While it is true that you can't judge a book by its cover,
often you canjudge a book by its title. Here is this years
installment of bizzare,esoteric, or just plain weird titles. Most
but not all are in the Morrislibrary. Any comments I have to make
are in parentheses....
Japanese immigrant clothing in Hawaii, 1885-1941
Allegorical play in the old French motet: the sacred and the profane in Thirteenth century polyphony
Food authentification ..("Taste this SPAM let's see if it really is food")
Special pagentry and early Tudor policy
101 delinquent girls ... (Definitely NOT a Walt Disney production)
Believing in opera
Poems of color : knitting in the Bohus tradition and the women who drove this Swedish cottage industry
Music : the new age elixir
The field guide to extraterrestrials based on actual eyewitness accounts and sightings
Wierd rooms
Dick for a day : what would you do if you had one? (This book was written by 52 women authors ... I am not making this up)
Cognition and tool use : the blacksmith at work
The transformation of Germanic Academic medicine, 1750-1820
Diary of a left-handed bird watcher
Being and not being : clinical applications of the death instinct
Bloom's morning : coffee, comforters, and the secret meaning of everyday life
Talking about machines : the ethnography of a modern job ... (According to the publisher this book is about "The people who repair photocopiers and shares vignetts from their daily lives")
Texts and the self in the twelfth century
Writings by western Icelandic women
Hymeneutics : Interpreting virginity on the early modern stage
Canada is not a country ... (Oh and I suppose Disneyland is?)
A great place to die ... (But, enough about work)
Constraints on Pulaar phonology
How German is she? postwar West German reconstruction and the consuming woman
Music and the silent film : contexts and case studies, 1895-1924
"Large slow target" : a history of the LST ... (Now we know what the Lawyers exam is all about)
Lollardy and the gentry in the later Middle Ages
Origins of the Individualist self : Autobiography & self identity in England, 1591-1791
Sugar water: Hawaii's plantation ditches
A mine of her own : women prospectors in the American West, 1850-1950
Mailbox U.S.A. stories of mailbox owners and makers
The development of elites in Acadian New Brunswick 1861-1881
Footsucker : a novel
The American dream in nineteenth-century Quebec : ideologies and utopia in Antoine Gerin-Lajoie's "Jean Rivard"
The you you don't know
The search for the ultimate sink
Early American probate inventories
Women bookbinders 1880-1920
Elvis after Elvis : the posthumous career of a living legend
The Tao of Muhammed Ali : a true story
The lighter side of gravity
French revolutionary syndicalism and the public sphere
Susan Smith : victim or murderer? ... (Charles Manson : victim or murderer?)
A history of European picture frames
Alice in quantumland
The redneck manifesto
Journey of the software professional : a sociology of software development
Southern Mountaineers in silent films : plot synopses of movies about moonshining, feuding and other mountain topics, 1904-1929
Exploring Nozick : beyond anarchy, state and utopia
Anglican chant and chanting in England, Scotland, and America 1660-1820
A friendly guide to wavelets
The unfolding truth of man and the universe plus vegetarian recipies
Coloured petrinets : basic concepts, analysis, methods, and practical use
Technology fountainheads : the management challenge of R&D consortia
Local hospitals in Ancien re'gime France : rationalization, resistance, renewal, 1530-1789
Chaucerian Polity : absolutist lineages and associational forms in England and Italy
Difficulties of a bridegroom : collected stories
German aircraft interiors 1935-1945
Revolution, romanticism, and the Afro-Creole protest tradition in in Louisiana 1718-1868
The anatomy of disgust
Towards a relative chronology of ancient and Medieval Celtic sound change
Alleys and back buildings of Galveston : an architectural and social history
Ya Ya! : young New Orleans artists and their storytelling chairs, and how to Ya Ya in your neighborhood
Poetry in speech : orality and Homeric discourse
The balloon lady and other people I know
Close readers: humanism and sodomy in early modern England
How Proust can change your life : not a novel
Puppets of nostalgia
Death : an essay on finitude
Ergonomics and safety of intelligent driver interfaces
The Psychology and psysiology of mirror writing
performance anxieties : staging psychoanalysis, staging race
Does your house have lions?
United colors of Bextehude
All so good and rats in white sauce
The complete guide to infomercial marketing
Achilles in the quantum universe : the difinitive history of infinity ...(yeah right)
The psychology and physiology of light and color as an issue in the planning and management of environments : a selected bibliography
The seed of madness : constitution, environment, and fantasy in the organization of the psychotic core
On the origin of objects
The literary companion to low-life : an anthology of prose and poetry
Jersey diners
Your mothers tounge : a book of European invective
Stallion semen a technology and industry guide
The innocence of roast chicken
New Hampshire DWI manual
Nixon's ten commandments of statecraft (1 don't get caught 2 Don't confess...)
Talking American : cultural discourses on Donahue
Lawyerland (Will soon be replacing the haunted house at the Disney theme parks)
The inexhaustible miracle of drab existence
The cyborg handbook
Studies in early Mediaeval latin glossaries
Mutants of maize (a really bad sci-fi movie. Wait for it on video)
Pursuing "The things of this world" Morman resistance and assimilation as seen in the furniture of the Bringham City Cooperative (1874-188)
The Romance of engines
Father sleeps with the mud pies
The man who ate everything
Nevermore : the hymen and the loss of virginity
The grammar of Attic inscriptions
Reflections on the pool : California designs for swimming
Semiotics and the modern Quebec novel : A Greimassian analysis of Th`erault's Agaguk
Shavetails & Bell sharps : the history of the U.S. Army mule
The Origins of English nonsense
Cod : a biography of the fish that changed the world
The role of thunder in Finnegans Wake
Piscinae : artificial fishponds in Roman Italy
Aphorism in the francophone novel of the twentieth century
The comedian as confidence man : studies in irony fatigue
Siblings in the unconscious and psychopathology : womb fantasies,
claustrophobias, fear of pregnancy, murderous rage, animal symbolism,Christmas and Easter neuroses, and twinnings or identifications with sisters and brothers
Woman police officer in elevator : poems
Deviant fertility in China
The woman who liked clean restrooms
Flatlining on the field of dreams : cultural narratives in the films ofPresident Ronald Reagan's America (Field of Dreams was released AFTER Reagan left office)
The little corset book a working paper on period underwear
Personality comedians as genre : selected players
Kicking the pricks
Dreams on Hitler's couch
Sexually transmitted debt : surety experience and English law
Bad hairciut : Stories of the seventies
Vaugeness : a reader
"That gunk on your car" (This book is a guide for identifying the insect splatters on your car's windshield -- REALLY!)
Field guide to common western grasshoppers (which can end up as gunk on yourwindshield)
The sun still shone : professors talk about retirement
I married a dead man
The idiot at home
Bail services in Scotland
Psychotherapy with the elderly : becoming Methuselah's echo
Eggs for young America
The economics of household behavior
Suffering and no suffering (what exactly are my options again?)
The brain without oxygen : second edition
Trembling at her own response : resistance and reconciliation in mass-market romance novels
The horse without a head
Corporations are gonna get your momma : globalization and the downsizing of the American dream
Whores and other feminists
The encyclopedia of Cleveland history
World government by stealth : the future of the United Nations (published no doubt by the Paranoids Press)
Schoolhouse Rock! : the official guide
Women pioneers in Texas medicine
And of course the award for the most bizzare, inanane, or just plain strangetitle of the year goes to ...
Drumroll please ....
Santa Claus, last of the wild men : the origins and evolution of Saint Nicholas, spanning 50,000 years
Thanks to everyone who helped spot titles
for this list you know who you are.
-- Jim Elfers