The funniest book titles from the world of publishing
Occasionally, when we lift our noses up from our dusty tomes here at Interesting Literature Towers, people ask us, ‘What’s the best book you’ve come across in your research?’ Okay, they don’t ask it all that often. Picking a best book would prove difficult (though we’ve compiled some of our favourite book recommendations here), but probably the one that’s made us laugh the most is Bizarre Books, a compendium of downright ridiculous but genuine books and their laughable titles. The sort of books that will make you wonder how they ever got published, and who thought the title might be a good idea (though to be fair, some of them have been the victim of language changes which the original publishers could not have foreseen – Grimm’s Tales Made Gay, for instance). Edited by Russell Ash and Brian Lake, Bizarre Books is a hilarious history of the weird world of publishing in all manner of fields – food, fiction, children’s books, celebrity memoir, entomology, sex, and much else besides – all told through that simplest and most revealing of things, book titles. Here are 20 of our favourite funny book titles mentioned in Bizarre Books.