Scouts in Bondage: And Other Books from an Innocent Age - Tapa dura

All the books illustrated in this irresistible little volume were collected by Michael Bell when he owned an antiquarian bookshop in Lewes. His criterion was 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 a 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, "How Nell Scored".