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My dad is into old sci-fi stuff, and will occasionally send books my way. Official Book of 2017:  Software by Rudy Rucker.  I read this again this year, and nothing like the scene on the cover takes place. It's by far my favorite of the bunch, surrealistically weird and great. Those "endorsements" are 100% accurate. There's three more books in the series, Wetware, Freeware, and Realware, which I plan to read at some point (probably in 2020 when the book is set). They're also available in an omnibus edition, but.... I probably won't buy physical copies unless I can find them individually and they have covers as amazing as this one. Later editions have a dumb boring cover  Rucker has also written some non-fiction books on mathematics that look interesting. If anyone has read them, what did you think? The Magnificent Wilf by Gordon R. Dickson  Take my wilf...please! The back cover asserts that you know what it means to be a wilf, but really, you probably don't know that they are a monosexual alien race that resemble women and go through the universe emotionally attaching themselves to other beings in order to make them more moral and principled people. Now you do! Wizard's Bane by Rick Cook  The bad guy in this one is named Thoth-Set-Ra, because....why not? More importantly, though, here's The Wiz casting a spell: quote:"backslash" he said to the Emac. "$" the Emac responded, now ready and waiting for orders. "transport" he said and the Emac began to gabble silently, translating the predefined macro spell into the words of power. "arg moira" He raised the staff high over his head as the air began to waver and twist around him. "EXE" he shouted. Sideshow by Mike Resnick  due to illustrated three-breasted lady https://i.imgur.com/imfXmNj.jpg The back makes it sound like Thaddeus Flint is the protag of the book, but he's really the villain. The three-breasted lady is actually a nun on a religious pilgrimage. Earth Factor X by A. E. Van Vogt  This one I haven't read. I think I may have bought it with the vague idea of giving it to my dad, but I'm glad I didn't because apparently it's all about sex and gender relations. Spoilers: http://mporcius.blogspot.com/2015/01/earth-factor-x-by-e-van-vogt.html From the blog: Because he is a disembodied brain that can't have sex, Hazzard, who has been obsessed with sex since his youth and has had nearly 200 sex partners, is wracked by doubts about his manhood.  More interesting (to me only) is that this cover and the brain-in-a-robot aspect remind me of a book that I only remember a scrap of: The main character gets (forcibly?) put into a stasis tank inside of a some kind of spider/tank/robot thing, along with 6-8 other people. They function as some sort of group mind to control the robot, I think following someone else's orders. Eventually the protag becomes aware of what is going on and himself as an individual, but after being so intimately linked to the other people in his robot, he considers the group to be his true self and doesn't leave. Instead they become a self-actualized group-mind robot and maybe fight the people who put them in there??? The word Wolf may also be involved somehow (title? author's name? main character's name? spider-robot-tank name?), but no actual wolves. I posted this in the identify that book thread, but no luck yet.
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Jan 6, 2018 03:00
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I have a couple of weird old books but I'm going to focus on this one because it's my oldest and coolest book. It's a marriage and family manual from the 1870s that is absolutely filled with content on how to... well, I'll let the title speak for itself. (These images will probably be super huge, sorry.)   It's really faded but the pages have a really pretty colorful design on their edges. The book is over 1000 pages long and it would be impossible for me to take pictures of all of the bizarrely racist and unscientific content. However, it does have an index in which every page is broken down by topic, and if anybody wants to see more of it I can take photos of the index and let people choose which ones they might like to see. Here's some excerpts:  Our prestigious author, Professor O.S. Fowler. In 1870s style, the book's leading page is a portrait of the man who made a ton of poo poo up.  This book features a broad range of courtship, sex, marriage and child rearing, but focuses almost to excess on specific topics: erectile dysfunction and, especially, tits. There are several distinct sections talking about boobs, why men like boobs, why men like big boobs and why big tits suggest a woman's fitness and marriageability, and how a husband can grow his wife's tits to be more "full and robust."   This appears to be a second edition printing from 1875, as best as I can tell. The book features a pretty large number of illustrations.  This book explains heredity in detail. For example,   Half-black children are basically animal-human hybrids:  Some examples of the different types of physical manhood:    Like I said, this is just a little taste of it, since this book is absolutely massive and every page is pretty much like this. There's more incorrect information regarding basically anything related to sexuality than there is correct info, although there are some things that are closer to the truth as we know it today than I would have expected from a book this old. If somebody wants to see more I can post the index and someone can pick a topic.
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Jan 6, 2018 03:16
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Yes please post more, it's fascinating.
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Jan 6, 2018 03:46
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I love how similar it is to the kind of thing modern neonazis rant about on YouTube, with the crazy made-up etymologies and "facts" about different races presented as self-evident truths.
