The Madman’s Library: The Strangest Books, Manuscripts and Other Literary Curiosities from History by Edward Brooke-Hitching was a vividly printed and weighty book devoted to the oddest works ever printed, at least according to the author. Chapters were divided into Books Made of Flesh and Blood (including those bound with human skin); Cryptic Books; Literary Hoaxes; Curious Collections; Works of the Supernatural; Religious Oddities; Curiosities of Science; Books of Spectacular Size; among others. I was forever taking notes to research titles yet thankfully Brooke-Hitching included so many photos that I was never in need of going on-line to find out what any of these weird books looked like. Photos were included on almost every page and it was a rare occasion to discover a page, always divided into two columns, unadorned.
The Madman’s Library was written by the same author as The Phantom Atlas. Both books are the same dimensions and were printed on thick paper. The font size that was used for the page numbers was microscopic and illegible without a magnifying glass. The Madman’s Library naturally included the titles of hundreds of books within the text. All of these titles were properly rendered in italics, none of which I could read with the naked eye. All the photo captions, some of them paragraph-length, were also printed in italics. Some italic fonts are so slanted and narrow that I cannot read them without a viewing aid.
One of the oddest books in the chapter on Curiosities of Science was Musurgia Universalis by Athanasius Kircher from 1650. In chapter six, which is devoted to music composition, we learn about the cat piano:
“In order to raise the spirits of an Italian prince … a musician created for him a cat piano. The musician arranged [cats] in cages side by side, so that when a key on the piano was depressed, a mechanism drove a sharp spike in the appropriate cat’s tail. The result was a melody of meows that became more vigorous as the cats became more desperate.”
The following is a list of titles I was most intrigued by, in the order they appeared by chapter:
The Land Rover Edible Survival Guide was included with its Dubai models in case any driver stuck in the desert needed sustenance. In addition to providing instructions on how to build a fire, find the north star and how to signal for help, the guide itself was edible.
Saddam Hussein allegedly provided up to 27 litres of his own blood over two years for the production of his own edition of the Koran. The blood was mixed with other chemicals to write out all 336.000 words in six thousand verses.
In 1979 Kit Williams wrote a picture book called Masquerade that contained the clues for finding a buried treasure, which was an 18-karat golden hare set with ruby, mother-of-pearl and moonstones:
“The book was a sensation, selling out its first print run in two days, receiving international press and eventually selling over a million copies. Treasure-hunters dug holes in public and private gardens around the country. ‘Haresfield Beacon’ in Gloucestershire suffered especially, and Williams agreed to pay for a sign specifically proclaiming the hare to not be buried there.”
Naked Came the Stranger was a hoax novel from 1969, written by 24 journalists to spoof the trashy sex novels like Valley of the Dolls which were dominating the bestseller lists. The authors were assigned a chapter each and were told to write about sex as badly as possible. The book nevertheless turned out to be a strong seller, and sales went through the roof when the secret came out.
Harris’s List of Covent-Garden Ladies was a pocketbook printed annually between 1757 and 1795 cataloguing the 120-190 prostitutes working in the Covent Garden and West End areas of London. The women’s names, ages and physical attributes were listed, as well as their specialties and talents both in and out of the bedroom. One such profile of a Miss B—:
“distinguished more by the elegancy of her dress, than the beauty of her person, which might perhaps have been ranked in the list of tolerable’s, had not the small-pox been quite so unkind; she is, nevertheless, a desirable well tempered piece.”
I was laughing out loud at O Novo Guia da Conversação, em Portuguez e Inglez, a phrasebook from 1855:
“…Portuguese writer Pedro Carolino set out to produce the finest Portuguese-to-English phrasebook the world had ever seen–an admirable ambition, for Carolino could speak not a word of English. What he had instead was a Portuguese-to-French phrasebook and a French-to-English dictionary. Phrase by phrase he diligently translated his Portuguese sentences into French, and then fed these results through the second dictionary into English. Of course, like anything passed through multiple digestive systems the result is a complete mess.
“Jettisoning all idiomatic nuance, Carolino succeeded in birthing the world’s worst language guide…”
I would love to see a copy of (see only, not touch) Shadows From the Walls of Death, a collection of nineteenth-century wallpapers that contain a high amount of arsenic. Only five copies out of a hundred are known to survive. The book contains 86 samples of the actual arsenic-pigmented wallpaper.
It was a pleasure to read the “Strange Titles” listed at the end of the book but I had more fun perusing the select bibliography.