A review by reeminbooks
The Madman's Library: The Strangest Books, Manuscripts, and Other Literary Curiosities from History by Edward Brooke-Hitching

5.0

"But these books breathe. They hold thoughts, knowledge and humour otherwise long gone. Their stories -and to a degree, their authors - are alive upon opening them, undiminished by the violence of time."

I've always known that books were interesting things, but this book just took interesting to a whole new level.
The book talks about a lot of book oddities throughout history; books that aren't books, books made of flesh and blood, cryptic books, literary hoaxes, and many, many more. Every single time I thought I'd seen the weirdest or oddest thing, I turn a page and be faced with another marvelous surprise. Some were rather weird, some were amusing, some had me completely baffled with how silly or gullible people could be. But honestly, they were all extremely fascinating.

The illustrations in this book were just gorgeous! A lot of this stuff I've never seen or heard of before, and I'm so glad I got to witness these marvelous, obscure oddities. If only I could see them in real life!
Now pretty much all I wanna do is start my own collection of weird antique books.