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Jan 6, 2018 04:16
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The table of contents describes every single one of the nearly 1100 pages and thus is itself 20 pages long, so I've just assembled it into a gallery, but I'll post the first couple pages here so you can get a taste of what's available: Gallery: https://imgur.com/gallery/fhdq2     It's hard to choose any specific thing so I'll take suggestions and see if it's worth posting. All I have is a camera phone with a flash so I'm limited in how much I can post.
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Jan 6, 2018 04:41
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I'm curious about the twelve-legged horse thing myself E: And his advice on "the causes and cures of feeble passion in women." That should be very interesting. E2: Oh, and how to make your kid good at math and poetry and stuff Pththya-lyi fucked around with this message at 04:53 on Jan 6, 2018 |
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Jan 6, 2018 04:44
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Here's the twelve legged horse. I have no loving idea what he's referring to.
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Jan 6, 2018 04:57
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I have a fourth edition printing of 'The New Textbook of Geology' by James D. Dana, the original printing of which appears to have been 1863, and mine is from 1883. Most of it is rather bland and not particularly notable, but there's a specific lack of anything regarding plate tectonic theory and continental drift, which didn't really become a mainstream geologic theory until the early 1900s. It explains mountain ranges and subsidence through a chain of ideas about how the crust is very thick and sinks and rises, with the borders of the region rubbing on one another and causing mountain ranges.
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Jan 6, 2018 05:42
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How many legs did sleipnir have? I think it was less than twelve.
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Jan 6, 2018 05:43
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Jan 6, 2018 06:10
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These have a bit of weirdness in them. I need to find a large format scanner before they disintegrate.  
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Jan 6, 2018 06:13
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Jan 6, 2018 06:21
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Jan 6, 2018 07:26
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Dr. Kloctopussy posted:Earth Factor X by A. E. Van Vogt 
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Jan 6, 2018 07:39
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1936       
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Jan 6, 2018 08:42
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I kind of want to read this whole book. It just keeps surprising me in every paragraph. Either I'm thinking "Huh, this is surprisingly progressive for the forties, it could almost be a modern- oh, nope, there it is." or the other way around "Ha, typical early 20th century bullsh- huh, I was not expecting it to go in that direction."
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Jan 6, 2018 09:35
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Die Hausfrau - A magazine for German immigrant housewives, published in Milwaukee, Wis. in the early 20th century           It had fiction, world events, American history, poetry, music, biographies, cooking, crochet...
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Jan 6, 2018 09:47
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Dr. Kloctopussy posted:Wizard's Bane by Rick Cook don't sell The Wiz short, dude found the like five magic spells that anyone, even a nonwizard, could cast, and then bootstrapped them into a loving magic programming language to write real spells with  (also there was a plot twist where the feisty waifu had her forced-love enchantment removed like halfway through the book by someone who then did not tell anyone until the end that he had done so, she's really just tsundere for The Wiz, etc)
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Jan 6, 2018 09:54
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Heath posted:Here's the twelve legged horse. I have no loving idea what he's referring to. The "12 Horses" section seems to claim that physical traits that are obsolete vanish from people and animals. Even though horses with 12 hooves were never in the fossil record. I don't know if the author was convinced of things like that or if he was pulling it out of thin air. To put it in a broader context, part 1, Chapter 1 seems to be about traits that do and don't get passed down thru sex. Section 1 is focused on physical traits that can get passed down or bred out. Section 2 is focused on intellect with a detour about jews. Section 3 probably denies any sexuality that isn't heteronormative. And section 4 might be about love or it might be making coy references to sex. I don't doubt that the author was or would have been in favor of eugenics.
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Jan 6, 2018 10:33
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Flyball posted:These have a bit of weirdness in them. I need to find a large format scanner before they disintegrate. Yeah, it'd be cool if V. Vale would reprint the first three issues of RE/Search in an oversize book like he did for the similarly-sized Search & Destroy. Newsprint doesn't stand the test of time very well. I'm glad that the later issues of RE/Search were printed as softcover books.        It's cool that Slash and Touch And Go were recently reprinted in book form:  
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Jan 6, 2018 23:43
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Here are some later issues/ books from RE/Search:          Seriously, I know I mentioned it earlier in the thread, but I cannot recommend their entire catalog highly enough. Please support them!! https://www.researchpubs.com/
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Jan 7, 2018 00:16
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Speaking of degrading newsprint, I have adored the Weekly World News since I was 10 or 11 years old. I still have a handful issues that I bought as a teenager, as well as a small collection of others that I've found at junk shops and used books stores for cheap. Here is the first appearance of Batboy from June 1992:  And another early appearance from August 1993:  This issue from 1997 had already been printed when Princess Diana died. It never made it to newsstands, but copies had already been mailed out to subscribers. (Thank you ebay and K. Ghoulash Peters of Reading, PA for my copy!):  Here are a few Weekly World News books:   
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Jan 7, 2018 00:37
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Godspeed, Bat Boy. Godspeed.
