David Wallechinsky - The Book of Lists

A biography that ignores Booth’s assassination of Abraham Lincoln and deals instead, for 234 pages, with his career as an actor, which continued until four weeks before he killed the President of the United States.

A lively account of the birth and growth of the elastic webbing industry in the nineteenth century. In the words of the author, once a man has ‘got the smell of rubber in his nostrils… he either stays with rubber or is thereafter ever homesick to get back into the rubber industry’.

A report of the first three years of the Canadian national egg laying contests, from 1919 to 1922, as well as a preliminary contest held on Prince Edward Island in 1918–19. The work consists almost entirely of charts comparing production and costs by owner, bird and year. In 1921–22 one of the birds belonging to Lewis N. Clark of Port Hope, Ontario, produced 294 eggs.

In his preface, Dr Kidd states, ‘No doubt many of the phenomena here described are intrinsically uninteresting and unimportant.’ However, if you have ever yearned for a book that analyses the direction in which hair grows on lions, oxen, dogs, apes, tapirs, humans, asses, anteaters, sloths, and other animals, you won’t be disappointed.

This pioneering classic makes use of 197 photographs to help answer the question ‘What actually happens when a drop falls and splashes?’ Worthington’s book was considered so valuable to students of physics that it was reissued as recently as 1963.

Thirty-three examples of sentences that include all twenty-six letters of the English alphabet. Included are classics such as ‘The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog’ and ‘Pack my bags with five dozen liquor jugs’, as well as the less well-known ‘The July sun caused a fragment of black pine waxe to ooze on the velvet quilt’ and ‘Very careful and exact knowledge should be emphasized in adjudging a quadrant.’

National Gallery Publications, 1946.

A rare opportunity to view the flip side of 42 famous works of art.

A definitive listing of 401 barbed wire patents filed between the years 1867 and 1897.

One hundred and fifty-six photographs of movie stars in bathtubs. There are also numerous shots of actors, actresses and animals in showers and steambaths.

A complete guidebook to wax museums in the United States, with 678 illustrations, including Brigitte Bardot, Nikita Khrushchev and the Battle of Yorktown.

The autobiography of the world’s first transsexual parents. Chris and Cathy began life as Anne and Eugene. Anne was a social worker who wished she was a man; Eugene was a Kung Fu instructor who wished he was a woman. They fell in love, Anne gave birth to a baby girl, Emma, and then Anne and Eugene switched sexes. Anne, now Chris, became Emma’s father and Eugene, now Cathy, took over the role of mother.

The subtitle says it all: The Complete Guide to Selling Your Organs, Body Fluids, Bodily Functions, and Being a Human Guinea Pig . If you are reasonably healthy, but have no job skills, this is the book for you. Hogshire explains how to earn $100 a day as a subject for drug studies and other scientific experiments, and how to sell your blood, sperm, hair, breast milk and bone marrow.

In exquisite detail, Adler traces the evolution of what Elvis ate from the time he was a baby (corn bread soaked in buttermilk) through his years in the army, Las Vegas, Hollywood and Graceland, and finally the bingeing that weakened his health. Elvis gobbled a dozen honey doughnuts in a cab before a visit to the White House and once ate five chocolate sundaes for breakfast before passing out. Included are recipes for fried squirrel, peanut butter and American cheese sandwich, and Elvis’s last supper, which was actually ice cream and cookies.

Unlike most books that deal with alien abduction, LaVigne’s treatise is a practical guide that helps abductees control their fear and ‘take control’ of the experience. The author smashes various myths such as ‘the ETs have no lips, and do not open their mouths’, ‘all ETs who are called greys are grey’ and ‘the ETs have long tentacle-like fingers covered with suction cups, similar to those found on an octopus’.

The BBB presents the history of pie-throwing as a political act and includes several recipes for easy-to-throw pies. Also included are photographs of such celebrities as Bill Gates and Clare Short being pied.

• How to Be Happy Though Married by ‘A Graduate in the University of Matrimony’. London: J. Fisher Unwin, 1895.

• How to Rob Banks Without Violence by Roderic Knowles. London: Michael Joseph, 1972.

• How to Shit in the Woods by Kathleen Meyer. Berkeley, CA: Ten Speed Press, 1989.

• How to Become a Schizophrenic by John Modrow. Everett, WA: Apollyon Press, 1992.

• How to Speak With the Dead: A Practical Handbook by ‘Sciens’. New York: E. P. Dutton, 1918.

The author is identified as also having written ‘recognised scientific text-books’.

• How to Start Your Own Country by Erwin S Strauss. Port Townsend, WA: Loompanics Unlimited, 1984.

• How to Avoid Huge Ships by Captain John W. Trimmer. Seattle, WA: Captain John W. Trimmer, 1983.

• How to be Pretty Though Plain by Mrs Humphry. London: James Bowden, 1899.

• Original title: First Impressions

Final title: Pride and Prejudice (1813)

Author: Jane Austen

• Original title: Mag’s Diversions: also The Copperfield Disclosures, The Copperfield Records, The Copperfield Survey of the World As It Rolled , and Copperfield Complete

Final title: David Copperfield (1849)

Author: Charles Dickens

• Original title: Alice’s Adventures Underground