The results are in on the challenge to find the titles in the list published in part 1. As a reminder, the titles were:

• Amputee Management : a Handbook.
• The Baby Jesus Touch and Feel Book.
• Big and Very Big Hole Drilling.
• The Book of Marmalade : Its Antecedents, Its History, and Its Role in the World Today.
• Group 4 Prisoner Escort Service : a Survey of Customer Satisfaction.
• Highlights in the History of Concrete.
• How to Avoid Huge Ships.
• How to Shit in the Woods : an Environmentally Sound Approach to a Lost Art.
• The Joy of Chickens.
• Proceedings of the Second International Workshop on Nude Mice : the Potentialities and Limitations of the Nude Mouse.
• Reusing Old Graves : a Report on Popular British Attitudes.
• Simply Bursting : a Guide to Bladder Control.
• Versailles : the View from Sweden.
• Virtual Reality : Exploring the Bra.

There were four responses to the challenge, two from within the Stanford community and two from without. The two Stanfordites, Molly Carroll and Sharon Hom wrote to say that they each own one of the books in question, The Joy of Chickens. Per Sharon, the author, Dennis Nolan, is one of her sister’s teachers at San Jose State. She says the book was so poorly distributed that “in order to give us copies, [he] had to literally talk his way into a warehouse somewhere and liberate copies of his own book.” Molly got her copy from the author’s son.

The two remaining respondents were the only ones to actually take the challenge. Each located eleven of the titles (one more than I did), identified a twelvth as bogus, and scratched on the two remaining items. I judge Emma Lee Yu winner by a hair over Michael H. Arshagouni, for providing full bibliographic details with her response.

The title they found that I couldn’t was The Baby Jesus Touch and Feel Book, which per Emma “was published in the ‘A touch-and-feel book’ series in 1995 by the Abingdon Press in Nashville.”

The title everyone identified as bogus was Virtual Reality: Exploring the Bra, a cut-off version of Virtual reality: exploring the brave new technologies of artificial experience and interactive worlds, from cyberspace to teledildonics. Presumably the original compiler of the list encountered the truncated form in an electronic title search and didn’t bother to glance at the full record.

The two titles no one found were Big and Very Big Hole Drilling and Simply Bursting: a Guide to Bladder Control. Anyone know if these actually exist?

--submitted by Brian Kunde

Originally published in SUL News Notes, Volume 5, Number 25, August 9, 1996. These titles reflect the compiler’s notions of the humorous, wry, ironic or unusual, and should not be construed as reflecting any other opinion or judgment, including the editorial opinion of the original publisher.