. Surprisingly good sized.
Not just an odd book, but apparently no one knew how it was obtained nor why it was kept.
Here’s a genuinely weird book I found in the bookstore at the American Museum of Natural History many years ago:
The Snouters: Form and Life of the Rhinogrades. It’s a translation from the German original Bau und Leben der Rhinogradentia by Gerolf Steiner, writing under the pseudonym Harald Stumke.
The book is an elaborate parody of Darwinian evolution, only instead of finding a Galapagos full of adapted finches, the fictional author finds an island group populated by mouse-like creatures that have adapted to fill ecological niches in truly bizarre ways, many of them involving their noses 9hence the title)
Maybe calling it a “parody” isn’t accurate – the author was a zoologist fully familiar with (and presumably supportive of) the Theory of Natural Selection, but he carries this to wonderfully absurd extremes. The book is heavily illustrated, so you are treated to images of the Snouters that mimic plants, or that hop on their noses, or that use nasal mucus to ensnare their prey. Several of the drawings appear to be caricatures of people, presumably colleagues. As the Wikipedia article shows, people have gone out of their way to fabricate taxidermic models of some of them. This is light years beyond “jackalopes” as taxidermy hoaxes.
I once stumbled across a particularly weird bit of crank literature called Somebody Else Is On The Moon, which purported to prove that aliens have been building giant devices and cities on the moon, that the astronauts discovered this, and that the gummint is covering it up. The key “evidence” was a batch of photos where some perfectly ordinary feature of the lunar landscape is circled and labelled as some sort of alien artifact. :dubious: :rolleyes:
I’ve seen that book. It’s not just a LOne Nut – there were several people drumming that particular drum, from at least the 1950s on. You can read about some of the others in Frank Edwards’ books (Stranger than Science, [I[Strange World*, Strangest of All…) Edwards was something of a nut, himself.
Anyway, at first the “inhabited Moon” nuts had to rely on observations and telescopic photographs. Later they had NASA images from the lunar orbiters and such.
If I recall correctly, the book you’re citing uses NASA pictures and claims to make out “X-drones”, constructions that look sorta like chromosomes. They’re big sloppy crossed tubes that he thinks are (were) excavating lunar soil for some nefarious purpose.
The thing is, there was a time when this didn’t seem – pardon me – looney. Look at this headline from The New York Times (!!!) from 1911:
https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_New_York_Times/Martians_Build_Two_Immense_Canals_in_Two_Years
I’ve actually read that book! It was as wacky as it sounds.
I also recently (as in within the past 2 weeks) watched a “documentary” about the same topic.
In the foreword, the author explains, facetiously, I think, that the three best-selling topics for books are golf, cats andNazi Germany, and that the cover was designed to tap into that popularity for increased sales. The book itself has nothing to do with any of them; it’s just a collection of columns written by Alan Coren.
Alan Coren, incidentally, was the father of Victoria Coren Mitchell, who might be familiar to folks around here for her appearances on QI and other British TV shows.
As a teenager interested in the occult, I found a book supposedly translated from a book written by an Arab person who was relaying the teachings of Simon Magus’ son (or maybe grandson).
It started with a stern warning that only the strongest willed person could control the demons that the following spells would unleash and even then, disaster was almost inevitable.
Then the rest of the book were a series of numbers arranged in square patterns that you were supposed to carve on plates of specific precious metals. I think jewels were somehow involved as well.
Each “numbers square” was for a different spell, such as flying or gaining wealth and they all involved summoning demons to bend to the summoner’s will.
There were other notes on the rituals to perform for each spell.
Whoever created the book would have made a cool DM.