90-99: Books about Publishing Curiosities

In the 090's in a typical library for general use, turns out you can read about all kinds of oddities of publishing: rare books and the people who steal them; weird books and the mysteries surrounding them; banned books; and the two things I chose: literary hoaxes, and books bound in an unusual manner.

Literary Hoaxes is a series of brief articles about all kinds of forgeries and falsehoods, organized by time period or topic (Native Americans and Australians seem particularly to attract printed tomfoolery, for some reason). I'm not a fan of sitting down and reading straight through compendiums like this, but I may need to just read the few pages that reveal that Go Ask Alice was a work of fiction.In fact, I had better at least flip through the whole book, lest I be fooled by more too-lurid-to-be-true autobiographies!

As a former calligrapher and student of medieval books, I am more excited about Miniature Books. What a fun thing to collect! I suppose you could put them on a miniature bookshelf! If you wanted to do it cheaply, you would end up with a lot of children's books-- Beatrix Potter and Maurice Sendak have particularly popular boxed sets-- and a lot of those things they sell near the check-out line at Barnes and Noble. I suspect this book is more about collecting exotic, rare miniatures-- it does seem to be full of pretty pictures. It's also, ironically, pretty big- a coffee-table book about matchbook books!