A book whose allure is actually increased by its utter lack of practical utility for most earthlings.

Reminder to all staff: Do NOT shelve these next to Tom of Finland!

A Sherlock Holmes mystery grows even more mysterious when printed in shorthand.

"In this day the sign letterer who does not understand colors and color harmony, and who does not know how to get up signs in color, is greatly handicapped, and his usefulness as a sign letterer is seriously interfered with."

Have you heard of the new parlour game called "Monkey's Paw"? Friends compete to see who can invent the most sublimely banal book title.

What kind of magazine devotes ten full pages to a typeface composed of naked women photographed on the floor of a Dutch gymnasium?

Logan, Herschel C.:
HAND CANNON TO AUTOMATIC: A PICTORIAL PARADE OF HAND ARMS
Standard Publications, Inc., Huntington, WV, 1944.

Lovingly rendered pen-and-ink illustrations of firearms both ancient and modern: basically it's pinup art for pistol fetishists.

<-- front cover

Lang, Robert (ed.):
LA COLLECTION DES "DOCUMENTS MÉDICAUX"
[16 issues bound in one volume]
Documents Médicaux, Paris, [ca. 1933].

In a perfectly aesthetic world, even a journal of gruesome medical photography would aspire to the highest standards of production and design… wouldn't it?

<-- "La Sympathologie"

[de Postels & Klinkel]:
TWINKLE TUNES PIANO BOOK
No publisher, no place; [ca. 1939].

The plinking of a 70-year-old toy piano makes a suitably eerie soundtrack, drifting from the back of a haunted bookshop.

<-- front cover, with toy piano keyboard

[n/a]:
[BOUND ARTIFACT] (paper, leather, fur, plant material, etc.)
[no publisher, place, or date]

Bookseller's dilemma: in what section do you shelve a cryptic leatherbound book-object, apparently handmade as an art stunt by a mad occultist?

<-- (fur, vellum, Satan)

[Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory]:
THE EFFECTS OF ATOMIC WEAPONS
U.S. Department of Defense, Washington, 1950.

Disclaimer: "Atomic explosion phenomena are so complex as to make precise quantitative evaluation of their results almost impossible."

<-- front cover

Arnim, Faye:

FUR CRAFT: HOW TO GLAMORIZE YOUR WARDROBE WITH FUR

Key Publishing Co., New York, 1964.

Includes instructions on how to make a fur coat for your poodle.

<-- front cover

Bishop, George: 

THE WORLD OF CLOWNS

Brooke House Publishers, Los Angeles, 1976.

Get your Gacy on!

<-- front cover

(At the Monkey's Paw, we love the twilight season. We love dead leaves, dead poets, dead books; we love women in masks, men in dresses, children in black cat costumes; we love neglected graveyards and cheap candy. Yes: we love Halloween!)

*** MICROCATALOGUE #16: HALLOWEEN 2011 ***

Laughlin, Clarence John:
GHOSTS ALONG THE MISSISSIPPI
Bonanza Books, New York, 1961 (Revised Edition). 

Decades before Louisiana produced superstar bloodsuckers like the Vampire Lestat or Bill Compton, its macabre reputation as the home of "plantation gothic" was firmly established by an eccentric photographer from New Orleans. In his visual study of the region's rotting and moss-draped antebellum mansions, Laughlin produced 100 images of grandeur and decay, and (subtlety be damned!) added splendid theatrical titles: "The Shadowed Pillars," "The Spectral Fans," "Enigmatic Urn," "Mementoes of Unreturning Time," etc. As an approach to architectural history, Laughlin's explicitly "poetic" style might be disdained by dry academics; but romantic souls attuned to the mildewed moods of the Deep South will find themselves transported. Happy Halloween, y'all!

Price, Vincent and Mary:
A TREASURY OF GREAT RECIPES
Ampersand Press, [n.p.], 1965.

So what if your séance fails to raise the spirit of Vincent Price? You can still dine on his version of "Cornish Hens with Sauce Diable." In this enormous vanity-published compendium, the horror actor and his second wife gathered hundreds of recipes from their favorite swanky restaurants around the world, and dressed them up with facsimile menus and a glib text by Vincent himself. The whole production reeks of jet-set exotica and Hollywood connoisseurship, particularly the autobiographical photos: breakfast in the dark-panelled library; high tea beside the swimming pool; curry served before a Mayan idol; wine on board a Clark Cortez mobile home; etc. The master lives!

Browne, Thomas; W.A. Greenhill (ed.):
SIR THOMAS BROWNE'S HYDRIOTAPHIA ["URN-BURIAL"] AND THE GARDEN OF CYRUS 
Macmillan & Co., London, 1896.

Seemingly obscure, and decidedly difficult, this strange essay is actually a stealthy classic, savored for centuries by literary melancholics from Poe to Borges. Originally published in 1658 after the discovery of a Roman grave in Norfolk, "Urn Burial" is more than just a survey of ancient burial customs. Browne's meditation veers into the deepest shadows: he obsesses on the relentlessness of time, the inevitability of death, and the pitiful transience of all human accomplishment. Whether you actually grapple with the text, or just feel comforted by its mortal weight in your hand, this little book will make an elegant accessory to that goth librarian costume you're putting together. [Bound with "The Garden of Cyrus," Browne's truly cryptic essay on the mystical geometry of the number five.]

