5 Strangely Specific Self-Published Book Titles

The Guardian recently announced the recipient and finalists in the 2012 Diagram prize for Oddest Book Title of the Year. While the winner, Cooking with Poo, clearly won for its ability to provoke juvenile laughter, most of the other top contenders were humorous in a different way, namely, being specific to a level that seems almost absurd.

While I’m sure both Mr Andoh's Pennine Diary: Memoirs of a Japanese Chicken Sexer in 1935 Hebden Bridge and Estonian Sock Patterns All Around the World have audiences in the high dozens, the niche-ness of them is worthy of a couple of giggles and a headscratch.

When it comes to niche specificity, though, the Diagram prize has nothing on the self-publishing houses. In fact, if there’s one thing vanity presses are good for, it’s printing books that don’t have a large enough audience for traditional publishing.

Culled from the great bowels of online publishing catalogs, here’s a selection of ultra-specific titles aimed at the few rather than the many.


Action Karate Quilts  by Kathleen Azeez

A use for your family's old gi scraps, at long last.

Just like your grandma used to sew herself, before she became the sensei of the adult daycare dojo. Instructions are included for using generic head designs or transferring your own photographs of heads for custom versions, so commemorative Ralph Macchio quilt, here I come.



Nail Pullers (With Patent Reference) by Raymond P. Fredrich

For pulling nails, and not your leg.

Collectors are a special breed, so it’s not really surprising that someone collects nail pullers. More surprising might be Fredrich’s mania for the subject, noting that handcrafted nails are such a big deal, “You might even burn your house down and pick up nails in the ashes.” (Keep an eye out for Fredrich’s second book, Pyromania (With Legal Reference).


Federal Prison & Federal Prison Camp: A Beginner’s Guidebook for First Time Inmates by Steve Vincent

Includes pull-out maps and cafeteria ratings!

You buy a travel guide before you go to Martha’s Vineyard, so it stands to reason you would buy this one before you embark on an embezzlement scheme. Beginners, schmeginners, though: Is the advanced level guidebook out yet?

Shoe Exotica & Poems, Volume I by Patrick Sart

Shelve next to your foot-binding Haiku collection.

If you’re a shoe fetishist who likes stream-of-consciousness poetry, you’ve just hit the jackpot with this collection that features original drawings of bizarre shoes with even stranger poetry. (Although, if you are, I’m probably not telling you anything you don’t know. You probably have Sart on speed dial.)


How to Start Your Own African/African-American/Caribbean Products Store Online by The African-American Business Network

This could only be more specific if it were called How to Start Your Own African/African-American/Caribbean Products Store Online, Louise.

At last, a book that recognizes that the methods for marketing clay tagines and pigeon peas are vastly different from those used to sell bamboo steamers or Marmite. It’s just too bad that the three concepts were combined into one book, rather than exploring the inherent intricacies in three volumes.

Have you seen any weird self-published titles that are bizarre in their specificity? Do tell. 

George W. Bush Spotted on a Pulp Fiction Cover

Nicolas Cage isn’t the only one to pop up unexpectedly on book covers (both a Serbian textbook and a children’s history book).

During a recent browse through the huge cover archives at the blog Those Sexy Vintage Sleaze Books, I spotted a disturbingly familiar face on the cover of Charles Willeford’s Honey Gal: George W. Bush.

Honey Gal and Dubya. The sheep's in the meadow and the cow's in the corn, no doubt.

I don’t normally recoil when I see W’s visage, but when he (or his doppelganger) is sprawled under a haystack grasping confusedly at a busty barefoot vixen, I get caught off guard.

There’s no record of young Bush doing any modeling for pulp mystery paperback cover artists in his pre-prez days, but I can definitely hear him uttering the expression “honey gal.”

"Mr. Willeford, I'm ready for my close-up." (Photo via mywesttexas.com)

For those who don’t know Charles Willeford’s work, don’t be too put off by the sensational packaging. He’s actually quite readable (though I haven’t read Honey Gal.)

Both The Pick-Up and The Woman Chaser are fine examples of pulp mystery. The latter was made into an odd (though worth watching) little film of the same name with the also-odd-but-worth-watching Patrick Warburton, whom you might remember as TV’s real-life version of The Tick.

Spotted any famous doubles on book jackets? Let me know. Book Dirt is poised to become the repository for celebrity book cover sightings.

Nic Cage Inadvertently Teaches Biology to Serbs

Bizarre book covers are part of the book biz, as anyone who’s done time working in a used book store can tell you. That’s why I was amused, but certainly not surprised, to see this oddity that popped up on Twitter recently.

Nic Cage on the cover of a Serbian Biology textbook. To quote his character in Raising Arizona: "Well...it ain't Ozzie and Harriet." (Photo via Belgraded)

That’s no Photoshop gag --It’s the cover of a 1998 Biology textbook from Serbia, inexplicably emblazoned with Nicolas Cage, Holly Hunter and their stolen baby from Raising Arizona.
 

How a pair of movie kidnappers ended up on the cover of a Serbian Biology book is up for debate, but Viktor Markovic from Belgraded (a website about Belgrade, Serbia and the Balkans) says the book’s designer told him it was “an honest mistake.”


This isn’t the first time Nicolas Cage has unexpectedly turned up on a book cover, though, as anyone who putters around on the Net reading both goofy celeb news and bookish things can tell you.

Cage as a military pyromaniac in 1814. (Photo via Buzzfeed.)

The actor --or his doppelganger, anyway,  also appears on the cover of this history book for young folks, The Story of the Burning of Washington.

This is one happy Redcoat. The Burning of Washington looks like a blast.

Maybe Cage can surpass Isaac Asimov, who (sort of) published in every category of the Dewey Decimal System, by being the first person to have his face emblazoned on a book for every category. He can certainly cross the 500s and the 900s off the list. 

Seen any weird book covers lately? Better yet, seen Nic Cage anywhere strange lately?