Around The Sun: Strange Books
...My first memory of dentists is hearing my mom say, “His hands will stop shaking when the needle is in your mouth...
Motivated by suh a memory Greg Hill simply had to buy "What It's Like To Be A Dentist'' when it appeared on the library booksale table.
I’ve encountered many strange books in my decades as a librarian, like “What It’s Like to Be a Dentist” by Arthur Shay. Shay meant this to be an educational book for children, but it carries a different message for anyone with a scary dental past. The cover features a curly-haired child grimly watching a Gestapo-looking dentist leer cruelly as he mounts the big bit on his drill.
My first memory of dentists is hearing my mom say, “His hands will stop shaking when the needle is in your mouth,” so I had to buy Shay’s masterpiece when it appeared on the library’s booksale table. Healthy public libraries constantly sift through their collections to look for outdated and worn items as well as gaps that need filling. It’s easier to find good, relevant books when they’re not hidden by a bunch of old, less-usable ones. These latter books are culled and sold for a dollar or two at the library, with all proceeds going towards new library books.
Books can retain a lot of their intrinsic value long after they’re published. After all, books and libraries are “thought in cold storage.” Besides at library booksales, the best hunting happens serendipitously at local used book stores, like Gulliver’s and the Literacy Council’s Forget-Me-Not Books, and at garage and estate sales.
My book-hunting site of choice is BookFinder.com, since it is so comprehensive it searches most of the big databases, including AbeBooks, Powell’s Books, Alibris, and Amazon.com. BookFinder also includes much fuller descriptions of the books’ conditions. Take a British children’s book featured in the latest Weird Books section of AbeBooks: Angela Royston’s “Why Do I Vomit.” The plaintive cover inspired recollection of my dentistry book, but I won’t buy it from AbeBooks, where Royston’s tome is listed from 25.48-to-31.65 pounds sterling. That’s $40.69-to-$50.76, but at BookFinder it’s only $4.74.
Many notable titles jumped out while perusing AbeBooks.co.uk/books/weird/index.shtml. Among the truly shocking I found “How to Be the Pope: What to Do and Where to Go Once You’re in the Vatican,” “The Beverly Hillbillies Bible Study,” “The Thermodynamics of Pizza” and “Stress Analysis of a Strapless Evening Gown.”
One of the list’s tamest titles rang a bell: “Mrs. Byrne’s Dictionary of Unusual, Obscure, and Preposterous Words.” I found a copy years ago at Title Wave Books in Anchorage, and its jacket shows the definitions from page 93, among them “hippopotomonstrosesquipedalian: pertaining to a very, very long word.” Mrs. Byrne includes an excellent example on page 128: the 1,913-letter word that begins with “methionylglutamin-” and ends “-threonylarginylserine”, and names a protein in the essential amino acid tryptophan. Weird yet useful words abound, like “kakistocracy – government by the worst of its citizens,” and “hieromachy – a fight between men or women of the cloth.”
“Codex Seraphinianus” is the “World’s Weirdest Book,” according to AbeBooks. “An art book unlike any other,” it’s “a window on a fantasy world complete with its own unique (unreadable) alphabet and numerous illustrations … Elements of today’s world are visible, but they are nearly always given some surreal twist – floating flowers, a peeled banana containing pills, a strange car covered in flies.” Italian artist and architect Luigi Serafini created the book in the late 1970s, which might explain the strangeness, if you recall those times.
The “Voynich Manuscript, written around 1500 in a still undeciphered language, obviously influenced Serafini. The manuscript was acquired in 1912 by Wilfred Voynich, an American-Polish rare book dealer after whom it’s named, and it resides in Yale University’s Beinecke Rare Book Library. The book uses 170,000 different types of letters, or glyphs, but mostly relies on only twenty or thirty of them. It’s profusely illustrated, mostly of bizarre plants, nudes, and circular diagrams. Still no one can understand even a bit of it, not the top code breakers around the world, nor even the British and American whizzes who cracked the German and Japanese codes in World War II.
This certainly contradicts 18th century German scientist Georg C. Lichtenberg, who said, “a book is a mirror: if an ass peers into it, you can’t expect an apostle to look out.”
**
To read more of Greg's inimitable columns please click on http://www.openwriting.com/cgi-bin/mt-search.cgi?IncludeBlogs=1&search=greg+hill
