Weird books that you have

[Guardsman Bass]

Do you have any particularly unusual titles among your various book collections?

For example, I have a book, published in 1981, titled The Intimate Sex Lives of Famous People. I have no idea where I got it - my dad has a tendency to buy cheap books, particularly those on sale at libraries, and then give some of them to me, but this doesn't have a crossed-out library tag.

That said, it is an interesting book.

[Stark]

I have a book (in a storage box somewhere) given to me by a partner years and years ago. It's from the 70s (well at least the photos of the earnest young pastor are) and it tells you all about how DnD and atheism are enabling a massive, nationwide satanist network which - aided by police and policymakers - are responsible for constant human sacrifice, rapes, murders, etc. This WAS the same girl who used to forward me emails about how you could TOTALLY extract PROPHETIC words from the Bible using arbitrary numbers, so ... y'know.

[PhilosopherOfSorts]

The Book of Mormon. I accepted one from a pair of Mormon elders (the people who come to your door) because I had just finished reading the Koran and wanted to see what another weird religon was about. I couldn't make it past the first chapter.

[Pulp Hero]

Go-Go Girls Of The Apocalypse by Victor Gischler usually gets funny looks from people who look at my bookshelf, especially since it is sitting between "smart looking" books about history.

[Hawkwings]

The Cross-Time Engineer series. So much fun to read. Still never managed to find the later books, but I suspect that many SDNetters would like it as well. Particularly those who like SDN in middle earth and all that.

[CaptainChewbacca]

So many books its not even funny;

A field Guide to Demons
Angels' Compendium
History of Alchemy
Encyclopedia of the Undead
Norse Magic
Secrets of the Vatican
Necronomicon

Fun stuff.

[Samuel]

History of the World Volumes 1,2 and 3. Copyright 1890
Alamanac 1810
Kate Beaumont 1872
The Soviet Union- A Guide and Referance Book 1985
The Vintage Mencken
The Great American Hoax 1966
Gentlemen Scholars and Scoundrels The best of Harper's Magazine 1850-1959
Now Don't try to reason with me
The Gulag Archipelago
Only the Paranoid Survive
The Torah
The Elemental Encyclopedia of Magical Creatures.

My highschool was purging its collection to make room for new books so I got 20. I would have taken more, but alot of them were trash. For some reason they had The Monkey Wrench Gang and a book that was essentially Cuban propaganda. It was written beore the fall of the USSR so its triumphant tone at the end was hilarious

The Cross-Time Engineer series. So much fun to read. Still never managed to find the later books, but I suspect that many SDNetters would like it as well. Particularly those who like SDN in middle earth and all that.

Shit. I looked it up and the author is dead. I liked his tank series.

[spaceviking]

I have an old book/ pamphlet somewhere in my house called Zionist network, though if i recall correctly it is not as anti semitic as it sounds

[Faabio]

The Golden Bough: A Study in Magic and Religion
Ufot uskonto ja saatana (Ufo's, church and Satan) one of those batshit insane books about paranormal world history and stuff. Like that the chinese are from Mars and atlantis was real and how all that somehow makes sense in todays New world order.

A Finnish law book from around 1918 or so. Cant verify the year as its in storage at my folks, but it might be from even before Finlands independence.

A field Guide to Demons and other subversive spirits.

[Bob the Gunslinger]

So many books its not even funny;

A field Guide to Demons
Angels' Compendium
History of Alchemy
Encyclopedia of the Undead
Norse Magic
Secrets of the Vatican
Necronomicon

Fun stuff.

Psssh, is that all? Besides, you didn't even specify whether it was the Hay Necronomicon or the Simon Necronomicon, which makes a huge difference. If only someone would publish Der Vermis Mysteriis or Unaussprechlichen Kulten. I want those on my shelf. I'd settle for just Tobin's Spirit Guide.

Anyway, I've got nearly full collections of S.L. MacGregor Mathers, Aleister Crowley, Eliphas Levy, La Vey, etc., etc., as well as a copy of the Malleus Maleficarum, the Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion, Secret Societies by Aron Dekaul, the book of Discordia (actually, I may have lost it), and many other "forbidden texts", as well as a bunch of David Icke, Timothy Goode, Jerome Clark, Von Daniken and other supernaturalists.

The weirdest book that I happen to own is probably this one. I still can't remember how or why I bought it.

Edit: I forgot about the book "Our Daily Bran", which was more of a 50 page pamphlet of incoherent rhyming poems written about Jesus. That would be the weirdest book I own if I hadn't given it to someone who got even bigger lolz out of it than I did.

[Oni Koneko Damien]

Something I found at Goodwill and simply couldn't pass up:

A copy of Al Franken's Rush Limbaugh is a Big Fat Idiot with the cover torn off and replaced with a cover of Rush Limbaugh: I Told You So. Trolling through literary means.

[Zac Naloen]

I have a book (in a storage box somewhere) given to me by a partner years and years ago. It's from the 70s (well at least the photos of the earnest young pastor are) and it tells you all about how DnD and atheism are enabling a massive, nationwide satanist network which - aided by police and policymakers - are responsible for constant human sacrifice, rapes, murders, etc. This WAS the same girl who used to forward me emails about how you could TOTALLY extract PROPHETIC words from the Bible using arbitrary numbers, so ... y'know.

