Balance Can you give us more detail on How To Build A Corpse? I enjoy craft projects, and a corpse would not look particularly out of place in my apartment (Quite a bit of space is devoted to the Universal Studios monsters).
The Big Book Of Urban Legends
Cooking To Kill The Poison Cook-Book
The Whole Pop Culture Catalog With sections devoted to such things as sea monkeys, 3 D movies, and pink flamingos
The Book Of Sequels
An issue of National Geographic. The entire cover (front, back,and spine) is a hologram.
Apocalypse Wow! James Finn Garner examines crystals, Nostradamus, Edgar Cayce, and the Book Of Revelations.
SPACE ALIENS FROM THE PENTAGON: Flying Saucers are Man-Made Electrical Machines by William Lyne. The title is pretty self-explainatory. I bought it because it contained the author’s patent application for an “infinitely variable pneumatic transmission” that actually looked feasible. It wasn’t.
Behold a Pale Horse by William Cooper. General UFO and conspiracy theory fare. I bought it because in the aformentioned “Space Aliens…” book, William Lyne calls Cooper a crackpot. I had hoped that someone whom a crackpot called a crackpot would actually be sane. No luck.
Sure–here’s the info I emailed Bosda when he asked about it:
There’s no author’s name or ISBN on it, but the copyright is held by DiStefano Productions. The company’s website is http://www.distefano.com. They sell the book as well as completed corpses (for around $500-$600) and other props. I originally got the book from http://www.terrorbydesign.com, which is an excellent source for house-haunting props, but they no longer carry it.
Balance Thank you for the links. Cooking To Kill contains recipes with few details and no information on poison. Recipes are often based on puns and devoted largely to murdering the victim instead of cooking them. It is, however, a fun book to leave around the kitchen when having guest over. I recommend To Serve Man instead. The recipes are detailed. Information is provided on how to select a proper specimen, preservation of raw meat, and other relevant subjects. It’s also conveniently available on Amazon
I don’t have anything demonic, anarchic, psychedelic, conspiracy-related, or illegal. But I do have a few volumes of modest interest.
I have a trilingual edition of the New Testament. Each page shows the same block of text in Greek, Latin, and English. Fully annotated. My high school librarian gave it to me when she learned I was taking Greek in grad school, but I bet it’s worth a lot of money.
Gregg Shorthand Manual Simplified. Not only do very few people study shorthand nowadays, but this book has been reprinted and sold without any revisions (it would seem) since the 50s. The sample sentences are so out-of-date that they’re hilarious, as are the extremely patronizing statements about female secretaries.
The Ancient Engineers. A pretty neat little volume on the construction of the pyramids. I noted with great interest that the Unabomber quoted it in his manifesto. And the fact that he had checked this book out of a public library repeatedly was one of the pieces of circumstantial evidence that would have been used in his prosecution.
The Odyssey, translated by W.H.D. Rouse. This eminent scholar opted to translate Homer’s epic poem as a novel, which comes off as rather strange. He uses the gods’ epithets as surnames, so you have “Athena Ox-Eyes” and “Apollo Shoot-Afar”.
Saints and Society. A book that goes a long way to proving that most medieval saints of the more ascetic bend were actually sadomasochists. Disturbing.
Eroticism and the Body Politic. We were assigned five books to read for my historical methodology class, but allowed to skip one. This one I skipped. But it’s still on my bookshelf.
The Cajun Night Before Christmas. St. Nick dresses in muskrat and drives a skiff drawn by eight flying alligators.
I almost forgot! We also have Criswell Predicts Your Future Until the Year 2000! We found it in a used bookstore a couple years ago, with some very odd newspaper clippings folded up inside of it concerning some local disappearances. It’s most amusing, because he predicts that the world will actually come to an end in 1997 or so, shortly after Denver is either overrun by homosexuals or destroyed by a mysterious cloud, I forget which.
We have a book called Why Cats Paint, which discusses the study of cats who inexplicably express themselves by painting when offered canvas and oils. It’s a very good parody and it’s fooled nearly every person to whom my hub’s shown it.
The Amanita family library also includes (as mentioned by other Dopers) copies of Lady Cottington’s Pressed Fairy Book, The Anarchist’s Cookbook, and Nothing in This Book Is True, but It’s Exactly How Things Are.
Mr. Amanita has a large blue hardback copy of The Urantia Book. We also have a hardcover copy of both The Book of Mormon and a Gideon Bible. We also have a Jerusalem Bible and a Good News Bible. We like to put these all on a shelf with our large occult book collection. A Witch’s Bible tends to upset people most… I think it’s the stark cover.
We also discovered when we combined libraries that we have a lovely book-ended set of How to Think about Weird Things (his) and Why People Believe Weird Things (mine). This says a lot about our relationship.
I have Sybil Leek’s Book of Curses, which is out of print now. I paid nearly $50 for it through Alibris. I like to keep it on the shelf next to my 1956 edition of Amy Vanderbilt’s Book of Etiquette that I found in a second-hand book store.
I have a glossy coffee table book called Cities of the Dead: New Orleans Cemeteries.
I have hardcover copies of The Tao of Pooh and The Te of Piglet.
