Remainder Pile

Ah, yes, the good old days, when men were men, even men like Liberace. This is a patchy, half-hearted attempt by pulp hack Leo Guild to paint one of the campest individuals ever to pound a gilt piano as a rootin' tootin' real feller, a ladies' man, a genuine 100% testosterone-fuelled pussy-hound.

(Alternate title: "The Bumper Book of Beards".)

Once in a while I come across a book whose oddity is charming rather than idiotic: Faces of World's Captains is one such. It records a series of drawings made by Kenji Miyakoshi when he was working as a harbour pilot in Tokyo Bay. Whenever he had piloted a vessel he would make a sketch of its captain from memory. Finally he had about 3000 drawings of which more than 600 are collected in this self-published volume. He says of his work:

The Kemsley Newspapers group was in 1950, when this book was written, a significant force in the British press market. It included the Sunday Times, the Daily Graphic, the Sunday Chronicle, the Daily Dispatch and a number of provincial newspapers. The group was owned by Viscount Kemsley, who wrote the introduction to this volume.