Customer Reviews

Bizarre Books: A Compendium of Classic Oddities

5 star:		(6)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(5)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

This book arrived in the same Amazon shipment as "Bertha Venation", a book devoted to funny names of people. While "Bertha Venation" managed to be singularly unfunny, "Bizarre Books" had a pretty high hilarity quotient. Almost every page had at least a couple of titles which made me giggle.

Conveniently grouped into chapters such as Double Entendres, Science & Scientific Theories, health & Medicine, Sex & Marriage, Sport, Leisure, Clothes & Fashion, Food & Drink, The Workplace, Crime & the Law, Religion & Beliefs, and Death , most of the titles included in this book are genuinely funny. For some of the more baffling titles, the authors include a representative short excerpt, a welcome feature.

This book is not for everyone. But if you have a penchant for the offbeat, the quirky, and obscure weirdness, it's good for more than a few belly-laughs.

It would be remiss of me not to include a few of my favorite entries:

* The Art of Faking Exhibition Poultry (1934), by George Ryley Scott.
The author treads an indistinct line between condemning this widespread and despicable practice, and telling the reader exactly how to do it.

* Correctly English in 100 Days(Shanghai Correctly English Society, 1934)
This book is prepared for the Chinese young man who wishes to served for the foreign firms. It divided nealy hundred and ninety pages. It contains full of ordinary speak and write language.....

* Was Oderic of Pordenone Ever in Tibet?, by Berthold Laufer (1914)

* The Love Sonnets of a Hoodlum, by Wallace Irwin (1901)
'Am I a turnip? On the strict Q.T.,
When do my Trilbys get so ossified?
Why am I minus when it's up to me
To brace my Paris pansy for a glide?'

* Truncheons: Their Romance and Reality, by Erland Fenn Clark (1935),
with over 100 plates illustrating more than 500 truncheons.

Admit it, aren't you just a little bit curious to learn more about those 500 truncheons? To know more about the mysterious, mythic Oderic of Pordenone? To sample more of that literary hoodlum's oeuvre?

Perhaps what I enjoy most about this book is the glimpses it provides of the infinite inventiveness, and never-ending quirkiness, of the human mind.

I really like this meta book - I just wish there were more excerpts from the featured books. After a while, reading the massive lists of book titles was like going to a restaurant and only reading the menu - eventually, you want something to eat!

"Bizarre Books" contains the titles, and a few excerpts, of thousands of the strangest books ever written. This book is hilarious! It would be a great Christmas gift for anyone with a relatively silly sense of humour.

Ny sister gave me a copy of this book this Christmas. I laughed so hard that I couldn't speak; the next morning, my stomach still hurt from laughing so hard. Unfortunately I am going through a spell of athsma and I can take this book only in small doses because the laughing turns into coughing fits. So I guess this book literally takes my breath away.

But it's hysterically funny. I wish there were more like it. But a word to the wise for people who have stress incontinence: Don't stray too far from the potty while you read this book, because it truly is a pisser.

To say the least,this is an interesting little tome.If you are an avid reader and haunter of bookstores,libraries or a bibliophile of any description,you will be fascinated with this compilation of titles and brief description of some of the unusual books that have ,first of all been written,and secondly managed to get published over the years.
Who hasn't come across a book wih a title that jumps out at you and makes you ask yourself;"What the heck could that book be about?".
The authors must have spent a long time,probably many years,assembling the titles,illustrations and information listed in this book.I have to admit that very few of them were ever encountered by me .One exception,though was "The Wit and Humor of Prince Philip" that I saw in a bargin bin and it immediately made me chuckle.About the last thing that comes to mind when thinking about Prince Philip would be humor,and little wonder such a title would end up in a bargin bin.
The book is an interesting perusal and will provide one with lots of chuckles.
I have to agree with several other reviewers,when they suggest that it would have been more interesting if greater information was given about the books listed,even at the expense of reducing the numbers.For that reason,I must admit ,I tended to find it a bit laboured and skimmed through a lot of the titles.
There are several of these books listed here on Amazon by these authors.The titles and publication dates vary;but I suspect that they are all one and the same and just reissues of the original book.

Russell Ash and Jay Lake, Bizarre Books: A Compendium of Classic Oddities (Harper, 2006)

Not bad for what it is, a list of book titles and authors with a few choice excerpts, but I must admit I was hoping for a great deal more from this little volume. How can one not thirst for more information about Joel Best and David N. Luckenbill's 1982 classic Organizing Deviance? Or Dr. Stuart Morton's My Duodenal Ulcer and I? Unfortunately, we only get title, author, and publisher. You could track some of them down, of course, but many of Ash and Lake's titles come from the nineteenth century or before, and that might be a harder task. Still, there's lots of food for thought here (and enough toilet humor to fill, well, a book). ***

Good for a few laughs but basically just a book of lists of bizarre book titles. Wished it did more than just listed the books with a picture here and there-often in black and white. It had great potential to be a fun book with its small descriptions/discussions of each title. I did have a hard time staying focused while reading it though. It was as though it was designed to be glanced through and nothing more. I also wished for more actual content. It is certainly not a bad book, but I've read much better and don't think that I would recommend it to others. You're not really missing anything if you choose to pass on this particular book.

As a professional librarian, I collected funny names of authors and books for 35 years, mainly for the amusement of my colleagues and myself. But reading Ash's and Lake's Bizarre Books (and Larry Ashmead's Bertha Venation) inspired me to publish my collection. The result is The Inscribed List, or Why Librarians Are Crazy: Hilarious Real Names of Real People from Library Catalogs. I am happy to say that Ash and Lake like my work as much as I like theirs.

Ash and Lake remain the undisputed champions of digging up literary howlers. Like trained pigs with noses for exquisite truffles, they find and publish the wildest names and titles.

Enjoyed this book, but didn't love it by any means. I guess I didn't realize that compendium meant "A short, complete summary; an abstract; A list or collection of various items"... Basically, this book is a list of bizarre books with a few pictures of covers of some of the books mentioned and a few excerpts/quotes from some of the books as well.

Bizarre Books: A Compendium of Classic Oddities is divided up into various chapters based on book subject. It seems well researched and is very funny.

A funny book, but it was kind of a mishmash and wasn't as comprehensive as I expected it to be. I got it with my Amazon points, but if I had paid 14.95 for such a slim book I would have felt cheated. I enjoyed it, though, and agree with what others have said; I'd like to have seen more excerpts (especially some of the jokes cracked by Lord Aberdeen, he looks like such a fun guy).