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