Odd Books

Odd Books approves of The Futility Closet. One notable item to be found there is The Inman Diaries.

When chronic illness confined Boston poet Arthur Crew Inman to a darkened room, he turned inward, scribbling his thoughts and feelings into an enormous diary that eventually filled 155 volumes with 17 million handwritten words — most of them peevish.

If you enjoy quack science as much as I do, you'll appreciate Science Conspiracy Website 4. It's not actually a website, it's a book, though one that looks like it's been written using horrible old HTML 3 authoring software. P. S. J. (Peet) Schutte is very annoyed that academics ignore him. It's hard to understand why when he argues so coherently that gravity is a hoax:

I recently discovered Charlotte Bach thanks to Francis Wheen's book about her. Her main living disciple is a man called Mike Roth, whose 1983 Bolt from a Bleeding Sky I have a copy of. Expect to hear more in coming weeks.

A Professor in Applied Linguistics believes he has decoded a few words from the mysterious Voynich Manuscript, a 600-year old work that has baffled scholars for the last hundred years.

Full story here.

Ann Morgan's Love is a verse depiction of Victorian poet Arthur Munby's own secret marriage with his serving maid, Hannah Cullwick. Munby was obsessed with big, literally dirty, working-class women, making them the subjects of many photographs and sketches. When he died, he left behind a box "not to be opened until 1950".

A perennial favourite for its title and cover.