Before the internet decimated the reference shelf, there were jewels to be found! Happily, I kept a few books safe from the pillaging bot armies, and I’m celebrating them each week in this space.

The dinosaurs didn’t go extinct; they just evolved into birds. By the same logic, reference books haven’t died off; they’ve just become coffee table books. Even when all the facts (and their alternatives) are instantly available online, you need something to furnish your room. And you’d be hard-pressed to do better than this week’s pick, a supremely browsable 1996 volume.

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Before the internet decimated the reference shelf, there were jewels to be found! Happily, I kept a few books safe from the pillaging bot armies, and I’m celebrating them each week in this space.

A dictionary of euphemisms has a bit of an I’ll-show-them flavour to it: The reference book as rejoinder to the swindlers, phonies, charlatans, shysters, and advertising executives who dump their effluent into the rivers and lakes of the English language. To do it properly, though, you need to create a system by which to strain all their bafflegab.

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Before the internet decimated the reference shelf, there were jewels to be found there. Happily, I kept a few books safe from the pillaging bot armies, and I’m celebrating them each week in this space.

What was the quotation dictionary? I now own more of them than any other individual person in my timezone, and I have thoughts. Publishing one in this day and age is like creating an opera: A passion project that’s only worth it if you can make the antiquated format say something new. And Garner’s Quotations did that.

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Before the internet decimated the reference shelf, there were jewels to be found there. General-interest dictionaries and encyclopedias, sure, but the best stuff was in the second-tier books that purported to offer a complete overview of a particular esoteric subject. Ah, the ludicrous audacity of a single finite codex proclaiming to be the definitive guide to anything! And who would stop them?

The second volume of this series cracks open a legendary reference volume with a cult following, one designed over many editions to offer analog rabbit holes par excellence.

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Before the internet decimated the reference shelf, there were hidden gems to be found there. General-interest dictionaries and encyclopedias, sure, but the best stuff was in the second-tier books that purported to offer a complete overview of a particular esoteric subject. Ah, the ludicrous audacity of a single finite volume proclaiming to be the definitive guide to anything! And who would stop them?

And so allow me to inaugurate a tour of some excellent reference books that offer way more amusement than information. To begin, let’s have an aperitif:

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There’s never been a writer like Samuel Marchbanks, mainly because there never was a Samuel Marchbanks. The self-proclaimed Philosopher of Skunk’s Misery, head of a one-man splinter party, and mid-century diarist in the Peterborough Examiner was also a pseudonym of Robertson Davies. Not his alter ego — a term that “suggests some dreadful non-cholesterol cooking substance,” Marchbanks insisted — but rather his doppelgänger.

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The typical pop song is three minutes long, upbeat, and all about love. It is quite simple and effective to substitute the word “lunch” in said songs, a sort of Top 40 Oulipo exercise. And then if Foreigner comes on the radio, you might find yourself asking, I want to know what lunch is. And in that case, I have just the book for you:

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Brevity is the soul of wit, wrote Shakespeare, and lingerie, wrote Parker. But there’s always an exception that proves the rule, be it flannel pyjamas or the shaggy dog story.

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As a rule, the art created in the pandemic should stay in the pandemic. It’s safe to assume that no one wants to revisit your lockdown epiphanies. And yet, if the art is good enough and it’s still on Netflix, maybe an exception can be made?

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1. Lists are everywhere.
2. They’re how things get done.
3. But are they worth reading?
4. Yes, and this book explains why.

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The world is in a real mess right now. So would it make you feel better to know that, save for a few brief interludes, it was always thus? Could it perhaps even make you laugh?

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They call it the funniest book of its time or maybe all time, so are they right? And if so, what is it exactly that continues to connect even as our senses of humour have continually evolved?

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A witty saying proves nothing, claimed Voltaire, but a witty song can get stuck in your cranium, trigger ill-advised singalongs, and induce involuntary swaying.

Based on the shelves of accumulated trophies and sheer quality of her output, one person (and her brother) is minting the clever songs of today like no one else.

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The wit of the staircase is what Denis Diderot called the great lines that pop into your head as you’re leaving a party. But imagine you accidentally shot yourself with a machine gun at said party. What would you say then?

You’ll be forgiven for being momentarily distracted.

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Can we ever truly know another person? What if we never actually meet them and must form an entire opinion of their existence based only on how we overhear them ordering a doughnut?

A lifetime of such interactions compiled into book form by a uniquely talented writer might lead you to think a doughnut order is all you really need to know.

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Corporations, as Mitt Romney famously explained, are people, too. When you write to them, they write back. Is this weird? Yes, it is weird.

But it takes a deft touch to show exactly why it’s odd to demand satisfaction from a fast-food restaurant. And it takes an even defter touch to keep the conceit going across three books of collected correspondence about Egg McMuffins.

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As a photographer, what could be better than inventing a surefire technique to look directly into the souls of your subjects?

Perhaps if that method invariably produced highly amusing portraits?

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You want to know how to get absurd? They pull a knife, you pull a penguin. They send one of yours to the hospital, you send one of theirs to the Kyiv zoo. That’s the absurdist way.

It doesn’t win the short term, mind you, but it is certainly entertaining.

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There’s an art to winning the New Yorker’s cartoon caption contest, but there’s also a science to it. And a GitHub dataset that lends itself to deep analysis. I’m not saying that a clever review of which entries have won will help you win, but I’m not not saying that.

When would you like to do that analysis? No, Thursday’s out. Never? Is never good for you? Yes? OK, let’s do it!

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It stands to reason that if you know how to riff, you know how to riff.

Jazz musicians connect unrelated musical phrases for the delight of an audience, so can they do the same with regular old phrases? In other words, does jazz virtuosity translate into verbal wit?

According to this terrific book, it can and it does. But someone’s got to write it down. In the words of drummer Shelley Manne, “We never play anything the same way once.” 

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