Celebrating the Unpopular Arts
 

Maybe not weird but certainly unusual

One of my occasional pleasures is to go to the used-book site Abe Books and browse their Weird Books Room.

These used books come in two categories: 1, the insanely specialized topic; 2, the genuinely weird who-would-want-to-read-that topic. For an example of the first category, while it’s obviously not appealing to the mass audience a book on British seaweed sounds pretty cool to me.

I admit that a history of seaweed rather than, say, a guide to identifying seaweed types sounds a little odd. Does seaweed have that much history? Even so, it appeals to me. A book on Russian snails does not, but I have no trouble believing it would appeal to someone with the right interests.

I do, after all, have Birds of the Atlantic Ocean on my shelves and I have absolutely no reason other than … albatrosses. Petrels. Gannets. Cool, am I right?

Please tell me I’m right!

Other books in the same vein of specialized or in some cases, overly specialized subject matter:

Then there’s the stuff that I think can justifiably be called weird.

This last one is obviously from the same vein of self-help as that ad I posted a while back.

 

2 Comments

  1. conrad1970

    I enjoy browsing Abebooks in general, I recently picked up a copy of The Hobbit with the cover by Darrell K. Sweet for a few $.
    Sadly being in the UK the postage costs are usually a deal breaker for me, I’ve seen sellers wanting $100 just to ship a paperback.

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