I also have two Disinformation books that tend to concern casual visitors, Everything You Know Is Wrong and You Are Being Lied To. I just ordered their Book of Lies : The Disinformation Guide to Magick and the Occult.
Thanks to my dissertation I have a large number of books on serial killers, murder, and nasty stuff in general. I see Death Scenes: A Homicide Detective’s Scrapbook has already been mentioned, but I must say it’s one of the only books I have that people pick up and immediately put back down again, without even really browsing through it. I have a great book on Ed Gein with amateurish illustrations of the man dancing in his skin suit and gravedigging, which is good for an occasional laugh.
I also have some of Creation Books’ series of cinema books that often get glanced through: Hollywood Hex: Death and Destiny in the Dream Factory: A History of Cursed Movies: Twilight Zone, The Exorcist, Rosemary’s Baby. Bad Blood: An Illustrated Guide to Psycho Cinema: serial killer movies, plus the real-life cases that inspired them! Lost Highways: An Illustrated History of Road Movies Meat is Murder!: An Illustrated Guide to Cannibal Culture Killing For Culture: An Illustrated History of Death Films From Mondo to Snuff
One of my favorite books, which isn’t really a book but more of a extended pamphlet, is The Penis Inserts of Southeast Asia, a gift from my father.
Love to peruse your library sometime. My Myth Adventures books are sandwiched between volumes 1 - 6 of Thieves’s World and Sandman
I think the single book that gets the most “Huh?” from people is an illustrated Japanese children’s book called Everybody Poops. It’s exactly what it sounds like.
The Illuminatus! Trilogy Is probably the strangest book I have ever read. I can’t make heads or tails of it, and yet it sits on my shelf at home. Every few years I take it down and take another crack at it.
Uh, it helps if you’ve actually done some drugs before attempting to read it. (Kidding, I kid, I’m such a kidder. Sorta.) Read Joyce’s Dubliners, it’ll help give you a feel for the style they were going for in Illuminatus!.
I have the Sherlock Holmes Book too- I never considered it especially strange.
I DO have almost the complete set of Chalet School Books, though by E Brent-Dyer. I still read them occasionally too. So there.
I have the SCA Knowne World Handbook too.
I also have a couple of Queen Victoria bios published in her lifetime- one for her jubilee in 1887, and one written in 1901 (okay it was just after she died, but still it’s old.)
I forgot that I have a paperback of Mafia Kingfish around here somewhere… the premise being that mobster Carlos Marcello masterminded the assasination of JFK. I had to read it for a history class, I swear to Og.
I don’t own this yet, but it’s on my to-buy list: A Million Random Digits with 100,000 Normal Deviates, published by the RAND organization. It’s, well, a list of a million random digits.
Stuff that I currently own:
Cassell’s Rhyming Slang–a dictionary of rhyming slang. The Bedside Book of Bastards–brief biographies of unpleasant people throughout history. A History of Phallic Worship The Erotic Muse–400 pages of dirty songs. The Schwa Corporation World Operations Manual Death Scenes–old photographs from police investigations.
Several books by Stanislav Szukalski.
I also have a number of books on somewhat odd topics in folklore and sociology.
For some reason, I seem to have this obsession with old sideshow performers (formerly known in pre PC days as “circus freaks”) and I have a couple of books about them. One is called Very Special People by Frederick Drimmer. It’s basically an anthology of stories about famous circus people of the “golden age of sideshows” such as General Tom Thumb, Julia Pastrana, Joseph Merrick (the Elephant Man), Jo-Jo the Dog-Faced Boy and various and sundry sideshow folks presented in a rather sappy (i.e triumph over tragedy) writing style. It’s pretty much Up With People except the people are usually physically malformed in some way.
I have another book simply called Freak Show which is more or less a long doctoral thesis about the development of showcasing, and later and exploition, of “human oddities.” Kind of dry reading, but it has some pictures in it that I haven’t seen before so it caught my eye when I was browsing Amazon one day.
I managed to read The Illuminatus! Trilogy while straight and sober, though I admit I did it largely by letting the book take me wherever it wanted to and not worrying about plot or consistency or continuity.
I imagine I have some odd books that I don’t think are odd myself, however there are few that I believe people might find odd.
Vampires, Burial & Death: Folklore & Reality by Paul Barber. It is a look at the folkloric beliefs about Vampires and how they are actually based on observations of what happens after death. (That’s not to say people actually come back from the dead, but rather that the signs that people took to mean someone had come back from the dead, such as blood on the lips and bloating, are commonly found on corpses that are decomposing.) It also points out that there is a big difference between folkloric vampires and fictional vampires.
How to Get Pregnant I found this one in a free-box outside a used book store. I thought the title was great.
You Call this Living? A Collection of East-European Political Jokes which records Romanian political jokes from the Soviet era. I found it at a used book store and thought it would be interesting to read.
I also have an Estonian-English Dictionary, an English-Estonian Dictionary and a grammar of Estonian (I take classes at the university, it’s one the few universities that offers 2nd year Estonian, I’m only aware of one other place and that’s probably it. So I’m among the very few Americans that can speak some Estonian, besides Estonian immigrants. After all, there are only a little more than 1 million speakers worldwide.)