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Jan 7, 2018 00:42
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I have a handful of weird books. Here are a few: I originally checked this out of the local library when I developing an interest in archeology. It carries a 1951 copyright, so only about 40 years old at that point. I went about tracking it down years ago but couldn't remember a title, only part of a chapter name. A Google book search found the proper one on snippet view. Armed with the information, I promptly bought a copy off Abe Books.    This little beauty was pretty popular, apparently. My copy is from the 14th printing.   Gaston Means' "account" to May Dixon how Harding must have been murdered. It's been debunked. 
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Jan 7, 2018 02:27
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Wasn't Gaston Means a con-artist who lucked out by clinging to the right people at the right time?
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Jan 7, 2018 03:11
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Heath posted:Here's the twelve legged horse. I have no loving idea what he's referring to. Maybe the author meant toes. The ancestor to the horse had multiple toes on its foot, and over time all but one of them shrank and disappeared. If this is the case he certainly had an odd concept of anatomical nomenclature.
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Jan 7, 2018 19:53
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Jan 10, 2018 18:09
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china bot posted:
OMG my Dad used to say this to me too. It took me years to figure out it was the title of a movie Reagan was in. Also this thread rules and I want to read so many of the trashy pulp novels that have been posted. If I can lay hands on my hardcover copy of "Michelle Remembers" I'll post it because that's one of the funniest and also painfully dull books I've read. Somehow a book about "Satanic Ritual Abuse" is painfully boring. Even Satan doesn't save thst book, but that's because it's Canadian Satan and he sucks.
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Jan 11, 2018 18:59
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, what will be the dated bedtime reference for this generation's children?
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I realized that I never posted the individual volumes of the Time-Life Books Mysteries of the Unknown library, so I'm going to do that. For those unfamiliar with the series, here is the ridiculous commercial that ran constantly during the late 80's: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v4zBYh2PUyk The white crap on some of the covers is from the disintegrating styrofoam that the seller used to ship them to me. No matter how much I try, I cannot seem to get it all off, and now it's all over my living room carpet again.         
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Jan 14, 2018 19:31
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Jan 14, 2018 19:34
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Jan 14, 2018 19:37
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Jan 14, 2018 19:39
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Judging by the covers, those books appear to be in fantastic condition. I'm jealous. I remember seeing adds for those on afternoon TV as a kid. I wanted them sooo bad.
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Jan 14, 2018 21:19
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Library book sales are really good places for finding full runs of Time/Life books for a buck apiece. In addition to the woo woo nonsense, some of them are actually really good (although unavoidably stuck in the 1970s/80s). I've put together full sets of the Myths & Mankind series, their Old West series, and their Seafarers books. Library sales are fun for weird oddball books in general. I almost grabbed a copy of THE NAKED COMMUNIST at one yesterday.
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Jan 14, 2018 21:28
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man I could go for some ancient wisdom rn
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Jan 14, 2018 23:05
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I have this really greasy old 70s basically sexual instruction? I guess book but it’s like borderline porny and very weird and gross I need to take a picture of. I got it when I worked at a bookstore that closed and was free to take whatever I wanted. I did get some actually good stuff too. Also a coffee table book of clothed and nude early 2000s porn stars.
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Jan 14, 2018 23:28
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I want to say HBO did a documentary bit about that clothed and nude book, that sounds really familiar.
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Jan 15, 2018 01:10
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Proteus Jones posted:Judging by the covers, those books appear to be in fantastic condition. I'm jealous. Yeah, the covers on the first and last volumes are a little scuffed up (probably from cheap bookends), but I don't think they had ever been cracked open before I got them. It was a fine score indeed. Keep searching for a set of your own!
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Jan 15, 2018 01:45
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Stinker Lets Loose! by Mike Sacks  I just ordered this and haven't read it yet, but having just returned from a live reading of selected chapters at the SF Sketchfest I am positive it will be great.  The concept is inspired: it is supposed to be a novelization of a lost 1977 movie from the trucker/ CB/ chimp sidekick genre. Holy gently caress, what I heard this afternoon was absolutely hilarious! I don't really listen to audiobooks, but I am seriously tempted to get the full cast reading of this one.  https://www.audible.com/pd/Comedy/Stinker-Lets-Loose-Audiobook/B077NM2GWY This interview with the author explains more about it: http://splitsider.com/2017/05/inside-james-taylor-johnstons-stinker-lets-loose-with-mike-sacks/
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Jan 15, 2018 01:59
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Gutter Phoenix posted:I realized that I never posted the individual volumes of the Time-Life Books Mysteries of the Unknown library, so I'm going to do that. Wow, these are almost in mint condition, which makes me jealous. i remember as a kid i read a similar series - the ones that i can recollect includes a book about how uri gellar is the best psychic forever, and another one about the bermuda triangle which freaked the hell out of child me. I'm planning a trip back to my parents' place next month and if i can find them i'll take some photos.
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Jan 15, 2018 03:19
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