Ten books on my bookshelf which almost certainly aren’t on yours.
Meta started it. I bet you don't have any of these:
- Benjamin Gal-Or, Cosmology, Physics and Philosophy "including a new theory of aesthetics"
Laudatory forewords by Sir Karl Popper and Sir Alan Cottrell should reassure the reader that the author's magnum opus is not obvious pseudoscience. I started reading it when I was a physics student at Cambridge, but didn't get very far (besides a lot of dipping). Introduces Havayism, a grand theory of the universe focusing on asymmetry and gravitation. - Tom Phillips, A Humument "a treated Victorian novel"
A reproduction of an old book painted over with illustrations so that just a few words of each page are visible, creating not so much a new story as fragmentary literary and visual images. - Tom Phillips, The Heart of a Humument
The same thing with the same book, but this time done only on a central rectangle of each page. This book is physically much smaller. - Stuart Sharpe, Mouse and Kat and the Evil one
A 20-page board book of excessively bold graphic design and typography illustrating a children's story. Kind of a children's story for ravers, or something. - Charles Hampden-Turner, Maps of the Mind "charts and concepts of the mind and its labyrinths"
All major theories of the mind, represented as sixty "maps", each illustrated with a full-page diagram/picture based on the profile of a human head - Ann Druffel, How to Defend Yourself Against Alien Abduction
Describes nine different techniques for doing this, including "mental struggle", "appeal to spiritual personages" and "repellents". In case you are wondering, repellents include yarrow, St John's wort and pennyroyal. The value in this book comes from the fact that the techniques are likely to work regardless of whether "aliens" are space beings, fairies from the otherworld, or hallucinations coupled with sleep paralysis. - Peter Greenaway, 100 Objekte zeigen die Welt/100 Objects to Represent the World
A catalogue of an exhibition I visited in Vienna in 1992. German and English. Each object is listed with a rationale and display instruction. - Ernest W. Piini, America's Stonehenge "a comparison with the ancient Stonehenge on England's Salisbury Plains"
A pamphlet on Sam Hill's Stonehenge replica WWI memorial on the Columbia near Maryhill. I probably bought it at the Maryhill art museum. - Jon Barwise and John Perry, Situations and Attitudes
Utterly impenetrable treatise on language and information. - Leonard Koren, Undesigning the Bath
A discussion of bathing experiences from many cultures in order to determine what makes a great bath, and why most architects can't do them. Extensively illustrated with black and white photographs of saunas, hammams, people bathing in rock pools, and so on.
Not rare enough:
- Luigi Serafini, Codex Seraphinianus (owned by hmw26)
My pride and joy. See my earlier entry. - Apple Computer Eastern Research and Technology, Dylan "an object-oriented dynamic language" (owned by chard)
This has the old Lisp-like syntax. I thought Dylan was the perfect language when I first discovered it. I marked this book up in black pen in response to revisions, before the syntax was replaced by something a little less parenthetical.