Habenstein, Robert W., and William W. Lamers:
THE HISTORY OF AMERICAN FUNERAL DIRECTING
First Edition. National Funeral Directors Assoc., Milwaukee, 1955. 

True or false: In 1882, Albert Fearnaught of Indianapolis patented a "Grave-Signal" device to summon help in the event of accidental burial alive; at the Chicago World's Fair in 1893, a manufacturer exhibited a purple hearse, but the style never caught on; Dr. Thomas Holmes, "the father of modern embalming," also developed a formula for tasty root beer; a proper Victorian lady in her first year of widowhood was expected to write on stationery with a 1/4" black border… (These and thousands more sepulchral facts can be found in this illuminating book, along with over 100 solemn illustrations.)

Sante, Luc:
EVIDENCE
Farrar, Straus & Giroux, New York, 1992. 

It's standard practice at Halloween to treat the subject of death as spooky entertainment; but "Evidence" raises those stakes considerably. Here, the image of a blood-spattered corpse on the floor of a saloon qualifies as truly profound art. The 55 graphic crime-scene photos in the collection (murders, mostly) were shot by NYPD technicians in the nineteen-teens; Sante discovered the pictures in the archives, and recognized them as exquisite, if inadvertent, dramatic tableaux. The accompanying text -- Sante's search for answers both literal and aesthetic within the mute, dispassionate photos -- should be shown to every snide kid who thinks history is boring.

[** end Microcatalogue #16: Halloween 2011 **]

Simics, Mihály:
A REVIEW OF BEE VENOM COLLECTING AND MORE
Apitronic Services, Calgary, 1994.

Basically, you electrocute the bees until they're angry enough to sting a glass plate; then you scrape off the poison, and sell it to a homeopath.

<-- front cover

Jacobs, Morris B.:
WAR GASES: THEIR IDENTIFICATION AND DECONTAMINATION
Interscience Publishers, New York, 1972.

We laugh that we do not cry. For example, Table 13 (food spoilage caused by non-arsinical vesicants) indicates that mustard gas will absorb readily into sausage meat.

<-- front cover

Jackson, Holbrook:
THE ANATOMY OF BIBLIOMANIA.
Farrar, Strauss & Co., New York, 1950.

To savor, stroke, and covet this book… well it's like a dog chasing its own tail.

<-- front cover

Wood-Allen, Mary:
WHAT A YOUNG GIRL OUGHT TO KNOW
Vir Publishing Co., Philadelphia, 1905.

"…will save her from ignorance, enable her to avoid vice, and deliver her from solitary and social sins."

<-- frontis and title page

Hellmuth, Nicholas M.:
PRE-COLUMBIAN BALLGAME: ARCHAEOLOGY AND ARCHITECTURE
Foundation for Latin American Anthropological Research, Guatemala City, 1975.

"Stone stelae at Cotzumalhuapa show victorious players triumphantly carrying the newly severed heads of their unfortunate opponents." Includes a very thorough bibliography.

<-- front cover

[British Medical Association's Board of Science and Education]
THE MEDICAL EFFECTS OF NUCLEAR WAR
John Wiley & Sons, Chichester (UK), 1983.

If you want to hear a dire prognosis, ask a panel of doctors about the prospects of providing medical care for tens of millions of burned and irradiated victims in the aftermath of a large-scale nuclear attack.

<-- front cover

Douglas, Helen (comp.):
THE SILVER CROSS, A COLLECTION OF POEMS AND HYMNS FOR THE SICK AND SUFFERING
George Bell & Sons, London, 1908.

Uniquely depressing verse on Christian resignation in extremis: titles include "Pain," "Weariness," "Enough," "Wishes about Death," etc.

<-- front cover

"Zeta" [Zachary Cope]:
THE DIAGNOSIS OF THE ACUTE ABDOMEN IN RHYME
H.K. Lewis & Co., London, 1949.

Rarely is the dissonance between form and function so jarring, even scandalous, as in this collection of perky doggerel describing life-threatening abdominal afflictions.

<-- front cover

Farnham, Albert B.:
HOME MANUFACTURE OF FURS AND SKINS
A.R. Harding, Columbus, OH, 1944.

All the ghoulish aspects of tanning and dressing animal hides, plus helpful advice on marketing the finished product.

<-- front cover

MacBeth, George:
PENGUIN BOOK OF SICK VERSE
Penguin Books, Harmondsworth, Middlesex, 1963.

Morbid obsessions, visions of despair, extravagant emotion, perverted action, sick jokes, and nightmares: an editorial conceit so compelling that the uneven quality of the anthologized poetry hardly matters.

<-- front cover

Richardson, W.T.:
HISTORIC PULASKI, BIRTHPLACE OF THE KU KLUX KLAN [etc.]
[Self-published, Lynnville, TN], 1913.

Uncommonly sinister: an unapologetic history of the Klan, published by its founding members in one of the most fanatical corners of the former Confederacy. Includes facsimile of the Klan's "cipher code," used for conspiratorial correspondence.

<-- copyright page & frontis photo