The Bible Code


I had some co-workers who were telling me about how this is totally true and amazing. So I looked it up, read the book and at the end I just laughed and told them it was complete bullshit.

Using that code you can get the bible to tell you anything you want it to.

[Ziggy Stardust]

Oh boy.

I have a biography of Matt Damon. Yeah. I found it in a flea market somewhere and bought it because the first two pages made me start laughing uncontrollably. Besides the fact that the premise is bizarre, it is just horribly written. One of the first sentences in the book is something along the lines of, "Besides being a versatile actor and screenwriter savant, Matt is widely considered by those who know him to just generally be a good guy." The same author also did a biography of Leonardo di Caprio, which I do not own.

I have some little book that I got as a kid, called "Extraterrestrial Life." I'm not at home right now so I can't check the author or publisher, but it is a really neat little book, full of pictures from famous science fiction movies and neat artwork of what alien life would look like on a low-gravity earth-like planet, high-gravity, jungle, ocean, etc. Really cool.

The "Very Scary Dictionary" and "Very Scary Almanac." Pretty neat stuff.

More books on Norse mythology and history than I care to count. Including many of the Norse epics.

"John Dies at the End," the novel written by one of the writers for Something Awful.

"Satan's Assassins"
"Bluff Your Way in the Occult"
"They Lived on Human Flesh"
"Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time (Studies in Contemporary German Social Thought"
"A Visitor's Guide to Rarotonga and the Outer Islands"
"Dowd's History of Limerick"
"And That's the Way It Was in Jackson's Hole"
"San Francisco Shipping Conspiracies of World War One"
"From Barbie to Mortal Kombat: Gender and Computer Games"
etc.

[The Spartan]

"How to Shit in the Woods" Is the only one I can remember off the top of my head. I can probably come up with others once I get home and browse through my library.

[Alferd Packer]

It's not really a book, but I still have a hilarious pamphlet from my college health center, describing the horrors of hemorrhoids, constipation, and anal fissures. While there were no graphic images, there were a few cartoon pictures interspersed throughout of a constipated face.

And what do you know, I have pictures!

Front cover

Inside

Definitely my strangest piece of literature.

[CaptHawkeye]

This WAS the same girl who used to forward me emails about how you could TOTALLY extract PROPHETIC words from the Bible using arbitrary numbers, so ... y'know.

Stark has the most adventurous relationships.

I found this wonderful book at a Barnes and Noble once.

[Zixinus]

I'm afraid that the most weird book I have and actually read is "The Encylopedia of Secret Knowledge", which is pretty mild. I would not call it an encyclopaedia, but rather than a guide to Christian Myticism with some mentions of other cultures.

[Solauren]

3000+ Pre 3rd Edition, D20 System / Dungeons and Dragons Third Edition books

Secrets of the Ninja (actually, it makes alot of sense)

[ZGundam]

The Cross-Time Engineer series. So much fun to read. Still never managed to find the later books, but I suspect that many SDNetters would like it as well. Particularly those who like SDN in middle earth and all that.

I have the whole series somewhere. Very fun read.

Also, there is the 'Guardians of the Flame' series. The plot is about sending a collection of college students into a fantasy setting similar to a role-playing world. Throughout numerous books, Rosenberg has traced these characters, their descendants and the changes they've made to society. He has shown no compunction about killing off popular characters, including the main character in the first 4 books.

[General Zod]

I have a copy of Musashi's Book of Five Rings somewhere. I also think I've got a copy of Sun Tzu's Art of War. That's about the extent of weirdness in my collection.

[The Spartan]

Secrets of the Ninja (actually, it makes alot of sense)

Oh I had forgotten about those kind of books. Mainly because I sold them to get them off my shelves!

Hilariously, when I was a dumbass kid, I thought I could learn invisibility and ninja skills with those books. Then I grew up and realized what a fucking crock of shit they were.

[loomer]

I have Mein Kampf, the Military Writings of Mao Tse Tung, Das Kapital, Trotsky's 'History of the Russian Revolution', Marx's letters to Engels, several survival guides, and some lawbooks. Anyone entering my study will think I'm plotting some kind of psuedo-legal Fasco-Communist revolution - especially since I keep a chart in which I rank global situations and tension on a scale of 1 - 10, normally with very specific decimals.

[Broomstick]

So many books its not even funny;

A field Guide to Demons
Angels' Compendium
History of Alchemy
Encyclopedia of the Undead
Norse Magic
Secrets of the Vatican
Necronomicon

Fun stuff.

Hey, I got a book on goetic evocation! (That's "how to raise demons" for you mundanes) If you ever want to lose the angels and demons part of your bookshelf let me know, it would like the company.

[Broomstick]

How about this one: Captive Care and Medical Reference for the Rehabilitation of Insectivorous Bats, Amanda Lollar and Barbara Schmidt-French, Second Edition, 2002.

[Losonti Tokash]

I think about the weirdest book I have is Prehospital Emergency Care, notable for its many graphic, full color photos of eviscerations and limb amputations, along with an extruded eyeball and a close range shotgun blast to the face.