Scouts in Bondage - And Other Curious Works from Bygone TImes with Titles that Might Cause Vulgar Minds to Misapprehend their Content

All the books illustrated in this irresistible little volume were collected by Michael Bell when he owned an antiquarian bookshop in Lewes. His criterionas simple: these were old books that raised a grin if not a guffaw from his customers as soon as they saw them. Some are simply mystifying like the enigmatic Book of Blank Maps ; bizarre like Frances E. Willard's perfectly straight-faced account, How I Learned to Ride the Bicycle ; or simply evoke world which has long since vanished like Paulo Montegazza's manual on The Art of Taking a Wife . Sometimes it is the combination of title and cover artwork that does the trick, but most frequent of all is the title that now conveys a meaning quite at odds with the author's original intentions, the boy's story Invisible Dick , for example, or another children's novel, Howell Scored ...